It’s honking huge giveaway time. HUGE. Forty copies of Erin McCarthy’s Hot Finish between Smart Bitches and Dear Author because Jane and I, we loved this book. Oh, my gosh, I re-read the series so I could enjoy this book more. I’ve got twenty copies here to give away, and the book isn’t out until 3 August.
This is part one of our Save the Contemporary campaign for Hot Finish. It’s in mass market, unlike the previous first releases in the series which were in trade (although they are now re-released in mass market). In the week leading up to the August release date, we will be giving away an iPod Touch to anyone who spreads the good word about Contemporaries and Hot Finish.
So why should you want this book? Well, Cindy Hwang describes HOT FINISH by Erin McCarthy thusly:
I love love love Erin’s smart, sexy Fast Track contemporary romance series, and from the moment she introduced Suzanne and Ryder in the first book, FLAT-OUT SEXY, I knew their romance would be something special. And it absolutely is—Suzanne and Ryder have a sexual chemistry together that practically leaps off the page, and what’s so wonderful is how funny they are together too. If you love second chance romances, you’ll love HOT FINISH!
What I liked about this book, I have listed in numerical order:
- Suzanne is courageous and scared, brave and gutsy and vulnerable and determined.
- Ryder wants Suzanne back, bad. And he’s not an ass about it.
- It is HOT. SERIOUSLY. Fan ye yourself hot.
- I laughed so hard I spit my gum out. In public. It was disgraceful. The opening chapters alone hurt my abs.
Want to read it a month early?
Leave a comment and tell me: what’s one unforgettable thing you never thought you’d get, that you worked your ass off to achieve? I’ll select 20 winners and books shall be yours. You have 24 hours.
Standard disclaimer: I’m not being compensated for this giveaway. I do not have a thing to do with hot studs who drive cars fast except for my husband. Machine wash with like colors. Close cover before striking. Shake well. Ribbed for your pleasure. Standard penalties for early withdrawal.
Actually finished college in 4 years and getting a job in something I enjoy that relates to what I majored in. Really thought both were a long shot.
for me the thing i worked my ass off for was getting my BA. Growing up, I always felt like i wasn’t smart enough to get a college degree. my brother was the smart one. he got straight A’s all through elementary school/junior high, and maintained an almost straight A average in high school. He was the one getting letters from Brown, while I got letters from the local college (that no one has ever heard of and it only took a 930 on the old SAT’s to get into). As a senior in high school, I was told by the college counselor that I didn’t have the grades to get into the school of my choice…and i probably didn’t, but it really did a number on my self-esteem. She even told me that if i attempted to apply to that school that she wouldn’t send them my transcripts or recommendation letters because it wouldn’t be worth the postage.
So, i ended up going to the local college that nobody has ever heard of unless they lived in my town. I spent 4 years working my ass off. I didn’t go to parties. I didn’t date. I definitely didn’t drink. My first semester there I got a GPA of 3.67, and the entire time i was there i didn’t have a GPA below a 3.4. Last year, I graduated Cum Laude, and I received highest honors in psychology. Now, I am almost done with my MA from the school of my choice (not the same one that i wanted to go to for Undergrad), and I am thinking about which schools I want to apply to for my doctorate.
(oh, and i know that it may be petty, but my straight A’s throughout school brother? he has a GPA of 1.75 and has just “taken a semester off” aka dropped out of school. i know this shouldn’t make me feel better about myself, but it does because everyone thought he would be the one with the fancy degrees and because i was always told that he was soooo much smarter than me.)
