Today is release day for my very first young adult, The International Kissing Club (co-writen under the name Ivy Adams).

With fifteen books under my belt, you’d think this would be old hat by now, but it’s still exciting every time I have a book hit the shelves. Today is doubling exciting, because it’s the first in so many ways. It’s my first young adult, my first single title, my first book with a publisher other than Harlequin, and–for my writing partner, Shellee Roberts–it’s her first book at all. She’s so super excited she’s bouncing off the wall.

All of these firsts have added up to one excited me. Plus, I just love this book! I really do. And I can say that without being all braggy, because I didn’t write  the entire book. The book is the story of four best friends. Since there were three of us writers, we each wrote the scenes for one of the girls. That leaves me completely open to love the chapters written by my writing partners, Tracy and Shellee.

So do you want to know all the things I love about this book? Here’s my list of my three favorite elements/moments from the book:

• The IKC Facebook Page — since the four friends are spending the semester apart, they decide to keep in touch via a Facebook page. The Facebook updates were so much fun to write and I think they turned out really fun and funny
• All the travel — three of the four girls travel for the semester, so we get to travel with them to Paris, Australia and China
• All the great guys — what would a YA romance be without … well, the romance? And, can I just say how much I love Lucas? Just wait, you’ll love him too.

At least, I hope you will. I hope you’ll pick up the book and give it a try, even if you’re not normally a YA fan. And as a sidenote, we’re doing a a great blog tour and giving away great prizes.

So when was the last time you were really excited about something?

Let’s face it. We all do it, right? Mentally re-hash all the gifts we got for Christmas or Hanukkah,  or whatever holiday we’ve just celebrated. I’m gonna be honest, this year, my stuffing in my stocking was a little sparse.

My sister always comes through and this year she did. Great gifts from Sis.

My mom is always a spotty gift giver. This year, from my parents I got a scarf that’s not in my colors and a bottle of Grandma’s Spot Remover. Um … okay.

Normally, my in-laws give great gifts, but my mother-in-law passed away this year and instead of gifts my father in law gave us daughters-in-law pieces of her jewelry. Beautiful, priceless heirlooms … but, really, I just wanted to sit and cry. I’d have to be pretty heartless to be excited about that.

My sister-in-law got me a nice toiletry bag. Not bad at all. Very nice.

Okay, you might be wondering about my husband and kids. There was a slight misunderstanding about when we were going to exchange gifts. I told the kids we could do a few family-only gifts the day before we left to visit family. The Geek  thought I meant the morning we left. So there he was, at four in the morning before we flew out and he wants me to open my presents. Only my husband could want to exchange gifts at four in the morning. He did eventually come through with the presents, but for the holiday itself, I had nothing under the tree from them.

I know I sound whiney … it’s just … this Christmas felt a little flat. It probably would have no matter what gifts I recieved. We’re adjusting to life without my mother-in-law. There’s naturally a layer of grief on top of the holiday joy.

But as I was packing up all our presents to head home, I realized something else about this Christmas. I didn’t give as many gifts as I usually do. It was a particularly busy December and a lot of family wanted gift cards, so that’s what I bought. Don’t get me wrong, gift cards are great to get, but they’re not fun to give. I felt no joy when people opened them. No delight in having chosen well and it diminished my pleasure in the holiday.

So here’s my first new year’s resolution: I’m going to buy more gifts and give fewer gift cards. I might still gift a few to supplement those who are hard to shop for, but everyone on my list is getting at least one real gift.

What about you? Did you get great gifts this year? If you don’t celebrate Christmas or Hanukkah , what about for your last birthday?

Hello avid quillers!

Remember I mentioned that young adult project I worked on under the name Ivy Adams? (Ivy Adams is Tracy Wolff, Shellee Roberts and I.) Well, yesterday Ivy launched her Around the World in 80 Kisses blog tour. I’m posting the info below in case any of you are fans of YA or have a young adult in your life who loves to read. Or just wants to enter for a chance to win the Kindle Fire.

So what do you think of blog tours? Do you love ‘em, hate ‘em, or couldn’t care less?

As a special treat, I’ll send a free Emily McKay book to everyone who posts here and on the Ivy Adams smooch stop today!

Also, be sure to check our super cute book trailer (which I could not figure out how to put directly into this blog. Sorry!).

Tonight I happened to be talking to someone The Geek works with about my job as a writer. “It must be great to be able to write like that. To have that gift,” he said. I stammered a bit and didn’t quite know what to say.

Partly, because I’m two weeks out on a deadline on a book unlike anything I’ve ever written. This is my favorite part of the writing process. It’s when the book starts to really take shape and feel like a book. But it’s also the time when I’m putting in extra long writing days and it feels like the book is just kicking my butt.  So at the moment I got the complement, it didn’t feel like I have a gift.

