Tour Stop, Deleted Scene & Giveaway: Rock N Soul by Lauren Sattersby

Hi, I’m Lauren Sattersby, and this is the blog tour for my very first novel, Rock N Soul! I’ll be featured on various blogs over the course of the tour, and I’ll be sharing deleted scenes, playlists, answers to questions, and some of my thoughts on what it’s like to write a ghost story and make it both hot and romantic. Comment on each spot to be entered in a drawing for a $25 gift card to buy some books from Riptide Publishing!

A lot of editing goes into a novel, and sometimes things get cut. In one of my creative writing classes in college, the professor told us that we had to always be willing to “kill our darlings,” meaning that no matter how much we liked a particular section or idea or scene, we had to be prepared to cut it for the good of the story if it wasn’t working. And one of the darlings I had to kill while editing was a prologue which originally introduced the story.

I dutifully cut the section and wrote a new opening, because one should always listen to one’s editor and also because the new opening is awesome. But I still like the original prologue because it gives a nice intro to Tyler’s voice and attitude. So here’s a deleted scene from Rock N Soul!

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Deleted Scene

My name is Tyler Lindsey, and on September 13, I found myself standing over the body of rockstar Christopher Raiden in his hotel room in Boston.

Okay, okay, so I didn’t kill him, and he didn’t die in my arms or anything. Or even in front of me. He did die, though, and I was the one who found him. I walked in to his hotel room, saw him on the floor, and called 911. I did manage to hold myself back from taking pictures of his corpse—pics or it didn’t happen, you know—which I have really come to regret. Because, well, pics or it didn’t happen. And also because I could have probably made like a million dollars selling still-warm corpse pictures of a dead rockstar.

I did push his corpse with my toe, though, to see if he’d wake up. So there’s that. Dead rockstar cells are on the toe of my work shoe. Maybe I could get at least fifteen bucks out of that on Ebay, or twenty-five at the Buy It Now! price. But then I’d just have to buy a new pair of work shoes which would cost more than what I’d make selling these, so forget that.

And the worst part about finding a rockstar dead in his hotel room? Fucker owed me a tip. Room service doesn’t deliver itself, you know. And you can rest assured that the hotel will hound his manager until they get reimbursed for the food, but I’m out a tip, and nothing will get that back. I seriously considered stealing his shit from the hotel room and hawking it to bereaved fans to cover my losses, but you don’t want the cops walking up to a corpse and seeing the guy who found it pushing a wheelbarrow full of eyeliner and designer underwear down to the service elevator. That looks pretty suspicious. I mean, I wasn’t the one who injected the guy with enough heroin to bring down a reasonably sized mammoth, but still. Fingers are always pointed when people die unexpectedly, and I do what I can to make sure they’re not pointed in my direction.

So far, so good.

Everybody is supposed to get their fifteen minutes of fame, but I only got maybe two. When word got out that Chris Raiden was dead, I got a gaggle of reporters who rushed me with microphones out and asked for a statement. There were cameras strobing enough to make me glad I’m not epileptic and people shouting, and then when I started talking it went so silent you could hear an empty syringe drop. It was thrilling. It was exhilarating. It was bullshit.

Because the only thing that shuts a reporter up faster than a roundhouse kick to the face is the realization that you don’t have a story to tell them.

They ended up quoting me on my thrilling description of my harrowing experience. “I found him on the floor and I called 911,” the article said. And that was it. They didn’t even use my name. So I didn’t get any minutes of fame, not really, and some guy named “a hotel employee” got what little fame I would have gotten. My girlfriend, Carmen, laughed at that for a solid ten minutes before she walked out the door with both birds in full majestic flight because I didn’t get her an autograph before the idiot offed himself via stupidity. I yelled after her: “Well, excuse me for not taping a pen to his cold dead hand!” but she couldn’t hear me over the sound of how dumped I was.

So now I’m out a girlfriend and fame and tip money. All because Christopher Fucking Raiden decided to die on my watch.

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Title: Rock N Soul by Lauren Sattersby
Publisher: Riptide Publishing
Genre: Contemporary, M/M, Erotic, Romance, Urban Fantasy/Paranormal, Comedy
Length: 418 pages/Word Count: 113,700

Summary:

I’m Tyler Lindsey, and until recently, I had an okay apartment, an okay girlfriend, and an okay job as a bellboy at a respectable Boston hotel. Then rock star Chris Raiden died right before I brought his room service—stiffing me on the tip, by the way—and my life went to hell. My fifteen minutes of fame was more like five seconds, and my girlfriend left me in disgust.

But even worse—Chris is haunting me. Not the room where he died, like a normal ghost. No, somehow he’s stuck to me and is insisting on taking care of a bunch of unfinished business in California. So now I have to traipse across the country with the world’s most narcissistic ghost.

But . . . I keep having these weird thoughts. Thoughts about how much I like the way he makes me laugh. Thoughts where I kind of want to kiss the emo-narcissist, even though he’s a ghost and an asshole and I can’t touch him anyway. And even if I could, what will happen when he finishes his business and nothing’s keeping him here anymore?

Add to Goodreads.

Purchase Link: Riptide Publishing

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Author Bio

Lauren Sattersby works as a budget manager by day, but while she’s at her desk mindlessly crunching numbers, it’s a good bet that she’s also writing M/M romance in her head and counting the minutes until she can get home and write it all down. She is a grammar enthusiast, which is why she has a Master’s degree in technical writing, but that tends to scare friends away so she keeps that to herself.

Lauren lives in Wisconsin with her partner and their three terrible cats. She’s a recent transplant from a thousand miles further south, so she still gets crazy excited about snow. When she isn’t writing, she can usually be found playing video games or scouring the countryside looking for interesting birds.

Author Links: Website * Tumblr * Facebook * Twitter * Goodreads * Email

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Giveaway

To celebrate the release of Rock N Soul, Lauren is giving away $25 in Riptide credit! Your first comment at each stop on this tour enters you in the drawing. Entries close at midnight, Eastern time, on January 23, 2016. Contest is NOT restricted to U.S. Entries. Follow the tour for more opportunities to enter the giveaway! Don’t forget to leave your email or method of contact so Riptide can reach you if you win!

Follow the rest of the tour HERE.