Love. Local. Latebreaking. by H. Laurence Lareau

Love. Local. Latebreaking.

by H. Laurence Lareau

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GENRE: Contemporary romance

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BLURB:

Professional passion in the tradition of Julie James, Love. Local. Latebreaking. is a page-turning
romance shining a spotlight into television news.

"Heart-tugging relational tension but with a sophistication that raises it above the romance genre." --
Jlaird, verified purchaser

"Mr. Lareau manages humor beautifully--I was able to envision certain scenes/situations/people so
clearly that I was chortling into my coffee. I highly recommend this novel as a light-hearted (and sexy)
diversion." -- Sarah K. Clark, verified purchaser

"The heroine had a career that she worked hard for and that she didn't give that career up simply
because she'd found love" -- A. Geek, verified purchaser

Local TV news reporter Karli Lewis has one goal: escape Iowa's cornfields and podunk local news
scene to hit the bright lights of the Chicago's newsrooms. Karli’s career is on the rise, thanks to her
talented, dizzingly handsome, yet enigmatic news photographer, Jake Gibson, a dedicated hometown
boy who is staying put. Will Karli listen to her heart, or will she choose a dateline over her favorite date?
Can she reconcile her unbridled ambition and her longing for the man she could lose forever?

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Excerpt Two:

“Um, Karli, I don’t think you need any more to drink,” Mary Rose said. “Or maybe you need a lot more.
Come to think of it, that always makes for a better story. Let’s have more.” She clapped her hands
together and rubbed them in anticipation, then raised a hand to catch the bartender’s attention and
gestured for a new round.

Bailey’s frustrated glare conveyed to Karli that her explanation had somehow fallen short of expectations.
“So I was pissed because he was sleeping with her after he kissed me on the bridge. . .”

“What bridge?” Bailey was interested but genuinely confused by now, and it showed in her tone and
face.

“Ooh, I love stories with trolls,” cried Mary Rose.

“You know, the covered bridge outside of Winterset,” Karli said. “Where the book is set and where they
did the movie.”

“WHAT?” Bailey nearly shrieked. “He took you to a covered bridge in Madison County and kissed you
there? That is probably the most romantic thing ever!”

“Well, he didn’t kiss me,” Karli said. “At least, not at first. I sort of started with the kissing. Then he
kissed me back. Really well.” Again, Karli’s memory transported her to a moment of intense passion.
Again, she felt the coiled tension inside of her—the aching wetness between her legs, the tightened
flesh of her nipples—crying out for release. Again, she lost the thread of the conversation.

“On a covered bridge, no less.” Bailey sighed wistfully.

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AUTHOR Bio and Links:

H. Laurence Lareau fell in love with romances the first time Pride and Prejudice came home from the
library with him. Since that high school summer, he has earned an English degree from the University
of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, worked as a television and print journalist, built a career in law, and
has remained a Jane Austen junkie through it all.

The Newsroom Romance series draws from his careers, his voracious reading, and his curiosity about
the tensions between real life and real love.

Real life now is dramatically different from the real life of Austen’s times—privileged women no longer
choose between eligible members of the landed gentry, nor are they imperiled by the sexist mysteries
of the entailed fee simple estate in land.

Modern women with the privileges of education rather than birth now embark upon careers that can
satisfy many personal and material dreams. Seemingly inevitably, though, careers fall short of the
promise that they’ll fulfill women as people.

Strong, modern women have defined Lareau’s professional and personal lives, and strong women fully
occupy center stage in their own newsroom romance stories. Their high-profile journalism and legal
careers matter deeply to them and to the people they serve.

Then love comes walking in. These book boyfriends don’t have kilts or billions or pirate ships, though.
Their career goals meet and often clash with their romantic counterparts, requiring both the men and
women to make hard choices about what happily ever after should look like and how to achieve it.

When he isn’t writing, practicing law, or raising children, he’s working on martial arts and music.

Available on Amazon at: https://www.amazon.com/author/hlaurencelareau

Website: hlaurencelareau.com

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HLLareau/

Interview with H. Laurence Lareau:

1. What is your favorite part of this book and why?

When Karli and Jake finally come together for their long-anticipated first kiss, a number of stars align. Madison County, Iowa is in the heart of their newsroom’s broadcast area. Jake arranges to photograph Karli on one of the covered bridges that appeared in both the book and the movie. Of course that’s where the kiss happens. The kiss isn’t perfect—it’s a cold winter day, for one thing, and they’re interrupted by tourists, for another—but the imperfections contribute to how awesome it was for both of them. The middle-aged couple visiting the bridge give our hero and heroine a glimpse into a possible version of their future together, and it puts the kiss into a less hormonal and more intimate perspective.

