In my current work-in-progress, there is a combination coffee shop/cafe/book store etc…which is the meeting place for this small town.

I want this place to have some kind of specialty baked good, something that they’re known for. At first I thought of oatmeal applesauce bread. I found this great recipe on the internet: http://www.stltoday.com/lifestyles/food-and-cooking/recipes/article_0bb9c669-6b14-53a7-876a-7dd4cc4856a1.html

But then, I thought no, I’d like something other than bread (no matter how good of bread it is)….I started thinking about coffee cake….I considered perhaps coffee cake made with a touch of brandy. But maybe the specialty shouldn’t be coffee cake at all…or maybe it should. Can you tell I’m floundering?

That’s where you come in. I’m giving away two books this week, drawn from everyone who comments and suggests a specialty I might use in this boo. And if you include a link to the recipe you get entered into the drawing twice.

I can’t wait to hear your suggestions. And please know I really appreciate your help!

Well, this summer has been busy for me — and, according to the calendar, it’s not over yet! But, as my youngest enters college in another week, I’ve been thinking over my summer experiences and thinking on what I’ve learned this summer.

1 – Florida is actually steamier than New Jersey! I’m not talking about romance novel totals, I’m talking about the unrelenting humidity and heat during July and August! I had blithely believed that because I live in humid southern NJ, I could withstand any weather I met up with in Florida, going to the RWA conference in Disney World. Okay – I learned I was wrong and that Florida humidity kicks the butt of NJ humidity.

2 – I learned that there are more old friends, acquaintances and writing colleagues at the RWA conference than there     is time to chat or even to see them. It never ceases to amaze me how I run into people as I leave the conference who I never even saw during the conference!  Or I get an email from someone who saw me in the hallway or at a meal or in line for one event or another and wanted to say hello — after the conference.

3 – I learned that too much of a good thing isn’t good for you. I had the chance to attend a lovely afternoon tea – complete with cream tea, scones, finger sandwiches, cream and whipped cream – at the Garden View Tea Room at the Grand Floridian Hotel. It was real lovely — an orchestra played in the lobby, gracious waiters and waitresses poured tea and offered a selection of desserts and sandwiches. It’s been a long, long time since I ate such rich foods and I paid for it later! So, next time, I’ll be wiser and not suffer from the excesses of cream tea!

4 – I learned that I have even more respect for Disney’s approach to storytelling than before! Hubby, son, daughter-in-law and I took the ‘backstage’ Keys to the Kingdom tour of the Magic Kingdom on our last day there and I am so amazed at the detail to which Disney imagineers and cast members protect the integrity of the story they tell. Secrets were revealed (but I swore never to reveal them) about the design, layout and operations of the Magic Kingdom and I saw (or noticed) things I’d only walked by on previous visits. And everything they do there, is to tell the story. As a writer, I love it! (This is my special Key to the Kingdom pin and souvenir nametage from the tour! >>>>>>>>>)

5 – I learned I can still shock my children! Okay, first I should explain that I don’t drink…well, not much and not often for a number of reasons. A single French martini can make my lips numb. But after having a wonderful dinner with hubby, friend, son and daughter-in-law I decided to try out a ’3 flight’ of Scottish whisky. I’d accomplished a whisky tasting last fall while in Banchory and thought I should try out a couple more. After all, it’s only about 1/2 ounce of each whisky — far less alcohol than in a French martini. From the expressions on all the faces at the table, you would have thought I’d gone on a drinking binge and finished off bottles of the hard stuff. My photo (the one next to this section) was immediately texted to my other children not present because those who witnessed it were SHOCKED!

And the last thing I learned was that I’m a much better photographer when I don’t try to aim and frame and plan my photos.  Doesn’t this look like a postcard? I took it as we walked quickly past the Castle during a dancing-and-singing show that included fireworks. I just snapped it and didn’t see it until after we got away from the crowds.

Terri is recovering from an overdose of Disney and heat and humidity, too. (There were no deleterious effects of the flight of whisky!) Just before heading into a deadline-binge-o’-writing, she’s enjoying a few last days of reading and relaxing. Visit her website (www.terribrisbin.com) for info about her current and upcoming releases!

Congrats to
anne
cheryl c.
and Leona Bushman

Each of you has won a signed copy of a Christie Craig book. Email your address to shana@shanagalen.com and we’ll get those out to you ASAP!

