Our Guest is Romance With a Touch of Weird Author Bella Street

Please leave a comment including your e-mail address for a chance to win a copy of Bella's book, in print or e-version.

Living so close to Nashville has provoked Bella to take up fiddle lessons. Until her tunes no longer sound like amorous alley cats, she writes romance with a touch of weird.

website: www.bellastreetwrites.blogspot.com

Timeless Love

Thanks for having me, Morgan!

Time-travel romance is one of my favorite genres because it shows that love can not only overcome myriad obstacles—it can overcome time itself. Misunderstandings, full throttle emotions, and crazy conflict get kicked up a notch when someone is from another flippin' time.

And the fish out of water storyline is always so much fun.

Whether you want to imagine yourself in older times, with polite manners and formalities, or cutie pies in Tartan kilts, while you're there, you can also save lives with your knowledge of medicine and technology. A caveat—depending on the time period, some might consider your knowledge to be due to witchcraft, so be careful!

Other other end of the spectrum is a character from the past coming forward in time. How do they perceive modern life? What will they understand or misconstrue? Will they want to stay, or go back to what they know? Is their love strong enough to bridge the divide?

This scenario is what I explore in my 'discreetly sweet' novel Kiss Me, I'm Irish.

Emily Musgrave is heading a direction she never wanted to go in Regency England--namely a convent to turn her from her waywardness. But it's more loneliness than rebellion that motivates her to escape her certain fate.

Liam Jackson is going nowhere fast in modern-day Tennessee. Playing his Dobro in seedy bars and backward dives along with his fiddling sister, Tinker, is doing nothing for his music career--and even less for the dark places in his soul.

Pixie mischief can not only change time-lines, it can change hearts. Because sometimes a girl just needs a little magic in her life.

Emily gets to discover the wonder of shaving cream, nail polish, and band management, all while trying to figure out how to handle her burgeoning feelings for the brooding Irishman and musician Liam Jackson.

And then there are the pixies.

Excerpt:

I just need to think this through, to get my bearings. A sudden desire for a breath of fresh air assailed her after hours in the stuffy room. Emily reached for the doorknob.

“I wouldn't go out there alone if I were you.”

She spun around and saw Liam sitting up in bed, shirtless. Averting her gaze, she dropped her hand. “I...I just wanted some fresh air.”

A sound of rustling reached her ears and Liam appeared at her side. She noticed he'd put on a white clinging shirt with short sleeves. The stubble was longer on his face now and his dark hair nearly resembled Tinker's style.

He regarded her from under heavy brows. “I'll come out with you, but just for a minute.” Liam unlocked the door with careful movements, possibly to avoid waking his sister. Opening the door, he ushered her out first. Once they were outside, he closed it quietly behind them. The air was heavy and warm and smelled of a mixture of hothouse blooms and decaying rubbish.

The light made Emily squint at first, but when she got used to it, she looked up and down the street, struggling to reconcile how she could be in another time. But how could a dream or hallucination be so fantastic and detailed? She turned to her host. “What are all those poles with strings on them?”

His brows arched as if it were the last question he expected. “Those are power poles. You know, they carry electricity from house to house. It's how we turn on the lights without...a flame.”

“Electricity,” she said slowly, looking back up at the wires. “I once attended a house party in Surrey where they had a Galvani machine. We all held hands in a circle and one of the members turned a crank on the machine. Then we each received an unpleasant electric shock. Is it anything like that?”

He stared at her without answering. Emily returned his gaze, realizing this was the first time she'd seen him in full light. His hair was coal black and mussed from sleep. His skin, tan and ruddy, as if he were a field laborer. And his eyes were the intense blue of a milkwort blossom, with a telltale darker ring around the outer edge of the irises. Of course! With a name like Liam she should've realized it sooner. He wasn't a gypsy at all.

He was an Irishman.

That meant this was some form of purgatory. Jem, Donnelly, and Our Lady of the Portal had had their revenge after all.

Some wonderful resources for finding time-travel romance novels are We Really Dig, Time Travel Romance Authors, and Amazon's Top 100 List.

Kiss Me, I'm Irish has spent over nine months on Amazon's top 100 list for Time-Travel Romance.

Purchase link: http://amzn.com/B004XD1ZYK

Website: www.bellastreetwrites.blogspot.com

Please leave a comment including your e-mail address for a chance to win a copy of my book, in print or e-version.