The Day After

I'm glad (and relieved) that Barack Obama won. I'm hopeful that he'll bring youthful energy and excitement back to our country, two things we badly need. I was touched by the tears rolling down Jesse Jackson's face last night. I'm not a fan of his, but he fought the good fight in the Civil Rights Movement, and I could only imagine what last night meant to him and so many other people who remember a much different America than the one we live in today. I salute John McCain. You can't be an American and not be compelled by his story. And, like most people, I'm glad the longest election EVER is over! During the primaries, my son kept asking me, "Do we have a new President yet?" I would reply, "Not yet, Jake." Over and over I answered that same question. Today, I was finally able to tell him that yes, we have a new President. It's truly a brand new day.

RIP Michael Crichton, creator of ER, one of my all-time favorite T.V. shows. I've hardly missed an episode in 14 years.

I'm reading "Just the Sexiest Man Alive" by Julie James, who I shared a cab with at RWA Nationals this summer. It took a while to get going, but now that the hero and heroine have met, I'm looking forward to some sparks flying!

And I'm working on book two in my romantic suspense series. This book is realllllly making me work for it, but I'm hoping the end result will make it all worthwhile. I'll keep you posted.

Election Day!

Yes, of course I voted! It was easier for me than most since the polling place is within walking distance of my house. Jake (my 10-year-old) went with me and came right into the booth with me to watch the whole thing. This is the first election our kids have had a real interest in. Going back to the endless primaries, Jake kept asking if we had a new president yet. He just couldn't believe the whole thing took this long (neither can the rest of us, right?) Emily watched the debates with interest and asked intelligent questions throughout the process.

Both the middle and elementary schools held elaborate mock elections. In both cases, Barack Obama was the winner, which is not surprising in this very blue state of Rhode Island. While most of us are thrilled the endless campaign is over, it has been an exciting election. We can only hope that better days are ahead for our country.

Update from yesterday: I finished Catch of the Day by my friend Kristan Higgins. I laughed, I cried, I LOVED it. Make sure you pick up a copy!

What I'm Reading

I'm about half way through CATCH OF THE DAY by RITA winner (and my friend) Kristan Higgins. I love it! If you haven't read it, I'd recommend you run right out and buy it. COTD is a great story about an unlucky-in-love heroine who has one disastrous date after another while nursing a very public crush on the local Catholic priest. After a few laugh out loud dates, she stumbles into a relationship with an unlikely hero. I can't wait to read Kristan's other books!

I've also recently enjoyed books by my Casablanca sisters: The Wild Sight by Loucinda McGary, Romeo Romeo by Robin Kaye and Dating Da Vinci by Malena Lott. What do these books and COTD have in common? They're all contemporaries and are what I gravitate to as a reader and a writer. Some of my friends write paranormal, and I buy the books to support them. I read them and usually enjoy them, but if I didn't know the authors, I wouldn't be tempted. I've decided that it's my suspension of disbelief muscle. It's the one muscle in my body that's well toned. I have trouble making the leap from the world I live in to the paranormal world. Even though it's not my genre of choice as a reader, I have tremendous respect for paranormal authors because of the work that goes into the building a believable make believe world. I'm looking forward to reading my friend Kendra Leigh Castle's second book, Dark Highland Fire, next.

The other book I've really loved recently is Sugar Daddy by Lisa Kleypas, who I met at RWA Nationals this summer when she signed my copy. This was Lisa's first foray into contemporary, and while it wasn't a true romance (until the very end) I really enjoyed the book. I'm looking forward to reading her second contemporary, Blue-Eyed Devil, soon.

What are you reading? Do you tend to gravitate toward one genre to the exclusion of all others? Or do you genre hop?

My Little Devil

We went out last night to a lovely party celebrating the 50th anniversary of our dear friends, Bob and Arlene Bouley. They are my dad's best friends and are extra parents and grandparents to me, my brother and our children. They thought they were going to a family dinner and were surprised by 60 of their family and closest friends, including a daughter, cousin and granddaughter who flew in for the occasion. Their daughters put together an amazing photo and home movie show that entertained us all evening. It's nice to see that some things do last. Happy anniversary Bob and Arlene!

We came home to find that sixteen-and-a-half-year-old Consuela the Wonder Dog had been VERY busy in our absence, devouring half of Emily's Halloween candy. Wrappers, including that of a full-sized Snicker's bar, were scattered about the living room. I was proud that Emily (age 13 and more evolved than she would have been a few short years ago) was much more worried about her dog than she was about her lost candy. We put what was left of the candy up on a low counter and went to bed only to wake up to the same scene! Somehow Willy Wonka had managed to get a bag down from a three-foot counter (the dog is two feet tall on her best day) and went to town AGAIN on the candy without anyone hearing her!

Since she hadn't croaked from the first dose, all we could was laugh. At her age, we're glad to see she's still got that spark of the devil we've enjoyed in her for as long as she's lived with us. She has no doubt that she's in trouble, but she's walked around all day with a smirk on her face, as if to say, "It was sooooooo worth it." And for once, her breath is pretty sweet, too! Let's face it, there's a whole lot less candy to tempt the work-at-home mom when everyone goes back to school/work tomorrow, so my little buddy did me a big favor.

The Place Where I Live

I live on an island, surrounded, as all islands are required to be, by water. I grew up here and lived here for twenty-six years before getting married and moving overseas for a few years with my husband. When we returned to the states, we made stops in Maryland and then Florida. Ten years after I left home, I came back to stay and noticed something that never struck me before. The water is literally everywhere. Travel down any main road, and you'll glimpse snippets of the river to the east and the bay to the west. I took that for granted the first time I lived here. After a decade spent elsewhere, I notice it every day.