Maureen!  Congratulations.  I just drew your name as the winner of the signed copy of MY LADY’S TREASURE.  Please check your inbox for an email from me.

Thanks to everyone who commented on my blog yesterday.  Please be sure to scroll down and read today’s wonderful post from our guest blogger Christie Craig.

Stretch!!!!

Have you ever taken yoga? If you have, you’ve probably found yourself in some pretty awkward positions as you stre…ee…ttttch. We do this in an attempt to bring balance into our world, to ease the tension in our bodies and basically to become more well-rounded and a healthier individuals.

Stretching is, well, it’s good for us. But let’s face it. Stretching isn’t always easy. i.e. They want me to put my leg where? It requires us to push our limits, to extend ourselves just a little bit beyond where we’ve gone before. We often tell ourselves that stretching can be dangerous. We could pull a muscle. Or as in yoga class, there’s plenty of times I felt I made an idiot out of myself. Heck, a few times in yoga, I found myself seeing parts of my own body I’d never seen before. Believe me, it wasn’t pretty.

Ahh, but I’m not really talking about yoga or physically stretching. I’m talking about stretching ourselves in other ways. Stretching ourselves mentally, or maybe just getting out of our comfort zones, trying something new, something different, and opening our minds to other possible paths. And I guess yoga could even be part of your new path.

The thing is, it’s so easy for us women to get to some place in our lives. Be it a new job, a new title as: wife, mother, AARP member, published author, or maybe it’s just reaching an ideal weight. And generally we got to the new place by stretching, by challenging ourselves. Yet once we arrive, what do we do? We master the new challenges and then we build ourselves another comfort zone.

We tell ourselves that we’ve earned this reprieve and it’s true we did earn it. We worked hard. The problem is that some of us, myself included, get too comfortable and we simply aren’t stretching anymore. We aren’t growing. Or, we’re only growing in one way. And is that enough?

A little over a year ago, I had an editor from a big publishing house call my agent and ask if I would consider writing a paranormal young adult series. When my agent first told me, I laughed. “Me? Write a young adult? Are you joking?”

Thankfully, I was smart enough to ask for thinking time. Then I called my good friends and asked for advice. The answers I got all sounded pretty much the same, “Are you an idiot? Of course you’ll do it.” Or “Hang up right now, and start writing. Now!”

But I still held back. The thoughts running though my mind were: But I know how to write a contemporary romance. I’m actually getting pretty good at it, climbing the latter of success. Shouldn’t I just stick with what I know I can do and work on that? I’d have to really study up on what makes a young adult novel work if I expect to make this happen. I’d have to put in a few more hours. And then there were my two biggest fears: What if I embarrass myself? What if I try . . . and fail? And then of course, What if they want me to put my leg somewhere that I can’t put it?

I had forgotten how good it felt to stretch. You know, when you’re just a little sore because you had to work just a bit harder? I forgot that learning can be fun. I forgot that like an athlete, cross-training in most anything in life is beneficial. That studying, and building skills in any genre could help me write better, no matter what I’m writing. I forgot what it feels like to come face to face with a challenge. I forgot that every now and then we all need to try something new, to mix things up, to push the fear aside, and just go for it. I forgot that taking a risk is sometimes a risk worth taking.

So how did it turn out for me? In April of 2011, the first book, Born at Midnight, in my Shadow Falls series will hit the bookstores. I’ve completed the second novel, and am busy plotting the third. Already, the foreign market sales tell me I made a wise decision. My friends like to rub it in, too.

Oh, I’m still writing my humorous romantic suspenses. That was another stretch I made. Because after I sold my YA series to St. Martin’s Press, my agent suggested I come up with a new adult romance series to shop around. But to do so, we would have to turn down the offer from the house I was already publishing with. No stranger to rejection, turning down a contract didn’t calm my nerves. I’m happy to say that my next romance series, Don’t Mess With Texas, will be released by Grand Central in late 2011.

For me, stretching was writing in a new genre and writing that new proposal, turning down one offer, without knowing if I’d get another. For non-writers, stretching might mean taking a class, learning to speak French, or going for that promotion at work. It could mean trying for a second child, deciding to date after your divorce, or going on a new diet. Maybe it even means taking a yoga class. My point is, change is scary, but if we want to grow as humans, we gotta learn to stretch and we gotta keep stretching. We can’t let ourselves live in only our comfort zones.