Mine would have to be my college degree. In high school I graduated with high honors was in all the AP and honors classes etc. My senior year came around and I was beat tired and just over it. I was still in all honors classes, but I was close to flunking out. I had been accepted to every college I applied to and yet I didn’t care anymore. I didn’t want to go to college I wanted to relax and not do anything. So, after numerous fights with my parents I took a year off of school. Every kept saying if you don’t go right after graduation you never will, but I knew different. I KNEW I wanted to do something with my life and that I’m a determined person, I just needed a break. To this day I still don’t regret my decision. I think if I would have gone to college right away then I would have dropped out. Anyway, after about a year (this is four years ago now) I met my boyfriend/ now he’s my fiance and I told him I wanted to go back to school but I didn’t want to get stuck at a community college and by that time I had a full time job and bills so I couldn’t actually afford the time off to go to college. I found Devry University and my mom took me to the local campus where they explained that their online program allows me to go to school full time online while still getting to work full time. I was stoked. I signed up and took all accelerated courses(their version of honors). I got my BSBA in accounting TWO and a HALF years later. I graduated last year BEFORE almost everyone I went to school with and I worked my ass off to do that even while working a full time job. SO now it’s been a little over a year since I graduated and I’m studying for the daunting CPA exams which is stressing me out but I know it will be worth it in the end. So not only did I take a year off after highschool before going to college, but I got my degree in 2.5 years and graduated a year before almost all my fellow high school students. I’m extremely proud of myself and I hold that degree with honor.
Spam word : Matter 53- it doesn’t matter that it didn’t take me 53 months to graduate from college, I still got my bachelors degree.
I worked hard to make military spouses’ clubs meaniful community contributors (rather than gossip dens and bitch sessions).
I continue to promote romance reading to military spouses – Hawaii is almost conquered!
I never, ever thought I would lose weight. I had been overweight all my life and one day I don’t know how to explain it…something just clicked. I started changing my lifestyle the next day and here I am! I’m now 60 pounds lighter and the healthiest I’ve ever been.
It’s seriously something that I would have never dreamed of being able to accomplish but just goes to show that anything is possible.
I never thought I could last at a thankless job for as long as I did. I also never thought I would meet some of my closest friends at this place.
OMG, what a fantastic giveaway!
The one thing I’m damn proud to have achieved is being happy. Most days I manage to roll out of bed and stumble in the bath with a smile on my face. I love being excited for what the day has to offer.
I like being happy and working for it was and still is totally worth it.
Getting under 200 pounds. I never imagined I’d get over 300 pounds(not exactly sure how much I weighed b/c that’s the highest my scale went), but a summer of studying abroad in England and subsisting of bread and cheese and a senior year full of late night take-out pushed me over the edge. I had every excuse imaginable including my favorite being the dryer shrunk my clothes. One day I realized I was wearing 24s and shortly thereafter I found out I was going to be a bridesmaid. My best friend told me the horror story of how she knew someone who had to have two dresses sewn together and I kicked it into gear. I didn’t lose all my weight then, but I started the journey of transforming the way I look at food and exercise.
I’ve tried every diet imaginable and it’s a constant struggle, but I’ve been been below 200 for a while and at the smallest I’ve been as an adult. It feels like a lifetime ago, but I keep a picture up to remind myself of my progress when I feel like beating myself up for a slip-up.
Well, both of them are in process…
I’ve been working my ass off to become a mom. Fertility treatments have not worked. I’ve been on the line to adopt from China for years. We are redoing our homestudy and will be trying domestic adoption next.
Getting down our debt.
6 years ago we were in serious financial trouble. I got deep into credit card debt to pay off our medical expenses. During the past 6 years we have paid nearly 1/3 of our debt and we will be cutting up the second of 3 cards after summer’s end.
I never thought I’d walk again without the help of a cane or that my health would improve so dramatically over the last year that people who did not know me a year ago would have no idea that I was so sick, due to arthritis in my hips and hands, that I worried I’d have to quit teaching after struggling to complete my PhD in English due to ill health. I still have arthritis and live with chronic pain. What changed was my attitude; instead of passively accepting what doctors’ and others were saying and just getting angry about being in my thirties with crippling arthritis, I decided to change my life and adopt a can do/positive attitude. I starting walking every day and then started walking for short periods without the cane. I starting eating more healthy foods and lost weight (35 pounds +). I got out of a bad relationship. I starting reading more (which made me happy), including rediscovering the romance genre, which I had stopped reading when I had entered university.
