Avon KissCon
Katharine Ashe speaking to the writers of NEORWA (Northeast Ohio Romance Writers of America).
This week I had the great adventure of attending the fabulous event Avon KissCon in Cleveland, where eight amazing Avon authors spoke to the public in a panel and also took part in a smaller reception that many of my writer friends and I got to attend.
Avon publicist Pamela Jaffee with authors Katharine Ashe, Toni Blake, Linda Howard, Linda Jones, Susan Elizabeth Phillips, Jennifer Ryan, Jill Shelves, and Shelley Shepard Gray.
Historical romance author Katharine Ashe gave a talk beforehand to our local RWA chapter (NEORWA), where she shared her writing goals, helped us to think about why we write romance and what we wish to achieve from writing, and reminded us that you can’t be happy if you’re trying to achieve other people’s goals. In a very competitive industry, that rang very true! It was an awesome talk!
SEP with my friend and author Cate Grimm
Katharine Ashe, who graciously tolerated my “help,” lol.
The best part of the night for me, besides chatting with SEP and getting some amazing advice from Jill Shalvis, (whom I was probably staring at dumbstruck for the entire time) was being an “author assistant.” My job was to stand behind Katharine Ashe while she signed books and “help” her–by giving her her books, by moving people along who might not want to leave, taking fan pics, etc. Lol, she truly didn’t need my help but it was so awesome to ‘bodyguard’ and essentially be a fly on the wall while she chatted with fans and signed books.
My writer friends and I were in writer heaven. And very proud to be part of this wonderful, generous community.
We went for burgers
My 19 yr. old is a fan of a local drive-up place where they serve burgers right to your car via a tray they stick in your window. Every time my son comes home from college, he heads there with his friends (usually late at night) and returns telling me in stomach-rumbling detail about the billion-calorie meal he just consumed which was often topped off by a milkshake. (And the car he used usually smells like ketchup for a couple of days afterward.)
Recently, after a rough evening of volunteer work (lol), my friends and I found ourselves starving. So on impulse, we pulled into this place. We, who rarely eat burgers and even more rarely fries! (When did we stop eating french fries?!) So there we were, four middle-aged moms sitting in a car eating burgers and fries and talking and laughing like we were a carload of teenagers.
The funny thing was, we felt like we were doing something edgy. Out of character. And it felt so good!
We left asking ourselves, why don’t we do this more often? Yes, why don’t we? Work-life balance is always an issue. Everyone is always busy. It was just funny how stopping the merry-go-round enough to do something like eat a cheeseburger with your girlfriends could be so much damn fun.
Trick or Treat Giveaway and November Fun
I wanted to tell you about a fun Trick-or-Treat giveaway going on on my Facebook author page this weekend. I got early copies of my December book this week (yay!) and I’m giving one away along with a mug and some other swaggy things. Enter the giveaway here. (Giveaway goes until Monday, October 31st, at noon.)
Also coming up, I’m taking part in a fun November celebration over at The Romance Reviews. There are giveaways and prizes all month. I got to write my own multiple choice question (it’s easy, don’t worry). All that is going on here. 
Lastly, CAN’T STOP LOVING YOU is up for preorder for $3.99. Don’t miss this pricing, I’m not sure it won’t go up on release day. You can read more about it here, and the blurb is below. Happy Halloween everybody 🎃!
When it comes to her heart, Arabella D’Angelo has moved on—even though she still lives in Mirror Lake, Connecticut, a little tourist town with a long memory for mistakes. Ever the dutiful daughter of a cantankerous widower who holds grudges, Bella has spent the past twelve years raising her younger brother and making a name for herself as a successful psychologist. Now, when she isn’t counseling a lonely-hearts club for senior women, she’s humoring her matchmaking girlfriends. Bella resists the romancing of their blind dates, yet her friends hope she’ll fall for a local and scrap plans for a fresh start in Chicago.
Then, just before Bella’s thirtieth birthday, her first love, Roman Spikonos, returns to Mirror Lake. When he moves next door to her family’s garden-center business to run his grandparents’ orchard, it stirs up gossip—and a tempest of passions—just in time for pumpkin harvest. As Roman and Bella once again get caught up in a swirl of desire and heartache, not to mention her overprotective father’s fury, Mirror Lake will soon find out whether the Italian hometown beauty and her unforgettable Greek god can stand a second chance.
Take Your Daughter to Work Day (for a Romance Author)
My 24-year-old daughter unexpectedly joined me at the New Jersey Romance Writers Author-Reader Luncheon last weekend. She drove up to New Jersey from Philadelphia, where she attends grad school.
I must confess, at first I told her not to come. “I’m too busy,” I said. This was really a cover for–I’m not sure how I feel about you seeing me “in action” as an author. Oh, because I’m a new author, because I was afraid there would be no readers who’d ever heard of my books at my table, because I was far from our home in Ohio and I wasn’t sure if I’d even know the other authors at my table…the list of my fears went on and on.