When opportunity knocks, you can’t run to the bathroom and claim you ate bad chicken. You have to answer that door, you have to spit fear in the face; you have to be willing to take risks. And if you open your eyes and see one of your own body parts that’s less than pretty, well, just shut those eyes and keep on stretching. Sooner or later, you might even get that leg where you didn’t think it would go. Remember that to try and fail is better than never trying at all. We can’t win them all, but when we do win … Wow!

Thanks for stopping by. And today, what I’d like to hear from you is: how are you stretching? How do you face the fear of change? What steps are you going to take that will help you grow into a more well-rounded and healthier person?

I’ll be giving away a copy of Shut Up and Kiss Me to one commenter. So make sure you leave a post.

(And the Jaunty Quills are offering two additional posters signed copies of Christie’s Divorced Desperate and Deceived and Divorced Desperate and Dating! Three lucky people will win books.)

We celebrated a new milestone in my family this week: my daughter started High School.

I can’t quite get used to the idea.

It was dark and humid at 6 am on Monday when she slung her new, red and black plaid backpack over her shoulder and strolled out the door, her size double-zero skinny jeans and short sleeved t-shirt the perfect outfit for a school day.  As she climbed into the car for my husband to drive her to the bus stop, I tried not to pay attention to the tight, uncomfortable ache in my stomach, that Mommy protectiveness that always intervenes at such moments.

I knew she was nervous.  I didn’t want to let her to see that I kind of was, too.  I wanted to be excited for her, to encourage her to stretch her teenage wings and to seize the opportunities ahead.  I smiled, waved, wished her a great day, and watched them pull out of the drive.

When they’d gone, I hugged Kai, our cat, who’d brushed against my legs and started meowing for attention.  My daughter had chosen Kai from the kitties at the humane society and had picked out his name.  The same daughter who’d started High School.  My sweet little girl, who loved snuggling in bed to read storybooks together, making up adventures with her stuffed toys, and racing our previous cat around in her toy wagon, was now going to a school of more than 3,000 students.  In just a few years, she’ll be graduating and moving away to start college.  She’s already talked about perhaps attending university in England.

I know, growing up is the natural process of life, but still . . .

All day Monday, I tried not to worry about the things that could go wrong for her: forgetting her locker combination; being late for class because she’d got lost trying to navigate the new campus; misplacing a textbook she needed for an important assignment.  What if she got on the wrong bus to come home?

I remind myself that my daughter’s a smart, independent, resourceful young woman.  A large group of her pals from middle school are going to this high school, so she has people to rely on, when necessary.  She’s already making new friends, being introduced to fresh ideas and ways of learning, and being encouraged to develop new talents.  She’s going to be fine.

More than fine.

But I still can’t quite get used to the idea.

***

Did you experience any milestones, large or small, in your life in the past few months?  Are you looking forward to milestones coming up soon?   Leave a comment, and I’ll pick one winner who will receive a copy of my award-winning medieval romance My Lady’s Treasure.

To read an excerpt from this novel, please visit my website.

Me, diving in Belize

My family and I just got back from a scuba diving trip in the Caribbean. The Geek and I have been diving since long before our kids and we’ve made a real effort to keep it up. It’s the last vestiges of our pre-kid life as a couple. There are a lot of things I love about diving. I love the silence of being underwater, where the only thing you can hear is the steady rhythm of your own breathing. I love the completely alien landscape of the coral reefs–like sixty feet under water there’s a whole ‘nother planet. I love the complexity of life under water–a few feet of reef can have hundreds, maybe thousands of species in it. All those creatures, just quietly going about their business regardless of my gawking at them like a tourist in Times Square. I kind of even love that no one can talk to me while diving. It’s just me, the fish, and my own thoughts. (What can I say? I’m an introvert.)

A scrawled file fish

I get very philosophical under water. It’s probably all that time alone in my head. Or maybe it’s just that the ocean seems to lessons to teach me. Every dive trip, I try to take away some big life lesson. Seven years ago, diving in the Pacific Ocean for the first time, I struggled against the current for most of the first dive, terrified the ocean would bash me against the rocks. I felt horribly ill-equiped to be down there. Then I noticed that none of the fish were struggle against the current. They were swimming with the current. I spent the rest of the trip thinking about how useless it is to flight something so big, when you can make it work for you instead.

Not a blenny, but a goby. Nevertheless, tiny and beautiful.

