Discover The Schoolmaster's Daughter Today and a Giveaway

 

Discover The Schoolmaster's Daughter by Naomi Laeuchli and check out the giveaway below for a chance to win from the author a $10 Amazon/BN gift card to ione lucky winner. The tour is sponsored by Goddess Fish Promotions and you can check out all the tour stops HERE. Make sure to comment on other tour stop posts for more chances to win the giveaway. 

Talking with Naomi Laeuchi about The Schoolmaster's Daughter

Tell us about your latest book, who are the main characters and what can we expect when we pick it up?

The main characters are Lydia and Julius. Julius is a fortune hunter who comes to Bath, after a friend gives him a tip-off about an heiress living there. Lydia is the heiress’s friend and she sees through Julius right away. After he tries to enlist her help, she decides to get back at him by pretending to play along…with the goal of making him suffer. Lydia is high-spirited and deeply loves to laugh, while Julius is very pragmatic and cynical and rather hates himself for it. 

It’s a clean regency romance, very much inspired by the works of Jane Austen and Georgette Heyer. It’s a lighthearted romantic comedy, full of misunderstandings, characters who don’t realize they’re falling in love, and hopefully a few chuckles. 

Do you come up with the hook first, or do you create characters first and then dig through until you find a hook? 

It very much depends on the book! For The Schoolmaster’s Daughter, it very much started with Julius. I knew I wanted to tell the story of a fortune hunter falling in love. The story got built around him, and in turn Lydia was fitted to the plot and to Julius. 

Which of your own characters would you like to have lunch with?

Lydia! She would be a delight to share a meal with, only I’d prefer brunch and maybe we could throw in a mimosa flight for good measure!

Tell us about what you are reading at the moment or anticipate reading in the future? Any favorite authors you enjoy reading in your spare time?

My sister gave me the complete A Court of Thorns and Roses box set for Christmas. I’m now deep into the third book and completely in love with Rhysand (no surprise there!). 

I recently went to Barnes and Nobles and bought several more Romantasy books, on the strength of my enjoyment of A Court of Thorns and Roses, and I’m itching to start them. 

Generally I don’t do a lot of rereading but I do revisit books and authors I love through audiobooks. My two favorite authors to listen to are Georgette Heyer’s books and Terry Pratchett.

 

Which of your own books would you like to live in?

Assuming I could be one of the ladies of high fashion, I’d love to live in the Regency era of fiction. The balls, the tea, the hunting, the country dances, the beautiful estates…so I guess I would have to say, for now, The Schoolmasters' Daughter.

 

What do you do when you have free time?

I love to ride my horse Peshitta (who gets a cameo appearance in The Schoolmaster’s Daughter), play board games (I’m currently deep into a solo playthrough of ISS Vanguard which is a 50+ hour game where you manage a space ship, explore planets and discover an epic story), and go caving (I love going underground, climbing and crawling my way through passages and exploring unique areas that look nothing like anything you ever see aboveground).

 

How do you approach character development in your stories? Do you have any specific techniques or methods that you find particularly effective?

I usually approach it by considering the characters and who they are when the story starts and then looking at my end goal. How do these people get from Point A to Point B? What do they have to go through and how do they have to evolve for that transition to make sense? Then how would they evolve given the scenes I’ve already picked out. 

Sometimes, and this did happen in the case of The Schoolmaster’s Daughter, I look at it and realize something is missing. That I’ve cut a corner or haven’t properly shown why a character now feels a certain way. In the case of this book, I realized I needed to add another plot thread throughout for my two leads to interact with and properly bring things together. 

Often I will also just tell myself a particular scene in my head, if it’s an important one, as a story and try to put myself in the shoes of the characters and see how I would feel and what I would think in their place.

 

What do you believe sets your writing apart from others in your genre, and why should readers choose to read your books?

I want to stress the fact, very strongly, that I am nowhere near the level of writer of Jane Austen. But the dream is to write regency romances that’s a cross between Jane Austen and a Hallmark romance movie, with a little angst sprinkled in. If that sounds like something that would bring you joy, then that’s when you should pick it up.

 

Can you discuss any upcoming projects or books that you're currently working on? What can readers expect from your future works?

I’m currently writing an interactive story over on the Dorian app, called Be My Sire, which is a vampire-themed romance/action story. I’m also working on a murder mystery/thriller in my free time.

THE SCHOOLMASTER'S DAUGHTER

Author: Naomi Laeuchli

 Regency Romance

Deep in debt and desperate for a solution, Julius Claydon knows that marrying a wealthy woman is his only hope. When he meets the beautiful and rich Clara Haughton in Bath, he believes she could be his salvation, but there's one obstacle in his path: Lydia Cray, Clara's sharp-witted and penniless companion. 

When Lydia quickly sees through his fortune-hunting motives, Julius proposes an alliance. He will help secure her future if she helps him secure Clara's heart. 

But Lydia is not all she appears to be, and she has a plan of her own: to teach him a lesson he won't soon forget. But her scheming soon leads to unforeseen consequences for them both. 

Can love spring from deception?

Buy Links:

https://www.amazon.com/Schoolmasters-Daughter-Naomi-Laeuchli/dp/B0D9SKC3D7 FREE TO LIVE ON KINDLE UNLIMITED

Excerpt Three: 

He had reached them now and was smiling down at her. “Miss Cray. You look lovely tonight.”

 

“Thank you.”

 

She was dimly aware that he was bowing to Clara and greeting her as well. But while he must, in the interests of politeness, have looked away from herself at some point, it didn’t feel like it. It felt as if his eyes never truly left hers. Which made it unmistakable who he was addressing when he asked, “Might I have the pleasure of this dance?”

 

Later that night she would look back and think it strange that he had asked her to dance before Clara, that he had barely paid Clara more attention than what was demanded by common civility. But now she simply held out her hand to him, beaming at him and nodded, finding words curiously difficult to form.

 

The music had changed to a waltz as he led her out onto the dance floor. She felt a curious sensation somewhere north of her stomach as his arm wrapped around her waist and he began to lead her.

 

He truly was graceful, as he smiled down at her and the pair twirled through the steps and the music.

 

This close, she could see the individual flecks of grey hairs in amongst the dark, which she found strangely endearing. The lines on his face seemed a little deeper under the candlelight and she felt a strange impulse to reach up and run her fingers across them.

 

His eyes, though, were a clear deep blue, and she suspected they held the exact same youthfulness and brightness that they had had on the day he was born. In some mysterious way, her instincts told her they always would. Those same eyes were smiling down warmly into her own, and she blushed a little but held the gaze steady.

 

 

AUTHOR Bio and Links: 

Born in Taipei, Taiwan, Naomi Laeuchli has lived overseas in nine different countries on three different continents where her family was posted with the American Foreign Service. In November 2012 she moved from the Democratic Republic of the Congo back to the states and currently lives in Arizona with five horses. She works as a freelance writer and part time at the local library. She has written several interactive stories for Choice of Games, Tales, and Dorian.

 https://nplwrites.wordpress.com/