2. If you could spend time with a character from your book whom would it be? And what would you do during that day?

It’s so hard to pick who I’d spend a day with! Jake and I share a passion for martial arts—he could teach me a lot in a few hours of training—and we could spend the rest of the day reveling in the environment-preserving awesomeness of his electric his Tesla S. Our stops would include some of Des Moines’ great wine bars, as well as golden-hour meanderings to find and photograph the amazing people who live in central Iowa. Each one of them has lived a great story, and those stories can be told well in pictures and video.

One of the most big early scenes in Love. Local. Latebreaking. tries to illustrate—and in some ways I’m still struggling to understand comes up short in showing—how Karli and Jake encounter both the big picture of the Iowa State Fair and the important portraits of individuals at the Fair. The images he captures to complement the stories she writes together form the heart of television journalism’s best collaborations. Readers have reacted very differently to Karli and Jake’s day at the State Fair. Some say it drags and should be cut in half or more, while others loved it and thought much more of the book should’ve been set at the fair. I struggled with telling a story about how journalists tell the stories they learn—that’s pretty meta, after all—so if anyone has insights into how I can up my game on that score, I’m all ears!

3. If you could have been the author of any book ever written, which book would you choose?

The Great Gatsby is not my favorite book, but it is a book I would love to have written. (Not because of its perpetual best-seller status and movie rights and all of that, though I certainly wouldn’t turn my nose up at any of those things!) So much of it is about the illusions people create and wind up believing and how distinct they are from the kind of love we all really want. Gatsby nurtures his desire for Daisy, shapes it continually into a vision that is completely separate from reality. What he wants—what we all want—is to love and be loved authentically, for who we are, who our partner is, who we can become together. Fitzgerald captures Gatsby’s fantasy in language so persuasive that readers often mistake the fantasy for something genuine.

So incredibly often, fantasies like Gatsby’s supply some or all of the ingredients that are missing from real life. Great friendships and partnerships can be almost completely devoid of the intimate, self-giving, vulnerable passion that is a necessary part of true love between a woman and a man. Likewise, even the most amazing sexual and emotional chemistry cannot supply the need for daily companionship, conversation, and shared life experience that is also necessary to real and enduring love.

We all need and deserve to love and be loved for who we are, to be accepted with romantic intensity as well as with kindness and friendship. Acknowledging the reality that we will often create illusions—vibrant, detailed, beautiful illusions—to fill blanks where our needs are not met is an important part of understanding our own needs and what the reality of our relationships can actually become.

4. Are your characters based off real people or did they all come entirely from your imagination?

The heroes are drawn from real life—of course they’re just watered down versions of me! (Oh, do I wish. To have Jake’s well, everything that makes him a hot book-boyfriend!)

Nobody’s imagination operates in a vacuum. Every character realistic enough to carry out the job must behave in plausibly realistic ways—the ways actual people might act in similar situations.  Properly put, the question is to what extent any given character’s traits were taken from a single person. Given that my day job is lawyering, I was careful to make sure that no character I wrote bore too strong a resemblance to any actual person. Every character has tics that were inspired by real people, but none is even remotely a compilation of any one person’s traits.

5. What made you want to become a writer?

Reading, naturally! I was an only child, so books took the place of siblings when I was growing up. (That’s something I didn’t realize until I had a houseful of four children; I was fine growing up alone until I saw how crazy they all were about one another—and their friends, and their friend’s parents, and their pets, and an entire extended world that I’d not known before.)

Being an omnivorous and voracious reader, I always viewed myself as a participant in the written word. Nearly every job I’ve had—from being a paperboy in elementary school to my journalism and television production career to practicing law—has had storytelling, factual or fantastic, at its core. Adding to the countless stories that explore meaning has always motivated me. Romance was appealing because every individual’s life is rooted in relationships. It also appealed because of the expected structure, the requirement of a happily-ever-after, the inherent optimism of the genre.

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GIVEAWAY INFORMATION

H. Laurence Lareau will be awarding a $15 Amazon/BN GC to a randomly drawn winner via
rafflecopter during the tour.

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