Guest Post (and a Giveaway!): Mary Connealy & A Model of Devotion

YAY!! One of my very favorite people is here today! Please join me in welcoming Mary Connealy to the blog to chat about the first book she loved – and her new historical romance, A Model of Devotion.

A MODEL OF DEVOTION by Mary Connealy
SERIES: The Lumber Baron’s Daughters #3
GENRE: Inspirational Historical/Western Romance
PUBLISHER: Bethany House
RELEASE DATE: October 11, 2022
PAGES: 304

She’s finally claimed her independence . . . how far will she go to keep it?

A brilliant engineer, Jilly Stiles has been educated since childhood to help run her father’s lumber dynasty. With the company safe from her stepfather after the marriages of her two sisters, Jilly can now focus on her dream of building a mountaintop railroad–and never marry.

Nick Ryder came into Jilly’s life when he saved her mother from her no-good stepfather, and he’s prepared to protect Jilly from anything that threatens to harm her–as long as he keeps his heart from getting involved.

But when a cruel and powerful man goes to dangerous lengths to make Jilly his own, she must make a decision between her safety and her hard-won independence.

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the first book i loved

by Mary Connealy, author of A Model of Devotion

I was a huge reader as a kid. I had a wonderful family. Big, but wonderful. There were eight kids in a three-bedroom farmhouse. Trust me, reading took me away, and we all really needed to live inside our heads now and then.

I read all the usual kid books, Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys, Trixie Belden, on and on.

And I read the Black Stallion books.

When I read The Black Stallion, it was the first time I closed a book and checked for the author’s name: Walter Farley. It was the first time I wondered, How did he do that?

Walter Farley wrote about horse races, and I can still remember being in that horse race. The heaving, galloping horses bumping into each other. The jockeys clinging to the horses, guiding them while at the same time going along for the ride. A two-minute race would go on for pages and pages, each second full of emotion and tension, competition and danger. I could hear those thundering hooves. Smell the dust.

It was a different way of writing that took me inside the book so that it was me riding that horse. I was in that race rather than reading about a race. It’s a technique I try to use as a writer, and it’s hard. It has to do with using all five senses as you write and using sensations the reader can recognize or easily imagine. Like when you walk into the kitchen and smell chili, hear it bubbling on the stove, and see the steam. You touch the cold bowl and the dipper, then feel the bowl warm up in your hand as the chili splashes into it, and finally taste the spicy soup.

All of those senses are familiar to the reader. It’s the familiar mixed with high-tension, sad, or funny situations that draw the reader so deeply into a story. Rather than having the reader know the heroine is hungry, I want my reader to be hungry. Instead of reading that the heroine’s heart is breaking, I want the reader to feel her own heart breaking.

As I write this, I’m inspired to go back to my work in progress and dig deeper, try harder to create a scene that draws the reader in. And it was a lesson I first learned from reading The Black Stallion.

Mary Connealy writes “romantic comedies with cowboys” and is celebrated for her fun, zany, action-packed style. She has sold more than half a million books. She is the author of the popular series BROTHERS IN ARMS, BRIDES OF HOPE MOUNTAIN, HIGH SIERRA SWEETHEARTS, KINCAID BRIDES, TROUBLE IN TEXAS, LASSOED IN TEXAS , SOPHIE’S DAUGHTERS, and many other books. Mary lives on a ranch in eastern Nebraska with her very own romantic cowboy hero.

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Bethany House is offering a print copy of A Model of Devotion by Mary Connealy to one of my readers! (US only. Void where prohibited by law or logistics.) This giveaway is subject to Reading Is My SuperPower’s giveaway policies which can be found here. Enter via the Rafflecopter form below.

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What about you? What makes you want to read A Model of Devotion by Mary Connealy?