What's on your "Mom" list?

Last week, I'm sure many of you had a list of reasons to wish your mother the happiest of Mother's Days and to thank her for all she has done. 

So did I.  

Here are a few of the things I'm most grateful for.  Thanks to my mother, I became:

  - a book lover

  - a lifelong reader

  - a writer

One of my earliest happy memories is of the day my mom took me to get my first library card.  And I do mean took me to get that card, because she couldn't get it for me.  According to the rules of our tiny local branch library, I needed to be able to print my own name on the application. 

Even at five years old, I knew just how much getting my very own library card would mean to me.  I practiced my printing every day, because I so wanted that small, yellow, rectangular piece of cardboard with my name on it.

And I aced the test, first time around!

Getting that library card eventually led me to become a student volunteer in the elementary school library.  Much later, it led me to selling a book—well, actually, two books—to Harlequin American Romance.  And not long after they were published, I found both of them on the shelves of my local library.  Can't you just imagine what a thrill that was!

I wish my mom had still been with us to know I'd gotten "the call."

A big thanks, Mom, for everything...

And a big thanks to you, Readers, for stopping by the blog.

Want to share something special your mother has done for you?

All my best to you,

Barbara

~~~~~~

Barbara White Daille

http://www.barbarawhitedaille.com

http://www.facebook.com/barbarawhitedaille
https://twitter.com/BarbaraWDaille

Stop and Smell the... Snow?

Today, I'm starting a new project while I wait to hear if my latest proposal will be bought.  My problem is I'm going to write a Christmas story, and  it's been 100 plus degrees this summer.  Although today we're "only" getting up to 97.  :)  

Getting into the mood to write about the frigid cold, wet snowflakes, and Christmas romance when I can barely muster the energy to open my laptop?  Not so easy.

I was glad to read Ann Roth's post for tips on cooling down.  Perhaps if I do some of these things, getting into the holiday mood will be easier.

Maybe I should read some Christmas/winter books. My office is in the basement, which can be downright chilly, so I might have an advantage there. Obviously, readers in the Southern Hemisphere (for instance, Down Under) have the opposite problem.  It's summer for Christmas there, and our books depict a winter Christmas. 

Which got me to wondering about readers' habits. 

Does the season in the book matter to you?  Does it throw you off to read books "out of season?"  Do you ever pick up a Christmas book in the summer for the purpose of transporting yourself to a cooler time? 

Or have you accidentally started a winter book in the summer and had to put it down because you couldn't relate right now?

Thanks for the answers. I'm curious about offering a "Christmas in July" promo before this book is released (I self-pubbed a Christmas book last year that I could offer).  But if no one's interested, I won't do it.

Have a great holiday...er, week.  Stay cool out there.
Megan  Kelly

www.megankellybooks.com

HONORABLE MEN

I love it when my blog date falls on Father's Day because it gives me an opportunity to honor my dad as well as yours.

Happy Father's Day to all the important men in your life!

Today, I'd like to talk about two men in my life. One's real. The other's fictional, but so real to me I feel as though he's stepped off the page and stolen my heart.

First, my dad.

Along with the wonderful traits of being a good husband and father and family provider, he had a few quirks. One of them was being the eternal fixer-upper.

From a couple of pieces of plywood and a few two-by-fours, he could make a set of bookshelves that doubled as a room divider. From a snarl of old twine, he could crochet a sack to keep his extra cash safe when he went off on a road trip on his motorcycle. He could transform a pile of chicken bones and a handful of herbs into the best soup you've ever tasted.

But my dad could never take a set of directions or a recipe and follow along step-by-step. Oh, no—he had to do things his way.

So does the hero of my August Harlequin American, HONORABLE RANCHER.

Ben Sawyer's way is to offer a hand in friendship, to be there when folks need him, to live up to everyone's expectations. To be the boy next door to the woman he's always loved from afar. The widow of his best friend.

Until...

Until he realizes he can't live his life following along step-by-step.

Until, like my dad, he decides to throw away the directions and do things his way.

This decision changes his life and that of the woman he loves...and just about everyone else's in the small town of Flagman's Folly!

Hmm...

I think it has suddenly hit me why I love and respect and look up to Ben Sawyer.

And why I dedicated HONORABLE RANCHER to my dad.