This trip, in a year when I’ve been struggling with professional jealousy (I mean, who doesn’t sometimes, right?), I thought about every body’s dive is different. Eight people can go into the water at the same time and each one of them is going to notice different things. Sometimes I’ll be swimming along and notice something tiny that no one else sees. An odd little algae growing on a soft coral that looks exactly like a flower. Or maybe the bright orange spots of the snout of a Banded Blenny. If I’m enraptured or entranced by the delicate fluttering of the fins of a file fish, does it matter if someone twenty feet ahead of me sees a Spotted Eagle Ray?

Once we’re all back at the resort and talking about the dive over a drink, it’s fun to hear about that Eagle Ray. I may feel a pang of regret that I didn’t see it, but that doesn’t make my Blenny any less beautiful.

So what makes you feel philosophical?

There is something very special about a quiet hero. Atticus Finch of To Kill a Mockingbird—perhaps the most beloved character in American literature and film. George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life. Sports has given us Lou Gehrig, the pride of the Yankees, and James J. Braddock, better known as Cinderella Man.  In the world of tantrums and steroid use, we have Mariano Rivera’s quiet calm and humility and Mike Lowell’s steadfast ability to come through when his team needs him. (Yes, he plays for the other guys. He’s still great.) In real life, we have Captain Sully, whose skill and calm saved hundreds, perhaps thousands, of lives. Wartime brings us the fathers and mothers who have to leave their families, and their spouses who hold things together while they’re gone.

Today, if you’ll indulge me, I’d like to tell you about another quiet hero.

My grandfather was born in 1918 in Terre Haute, Indiana. His house didn’t have running water, and his parents didn’t speak English, having emigrated from Hungary a few years before. Poppy translated for them, did the errands that required English. He was an altar boy, studied hard, helped his mom, swam in the Mississippi River with his two brothers. They had no money, but they had each other, their church, a solid work ethic.

When my grandfather was 14, his family moved to Connecticut to a neighborhood full of Hungarian immigrants, including a family of four girls just down the street. Pop took a shine to Helen, asked her to walk him to the train station the day he left for college and kissed her goodbye. She was thirteen years old. They wrote throughout the next four years—Pop never had another girlfriend—and got married the year after he graduated from Notre Dame. He went on to get his master’s in English from Yale, but when his mom needed help at the humble grocery store they owned, he left teaching. He played the stock market, loved sports of all kinds, adored my grandmother, loved children. He had nine children, twenty-eight grandchildren and a couple dozen more great-grandchildren. Whenever a new baby was brought to him for inspection, his eyes would grow wet, and he’d say, very softly, “Well now. Look at that.”

My grandfather was a great man but lived a quiet life. His heroism came not from acts of courage in times of war, but in the everyday kindness he showed to every single person he met. He offered credit at the grocery store knowing full well a lot of those bills would never be paid. Mothers unpacking at home often found extra food in their brown paper bags…an extra half-pound of ground beef or a gallon of ice cream they didn’t order, and when they called the store to let Poppy know, he’d say he must’ve made a mistake, no need to pay the difference. When little kids came into the store to buy candy, their pennies went a lot further than at other stores, and Pop’s attitude on shoplifters was, “He really must’ve needed that.”

He never said an unkind word about anyone, never participated in petty gossip, never complained, never wanted more than he had—a loving wife, healthy children, a roof above his head.

Poppy wasn’t demonstrative; he rarely hugged me, would duck if anyone tried to kiss him. When my own father died, Poppy stepped up; a hand on my shoulder once in a while, or a few words of rare praise, “Your dad would be proud.” He kept my books on his nighttable, though I’m pretty sure he never read them. But he looked at the covers all the time, and he always seemed to get such a kick out of seeing my name there in big print.

Only once did he tell me he loved me—just after I gave my grandmother’s eulogy. But in the last days of his life, when speech had left him and he no longer opened his eyes, he held my hand and kissed it repeatedly, and when he finally slipped away this past May, my hand was on his chest, right over his heart.

He was the best man I’ve ever known, probably the best I’ll ever know, and I will always be grateful that my life was blessed with such a gentle, good man as my grandfather.

Who are the quiet heroes you remember in film or in books? Do you have a quiet hero in your life? What has he done that makes him so memorable?

The winner from my Hogwarts post is Laurie G. Congrats! Send me an email robyndehart @ gmail.com with your snail mail addy and I’ll get some books in the mail to you.

I drew Shannon’s name – Congratulations!

Shannon – contact me (margomaguire@yahoo.com) with your snail mail address and I’ll send you your books!