But the other reason the complement made me uncomfortable is that I generally don’t think of myself as having a gift. No, I’m not fishing for complements. I’m not being coy. I just don’t see it that way. I know a lot of truly gifted writers. People who write gorgeous poetic sentences and will make you want to weep. I’m not one those people. My friend Skylar White is like that. Omg, her writing is so beautifully lyrical, sometimes all I can do is shake my head. My friend Tracy Wolff/Tessa Adams/Tracy Deebs is like that too–oh, and she’s prolific too, if you can’t tell from the grocery list of pseudonyms. Sherry Thomas is another writer I know who’s like that. Just gorgeous prose! And she’s not even a native speaker of English.

All of these people can sentences so pretty they make you cry. Metaphors that make your heart sing. Me? Not so much. Me crafting a metaphor is a bit like those apes at the beginning of 2001: A Space Odyssey. It’s awkward and uncomfortable and everyone just wants it to end so we can get on with the story.

That’s what I mean when I say I’m not a gifted writer. I don’t do that pretty prose thing.

What I am, is a determined writer. I have wanted to tell stories since I was a kid. Telling stories is the thing I was meant to do. It’s woven into my brain and my blood like nothing else. My entire adult life has been about learning to tell stories well. Not so much because I wanted to be published (but, yeah, that too), but because I want to do justice to the stories  and characters in my head. I want them to be as vivid and real to other people as they are to me. It’s that determination that brings me to the keyboard everyday.

Sometimes, I wish like hell that I was a gifted writer, but I’m learning to make do with my determination. Determination probably will never earn me literary accolades, but it’s won me friends and fans. And I’m damn proud of that. My journey as a writer has taken some interesting twists and turns this year, partly because I’ve stretched and grown and tried new things. Partly because I’ve wrestled with issue of writerly gifts. There’s something to be said for making peace with your limitations. For embracing them even. I hope that doing so will make shore up the bedrock of my strengths.

Are there any gifts you wish you had?

Note to readers: I accidentally posted this on Thursday instead of Friday. If you missed it yesterday, then you can read it now. If you saw it yesterday during the few hours it was up, then scrolled down and make sure you caught Catherine’s post about the joys of catalogue shopping for the holidays! Now back to our regularly scheduled programing…

For the past year or so I’ve been quietly working on a couple of Young Adult projects. I love my Silhouette Desires with all my heart and feel so blessed that I get to write them, but every once in a while, I’d get an idea for a story that clearly wasn’t a Desire. An idea that just seemed too much fun to turn my back. The project I’m currently working on is a YA paranormal called The Farm. I’ll tell you more about it later. That one is still more than a year away from being released.

The other project I’ve been working on is The International Kissing Club, a romantic comedy YA, written under the name Ivy Adams. Here’s peek at the back cover blurb:

Four best friends plus one great idea divided by four different countries . . . equals too many kisses to count! 

Piper, Cassidy, Mei, and Izzy are the misfits of tiny Paris, Texas. Their whole lives, they’ve dreamed of escaping small-town life and seeing the world. So when Piper is the victim of an embarrassing prank that goes viral online, she gets the idea that the girls should escape via the school’s international exchange program, in search of fun, love, and Internet redemption. To add spice to their semesters away—and to stay connected to their best friends while apart—the girls start the International Kissing Club, a Facebook fan page where they can anonymously update one another on all the amazing guys they’re meeting. Lucky for them, amazing guys abound at every turn! But sometimes fun, flirty vacation flings turn into more serious romances, and sometimes you don’t return from abroad the same person you were. Will the girls’ romances—and their friendships—survive?

Ivy Adams, aka: Emily McKay, Shellee Roberts, and Tracy Wolff

It’s sort of an updated Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. I wrote it with two friends of mine, Shellee Roberts and Tracy Wolff. And, seriously, what could be more fun that writing a romcom with two great friends? We each wrote one character and then just divvied up fourth character. Mine girl is Izzy O’Reily, the one who gets stuck at home due to her parent’s poor financial planning. The book was so much fun to write, plus it was fascinating getting that front row seat to someone else’s creative process.

The book will hit the shelves January 3rd. We’re going to have as much fun promoting the book as we did writing it! We just launched our website  http://theinternationalkissingclub.com/. We have lots of fun things planned.  For now if you’re interested (or if you’ve a teen or tween girl in your life who might be), you can like  our Facebook page. Or you can click here for info on how to win an ARC of IKC through Goodreads. You (or your teen) can even join our Smooch Club for chances to win free swag and exclusive content.