~~~

On this special day, I hope you'll take a moment to honor the special men in your life—and to leave a comment or share a story about one of them here.

 All my best to you,


Barbara


~~~~~~


Barbara White Daille
http://www.barbarawhitedaille.com
http://www.facebook.com/barbarawhitedaille
https://twitter.com/BarbaraWDaille

New and improved...or is it?

We recently went to see a little theatre production of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None. For those of you not familiar with the story, here’s a brief description:

Ten people are invited to an isolated mansion on a private island. On prominent display in the mansion are copies of a poem about the deaths of ten little soldiers, as well as a grouping of ten small ceramic figurines representing...you guessed it. The soldiers. Not long after the guests arrive, they’re cut off from the mainland—and then someone begins murdering them one by one. The circumstances of the murders match the deaths in the poem, and as each victim is claimed, one of the statues goes missing.


The actors were great, the set appropriate to the time period, the mystery as intriguing as ever. They’d even found a clever method of eliminating the statues at the time of each murder. But...


The ending of the play didn’t match the ending of the book.


As a romance writer, I have to say, the different ending to the play satisfied me. But as a long-time mystery reader and a huge Agatha Christie fan, I’ll tell you truthfully, I was crushed. It didn’t help at all for me to learn that the new ending for the play had been written by Agatha herself.

FYI, all this didn’t come as a surprise to me; I’d read the book and seen both the play and movie versions many times before. But, still...

I was crushed. LOL

How do you feel about it when one of your favorite books is turned into a script for the stage or the big or little screen? Are you okay with the new version? Or do you wish they’d stayed true to the original?


All my best to you,

Barbara

~~~~~~

Barbara White Daille
http://www.barbarawhitedaille.com

Books and Babies

Before you read my post below, feel free to let your gaze linger on the man to the right.

This is Sam. Hot, isn’t he? ;)

I won’t go into details, but trust me, he has just experienced a life-changing event and is still reeling from it. You couldn’t tell by looking at him, though, could you? Anyway, on to my regularly schedule blog post...

~~~~~

I’m due in two weeks!

No, I don’t have a deadline two weeks from now. As if that’s what you were thinking! ;)

And, no, I’m not expecting a baby.

Or am I?

All right, I may not be the first person in the universe to compare publishing a book to having a baby. But the truth of the matter is, A RANCHER’S PRIDE, my fourth Harlequin American Romance, will be hitting bookstores shelves soon (and is already available online), and it’s not much of a stretch to say I feel as though I’m welcoming a child into the world.

After all...

~~~Warning! Pun Alert~~~

...I conceived the idea for this story, carried it with me for months, labored over the manuscript, and am eagerly awaiting its delivery. And I know, once it makes its first appearance in the world, I’m going to feel extremely happy and proud.

Baby or not, it seems like—and is to me—a very special event.

I’m sure many authors know the feeling and many mothers do, too.

Speaking of mothers... My next post here at the blog will be past the date to wish you all a Happy Mother’s Day, so let me do that in advance.

Hope you have a wonderful day!

To get us ready for the upcoming holiday, I’d love to hear about your best, most touching, or funniest Mother’s Day memory ever—whether you play the starring role or the honor belongs to another mother you know.

Please share!

