Total pages in book: 130
Estimated words: 126425 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 632(@200wpm)___ 506(@250wpm)___ 421(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 126425 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 632(@200wpm)___ 506(@250wpm)___ 421(@300wpm)
Essie Smith-Scott, the author known as SS, has been the number one spicy romance writer in the world for the past ten years. Movie deals, merchandise, dozens of books on the New York Times bestseller’s list, and the founder of the biggest romance convention to ever hit the planet.
Scoring an invitation to the Sin With Us Romance Convention in Las Vegas is the ‘big break’ every romance author hopes for and Cynthia Lear’s name just made it to the top of the wait list. She’s in. And she’s gonna make the most of it. This is her chance to shine and propel her career into the stratosphere.
But then she meets Essie’s twin brother, Steve. Not only is Steve Smith handsome, and charming, and loves her work—he’s also… lying . To the whole world. Literally everyone.
Because his twin sister, Essie, isn’t the one who’s been writing all those super-spicy Master Choke books all these years—it’s Steve.
***********
Written by New York Times bestselling author JA Huss and actor, author, screenwriter, narrator, Johnathan McClain—The Ro Bro is a rompy feel-good adventure through the secret life of romance authors and the conventions they attend. Prepare to laugh so hard you pee your pants. This is a story that will make you smile every time you think about it.
(P.S. - If you’ve never been to the biggest romance convention in the world, well now you don’t even have to go. Because they all happen just like this.) ;)
*************FULL BOOK START HERE*************
CHAPTER ONE
THREE WEEKS BEFORE THE CONVENTION
I know I shouldn’t bite my nails.
But I can’t help it.
It’s the whole reason I’ve never gotten a manicure.
I can hear my mother’s voice in my head even as I’m doing it: “Cordelia. Don’t chew at your fingers like you’re some kind of rabid wildebeest. It’s a filthy habit.”
Never mind that wildebeests can’t chew their nails because they’re basically antelopes and antelopes don’t have fingers and even if they did are unlikely to be able to get one of their hooves up to their mouths to chew on it in the first place, so it’s a bad simile and she could have just said ‘wild animal’ and also left out the part about it being rabid because what does that have to do with anything, but my mother has never been one to go for simplicity, much less use only two words when fifty will do…
Which, as I play back my run-on sentence to myself, occurs to me, not for not the first time, might be a heritable quality.
But putting all that aside, it’s not the most constructive way to get a kid to stop doing something. By lecturing them.
Or, at least, it wasn’t for me. The more I’d get lectures to stop, like, biting my nails, or touching the door handle five times on each side before turning it, or rearranging the silverware by my dinner plate in three very distinct formations before I could begin eating, the more it made me anxious and drove me to do the thing she was telling me not to do even more.
Like when she said, “You don’t want to be a writer, Cordelia. You really don’t. It will break your heart. Then, when it’s finally beaten you all the way down, it will cause you to become filled with hope just when you least expect it only to break your heart once more,” it made me decide: Okay. Well, guess I’m gonna be a writer then.
At least that particular lecture was founded in something more substantial than just her not wanting me to look like a wildebeest. Mom and Dad are both writers, and neither of them ever really achieved what I think they thought they would when they started out. I mean, all things considered, they’ve had pretty good lives. They wrote as a team for some of the most successful TV shows ever to be on TV, back when TV was just on, like, TV.
Changing tides and all that caused them to realize that the world of entertainment was moving in a direction they really didn’t want to try to keep up with, so they took all the TV money they made over the years and moved to Mykonos, where Dad’s side of the family is originally from, and now they wake up every morning, drink their coffee, look out at the ocean, and then spend a few hours each working on their own ‘great literary novel.’ Which, I mean… if the cost of a repeatedly broken heart is having enough money to retire in your early fifties to an island off the coast of Greece? I’d be willing to take that trade.
But the point is I sometimes wonder if maybe I should’ve just listened to her.
Instead of pushing back like I tend to do when given advice I don’t want to hear, maybe I should’ve considered that what she was saying was a genuine attempt to look out for my best interests. I was a pretty high-strung kid. I think I’m less of a high-strung adult, but I can’t deny that one of the things my mom encouraged me not to do—bite my nails—is happening at the moment because of another thing my mom encouraged me not to do—become a writer.
Sitting in my favorite sling chair—that really needs to have a section of the canvas back reupholstered so I stop playing obsessively with the bits of loose thread that hang from it—by the side of the pool, waiting for Britney to finish reading the last two chapters of my latest manuscript, I find myself unable to avoid biting at my nails and letting my brain wander all over the place.
I actually first tried my hand at being a TV writer like Mom and Dad, but I wasn’t cut out for it. You have to write in teams with a whole writers’ room filled with other maybe-up-and-coming writers and collaborate, and be willing to have all your writing rewritten by someone else and just a whole lot of other stuff that made it feel less like writing and more like going to work on some kind of assembly line. Just, instead of assembling widgets or car parts or something, you’re supposed to be assembling art.
Or, no, that’s not quite right. It isn’t art. It’s entertainment.
And there’s nothing wrong with that. Entertainment is great. I love being entertained. I find many things very entertaining. Circuses, for example. I think circuses can be super fun. But I don’t wanna be a clown.