Tag Archives: Romance

Valentine’s Day in December? #MondayBlogs

Oh. My. God. This year is already on greased skids. We went to the grocery store the day after Christmas, and some proactive goobers had the Valentine’s Day merchandise on shelves. Seriously?

Happy New Year!

By the time this posts, I’ll be up five pounds and face down recovering from New Year’s wine. There’s so much pressure out there to make every second count, to share every moment with a special someone. Even worse? Society expects people to create this perfection on as little sleep and food as possible.

I happen to know a couple of people who can accomplish the feat of a sparkling life. The talent is natural to them. For all of us with tarnished lives, keep reading, and I’ll share some ideas for coping with the romantic pressure.

The crafter side of me understands the need to be on top of the next holiday. Nothing is more fun than knitting Christmas gifts on Boxing Day. I’m working on a gift for someone’s 2016 Christmas. I know, I know. As close to being done as I am, he’ll get his gift Christmas 2018 for sure.

The side who had spent a bunch of Valentine’s alone still feels that “No,” feeling when the aisles start filling with red hearts, roses, and sappy everything. It’s hitting all the lonely buttons when the whole world seems to be full of happy couples, and you’re a sad single. If you’re not glum and want a significant other for February 14th, I’ve written the solution already. Click here.

My solution for when you want to spend the holiday alone but not lonely? Don’t, because you don’t have to. Everyone has a single friend. Have a Valentine’s celebration with your best unattached pals. If I weren’t married, I’d call up my knit group friends first. They’re all fantastic people, Happy New Year and each one makes everything much more fun. Dinner, clubbing, going on a yarn store crawl, whatever you all enjoy will work.

What if, like one of my V Days (because ‘my’ and VD don’t go together, sorry), you’re in a new town with zero single friends? Be your own date. Do something fun and esoteric just for you. Every married person knows that nine times out of ten, you’re compromising with your spouse over where to go, what to eat, what you watch on tv or movies. Enjoy your singlehood by being as wild or mild as you’d like for the day.

Bottom line? Plan now to eat all of the chocolates and toss the yucky ones without guilt. Drink all the bottle of wine whether it’s sparkling juice or the hard stuff. Watch the sappy or action-packed movie you enjoy. Go to a fancy place for dinner and dress up for the occasion. Treat yourself like the great person you are.

Next week? What to do when you’re stuck with the anti-romantic spouse on Valentine’s Day and how it’s probably too late to ask for a refund on them.

Merry Christmas and happy #MondayBlogs!

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There’s going to be so much in this post! Grab something to drink and get comfy because this’ll be fun.

First off, happy holidays! No more Christmas music! Yay!

Whaddya mean you’re glad it’s over?

I know. I’m one of those people who dread the music every year. I do try to like it, but nope. I’ll let others enjoy the tunes. Even better than the lack of Jingle Bells sung a million different ways? Free trash pick up! That may be for only our city, but it’s wonderful and I love it. Trash men are magicians, no kidding.

My writing is my life, but my publishing is my business and I have goals for 2018. Readers will be happy to know I’m expanding a beloved series and adding more to a currently in progress series. If I stick to plan, I’ll have at least eight novels and three short stories drop in the next year. They’re all plotted and waiting for me to write them. Along with all the writing, I’ll be creating another spin off series and maybe launching it late in 2018. Everything depends on God not laughing as I plan.

Meanwhile, 2018 will find me upping the romance in my life and hopefully in your life, too. I’ll be researching and posting practical action items we all can take to help add love and romance to our day. I don’t intend for my posts being all for married people. I want to help singles find their best match possible or how to enjoy being on their own.

I hope you either join or continue on this vastly fun journey with me in 2018. Click subscribe or follow me on the various social media outlets I play on right now.

Make Time for Love

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It’s Christmas! No matter if it’s the most wonderful time of the year or a colossal bah humbug to you, I know everyone’s busy with gifts, parties, and end of the year activities. Laura Stapleton In all the craziness, my husband and I made time to reconnect and remind ourselves of what’s truly important.

