I'm happy to announce we have author Louise Wise as our guest here today.
![]() |
| e-book is only $2 from Amazon. Click on book to buy. |
Q. Where do you come from? I come from Northampton in England, the same place where the late Princess Diana lived.
Q. What made you write this book? I love reading chick lit. Funny things naturally happen in life, and I wanted to enforce that. Life is funny, and I enjoy writing about people rather than the actual romance.
Q. Which authors have had a significant influence on your writing? Melissa Nathan. She was the first chick lit author I read and I absolutely fell in love with the style. I have read all of her books, sadly she died in 2006 with cancer (she was only 36!!). Through her writing she has shown me that life is funny and delightful as well as scary and heart-breaking.
Q. Do you like to listen to any music while you write? I like background noise, and because it can get a little solitary tapping away on the keyboard I like to hear another human voice in the background as well as music, so I listen to the radio. Radio 2 with Jeremy Vine and Steve Wright are my favourites.
Q. What do you think of the changing world of electronic books? Fantastic from all points of view, I think. The unknown writer can get his or her work read, the reader can pick up next to nothing books and the environment is cleaned up! Who invented them? Got to have been a woman!
Q. Do you have any other books you can talk about that you’re writing? My first book, Eden, is a romance/science-fiction book which is out on Amazon and Smashwords at the moment. I enjoyed writing that – I just let my imagination run riot! The book I’m working on now has the working title Miss Anthrope. It’s a chick lit with the theme depression. I know, it sounds odd writing a fun book about depression, but my character has problems that she doesn’t know she has. She dreams about them, and wakes up and promptly forgets them. It’s her minds way of protecting her, but sub-consciously she knows something is up and thus is depressed. In her words about her friends: “I feel like a normal person stuck in a chick lit novel.” Everyone/thing around her is light-hearted, fun-filled and happy and she’s grouchy, bitchy and money-pinching. I love her!
Q. If there were three books you could only take to a desert island what would they be? Tolsoy’s War and Peace – after I read it I could burn it for fuel. I’m boringly practical like that.
Wilderness Survival by Gregory Davenport – for obvious reasons.
Twenties Girl by Sophie Kinsella – seriously impressed by this book.
Q. What advice do you have to offer other aspiring authors out there?
Know the difference between an editor and a proofreader.
Q. Is there anything else you would like to say about yourself and your work? My work is branding myself as a comedy writer. I never realised that; I thought becoming a writer was all about thinking up stories and putting them down on paper, and that’s it. So, what I’d like to say is that writing is only half the battle. Branding, networking and marketing is the other half. And I speak for the traditionally published as well as indies.
Thank you Louise for visiting with us today.
Q. How can readers find you and follow your progress?
Here is a free excerpt from the novel of Louise Wise, A Proper Charlie.
Excerpt:
Charlie watched as he fell back onto her settee, and then straddled his lap. Oh my God! What was she doing! She was having an out-of-body-experience, she thought. Only she wasn’t dead. She was alive. Very much so. She wriggled against him wonderingly and excitement flared in her body as his own rose to her teasing.
His lips parted on a groan, and his Cadbury eyes blazed. She was rocking on Ben Middleton’s lap like she was in a third-rate porn movie. Rocking on the man of her dreams’ hardening lap.
A criminal’s lap.
She had recognised him the instant he pulled up beside her in the Audi. The hair curling around the ears, the way he held the angle of his head, the slight slip-up on the stupid Scottish accent. Oh, yes, here at her disposal was Ben Middleton. And boy, was she going to see justice done!
But then he kissed her.
She felt her body relax like she had been steeling herself against this passion but had now given up. His tongue entered her mouth, and when she met it with her own she knew she was lost. The kiss was explosive and volatile, and suddenly she was lying on the settee and he was on top. His hands were in her hair, as his tongue explored the moist softness of her mouth.
She wasn’t setting him up in a honey-trap, he wasn’t an abductor or even Ben Middleton. She wasn’t a pretend prostitute, a journalist or Charlotte Wallis. They weren’t even people anymore. They’d melted and fused in a tangle of passionate chaos.
She felt his hand mould around her breast; her jacket was open at the front revealing the plain white T-shirt. He pulled it up, clumsy and impatient in his desire, and this power she had over him drove her wild! Her flimsy bra was no barrier as her breast came alive under his inquisitive fingers. She moaned and arched towards him. That she’d hate herself afterwards; that he’d hate her didn’t seem to figure in her enflamed, glazed mind.
Their unchecked passion was frightening. And all at once, he was on the floor and she on top, mouths still together, hands pulling at one another’s clothes.
The telephone rang.
Charlie froze. Then all her senses came flooding back. She scrambled up, and ignoring the phone patted her jacket pockets for the knife.
‘What’s the matter?’ Ben croaked, he didn’t appear to hear the phone. He looked as soppy as she felt. He held out a hand to her. ‘Come back.’
‘Condom,’ she said, and forced a smile. She felt sick. Sick with that she’d lost control so easily. He’s a criminal, she reminded herself. He abducted Sally Readman.
She pointed the knife at him. ‘I’m armed.’
‘Charlie…?’ Ben lowered his hand. He stared from the knife to her. ‘Is this a joke?’
Charlie’s chin trembled and tears spilled from her eyes. ‘I’m deadly serious.’
Ben sat up. ‘And I’m deadly confused. One minute we were… and the next you’re holding a knife to my face.’
‘It’s a lock-knife, and it isn’t in your face.’ She moved forward and bent slightly so she was at his level. ‘This is at your face.’
Ben flinched, and Charlie swallowed. She tried to stop her tears from falling and her chin from wobbling, but she couldn’t. She rubbed her nose and almost stabbed herself in the eye.
The phone stopped ringing and the answer machine kicked in. ‘Hi, Lottie, it’s Andy. Just to say, I forgive you and I’ll be home by Friday. Get the beers in, eh? Bye darlin’.’
They both stared at the phone, then Ben scrambled up and grabbed her hand around the knife. Charlie brought up her knee like all girls are taught.
‘Ben Middleton,’ she said as Ben sank to the floor once again with an anguished cry of pain. She held the knife out warningly towards him. ‘I didn’t listen to the rumours about you. I believed your innocence,’ she swallowed on some emotion, ‘b-believed you. God, how stupid. I e-even felt sorry for you!’
Ben stared up at her from where he knelt; his face still contorted in pain.
‘You s-seemed sad a-and haunted by something. Now I know what it was…’ her voice broke and her tears fell freely. ‘Guilt!’
‘I don’t under –’ he began. His expression was changing to bewilderment. He began to stand.
‘No!’ she shouted. She moved towards the phone. ‘Stay where you are. I’m making a citizen’s arrest!’
Ben’s confusion was swapped with shock. ‘You can’t think I had anything to do with the abductions? Charlie, I was cleared! It was a misunderstanding, that’s all!’
Slowing standing, Ben held out his hands in a gesture of innocence. ‘OK, I know how this looks, but I don’t normally pick up prostitutes. The only reason I did this time was because I knew it was you.’
She glared at him and he coloured.
‘That didn’t come out right.’
‘Sure didn’t.’ She looked away to reach for the telephone and Ben moved in, quickly grabbing the wrist that was holding the knife. Charlie yelled angrily and brought her knee up again, but this time he was ready, catching her leg between his own.
