Magdalen Braden: Love in Reality

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 Magdalen Braden, author of the delightful romance Love in Reality, is my guest this week.

I keep wondering how things work. That’s curiosity, which—if it doesn’t kill you—is not a bad thing. Trouble is, my curiosity was never a very marketable skill…until I started writing.

My first contemporary romance, Love in Reality, is out this week. It’s the story of a law student, Libby, who ends up on a fictional reality TV show, The Fishbowl, pretending to be her identical twin, who’s a bartender. What really triggered it was my curiosity about shows like Big Brother, where contestants are locked in a house with lots of cameras and microphones. Each contestant has to talk to a camera about how the game’s going. Those “journal entries” end up on each episode of the show.

Only you know they’re not spontaneous, right? Someone has to ask the right questions to get the player to talk about the aspects of the game the executive producer most cares about. Turns out, those people—the one’s asking the questions—are producers.

So I had in my mind a rather intimate relationship between the producer—a man—and the contestant, who’s female. What if their conversations—after the camera was turned off—got personal? What if the producer was attracted to the contestant? What if they fell in love?

Here’s the thing about writing: It’s all problem solving. Every idea I have generates scads of problems I then have to solve. How did a law student end up on a show that would never cast a law student? Why’s she pretending to be her twin sister? Why is the producer attracted to her so much that he’s willing to break the rules to spend time with her?

And, because of my background as a lawyer, I asked really arcane questions no one else would even think of, like whether the heroine has committed “fraud in the inducement”? (Short answer: no.)

Well, it took a few incarnations before I was confident I had a workable plot. (Mind you, by that time I’d written the entire book two-and-a-half times. But that’s a whole different blog post!)

Here, then, are the answers to the questions: Libby (our law student heroine) is working as her twin, Lissa, at the South Philadelphia bar because of a family friend’s cancer. The producer, Rand, wants “Lissa-the-bartender” on the show because he hates his boss, Marcy, who’d never cast anyone that confident. He doesn’t realize it’s really Libby he wants to go on the show. And she would never have accepted if her summer law job hadn’t fallen through.

Oh, and she thinks he’s cute. Which is okay, because he’s really attracted to her too. But she’s not being honest to him, and he’s not being honest with himself, and reality TV is a really screwy environment in which to fall in love, so…let’s just say, they have a lot of work to do before their happy-ever-after.

And all of that started with the image of a man asking a woman questions.

Magdalen is a 2012 Golden Heart® Finalist
You can find out more about her at her website: http://MagdalenBraden.comJoin Magdalen on Facebook

The Love in Reality page at Harmony Road Press: http://harmonyroad.com/books/love-in-reality