Our Decembers tend to be like everyone else’s, rushed and focused on others instead of each other. So how do we cope? There are several ideas and here are just a few:

Go on a date night! Ideally, couples should already be doing this. Even if it’s wandering around looking at Christmas lights or going for a twilight stroll in the park, anytime can be a date night with the right attitude.
No time for even a dinner out? Shop together! My husband and I do all the time. It’s a great way to make sure we get milk AND butter. Two brains are better than one when it comes to remembering to pick up cat food. Plus, he buys snacks, and I buy produce, providing balance in our pantry and fridge.
You have to sleep sometime. Even if you’re too tired to tango, go to bed together for quality pillow talk. Set aside the devices for better sleep unless you’re like my guy and me. We go to my Twitter feed, getting angry or laughing together at what people post online. A mutual foot massage would be terrific, too. Bath and Body Works has some wonderful anti-biotic lotions available. I went on a shopping spree several years ago and still have some stocked up.

These are my favorite things to stay connected with my guy. How about you? What are ways you keep the bond going with your significant other during this time of the year?

My Husband Wears The Romantic Pants in This House.

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You’d think the resident romance writer would be the one remembering anniversaries, wouldn’t you?

Nope!

Every year since 1993, I forget the day my husband proposed to me. Every. Single. Year. So I wake up on December 10th to flowers and a mushy card about how he’s glad I said, “Yes!” He doesn’t wake up to anything but my snoring.

Maybe I need to get all of us “It’s what day???” people in a huddle and talk about ways to remember significant events. I asked my husband just now how he remembers and he said, “I just do. It was a big step in my life.” He adds he’d be traumatized if I’d said no. I can imagine since he had us fly to Magic Mountain ski resort to ask me. Best proposal ever and he’s such a romantic.

For the rest of us in the memory challenged department, I have some hints and helps.

The obvious: Put it on your calendar. Not the pretty one on your fridge, but the one where you grab all your social media birthdays. Set it up to reoccur every year and voila! You’re set.
See #1. Kidding! Mostly. I have Cortana as my assistant, thanks to Microsoft. No matter what your assistant’s name is, you can set up a reminder for the occasional dates. I’d use this feature for anniversary dinner reservations, but not for the day itself.
Make it special. Plan ahead, plan for every year to have the same fun tradition and you won’t forget the day again. I need to pick an extraordinary thing to do for my husband on our proposal anniversary beyond the usual, “Oh crap! It’s 12/10!”

Now that I have an idea of what to do next year, how about you? Do you remember special days in a way I’ve not listed? Comment below and tell us how it worked or works for you because I could use the help. ❤

Hey baby, in the mood for a quickie #MondayBlog ?

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This is the US’s Thanksgiving holiday week and National Novel Writing Month. How are those two related? One is a time for family, and the other is time for a panicked meltdown.

Okay, maybe they’re a lot more related than I thought. If you’re single and staring at the green Jell-O salad with carrot strips, wondering if your mom is right and you should settle down with someone, anyone, I have your solution.

Before you ask, no. This fix, though as powerful as, does NOT involve duct tape. Leave it at home this time. Instead, I’m giving you something to guarantee you have a significant other by Valentines Day if that’s what you want.

What do you do for this matchmaking miracle?

Write a list of what you want in a partner. Be specific. Be greedy. List every attribute that’s important to you. Does your person need to like dogs, or cats, or both? Write it down. Do they have brown eyes, blue eyes, or one of each? They’ll be a little tougher to find, sure, but list it. The list is more powerful when handwritten, but typing is fine, too.

I know you’re tempted to blow this off as all mythical hoo-ha stuff and I totally understand. Write the list and magic happens? Whatever. The science and psychology behind writing down the attributes you want in a forever or even temporary partner is real. What happens is when you come up with what you need, this action gives your brain a pattern to match.

Don’t believe me? What about when you start researching a new car? You want a red Honda and what happens? They’re everywhere now and more so than ever. Actually, no they’re not. You notice more of them now because that pattern is in your head. There’s a quick way to break that because now that’s all you see out there, and it’s not by saying, “I want to stop seeing red Hondas everywhere, dammit!” Just think of green Land Rovers or yellow Ford Mustangs. There! Fixed!

In seriousness, this list idea works for more things than silencing the, “Who are you dating now, dear?” crowd. Writing a list for anything you desire helps lock in what you want and tells your brain to start looking around for what you’ve listed. It’s pretty awesome and powerful as well.