All my best to you,

Barbara

~~~~~~

Barbara White Daille
http://www.barbarawhitedaille.com/

NOVEMBER WINNER!

CONGRATULATIONS MJFredrick! You’re the November winner. To receive your free autographed books please contact Rebecca Winters and Laura Bradford through their Web sites.

To enter the contest simply leave a blog comment and your name will go into the drawing. Simple and painless. And FREE BOOKS.

So check back often and be sure to leave a comment. Good luck!

AUGUST WINER!!

CONGRATULATIONS JenniferM! You’re the August winner. To receive your free autographed books please contact Lisa Ruff and Cathy McDavid through their Web sites.

To enter the contest simply leave a blog comment and your name will go into the drawing. Simple and painless. And FREE BOOKS.

So check back often and be sure to leave a comment. Good luck!

The Thrill of Discovery and Survival

I love the feeling of discovering a new author, a new series, a new TV show or new band. It's a little like falling in love -- the initial excitement, the all-consuming need to be with them all the time.

I'd say most, if not all, of us here have been excited about reading since we could make out words. There is nothing quite like discovering a new author, book or series that keeps us up reading way past when we should be calling it a night and getting some sleep. I've felt that way about the Harry Potter books, the Twilight books, Diana Gabaldon's Outlander books, Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games series, J.R. Ward's Black Dagger Brotherhood. Now I can add Susan Beth Pfeffer's The Last Survivors series. I hadn't heard of this young adult series until I recently saw the third book, This World We Live In, at the bookstore on the recent releases shelf. The premise is that a giant asteroid hits the moon and knocks it closer to Earth, causing catastrophic climate change and lots of death. The first story, Life As We Knew It, is set in rural Pennsylvania and follows how a teenage girl's family copes with the aftermath of the collision. The second, The Dead and Gone, takes place during the same period, but it illustrates how a teenage boy and his siblings survive in New York City. I'm almost finished with the second book, so I'll be starting This World We Live In, in which the two families somehow cross paths.

I don't know why, but I've always been fascinated by survival stories -- Robinson Crusoe, Julie of the Wolves, The Swiss Family Robinson, The Hunger Games, Defiance (the WWII movie with Daniel Craig), The Day After Tomorrow. I'm interested in how people will survive if they're stripped down to their very base nature -- the need for food and water. Watching the news after big events like hurricanes and earthquakes gives us a glimpse that it doesn't take long for man to get back to that basic instinct for survival. All the niceties of civilized society go out the window when you're hungry and thirsty. But in spite of that, it's inspiring to see the triumph of the human spirit -- those stories of people surviving in earthquake rubble for more than a week, against all odds. The ones who are mauled by a bear or cougar and manage to drag themselves miles to a road. Man will do a lot to survive.

Do you like survival stories. If so, what are some of your favorites?

Happy Launch Day to Me!

Or—The strange and wonderful feeling of being a debut novelist.

It’s been quite a year (and a bit) since I got The Call in person at the RWA conference in San Francisco. Although I was overjoyed that a twenty year undertaking had finally been realized, in some ways it didn’t feel quite “real”.
It started to get real around the time that my debut novel, “Colorado Christmas” was listed on Amazon. Up until then, I couldn’t help thinking it could all fall in a heap. Not that I didn’t have confidence in Harlequin or my wonderful editor, Paula Eykelhof, or even the belief in the evidence of my advance check – it was just that somehow, until that concrete proof that my book was actually in production and people could order it—it was still all a little surreal. Like I might wake up and find it was all a dream.
Maybe it was the 20 long years it took to get The Call that had me feeling jittery?
Well now I’m feeling jittery in a different way because today is the official launch day for my book!
I’m jittery about whether people will enjoy it and want to read more of the O’Malley Men and subsequent books of mine. A Top Pick review from Romantic Times had my head swollen bigger than a watermelon, but how am I going to feel when I get my first negative review?

So far I’ve had some lovely fan letters from readers. And even my husband liked it: “Apart from spoiling it with all that mushy stuff”. Any wonder I write romance? (grin)
