Summer is winding to the end and I’m not ready for it.  As you are reading this my son is starting his last year of middle school and my daughter is heading off to college.  My life is changing.  This Fall will be the one I remember for a long time to come as when I went to being a mother of two school aged kids to being a mother of just one.

The dynamic in my household will change as it will be me and two guys.  I wonder what that will be like and how it will play out.

Have you ever had a big life changing moment that you knew was coming?

Katherine

“People often say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and I say that the most liberating thing about beauty is realizing that you are the beholder.”
— Salma Hayek

Since the audience for most romance novels is mainly women, I often think of our images of ourselves as key to my heroines. I started reading romance novels when I was 13 years old and I know that those books I read and the women in them in part shaped the woman I am today.
I knew that a woman should expect certain things from the man who loved her and she shouldn’t compromise herself to get him. And though in the media it is often said that heroines in romance novels are all beautiful, I think that is misconstrued. Everyone has a glow about them when they are in love and it makes them more beautiful to anyone who sees them.
Finding beauty in us is harder and harder all the time. The media spends a lot of time showing images of “Hollywood” beauty both in image and in size and yet seldom does that reflect the reality of people I see every day.
I strive to make the women in my books real, with issues that make them more human and after reading this quote I realized how much power we have over ourselves. I hope that whenever you go you feel out you realize that you are beautiful.

Happy reading!
Katherine

People often ask me why I write romance and to tell you the truth I usually say its because its what I love to read. But to be honest with you its also what I know.

At the heart of romance its about family and community and the bonds that a couple form as they start to build their own family. And of course I love love….who doesn’t!

So here’s my story…
After a surprising and a little bitter divorce I never thought I’d find love again. Who does when your heart is breaking and your dreams are shattered. But then I met Rob. He lived in another country and we’d been friends for a long time. But as we started talking to each other for hours every day we realized that at the core of our beings we belonged together.

I didn’t know if we would ever be anything more than friends and after a few months of chatting I flew to London to meet him. And at the moment our eyes met I know he was the one for me. I’ve written about that moment so many times but to be honest had never experienced before then. Every moment we spent together that week just confirmed what I already knew in my heart…Rob and I were soul mates.

We slowly melded our lives together with Rob moving to the States and our kids meeting each other and now on Friday July 16 three years after I flew to meet him, we are getting married.

Its going to be a small intimate wedding sharing our love for each other with our closest friends and family. Much like the weddings I write about at the end of my books.

Now when people ask me why I write romance I will simply tell them that I write about what I know and want everyone to get their own happy endings!

Love and laughter to you all!
Katherine

As you are reading this I’m driving across the country from Texas to NYC. Nothing says summer to me like a road trip. I’ve preplanned where we will stay each night but the rest of the trip is going to be one big surprise!

I love to drive along and discover something new as we are on our route. In that way, road trips are for me a lot like writing. When I start a book I have an idea of where I’m going to end up but a lot of the story is a surprise. It unfolds as I get to know the characters and what is really important to them.

The same with road trips I have an idea of the places that the kids will want to stop or to see but occasionally we will come across a random sign and just detour. There is so much freedom in being able to change your mind as you are going along.

Last summer when we were in the UK we would just hop in the car and drive out for the day having no real idea where we were going, but would stop when one of the kids saw something they wanted to check out. We found some really cool Roman ruins that way and I’m hoping that this trip will have the same result.

Happy reading and travels!
Katherine

I have just had the best weekend I’ve had in a really long time. My family was all around me and my best-friend flew in. We talked sometimes all of us at once, we laughed and reminisced about old days. Its just the kind of happy times that help remind me why I write romance.

I love the bonds that falling in love creates between a couple. I like to explore how that bond between two people expands to help create a community.

This weekend I was reminded of how much I love my little community!!!

What about you? How do you refill your well?

I love the long lazy days of summer. I have to be honest and admit to you I’m not one of those moms who schedules every second of her kids summer instead I fill our days with trips to the pool, ice cream making and lots of time to just lay around the house.

I like being in my home with my kids and just letting them do their thing. Recently we moved and my kids had a great time showing me stuff they discovered that they’d forgotten they’d made. A little note from son addressed to ‘whoever finds this’ with some lyrics of a song he used to like inside it. My daughter discovered a fan from a Disney trip and came down stairs to show me how she used to dance with it.

By being home my kids have a chance to discover their creativity in those moments when they are almost bored. Because that is the moment when they are forced to think of something to do. It was in a moment like that last summer when we were camping with my nieces and nephew that my daughter came up with the spark of her first short story. Then every night while they were camping she added and embellished that story until it took shape.

It was a moment like that when my sun decided he had a guitar hanging on the wall and he was going to try to write a song. Spending hours in his room playing notes until he found just the right ones to string together.

I guess in my house summertime isn’t just when the living is easy, it’s also when the living is very creative!