For today, tell me about a time you worked with others on a big project. Did you have fun or was it miserable? I’ll pick one person to win a copy of my latest Desire, The Tycoon’s Temporary Baby.

I think I might have mentioned before how much I love Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files series. In fact, it’s one of my all time favorite series. It’s just the best genre fiction gets. Here’s the problem. I’m a slow reader. Picture glaciers. And molasses on glaciers. That’s how slow I am.

The series (Sooo good. Have I mentioned how good they are?) is thirteen books in out of a planned twenty something books. We’re on book twelve. I say because I’ve been reading them aloud to my husband. (That’s part of the reason I’m so slow.) As much as I love sharing the books with my family, I know that I’m probably missing things because reading aloud isn’t the deep reading experience that you get when you immerse yourself in a book for a deep chunk of time. You know what I mean, right? Yeah. You do.

So the other day, as I was reading aloud, I thought, “Sometime before I died I want to reread all these books again.” No, this isn’t as grim as it sounds. In fact I felt something light up inside of me. Yes, I am that much of a book dork. I don’t have a Bucket List. But a Book Bucket List? That’s something I can get behind. That’s something I can be really excited about. So here’s my Book Bucket List:

• The Dresden Files (sooo good. am I repeating myself yet?)
• The Amelia Peabody books by Elizabeth Peters
• The Troubleshooter series by Suzanne Brockmann
• The Harry Potter series by J. K. Rowling (yeah, as some of you know, I actually reread these just this year. But I still want to reread them again. Their just that good.)
• The Slightly Series by Mary Balough (I’ve already reread a couple of these, but I’d love to reread the series in order)

When you tell someone you’re a writer for the first time, one of several things happens. Every once in a while, I happen to be talking to someone who actually reads romance novels or YA and they’re super impressed. That’s like hitting the jackpot. More likely however, it’s someone who reads high fantasy (if it’s someone from the Geek’s work) or serious literary fiction (if it’s a playgroup mom). The third option is someone who doesn’t really read much at all. These conversations read about like this:

Them: What do you do?

Me: I write romance novels.

Them: Like Daniel Steele?

Me: Um, no. She writes women’s fiction. And gets paid way more money.

Them: Oh.

Me: I write those thin books you can buy at the grocery store and Walmart. Or in a bookstore.

Them: <surprised> Oh … You can buy them in bookstores?

Me: Yep.

Long pause ….

Them: There’s a book club in our neighborhood. You should join.

Me: Oh, do you go?

Them: No. But my sister’s best friend’s cousin goes and she says it’s great. If you want I can email you the information.

Me: Ah … no thanks?

Don’t get me wrong. I want to be polite. But in the years since I’ve started writing, I’ve been invited to join about a dozen book clubs. None of which I’ve been remotely interested in joining. In my defense, I’ve never been invited to join a romance book club. It’s always, always “important” literary fiction. I’m guessing a lot of characters die.

Today at the park, I realized why people do this. It’s not that they want my wise insight into the fiction. It’s because they don’t know what else to say. I’ve been there before. Last year at the kindergarten social I asked on of the dads what he did. When I found out he managed the entire website for Ford all I could think of to say was, “My dad drives a Ford.”  Today at the park, I realized for the first time that all those book club invitations are the equivalent of “My dad drives a Ford.”

And now I know … I can turn down the book club invite without guilt. They don’t really want me there. It’s just the only thing they can think of to say that’s remotely related to books.

Have you ever met someone who’s profession took you so completely by surprise that you didn’t know what to say?

No matter how upbeat your personality, everyone feels blue occasionally. It’s just part of life. Sooner or later, you have to learn how to deal with it. In fact, my personal theory about why adolescence is so horrible is that once you’ve lived through that, you can handle most of the other highs and lows in life.

Everyone has different coping skills. As much as I wish I could be one of those crazy women who loses herself on the treadmill, that will just never be me. (Wouldn’t that be great though? “Oh, I’ve been a bit down lately. Now, I’ve lost fifteen pounds and have been jogging ten miles a day. Now, I’m in the best shape of my life!”)

Yep, I get it. Exercise=endorphins=improved mood. Sounds great in theory, but I’ve always been more of a Ben&Jerry’s=increased serotonin=improved mood. If the Ben & Jerry’s is accompanied by either a Jane Austen flick or a really great romance novel, that’s even better. Brownies optional, but recommended.

In the past few years, I’ve discovered that sometimes hard work helps just as much as ice cream (shocking, I know!). Sometimes, all I need to snap me out of a funk is to get to work and accomplish something. Finishing a big project (or even just making big progress on it) can do wonders for my mood. (Brownies still optional. Reading a good book, optional too. Both are good rewards.)