Comment below if you’ve used this technique and it’s worked. Follow this blog if you want more romantic #MondayBlog posts in the future.

Romance after 50? Is it possible? Here is what I know for sure. #MondayBlogs

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Once upon a time, I was a teenager who read copious amounts of romance novels. Ah, love. Full of longing, conflict, and the inevitable happy ending. Every new relationship was a rosebud waiting to bloom.

Um, no.

Even with the optimistic point of view, seeing my parents manage their real-life marriage kept me grounded. A truly successful commitment took work and compromise and I knew nothing was perfect. In fact, my father often said if two people never argued, someone was giving in. I vowed to never knuckle under to some knuckle head.

Fast forward to my fifties and all of the lessons I learned about love? I can see why older men go for younger women. Someone in her twenties is far more malleable than a woman in her fifties or even forties. My personal example?

While married to my first husband, I was twenty-one when he said he wanted a vasectomy because he didn’t want children. If I wanted to have a baby, he continued, I’d have to have one with someone else. His proclamation to my until-death-do-us-part mindset was as if a doctor said I was sterile. I was heartbroken.

If my husband said such a thing now? He wouldn’t, because he’s a far better human being than my ex ever will be, but if he did? My older and wiser self would say, “Challenge accepted and I have candidates picked out.”

There are several more examples of a boyfriend giving me orders while I scrambled to be a better person for him. Ah, youth. So how does a woman who’s outgrown the wide eyed optimism about relationships make her own life more romantic? My answer was to marry a romantic man, but I know that can’t work for everyone.

Going forward in this new #MondayBlogs series of mine, I’m digging deep and exploring how to bring out the love and romance in life for everyone. A life of love, fulfilling relationships, and happiness is possible for people willing to reach for more.

New and Improved Very Best Man

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My entire Very Manly series has been undergoing a huge makeover in the past six months. The whole process turned out to be a lot more work than I’d planned but is also a lot more rewarding. There’s so much to write about the amazing editor who worked with me, my wonderful publicist, and my “Oh no, not again,” digital content manager/husband. Let’s just say I’ve learned setting deadlines for others can be a necessary thing.

How new and improved can this book be? So much so that I’ve added 10,000 words to the original story. Not by appending or inserting new chapters but by adding more drama and more importantly, more feeling. The love scenes are a lot spicier, too.

Now, on to the good stuff. The VERY Best Man releases tomorrow and is available for preorder now.

Jane Lawson is getting married, so of course her sister Susan will be her maid-of-honor. But when sis skips out on planning the wedding, Jane finds a surprising stand-in… the best man!

Dr. David Wells is more than willing to taste wedding cakes, sample reception menus, and even help the bride in and out of wedding dresses, if it means spending time with her. Soon enough, she’ll be his best friend Alan’s wife… and thus off limits forever.

But when the groom says ‘I don’t’, and runs off with the maid-of-honor, his best man is left to pick up the pieces of the bride’s heart. David is more than willing, and as Jane turns to him for support, their friendship blossoms into something much more.

Until Jane’s old fears get in the way, and David realizes that to keep her, he must fight not only her hostile family, but ghosts from her past.

Not Going There On The Oregon Trail for #MondayBlogs

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I’m currently elbows deep in the third and final novel of my Oregon Trail series. A lot of writers feel sad when a series ends, but not me. There’s three more series hanging out in my idea folder at the moment and I’m wanting to start all of them right this minute. What are they? A three book set on the American West, a three to six book set on historical romances from around the world, and a six book minimum murder mystery series. I really can’t wait, all of them are going to be fun.

But, let’s get back to the salacious.

Like television most times, none of my books go into the bathroom details of live along the Trail. And you know, I don’t even want to think about it. They didn’t pack toilet paper and finding water was a treat. There’s nothing romantic about chafing due to unclean.

Food. My books has a little of the bland diet, but really? They only had what they could find, carry, or trade for along the way. No refrigeration or even an ice chest. I don’t know about you, but I LOVE my fridge. Ours died a few years ago and it wasn’t pretty. Of course this happened in summer, winter would have been too convenient in the cold department.

