Interview with sweet romance author Melissa J. Roche

Contemporary sweet romance author Melissa J. Roche is here today to chat about Skate Cute.

During her virtual book tour, Melissa will be giving away a $25 Amazon or Barnes and Noble (winner’s choice) gift card to a lucky randomly drawn winner. To be entered for a chance to win, use the form below. To increase your chances of winning, feel free to visit her other tour stops and enter there, too!

Bio:
Melissa is a writer and scientist and artistic skater, author of Skate Cute and the Sacreola Sweethearts Series. She enjoys skating and singing at the neighborhood rink in her small town in Colorado, where she lives with her husband, two boys, and a cozy lap cat. Only one of them is allowed to read her writing over her shoulder.

Please tell us about your current release.
Skate Cute is a contemporary “meet-cute” romance set in the small prairie town of Sacreola, KS. Astronomy grad student Kriss heads home with 98% of an astrophysics PhD, a load of memories she’d rather not think about, and a survival plan: skate and graduate. Her plan doesn’t include the attention of a familiar admirer from the nearby fire station, one with an impressive physique, a hidden singing talent, and a smile dazzling enough to sweep her off her skates. Before she knows it, she’s falling for him—hard.

Chase has settled into the rhythms of his small-town firefighter routine, but he remembers Kriss from high school: the starry-eyed skater girl on her way out the door of his life. Now she’s back, just as gorgeous as ever, spinning around the next-door rink without a care in the world. Or so he thinks until Kriss is targeted with mysterious acts of vandalism designed to derail her dreams. Can he help her find the courage to stand up under the attacks and trust herself to love again?

What inspired you to write this book?
This book has such a fun origin story!

The date is October 12, 2020. I’m spinning around my neighborhood rink in Colorado on my old, scuffed-up skates, enjoying the song in my ears and the sun on my face. I look up, only to be swallowed by the endless dome of the forever-blue sky. My knees weaken, and I’m just about to fall down to the concrete and stretch out underneath it all… But I stop myself, thinking that someone from the nearby fire department would probably see me lying on the ground and come check on me, and wouldn’t that be embarrassing.

Then it hits me. That would be the BEST meet-cute…

Excerpt from Skate Cute:
“Have you ever heard of dark matter?”

“Sounds like something from an old B-grade sci-fi movie.”

“Nope, it’s real. Sort of. Basically, we know there’s something out there, but we don’t know what it is.”

“That’s totally a movie trailer.”

She laughed, and Chase, emboldened, swept an arm enigmatically across the sky, pitching his voice low to make it as epic as possible. “‘We know there’s something out there…’”

“You’re ridiculous.” But the smooth and dark curve of her lips was still grinning at him.

“‘We don’t know what it is…’”

“Stop it and I’ll explain. Basically, there’s something inside galaxies that makes them hold together more than we’re expecting—don’t you dare.” She waved a warning finger in his face before he could comment further.

He sobered his silly grin and obediently held his silence.

“We know it’s there because the galaxies’ rotation curves… Well, the galaxies are spinning fast, but they don’t fly apart like we’d expect. Like, you know, if you spin the merry-go-round too fast all the kids would fly off.”

“I do that all the time.”

“Shush. Galaxies are just the same. They’re all spinning so fast they should be flying apart, but something inside them is holding them together. We’d expect it to be the gravity of the stars, but when we look at how many stars we can see, there’s not enough visible matter there to account for the difference. So we call whatever it is we can’t see ‘dark matter,’ invisible stuff that must have mass because it’s got gravity.”

“Ah.” The pieces were coming together. “So… the galaxies you study have this mysterious inner strength to them that goes deeper than their outward beauty?”

“Yeah, pretty much.”

He waited, holding his breath. “And something about curves,” he finished, just as understanding began to dawn on her face.

Her mouth hung open for a moment, so close. “You did not,” she protested hotly, pushing herself onto her own elbow on the blanket to face him down. Even closer now.

“Not what?”

“Just turn my dissertation into a pickup line.”

