Spotlight & Giveaway: Crashing the A-List by Summer Heacock

Today it is my pleasure to Welcome author Summer Heacock to HJ!

Hi Summer and welcome to HJ! We’re so excited to chat with you about your new release, Crashing the A-List!

Please summarize the book for the readers here:

Clara, a recently laid off book editor takes a job cleaning out abandoned and repossessed storage units. She comes across a unit owned by a former escort service and finds the “resume” of a man who is now an astronomically famous English actor.

After considering selling the information to get her back on her feet and off her brother’s couch, her guilt (and a bottle of wine) pushes her to try to get the information back to him, assuring him his secret is safe.

He mistakes her drunken efforts for blackmail, and because one good turn deserves another, he shows up and starts blackmailing her.

And then, of course, hijinks and sexual tension ensue.
 

Please share the opening lines of this book:

This is the worst couch that has ever existed in the history of couches.
I hate this couch the way my third-grade class gecko hated the dick-weed kids who kept trying to pull off his tail, just to see if it would grow back.
There’s no way my brother picked this out.

Please share a few Fun facts about this book…

The entire premise of this book, start to finish, came from a heavily-medicated fever dream I had in the hospital shortly after having a very mild heart attack 5 years ago. While efficient, I do not recommend this as a habitual muse.

Please tell us a little about the characters in your book. As you wrote your protagonist was there anything about them that surprised you?

Clara is going through a terrible time in her life, and it surprised me how dedicated she was to her beliefs about how she deserved to climb out of that situation. She had so many opportunities to use the situation to her advantage, and not in a particularly immoral way, and yet she always stood true.

Honestly, the worse things got, I’d have expected her to use the situation with Caspian to get a foothold. (I never actually know what the characters are going to do, it all just sort of…happens.)

If your book was optioned for a movie, what scene would you use for the audition of the main characters and why?

I would definitely use the scene where Caspian tries to turn the tables on Clara. I love their back and forth. They go from venomous, to terrified, to sincere, and back again. The line between rage and banter is just perfection and would give the actors a great chance to showcase all the rapid-fire emotions they have to roll with for the rest of the story.

What do you want people to take away from reading this book?

That the upheaval of one’s life is all too common a tale, and people need to stop being so judgmental about it. Even when we’re the ones in the upheaval.

Clara is particularly hard on herself, despite being in an industry that’s swimming in layoffs, she’s constantly beating herself up and thinking that she should have been able to pull herself up sooner, and successfully.

And her mother is certainly no help in the confidence department.

We were always taught that we should never discuss money lest we appear uncouth, but the truth of the matter is that most people have had a time in their lives where the universe hopped up to punch them right in the face.

The more we normalize the fact that the whole “bootstraps, bootstraps!” idea is kind of a bullshit concept when attempting to cover an entire country under that umbrella, the sooner people can learn to feel empathy for people who are in dire straits outside their circumstances.

Also that you should never leave a voicemail for a movie star you’ve never met whilst drunk.

What are you currently working on? What other releases do you have planned?

Currently, I’m toiling away on a lovely queer YA rom-com that I am so smitten with. While also working on my next adult rom-com, and a speculative fic I’ve been dying to write for over 20 years.
 

Thanks for blogging at HJ!

Giveaway: Paperback copy of CRASHING THE A-LIST by Summer Heacock

To enter Giveaway: Please complete the Rafflecopter form and Post a comment to this Q: If you could have any actor or actress show up at your door, completely by surprise, who would you want it to be, and why?

 
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Excerpt from Crashing the A-List:

