Delicious Dilemma

For my last Six Sentence Sunday featuring my novel Symmetry, I felt I needed to show why Jess has such a tough decision about which man she wants to be with.

Last week I left you in the middle of a testosterone-charged exchange between Jess's estranged husband Lee and Noah, the attractive man from her past. Jess manages to stop Lee before things become physical, but he makes sure that Noah knows Jess is still his wife before he leaves. He comes back in the middle of the night, reeking of whiskey and pleading with Jess to forgive him for all his past transgressions. She's not at all convinced, but she lets him sleep on the couch since he's in no condition to drive. This scene takes place the next morning.

Lee was still asleep when she got up in the morning, sprawled on the couch the way he’d taken a nap there so many times in the past. She stopped to look at him on her way to the kitchen and had to marvel at how, even while in dire need of a shave with his hair a mass of blond chaos and his bottom lip vibrating rather obscenely every time he exhaled, he was still the best-looking thing she had ever seen.

Her gaze was drawn to the way his biceps flexed on the arm bent over his head and the glorious shape of his lower body inside his wrinkled cotton pants. Her pulse quickened the way it always had whenever she looked at him. God, she was so hooked on him it was like having a chemical dependency--addicted to the hormonal rush her body always experienced when it was near his. She was nothing but a pathetic Lee junkie.

Which man will she pick? Her hunky, clueless husband or the silken-voiced sweetheart from her past? Buy Symmetry here and find out!

And please also check out the other Six Sentencers.

~Stay true to yourself and your dreams will come true!

Male Egos R Us

When last we saw our heroine Jess, she was checking out a tall drink of water from her past and considering a switch from Team Hunk to Team Soulful. After the lecture, she goes out for coffee with Noah and agrees to have dinner with him the next night. The initial guilt she feels disappears pretty quick when she tells her estranged husband Lee that she's having dinner with an old friend and he can't stop advancing his career long enough to even care.

When Lee shows up at their house just as she's coming home from her date with Noah, she discovers that he thought her old friend was an old girlfriend. Turns out he cares a little after all.

“Why don’t we see if your boyfriend’s willing to get his ass kicked for you!”

Noah held up his hands and took a step back. “Look, I don’t want any trouble with you, but I intend to keep seeing Jess.”

Lee sneered at him. “Oh, really? Well, I intend to break your face!”

Oh, my. What girl doesn't appreciate a little macho posturing on her behalf? Tune in next Sunday to see what happens next!

Or you can just buy you own copy of Symmetry here. And please also check out the other Six Sentencers.

~Stay true to yourself and your dreams will come true!

Mystery Man from the Past

Happy Sunday, everyone!

This week's six sentences feature the man in Symmetry from Jess's past who shows up while she's separated from her husband Lee. To celebrate her new independence and reward herself for standing up to her mother, Jess decides to pamper herself a little. But since she's Jess, her idea of pampering is to get her first pedicure, take art and yoga lessons, and sign up for a lecture series on the Revolutionary War. Her best friend Deb tells her those things are an insult to pampering and that she's like the heroine in the nerdiest Chick Lit novel ever, which of course she is! ;-)

When Jess attends her first lecture, the speaker--Noah Hamilton--seems very familiar to her, but she can't place him. This scene takes place right after he's introduced to the audience, but it still doesn't jog Jess's memory.

Jess thought she might’ve heard his name before, but she had no idea where or when. As he stepped up to the podium, his gaze met hers again momentarily, and she got the feeling he was looking for a reaction from her, as if he knew who she was and wanted to see if she recognized him as well. Who the devil was he?

As soon as he began speaking, she knew. Although she thought they might have had more than one class together in high school, she remembered talking to him only once when he’d complimented her on an impassioned essay about tobacco company lawsuits that she’d written and read aloud in her sophomore English class. She recalled thinking then that his voice reminded her of the wind in the trees outside her bedroom window, a soothing whisper that had lulled her to sleep for as long as she could remember.

Uh-oh. Looks like Lee has some competition, huh? Find out next week what happens when these two polar opposites on the testosterone scale meet face to face!

Or you can just buy you own copy of Symmetry here. And please also check out the other Six Sentencers. Loads of talent on this list!

~Stay true to yourself and your dreams will come true!

Hands Down and Heads Up!

Last Sunday I promised to explain what I meant by the "hair pulling" reference in my description of Symmetry. Since I'm on vacay this week visiting my step-daughters, (one of whom is the beautiful redhead on the cover of Symmetry) I'm being lazy and letting an excerpt from one of my reviews do it for me. This is from Julie's review on the Girls Just Reading blog:

"What I enjoyed most was Jess's journey to figuring out why she liked to pull out her hair, strand by strand. This leads her to a self-diagnosis of trichotillomania or TTM for short. She begins to try to understand the triggers for this and takes actions to stop. I also liked how she developed a relationship with a young girl named Cara who did not have the support of her family in treating this disease. As a psychology major, I found it extremely interesting that this is a physical disease and not a mental illness. I can see why it would be misdiagnosed a lot of the time. I liked how this also brought her closer to her younger sister-in-law Lexie, and how she was able to help Lexie with her own issues with OCD.

Normally, I would think that authors would have to do a lot of research on a disease like TTM, but not Ms. Scarbrough. For her this was a personal novel because she deals with TTM herself. I always like it when authors use a subject matter they know personally as a source of inspiration for a character. I have a feeling that Jessica is a lot like Joyce in her way of dealing with TTM."

So there it is. I have trichotillomania. The six sentences I chose for this week come from the book's dedication and from the author's note at the end, and they explain why I wrote it.

This book is dedicated to all the people suffering alone who don't even know that what they do has a name. You are not defective, damaged, or mentally ill, and you are worthy of love and understanding.

I’ve often been asked why I decided to include a topic like hair-pulling in a novel instead of telling my own story about it in a book of non-fiction. The answer to that is twofold. First, I have TTM only to the degree that Jess has it, so it’s not a major problem for me—certainly not interesting enough for an entire book about it. Second, I figured the only people who read non-fiction books about TTM are people who already know what it is, and my goal is to raise awareness in the rest of the population.

See, I always knew there had to be a reason God gave me both the ability to write and enough hair for three people!

You can buy you own copy of Symmetry here. And please also check out the other Six Sentencers.

~Stay true to yourself and your dreams will come true!