Time is just flying by! For those of you who might not know, the AAD (Authors After Dark) Convention was last weekend, and author Cat Grant attended. She decided to share some of her experiences and pictures from AAD here. 🙂

Hello, all! Thanks for joining me on my blog tour for Black Dog, the first book in my new Bannon’s Gym series. (Hot mixed martial arts fighters – rawwrrr!) I’m giving away a brand new Kindle Paperwhite loaded with my entire back list. Follow along at all my stops on this tour – and leave comments on each. Every comment counts as another chance to win! I’ll announce the winner on my blog on Friday, August 30th.

I just got back from a week in America’s “Hostess City,” the gorgeous Savannah, Georgia, where I was attending Authors After Dark. I haven’t fallen in love with a town like this since the first GayRomLit in New Orleans.

Luckily, my good pal/sister from another mister Gina X. Grant and I programmed in some sight seeing time. We took the trolley tour, the riverboat tour, and our favorite – a horse-drawn carriage tour of the historic/Victorian district. I finally got to see Mercer House up close!

(In case you’ve never seen Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, Mercer House was the former home of songwriter Johnny Mercer and the scene of an infamous 1981 murder. I told myself if I ever made it to Savannah, I was going to see Mercer House. Another one crossed off the bucket list! )

And, oh my gawd, the food! One night Gina and I braved a thunderstorm to visit Huey’s down on the river. We sampled each other’s shrimp Creole and grilled salmon with Parmesan-garlic grits – then, despite being full to bursting, ordered the chocolate-caramel tart for dessert. Hey, screw the diet – we were on vacation! We dropped by Ruth’s Chris Steak House and Joe’s Crab Shack too. (Yes, Virginia, there really is a Joe’s Crab Shack. And here I thought it was an urban legend!)

I was a bit skeptical about “Southern hospitality,” but Savannah changed my mind. Every local I met was cheerful and helpful. I’m a California girl born and bred, but when we say, “Have a nice day!” most of us don’t really mean it. In Savannah, they do.

Of course, I could’ve done without the humidity, which turned my straight-as-a-board hair into a frizzy tangle, but just about every place in Savannah is air conditioned. The only thing that could’ve made the trip better was if Lady Chablis was playing at Club One, but that’ll have to wait for next time – preferably in the spring or fall, when it’s cooler!

Black Dog is now available at Amazon, All Romance ebooks, Nook, Kobo, iTunes and Smashwords.

Here’s a blurb to whet your appetites:

Danny Bannon and Eddie Roscoe have been fighting in and out of the ring for more than fifteen years, held together by mutual attraction and small-town ties, yet kept apart by a shared tragedy that continues to haunt them. Their steady on-again off-again is shaken up by the arrival of Tom Delaney, a teenage runaway trying to escape his tense home situation and his punch-happy dad.
In no time, the scrawny homeless kid has shown himself to be a boxing prodigy, and building him up brings Danny and Eddie closer than they’ve been in ages. It seems that the three of them, plus Eddie’s mother, Gloria, are forming a new family unit, much tighter than anything Tom experienced in his difficult past.
But Tom’s politically influential father isn’t the only person he left behind. When his mother shows up at Eddie and Gloria’s diner with a shiner and a haunted look in her eyes, Tom is hopeful for her future. But when that hope is snuffed out, Tom is ready to turn his new fighting skills to a deadly purpose: get revenge on his abusive father or die trying.
It’s up to his surrogate big brothers, Danny and Eddie, to put their differences and their painful history aside to prevent another tragic ending.

Cat Grant lives by the sea in beautiful Monterey, California, with one persnickety feline and way too many books and DVDs. When she’s not writing, you can usually find her watching movies or TV (Supernatural and The Vampire Diaries are among her favorite shows), singing along to whatever’s on her iPod, or fantasizing about kinky sex with Michael Fassbender.
Here’s Cat’s various hideouts on the Internet: Website, Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads.  You can contact her directly at: cat@catgrant.com or  Subscribe to her newsletter.

So we don’t usually do this here at ALBTALBS (and communication wasn’t as fast and furious because Cat was at AAD!) but leave a comment for an entry in her overall tour giveaway. Hey – it’s a kindle paperwhite, so come on – ask her some questions!