Speaking of camping…what if every time you wanted a hot meal you had to build a fire from scratch. Even better? In a place like this:

Just waiting for that buffalo to poop. Then it’s a wait until the poop dries. It might be a while. Hope you’re not starved. Speaking of buffalo, he’s looking mighty tasty….

Water that’s free of bugs, dirt, and amoebas. Cholera and typhoid free too, please. Add dysentery to the mix and it was an ugly death. Specifically death by diarrhea. I left that out, because, romance and all. Nothing kills the mood faster than, well, lots of poop.

Sleeping on the ground is in my books along with the getting the bedding out and putting it away every day. In the beginning, my husband asked about a romance (sex) in the wagon. I said no, too squeaky. Then he said, “Not on the ground!” as if aghast at the idea. I laughed at him, not knowing I’d married such a 5 star hotel kind of guy. But yeah, on the ground, against a tree, behind that bush, and hopefully quiet because who wants to get caught with their pants down or their skirt up?

It’s been somewhat nice for my characters that they’re in a very arid region. Wind and dust are huge problems, but rain isn’t. I’ve put in a skim-the-surface description of the cold at night. Which was fun because my southern editor called me on it. Water doesn’t freeze in August, right? Up in the high desert, it does! Maybe not solid, but it does get that cold. Especially in the 1850’s at the end of the Little Ice Age.

I’m positive there are other gritty details I’m leaving out that were also not included in my series. What do you find that writers tend to leave out of historical romances that would crack you up if they included? Comment and tell me!

#MondayBlogs for the Readers

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I’ve had a lot of feedback from readers in the past week and thankfully, it’s all been great. It’s super hard for me to take compliments and I find praise both wanted and difficult. Whenever someone is gushy over my work, I have to take a deep breath and say thank you. Then nothing else. No deflecting or saying I’m not worthy because doing such will dilute the compliment and who wants that?

That’s my thoughts on the past week. Back to you, the reader. In that ‘Fine’ voice you get from your mother when she’s been worn down by your pestering, I say, “Fine.” There’s been enough ‘eh’ reviews about The Very Best Man’s ending that I’ve decided to add another chapter. This last bit of the book is inspired by Kung Fu Fighting.

I think most of the readers who didn’t like the current ending are those born after 1985. They’re too young to remember the non-endings of movies made in the early and mid seventies like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Did they die? Or did they survive and live out their lives in Bolivia? We can only guess because that movie’s end didn’t tell us, just hinted.

I’m currently mired in the thing that is National Novel Written in a Month. The word count is good and I’m using the month to write The Very Worst Man.

In progress!

It’s wonderful so far. I’m having the best time ever writing it. The dialogue is a blast. Plus, there’s already a secondary character trying to take over and I’m having to back off from letting her do so. Can I just drop her and go on? Of course not! She’s my heroine for The Very Poor Man.

Most of my readers will probably be wondering whose blog they’re reading. Like, am I not the author of that whole Oregon Trail series? Yes! I am and Uncivilized is in progress. When I hit the word count goal on The Very Worst Man, I go back to the 1850’s and hang out there. I thought when starting the contemporary Worst Man that intense research could take a break. Nope! Thanks to writing Hayden and Alexandra’s love story, I know a lot more about Wyoming law, prisons, and prosecuting attorneys than I had planned. Something else that’s been a surprise? How much of the villain’s crime I need to know. So much for my idea of writing a few sex scenes and calling it good. The best thing is how all my research makes it a better book for you, the reader.

Freebies and Prequels!

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I’m still loving this cover. There’s four paintings around here, one for each book so far. Considering I have something to paint on the Santa Fe trail, the Pony Express, and the Orphan Train subject… I’m going to need more canvas.

Unavoidable is one of those projects I found irresistible. I always knew the story of how Samuel Granville convinced his brother Nicholas to come back home. This is a little snippet of a day in the life that begins a huge change in Nick’s life. I love how the brothers interact and their sniping has a strong undercurrent of love. The romance is at the very end, but is a doorway to another, longer book.

Where can you find this particular story? Just pick your favorite and it’s there!

Amazon US, Nook, iBook, Kobo, Smashwords

Next Week: The latest information in Self Publishing as gleaned from a plethora of bloggers. I have a lot of research to share but still need to write it all.