August is when?!!

Somehow the summer has flown by and now I'm facing down one of the busiest Augusts I've ever faced! June was taken up by college graduations and weddings - well, my youngest son did both of those! Usually, late June and most of July is taken up with RWA preparations but I can't even blame that this year since it's the first RWA I've missed since 1998.

But somehow July whipped on by me anyway. And those who know me are probably saying there must be a writing deadline coming soon and you would be correct. I also accepted an invitation to be part of a Celtic ghost anthology, coming out in time for Samhain/Halloween. So that meant writing my brains out even before I need to write my brains out on my next book. . . due August 31!

Yeah, that's how I roll....LOL!

I have actually had the chance to read a few books and would love to share them with you - in case you need a couple more romances to read this summer...


First - I grabbed up Annie West's newest one - The Flaw in Raffaele's Revenge - and read it in ONE day! It was hot and a great romance - try it if you haven't! (I think she may be talking about it here tomorrow so stop back!)



Then,  a friend suggested an author I'd never read - Emma Wildes - and I confess, I'm in love! Her historical romances were out a few years ago and I tried to savor the first one - An Indecent Proposition - it didn't work and I stayed up late two nights finishing it. A steamy, old-school historical romance with a wonderful secondary romance, too! I've since bought up print copies of her other books so I've got lots to read!


And finally, I found another new-to-me author - Kerrigan Byrne. She's getting rave reviews on her Victorian Rebels series so I read the first one - The Highwayman -  and ordered the next 3! Again, old-school historical romance - this time sexy and so emotional. Her next one comes out next week and I wish I could read it as soon as it gets here... but. . .

Now, I'm heading straight downhill into my next deadline. AND -- going to Scotland  on August 31! Yes, finally returning there after 7 years and I'm so excited. I have research places to visit for my upcoming books and Blas Festival concerts to attend.  Lots of photos will be posted all over my social media places.

So that's my summer -- how's yours going? Read any good books you can recommend to me or done anything fun? Please share in a comment and I'll be choosing two commentors to receive a copy of the "Once Upon A Haunted Castle" coming September 27!

Terri is thrilled to share that she'll be writing 6!!! more medieval Highlander romances for Harlequin over the next few years! Her next one - Kidnapped by the Highland Rogue - will be available in print on September 20 and in digital on October 1! Stop by her website for lots of info!

Nothing Like a Little Added Deadline Pressure...by Jenny Gardiner

I don't know what I was thinking when I emailed my editor and told her I'd love to do one additional book with her this year.

I adore this editor and we work really well together, but as is the case with indie editors, you need to plan well in advance to line them up. I'd already done two books with her this year, and had long ago scheduled another terrific editor for three more books. But when she offered to squeeze in one more with me, well, I couldn't help but give it some thought. Of course this happened just as I was brainstorming some new series ideas, and then I thought, well, if I start another series I'd better get three books ready to launch at once, and well, that would mean it would be just perfect to have that extra edit lined up!

At the time I'd just finished a book and had what I madly viewed as idle time in front of me for a few weeks. Sure, I had a crazy May lined up: my youngest graduating from UVA undergrad, my oldest graduating from UVA with 2 Masters degrees, and my middle coming home from halfway around the world in Australia for a very infrequent visit to coincide with graduations. Throw in some 18 people staying at my house for graduation (I think I was in deep denial about that).

Oh and did I mention our house is on the market and there's all sorts of extra work involved with keeping a house clean and organized for any sudden showings? No worries...All under control...

But 5 weeks ago, this was hardly on the horizon! I had time on my hands, baby! I was going to crank out that additional book in no time flat and be in bed by midnight! Not only that, I'm going to confide in you my little secret: I was also planning to resurrect my all-but-dead daily mindfulness-based stress reduction meditation practice and also get my fat ass off the couch (where it's been parked writing books) and resume my anaerobic interval spin workout so I could try to get back in shape. And maybe get back to regular yoga classes. Let me tell you, people, I was going to be Wonder Woman (minus the metal breast plates)!

Um, er, well...Graduation is this weekend. I'm too stressed without free time to do any stress reduction (I had been doing it! I swear it!). Finding a daily hour for the bike workout? Are you kidding me? I have been running around like a crazy person preparing for the onslaught of houseguests and graduation and graduation breakfasts for 20 people both mornings before the ceremonies and then the combined graduation party mid-day Saturday for some 50 people as well as lunch mid-day Sunday for another 30 and, yeah, very little writing has happened.

Plus, I am releasing a book in less than a week and kind of need to figure out my marketing strategy for that, eh?

So just now, instead of writing? I gave my dog a bath. In my defense, with all of these houseguests showing up, we don't want the poor thing to be shunned because she smelled like, well, dirty dog.

