Housekeeping and Other Dirty Words - Dani Collins

I'm on deadline as I write this. Sort of.

I'm taking some time off this month and want to send my WIP to my editor before I go. I reached The End last night after a marathon writing sprint. It needs polishing before it's fit for submission, but it felt good to finish. The downside is that my house is a pig sty, mostly because I'm trying to get a book in early. Also because the unending wildfire smoke has left a fine layer of soot on every surface, especially since it cooled off enough to open some windows.

Naturally, with all of that hanging over me, I spent the day on making travel arrangements for December, catching up on emails, pre-writing blog posts and going for a walk in the sun...

It's been a day of mental housekeeping and, for me, it's as necessary as the real kind. When I'm pushing for those final eight or ten thousand words, it's very common for me to go on complete strike where being human is concerned. Cooking? Forget it. Shower? Meh.

Last night, as I was pounding out a terrible epilogue just so I could go to bed after writing those final, magical two words, my husband came into my office. He was on the phone to his mother. And he kept coming back. I near about lost it. "No. YOU text our daughter and get her postal code for your mother. What makes you think you can come in here? Read the room."

I have arrived back at the station of 'rational' now, but my post-sprint brain demands I catch a breath and look after everything I ignored while I was making that final push. Bills. Crumpled notes that read, "I never fit. Knew why she left. Broken."(Your guess is as good as mine.)

Tomorrow I'll do my edits and get the manuscript off before I leave.

And this blog post will come out while I'm away, hopefully enjoying some nice pub food with my sister and her husband or maybe taking a selfie with a Viking statue in Gimli, Manitoba. Yes, these are the glamorous rewards for the hard labor of finishing a book--early, no less.

The truth is, I have no use for housekeeping until I need it to distract me from other things. Like writing. So I will go attend to some actual, physical housekeeping, but before I go, I'll take care of one more task here...

Watch for 
His Mistress With Two Secrets 
to go to 99c Sep 18-23.

His Mistress With Two Secrets is Book Two in my Sauveterre Siblings quartet about two sets of identical twins. This one has, you guessed it, another set of twins on the way!

Pregnant with the billionaire’s babies! 

After the painfully public demise of her intense fling with renowned tycoon Henri Sauveterre, Cinnia Whitley discovers she’s pregnant…with twins!

Cinnia burns with the memory of his touch, but bearing a new generation of the Sauveterre dynasty will bind her to Henri forever—unless she keeps it a secret…

Henri is infuriated when he discovers Cinnia’s deception. His little sister’s abduction ended all his intentions of having a family—but any Sauveterre deserves his full protection. Henri must make Cinnia his wife, and he’ll show her just how pleasurable their reunion can be! Buy Links are here.

Award-winning and USA Today Bestselling author Dani Collins thrives on giving readers emotional, compelling, heart-soaring romance with some laughter and heat thrown in, just like real life.

Mostly she writes contemporary romance for Harlequin Presents and Tule’s Montana Born, but her backlist of nearly fifty titles includes self-published erotic romance, romantic comedy, and even an epic medieval fantasy.

When she’s not writing—just kidding, she’s always writing. She lives in Christina Lake, BC with her high school sweetheart husband who occasionally enters her attic office uninvited.

Feeling Lucky?

St. Patrick's Day is tomorrow, which I know very little about aside from you're supposed to wear green and if you find a four-leaf clover, you're lucky.

Frankly, after what has felt like a very long winter, I would feel insanely lucky if I saw any clover of any variety. Our lawn is still white, white, white.

But even in the height of summer when I was a kid with nothing but time on my hands, I never found a four-leaf clover.

My grandmother often did. She was an avid gardener and would leave them to dry in a dish on her kitchen table. It always seemed so magical to me that she could just be weeding away and--oh, there's one! Lucky.

My husband has found them. He would say it's because he's one-quarter Irish, but I know it's because he has infinite patience. (That's also why we're still married.)

Our daughter seems to have inherited the ability from both sides. She finds them quite easily. It's very annoying for someone like me, who is, apparently, four-leaf-clover blind.

Have you ever found one? Comment below with your story. I'll check back in on March 24th and draw one lucky winner. The prize is a print copy of my March book, Pursued By The Desert Prince.

Draped in the Desert Prince’s diamonds…

To ensure his sister’s successful marriage, Kasim, Crown Prince of Zhamair, must stop Angelique Sauveterre’s alleged affair with his future brother-in-law. But when Angelique denies any involvement, Kasim can’t resist the chance to make the feisty beauty his!

Angelique is tempted by Kasim’s offer of a fling—always compared to her twin sister, she’s never allowed to just be herself. They couldn’t be from two more different worlds, yet Angelique blossoms under Kasim’s touch, and surrenders to the desert Prince. But can he give her more than passion and precious jewels?

Dani Collins is the USA Today Bestselling Author of thirty books for Harlequin Presents, Montana Born and herself. 

Join Dani's newsletter and receive a link to download Cruel Summer, a short ebook romance, as a welcome gift. 

Childhood Treasures!

by Anna Campbell

2014 is going to be a year of many changes for me, not least the fact that I'm putting the family home on the market and moving to something much smaller and much more central.

Please take note of those two words 'family home.' That means family junk reaching right back into childhood for my brother and I. So downsizing is a mammoth job.

So far I've tackled a lot of the easy stuff - books, papers, sheet music, CDs. Some of it in fact, has been really pleasurable to see again, especially the childhood books. This month on my website in My Favorite Things, I talk about some books from the 1930s that my mother won as academic prizes. Check them out!

Today, I'm talking about a real treasure that brought back so many memories. THE GIFT BOOK OF NURSERY RHYMES was my baby brother's book (his name is neatly inscribed inside in my father's lovely handwriting) but I placed dibs on it pretty much straight away. You can't see it in the picture above, but I wrote my name all over the cover - I was a possessive young wench!

The minute I opened this book I remembered my childhood fascination with the beautiful historical costumes in the illustrations. I really think this book may have in the end resulted in me writing historical romance!

The illustrations are the work of two English twin sisters, Janet and Anne Grahame Johnstone, who were active in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s until Anne was tragically killed in a fire. You can read about their amazing partnership here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janet_and_Anne_Grahame_Johnstone

So I thought today, I'd share some of these beautiful illustrations with you. I think the costumes are just exquisite!

So did you have any books illustrated by the Grahame Johnstone sisters? Perhaps even this one? What was your favorite childhood book?