Wish Come True (The Blogger Diaries Trilogy Book 3) (36 page)

No big, important life changes happened again until June 2012, when I quit GNC and started working at Legacy Gymnastics as the Office Manager. It was amazing being able to bring my kids to work with me, them hanging out in the office just like I used to do at my mom’s job at the church. They even got to take gymnastics classes as one of the benefits. There was a lot of downtime, since how I was only really busy in between the recreational classes, when parents would either register their kids for classes or need to fix something on their account. So while classes were in session, I did a lot of reading, Facebooking, and playing on Pinterest.
 

After saving up the money, I went and bought an iPad 2, which opened up a whole new world in reading for me. I had fought for so long, not giving in to the e-book phenomenon, staying loyal to printed books exclusively, but with the first flip of the electronic page in iBooks and the Kindle app, I was hooked. One day, I heard whisperings about a book called
Fifty Shades of Grey
, which I only picked up because it was fan-fiction of my beloved Twilight series. I had never read a series that wasn’t paranormal before, so I didn’t have high hopes.
 

Boy, was I wrong. The series absolutely consumed my entire world for three days straight. I only left my bed and my bathtub long enough to throw some food at my kids before returning back to my reading cave. And when I had finished the third book, I seriously didn’t know what to do with my life. I started researching, trying to get my next fix, attempting to find something that would affect me the way EL James’s books had, and after a lot of duds, I finally found one.
Bared to You
by Sylvia Day blew my mind, so much so that I needed to tell the whole world about it.
 

October 2012, at work, instead of getting on Pinterest and scrolling the Popular board, I logged onto Facebook and figured out how to create one of those pages you can “Like”. I named it Kayla the Bibliophile, after having fallen in love with the word after learning it in Karen Marie Moning’s Highlander series. I’m definitely a person who loves and collects books, so the name fit me perfectly. Many of my friends and family members always called or messaged me, asking what they should read next, especially after not having my old blog to refer to. I hadn’t kept up with it in a couple years, so I sent them all a link to the page so my posts would show up in their newsfeed whenever I would write a new review.
 

Then, the unthinkable happened. One of my very favorite authors, Dakota Cassidy, saw my review for
The Accidental Werewolf
, and she shared it and my page with her readers, and my following shot up to 100 likes overnight! What an adrenaline rush that was! Not only did I have more people to share my love of books with, but one of my idols had actually noticed me. It was almost as great as when I went to Kerrelyn Sparks’s book signing at Katy Budget Books and got to meet the woman herself.
 

And then it happened again, and again, authors sharing my reviews after I’d post them, and soon, new authors who were publishing their own work, which I learned were called indie authors, started contacting me, asking me if I would like to read their book in exchange for an honest review. My mind was blown. Authors wanted to give me their books just so I would review and post about them? Score!
 

That’s when I met an Australian author by the name of Belle Aurora. The name immediately caught my attention in the sea of review request messages, because of my obsession with Belle from
Beauty & the Beast.
She asked if I’d like to read her debut novel,
Friend-Zoned
, and I instantly said yes after reading the blurb. My enthusiastic messages while reading, and my review, were the beginning of our beautiful friendship.
 

Not only did I start blogging again, but I also started following and supporting other blogs, including one I’d been in love with since 2009, Maryse’s Book Blog, which I found on the internet when I needed the reading order for Sherrilyn Kenyon’s Dark Hunters series, and a new one I became addicted to, Smut Book Club, now known as Shameless Book Club, because of its creator Angie Lynch’s fantastic book recommendations and hilariously naughty sense of humor. I love the comradery between people with the shared love of reading. I even made friends at small, single-author signings around Houston, running into the same two readers, Amanda Cantu and Shawna Stinger, at Katy Budget Books. We realized we had the same taste in books if we kept fangirling over the same authors, so we became Facebook official.
 

