Cowboy Lovin' Kick-Off with ALISON KENT!

Welcome to Day 1 of January's Cowboy Lovin' event here at The Cozy Page! To get the party started, I'm very pleased to welcome my first guest of honor (and someone who KNOWS her cowboys), author Alison Kent! Take it away, Alison....

The first book I ever wrote was about a Wyoming cowboy. I came to romance reading through Diana Palmer, Elizabeth Lowell, and I loved their wild western men. Contemporary or historical, it didn’t matter, and so I wrote my own. I loved him. He was heroic, a man of the land, courageous, brave, hardworking, but passionately tender with the heroine, and a role model to her son. That book never sold. I didn’t know enough about making a story work. I was the queen of clichés. But I did know cowboys.

Though I live in urban cowboy country, I also live in REAL cowboy country. The odors from the pasture edging our neighborhood waft strongly at times, reminding us that we neighbor with horses and cows and goats as well as with people. As many driveways sport pickups as cars. Drive another twenty minutes, and there are any number of small ranching operations scattered around. When I was a kid, my best friend’s family had horses, and my favorite thing to do was spend Friday nights at her house then spend Saturdays riding. (This is probably where I should mention the scar on my right thigh from going completely over a horse’s back once and landing on a piece of rebar.)

Though I’m a city girl in reality, I’m a country girl at heart. Just ask the husband who had to spend a vacation week with me in West Texas where there was nothing for him to do. Me? I soaked up the heat of the day, shivered in the cool desert nights. I found settings to use in future books, and any number of the people we ran across will end up with cameo appearances.

My first book for Harlequin Temptation, CALL ME, had a cowboy hero, as did my second, THE HEARTBREAK KID. Gardner and Tyler Barnes were brothers. Wyatt Crowe in TEX APPEAL was my third true cowboy hero to write, though most of my heroes are cowboys at heart, rough and tough. Kell Harding, my Texas Ranger hero from my September 2009 Blaze, ONE GOOD MAN, was law enforcement, but still pure cowboy through and through.

Willie Nelson urges mamas not to let their babies grow up to be cowboys. Paula Cole wants to know where all the cowboys have gone. So what’s the appeal? One of my favorite blogs is Confessions of a Pioneer Woman, and Ree captures a lot of it in her posts about this hardworking, honorable breed of man, and then getting to the female heart of the matter:

And all I know is that if I ever did ponder the kind of man I’d eventually end up with, “Cowboy” wasn’t anywhere in the picture. Neither was “Rancher,” for that matter, but before I met Marlboro Man I’d never distinguished between the two. Not that there’s really any difference when it comes right down to the nitty-gritty business of the All Time Most Appealing Activity a Woman Can Possibly Witness a Man Doing — Riding a Horse.

And whew. This one’s bad, ladies. It didn’t take me but two seconds once I saw Marlboro Man on a horse to decide that there was absolutely no going back for me. And consistently, throughout the ten years we’ve been married, just one glance of him on his horse has always been nothing short of an instantaneous revival of every ounce of love, lust, respect, and adoration I’ve ever felt for Marlboro Man. He gets on a horse? It all comes rushing back. I get busy and bogged down with laundry and temporarily forget all about the butterflies and hiney tingles that caused me to drop everything and move to the boonies in the first place? I see him on a horse and it all makes sense. It’s a magical, powerful feeling.

No doubt she’s got a point, though I think sometimes it’s just about the clothes . . .

I’ve got copies of both TEX APPEAL and ONE GOOD MAN up for grabs – two of each – so four people (with US mailing addresses) who comment here can be in the running! What do you guys love about cowboys?

ALW: This contest runs until midnight (EST) of January 4th and winners will be randomly drawn and posted here at The Cozy Page the following morning, January 5th. Please check back in to see if you won. Winners depend on the number of entrants and you must be 18 years or older to enter.

Thank you, Alison, for kicking off Cowboy Lovin' and the new year in a fun way...and for bringing the butt! I LOVE it! Those are some fantastic prizes! Readers, be sure to come back tomorrow for more fun with yet another Texas lady who knows her cowboys!