I finished the first draft of Her Heart’s Desire! 

Her Heart’s Desire is Sally Larson’s romance.  It happens before A Bride for Tom on the Nebraska timeline.  I had wanted to tell Sally’s story for some time now, and I finally got the right plot.  Here it is:

Some men don’t realize the right woman is the one they aren’t pursuing….

As soon as Sally Larson meets Rick Johnson, she knows he’s the one for her.  The catch?  He’s interested in her friend, Ethel Mae.  But Sally has a plan.  With Ethel Mae’s help, she convinces Rick that the only way he’ll get Ethel Mae is to make her jealous.  So he agrees to pretend to be interested in Sally in order to get Ethel Mae’s attention.

But Rick has a trick or two up his sleeve, and Sally just might find that the one playing cat is really the mouse.

 

This is a light-hearted romance with some humorous moments.  It is rated R for sexual content, but like my other books, sex happens after marriage.  My favorite parts of this book involve Sally’s brothers, especially Tom and Joel.  I love watching those two interact together.  But I also added a scene where Sally talks to Richard and Amanda.  The scene gives a hint to why Richard Larson and Amanda decided to leave New York when his family moved to Nebraska.  I’ll discuss more about that in a moment, but first, I want to mention the other book I finished the first draft on…The Earl’s Inconvenient Wife.

I also finished the first draft for The Earl’s Inconvenient Wife.

(In case anyone hasn’t read my other blog, I decided to rename An Inconvenient Wife to The Earl’s Inconvenient Wife)

I had to go back and rewrite portions of this during April, but I’m happy to say that I finished the second version and am happy with it.  Like Her Heart’s Desire, I am now working on the edits with this book.  Her Heart’s Desire has already been with an editor, and I need to go and check what the editor found to make Her Heart’s Desire better.  Before I hand her The Earl’s Inconvenient Wife to edit, I need to do an initial read through because I have to smooth out some scenes to make the story flow better.  That’s why Her Heart’s Desire will be out before The Earl’s Inconvenient Wife.

As for The Earl’s Inconvenient Wife, I decided to name it that (instead of keeping it as An Inconvenient Wife) after asking people on my other blog what they thought.  The decision was unanimous.  Everyone likes The Earl’s Inconvenient Wife better, and considering the title tells everyone it’s a Regency and the fact that the title flows better off the tongue when I say it, I have decided to change the title.

And while I’m discussing this book, here’s the plot:

    When Nathaniel Buford’s brother died, the title of Earl of Roderick passed to him, as did the duty to get an heir, a duty he doesn’t want. Now he must find a lady who suits him among the money-grubbing Ton and marry her, but it is not as easy as he would want. Fate is about to play him another unfair hand, as a moment’s kindness to a lady has him trapped by scandal to a family that is reported to desire money above all else.
    Miss Claire Lowell desires marriage to a kind and respectable gentleman who she could love, but one moment might destroy it all. Despite all her protests that the scandalous circumstances were merely an accident, her family forces to accept Lord Roderick’s marriage proposal, and now she is tied to a man who blames her for trapping him into a marriage that neither of them wanted.
    Is Claire condemned to a loveless marriage because of her father’s eagerness to marry her to an earl? Is Nate capable of seeing past all the circumstances that brought him his wife and see Clarie for who she really is? Is it possible for love to thrive with all distrust, deception, and misunderstandings plaguing their marriage?

When Will Both Books be Out?

It’s hard to say.  I’ll be spending the majority of May working on edits, and I have three people total who look over my books before I send them out to be published.  I read it twice before it gets published.  I read it after the first draft to polish it up and then I read it after the other three people (the editor and proofreaders) have a go at it.  So it takes time to go through this, and I’m asking these poor people to double up this month on how much they usually do.

I think June is a good estimate, but I don’t know exactly when.  I can’t control how quickly places Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Apple, Kobo, Sony and Diesel etc will put up my books.   But I’ll post up some links when they are published.

What’s Next?

Bound by Honor, Bound by Love

I will keep working on this book.  It’s slow in coming, though.  I don’t know why, but the story seems to be progressing at a snail’s pace.  I’ve learned not to rush a book.  I rushed The Earl’s Inconvenient Wife, and I ended up having to go back to rewrite parts of it because the final book wasn’t as good as it could be.  So I’m going to take my time on this.  Currently, I’m in chapter 9, which isn’t bad, but I don’t think it’ll get me to my hoped-for July publishing month.  So that’s the bad news.

Other potential bad news regarding contemporaries

I’m not sure how many of you prefer contemporaries.  I like them enough, but my problem is I like historicals more.  So I keep getting the urge to write historicals, which makes it hard to work on contemporaries.  I’ve been trying to begin Runaway Bride and continue Just Good Friends, but they just aren’t coming.  I don’t know what the best course of action is to do.  I could just wait until those books are ready or transfer those plots to historicals.  But then, I don’t know if the appeal to you guys is the plot or the fact that it’s contemporary.  But I’m not primarily a contemporary author so I’m guessing most of you prefer the historicals.

Mitch’s Win

I’m thinking of going back to working on this one again.  I’m at chapter 8, so I made some good progress on it earlier this year.  I stopped because I had no idea where to go next in the book.  I think I got it now, so I’m going to write a little bit in it and see how it goes.  This is a historical western that takes place in Montana. 

My Next Regency: Her Counterfeit Husband

I’d like to write another Regency, and this is a plot I’ve been wanting to do for over a year.  I couldn’t use the plot for a historical western or a contemporary, so I put it on hold.  Then I as I was writing The Earl’s Inconvenient Wife, I realized I could make this plot a Regency because the it’s necessary that the heroine need a husband with some kind of title or rulership.  Originally, I thought of a king or prince on a fantasy world.  But I didn’t want to write a fantasy.  I want to focus on romances.  As a Regency, this plot works great.

In a nutshell, the heroine’s husband (a duke) dies, but no one knows except for her and the butler.  With the butler’s help, she buries him and plans to tell everyone her husband is still alive but in another country.  However, they come upon a man left beaten for dead who is an exact lookalike to her husband.  They bring him to her home and hope he’ll pretend to be her husband, but when he wakes up, he has amnesia.  Taking their chances, they convince him he’s her husband, but she soon discovers that he’s nothing like her jerk of a husband and falls in love.  Their love, however, is tested when he learns that he’s not who he thought he was. 

I’ll stop here for this newsletter.  Hope everyone has a great May!