December Wedding by Emelle Gamble

I asked today’s guest, Emelle Gamble, to share her research into the film industry with us. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that some of it isn’t research – it’s experience.


Emelle Gamble on Writing About an Actress

 
Molly Harper is an academy award winning actress and the star character in three of my books, DUETS, MOLLY HARPER, and the final installation, DECEMBER WEDDING.

She works her butt off, is professional, beautiful, talented, successful and, when you meet her in DUETS,  at the point in her life where she is wrestling with THE BIG QUESTION woman of all professions grapple with, can I have it all?

I think actresses are in a weirdly different category than the rest of us in that they are wealthier than most, and have almost no privacy when they are at the achievement level of this character. Interesting trade-off for a writer to consider…particularly as fame and fortune and loss of ‘ordinariness’ do not really change the yearnings, wants and needs, and shortcomings that any human being has.

I grew up in Los Angeles. I knew several actors, dated a couple and for the first two years of college I majored in drama and hoped to be a professional. (I did a play with Anson Williams - Potsie of Happy Days. HA! I was Joan of Arc! No, ‘the Fonz’ did not save me.)

I also worked in a non-entertainment job where my clients were studio people. (I once worked overtime one Friday night to get some equipment of my company’s moved so Clint Eastwood’s stuntman wouldn’t kill himself running into it on the streets of San Francisco. Clint’s people sent me $200 of roses the next day to thank me. Yes, a highpoint. He also sent me an autographed photo, which I have in my office.) So I felt like I understood not only some of the nuts and bolts of movie-making, but also the psyche of an actor.

Most actors I know, like Molly Harper, have something painful in their backgrounds. She has a huge secret she’s been keeping from everyone, and it changed her forever. So she took that pain and turned it into creative expression in her work. I know a lot of writer’s who do this too…art and hurt seem to often go together.

It was very fulfilling for me to write about Molly Harper, actress, daughter and secret keeper. A lot of her personal life I also knew a lot about first hand.  Family secrets. Good and bad love affairs and choices.

And yes, I too fell in love with a dark haired hot guy and it was complicated, but I got my HEA.

I hope you’ll get to know Molly Harper and Cruz Morales, and their families and friends. Let me know what you think if you do…I love getting reader email at [email protected]. Or visit my website at www.EmelleGamble.com. There’s  always something fun going on over there…


Thank you Marlow Kelly for hosting me!

Available on Amazon

Molly Harper is a movie star who fans think ‘has it all’. Cruz Morales is Molly’s true love, and he hates the media intrusions into their life. Molly and Cruz are going to have a baby. And throw a secret wedding for her brother Harry. What could go wrong? Read DECEMBER WEDDING, the sequel to DUETS and MOLLY HARPER, and find out if there really is a happy ever after for Molly and Cruz.

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Excerpt





Molly Harper lay beside Cruz Morales in the darkened bedroom, finally drowsy as the familiar night sounds floated in on the Santa Barbara breezes. She was on her second set of counting backwards from 100 to fall asleep, forty-two, forty-one…

“Will you marry me, Molly?” Cruz asked, his voice husky and close.

“No.” She’d said no to him a hundred times the last year. He told her last Christmas Eve he was going to ask her the last thing every night for a year before he’d give up. Saying no had been easy. Though meaning it was getting a little more difficult.

“Why not?”

“You know why not. I love you too much to subject you to a wedding.”

Cruz sighed. “Lame reason, chica. No one I know would think that’s a good reason.” 

“They would if they remembered I’m an actress whose life attracts the press like a tub of honey attracts bees. And bees sting. You know what a zoo our wedding would turn out to be.”

“Not if we got married at the courthouse in Taos, or at your home there. People can get hitched the same day they get the license in New Mexico. I checked. We could keep it a secret.”

“A secret?  You know that’s impossible. Someone at the courthouse would tell their friend, who would call the newspaper or People Magazine or tweet it to thirty thousand of their closest friends.”

“Are you sure we’re still interesting to other people? I think the gossip about us has cooled down. People seem more interested in royal babies and the Jolie-Pitt clan now.”

“That’s true. There were only two camera crews outside the restaurant where we ate last Friday.” Molly’s brain reran a few snippets of the last two years, all recorded and available on the internet. Cruz struggling to recover from the motorcycle accident that nearly killed him. Her movie star husband leaving her for another woman. Her ex and the other woman having a baby.

Mother’s death.

All events which were played out on the front page of newspapers and websites around the world. 

“Please? I’ll put a ring on it tomorrow if you say yes.”

Molly took a rattling breath. Tonight’s discussion was quite a bit more protracted than the three hundred plus nights before. “No, thank you. I don’t need you to do anything more to prove you love me.”

In the midnight shadows, his generous mouth softened against the hard curves of his face. “I do love you. I’ve always loved you. Every single moment since I met you. Even when we were apart.”

“Did you, Cruz? Did you really even love me then?”

He touched her nose with his finger and cleared his throat, which he always did when he recited a favorite poem.  

“i carry your heart with me (i carry it in my heart) i  am never without it (anywhere I go you go, my dear; and whatever is done by only me is your doing, my darling) i fear no fate (for you are my fate, my sweet) i want no world (for beautiful you are my world, my true)”

Molly’s eyes burned. “I melt when you recite love poetry, Professor Cruz. I hope you don’t do in class; all those cute girls will be trying to jump your bones.”

“I only recite for you, chica. I read e.e. cummings when I was recovering in the hospital. He brought you back to me.”

“Oh please,” she whispered. “Let’s not talk about those terrible times.”

“Why? They don’t matter now, they hardly mattered then. Once we got back together, I mean, the past was gone.”

“The past is never gone. It’s on Facebook and Entertainment Tonight.”

“No one looks at those things. 

That made her laugh, as he had hoped it would.

“Right. No one.” Molly embraced him, the sheets silky smooth, while Cruz was warm and hard, and then rolled onto her other side.

AUTHOR Bio and Links:

Emelle Gamble Bio : Emelle Gamble became a writer at an early age. As ‘M.L. Gamble,’ she published several romantic suspense novels with Harlequin Intrigue. She is now self-publishing and also working with Soul Mate Publishing  who have released  two romantic women’s fiction novels,  Secret Sister, in July of 2013, and Dating Cary Grant, an April 2014 release.

Always intrigued by the words ‘what if’,  Gamble’s books feature an ordinary woman confronted with an extraordinary situation.  Emelle celebrates the adventurous spirit of readers, and hopes each will enjoy the exciting and surprising journeys her characters take.

Emelle welcomes any reader interested in emailing her at [email protected]  and hopes they will visit her website, www.EmelleGamble.com ,  her FaceBook page: https://www.facebook.com/Emelle.Gamble or follow her on Twitter @EmelleGamble.

Emelle will be awarding a $20 Amazon GC plus a digital copy of December Wedding to a randomly drawn winner via rafflecopter during this tour and the Review Tour.

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