Blog Tour - Guest Post: Twisting the Truth by Avril Tremayne

I'm kicking off another great Blog Tour for all you die-hard romantics out there. This time around, I'm delighted to welcome Avril Tremayne, author of Wanting Mr Wrong which was published on the 2nd February.

Avril has kindly offered to share her thoughts on her characters ... and the torture she loves to put them through!

Just a quick note before I introduce you to Avril though and that is, that the tour will continue tomorrow at Australian Women Online. Please do hop on over to see what Avril has to say to them. 

After a highly successful career in corporate communications, Avril Tremayne decided she needed a little more romance in her life.

And, having tried her hand at shoe selling, nursing, teaching, and short-order cooking, before braving the corporate ladder as a high flying executive mixing it up with the business elite and an occasional celebrity, Avril has gathered more than enough raw material to kick-start a swag of tall tales.

Avril is a mad keen traveller, with more favourite cities than should be strictly allowable, and loves giving travel advice to anyone who asks - and a good few who don't!?

When she's not writing or reading, she can generally be found eating - although she does not cook - drinking wine and obsessing about shoes.

Avril lives in Sydney, Australia, where her husband and daughter try to keep her out of trouble - not always successfully.

Before Avril kicks off with her Post though, I'd just like to thank Random House Australia for arranging her contribution and also Avril for agreeing to chat about the metamorphosis of those wonderful things called characters.

Wanting Mr Wrong can be purchased in eBook format from the following links:

Amazon    eBooks.com    Google Play    Kobo Books

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Recently, a friend of mine told me she was going to have fun matching the characters in one of my books to their real life models.

I was like, whoah – I don’t do that! 

But then I started wondering if maybe I actually do. 

Okay, I’m confessing right now that very often something in my real life tends to trigger something in my brain that ends up in something on a page. For example:

• My slightly embarrassing crush on British actor Matthew Macfadyen gave me the idea for the crush-crazy heroine, Evie Parker, in Wanting Mr Wrong.

• In Here Comes The Bridesmaid, I used a few characteristics – and the real surname, because I love it – of one of my all-time favourite aviation colleagues, who was a willing participant. He wasn’t exactly a ‘touchy-feely’ kind of guy, and is also a head-shaver. Just those two things were enough to get me started on building a fabulous hero, Leo Quartermaine. (Oh, yeah, and my own carnivorousness and shoe obsession came in handy for heroine Sunshine Smart.)

• The genesis of my book Turning The Good Girl Bad was a mortifying experience from my corporate life. I was naughty enough to be doing a little sly editing of a romance manuscript in my office at lunchtime, when I was interrupted by a request from a senior executive (who shall remain nameless) for a particular document. I duly put the document in an envelope and handed it over, only to look around for my manuscript pages and find them missing. Shock horror! I raced into that poor executive’s office and wrenched the envelope out of his hand so fast, his head was spinning like Linda Blair in The Exorcist!

• I started thinking of my nurse heroine, Ella, in From Fling To Forever, when I was applying for a job with Médecins Sans Frontières (a job I didn’t get, incidentally).

• My book, The Contract, which is coming out as a Random Romance in April, came about because a banking colleague once joked that I should make my hero an economist, just like him. I liked the idea of an economist straight away – but for my heroine, and somehow the plot unfolded from that career choice.

But the truth is that although my stories and/or characters might start in real life, they don’t stay there. They metamorphose into something much more wonderful. 

For example – those pages I thought I’d put in that envelope with the executive’s document, which kick-started Turning The Good Girl Bad? Well, in real life, they weren’t in that envelope – but if you read the book…? Let’s just say the result is more exciting.

You see, the fun happens when I start twisting and turning and torturing. Giving my characters excruciating pasts to deal with; getting them into trouble – and out of it; laying on the passion; raising the stakes; giving them choices – the more difficult the better.

Inevitably, my characters end up nuttier, more glamorous, cuter, tougher, nastier, and altogether more fabulous than anyone I know. 

And that’s why, when another friend of mine remarked recently on the utter gorgeousness of Jackson J Stevens, the hero in Wanting Mr Wrong, I replied (with apologies to Mr Tremayne, who is a very worthy hero himself) that I only wished I lived my heroines’ lives. 

Sigh.

About the Book

Wanting Mr Wrong is an irresistible rom com about a girl who refuses to fall for the man the whole world is in love with.

Evie Parker has never been one to swoon after celebrities – give her a neuroscientist over an actor any day! So when she develops her first movie-star crush, she's determined to date her way out of it, starting with the next good-looking doctor she sees.

Yet hovering on the fringes of her life is her gay best friend's determined brother, Jackson J Stevens, a famous actor who comes with trailing paparazzi.

The one thing worse than a celebrity in Evie's eyes is a media circus, so Jack isn't an option no matter how hard he flirts with her.

Evie knows what she doesn't want; Jack knows what he does. And somewhere in the middle, pheromones are making things go haywire every time they're together.