By the end of the summer I could walk for an hour without the cane and my limp only appeared when the pain was really bad. The arthritis and pain are my constant companions but over a year ago I decided to not let them stop me. I haven’t used a cane in ten months and the changes I have made have had positive consequences in other aspects of my life. For example, my self esteem improved dramatically. I feel a huge sense of accomplishment.
Biggest battle I ever fought? Cancer. Just completed my 3rd year out of treatment with no sign of recurrence. There were many times when I just didn’t think I could go on, but I knew I couldn’t let my kids down.
Firstly, I worked very, very hard to get into the college that was the dream school for at least two generations of my family (buckled down freshman year and never looked back). I even got in through early admission!
Secondly, I actually graduated from said college. It did take me an extra semester, but since I had run out of money, it was do or die time. Although I would have changed my major if I were to do this over, I didn’t regret attending that college. I’ve always told young people that they should try to get in the best college possible no matter what their financial situation may be, even if they have to work at least part time (during the school year and full time during vacations) like I did. Now I call my BS degree my “smarties badge”. 🙂
When I was 15, I overcame a lack of athletic talent and extreme lack of self confidence to bicycle from Quebec all the way out to the Atlantic Ocean. I went with a group from American Youth Hostels and everyone else was from NYC and thought I was completely bizarre and irrelevent because I was from the midwest. I stuck it out through some incredibly difficult climbs (including one where I was slugging along so slowly that a group of teenaged boys were able to hit me with their chocolate milk carton as they zoomed by), so many flat tires, and of course the idiots from NYC who thought they were so damn cool but were actually incredibly ignorant.
I returned home with so much more self-confidence- it affects me even today.
These are all amazing stories, and so enlightening to read. I’m trying to figure out if there was anything I worked for that I didn’t think I would get. Frankly, right now that’s working toward publication. It’s not that I don’t think I’ll get there if I work long enough and hard enough, it’s fighting the fear every day that it won’t happen and it will be another dream crushed.
I hope to be able to report achieving that goal sooner rather than later, but right now, I’m still in the process. Having one dream I worked for tank on me has made me gun-shy, but I’m determined not to let it dictate the rest of my life.
It’s pretty fucking scary at times, though.
Ok, just trying to correct tag-fail.
Testing, testing….
One more try, and then I’ll turn it over to wiser heads.
I have had Type 1 diabetes for 28 years and I don’t have any health complications. Every single day I work my ass off to balance diet, exercise and medication, along with all of the variables in daily living you just can’t control. Even if I don’t get a book, I’m pretty proud of that.
I also maintain a totally normal (and probably boring) life with a husband and a job and graduate school.
Thanks for the chance! I always love reading your blog.
I was just happy finishing school. Guess I am not much of an achiever.
I’m in the process of working my tushie off to get a book written and myself to nationals at RWA. While I’m thrilled and excited to have the opportunity, I have a long way to go. (and great romance novels always make things better)
I wasn’t happy with my child’s lack of speech and other devlopemental issues at 18 months. I agitated and got him evaluated for early intervention but was devastated when the tester told me his IQ was under 80 and his educational prospects were limited.
I did get him approved for early intervention (speech therapy,
OT , PT, etc in a small special ed preschool) and in the subsequent years, yelled, screamed, sued, networked and wore myself out making sure he got a good education.
(later IQ tests had ranges from 120-140) My son graduated from HS with a NYS Regents Honors Diploma and was accepted into a few selective colleges with partial merit
scholarships. He still has his issues, but I feel that I did every thing I could to make sure that he knew he even had potential, much less realizing it.