The tiniest sliver of light peeks under the door, and I see the man’s shadow walking back and forth. A second later, I hear the sound of another vehicle, and I feel a sense of dread, thinking of some poor stranger coming by to visit their own unit and being greeted by a monster with a crowbar.
I start to run toward the entrance, prepared to scream a warning, but Caspian doesn’t release my arm. The blackness is beyond disorienting, and we both grab onto each other to keep from falling.
“We have to do something,” I say, not at all sure what that might be other than shouting until my lungs bleed. Since he still hasn’t let go, I drag him up near the door with me. “What if he hurts whoever that is!?”
“I don’t think that’s a random visitor,” Caspian says quietly. I look up and see the faintest outline of his face in the minimum light we’ve been allotted. He seems to be listening carefully. The sound of things being slammed into the back of a truck echoes into the unit, and I try to picture what’s happening on the other side of that door. “I think he came for his belongings,” he adds.
I hold my breath and try to picture what’s happening outside. Yeah, it definitely sounds like he’s moving things from the back of Brutus to another truck.
For a few minutes, that’s all we can make out. Then I hear the unmistakable sound of shattering glass again, peppered with the slamming of the crowbar against metal.
“Hey!” I shout, pounding on the door with my free hand. “You leave Brutus alone, asshole!”
Caspian yanks my arm so hard I stumble into him again.
“Are you mad?” he hisses at me.
“They’re beating up Charlie’s truck!” I yell.
“Better the truck than us!”
“He can’t get back in here, because the creepy fucker left the keys with me!” I continue banging on the door, and Caspian tries to shush me again. I angrily yank my arm from his hand and blindly push him away. After a few more sickening cracks, I hear vehicle doors shut and the squealing of tires. “Yeah, you’d better run!” I scream at the door.
“My god,” Caspian says from a few feet away. “You are truly unhinged.”
“Oh, shut up!” I shriek at him. “Just shut up! Not everything needs your pompous commentary!”
“Yes, screaming obscenities at the violent man who brought friends seems like a positively brilliant idea!”
“I told you, they can’t get back in here!” I say, taking the keys out of my pocket and jangling them in front of his face. “I have the goddamn keys!”
“Right,” he shouts back. “Because that seemed like a man who would be stopped by a missing set of keys!”
I stare at the keys in the outline of my hand, illuminated by the miniscule streak of light. “Oh my god.”
“What now?”
“We…we are locked in here.”
He scoffs. “Worked that out, have you?”
I walk up to the door and put my hands on it, feeling every ounce of my body starting to panic with claustrophobia.
“Oh Christ,” Caspian says as the same realization hits him, suddenly sounding detached. “We’re locked in here.”
I hear him walk up beside me and stand by the door as well. I strain to hear any sounds at all, but there’s nothing.
“I don’t suppose you have some burly driver outside who is proficient in picking locks?” I ask.
“I took a car from the theater and was dropped off,” he says, still sounding terribly far away. even though he’s less than two feet to my right. “I was going to call another one when I was ready.”
Whatever pocket of adrenaline that’s been fueling me through the bulk of this ordeal wears off, and my heart is pounding in a different way now. “Our phones. We can’t even call for help.” I push away from the door and feel the entire unit closing in around me in the darkness. I try to take a breath, but it stalls with only a fraction of the air I needed. “Oh god, what if we suffocate in here?” I gasp, either from shock or lack of oxygen, I’m not sure which. I lurch back to the door and fall into it with one hand outstretched. Dropping to my knees, the panic takes me, and I can’t breathe.
“You’re hyperventilating,” he says, and just as I pull in enough air to make a biting comment, I feel his hand on my shoulder. “Lean forward.”
I collapse down onto my elbows, curling up in a little ball, and wonder if I can suck enough air through the crack. “We won’t suffocate,” he tells me. “There’s plenty of air in here.”
“Oh yeah?” I gasp. “Do you know that for sure? Do you somehow know the exact rate of oxygen usage for two people in a unit this size?”
“I mean, I’d look it up, but some lunatic broke my phone.”
My head jerks up, and I realize his hand is still on my shoulder. “Was that a joke? Is this what it takes for you to make jokes that aren’t at the expense of other people? Near-death experiences?”
Caspian chuckles. “Evidently.”

Excerpted from Crashing the A-List by Summer Heacock, Copyright © 2019 by Summer Heacock. Published by MIRA Books.
 
 

Book Info:

Four months after losing her job as an assistant editor, Clara Montgomery is still unemployed and has resigned herself to sleeping on her little brother’s couch until she can find a new position in her field. While waiting to hear back on the dozens upon dozens of resumes she’s been sending out, she takes a job cleaning abandoned and repossessed storage units. Clara goes in knowing it will be hard work, but she is in no way prepared for decade old used condoms or an unexplainable stench of beets that permeates some of the units.

When Clara comes across a unit that had been owned by an escort service in the 90s, she finds the brothel “resume” of a then nineteen-year-old Caspian Tiddleswich, who is now a forty-year-old amazingly famous English actor. Her best friend, CiCi, tries to push Clara into selling the information to the highest paying tabloid to boost herself out of a life sleeping on her brother’s hideous couch. Instead, Clara manages to track down Caspian’s contact info, intending to reassure him that his secret is safe with her.

Unfortunately, Caspian misinterprets Clara’s intentions and shows up on her doorstep, accusing her of attempted blackmail. When a gossip magazine prints a photo of the two of them together, Clara is swept up in a “pretend” relationship with Caspian to please his PR team – and as his revenge against her for her plotting. But soon, their fake romance blossoms into more than either of them were prepared for.
 
 

Meet the Author:

Summer Heacock is an author of contemporary women’s fiction, and prances through life like a Disney cartoon that says the F word a lot. She lives in a teeny Indiana town where she’s a stay-at-home mom to two scampy tots, wife to an amazingly understanding husband, herder of a rescue critter menagerie, and collector of life-size celebrity cardboard cutouts. When not writing or hoarding jellybeans, she’s a member of the Midwest Writers planning committee and a cohost of PubTalkTV.