Interview with Cecilia Dominic, author of A PERFECT MAN + Giveaway

Hi everyone! I’m so happy to be featuring Cecilia Dominic and her latest contemporary romance today. A PERFECT MAN is actually on sale right now for $0.99 cents, so if you’re interested, make sure to check it out!

About the book

The Perfect Man by Cecilia Dominic
Find out more info here.

Until he overcomes his past, he can’t be anyone’s hero. Not even hers.

After leaving her abusive relationship, Karen Hardeman stifled her self-doubt and enrolled in Foothills University’s MFA program. Her first course—Intro to Romance—is ironic. Goodness knows she needs help in that area.

The professor is offering a prize for writing the best novella: dinner with her favorite author. It’s as good as hers, if she can just find the right model for her hero. One thing is sure—it’s not her irritating classmate, Seth Sayers.

Seth left his soul-sucking software career to seek a new direction—and to escape family drama. After a disastrous encounter with a jagged piece of wine bottle lands him in the ER, a painkiller-induced dream casts him as the male lead in Karen’s project. The pills also dull his better judgement, and he re-writes her story from the male point of view.

When their professor forces them to collaborate on the manuscript, it’s hardly a match made in writing heaven. Trust is in short supply. But when Karen runs afoul of a villainous megachurch preacher, she instinctively reaches for the one man who already has a piece of her heart – Seth. But can he can overcome his doubts and be the hero of her dreams?

Warning: This is a book about graduate students, which means the characters are young enough to get into trouble and old enough to know better. They guzzle caffeine and drink alcohol like writers, and they engage in some adult behavior, but nothing too explicit.

The Interview

Thank you so much for having me today! Since my book is about writing students, I can’t help but imagine their reactions to the concept of #ARCAugust. Some might be dismayed that there are so many authors vying for reviews, but I imagine they’d just be happy to be published, which at this point feels like a long way off for them. And I’m sure more than one of my characters would want to sign up to be a reviewer just to get hold of so many lovely books.

 

To give the readers some context, I was originally published by Samhain Publishing in 2013. I had seven books with them when they closed in March 2017, and I received the rights back. I’ve been in the process of self-publishing them – and boy, is it a process – in the order they were released. A Perfect Man is my middle child, the fourth of seven, and the only non-paranormal in the bunch.

 

Use any five words to describe your novel.

Five words together or separately? If it’s a five-word sentence, it would be “Life is stranger than fiction.” But I suspect you mean five separate words, so here they are:

Funny – I don’t know if I would have used this word if you’d asked me back in early 2015 as I was finishing the editing process for A Perfect Man. For those who don’t know, a properly edited book goes through several rounds of edits, and I’m not the only author who has thought about how tired they are of reading their work over and over again. Re-releasing my novels has given me the opportunity to read them with fresh eyes. It’s weird how reading something I wrote two or three years ago is like reading something written by someone else. I found myself laughing out loud at parts of the book I didn’t remember writing.

Meta – A Perfect Man is about a pair of students who are just starting a Masters of Fine Arts (MFA) in genre fiction program at a fictional university in North Georgia. I enjoyed writing the book as they were progressing through their own projects, and I even got to express some of my frustrations with my own writing process through their experience and the class content.

Delicious – I love food, and I have a wine blog I update occasionally. I’m too busy to make up and test complicated recipes, and alas, I can’t eat out at fabulous restaurants all the time, so I live my food fantasies through my characters. There’s a dessert in the book that’s rumored to be better than sex. You’ll have to read the book to find out what it is, but of course it involves chocolate.

Nostalgic – I’m one of those people who loves being in school, and I would have been a professional student if I’d had the opportunity. I put off the real world as long as possible by getting a Ph.D. in clinical psychology at the University of Georgia. Foothills is loosely based on Athens, GA. Several of the places the characters go to are modeled after restaurants, bars, and other venues I miss, some of which aren’t there anymore. I enjoyed revisiting it through my characters.

Realistic – Yes, A Perfect Man is fiction – the title should be a giveaway. 😉 But one of my early reviewers commented that the romance between Seth and Karen is more true to life in terms of pacing and what happens than in more traditional romance novels. That’s why I think of A Perfect Man as more chick lit. As a psychologist, I wanted Seth and Karen to work through their own stuff so by the time they come together, they can be their authentic selves.

 

What was your inspiration for A Perfect Man?

As I mentioned above, I could have been a professional student, but alas, one does have to engage in real life eventually. Being somewhat stubborn, I decided back around 2008 that if I couldn’t get an MFA the traditional way, I would build my own self-study program. I planned for my projects to reflect the genre I was studying, and I was going to try to write one novel a “semester” starting with romance. A Perfect Man took much longer, and I quickly dropped my DIY MFA plan. I’m happy to pick it up again and continue the series with the characters experiencing a different genre as they study and write about it in each book.

This is a re-release of a previous novel. Should readers expect any changes?

Another fun thing about re-releasing my books has been to see how my writing has grown. While I still have much to learn, I’m happy for the opportunity to go back and revise my previous work. The characters and story are the same, but I hope the writing is better. My high school art teacher pushed me to make my lights lighter and my darks darker in my drawings, so I did so with the emotional reactions of my characters. Other changes include cleaning up some of my early bad writing habits, for example, by untangling long, convoluted sentences.

How has your writing process evolved over your publishing career?

Every book is still a learning experience. I’ve always generally been a pantser – someone who writes the story without an outline or plan – until a certain point. Then I sit down and figure out what questions need to be answered and what plot points need to be resolved or carried through to a sequel, and I’ll outline the last third of the book. When I was with Samhain Publishing, I learned to put together a synopsis as part of the proposals I’d send my editor. When I got stuck, I found it helped to have an overview of the book with enough wiggle room to not be stifling. I’d like to get faster, so I’m going to try outlining more, but not too specifically, when I start writing new stuff again.

What are you working on now? (If you can share!)

Much of my time and attention is going to re-releasing the books I had with Samhain, but I’m almost done! The last re-releases will be my urban fantasy/medical thriller series the Lycanthropy Files, which will be rapidly re-released in September and October.

I’m currently revising an urban fantasy novel I wrote as part of NaNoWriMo in 2006, and which will be the start of a new series I’ll release in early 2018. It’s a fun premise that allows me to bring in my sleep psychologist side – creatures from the Collective Unconscious are breaking through the barriers between the waking and sleeping worlds to wreak havoc in the real world. How would you like to meet your nightmares?

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Thanks to Cecilia for participating in this interview!

Giveaway

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