Get ready for Bama Bride…

What if you grew up with an older sister who was obsessed with weddings?  Always sketching out gown designs on scraps of paper.  Constantly doodling elaborately decorated wedding cakes on napkins.  How would that shape your ideas about love and romance?  In my soon to be released Bama Bride, Neal Sinclair has had just such a childhood.  By the time she’s grown, she’s ready for her own Cinderella story.  All she needs is the right Prince Charming.

She sees him by chance when she fills in at the last minute for her sister, whose bakery – Bama Brides Bake Shoppe – is double booked with two weddings at the same time and  one too few available drivers.  Alas, introductions aren’t an option as he’s tied up taking wedding photos with the other groomsmen, and she has to hurry back to the bakery.

As fate would have it, they wind up at the same Tuscaloosa bar later on, and this time she takes charge of her own destiny by asking him to dance.  But their’s isn’t exactly the stuff of fairy tales, and she discovers that he lives in Boston, and only has one night in town before he returns home.

But the chemistry they share isn’t easily extinguished, and they both find that distance doesn’t have to be a deal breaker.  What begins as a more “old fashioned” romance, with long phone calls and frequent texts and emails, grows into something that begins to feel like it might actually stand the test of time if given the chance.

Circumstances contrive to keep them apart, but it might just take a force of nature to finally bring them together for good!

Bama Bride is set for an April 17 release, through Bookstrand Publishing.

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New book on the way…Bama Bride

What if you grew up with an older sister who was obsessed with weddings?  One who was always sketching out designs on scraps of paper, then made you stand perfectly still as she draped bed linens around you and straight pinned them until they resembled bridal gowns.  One who was constantly doodling elaborately decorated wedding cakes on napkins, then practiced in the family kitchen with Betty Crocker mixes and let you sample them.  How would that shape your ideas about love and romance?

In my soon to be released Bama Bride, Neal Sinclair has had just such a childhood.  By the time she’s grown, she’s ready for her own fairy tale, Cinderella story.  All she needs is the right Prince Charming.

I am pleased to announce that BookStrand Publishing has set the release date for my newest book for April 2013.  Only two more months to wait!  I am very excited about this sweet contemporary romance, and will be sharing more information in the coming weeks.

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Endings and New Beginnings

For my family, tonight is officially the last night of summer.

Tomorrow, my daughter starts her last year of lower school (I can’t believe next year she’ll have to wear a blazer and be a middle grader!!) and my son heads to Tuscaloosa for another year at Bama.  I am so sad that tonight we can’t continue our ritual of staying up late to watch movie marathons, or reading, or just listening to my son play his guitar and sing.  The nights of staying up till 2:00 a.m. are over for a while, and they will be missed.  Seems the past few months have been so busy that it was often only in the still hours of the night that the family managed to come together and bond.  And we had a blast doing it.  Never mind the fact I left the two younger ones in their beds each morning, where they would crash until noon while I reported to work dutifully by 7:30 each day (okay – I confess, I did drag in 10-15 minutes late sometimes!).

But this is also a time for excitement as they begin another year of school.  My daughter had a rough go of it last year.  But she was finally diagnosed with a vision problem when the school year was almost over and now she is doing much better with corrective lenses. I am excited to think how much easier this year should be for her now that she has glasses which will help her focus better on what is written on the page in front of her.  Instead of feeling “stupid” as she did last year (her word, not mine!), I hope she feels like the sky is the limit as she soaks up all that knowledge!

My son will start his second year of college and hopefully secure a spot in an internship program that he’s been eyeing.  But let’s be honest, he has to get past college football season first!  He is thrilled that he managed to procure tickets to all the home games.  Roll Tide Roll!

As for me, it’s time to evaluate how the year has progressed and decide where I want to be by the time New Year’s Eve rolls around.  The diet I started at the beginning of the year has gone no where (totally NOT the diet’s fault…the blame is all mine! LOL).  Maybe I’ll start a new one.  My pal told me about one called The Caveman Diet.  I am curious and need to google it.  Never heard of it before, but with a name like that, it’s gotta be intense, right?  I’m also still at the deadend job where I’ve been for more than a decade.  I seriously need to decide if I’m going to keep trying to weather the storm there or jump ship and go elsewhere.  (as my dad would say, either piss or get off the pot!)  As for the writing career, I am loving every minute of it, but have yet to pen my own work that becomes the next 50 Shades of Grey or The Marriage Bargain. So I’m still dreaming, and still writing.  But also still forced to work a full-time job in the Corporate world in order to pay the bills!   🙂

Sounds like the future is full of possibilities, and it will be fun to see where it takes us.  For those of you who may be heading off to college yourselves, good luck to you!  Make the most of the coming year.  For the rest of us who are watching our little ones load up the backpack, I hope they enjoy school and have fun learning.  For the rest of you, make the most of every day and always look to what lies ahead!  Aim high, but know when to set your sights on a new target too.

Here’s to the future!  And come next Memorial Day, you better believe me and my two precious kids will be sitting up till 2:00 a.m., watching movies.  Bring it on!

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Gratitude and Regret…

My family, on my father’s side, has always been extremely close.  Dad was one of only two children, and the bond between that family of four was incredibly tight.  Because of this, my siblings and I were able to make some of our most cherished childhood memories.  Even though my family moved around alot, from Florida to South Carolina, to Georgia and back to SC, then back to GA and then to Alabama, it was a given that we would always make time to reconnect at my grandparents’ house.  Every Christmas was spent around Granny’s tree, with all of us in attendance – aunt, uncle, cousins, grandmother (my granddad had already passed away before my birth), my immediate family, and even one or two great-aunts. 

Just as we always knew where we’d spend Christmas, every summer my sisters and I could count on spending at least a sizeable chunk of time on those beautiful, white-sandy Florida beaches.  We were allowed to spend a few weeks with Granny each year after school was dismissed, and at least part of it was without our own parents being there.  Mom and/or Dad would drive us there, stay a few days and then leave.  Then they’d come back to pick us up a few weeks later.  The list of things to look forward to was very long:  Granny’s homemade fried chicken and veggies right out of the garden;  the huge watermelon patch next to the house with such an abundant crop that we’d split the melon, eat the heart of it, and then pitch the rest; picking blackberries so Granny could make homemade blackberry jam;  getting paid to go to our aunt’s insurance office to file records for her, and then getting a donut mid-morning at the bakery just around the corner; going to bed at night and having Lallie scratch our backs until we fell asleep (but our great-aunt was very smart…she always asked us to scratch her back FIRST so she could ensure she got a turn!);  swimming out in the Gulf to, not the first sandbar, but all the way beyond it to the second one (that’s where the biggest shells were)!  The list is endless.  THere were only a few things I did NOT look forward to:  shelling butterbeans (and the inevitable sore thumbs the next day!);   those infernal military helicopters that would fly overhead and I was convinced if they saw me in the yard they’d kill me (it’s a long and wierd story, and thankfully I grew out of it…suffice it to say I was very young and it was during the latter years of the Vietnam war…I didn’t understand that it was all happening on the other side of the globe); Granny’s lack of central air conditioning (but she did have a lot of oscillating fans and two window units, although she didn’t like to turn those on); and….well, what do you know – I can only think of three things.

The point is, it was the stuff that makes a childhood magical. 

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