Aloha to Ruthie Knox and RIDE WITH ME (ebook giveaway)

Let's kick off Valentine's Week with Loveswept author Ruthie Knox.  From her bio,

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. She’d love to hear from you, so drop her a line.

Kim:  We are nosy here at SOS Aloha - tell us your favorite sight, sound, and smell from where you live.

Ruthie:  I'm a very outdoorsy person, so I'm happiest in the woods. My husband, three-year-old son, and I live in Green Bay, Wisconsin, and do as much hiking as we can in nearby Door County--a peninsula that sticks out into Lake Michigan--in the summers. My favorite place to hike at the moment is probably Potawatomi State Park.

It's a wonderfully sparse, open forest, with a lot of new growth because it was logged in the first decades of the last century. It sounds like the woods -- all whooshing breezes in the canopy and dead leaves rustling underfoot. And in the fall, which is my favorite time to be there, it smells like clean, damp dirt, in the best possible way.

Kim: What movie prompted you to fall in love with Daniel Day Lewis? I think Daniel Dae Kim (from LOST and Hawaii Five O) is yummy.

Ruthie: I'm pretty sure the first movie I ever saw Daniel Day Lewis in was ROOM WITH A VIEW, followed by MY LEFT FOOT. Both great movies, but I have to admit, the crush started when I saw him in LAST OF THE MOHICANS. I was in eighth grade, and I fell hard. I think I saw it seven times in the theater. (Oh dear, did I just admit that on the Internet?) I don't usually go for long-haired guys, but as Hawkeye, Daniel spent most of the movie bedraggled, grimy, occasionally bloody, and relentlessly determined. I can't remember what he was determined about. He looks really hot when he's determined, though.

I still like Day Lewis, in part because he's such a weirdo, and he plays a weirdo in his movies so well. He was awesome in GANGS OF NEW YORK and THERE WILL BE BLOOD. And I heard on the radio that he spent a year apprenticed to an Italian cobbler not too long ago, which is pretty cool. I love an eccentric man.

As for Dae Kim -- *swoons*. Yes. Agreed. Totally yummy.

Kim: What did you plan to do with your double major from college and your PhD in modern British history? Any chance you'll incorporate what you have learned into your writing?

Ruthie: Plan? 

*snorts*

I didn't have much of a plan, really. I always liked being in school but knew too many academics when I was growing up to want to be a professor. They seemed to complain a lot. :) So I decided to try being an editor, and I worked through grad school at an academic press. After I finished my history degree, I launched a freelance editing business, and that's what I've been doing with my training for the past eight years -- helping academic writers get their books into shape for publication.

As you can probably imagine, all that editing experience has come in handy as I've been writing my romance manuscripts, and lately I've also been looking at transitioning from nonfiction into fiction editing, since fiction is where my heart is these days.

As for the history part of my degrees, I don't know if any of it will ever find its way into my writing. I don't read a lot of historical romance, and so far I haven't developed an interest in writing it. But you never know! If I were to try it, I have a feeling I would write very gritty, smelly historical romances about poor, desperate, urban people. Which is perhaps not what readers are clamoring for.

Kim: I am intrigued by your new book, as I followed some Canadian friends with the support van when they cycled around the Bodensee in Germany. Are you a cyclist? What resources did you use to write this book?

Ruthie: Yes, I am absolutely a cyclist, and RIDE WITH ME grew out of my love of cycling. It's the story of Tom and Lexie's journey across the TransAmerica trail, which stretches from Oregon to Virginia through the heart of the United States. When I wrote the book, I drew on a lot of stories from my own camping and cycling adventures, as well as from my dad's. He and two friends would take off every year when I was a kid to spend a week riding the Southern Tier Route, which crosses the United States from San Diego, CA, to Saint Augustine, FL. Dad always came home with funny tales.

As an adult, I've taken bike touring vacations with my parents and my husband in Utah, Montana, Colorado, and Vermont, and I've also done some riding in Ohio, Oregon, Indiana, and Wisconsin. (The picture is me on the Great Divide trail in Colorado.) So when it came time to write about Tom and Lexie's journey, I ended up having a lot of experience to draw on. I was actually surprised to find how familiar I was with a lot of the route.

I also made use of the Adventure Cycling Association's website (www.adventurecycling.org), which is an amazing resource. Adventure Cycling is a nonprofit that creates all these cross-country bike routes and publishes the trail maps, and they encourage people to post ride journals on their site. I combed through a lot of the journals to help me get a feel for what the terrain and overnight stops were like in the various places Tom and Lexie ride through.

Kim:  What's next for Ruthie Knox?

Ruthie: Well, RIDE WITH ME just released yesterday, so I have a fair amount of promo to do! This spring, I'm really excited to be going to my first writing conferences: Romantic Times in Chicago in April, followed by Romance Writers of America in California in July. In between those two conferences, I have another novel coming out with Loveswept on June 11, 2012, titled ABOUT LAST NIGHT. It's a London-based story about a bad girl who's been trying to reform and the straitlaced banker she meets, who turns out not to be nearly as straitlaced as she thinks. It's a funny, sexy, sweet clash-of-cultures romance about a damaged woman learning how to trust.

After that, who knows?! My agent has a few more projects that she's shopping around, and in the meantime I keep cranking out the pages. I've got my fingers crossed that readers will like this book, because I want to write lots more. :)

Thanks so much for interviewing me! Here's my question for your readers: Who was your first really serious cinematic crush? I'll give away an ecopy of RIDE WITH ME to one commenter.

Kim:  I look forward to meeting you at RT in Chicago and RWA in LA!  Thank you for the giveaway of RIDE WITH ME:

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?

Comments are open through Saturday, February 18, 10 pm in Hawaii. I'll post the winner on Sunday, February 19.

Mahalo,

Kim in Hawaii

Check out my review of RIDE WITH ME on Goodreads at this link.

To learn more about Ruthie and her books, check out her website at www.ruthieknox.com.

Daniel Dae Kim, "Ride with me!"