Laura Chapman is a book "Bridezilla"...plus a special giveaway

We're pleased to introduce you to Laura Chapman. Like Melissa A, she is a fan of The Mindy Project. And like Sara, she lives in Nebraska. Two brownie points right there! She's here today to talk about how she got into the mood for writing her latest novel The Marrying Type and she has a "Wedding Planner Prize Package" for a lucky reader in the US or Canada! (It can be used for planning other types of events too.)

Laura  is also the author of Hard Hats and Doormats (reviewed here) and the "Autumn and Tuck" series, which appear in Merry & Bright and A Kind of Mad Courage. A native Nebraskan, she loves football, Netflix marathons, and her cats, Jane and Bingley. Until she fulfills her dream of landing a British husband or becoming a Disney princess, you can find her in a bar penning her next novel.

You can find Laura at her website, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Always the wedding planner, never a bride, Elliot Lynch is famous for orchestrating the splashiest weddings in Charleston, South Carolina. When her father’s sloppy management practices leave them on the brink of bankruptcy, Elliot will do whatever it takes to save the family business. When asked to appear on “The Marrying Type,” a reality TV show about the people behind the scenes as couples exchange I dos, she says yes to the invasion of privacy (and the hefty paycheck that comes with it).

With a camera crew capturing every detail of her life, Elliot faces her most challenging contract yet: planning a wedding where her ex is involved in every part of the process. Add in a lazy assistant, liquor-loving bridesmaid, and rival planner encroaching on her turf, and Elliot’s wedding season goes from high-end to high-stress.

Forced to confront her past, Elliot must live out her troubled present on national TV if she has any hope of saving her future.

View the book trailer:

Becoming a (Fake) Wedding Planner

One of my favorite parts about writing a book about a wedding planner was getting to plan a wedding. While most of the weddings featured in my new novel, The Marrying Type, are light on detail, I still had a blast looking up everything from dress designs to place settings to help me get in the spirit of the process. There’s something deliciously fun about writing a book about wedding planning. Though I’ve never planned a wedding of my own, the Type A person within me adored the idea of making lists and doing research to imagine someone else’s fictitious perfect day.

Plus, it was nice to have an excuse to spend hours on wedding sites and Pinterest oohing and ahhing over lace and bling. As a single gal of adequate fortune, it was nice to have a free pass without people assuming I must be in desperate want of a husband.

For research purposes, I spent the most amount of my “research” time checking out wedding dresses. Like a proper bride-to-be, I recognized how much the dress can set the tone for a wedding. I spent several minutes (okay, hours) looking at dresses, imagining how I might describe them in the story. Along the way, I had some definite favorites (here and here). I also had a dress or two that gave me a double-take in a “seriously?” kind of way (like here).

I’ve gone to a couple of bridal boutiques as a friend of the bride, and each of those experiences was lovely and drama-free. Unfortunately, lovely and drama-free doesn’t necessarily make for great storytelling. To help myself get into the mindset of what could go wrong with wedding dress shopping (or the dresses in general), I turned to the good people of Say Yes to the Dress: Atlanta. With my story set a few hours down the road in Charleston, South Carolina, I watched the show thinking, “These are my people.”

In addition to being amused (or suitably horrified), I had the added bonus of learning more about the terminology involved in wedding dresses. I could see what styles are fashionable, what certain cuts are called, and how those styles fit various brides.

Hours and hours of watching Lori, Monte, and the rest of the Bridals by Lori crew also gave me an extra bit of help I hadn’t expected. I gained inspiration on how to write the reality TV show elements of the book. While watching an episode, I would often find myself imagining how it was filmed and what went into making the finished product.

Whether or not my imagination was correct, it stirred my creative juices. (And here's a photo that delighted me when it appeared on Lori's Facebook page last month.)

Along that same grain, I turned to Netflix, WE, and TLC for more inspiration. I binge-watched episodes of Whose Wedding Is It Anyway?, Platinum Weddings, and Four Weddings, always imagining what it must have been like behind the scenes of the behind-the-scenes shows. I owe a lot of gratitude to the people who made those shows for helping me research.

In preparation for writing this book, I also used The Everything Bachelorette Party Book and The Everything Wedding Book for insider tips on party planning best practices.

Here's what you could win!

I devoted more than a few minutes to creating a wedding board on Pinterest featuring some of the wedding designs, floral arrangements, dresses, and more that I used for inspiration throughout the writing process. You can view it here.

But even now that that book is being published, I’m hardly an expert on weddings. Still, I had a lot of fun in the process. I hope you will see that when you pick up your copy of The Marrying Type. It can be found at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, and Marching Ink.

Thanks to Laura for visiting with us and sharing her Wedding Planner Prize Package with our readers. You can enter to win a copy of The Marrying Type from Goodreads. (Also US/Canada.)

How to win: Use Rafflecopter to enter the giveaway. If you have any questions, feel free to contact us. If you have trouble using Rafflecopter on our blog, enter the giveaway here.

a Rafflecopter giveaway


US/Canada only. Giveaway ends March 1st at midnight EST.