Of course, sometimes, I pull out the advice from one of my favorite musicals, Camolot, and just whistle a little tune. (Anyone else remember “What do the Simple Folk do?” from the movie with Guenevere and Arthur dancing around? Sigh. I never understood why she wanted Lancelot.) Okay, I can’t whistle at all. But I do like to turn up the iPod and dance around the living room.

What do you like to do when you’re feeling down?

I’m bad about sending Thank You notes. I mean, really bad.

It’s not that I don’t intend to send them. I do. I just never get around to actually sending them. Or writing them, for that matter. And every time I intend to send a thank you, but then don’t I feel bad about. There are seventeen people I still owe thank you notes from my first baby shower. I was under deadline and she came early, (I sent a book in less than on week before she arrived.) So I actually still have the addressed envelopes and unwritten thank yous for seventeen people who sent me baby gifts. So, to my second cousin, once removed: Thank you for the charming baby blanket. The sweet yellow quilt. We still have it. It was one of our favorites. Thanks.

See, that wasn’t that hard.

But still, every time a thank-you worthy occassion rolls around, I dread the fact that I know I’m not going to send thank yous and knowing that I’m going to feel guilty about it. My mom always made me write them. And harrassed me for months if I didn’t. That’s probably why I hate doing it so. And the truth is, I love the idea of writing thank yous. It harkens back to a simpler time when we cared enough to express our gratitude. There is a romance and an elegance to hand-written thank you notes. Something we’ve lost in our modern world. It makes me sad. It makes me wish I was the kind of polite, sensitive, elegant person who sent beautifully words of gratitude.

Perhaps you’re beginning to see the problem.

It’s the week after my birthday, time once again for the bi-annual festival of not-sending-TY-note-guilt. I realized this week that perhaps the problem isn’t merely that I’m too busy to send thank you notes. Or that I’m ungratious. Or unappreciative. Perhaps the problem is that I’m perfectionist.

I vividly remember sitting at my baby shower six years ago, feeling this tremendous upswell of gratitude towards my friends and family. I was about to face this scary, exciting, challenging thing. And it gave me such courage knowing that so many people were there to support as I embarked on the next stage of my life (or at least couldn’t resist the urge to buy cute baby clothes). The fact that my second cousin, once removed would actually buy me a baby quilt, when I hadn’t seen her in years … well, it was overwhelming. No mere note could live up to the gratitude I felt at my baby shower six years ago.

And so the opportunity to thank everyone came and went. All too often, I can’t put into words the love I feel for the people in my life. The gratitude that they are there. It’s not about the tiny bar of scented soap that someone gave me, it’s about the years of friendship. Words are simply inadequte. As a writer, it pains me to say it, but there it is. Sometimes, words are not enough.

But as I’m writing this, it occurs to me that perhaps the bar of soap is also inadequate. If I think of it that way, maybe I’ll just write the darn note.

Where do you stand on Thank You notes? Do you send them or not?

I spent most of the week with my fourteen niece and nephew. As a result, I’m feeling quite old (and wondering how much older I’ll feel when my kids are fourteen).

Okay, don’t get me wrong. I’m nearing forty and I feel it. It’s not like I didn’t know I was old. I would never expect my nephew to catch a Breakfast Club reference or my niece to sing along to Ah Ha’s “Take on Me.” But surely there are other areas were we speak a common vernacular.

For example, I sort of pride myself for being relatively edgy with the gadgets. (Okay, maybe only a tiny bit edgy.) We have two ipads! Surely that counts for something. However, I also have an old third generation ipod. Which my niece couldn’t even figure out how to use. She kept running her finger down the screen in the confusion. “I think there’s something wrong with it.” Yes. The thing that’s wrong with it is that it has buttons. Sorry. No touch screen there.

I tried to shrug off the ipod incident, but then something happened that I could not ignore. We were shopping and decided to stop for a snack. “There’s a Hagen Daz right over there,” I said.

“What’s that?” she asked innocently.

“What’s that? What’s that???” It’s …. it’s… It’s Hagen Daz! That’s what it is.”

She continued to look at me blankly.

Now, I don’t want to sound too judging here … but this is an unacceptable breach in her education. She’s fourteen. You can’t send a girl into the turbulent and troubled teenage years without an in depth knowledge of the major ice cream brands. Yes, yes, those modern frozen yogurt brands are all well and good, but there are times in a girl’s life when she needs an ice cream that’s thirty-five percent fat.

But maybe that’s just me. I’m old fashioned. I still listen to things on my ipod instead of my phone.

So what dates you?