Guest Post: Emily Greenwood

Title: A Little Night of Mischief
Author: Emily Greenwood
Publisher: Sourcebooks Casablanca
Release Date: June 4, 2013
Pages: 384
Buy Links: Amazon (Kindle) | Amazon (Paperback)

Blurb:

Every Prize Comes with Complications...

A game of chance saves James Collington from the prospect of debtors' prison, and grants him ownership to Tethering estate. Little does he know that his winnings come with serious complications--not least of which is a beautiful but impoverished young lady who insists his new manor belongs to her.

If He Can't Stop Her, He Might as Well Join Her...

Felicity Wilcox is determined to run Mr. Collington off her land, Though James's charm and devilish good looks are a serious distraction. What she doesn't know is that she may be haunting him right back.

Guest Post

Tell us about a time you got into trouble as a child.

Thank you very much for having me here today! This topic made me smile because in my debut, A Little Night Mischief, my heroine gets into lots of trouble. Though of course she’s all grown up and should know better—but where’s the fun in that?

I’m sorry to say that I was pretty much a good girl, save for a few transgressions that now seem really boring and minor, like the time I got busted for not singing along with the other students in music class. I had to stay after school and write an essay atoning for my misbehavior and also copy out all the stanzas of the song. I can still remember the first line: “Somebody robbed the Glendale train, this morning at half-past nine.” I still hate it. 

Yes, things were a little uptight at my Catholic grade school, so even if you behaved perfectly 99% of the time, if you messed up once every few years, they came down on you so hard you felt like a reprobate. My parents, on the other hand, were pretty permissive, and I can’t remember them ever getting mad about anything I did. So if you’re wanting something else that resulted in disciplinary action, the best I can do is an incident from my teen years.

Over the summer before high school my family moved to a new place, so in the fall I started freshman year at an enormous public high school where I didn’t know anyone. The students all seemed rowdy and confident and a lot wealthier than me, and my main goal was to not attract any attention whatsoever. This desire was thwarted a couple of months into the school year when we had an assembly with Officer Friendly. 

All five hundred of us freshmen filed into the auditorium to hear him talk about stuff we shouldn’t do. One of the things he wanted to warn us against was shoplifting, and for that he apparently needed a perpetrator. I was wearing my favorite sweater, which was a preppy kelly green, and I guess it stood out well, because Officer Friendly looked down from the stage where he was standing and indicated that the girl in the bright green sweater should come up there. Of course, I wanted to die.

While I stood up on stage with this tall, uniformed man and stared out at all those strangers I’d been passing in the hallways, he proceeded to talk about how awful it is to get caught doing a crime, and then he handcuffed me and invited me to discuss how that felt. 

Interestingly, being handcuffed by a stern police officer actually does make you feel like a criminal, especially when you’re standing in front of five hundred teenagers you’re certain are silently judging you. I managed to conjure enough bravado to mutter something about it not being very pleasant, and felt ridiculously grateful when he finally released me.

As much as I hated the experience, afterward it actually turned into a way of meeting people, because I had become “the girl who got handcuffed.” It was a sort of forced introduction to everyone. And it made me see that many of those kids from whom I’d wanted to hide were actually pretty nice.