El-e-e tagged me for this meme. I’m glad because it’s been awhile (again) since I wrote anything here. Yes there will be more featured authors. I’m working on interview questions tonight.

The rules:
1. You have to post these rules before you give the facts.
2. Players – You must list one fact that is somehow relevant to your life for each letter of your middle name. If you don’t have a middle name, use the middle name you would have liked to have had.
3.At the end of your post, you need to choose one person for each letter of your middle name to tag.

I’m glad I have a short one:

S – Sister. I had one sister who died when she was 27 and I was 30. I still miss her. Also for S – the fantasy novel I’m working on now is called Sword & Illusion.

U -  Unicorns. I love them and used to collect them, but as I’ve gotten older and more into writing fantasy novels, I love all kinds of fantasy things. In fact, I have a lovely statue/figurine thing of two glittery dragons guarding a crystal tower that holds a silver sphere on my desk. It was a gift from my daughter and I think they’re calling out for their own book soon.

E – Europe. I’ve lived their twice – once in the Army and once when I wasn’t, when my husband worked as a scientist there. While there we went to the top of the Eiffel Tower.

Thanks for the tag, el-e-e!

Now I tag:

Shannon from Rocks in my Dryer

Unlikely Homesteader – Only U I could find.

Everyday Mommy

It was a big weekend at our house, at least Sunday was.

All day the Boy kept talking about how he wanted to sleep in his own room. You have to understand that Beloved and I are kind of Attachment Parenting types. We breastfed our daughter for… a long time and we believe in the family bed. However, the Boy is five now and by this time the Girl was already in her own bed and I think in her own room, at least for the beginning of the night. The Boy has been sleeping in his own bed in our room for awhile now, but whenever we suggested that he think about sleeping in a different room, he balked at it.

Another thing is that we had our guest room (third bedroom) set up as a guest room, but also as a “clean” room for the boys. Both of them have allergies and an air purifier goes all the time in there, so if things got bad in the master bedroom (which has French doors to the back yard which butts up against a forest on the other side of our fence – and the doors are not in the best shape) with pollen or whatever, Beloved would take the Boy and they’d sleep in the guest room.

So, anyway, yesterday the Boy said all day that he wanted to sleep in his own room. We said okay and encouraged it, telling him what a big boy thing to do that was.

Well, last night, at bedtime, we put a night light in his room and took his pillows and quilts made by Grammy for him and made a big deal about getting the bed set up for him. Then I turned out the lights so he could see what it would be like when it was dark. We left the bathroom light on and left his door open a little and he said it would be okay.

Then we did prayers and Daddy kissed him with his normal goodnight routine (Llama, llama, (whatever color) pajama, gets two kisses from his papa. Snuggle in the pillow soft and deep, Baby Llama go to sleep). It’s from Llama, Llama Red Pajama which we had, loved and now can’t find anymore! Then Mommy read him a story, and gave him kisses with Llama, llama. I could tell that he was very sleepy. Then I left.

Not a word out of him!

Okay, he started coughing after a little while. Remember he has allergies, so we gave him some cough medicine and Beloved told him that he thought he’d sleep better if the door was closed. By this time the Boy was asleep again and Beloved closed the door.

We didn’t hear from him until we woke him up this morning!

For the first time in five years, Beloved and I slept alone together in our own room!!!!

THEN, this morning, the Boy lost his third tooth!

If the size of the permanent teeth mean anything, my son is going to be a big boy when he grows up. With the lost of this tooth, his two permanent teeth on the bottom finally have room to fit, so I’m hoping that he hits a growth spurt soon so he’ll have room for this third new tooth to fit. The dentist says that the only thing we can do is wait and that as he grows up his jaw will grow, too, and there may be room. I hope so!

Anyway, he’s getting to be a big boy, emotionally, anyway. With his sister 18 now, I’m losing my babies!!

I’m thrilled to be able to bring you another wonderful author, Elaine Grant.

