Blog Tour | The Chateau of Happily Ever Afters #GuestPost #giveaway

You may remember back in April I hosted a cover reveal for this book, well now I’m delighted to welcome you to my first stop on the blog tour for The Chateau of Happily Ever Afters, before we get to the guest post here is what the book is about.

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Where dreams come true…?

Wendy Clayton stopped believing in fairy tales a long time ago. Instead, she has a ‘nice’ life. Nice job. Nice flat. Absolutely no men. Until her life is turned upside-down when her elderly neighbour, Eulalie, passes away and leaves her the Château of Happily Ever Afters!

But there’s a catch: she must share the sprawling French castle with Eulalie’s long-lost nephew, Julian. And no matter how gorgeous he is, or how easily she finds herself falling head over heels, Wendy needs to find a way to get rid of him…

Because surely happily ever afters don’t happen in real life?

Escape to beautiful France this summer with this uplifting romantic comedy. Perfect for fans of Kat French, Caroline Roberts, and Holly Martin.

Amazon UK | Goodreads | Amazon US

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Now over to Jaimie who is going to tell us five things we didn’t know about the book…

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1. I’ve always wanted to call a character Julian. It’s a name that instantly brings to mind a gorgeous guy – to me, anyway! It’s never fitted for any of my characters before, but it just clicked with this book. As soon as I started thinking about the characters, Julian named himself. Having said that, in the book Wendy nicknames him Jules, and I didn’t know that was going to happen until the first time she called him it, but it became a thing between them and I ran with it. When authors say that sometimes characters do things you don’t plan on, this is what they mean! Julian also made himself Scottish. That was something completely unplanned by me, but from the moment I wrote his first sentence, he had a Scottish accent.

2. Even though the book is set in Normandy, I have very little experience of the region. I’m lucky to have friends living there who I’ve questioned and nagged incessantly for realism purposes, and although the village and château is entirely fictional, it’s set in a real area of Normandy to get the feel of the place right. And no, I won’t ever tell anyone where the real area is! I firmly believe that sometimes a more exciting setting is somewhere you really want to go rather than somewhere you know like the back of your hand, and Normandy is top of my bucket list of places to move to!

3. Wendy’s a baker in the book, but I can’t bake to save my life! I love The Great British Bake-Off as much as the next person, but soggy bottoms are the least of my troubles when it comes to baking. It’s something I’d love to be able to do, but even simple fairycakes go wrong for me! Even with the best of intentions and the simplest of recipes, everything I make comes out looking like someone’s flung mud at the baking tray and tasting even worse! I think the only thing I’ve ever made without ruining it is peppermint bark, and melting chocolate is the most complicated thing that involves, and yes, I’ve even managed to do that wrong on occasions – plural!

4. When I sent the first few chapters of this book to my editor, I was convinced it was the worst thing I’d ever written. I’d really struggled with the beginning, I’d started writing without knowing the characters properly and had scrapped and rewritten the first few chapters three times. When she phoned three days later, I was 100% convinced that it was going to be to let me down gently and politely tell me to never darken the publishers door with such rubbish again. I couldn’t believe it when she told me they’d loved it! I spent most of the phone call waiting for someone to go, “Hah, only joking!”

5. Chestnuts are significant in this story, and like Wendy, I’d never eaten a chestnut before! The château in the book is called Le Château de Châtaignier, which means The Chestnut Castle, and the name came from a French bottle of chestnut-flavoured coffee syrup that sits on top of my fridge. I knew the château would have an orchard, and that Julian would be a plant lover, and it suddenly fell into place that chestnuts would be what was growing in that orchard, and that they were important enough to name the château after. At that point, I realised I’d never even eaten a chestnut before, and luckily it was in the autumn, right at the time the supermarkets bought them out for the Christmas season. I got a bag and roasted them in the oven (probably not as good as on an open fire, but there’s only so far you can go in the name of book research!) and they were delicious. Why had I never tried chestnuts before?! They’re now top of my festive foods! In fact, my family got a bit fed up of constantly having hot chestnuts shoved at them this year!

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Well after reading those I am very excited to dive into this book, so make sure you check back with me next week when I’ll be posting my review.

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Now for the fun bit, the giveaway!! Which you’ll especially like if you are a fan of all things French, click on the link below to win…

A Paperchase Paris notebook and pen
The Chateau of Happily Ever Afters notebook
little Eiffel Tower model
Eiffel Tower bookmark
The Chateau of Happily Ever Afters magnet
Signed postcard

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Jaimie is a 32-year-old English-sounding Welsh girl with an awkward-to-spell name. She lives in South Wales and enjoys writing, gardening, watching horror movies, and drinking tea, although she’s seriously considering marrying her coffee machine. She loves autumn and winter, and singing songs from musicals despite the fact she’s got the voice of a dying hyena. She hates spiders, hot weather, and cheese & onion crisps. She spends far too much time on Twitter and owns too many pairs of boots.

She will never have time to read all the books she wants to read.

She is the author of chick-lit romantic comedies The Chateau of Happily Ever Afters and Kismetology, and she has also written young-adult romantic comedies Afterlife Academy, Not Pretty Enough, and North Pole Reform School.

You can connect with her through her Website, Twitter and Facebook.

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