Guest Author (+ a Giveaway): Ruthie Knox Talks about Road Trips and Romance…

Ruthie Knox: I have a confession to make. Are you ready? Here it is: I hate landscape pictures.

This one is sort of okay, because it has a person in it. Namely, me. It also has a bike. But even so, I don’t particularly want to look at it. I want to be there, riding. Failing that, I don’t want to gaze at the photo, and I definitely don’t want to read about the scenery.

This leads me to a second, perhaps more shameful confession: I don’t read landscape descriptions in books. Ever. It’s not even an intentional thing, it’s just that my eyes skip right over them. Later, I might be talking to my husband about a novel we both read, and he’ll say, “I loved that part where [blah blah blah landscape description that you don’t recall ever having read, to the point that you start to question whether we even read the same book],” and I’ll say, “Mmm-hmm.”

See, the thing is, I’m a people person. I’m interested in what people do, how they behave, what they look like, what kinds of mistakes they make. This is why I write romance, in part–because romance is completely preoccupied with people, and not so much with landscapes. Romance readers are my kind of people. I suspect–secretly and subversively–that many of you guys don’t like landscape pictures either. In fact, I suspect that some of you guys skip the landscape descriptions, too. I can’t be the only one.

But then the question arises, Why did I write a romance novel about two people stuck together on a cross-country bike trip? Why not just plunk my hero and heroine in a little beach shack, lock the door, and throw away the key? The effect would be the same, after all–they’d be stuck together for X number of days, forced to get to know each other and negotiate their differences. And I’d only have to describe the little beach shack once.

The answer is that I love a good road trip. I love the adventures, the stories, the flat tires, the disasters. I love the unexpectedness of the open road, and I love it that when you’re on a road trip, if you keep doing what you’re doing–keep pushing your foot to the gas pedal, keep rotating your bike pedals in endless circles–different things will happen. Every day brings new discoveries, new vistas, new adventures. I wanted my characters, Tom and Lexie, to have that experience of learning each other while they coped with all the adventures, good and bad, the road threw at them along their three-month-long journey.

But I wanted to do it without writing a travelogue, because, as I said, travel writing is so not my thing. So in Ride with Me, I tried to keep the landscape descriptions to a minimum, to make them short and lyrical and always tied to what my characters were noticing and feeling.

Because the point of a road trip romance isn’t the landscape, after all. It isn’t what the characters are pedaling past. It’s how they feel. It’s the promise of a wide-open valley laid out at the base of a steep mountain pass; the flat, dull despair of Kansas; the damp, hot elation of Missouri’s roller-coaster hills. In Ride with Me, landscape is adventure, and the only adventure that matters is love.

Fabulous post, Ruthie! I’m right there with you. For me, it’s all about the characters. The people that the story is about, that’s what I love most about reading books. Reading the internal journeys that they go on and relationships that they form. All of the other stuff is background noise to me. If you want me to love your book, make me love your characters.

BOOK DESCRIPTION

Ride with Me, available from Loveswept on February 13, 2012!

Link to book: Ride with Me on Random House

In this fun, scorching-hot eBook original romance by Ruthie Knox, a cross-country bike adventure takes a detour into unexplored passion. As readers will discover, Ride with Me is not about the bike!

When Lexie Marshall places an ad for a cycling companion, she hopes to find someone friendly and fun to cross the TransAmerica Trail with. Instead, she gets Tom Geiger — a lean, sexy loner whose bad attitude threatens to spoil the adventure she’s spent years planning.

Roped into the cycling equivalent of a blind date by his sister, Tom doesn’t want to ride with a chatty, go-by-the-map kind of woman, and he certainly doesn’t want to want her. Too bad the sight of Lexie with a bike between her thighs really turns his crank.

Even Tom’s stubborn determination to keep Lexie at a distance can’t stop a kiss from leading to endless nights of hotter-than-hot sex. But when the wild ride ends, where will they go next?

BIO

Website: http://ruthieknox.com

Ruthie Knox figured out how to walk and read at the same time in the second grade, and she hasn’t looked up since. She spent her formative years hiding romance novels in her bedroom closet to avoid the merciless teasing of her brothers and imagining scenarios in which someone who looked remarkably like Daniel Day Lewis recognized her well-hidden sex appeal and rescued her from middle-class Midwestern obscurity. After graduating from Grinnell College with an English and history double major, she earned a Ph.D. in modern British history that she’s put to remarkably little use.

These days, she writes contemporary romance in which witty, down-to- earth characters find each other irresistible in their pajamas, though she freely admits this has yet to happen to her. Perhaps she needs more exciting pajamas. Ruthie abhors an epilogue and insists a decent romance requires at least three good sex scenes.

What about you — do you read landscape descriptions? Do you like your romances to take place against a sweeping backdrop of adventure or in a small, locked room? One lucky commenter will be randomly chosen to win a digital copy of Ride with Me. Winners will pick up their copy through Net Galley. Good luck to all!