Elaine and I have been friends for over a year. She was president of our local RWA chapter, HeartLA last year and I was vice-president. We went to RWA’s National Conference in Atlanta last year. Elaine drove and I paid for gas! It was a hoot, so when she sold her book, Make-Believe Mom, I knew I wanted to do something special for her.

When Elaine was five years old, she decided she wanted to be a writer who illustrated her own books. Her first short story was published in the local weekly newspaper when she in third grade. There was no turning back after that!

Elaine graduated from Louisiana State University about ten years late with a degree in Computer Science and a minor in Creative Writing. She worked for several years in the chemical industry first in sales then as a computer analyst. When her son was born, she “retired” to start a second and more fun career as a stay-at-home mother–and to indulge her lifelong obsession to write.

Her first novel Roses for Chloe, a ghost romance set in south Louisiana, was released in 1998 by Penguin Putnam/Berkley Jove.

Elaine loves horses, cowboys, gardening, baseball, travel, and eating sushi with her son when he’s home from college. A native of Alabama, Elaine lives in Louisiana with her husband, son, a psycho cat, and a lovely Australian Shepherd, where her family enjoys the food and the unique culture of the area.

Hi, Elaine, and thanks for the opportunity to interview you and share your writing with the readers of my blog.

Your first book, Roses for Chloe, was published in 1998 and your second one came out this month. How did you stay motivated with so many years between books?

I write simply because I must. It’s an obsession I’ve had since I was about five years old. I wrote long, long before I published the first one, and will probably always write no matter what the circumstances. As for the specific period between books, I was incredibly busy during those years. My son was in high school, playing baseball with a very competitive state championship team. My husband and I never missed a game. I was a partner in a small non-fiction publishing company. After a couple of years doing that, I realized that I much preferred to lie–I mean create other worlds–so I “retired” from the publishing company and returned to my first love, fiction. I also finished two manuscripts during that period, one being Make-Believe Mom.

You have one son, yet in Make-Believe Mom the hero has seven children. Did you find it difficult to keep all those children strait and give them distinct personalities?

Actually, no, I had no trouble at all keeping up with them–maybe because they were stuck on paper and not able to get in real trouble. Each of them brought his or her own personality to the character. I did have to write down eye color and hair color, just to be consistent. They were sweet children, and I found myself in restaurants and malls, watching young kids. I often asked mothers how old their children were, to try and make sure mine “acted their age.”

When we were driving to Atlanta in 2006 for RWA’s National Conference, you shared an interesting story about the opening scene in the book. Would you share that with my readers?

Originally Jon called the vet to the ranch because his young calves had scours (a form a digestive upset). I needed to know how this illness would be treated and joined a cattle forum where a lot of ranchers and farmers discussed problems. It didn’t take long to realize that almost without exception ranchers would treat scours themselves with no need for a vet. I’d almost made my hero TDTL (Too Dumb To Live).

When I realized I needed something more complicated than scours I located a lady vet on that same Cattle Forum and she walked me through a cow-C-section, which was one of only a few things a vet would be called out to do. She was very helpful with her minute detail on this and also gave me some insight on the difficulties of being a female large animal vet in a predominately man’s world.

So that’s why Make Believe Mom begins with a cow C-section!

What inspired you to write Make-Believe Mom?

Good question. I don’t know. I’ve always loved cowboys, and this rancher named Jon came to visit in my head one day and brought along all seven kids. He mentioned there was this new lady vet in town and well, he’d like to …. So, I just took it from here.

What is your favorite scene from Make-Believe Mom?

I think probably Jon and Kaycee’s date at the Rainbow Ranch restaurant. Very romantic night, when they actually realized they were in love.

Have you always wanted to write romance?

No. When I was in college I wanted to write literary fiction. The trouble was the eternal manuscript I was working on was historical and had romance in it. So that wouldn’t work. I read a lot of different genres and like to write all kinds of things. My first published book Roses for Chloe was a paranormal Southern Romance. I’m working on a thriller. And I have three historicals gathering dust on a shelf. But the common thing is that they all have a strong love story in them, because I do like to write love stories.