What exciting story are you working on next?
I’ve finished the first draft of Ever After, Etc, Book 2 in the Sacreola series!. It’s about Angie Hoffman, Chase’s mom, a character who literally flew off the pages of Skate Cute with more story to be told. Ever After, Etc picks up the timeline only a few months after the first book ends, with romance author Angie falling asleep at her favorite downtown bookstore during a late-night writing session, then waking up after hours to the sound of beautiful cello music. The musician is Ben, of course, the widowed shop owner who makes those amazing caramel lattes Angie can never resist. Pretty soon she can’t resist him either…

When did you first consider yourself a writer?
I first started writing because I had an idea about a story involving “Great” and “Wonderful,” both artists, painting works of art together. Wonderful looked over at his friend’s canvas and praised: “That’s great, Great!” Only to receive the immediate and obvious reciprocal praise: “That’s wonderful, Wonderful!”

I was five years old. Everybody loved it.

But I really can’t remember when I first became “a writer.” I’m older than five now, and every year of writing and reading is shaping me into something new, guided by so many words that want to come to life. In a way, I’ve always been a writer, and I’m a newborn writer every day.

I just hope to someday have another idea as good as Great and Wonderful.

Do you write full-time? If so, what’s your work day like? If not, what do you do other than write and how do you find time to write?
I wish I could write full time! But I do love my day job: I’m a planetary scientist with an astronomy PhD (like Kriss!), and I have studied asteroids for years, particularly the clusters of fragments left over from giant and ancient asteroid collisions. I am also a mother of two elementary school kids, so these summer days also find me crawling under the lilac bush in our front yard to scribble scenes in a novel we’re writing together, full of adventure on the high seas of young imagination.

What would you say is your interesting writing quirk?
I am still discovering myself, as a writer and a human, but I like to think that I see people. If you truly see people, as a storyteller or a reader, you can imagine all they might be, all they could be. Thus I lean more toward character arcs and development than worldbuilding and research. (I do enough detailed research in my science job; I need an escape in my writing!) I have always found that for me, raw and beautiful humanity is the ultimate draw in reading and storytelling.

But as the words land on the page, I find I can never resist a good turn of phrase or a touch of wit. I’m a big fan of dry humor and subtle innuendo. And I do very much love when my characters’ wit surprises me, or when they decide to throw a twist into a tired scene with a new idea or a side of them I haven’t seen before.

As a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?
Oh my. When I got past “I’m going to be a pirate,” I wanted to be an artist, then a novelist, then a Jedi. That last one hooked me for years, and I swore my life to the study of the stars in honor of Luke Skywalker, a passion that carried me all the way through astronomy grad school. Little did I know, I was actually drawn to the storytelling and imagination of Star Wars, and that journey of self-discovery has brought me back to novel writing today.

Anything additional you want to share with the readers?
The title of Skate Cute is a play on the phrase “meet cute,” a description of a romance where a charming first encounter turns into a relationship. My book’s meet-cute moment happens at the skating rink, when the firefighter paramedic sees the cute skater girl lying down on the rink’s concrete and rushes to her “rescue,” only to interrupt her in the middle of an emotional moment…

But beyond the title, there’s a lot more underneath the surface of the story. Kriss is an astronomy grad student, and I’ve peeled back a few of the layers to share the raw reality of her life. She struggles with “impostor syndrome,” always asking if she’s good enough to deserve a degree or worrying that everyone around her will figure out the “truth” that she’s not smart enough to do science. She has faced harassment at many points along her academic journey, a cruel reality for so many women in academic fields. I don’t want these stories to go untold.

And yet, all is not hopeless. Skate Cute offers a hero who, at first glance, fits the macho type. Chase could easily choose to be part of the problem, falling in line with all the warped masculinity that has haunted Kriss her whole life. But he decides instead to fight for her, valuing her and helping her heal. Chase is a tribute to the guys out there who use their strength for good, many of whom I interact with on a daily basis. Good heroes exist, and their stories need to be told too.

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