But then I started to think. I have not had the chance to have my daughters or my son come to “work” with me for a long time. For the past few years, “work” consisted of Mom huddled over her computer in my office begging them not to bother me unless someone was hemorrhaging. “Work” was preceded by years of rejection. For years, I wasn’t sure what kind of example I was setting for them. After all, the only people I talked to all day long lived in my computer.
But now was an opportunity for my daughter to see me “at work.” It was an opportunity to introduce her to the wonderful, amazing romance community and give her a glimpse into what on earth my books are really all about.
My kids (all 19 and older) are sort of terrified of my books. “Do they have sex in them?” they ask me. “Yes,” I say with a straight face. “They do.” I try very hard to not qualify this by saying “not a lot” or “I write LOVE stories not SEX stories” or some other justification for writing romance. I’ve tried to tell them my books are about people overcoming their flaws, getting over past mistakes, finding love, and they’re about family and friendship and how family and friends mostly make things better but can inadvertently sometimes make things worse. But their love can get you through the tough times. Somehow my children distill all this down to “They Have Sex.”
But I digress. Last week, I courageously put all of my nerves aside. “Come to the luncheon,” I told my daughter. Because one day soon, I told myself, she’s going to be too busy to drive two hours to come see me. She’ll have a job and a husband and a family and…the opportunity will be lost.
And so she came. And it was so great! The amazing Nancy Herkness actually sat me at her table, and introduced me to her lovely readers who drove over two hours for the event and to fellow contemporary romance author Jenn Doyle. Jennifer Proffitt from the Heroes and Heartbreakers blog was at our table, too. All of us, coming from different backgrounds, had such a wonderful time talking about and sharing our love for books!
“Mom,” my lovely daughter said to me afterwards as I was leaving for the airport and she was heading home, “You work with a wonderful community of women. I’m so glad I got to come.”
I almost cried. Because she said work. Somehow, all those years of toiling did what they were supposed to do–add up to something meaningful in my daughter’s eyes. She got a glimpse into why I–we–write the stories that we write. At how supportive and awesome the romance community is. About how we are all bound together by our love of books and our belief in the power of transformative, optimistic stories.
I saw an interview recently on the Today Show–Matt Lauer interviewed Judge Judy Scheindlin. I can’t find the exact words of the interview on the internet, but she said our job as parents is to watch and find out what it is that makes our children happiest–then find a way to parlay that particular thing, what they’re good at, what they enjoy doing–into a job that will support them for their life’s work. I hope that my daughter saw that–that you can take what you love and make a career of it, because that is what I wish for her, too.
Kiss a Librarian
Most of us who love books have a story about how we first came to love them.
My mom was a huge reader, but we didn’t have a lot of money to buy books. But she was constantly hauling us off to the library. That was the only way I knew of to get books. The idea of a book store never even occurred to me until I was much older.
In fact, I came to love the smell of old books. The more bent, the more old fashioned, the more read, the more loved they seemed to be. I never longed for brand new books. To this day I prefer the smell and feel of the old, worn ones.
Books are your friends, my mother told me from a very young age, (like I’ve repeated the mantra to my daughters time and time again, your sister is your best friend, praying that it took!). When you’re sad, pick up a book, she would say. You’ll get lost in the world of the book and forget your own troubles for a while and when you stop reading, you’ll feel better.
She was right. So my mother began my love affair with libraries, but at our little library, there was a wonderful librarian whom I remember very fondly from my childhood. I remember her being…amazing.
She had this quiet way of knowing what you were doing and then suddenly coming over to you and saying, why don’t you try this book? Or, this book is better, it has better pictures. Or, I can order you another one in that series if you like it.
She never balked at all the endless questions we bombarded her with to get sources for school reports and projects. She was endlessly patient. She was the kind of person made you want to be curious–that rewarded our inquisitions with…answers. No assignment was impossible. And she taught me that maybe no one knows all the answers, but you can always look them up. And if our tiny library didn’t have what was needed, then by God, she’d find it somewhere else and ship it in for us.
Miss M. taught me that there was a big world beyond the confines of our tiny town, and to learn about it, all you had to do was pick up a book.
When I got into graduate school, I sent Miss M. a note thanking her for all she’d done. Looking back, I remember it was my mom’s idea. “She’s asking how you’re doing in college,” my mother would say. “Why don’t you drop her a little note.”
Today, I’m so glad I did. Even though at the time I wrote that note, I had really no idea what a rare, wonderful person Miss M. was. In all my years of taking my own children to the library, we have met some very special librarians too, like the one who searched every corner of the universe to keep my preschool son supplied with dragon picture books during his dragon fetish.
For every kind, non-cranky librarian who loves children and doesn’t constantly shush you or snap at you, who treats your children wonderfully, who isn’t a compulsive rule follower and who loves to learn…thank you. You made all the difference.
Don’t wait until National Library Workers’ Day in April. Go hug and kiss your librarian today!