Ah, well...the good news is I was the girl who pulled all-nighters studying for exams in college and self-conditioned to crank out papers one after the other shortly before their due dates. It must be the former journalist in me, but I definitely thrive under time constraints, so...the good news, is I just sort of lit a fire under my butt, which isn't such a bad thing after all. Now if I could figure out how to burn the fat in that butt with the fire now scorching it, I'd be good to go!

Hope you can check out my upcoming release: It's Getting Hot in Heir, book 7 in my It's Reigning Men series! 

It's available for pre-order, coming out May 24! You can get it here: iBooks, Kindle, Kobo, GooglePlay

And I tell you I really am writing book 8! Just not as fast as I'd planned to. Here's the cover--what do you think? It's available for pre-order here:   iBooks   

Oh and for a limited time I've got an awesome free book for you if you sign up for my newsletter: Something in the Heir, book 1 of the It's Reigning Men series! Sign up here  and you'll be first to hear about deals and giveaways.

    

           

Subscribe to my newsletter     find me on Facebook

find me on Twitter                    my website

Susan Sands:  Graduation,  Home Improvement, and Basement Floods, Oh, My!!

Store window at Details Boutique
where my book release was held!

Y'all. It's May.  I know in my life that means end-of-school craziness, in general. Tennis playoffs and state tournament, end-of-season banquets, kids studying for finals, and celebratory everything. I just pushed a new book out of the proverbial nest last month with all the hoopla and promotional insanity that goes with. 

This year my second child is graduating from high school. Just go ahead and times everything by three. The things to remember, and pay for--the stress. How was I supposed to know I had to actually read the body of the email to find out of about pre-ordering those blasted celebratory blue yard signs everybody else's graduate had show up in their grass one morning last week? I spent the next day, with another "headline-only-reading" loser mom, tracking down who was in charge of procuring the $25 foam core and wire "CHS Graduate lives here!" rectangle. But I had one, not more than twelve hours later.

Some of you are nodding and some of you are shaking your heads. I have the cap and gown. He has

pants and a white dress shirt. We'll be there May 20th. He'll get through AP Stat. I'm only sending out a few invitations because I know how remiss the thank you notes will be once summer and college prep get cranked up. Family will forgive. Or we won't care as much if they talk about us behind our backs. We try, we really do. 

Oh, and I'm getting my house ready to sell. With much pressure washing and handyman-ning. The hot water heaters went out and the sewer pump failed the same week--and my basement flooded AGAIN, and we noticed at 3 a.m. We had to rip up all the carpet and have tile installed. I didn't even take a moment to whine about this on Facebook. There were so many other posts, I thought, "I can't take a single, 'Oh, Susan, so sad to hear about your basement!'" I would have burst into tears at that point.

I will survive May, and I'll complain again in August when it's time to start college--I mean, for my son to start college. But I'll be super-busy between now and then.

If you get a chance, check out my new release, Love, Alabama! 

Connect with me!

http://susansands.com

https://twitter.com/SusanNoelSands

https://www.facebook.com/susannsandsauthor/
https://www.pinterest.com/susansands/

Susan

A Letter to All Millenials by Jenny Gardiner

authors note: 

With it being graduation time, I thought I'd post a recent column I ran as my regular column in my city's newspaper. It elicited a bit of response so I figured I'd re-post it here for your contemplation...

Dear Millenials:

            On behalf of my generation, I'd like to apologize. I know there are those who consider you pampered and fragile and expectant of handouts, desperate for the wub-wub-wub of your helicopter parents to swoop in and save you from failing.

            But I see it differently. I see us as having failed you on far too many levels. And for that I'm most sorry.

            We arrogant Baby Boomers thought we knew it all: how to succeed in business (and life) without really trying. Yet then imposed on our children a set of rigorous expectations, so that they became near-paralyzed in their Herculean efforts to achieve them. To make matters worse, the terms and conditions got changed while they were busy killing themselves to succeed by our skewed definition.

            Yeah, my tribe imposed structure out the wazoo: no more playing outside, for fear of kidnappings. Only organized sports, the earlier and more intense the better. Learn your Beethoven while in utero, by God, all to prepare you for a lifetime of preparing you. For what? That's what a lot of these kids are starting to wonder now that they're young adults. For what?

            They had to overachieve in order to achieve. The one or two AP courses of my era morphed into quintuple that and more. Childhood became a grind, working to the breaking point, whether in academics, sports or work, preparing you for work. Because these kids practically had to know their career path by Kindergarten.

