Thought I Knew You Tour: Guest Post

Summary: Claire Barnes is shattered when her husband, Greg, goes on a business trip and never returns.

Unwilling to just wait for the police to find him, Claire conducts her own investigation. Her best friend Drew helps her look for answers, but all she finds are troubling questions.

With every clue, she discovers that Greg may not be the man she thought she married.

While battling her growing feelings for Drew and raising her two young children, Claire must learn to live with the knowledge that the truth behind Greg’s disappearance may never be revealed.

Purchase from any of these retailers:

Amazon Kindle: Thought I Knew You

Barnes & Noble Nook:Barnes & Noble

Smashwords (Multiple eBook Formats): Thought I Knew You

Amazon Paperback: Thought I Knew You

Kobo: Kobo eReaders

Be sure to check out the rest of the tour here.

Guest Post:

Kate Moretti has provided a guest post about writing a romance novel:

I accidentally wrote a romance novel. Which sounds crazy because what did I mean to write? I don’t actually know. I guess I started out wanting to write a mystery, or an examination of marriage, or maybe some combination of the two. I even envisioned it a crime novel when I first started typing. But for me, the strangest part of writing was the realization that past a certain point, you really do lose control of the story. My characters tended to do their own thing and what was going to be a small romantic angle to fill the middle of the book became the main plot! No one was more surprised than I was. So if I didn’t set out to write a romance novel, and I’m not a big romance novel reader, how did this happen?

In Thought I Knew You, Claire’s husband goes on a business trip and doesn’t come back. The police can’t find him, he’s just – poof! – gone. She has no choice; she has to move on. The book spans three years in Claire’s life, in the middle of which she develops feelings for her childhood friend.

I was probably drawn to writing the relationship with Claire and Drew because my husband has been in my life off and on since we were in high school. We didn’t grow up together in the classical sense, but we sure as heck became adults together. Exploring their relationship with all its cracks and fissures was fun. I was interested in portraying real love, with flawed people who don’t always take the high road, who are sometimes selfish and thoughtless. I liked walking the fine line of making them human and real, while still being likeable. I wanted you to root for them.

The hardest part for me was the sex scenes. I struggled there. I wrote it the first time, and my editor basically told me it had to be expanded (I think she said “fleshed out” wink, wink) or removed completely. I chose to expand it. But I had somewhat of a hard time. I’m not a prude, necessarily, but I don’t walk around talking about sex openly all the time. There was quite a bit of back and forth with my editor where she’d just say, MORE! I had sex on the brain constantly for about four days; it’s enough to make a person crazy! I said this to a friend, who joked, “This is what it’s like to be a man!”

There’s something completely husking about writing about the most intimate moments of people’s lives. I’ve had to forgo modesty and the thought of “Oh, my eighty-year-old aunt might read this,” and put it out there, on paper, for my small corner of the world to see. And frankly, this is my first novel, so I was definitely still inhibited. It’s more like PG-13 than R. But hopefully, it’s character building and not gratuitous, and it’s possible that next time, I’ll (ahem) bare a little more. We’ll see.