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When I returned from my vacation in upstate NY, I promptly submitted LOVE ON THE RUN and then got to work on completing the last quarter of my FBI undercover New Orleans-set book. It took three weeks of writing every day. I was doing what I was born to do and it only took me "X" number of years to figure it out. I set HOLDING HER OWN aside and let it rest for a couple of weeks. After that time passed I went through and revised and polished it and submitted it by the end of the year.

TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE would release on March 20, 2007. In the meantime, my editor offered me a contract for LOVE ON THE RUN as well. It would release on November 2nd, 2007 with the print version releasing September 30, 2009. Yes! LOVEON THE RUN IS available now at all the usual places. Borders Books and all the online stores.

Three books in the pipeline! Whoopee!

I flip-flopped around for a couple of days. What to write next? I had a futuristic perking, but when it came time to buckle down, I just couldn’t seem to work up the enthusiasm to push beyond those first few chapters. There was also a vampire story perking—same problem. Then the idea hit me: why not write a sequel to LOVE ON THE RUN? At the time Samhain was publishing mainstream books in addition to romance. Perfect!

I started ONE TOO MANY, a mainstream mystery/suspense. After all what could me more fun that writing a mystery series with David and Miranda? Yes, it was a lot of fun. I wrote ONE TOO MANY in two and a half months—95k words! Honestly the book almost wrote itself. I went through the same routine: let it rest and then take it out and revise, revise.

In the meantime, I received a contract for HOLDING HER OWN, followed shortly by a contract for ONE TOO MANY. However, due to some kind of mix up, my signed contract for HOLDING HER OWN was never received, so ONE TOO MANY (May 27, 2008) was added to the lineup before HOLDING HER OWN (July 15, 2008). These two won’t be available in print until April and June 2009.

I already knew what I wanted to write next. Series were doing very well among the Samhain readers. I had an idea for a series, set in Nashville, so I started the first one. I was disappointed to discover that the writing was much more difficult than what I’d experienced with my previous book, ONE TOO MANY. Also my mother had moved in with me and we were adjusting to a new situation. I would hide in my office just to have some time to myself, but the words weren’t rushing full-force from my brain to my keyboard. I also had less time to write because there were frequent doctor appointments, lab work and lots of trips to WalMart for prescriptions.

By this time, I’d done the edits for TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE, and it had released and done well enough to hit the Top Ten Best Seller list at Samhain...for about fifteen minutes.

Edits—now there’s a topic to warm any author’s heart. I look at them as a fantastic opportunity to make my book even better than I already think it is. For all four of my books, I had a wonderful editor, Linda Ingmanson. She was approachable and definitely knew her stuff when it came to digging deeper into my characters’ emotions. More about edits tomorrow.

Still I kept plugging away on book one of my series and completed it in late summer. After I submitted it, I started on book two of the Nashville series. Mom had decided she was going to move back to Kentucky and so we were in preparation mode for that and I was in full promo mode for the release of LOVE ON THE RUN when I received the rejection for book one in my Nashville-set series.

Oh, no!