Blog Tour: How To Get A (Love) Life

Today I'm thrilled to be taking part in Rosie Blake's How To Get A (Love) Life blog tour with a guest post. Take it away, Rosie!

Chick Lit is Good for Your Health by Rosie Blake

Chick lit makes your brain go soft! Chick lit is bad for your health! Chick lit is the scourge of the devil! And so on and so forth. Chick lit is constantly getting a bad rep. To anyone giving it a bad rep, I say: NONSENSE and TOSH. Let's just look at what a positive force for good it can be, shall we?

Chick lit or rom coms – or comic commercial fiction as I like to call it – is simply trying to make a generation of women LOL and ROFL all over the place.

The fact of the matter is, chick lit is pure escapist fun. As anyone who knows anything about mental health can tell you, putting life into perspective and appreciating the little things can go a long way to tackling depression. When you're snorting on the tube because your heroine has just done something suitably idiotic you're not mulling over the minutiae of your day or worrying about the big things. It's relaxing and, frankly, we don't do enough of it.

We all have similar concerns in life; relationships that wobble or end and jobs that we can't see the end of, for example.These books emphasise how normal it is for people to face these challenges. Chick lit at its silliest doesn't want people to mull over the boring stuff. It doesn't want people to get bogged down in emotional baggage. It wants to bring people out of themselves. It doesn't take itself seriously and it doesn't expect its reader to take it seriously either.

But what about those books that tackle tougher subjects, you cry? Like Jojo Moyes’ wonderful Me Before You? A lot of this comes down to how we market books by women and I fear that is a whole other article waiting in the wings. What I'm talking about are the simple, belly-laughing books that promise a few hours of unashamed delight as you romp through the heroine's world and share in her journey. Call it what you like – chick lit, rom com, commercial fiction, but as long as it makes you chuckle, I think it is the perfect prescription for any ill.

And I suppose that is what I have wanted to achieve with How to Get A (Love) Life. I wanted the reader to simply have pure, escapist FUN. I wanted them chuckling and rooting for the good guy and, at its very core, I wanted to make sure they enjoyed the laughs. I hope you do, too.

This has been Rosie Blake, over and out!

*climbs down from soapbox*

 

How To Get A (Love) Life is available from Amazon here