AUTHOR BIO
MJ Compton grew up near Cardiff, New York, a place best known for its giant, which inspired her to create her own works of fiction.
Although her 30-year career in local television included such highlights as being bitten by a lion, preempting a US President for a college basketball game, giving a three-time world champion boxer a few black eyes, a mention in the Drudge Report, and meeting her husband, MJ never lost her dream of writing her own stories.
MJ still lives in upstate New York with her husband. She’s a member of Romance Writers of America and Central New York Romance Writers. Music and cooking are two of her passions, and she enjoys baseball and college basketball, but she’s primarily focused on wine . . . and writing.
CONTACT INFORMATION
E-mail: mj@comptonlations.com
Website & Blog www.comptonplations.com
Twitter https://twitter.com/Comptonplations
Facebook https://www.facebook.com/AuthorMJCompton
Tsu http://www.tsu.co/mj_compton
Goodreads https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/8075221.M_J_Compton
Amazon Author Page: http://www.amazon.com/MJ-Compton/e/B00J9DFFIG/ref=ntt_athr_dp_pel_1
INK MOTIONS INTERVIEW
IM: How did you get your idea for your novel?
MJ: While researching baseball groupies, I came across an interesting study alleging minor league players sexually sharing the young women who hang around the ballparks. I started wondering what would happen if a former groupie and one of her lovers ran into each other several years later. SUMMER FLING is the story of one such young woman and a rookie pitcher who made it to the big leagues.
IM: What is your writing style? Do you just sit down and write or do you create a storyboard, character sketches, outlines, or note?
MJ: I’m mostly an organic writer, as opposed to an organized writer. But I do work on the characters before I start. My stories are character driven, so I find knowing the characters really helps. I also like to know the core conflict between the characters. Conflict drives the characters; characters drive the story.
IM: How many novels have you written, including all works in progress you currently are working on?
MJ: I’m not quite sure how many novels I have. There are quite a few “under my bed”, mostly incomplete. I have two sexy paranormal romantic suspense novels featuring a werewolf country music band working undercover for the US government currently available on Amazon. A third story in that series is about half-done and a fourth one is simmering—and I’m debating making the fourth story the third one.
In addition to Summer Fling (my new contemporary baseball romance), I have another baseball romance in the second draft stage, and two others in the work. Oh, and my critique group is working on an anthology—my hero is a professional baseball werewolf. I’m having a blast with that story!
IM: What is a good villain?
MJ: According to Dwight G. Swain (Techniques of the Selling Writer): “A villain is the personification of the danger that threatens your hero.” I agree. And a villain doesn’t always have to be the “bad guy.” In my newest release, Summer Fling, there a several obvious villains, but the heroine’s family as a whole is her true adversary. She can end up like them—or she can free herself to be with the hero.
BOOK BLURB
Caroline Maplethorpe spent a summer as plaything for a minor league baseball team…and oh, how Win Winston played. Seven years later, she’s respectable, and he’s in the big leagues. Now that he’s found her again, he still wants her in a major way. But their second-chance relationship attracts too much publicity, and the third member of their long-ago ménage threatens to destroy the respectable life Caroline so carefully reconstructed after that crazy summer.
EXCERPT
I never thought the indiscretions of my youth would return to bite me in the butt by walking through the door of the Susie Buddha Café in Syracuse’s trendy Armory Square district, but they did. Or rather, one did. Winslow Winthrop Winston the Whatever, commonly known as Win.
I don’t know if I lost my ability to breathe because I was terrified he’d recognize and expose me or because he was just so darned good-looking. Probably the result of both. Win had always had a paralyzing effect on me.
Chuck somebody or other, one of the Syracuse Saltboilers baseball team board members, accompanied Win. They headed straight for our table.
There was no escape. Life as I knew it was about to end.
“James!” Chuck greeted my father.
Dad stood, shook Chuck’s hand, and then turned to Win. “Welcome to Syracuse and the Saltboilers, Winston.”
Win’s gaze, however, fixed on me. “Carrie? Carrie Thorpe?”