I know you have another book in the pipeline. What can you tell us about that one?

My next Superromance is slated for 2008 and has no title at this point. It’s the story of Sarah James, the independent woman who runs the Little Lobo Café in Make-Believe Mom. She has plans to tear down the old, dilapidated mansion behind the café and build a brand new bed and breakfast–until her double-crossing brother sells his half of the property to stranger Cimarron Cole, who is determined to restore the house for his own use! Sarah and Cimarron battle each other and demons from their respective childhoods. Then four-year-old Wyatt, Cimarron’s orphaned nephew who calls himself Nobody’s Little Boy is dropped on Cimarron’s doorstep and two people who claim to never want kids have to decide this child’s fate.

What are you working on now?

I’m working on Sarah and Cimarron’s story, and the thriller set in Tennessee.

Anything parting words?

Thanks for inviting me! I hope readers enjoy Make-Believe Mom and I’d love from them at elaine@elainegrant.com. I also have a contest going at www.elainegrant.com

Elaine’s Book, Make-Believe Mom, a September 2007 release, is the rollicking story of a widowed Montana rancher who will do whatever he must to keep custody of his seven young children–even fake an engagement with the new lady vet in town.

I’m starting a few feature here. I decided that with so many wonderful authors and books out there, my readers might like to know a little more about some of their favorites and maybe find out about some authors they didn’t know before. I hope you find something here you’ll want to read!
Today’s author is Mary Connealy

Mary Connealy is the author of Petticoat Ranch and Golden Days. She has recently signed an exclusive contract that includes Calico Canyon, a sequel to Petticoat Ranch.

She writes for three different divisions of Barbour Publishing; Trade Fiction, Heartsong Presents, and Heartsong Presents Mysteries. She also teaches GED by day and writes her novels by night, which sounds like a transformation worth of Superman so she’s always looking for a phone booth!

Mary’s dream is to tell love stories that make people laugh while drawing them closer to God. She lives on a farm in Nebraska with her husband, Ivan. She just moved the last of her youngest child to college and the nest is so empty it echoes. She has four daughters, Joslyn, Wendy, Shelly and Katy. Writing is great but her family is her true life’s work.

She has two books out.

I had the pleasure of interviewing Mary recently.

 

Mary, welcome and thank you for finding time to speak with us about yourself and your writing. First, let’s talk about you a little.

You write for three different divisions of Barbour Publishing; Trade Fiction, Heartsong Presents, and Heartsong Presents Mysteries. Do you ever find yourself confused as to which division you’re writing for today?

It’s been okay, Nancy. I worried about it some, but I just finished a three book series for HP that will be out in 2009 and it’s contemporary, my Heartsong Presents Mysteries are contemporary too, but cozy mysteries. They’ve very different from a regular HP in voice and style, it’s pretty off the wall, the characters are supposed to be quirky.

So, when I finished that third HP I went straight to a historical romantic comedy that I had finished but needed to revise. I wondered if I’d have trouble catching the drawl and the attitude of historical characters.

But the first time I had my cowboy tip his Stetson back and say, “I reckon so, Ma’am.” Well, it was just fun. I love that style of writing.

So, I’m doing okay. I probably helps that I wrote for years…many, many years…before getting a contract. In those ten years I wrote everything, cop dramas, sweet romances, spy thrillers, gothic romances, romantic suspense, westerns, anything and everything that had a story idea I wanted to pursue. So I’m used to writing for different genres.

How do your books for Trade Fiction and Heartsong Presents differ?

The basic difference is length of course. An HP is 45,000 words and a Trade Fiction is more like 90,000…those books aren’t as chained to a word count as the HPs so they can be longer or shorter, but 90,000 is a good ballpark figure.

Also an HP is two POVs. We’re party to the thoughts of the hero and heroine. Once in a while we get a bit of the villain, but that’s it.

In Petticoat Ranch I’ve got…I’d say eight Point of View characters. And several of those only have one scene. So that’s a big difference.