Well…. I’ve finished 3 novels, which was certainly hard work. Don’t have an agent or have them published or anything, but they’re written and I’ve spent a lot of time. (in doldrums right now about it, though…)
I worked for days and days on a creative idea for my International Law paper on torture in law school. My professor was terrifying in person. He had a deep, soothing voice that sort of lulled me into this false sense of security until he called on me in class. Then I choked. Every. Time. I never said one comprehensible thing in that class. He was brilliant, and Harvard and Oxford educated, and I felt like I was at Cambridge and completely pressured just by him standing there. He gave us the okay to do something creative for our final paper, but I thought no matter what I did he must have thought I was a complete idiot.
I spent four straight days, 12 hours a day, writing this magnificent story about torture, based upon the Abu Ghraib torture scandal in part, and how as a country we need to not only look at what torture does to the victim (since so many people don’t seem to care about that), but that it can also have a negative effect on the torturer for the rest of his/her life. He was famous for having contributed to the Torture Memos, so I knew it was a crapshoot to cover something that he’d contributed in support of. I was ridiculously proud of it, everyone of my friends who read it were speechless, and I thought for sure I’d end up with a C because I was such a moron in class. I checked everyday after that to see if we got the papers back, and finally at the end of finals I went in and asked him if he had my grade for my paper. He was completely calm, didn’t look at me liek i was the idiot from class and told me I had gotten an A and that it was a very good paper. I walked out and promptly burst into tears in the bathroom. Best day of law school. Ever.
He is, to this day, my favorite prof from law school for never holding my idiocy against me in class. 🙂
I worked my butt off to pass my stockbroker license. I put in 120 study hours, of my own time in 4 months. My hubby and kids couldn’t wait for it to be done, but I did something I never thought I could do!
A good credit score. Growing up in a family where people played fast and loose with money. Sometimes we didn’t even know if we could pay our bills from one month to the next. I started off in college on a bad note, collecting credit cards like clothes…when one got too tight, I signed up for another one. I put myself in a hole and figured I would never get out of it…but I did. I realized that I wanted my own home. I wanted security and most of all, I wanted to know that if I wanted to buy that fancy new gadget, that I could pay for it out right without worrying if I had enough money to cover it. Oh yes, I worked hard for that good credit score.
I’m retiring the First of August: I want a good book to read!
I saved my marriage.
Oh gosh… Something I have worked my butt off to achieve… Well… I am still working.. But it would be to be the best Mom I can be to my 16 yr old daughter!
Now that I went back to read some of the others… oh man.. Wow!
Thank you for the chance!
After fourteen painful months of embarrassing, expensive and invasive infertility treatments, I came to the place where I believed I had to give up my dream of being a mother. I was thirty years old, lived in small Alabama town and was a lesbian. I had wanted a child for so long and it wasn’t going to happen. My doctor said my choices were in vitro or a try to lose a great deal of weight to jump start my metabolism. I had been trying to lose weight my whole life and had tried dozens of diets. Nothing worked. But I couldn’t give up. So, I went on a severe diet and exercise regemin. I lost sixty pounds in less than three months. It wasn’t healthy but it worked. My son turned eleven last Friday. Every minute of the infertility treatments and high risk pregnancy was worth it.
Busting my ass hard enough as an undergrad to be allowed to teach English Literature at a university at twenty-one while earning a Master’s Degree
I was scalded in a childhood accident. Spent six months in a burns unit. In my generation there weren’t any camps or support groups, we just got on with life, dealt with the playground bullies and grew up.
I’m not horribly scarred like some but it (and the childhood taunts) to make me very shy. To this day, I have a hard time not wearing sleeves and have to know people well before they see my scars.
A couple of years back, I met a small boy who had the same scald scar as mine, virtually the same accident. He and his mother were fantastic. She told me I was proof that his life wasn’t ruined. He touched my scars and I think they were both reassured that life does go on.
My fondest memory of my husband is when he kissed those scars and told me they made me the woman he fell in love with.