            And in the middle of it all, the bottom dropped out. Even though they did what they were told: work your fingers to the bone to get into the premier college. Don't you dare ever do anything wrong, because it will destroy your permanent record, permanently. Caught with a beer at the age of 18? You'd better hang it up and plan for a lifetime of misery, because You. Will. Pay. Forever.

            And now? With an economy my peers decimated, these young adults carry debilitating college debt, for which they cannot find relief: Congress made sure they could never, ever discharge that debt. And despite that unspoken deal we made with them to abandon their childhoods in order to achieve their adult goals, they can't find jobs, thanks to an economy that still barely chugs along.

            Instead we have bright, productive, ambitious kids inventorying sweaters at The Gap if they're lucky, or floundering for years in unpaid internships, because that's all that's out there. No insurance, can't afford rent, so they live at home, feeling like losers. Type-A-perfect-score-on-the-SAT-attended-UVA-or-Haverford-or-Dennison-invented-the-cure-to-cancer-but-can't-get-hired-losers.

            I want to tell them, "Go. Have fun. Stop worrying about everything." Yet they were brainwashed into a culture of fear. How could you not be afraid, 24/7, when we have CNN broadcasting nothing but "updates" (even when there are none) on a missing and presumed malevolently-downed jet? When Fox News' business model is "scare-the-hell-out-of-you-24/7"? Weaned on war and attacks and uncertainty, it's impossible not to "catch" the fear if you're subjected to it long enough.

            My advice for those soon to enter college is not to amass reams of debt for an undergraduate degree at an overpriced university; stay local and save. Look for scholarships when possible, but ironically, in reality, most super-achievers actually don't qualify for merit money anyhow, so why bother? Better yet? Take a gap year and breathe.

            Try to have fun while you're in college, while trying on lots of hats to see what truly does strike your fancy. And when you graduate? Travel. See the world. Do it on the cheap while cheap doesn't bother you so much: assuming eventually you'll actually earn some money, you'll get soft and grow accustomed to sleeping on beds, and want to eat at nice restaurants and drink good wine. But now? Forego the comforts to burnish the memories of your journey, which will far more imprint on you and your future than would that unpaid internship-to-nowhere that lies in wait regardless of when you get back.

            I wish I had answers for these young adults who doubled down on our rules and were robbed of the intended results. I wish stress and anxiety in young people wasn't at record levels. I wish we weren't drugging these kids up with pharmaceuticals to counter the irrational demands we've placed on them.

            And mostly, I wish we hadn't denied them their childhoods. But I'm encouraged that now that they're adults, these bright people are realizing they can rewrite the rules to suit their needs, and they can find joy in less, and not feel bound by this rewardless, perpetual, nose-to-the-grindstone movement we launched on them. They're eschewing the materialism of my generation in favor of simplicity. Their "failure" is ultimately their greatest success.

            I was inspired recently by a young couple that travel the country, playing music at farmers markets, sleeping in a retrofitted van. Or the young man who took a break from straight-A grades in a premier college to decompress and work on a sailboat instead. And the UVA grad who got tired of a futile job search and instead took her barista act on the road, California-bound.

            Sadly, our cost-cutting, budget-busting, bottom-line society has rendered the finer things in life irrelevant. Music education, arts education, a liberal arts degree? All now viewed by "deciders" as obsolete. Value is only placed on science and technology, so those without such skills are considered professionally irrelevant.

            In the meantime, my generation wanted what we wanted and needed it now. And that means sorry, kids, we've fished out your oceans, drilled out your Earth, squandered your resources, and now, lucky you, we're leaving you to hold the bag and figure out if you can fix the mess we've handed you. Thank goodness we made sure you were the smartest generation ever. You're gonna need it.

            In the meantime, in this graduation season, I wish you all nothing but peace and happiness. And hope the journey to find that is a joyful one. 

  Sleeping with Ward Cleaver

Slim to None

Anywhere But Here

Winging It: A Memoir of Caring for a Vengeful Parrot Who's Determined to Kill Me

Accidentally on Purpose (written as Erin Delany)

Compromising Positions (written as Erin Delany)

I'm Not the Biggest Bitch in this Relationship (I'm a contributor)

And these shorts:
Idol Worship: A Lost Week with the Weirdos and Wannabes at American Idol Auditions

The Gall of It All: And None of the Three F's Rhymes with Duck

Naked Man On Main Street

find me on Facebook: fan page
 find me on twitter here
 find me on my website

Beginnings and Endings :: Anne McAllister

Perhaps it’s because I’m in the middle (deep, deep in the middle) of my current book, that I’m thinking about endings and beginnings (anything but the present moment is far more appealing!)

Perhaps – and even more likely – it’s because my oldest grandson is getting his AA degree this week (I was a child grandmother),  two more grandsons are ‘graduating’ from pre-school and a granddaughter is graduating from 8th grade.