Seeing that most author interviews consisted of a lot of the same boring questions, I came up with a list of seriously risqué questions, “Dare to Tell the Truth with Kayla the Bibliophile”. I wanted it to feel more like sitting down with a group of your girlfriends, having some drinks, and talking about boys. I contacted as many of my favorite authors as I could think of, requesting an interview with them, warning them it wasn’t the average ‘What made you want to become an author?’ type questions, and surprisingly, a ton of them thought it was a great idea and sent in their answers. Making it a weekly post, it became widely popular, and I suddenly had authors contacting
me
, asking if they could do the interview!
 

Scrolling through my newsfeed, I came across a book by an author named Red Phoenix called
Brie Learns the Art of Submission: Submissive Training Center
. With its ultra-sexy cover and the author’s unique profile picture—she’s a redheaded hottie who always wears a mask—I just had to read it. I signed up for my first ‘blog tour’, in which the author gathers a bunch of bloggers to review and post about their book to get one big burst of attention, hopefully reaching a good amount of new readers. This one was run by Stephanie’s Book Reports, and as soon as
Brie
arrived in my inbox, I started reading… and didn’t stop until I had consumed the entire series. Little did I know it had started out as a serial—short novellas released in increments—and I was just lucky enough to catch it when it was being published as a full-length novel. I don’t know how I would’ve handled having to wait for the next serial to come out only a few addictive chapters at a time.

I was obsessed with a capital O with this book. Like, even more so than with
Fifty
or
Bared to You
, and I was inspired. I identified with the character, Brie, so much that I felt like I could portray her, and it didn’t hurt that we had the same physical attributes. So I made a profile on Model Mayhem and found a photographer who was looking for a model to add photos to their portfolio. Mike Fox wanted to try his hand at boudoir photography, seeing its rising popularity after discovering he was damned good at taking headshots and senior portraits, and he just so happened to live right down the road from me.
 

My mom was visiting me the week Mike and I set up the photo shoot, so she went with me. I hadn’t modeled since I was a teenager, so I was super nervous, but Mike put me at ease from the get-go. Along with his hilarious wife, Angi, and their three teenaged kids, they are all actors in the small theaters around town. As animated and jovial as he was, he had no qualms getting down on the floor and striking the sexy pose he wanted me to try while directing me throughout the shoot. With Angi acting as his assistant, there wasn’t a single wardrobe malfunction or a hair out of place, and we got all the pictures I wanted, including one kneeling on rice—a BDSM punishment we learned in the book—suggested by my blogger friend, Crystal, of Crystal’s Many Reviewers. That one was painful… so painful, that when Mike’s dogs heard me groaning, they came to see about me, and he got a cute candid picture of me playing with the pups with the rice spread out all around us.
 

As a surprise for Red Phoenix, when it was my date to post for her blog tour, not only did I include all the buy-links, the book’s description, and an almost manic raving review, I also posted the pictures I had taken as Brie. She absolutely loved them, and I could tell that my fandom truly touched her, and so began my friendship with one of my very favorite authors on the planet.
 

She invited me to join her private group, Club Red, where her readers could openly discuss the books and everything inside them without fear of judgment. One day, Red posted a contest in the group, to see who could create the best quote pic, where you find a picture that reminds you of a certain line from the book, and you make a graphic/collage. My competitive nature kicked in hardcore. That signed paperback would be mine! Suddenly, I was in competition with this Sara chick, who was putting out just as many quote pics as I was, everyone else left in the dust—probably because they have lives—but instead of hating on her, I couldn’t help but admire the graphics she was creating.
 

Everyone on Red’s fan page voted, and thankfully, I won that gorgeous book to add to my collection, and Sara messaged me to congratulate me. And I think we ended up messaging back and forth for like three hours that night. We were insta-besties, with an almost identical taste in books, and I loved her sense of humor. Not too long after that, I asked her if she’d like to join my blog to help me keep up with all the interviews and review requests I was getting, and so Sassy Sara came to be.
 