Not as exciting as the degrees listed above but it’s all I have.
Hello,
I guess I always had this desire to get my MBA. I had taken the entrance exam (GMAT) a couple of years ago and didn’t really get the mark I wanted and decided to put the idea on hold. Well, last year I made the decision to try again and I studied hard for the test and I was quite worried that I wouldn’t do well. I would get the mark I wanted on practice exams, but was nervous about performing well on test day. Well, I took the exam and I ended up getting the mark I needed to get into the program I wanted and now, I’m mid way through my MBA.
I never thought I could get over my fear of spiders, but I did! Mainly because once I moved out from my parents home there wasn’t anybody I could go to in the middle of the night and tell them “THERE IS A SPIDER IN MY ROOM! I HEARD IT WALK ON MY WALL! GET IT OUT OF THERE OR I AM NOT GOING BACK IN THERE, EVER AGAIN!”
Seriously, I once heard a spider walking across a Wham! poster I had put up on the wall next to my bed. I think that was about the time I had to get a grip on myself.
Hats off to those of you who had to struggle to get their education, you humble me.
And I don’t think editors should be allowed to participate in these giveaways. Aren’t they lucky enough already?! I am looking at you, Angela James!
Running six miles!
In 2007, I woke up one morning, turned on my laptop, and wrote a seven-page short story. As someone with degrees in theatre and law and nary a creative writing class in my life, I had no idea where it came from. Three years, three manuscripts, one blog, several freelance assignments, and one artists’ residency later, I finally, FINALLY feel comfortable calling myself a writer. Next step: finding an agent! Any takers? 🙂
I never thought I’d ever get published years ago (article in an academic journal).
Now currently working on: finishing my PhD with a toddler!
My writing partner and I wrote a TV pilot out of the blue, filmed it, starred in it, entered it in a prestigious festival, got in, and won our category. OH SNAP. When we first told folks we intended to make our own TV show, they thought we were nuts. Well, we are, but we’re TALENTED, TOO, BITCHES. 🙂
Let’s hope we can win with our book, too!
Getting back in shape!
My major achievement is still being alive at the age of 39 and graduating college. I became a quadriplegic at the age of four and was told by every doctor that I’d be dead within a few months. My parents were told to give me up and forget about me, that they could have other children. My parents are never ones to do as they’re told. So they took care of me as best they knew—through trial and error when it came to medical issues. At the age of 18 I went to college and have lived on my own for over twenty years now. I graduated with three degrees and a 3.8 GPA. All of this despite doctors declaring my impending death and thinking I was a burden. I’d truly like to see them now to prove them wrong—except they’ve probably passed away after all these years.
Decided I didn’t want to be a nun anymore, so I studied hard and converted to Judaism. Planning to convert to Buddhism next and then Islam, so I can eat a port sandwich on Friday and commit a mortal sin in four relilgions simultaneously.
When I was in college, studying Computer Science, I was in love with games by Origin Systems, specifically their Ultima series. Origin happened to be located in my neck of the woods. I drove by their building often, wondering what amazing things were going on there and wishing I could hurry up and graduate so I could interview for a job. Sadly, I was only a freshman. But I spent all my spare time writing computer games, learning the trade, making myself into what I hoped would someday be their dream hire.
As summer neared, I called them and asked if they offered summer internships. They said no. I said okay, what were they looking for in their college hires? They said they were interested in Windows experience.
Windows was this newish product put out by Microsoft. I figured, what better way to learn Windows than to work for the company that was creating it? So I interviewed for and got myself a summer internship with Microsoft, which was at the time a relatively small company. I flew up to Washington for the summer.
Guess what, I never made it to Origin. I fell in love with Microsoft and they fell in love with me, hiring me for a fulltime job out of my sophomore year of college (I finished my degree later). Origin fell into decline and ultimately went out of business. But it was my relentless pursuit of a job at Origin that got me to the place I needed to be.