Love Bytes is happy to welcome author Lauren Sattersby to the blog to talk about her first release “Rock N Soul”.

Hi, I’m Lauren Sattersby, and this is the blog tour for my very first novel, Rock N Soul! I’ll be featured on various blogs over the course of the tour, and I’ll be sharing deleted scenes, playlists, answers to questions, and some of my thoughts on what it’s like to write a ghost story and make it both hot and romantic. Comment on each spot to be entered in a drawing for a $25 gift card to buy some books from Riptide Publishing!

When I was in high school, I decided that I wanted to write a novel—a romance novel about a rock star who falls in love with a small-town girl like me. I spent months on it, writing in sparkly green gel pen on pink notebook paper, and my friends read it and told me it was wonderful. They were lying.

No, seriously, it was terrible. The main characters were perfect and completely in love from the very beginning, with no obstacles in their way. Despite being a rock star, the hero was a nice guy who never let fame get to him, and the heroine was beautiful and modest and so sweet that you’d need dental work after reading a page about her. And it was boring.

See, interesting characters can’t be perfect. That’s a mistake that a lot of first-time writers make: they want readers to like their protagonists, so they don’t give them any reason to dislike them. But in reality, the characters we like are the characters who feel like real people. Good characters have personality failings, annoying tendencies, stubborn streaks. They make mistakes and say stupid things and pick the left door when they should have picked the right. And that’s what lets us connect to them—the idea that they’re not perfect. They’re like us.

In Rock N Soul, you get intimately close to the first-person narrator, Tyler. He’s a very cool guy who’s always one step ahead of everyone else as far as conversation goes, and he always has the perfect comeback for anything said to him. He’s funny and witty and very resilient, and he’s pretty good at handling stressful situations without flipping out and/or punching someone (even though he really, really wants to at one point in the story). He’s loyal and friendly and has a big heart that’s just waiting to find love.

But Tyler is most certainly not perfect. He’s snippy and sarcastic, sometimes to the point of actually being a jerk, and he has a tendency to be pessimistic and crude. He’s also stuck in his life, in a way that lots of us can relate to—he knows what he needs to do to move forward and be the man he wants to be, but he just can’t quite make himself go out and do it.

And Chris definitely isn’t a perfect guy either. He starts out the novel dead from a heroin overdose, and he’s every bit the spoiled, selfish rock star that the media had made him out to be. He gets grumpy, he gets angry, he gets bored. And he pesters the daylights out of Tyler pretty much constantly.

But he’s smart and sexy, as a rock star should be, and his larger-than-life persona is exactly what Tyler needs in his life. And Chris himself is a romantic at heart, convinced despite everything that love is real and desperate to find it for himself. He’s also generous and charming, with dimples and a playful enthusiasm that Tyler can’t help but find endearing.

And that’s what good characters need: a mix of good and bad traits. Give us a wholly good character with no flaws and we’ll find them boring at best and completely annoying at worst. Give us a wholly bad character with no redeeming qualities and we’ll dismiss them as a mustache-twirling villain and give them no more thought. But give us a real person, someone who’s just like us or at least like people we know, someone who could be the guy in the apartment down the hall or the rock star in the tabloids, someone complex and messy and sometimes even contradictory, and we love them because we feel like we know them.

That’s what I’ve tried to do with Chris and Tyler in this story, and I certainly hope you get to know them and love them as much as I have!

About Rock N Soul

I’m Tyler Lindsey, and until recently, I had an okay apartment, an okay girlfriend, and an okay job as a bellboy at a respectable Boston hotel. Then rock star Chris Raiden died right before I brought his room service—stiffing me on the tip, by the way—and my life went to hell. My fifteen minutes of fame was more like five seconds, and my girlfriend left me in disgust.

But even worse—Chris is haunting me. Not the room where he died, like a normal ghost. No, somehow he’s stuck to me and is insisting on taking care of a bunch of unfinished business in California. So now I have to traipse across the country with the world’s most narcissistic ghost.

But . . . I keep having these weird thoughts. Thoughts about how much I like the way he makes me laugh. Thoughts where I kind of want to kiss the emo-narcissist, even though he’s a ghost and an asshole and I can’t touch him anyway. And even if I could, what will happen when he finishes his business and nothing’s keeping him here anymore?

About Lauren Sattersby

Lauren Sattersby works as a budget manager by day, but while she’s at her desk mindlessly crunching numbers, it’s a good bet that she’s also writing M/M romance in her head and counting the minutes until she can get home and write it all down. She is a grammar enthusiast, which is why she has a Master’s degree in technical writing, but that tends to scare friends away so she keeps that to herself.

Lauren lives in Wisconsin with her partner and their three terrible cats. She’s a recent transplant from a thousand miles further south, so she still gets crazy excited about snow. When she isn’t writing, she can usually be found playing video games or scouring the countryside looking for interesting birds.

Connect with Lauren:

Website: laurensattersby.com Facebook: facebook.com/laurensattersby Twitter: @LaurenSattersby Tumblr: laurensattersby.tumblr.com Email: laurensattersby@gmail.com

To celebrate the release of Rock N Soul, Lauren is giving away $25 in Riptide credit! Your first comment at each stop on this tour enters you in the drawing. Entries close at midnight, Eastern time, on January 23, 2016. Contest is NOT restricted to U.S. Entries. Follow the tour for more opportunities to enter the giveaway! Don’t forget to leave your email or method of contact so Riptide can reach you if you win!