Around the same time I had met Red, I had gotten a review request from an author in New York named Danielle Jamie. Only her request was a little different than others I received. She had found my blog and saw that I lived in Houston, and she asked if I would read her books and give her names of places to add to the story, since she was basing the series in Houston, TX. Seeing it as a new challenge to mix things up, and the author was too sweet for words, I told her yes and began reading the Savannah Series. This was a whole other challenge than what I had originally thought, because before then, I had never read an unedited book before. I had always received Advance Reader Copies that had already been through the editing process. Keeping in mind she was still working on it, I didn’t let the editing issues effect my enjoyment of the book, but being a grammar-Nazi, I couldn’t help but fix punctuation and minor issues that were easily noted by highlighting them on my iPad. It was actually thrilling finally putting my degree to good use, considering how I had taken extra English and writing classes when I first started college.
 

When I sent her the document back, I sent it with a note that read,
 

Please, don’t be offended, but I’m kind of crazy when it comes to mistakes in books. I know you haven’t gotten it edited yet, and I’ve included some Houston-based restaurants and places Brooklyn and Savannah could go in your story, but I’ve also taken the time to edit the rest of the story for you too.

Instead of being offended, Danielle was ecstatic, and I breathed a sigh of relief. In exchange for some fancy handmade hair bows from the children’s boutique she runs, Bailey Booper’s Boutique, for my little girls, she had me do another read-through when the story was complete, just to make sure she had gotten all the details right, and asked if I’d edit her next book when she was done writing it. My answer was a resounding, “Hell yes!”
 

A few weeks later, I read a book called
This Man
by Jodi Ellen Malpas and fell in love with the over-the-top Alpha hero, Jesse Ward, and his heroine, Ava. Around the same time, Mike contacted me, asking if I’d like to be his guinea pig for some things he’d learned in a photography tutorial—the perfect opportunity to take another picture starring as a book character I loved. In my favorite undies and a lace-sleeved shirt, a paperback copy of
This Man
in hand, we got a great shot of me as Ava. When he sent me back the edited version, I added the quote, “Always in lace,” to the picture, a line Jesse always tells his woman, and sent it to Jodi in a message. And just like Red Phoenix, she loved it, thanking me profusely and even sharing it on her page.
 

I told her how much I loved her books and asked if she’d like to do my interview, and after reading my raving review—complete with a British-to-American glossary, since she had used some words I had no clue what they meant, forcing me to google them, and thought my American followers would appreciate the help—she readily agreed. I couldn’t help but grin when she called me “cheeky” for asking such invasive questions.

My next obsession came in the form of CJ Roberts’s
Dark Duet
, by far the darkest books I had ever read. In my review, I stated, ‘It’s like CJ somehow got inside my brain and wrote a story that would make the most sinister, kinky parts of me evilly grin with glee.’ I had no idea there were books out there like these, telling stories that I wouldn’t even confess to my best friend I fantasized about. After researching, trying to find more in this dark genre, I found a few more and quickly devoured them, including Aleatha Romig’s
Consequences
and CD Reiss’s Songs of Submission series, which led to another photo shoot with Mike, adding three more characters to my photo album, Olivia, Claire, and Monica.
 

Now that there were five, I figured I needed a name for this niche of my blog, especially since no one else was doing it. I dubbed it The Book Girlfriend Series. Everyone else seemed more concerned with the leading men in books, but to me, I found that if I didn’t like the heroine, then I didn’t like the book, so it was my way of paying homage to the women in my favorite stories.
 

Chatting with my Australian author friend, Lola Stark, one day, I told her about what I had done for Danielle’s book, and she asked if I’d like to read through her debut novel, “Tattered Love,” before ARCs were to go out. I inhaled that book in a day, which tells you how much I loved it, since I’m a pretty slow reader, and when I sent her my notes back, she was impressed I had found that in the beginning of a scene, her hero Mace had been wearing a blue shirt, but when he was undressing to molest the hell out of the heroine, Scarlet, his shirt was green. It had been through her editor and several sets of beta eyes, and no one else had caught the blooper.