On Tour: Unscripted by Jayne Denker - Review & Q&A

Jayne Denker is now on tour with CLP Book Tours with her book, Unscripted. Please visit her tour page for more blog stops.

Unscripted
by Jayne Denker 

Genre: Chick Lit, Romance
Publication: August 2013
Source: ARC, CLP Blog Tours
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Buy the Book: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Kobo

One of Hollywood’s hardest working women is about to discover there's a lot more drama behind the camera than in front of it... Faith “Freakin’” Sinclair probably shouldn’t have called her boss a perv…or grabbed his “privates.” But as creator of the hit dramedy Modern Women she’d had enough of his sexist insults. Now she’s untouchable in the industry—not in a good way. The only way to redeem herself is to convince Alex the wildly popular wildly demanding former star of her show to come back. But there’s one obstacle in her way—one very handsome broad-shouldered obstacle…

Professor Mason Mitchell is head of the theater department where Alex is studying “real” acting. The only way he’ll let Faith anywhere near Alex is if she agrees to co-teach a class. It’s an offer she can’t refuse—and as it turns out the professor just might end up teaching Faith that there’s more to life than work—and that real-life love scenes are way more fun than fake ones….

I received a copy of Unscripted by Jayne Denker from the author/CLP Blog Tours as part of the blog tour.

Faith Sinclair, a producer of a top rated TV show is now in trouble after she made a mistake by grabbing her boss’s privates. Now she found herself jobless and blacklisted. Faith needs to get back on her feet. And to get back to her show, she needs to convince Alex, a former star of her show, to come back.

Unscripted is a light, cute read with bits of romance and Hollywood scenes. I was hooked with Unscripted from the very beginning. I love the story line, the dialogues, characters and I love Faith ‘Freakin’ Sinclair. It was very hard not to like Faith. She’s smart, confident and she can be funny too.  I think the author did a pretty good job with writing this through Faith’s point of view. I thoroughly enjoy reading this book and I would recommend this book to anyone who is looking for a fun, relaxing read.

Q&A with Jayne Denker

1. Please introduce yourself and your book.My name is Jayne Denker, and I’m a fairly new chick lit/contemporary romance author with Kensington Publishers. I’m big into snark and comedy and banter—in my books, of course. In real life, I can only wish. Unscripted is my second novel, about Faith Sinclair, a headstrong TV producer in L.A. who gets fired from her own show and moves heaven and earth to get it back, all while dealing with crazy friends, a mooching stepbrother, an overbearing movie producer mother, and the lure of a hot college professor.

2. What inspired you to write this book?A couple of things, actually. I always get irritated when executive producers/creators of my favorite TV shows get fired for whatever reason, and the networks think they can carry on without the program suffering, even though they’ve just booted the person who was the keeper of all the ideas, the story arc (often all the way to the last episode), and—most important—the characters’ voices. So I started to wonder what the fired producer thinks and feels when she has her “baby” taken away from her.

The other thing that inspired me was the desire to get out of my comfort zone, not only with regard to the characters, but also the story’s location. I live in a rural area of western New York State, and because I have a young son, I don’t travel as much as I used to, but I still want to set my stories in places other than, well, rural western New York State. However, I’m a real stickler for authenticity; I only want to write about places I know well, because I don’t want to get any of the details wrong. Of course, it sounds crazy that I decided to write a story about a Hollywood big shot, but at least I could do research on it. My brother and his family live in Southern California, and I visit them every summer, so by this time I’m an honorary native. I have driven their freeways and lived to tell the tale.

3. Can you relate yourself to any of the characters?I think every writer would say that there’s a tiny kernel of him- or herself in every character, from the main characters all the way to the minor, male and female, young and old. You just take that little bit and expand it, until you have a fleshed-out character. So I can relate to all of them, in one way or another. Of course, I adore Faith. She’s beyond ballsy, headstrong, tough, confident, successful, obnoxious, and a little insane—everything I wish I could be. I love to live vicariously through her!

4. What are the most offensive sexist insults you’ve come across?Egad, aren’t women on the receiving end of sexist insults all the time? I think the worst one—or at least the one that sticks in my memory very strongly—happened when I was in college. We had a “coffeehouse” on campus (but at the time there was very little coffee and a whole lot of beer) that held an open mic night once in a while. I was a pretty good singer and guitar player, so I went to the interest meeting to sign up. The three guys in charge of the open mic night were sitting around a table. I knew all of them well (one of them was my roommate’s ex boyfriend), but they looked at me like I was some sort of three-headed alien. One of them said, pretty formally, “Can I help you?” like he’d never met me before. I blinked at them. When I said I wanted to sign up for the open mic night, they all practically fell off their chairs. Girls didn’t perform at open mic night! They didn’t try to deter me or anything, but what was insulting was that they never once considered that a girl might be able to do that, or even want to. I proved them wrong.

5. What are your favourite romantic comedy reads and/or movies?Romantic comedy is my favorite movie genre, so I’ve got a lot of favorites. Right alongside the evergreens Bridget Jones, the Pride and Prejudice miniseries, and Love Actually, I’ll stack up repeated viewings of Easy A, Lost in Translation, Local Hero, Singin’ in the Rain, Dan in Real Life, and American Dreamer. Oh—and L.A. Story (of course, right?) As for romantic comedy reads, I’m a big fan of Kristan Higgins. I own every one of her books.

6. What are you working on right now?I’m writing the second in what I hope will be a small-town series. My third book, Down on Love (publishing November 21), is the first that takes place in the small town of Marsden, New York, and now I’m writing another, with a minor character from Down on Love as the heroine. This new story also gets back into the entertainment world a bit—the hero is a comedic movie star.

7. Anything you would like to say to your readers?
Just thanks for checking out my work! I know the romance market is glutted and it’s tough to figure out who’s worth reading. I hope you’ll give Unscripted a shot and that you’ll love Faith as much as I do.

Author Bio:

Jayne Denker is the author of three contemporary romantic comedies, By Design, Unscripted, and Down on Love, and is hard at work on a fourth. She lives in a small town in western New York, USA, with her husband, son, and one very sweet senior-citizen basement kitteh who loves nothing more than going outside, where she sits on the front walk and wonders why she begged to go outside. When Jayne’s not hard at work on another novel (or, rather, when she should be hard at work on another novel), she can usually be found frittering away stupid amounts of time online.