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Some Assembly Required Blog Tour and Giveaway

I’ll start by thanking Nina and her crew for having me here today as Lex Chase and I make the blog rounds promoting our upcoming release, Some Assembly Required. It’s the paranormal home goods store purgatory meet-cute you never knew you needed until now!

While I really do start all of my guest posts with a thank-you to the host (because that’s just good manners!), today it plays right into my blog post theme. See, when Benji wakes up dead in his favorite home goods superstore with the snarky, prickly Patrick as his purgatory pal, it doesn’t occur to him to be angry. After a few missteps, he accepts his fate. He even accepts Patrick and all his eccentricities, which is a nice Midwestern way of saying that Patrick is a bastard, but Benji overlooks that.

via Visit Indiana Tourism

Benji’s never-say-no attitude and Midwestern pluckiness is borrowed from my own psyche. I was born in Hawaii but moved to Indiana at a young age, so trust me when I say I’m a bit of an expert on Midwestern kindness. It’s not in my nature to turn someone away who needs help, and it’s not in Benji’s either. Here’s a passage from Some Assembly Required that’s pretty much Benji in a nutshell:

His mom had never liked his ex, Charles. For starters, Charles was ten years older, and Benji knew his mom blamed the age gap for how set in his ways Charles had been. But Benji knew the truth. It hadn’t been Charles’s age. It had been Benji’s own inability to say no to anything. Benji desperately wanted to please people, and as a result he’d let Charles walk all over him. In the end it had landed him in an apartment he didn’t want with a cat he was allergic to—and who peed on the carpet.

Who would do that, right? What kind of person would keep someone else’s cat when it was hellbent on destroying everything in their house?

Well, a Midwesterner probably would. In fact, I’ve done it. Twice. Both times I hated the cat but kept it because the cat didn’t have anywhere else to go, despite the fact that it meant ruined carpet and clawed up leather furniture. Benji would do the same, but he wouldn’t even have a dark, hateful internal monologue about it. (I did, but maybe that’s because I wasn’t actually born a Midwesterner, just raised as one. Also because those were really expensive couches. *sigh*)

Basically, Benji is a ray of sunshine, lighting up corners of Patrick’s heart that Patrick hadn’t even known were there. But he has to learn to put himself first or he’ll never move on from purgatory, and that’s a big challenge for him. He has to learn how to balance his own needs with the needs of others, which turns out to be a lot harder than assembling the kind of paperboard furniture CASA is known for.

So tell us! What are you a big softie for? What tugs on your heartstrings and turns your soul to mush?

Don’t forget to record your answer in the giveaway widget!

Genre: Contemporary Paranormal Comedy
Length: Novel
Published: February 8, 2016
Publisher: Dreamspinner Press
ISBN: 978-1-63476-810-8
Buy: DSP – ARe – Amazon – Barnes and Noble

Blurb:

Everyone wishes they were dead when wandering the purgatory of a home furnishings store, but these guys actually are.

Benji Goss is the quintessential good guy. When his boyfriend dumps him and moves out, Benji obligingly keeps the cat—even though he’s allergic—because his ex’s new place doesn’t accept pets. He’s always joked the cat would be the death of him, but not in a way he expects when a feline mishap crushes him under a DEL TORO bookcase.

Snarky loner Patrick Bryant is in such a rut he barely remembers the life he used to lead. The last thing he recalls is being decapitated by a DEL TORO bookcase in a freak accident. As a spiritual CASA resident, he haunts the aisles of affordable Italian furniture, assisting fellow spirits in moving on to their final destinations.

When Benji appears in the CASA café, Patrick considers the naïve spirit just the man to cure his boredom. Benji’s relentless optimism chips away at Patrick’s sarcasm, making him question if there’s something beyond what he can see. But the heart is like CASA furniture—there’s always some assembly required.

About the Authors:

Lex Chase once heard Stephen King say in a commercial, “We’re all going to die, I’m just trying to make it a little more interesting.” Now she’s on a mission to make the world a hell of a lot more interesting.

Weaving tales of sweeping cinematic adventure—depending on how she feels that day—Lex sprinkles in high-speed chases, shower scenes, and more explosions than a Hollywood blockbuster. Her pride is in telling stories of men who kiss as much as they kick ass. If you’re going to march into the depths of hell, it better be beside the one you love.

Lex is a pop culture diva, her DVR is constantly backlogged, and she unapologetically loved the ending of Lost. She wouldn’t last five minutes without technology in the event of the apocalypse and has nightmares about refusing to leave her cats behind.

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Bru Baker got her first taste of life as a writer at the tender age of four when she started publishing a weekly newspaper for her family. What they called nosiness she called a nose for news, and no one was surprised when she ended up with degrees in journalism and political science and started a career in journalism.

Bru spent fifteen years writing for newspapers before making the jump to fiction. She now works in reference and readers’ advisory in a Midwestern library, though she still finds it hard to believe someone’s willing to pay her to talk about books all day. Most evenings you can find her curled up with a mug of tea, some fuzzy socks, and a book or her laptop. Whether it’s creating her own characters or getting caught up in someone else’s, there’s no denying that Bru is happiest when she’s engrossed in a story. She and her husband have two children, which means a lot of her books get written from the sidelines of various sports practices.

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