They are celebrating endings.  They’re looking back and remembering good things (even a rather recently turned five year old can say, “Remember when …” ) – and they’re looking forward to new beginnings.

They will no doubt leave part of themselves behind as they end this phase of their lives.  But a part of who they were before their graduations will be with them always. What they did then will make a difference to who they become. 

The oldest one, of course, knows this better than the others. He’s a baseball player as well as a good student. He’s worked hard both academically and in his chosen sport.  I could say that his sport chose him, because I think that that’s more likely the case.  He’s always been a baseball player, as was his father before him, and his brothers coming along behind.

But given the predilection and the talent, he’s added plenty of hard work, so that now he has been given a very good scholarship for his final two years to a school he wouldn’t have dared think about without having made that effort. One beginning leads to another.

The past leads to the future, informs the future.  It isn’t just a matter of unrelated stepping stones. These beginnings and endings build on each other.

I had an email from one of my daughters-in-law the other night talking about the same experience in her life – how she wanted to get back to the important personal reasons she had begun her medical career, how touching base with her beginning was, she hoped, going to help her make the right decisions about future work. 

It seems that way in writing, too (and not only because I’m in the middle).  I’ve always written – and it wasn’t the writing that mattered. Like my grandson and baseball, it found me rather than the other way around. But while the interest was there, like him, I had to hone my skills.  And then I had to find out, like my daughter-in-law, what I was doing the writing for.

Going back to my own beginnings has helped me do it.  What has always mattered to me is the notion of relationship.  What connects people, what they find in each other that makes them each more fully who they really are – that’s always been a major fascination for me.  When I get side-tracked by the middle or feel depleted at the end, it only takes thinking about the beginning to give me that desire to start all over. 

Maybe it’s the leitmotif that gets me from one beginning to the next.  It’s been around for a long time. It is a thread that runs through all my beginnings and endings.  It runs through my books, too.

What about you? Do you see beginnings and endings that feed on each other in your life? Or do you think about the changes in a different way?  Please share them with us.

Watch for Last Year’s Bride, coming soon from Montana Born Brides at Tule Publishing!

 

 

 

 

1) Pre-school graduation: By Gideon Tsang (Flickr) [CC-BY-SA-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

CALGON! TAKE ME AWAY (or May is a Four-Letter Word) by Jenny Gardiner

Ah, the month of May…The flowers in bloom, the birds whistling a happy tune. Parents across America ready to throttle the next teacher, coach, or offspring activity-related person who dares to lump one more have-to in their lap.

The month of May…what my friend refers to as the Storm before the Calm. What I view as the annual rite of hazing inflicted upon every mom (and most dads, to a certain extent) every springtime as the school year draws to an imminent close.

The drill goes as follows: class play, class music program, soccer practice, soccer games, soccer try-outs, baseball, baseball and more baseball, lacrosse games, lacrosse playoffs, state cup championships, piano recitals, ballet recitals, field trips (why weren’t these scheduled for the dull month of January?!), pre-school graduation, kindergarten graduation, lower-school graduation, middle school graduation, college graduation, teacher appreciation luncheons, class parties. Class parties? I’m thinking class warfare at this point.

I get nightly calls: can you come in for the teacher appreciation luncheon? Can you drive for the field trip to Pakistan? Can you pledge your extra kidney to be auctioned off at the school fund drive?

Can you stop calling me before I have the national do-not-call list enforcer come after you for harassment?

Truthfully, I’m happy to be of help. To a certain extent. But when I start to wake in the middle of the night, fearful that I have sloughed off my duties to prepare Pad Thai for 300 for International Day, I get to worrying. And when I realize that I am clenching my teeth so hard that I think lockjaw has set in, I’m a little more concerned.

And when the call comes in for me to do just one more teeny little thing to help out so and so, and I—without thinking, without feeling, snap the first snarky come-back that pops into my head to the poor unsuspecting room-mother calling me in a desperate spot, I know two things. One, that it’s time for me to hang up my mommy cleats for a few hours and re-gain my grip on reality, and two, summer vacation must be just around the corner. At which time I might just be longing for the days when the kids were in school and the demands on a mother’s time were at their peak.

*a note from the author: I must tell you that Claire Doolittle, the lovable heroine in SLEEPING WITH WARD CLEAVER, penned this piece. Jenny Gardiner had absolutely NOTHING to do with it. Jenny is, without question, perfectly contented to have a life that is out of control and she never loses her temper with room moms and she has in fact already donated a couple of organs to the spring fund drive. She has had no weeping fits, no stress-related breakdowns, and hasn't even noticed that it's Parental Hazing Month.