I held my breath. It had been seven years. Surely I’d changed enough that Win couldn’t be certain of my identity. “Caroline Maplethorpe,” I corrected in a tight voice.
That might have been the end of it except for my father’s ego. People don’t usually ignore him. He liked to think of himself as the George Steinbrenner of Triple-A Baseball, even though he owned only a few shares of the Saltboilers. And Win had ignored him.
“Do you know Caroline?” Dad asked.
I blinked and waited to see what Win would say.
Chuck interrupted. “Win, this is James Maplethorpe, one of the Saltboilers’ shareholders.”
Win’s gaze jerked away from me and focused on Dad. “Nice to meet you, sir,” he said as he gripped Dad’s hand.
“Why don’t you join us?” Dad invited. “Then you can tell me how you know my daughter.” He looked around the table, as if searching for an empty seat or two.
Of course, there weren’t any. Dad had called us all together for this dinner meeting at the minuscule Susie Buddha Café, and there was barely room for the ten of us at the table.
I briefly thought about vacating my chair. I already didn’t want to be at a family dinner. Win’s appearance put the cherry on my resentment.
“We don’t want to intrude,” Chuck said.
Win nodded at me, and the two of them continued to a tiny table crammed into a remote corner of the café.
“How do you know Win Winston?” my father asked me once the other men were out of earshot.
I picked up my glass of water and sipped. I couldn’t tell him the truth, especially not with the entire family and its satellites sitting there. Waiting. “What makes you think I know him? He didn’t even get my name right.”
I glanced at Chandler Goodeve, my date for the evening. He seemed unperturbed. He was one of the Blandroids, the men our father had chosen for my sisters and me. Beige hair, beige eyes, beige skin, well-bred, and boring. Even their names were banal: Brandon Cummings, Andrew Armstrong, and Chandler Goodeve. The Blandroids.
I wondered what it would take to provoke a reaction from Chandler. Setting him on fire? A knee in the privates?
My answer seemed to satisfy my father. At least he dropped the subject. We were supposed to be having dinner to plan a tribute to my mother during the Syracuse Saltboilers baseball game on Mother’s Day. The Saltboilers always staged their Breast Cancer Awareness Day promotion on Mother’s Day. Dad decided the Kathryn Maplethorpe Foundation should participate. Dear old Dad would do anything to make himself look good to the community. Never mind the truth. As long as the result reflected positively on James Maplethorpe, he was content.
My old resentment against him preened for a moment. Then I reminded myself I’d outgrown my rebellious teenage furor, and I was a civilized woman now. I might never forgive Dad for what he’d done, but he was still my father. And I loved him.
Besides, I had bigger things to worry about. Like Win Winston showing up in Syracuse.
My head throbbed. My appetite fled. I forced myself to ignore the twosome at the corner table. For all of Syracuse’s size—one of New York State’s “Big Five”—it’s an incredibly small town. Six degrees of Kevin Bacon could take lessons. If Win was pitching for the Saltboilers…
“What’s wrong?” my sister Victoria whispered in my ear when the server whisked away our salad plates. Across the table, my younger sister, Alexandra, watched me with solemn eyes.
I shook my head and made sure I smiled. “I don’t know why Dad has to make a big production.”
“To assuage his guilty conscience,” Victoria assured me.
She and I were close, but even she didn’t know everything about me, especially about the summer I’d met Win. That was my secret. My shame.
I glanced around the table, wondering what these people would think if they knew the truth about me. My father would blow a gasket. Polly, my stepmother, would be shocked. Her mother, Marsha Lee, would smirk and gloat. Victoria would be appalled. Alexandra would be curious. Polly’s brother, Marc, would want the prurient details, and the Blandroids would probably not react at all. They were expected to merely marry James Maplethorpe’s daughters and be appropriate husbands, as long as they used my father’s definition of “appropriate.”
Winslow Winthrop Winston the Whatever—and yeah, “whatever” really was part of his name—had it in his power to expose all my secrets and destroy the life I’d so carefully pulled back together after that summer. The summer I went crazy. It had been seven years, but there is no statute of limitations on shame.
SUMMER FLING by MJ Compton
Available at
http://www.loose-id.com/summer-fling.html
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