CLP Blog Tour: Guest Post with Author Denise Grover Swank

For Rose Gardner, working at the DMV on a Friday afternoon is bad even before she sees a vision of herself dead. She’s had plenty of visions, usually boring ones like someone’s toilet’s overflowed, but she’s never seen one of herself before. When her overbearing momma winds up murdered on her sofa instead, two things are certain: There isn't enough hydrogen peroxide in the state of Arkansas to get that stain out, and Rose is the prime suspect.

Rose realizes she’s wasted twenty-four years of living and makes a list on the back of a Wal-Mart receipt: twenty-eight things she wants to accomplish before her vision comes true. She’s well on her way with the help of her next door neighbor Joe, who has no trouble teaching Rose the rules of drinking, but won’t help with number fifteen-- do more with a man. Joe’s new to town, but it doesn’t take a vision for Rose to realize he’s got plenty secrets of his own.

Somebody thinks Rose has something they want and they’ll do anything to get it. Her house is broken into, someone else she knows is murdered, and suddenly, dying a virgin in the Fenton County jail isn’t her biggest worry after all.

Today I was lucky enough to have Denise Grover Swank stop by my blog with a guest post. I absolutely adored her book you can find my review here.

Thanks Denise for taking time out of your busy day to stop by.



Now on to the Guest Post:



In my novel, Twenty-Eight and a Half Wishes, my main character Rose lived her entire life under her Momma’s iron clad rules. When she sees a vision of herself dead on Momma’s sofa (Rose sees visions, just usually nothing very bad) she realizes she’s been frittering her life away and decides to do something about it. Her first option is to never sit on her Momma’s sofa again, but her second is to create a list of the things she always wanted to do but never thought she could, or dared to try, under her Momma’s watchful eye.

In truth, I think most people have their own Wish Lists, or Bucket Lists as some people call them. Maybe they don’t actually write them down but they rattle around in our heads, popping up every so often to grab our attention.

I’ve never made a list but there’s plenty of things I’d like to do before I die. One is travel all over the world, particularly Italy. (Rose wants to do this, too.) I’ve been fortunate to see some amazing places including China and Vietnam while adopting three of my children. Another “wish” was to complete and publish a novel. Check. :)

But hello, everybody has these kind of “normal” entries on their lists. What about the more unique? Come on. You can admit them. Surely, I’m not the only one with odd things on their list. Or maybe I am.

The one that’s been on my list the longest is I want to be in a parade. I have no idea why. I don’t even like parades. What will I do in this parade? Beats me. Let’s hope it doesn’t involve juggling, baton twirling or fire. Or any combination of the three or I might make YouTube. And nobody wants that.

Years ago, I learned how to decorate cakes. I took the Wilton classes at Jo Ann Fabrics and had a lot of fun learning to make daisies and roses. I had the bright idea of making cakes for other people. And it was fun, for the first two or three cakes. Then I realized that the decorating was only a small part of the cake making. I still had to make all the frosting. And color it. And then clean all that greasy mess up.
But in spite of all the mess, I still had it in my head I wanted to make a tiered cake. I finally did for my first husband’s parents wedding anniversary. I decorated three layers with white frosting and pink roses. I set it up on white pillar columns and it was gorgeous, if I do say so myself. That night at the party as someone was admiring it, they asked how difficult it was to put the dowel rods supports inside the cakes.
What dowel rods? Thankfully, the cake didn’t topple over.

For the longest time I wanted to be on The Amazing Race. Seriously, how could it get any better? Travel combined with good old fashioned racing. That was my idea of heaven. The problem was who in the world would I take? I told my husband he was out. When he was stressed he’d yell. No way was I letting him chew me out on international television.

I briefly considered Survivor as a substitute. Pros: Travel, game playing, effective weight loss system. Cons: Bug bites and the potential to eat the bugs that bit you.

In the meantime, my oldest son turned twenty-one and became eligible to enter TAR, as we fanatics call it. We discussed how to make our interview tape which demonstrated how we worked together as a team. Which basically boiled down to:

Me: Trace, I said to go right.
Trace: No Mom. You said left.
Me: I KNOW I SAID RIGHT!!!
Trace: *throwing hands into air* Oh, Mom.
Okay, forget The Amazing Race.

In the end, I don’t think it matters what our list is or even if we complete all of them (some of mine dropped off, like TAR). What’s important is that we’re living life. And we’re enjoying it.


Thanks again for stopping by.

You can purchase a copy of Twenty Eight and a Half Wishes at Amazon or Barnes & Noble.





You can find the author on her website, twitter, or facebook.