Still, he did love Louella (the very naughty pig) and asked if she’d be returning in any other stories. Well… no… she wasn’t but then I ran it by my editor and she thought Louella deserved an encore performance. So Louella is back in book #2 of The O’Malley Men series, “The Sheriff and the Baby”.
It’s interesting hearing from readers what they liked about the book, each one so far has remarked on something different which surprized me. Some enjoyed the light-hearted moments, others the romance, or the quirky characters and yet others remarked on impact of the… well, I can’t tell you about that because it would be giving away the ending! So you’re just going to have to read the book and tell me your favourite part of “Colorado Christmas”.
I’ll choose my favourite comment and give away a copy to the winner in my December 10 blog. Since you might already have read “Colorado Christmas”, I’ll autograph the winning copy to whomever you wish to give it as a Christmas present. A perfect Colorado Christmas gift!
Till next month - happy reading everyone!
CC

Outside of a Dog

A writer friend sent me this Groucho Marx quote and it made me smile. I hope it makes you smile, too.

“Outside a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read.”

This is Blue, a heart-wrenchingly adorable Bearded Collie who was adopted by the good people at Sheepie Hollow. You can read Blue’s story here.

Read a book. Hug a dog. Have a wonderful summer.

Until next time,
Lee
The Writer Side of Life

Literacy

I know. Literacy isn’t a very exciting blog topic. But it's an important one. Next week I'm speaking at the Janesville, Wisconsin Literacy Council monthly meeting. The council sponsors a community program designed to train volunteers to tutor adults and children, who lack proficiency in reading, writing, and speaking English.

I was asked to discuss how my publisher--Harlequin--promotes literacy. The first thing that came to mind was the http://www.eharlequin/ 10,000 book challenge. If you haven't heard of this pop over to http://www.eharlequin.com/ and check it out.

For every book read, Harlequin donates a book to the National Center for Family Literacy, whose mission is to promote family literacy. "When parents struggle with literacy and life skills, their children have fewer chances for success. Family literacy reverses that cycle by teaching the families of today in order to impact the generations of tomorrow."

I grew up two blocks from the library in Janesville. My family didn’t have money for summer vacations, so every year in June I'd lined up with other kids just like me--stuck in town--and register for the library's summer reading program. Books were my vacation. I traveled to exotic places--jungles, outer space, even back in time to the Civil War.

If not for a love of reading that my local library nurtured, I doubt I would have become a writer. We all know how important reading is to succeeding in school or landing a good job. But reading a book is so much more than an education--it's an escape, an adventure, a journey of self-discovery. Reading nurtures the imagination and frees the spirit.

As an author who depends on readers for her income--I just want to say "THANK YOU" to all the people in our communities who give their time to help others learn to read. The world's a better place because of you!

Marin

A Cowboy's Promise *Men Made in America* April 2009

Samantha's Cowboy August 2009

A Cowboy Christmas Dec 2009

http://www.marinthomas.com/

Simple Pleasures

I spotted these pink tulips in the grocery store the other day and almost walked right by them. They were gorgeous, but I've been trying to watch our budget and $10 for flowers seemed like a big splurge.

But they were so beautiful and on impulse, I bought them. I brought them home and put them in a vase, then remembered this pink ribbon I'd saved from a candy box and tied that around the vase.

I think they're beautiful and I can't tell you how much pleasure they've given me. Every time I pass through the living room and see these tulips, I smile. I count it $10 well spent.

I'm not always good about indulging myself with little pleasures, but I'm getting better. For instance, last time my favorite dark chocolate bars were on sale, I bought a bunch and stashed them in my closet. They are my own secret pleasure -- a little bit of luscious chocolate all for me.

And books -- who could forget books? A paperback book is one of the best cheap pleasures around, even in these expensive times.

What secret pleasures do you indulge in?

Anticipation

Does it seem the longer you wait for something, the more acutely you feel those last hours and minutes until it happens? Like baseball season starting (finally!) or Christmas morning as a kid, waiting for my parents to open my bedroom door, signalling Santa had come. (If we opened our doors, Santa would know we weren't sleeping and wouldn't stop at our house. My parents were wicked/clever!)