And the other thing is an HP is very straightforward. It’s just to short a form of writing to be otherwise. No subplots, just the love story. Of course there’s an underlying story, but in Petticoat Ranch I’m jumping to major subplots, which I love, I find the shorter style difficult to rein myself in. And I also find myself closing in on the end and I’ve got a lot of story left to tell. But it’s challenging to NOT go off on a tangent and I find I like writing both ways.

You’re in the “empty nest” phase of your life? As the mom of a recent 18year old, I’m dying to know how you’re coping with that.

Honest, Nancy, the day my husband Ivan and I moved Katy to college…yikes, I can’t even tell you how it felt. It was just shocking. Devastating, really. We barely spoke to each other the whole hour plus drive home because there just wasn’t a way to put it into words, this sense of a huge chapter of our lives…the MAIN focus of our lives for thirty years, being over.

We see our children a lot. It’s an unusual week that we don’t see our girls, although one of them didn’t show up last week. But we talked to her a dozen times. They’re just not that far away and we are really close and just enjoy them so much.

But it’s different.

Ivan and I sat in our living room watching TV after we got home from moving Katy and I just had this awful sense that this was it. Our lives. We’re both fifty-one and we’re from long lived people. Possibly we could just sit there in front of that TV for the next forty years. Awk!

We even talked about it. We need to find a hobby, a group, and activity. But we can’t think of anything. We’ve just been parents forever. Maybe something will come to us.

As the mom of daughters, I can understand that writing heroines might come easily to you, but do you find it hard to get into the minds of your heroes?

Well, I think of Petticoat Ranch as my husband’s story. So I hope I got the hero right.

My husband, Ivan, is from a family of seven sons. Now we have four daughters. Sometimes, watching Ivan react to the girls, doing the very normal things the girls do, is hilarious. They just shock him. One time, during an extensive discussion of control top panty hose, Ivan shook his head and said, “This is a conversation we never had at home.”

I used his well intentioned efforts to figure out women as the background for Clay, my hero in Petticoat Ranch. At least Ivan had a mother, girl cousins and classmates. Then we dated and married, then added the daughters one at a time.

Clay came from an all male world, first in the Rocky Mountains, then in the war. He was dropped into his all-girl family with absolutely no preparation. Believing it is his Christian duty to protect and care for these women, he marries Sophie about four hours after he regains consciousness in her care.

And then the shocks start coming. The giggling, the hair pulling, the tears. He handles it all as badly as possible all while being charmed and drawn to his wife and daughters. The man is wildly conflicted and the comedy of his confusion just floods the entire book.

The next book in this series, Calico Canyon is about the prissy Grace Calhoun, the school marm and the father of her most unruly students. She gets his kids kicked out of school. He gets her fired. A completely innocent compromising situation forces them into marriage. NOT a happy marriage. So this is the flip side of Petticoat Ranch, a woman thrust into an all male world. We’ll see if I get it right.

Now, Golden Days doesn’t sound, from the blurb, like it would be as funny as Petticoat Ranch. Am I right and if so, is it hard to switch from one to the other?

No, there is a lot of comedy in Golden Days. You know, I can’t seem to not write comedy. I don’t even mean to. When I’m writing along I just always seem to go with the sassy choice in dialogue and the wackiest choice in action. I can’t stop myself.

What advice would you give an author who is interested in writing humorous books?

I guess see if you actually write humor first. I don’t think it’s necessarily a natural choice. It just kind of happens. I mean, I can control the comedy to a point, but it’s always there. I’ve talked to people who are really fun and funny to visit with who then write really serious books and I always say, “Your humor is a gift from God why isn’t it in your books?” They just act like it’s not what comes out of them. Do people really sit down to a book and think, “Okay, I’m making this one a comedy?” I don’t know.

Do you find it difficult to tackle serious spiritual truths with humor?

