Blog Tour - Giveaway! Ride with Me by Ruthie Knox

Today we welcome author, Ruthie Knox who is promoting her book, Ride with Me.

Giveaway Details:
Ruthie has kindly offered up  a digital copy of Ride with Me to one lucky winner. Winners will pick up their copy through Net Galley. Just leave a comment with a valid e-mail address.  This will run until February 10. Good luck to all!

Author: Ruthie Knox
Publisher: Loveswept
Date of Publication: February 13, 2012

In this fun, scorching-hot eBook original romance by Ruthie Knox, a cross-country bike adventure takes a detour into unexplored passion. As readers will discover, Ride with Me is not about the bike!

When Lexie Marshall places an ad for a cycling companion, she hopes to find someone friendly and fun to cross the TransAmerica Trail with. Instead, she gets Tom Geiger — a lean, sexy loner whose bad attitude threatens to spoil the adventure she’s spent years planning.

Roped into the cycling equivalent of a blind date by his sister, Tom doesn’t want to ride with a chatty, go-by-the-map kind of woman, and he certainly doesn’t want to want her. Too bad the sight of Lexie with a bike between her thighs really turns his crank.

Even Tom’s stubborn determination to keep Lexie at a distance can’t stop a kiss from leading to endless nights of hotter-than-hot sex. But when the wild ride ends, where will they go next?

My thoughts:

I devoured this story. Ride with Me is a sweet romance about two people who set out on a journey to reach the other side of the country and end up finding something they never bargained for...each other.   I loved the chemistry between Lexie and Tom.  What a better way to get to know someone, then to ride across the country with them. They both grew some much over the trip and I was rooting for their HEA.   There is more to this story than just the romance.  It's really a tale about finding the balance in life where you can be happy and learn to live with the choices you have made.    I loved the author's use of Thoreau's Walden to help Tom find out how to achieve this.  Ride with Me is a quick read and one you won't want to pass up!  

Ruthie stopped by to share some thoughts with us:

Inspired at Last

I am thirty-four years old. For thirty-three of those years, I was not a writer, which is an odd thing, because I had all the equipment. I’m a reader of the most obsessive, devoted, addicted variety. I did the English major thing in college. I’ve learned my literary theory (God help me). As a kid, I wrote stories and attended all the weekend events for budding writers and joined the seventh-grade writing club.

What kept me from writing was that I didn’t have any stories in my head. I understood that this was how it worked: the writer had ideas. The ideas demanded exit through her fingers. Lacking those, I just didn’t see how one would begin, or why one would bother. What would be the point?

I rediscovered romance novels a few years ago, and I read as many of them as I could get my hands on. One day, at a yoga class, I had an idea for a romance novel of my own. I worked my way through sun salutations and standing poses and corpse pose at the end, and I thought, for the first time since I was a kid, about my own characters. My own plot. I thought of how a few of my own experiences might be reworked to become the stuff of a novel.

The next day, I started writing.

For me, the structure of romance was itself inspirational. The genre gives the author boundaries to work in, so the project became almost an assignment: Write a novel of 65,000 words in which two characters meet, fall in love, and overcome obstacles to find their happily-ever-after. (Never mind that this was a ridiculously simplified notion of what romance novels are all about. At the time, I was both ignorant and arrogant—qualities that my friend Serena Bell has since convinced me are essential to writerly happiness.)

I have always been an excellent student. I like assignments. Give me boundaries, and I am happy to innovate within them. Give me a blank notebook and no guidelines, and I will stare at it, uninspired, and claim not to be artistic. So the form of the romance novel gave me the structure I needed to find my legs as a novelist. I wrote three novel manuscripts in the space of a few months. I discovered that I did, in fact, have ideas, and that I loved to develop characters. I discovered that I had a ridiculous amount to learn, but that’s okay. I like learning. All I needed to become a writer, it turned out, was a direction.

Since then, I’ve found inspiration from dozens of directions. It’s as if I flipped a switch, and now my previously dormant writer-brain seeks out the sort of conflicts and interesting situations that work well in romance novels. I got an e-mail one day out of the blue from the manager of a rock band asking whether I’d be willing to design a custom sweater for the star of this band. (I used to do a lot of knitting, including some design.) Instead of thinking about sweaters, I thought, Man, that would make a great set-up for a romance novel. Now, does the heroine fall for the rock star, or does she fall for the guitar tech? What do they fight about? My writer-brain started thinking, started playing, started asking questions.

It never shuts off now. I have a file full of ideas that will probably go nowhere, but there are seeds in there, and they find unlikely places to grow. The inspiration for the novel that became Ride with Me came from flipping through the magazine of the Adventure Cycling Association and thinking idly about the “Companions Wanted” column, which helps cyclists who are planning a trip find like-minded folks to ride with. What would happen, I wondered, if a hero and heroine got matched up through that column, but neither got what they were expecting? What if they had to ride four thousand miles together and didn’t like each other. Ooh! Fun!

I had to find out, so I sat down and started writing.

About the Author:

Ruthie Knox figured out how to walk and read at the same time in the second grade, and she hasn’t looked up since. She spent her formative years hiding romance novels in her bedroom closet to avoid the merciless teasing of her brothers and imagining scenarios in which someone who looked remarkably like Daniel Day Lewis recognized her well-hidden sex appeal and rescued her from middle-class Midwestern obscurity. After graduating from Grinnell College with an English and history double major, she earned a Ph.D. in modern British history that she’s put to remarkably little use.

These days, she writes contemporary romance in which witty, down-to- earth characters find each other irresistible in their pajamas, though she freely admits this has yet to happen to her. Perhaps she needs more exciting pajamas. Ruthie abhors an epilogue and insists a decent romance requires at least three good sex scenes.