Why am I recalling Christmas when I'm eagerly awaiting a long-delayed Spring? Because I'm also eagerly awaiting the release of my first book, which should hit bookstore shelves tomorrow. The pit in my stomach (which, trust me, I'm trying to fill with any snack I can find!) just grows. I've had good reviews, but it's still like waiting on Christmas morning. I'm pretty sure there will be presents under the tree, but until that door opens, there's always the "thrill" of anticipation, watching for the turn of the doorknob, wondering what I'll find when I venture (run!) down the hall.
Does this happen to you? The minutes creep and you swear the clock ticks slower, even after you replace the batteries? Is it just me, being a crazy first-timer, or is this universal?
I'll be guest blogging at Lee McKenzie's blog on Thursday the 10th, so please stop by and say hi. http://thewritersideoflife.blogspot.com/
Especially if you have a method or any tricks to speed time!
Sincerely,
Megan

Favorite heroines

I've seen lots of blog posts lately about favorite fictional heroes, and that makes sense because we often read romance or watch movies and/or TV programs because of the heroes. I have to say, I like a heroine who can hold her own too. I like heroines, and even write some of them, who can kick butt and take names and still be feminine at the end of the day. All you have to do is scan the bookstore shelves, the TV Guide or the DVD selection at Best Buy to find that this type of heroine is popular. I think it's because we, as women, want to feel that we can hold our own with men, we can be in control without giving up those aspects that make us uniquely women (oh, say, like enjoying buying cute shoes).

Let's take a look at some popular gals who fall into this category:

1. Buffy the Vampire Slayer -- I admire show creator Joss Whedon a great deal for the strong heroines he writes and his dedication to showing the strength a woman can possess. Buffy was a cute little blond teenager when she came into her powers, but looks were deceiving. She could kill vampires and various demons with an ease the grown men in her world couldn't even dream of. And the vast majority of the time, she was stylin' when she did it. Even if she was a badass, she still dealt with things like dating problems, losing her first love, and sibling rivalry. Willow Rosenberg, her good friend, was a very powerful witch who could even kick Buffy's behind if she fully tapped into her power.

2. Wonder Woman -- She was the first superheroine I remember, both on the Superfriends cartoon on Saturday mornings and in the Lynda Carter primetime show. Being a fan of Wonder Woman led to being a fan of other superheroines like Elektra, Firestar, Jean Grey, Rogue, Storm, Sara Pezzini/Witchblade, and Xena.

3. Max Guevara -- from the show Dark Angel (one of Jessica Alba's easier roles); she was a genetically enhanced super-soldier.

4. Bionic Woman -- Lindsey Wagner's version of Jaime Sommers was a childhood favorite, and I've been enjoying the new version played by Michelle Ryan.

5. The heroines of urban fantasy -- Urban fantasy is a very popular genre right now, and many of the protagonists are women. Authors such as Patricia Briggs, Rachel Caine, Laurell K. Hamilton, Tanya Huff (her Blood books have made it to the small screen in the form of Lifetime's Blood Ties), Rachel Vincent and others bring strong heroines to the reading public.

6. If I think about just the TV shows I watch now, there are very strong women in Bionic Woman, Blood Ties, Heroes, Supernatural, Smallville, and Stargate Atlantis.

Even though many of these heroines either have superpowers or are just trained to be able to handle themselves in tough situations, that isn't the end all and be all of strong heroines. An everyday woman like those who appear in our Harlequin American novels can be strong too. They can face adversity, weather it, and come out the other side even stronger. I'm in the midst of writing my second American (actually that's why I'm late blogging today -- oops), and the heroine has had to be strong because her life was totally turned upside down by something someone close to her did. She's having to start over even though she doesn't know if it'll work out. That takes a different kind of strength, but strength nonetheless.

Give me a heroine who is strong any day, whether that strength is superpower in nature or just the strength of the Average Jane. Just don't give me a wimpy, whiney heroine. That will make me close a book or click off the TV faster than anything.

Okay, now it's your turn. Who are some of your favorite fictional heroines from books, TV or movies?