I haven’t found anything that I can’t lace with humor. I think the humor makes everything more accessible to the reader. One of my favorite scenes in Petticoat Ranch is a church service. A service where the sermon is a very powerful, fire and brimstone like preacher telling them to forgive their enemies, and the whole service has the kids flinching from the shouting and the parents feeling guilty. We hear very little of the service, it’s more about the families reaction to it. It’s a very funny scene with a fundamental scriptural truth about love and hate and forgiveness.

Thanks for being with us today, but before we go, do you have any final words you’d like to say?

I want to make a pitch here for Christian fiction. I think it’s the most exciting time possible to be involved with Christian fiction. It’s growing steadily and expanding into all genres and I’m thrilled to be a part of it.

Anyone who is reading you blog, I want you to think about what you like to read, then, if it isn’t Christian fiction, go see if there isn’t a Christian version of it. Fast paced, well written books in all genres but with a Christian viewpoint. So, no profanity, no nudity, heroes and heroines making moral choices. But the bad guys are just as bad, the problems go just as deep. It’s just done in a way that isn’t offensive to a Christian reader.

Thanks for having me on your blog, Nancy.

Petticoat Ranch

Sophie Edwards’ life is one long struggle for survival, and, more importantly, the survival of her four daughters. She wants to avenge her husband’s murder, but she has no idea how to do it. And as if she hasn’t got enough to do, now a wounded man is disrupting her family’s lonely
life.

Clay McClellen left an idyllic, all-male world in the mountains. But, after plunging headfirst over a cliff, Clay finds himself at the mercy of a widow and her four girls.

Petticoat Ranch is a suspenseful romantic comedy about a mountain man trapped in a pretty, sweet smelling, confusing all-girl world, from Barbour Publishing

 

Golden Days

 

After a mishap on a bustling Seattle street nearly kills her, Amy Simons is going home to Alaska.

Braden Rafferty, devastated by the loss of his wife and child, needs to get away from his home. His brother’s new life in Alaska lures him north in the midst of the Klondike Gold Rush.

Amy, frail from her recent injuries, reminds Braden too much of his fragile wife. Amy’s independence on the trip north is crushed when she has to accept Braden’s help getting home, and she vows that as soon as her strength returns, she won’t depend on anybody. But Amy finds out she has no home to go to, and Braden steps in and takes her to his brother’s.

After Amy has another near death experience, she begins to wonder if her accidents aren’t accidental at all.

Golden Days is available through Mary’s website, www.maryconnealy.com or the Heartsong Presents website. www.heartsongpresent.com

Heartsong Presents, a division of Barbour Publishing

 

Well, the results from Who Wants to be a Superhero is over, and of course, the best man won. I’m not has thrilled with the updated special effects and all that cheesy “story line” stuff they added this season once they found out that people actually watched this. Last season was a little more fun when it was a little less staged. I just kept wondering how much of this season was rehearsed, done with a blue screen, and edited. I still can’t believe they slept all in the same room in their costumes!

Then of course, Feedback’s great movie on sci-fi, Megasnake, was a MAJOR DISAPPOINTMENT!!! True believers will go to this site and sign a petition to get him a REAL movie.

What will we watch in it’s place? I suggest the new show, Who Wants to be a Necromancer?, on DarkFantasy TV.

In this televised competition five contestants have been chosen to compete. Each of them wants to be declared a “Lord of the Dead.” Each week, one will be unlimited until one of them earns the title.

1. Bill of the Dead – Started his career as a zombie wizard by winning the annual South Ferry brain-eating-contest. He has also guest starred on Zombie Iron Chef. He was criticized for lack of exotic ingredients in his dishes.
2. Brain Hellda – Raised and commanded a legion of undead Sumo wrestlers. Was able to demolish that same building in Japan that got demolished in every one of those old Japanese monster movies.
3. Gerard Weird – Created a great undead parade, supposedly through the use of potions and chemicals.
4. Petricia Cemetary – Created the most powerful army of undead guinea pigs ever known in all the Seven Lands. Unfortunately, stopped in its first campaign by a pile of wilted celery.
5. Morgue-Ann – Captain of the all-undead Quidditch team. Unfortunately, last season they did not have a ghost of a chance against Hogwarts.