Happy Friday!
Katherine

“I realized that if I’m obsessing about my own feelings,
I’m not present with the people around me—and am frankly
of no use to them” Jane Lynch

Sometimes I get so caught up in the day-to-day details of my life that I forget to take the time to breath. You know to step out of the rushing around and say heck, yeah, I have a good life.

Being present isn’t something that happens easily for me. I have a constant stream of “stuff” going in my head. Part of that is the story world I happen to be living in at the moment, the other part is schedules for two kids and my honey, and errands that must be run–groceries don’t magically appear in the fridge–trust me on this!

Sometimes bigger things take precedence over my thoughts like the fact that my daughter is graduating high school and starting a new adventure half the country away from me. And instead of enjoying every last moment with her this year, I’ve been worried about the future and how she will do.

Being present should be simple, but then I thought learning my left hand from my right hand in kindergarten would be easy and I never really mastered that. In fact that’s a lesson I’ve learned over and over again in my life. The things I think should be easy for me never really are.

Those are the very things I have to work harder at.

What about you? Is being present in your life a natural thing or do you have to remind yourself to stop thinking and just live?

Kirsten and Karyn Gerrard are my winners today. Please email me at kathy@katherinegarbera.com with your snail mail addresses.

We all know that telling a lie is wrong but we all still do it anyway. I’m not talking about big lies, but the little small white lies that we tell friends, acquaintances and even sometimes ourselves. Lies have a way of just becoming accepted sometimes. And in most cases that’s okay. But in some situations it can end up hurting you.

I started thinking about this “lie” that we tell ourselves in marriage when a friend of mine who was also going through a divorce after several years of marriage and I were talking.  And she said to me I was living a different lie than you were.  And I thought universally most women are telling themselves (and maybe men, I don’t know how men think!) some sort of half-truth about their marriage.
I was married for 17 years before I found out I was living a lie. Not a big lie that would hurt anyone but a lie that I had been telling myself. I had the “perfect” husband–everyone said so and that was the lie. I knew that my husband wasn’t perfect and that beyond the façade of our marriage it wasn’t solid. Yet at the same time I didn’t want to let on to anyone that it was less than perfect.
I’d made this image of a nice family where everyone was exactly as they were supposed to be and after a while it was hard to say things aren’t working out. Or my life isn’t what I’ve been pretending.
Now this lie didn’t hurt anyone…at least I don’t think it did. I think that most of us are telling little lies to ourselves to keep up the façade of being happily married or happily employed or whatever other role you are pretending at. I think that most of us are living a lie of some kind or another because in our society we are judged by what we are good at and frowned on by our failures.
A perfect case to prove this is the fact that two of my neighbors stopped talking to me when I got divorced. I no longer fit in on our street or in their eyes in a neighborhood. I didn’t have a husband to fill out the party partnering that happens in suburban American. Does that mean that I shouldn’t have been lying to myself all those years?
I don’t know.

I think this is one of those situations–the lies we all live–that is a necessary evil. I think if we are true with ourselves and admit that our lives aren’t perfect and if we can somehow become okay with it then maybe we can move on…I mean me–maybe I can move on.  But letting go of perfection is hard.

This is something I’ve been exploring in my writing. My upcoming book from Brava THE PIRATE features heroine Daphne Bennett and she had been living the lie of a perfection marriage with the perfect children until her husband pulled the rug out from under her and let the world know that all wasn’t as peachy as it had seemed.  She is facing her summer alone as her kids are going to their dad’s and she needs to escape. So she volunteers with Doctors Across Waters and heads off to Somalia finding more of an adventure than she expected to. Writing about Daphne gave me a chance to explore some of my feelings about my marriage and marriages in general. I still don’t have the answers but I think that I’m getting closer to them. It also gave me a place to explore what was different about me since my divorce.  Of course I didn’t have to face death to find those answers, which I think is a very good thing!

I’m not really talking about telling little lies to friends to make them feel good about what they are wearing or their new hair cut.  I’m talking pretending that your life is closer to perfect.  I guess also that sometimes we fake it before make it!
What about you, are you living a lie? Do you think that we all are in some way?
I have two copies of ARCs of THE PIRATE to give away to two blog participants today.

Happy reading!
Kathy

I’ve always been extremely blessed to have a great family. And as a romance writer and a woman I know how strongly our relationships with our father’s influence all of the male relationships we have as adults. My dad turned 70 this week and we had a surprise party for him.

My dad is a tough guy–a former Marine, a salt-of-the-earth kind of guy who grew up tough. And I’ve always said that I thought the universe (God) gave him three daughters to soften him up a little. This weekend we were all home at the same time something that hasn’t happened in almost two years, my dad was beside himself with joy and happiness to see all his girls in the same place at the same time.

He has always been very solid and the kind of man you can count on to do the right thing in a tough situation. I think he’s influenced the kind of hero I write in my books because my guys always have something they are working to overcome. And they always have a deep respect and eventually love for the women in their lives.

What about you? Did you dad influence your life and your choices? Do you see your entire family all the time?