Walking just now from the high school football game, I had panoramic water views of the river and the northern most point of the island. From my back porch, I have a pie-shaped piece of the river to look out on year round. I use that scrap of water to judge the wind, to see if there are white caps, to notice that every day the river takes on a different shade of blue. In the winter, after the leaves fall, we have a winter water view that stretches for miles. The only way I would ever move again is for a spectacular year round water view. I dream about a having a writing grotto that looks out over the water. However, I worry that I would wile the day away staring out at the ever-changing view. The water resides in my soul. Before we were married, I told my Hoosier-born husband that I could never, would never live in Indiana and even then he understood. After twenty years in the Navy and now six years here, I don't think he could be landlocked again either. Don't get me wrong, Indiana is a beautiful place, and I love to visit there. But the Wabash River is no substitute for my beloved ocean. When we lived in Maryland, I was under the impression that we lived close to the ocean—until the day we set out for Ocean City and discovered it was three hours away. I cried all the way home.

We experience the depths of every season—from biting, frigid cold in the winter to life-draining heat in the summer, from the soft promise of spring to the earthy decay of a spectacularly colorful autumn. You can be born, grow up, go to college, get decent a job in the defense or other industry, and never have to leave my island. In fact, many people really never leave. I've heard talk of a man in Newport who has never been over the "new" Jamestown Bridge, which opened in 1988. I believe it. Three bridges, one on the south end and two on the north, provide the only ways off the island by car. On the south side, you must cross two bridges to get to mainland Rhode Island. Those bridges, the Newport Bridge in particular which graces the banner of this site, are symbols of home to me. No matter how far I travel, they mark the way home. Yet our island is big enough that it is easy to forget you're on an island, unlike Block Island to our south, which has not a single traffic light nor a bridge to connect it to anything. You must fly there or take a ferry or private boat. We are known here on Aquidneck Island as the home of the City by the Sea and the Sailing Capital of the World. We're also home to world-famous mansions, a ten-mile Ocean Drive, and spectacular beaches.

My father grew up in Newport, the southern most of the three towns on my island. My mother was raised in the north in Portsmouth, so it was no wonder that I was brought up in Middletown. A compromise if ever there was one. Today I live in Portsmouth, the town we loved to hate as Middletowners. My 10-year-old son worries that when he plays high school sports I'll root for Middletown over his team. Maybe I will, but he'll never know! We live on Education Lane, at the corner of Conjunction Junction (okay, I made up that part). The high school sits at the top of our hill. Excited PA announcers and marching band music from football games dance through the air of our neighborhood on crisp fall Friday nights. I tell my children that kids brought up on Education Lane are expected to be world-class scholars.

My husband and I once teased my brother about never living outside the state of Rhode Island. Sitting on the back of our father's boat in picturesque Brenton Cove, my brother gestured to the breathtaking view of Newport Harbor, Narragansett Bay and the Newport Bridge. "And go where?" he asked. After going there and coming back, I couldn't have said it better myself.

Happy Halloween and a New Review

Happy Halloween to all the trick or treaters out there! Should be interesting this year to go out an hour later than usual, since the daylight savings time shift hasn't happened yet.

We got a lovely new review in today from Romance at Heart Magazine.

"Line of Scrimmage is a really great book, especially if you like an action packed romance. There are a lot of things going on in this book, a whole lot of feeling, and everyone agrees there is no romance without feeling. THe problem is the difficulty for Susannah to admit her own feelings, and her part in thier split, just as it is hard for Ryan to cop to his own feelings of neglect and sorrow at the way Susannah moved away from him after they lost their first child at birth. Now he has the fight of his life on hand, and somehow, he has to convince Susannah to look at her own feelings, and come back to him. Marie writes with a light touch, but the book grips you from beginning to end. Detail of life in the NFL must have been meticulously researched, and the plot is well thought out and nicely executed. Line of Scrimmage has a lot of surprises for the reader, and one can't put the book down once started. If you want a hot read for a cool fall night, then Marie's book, Line of Scrimmage, is a definite must buy. It is available from Buy Sourcebook's Casablanca Romances, and from Amazon, so get a copy and enjoy this tale of romance with a very happy ending that will assuredly please and appease all!"

Read the full review.

I Had Good Intentions, Really I Did...

I was going to blog every day. I was going to find something, anything, from my usually mad cap life to share with my blog readers. Then I looked today and realized a whole month had gone by since I last blogged. How did that happen?? Life has a way of getting in the way of our good intentions, doesn't it?

So what have I been doing when I should've been blogging? Well, in October I did 10 radio shows to promote Line of Scrimmage, my brother turned 41 and my son turned 10—in the same week—I had an anniversary (no. 16), went to the New Jersey romance writer's conference, and tried to help my dad get his boat to its winter home up the bay. Suffice to say the boat adventure turned into an epic family cluster, but the boat did make it safely home...eventually. Oh yeah, I worked full time, ran two kids around, did my best to keep my house from turning into a Superfund site, and got back to writing somewhat regularly. Here's a post I did on the Casablanca Authors Blog about some of my recent adventures, complete with photos.

After my summer "off" from writing turned into a summer and most of an autumn, I was starting to worry that my writing bug had been cured. I'm still struggling more with this WIP than I ever have with any other, but I produced about 10,000 words this month, and we're entering the home stretch. To be honest, while I love these characters so much, I'm ready to be done with this book. It's really made me work for it. Every word. I've got an idea for a single-title contemporary that I really want to get going on, but I refuse to start one book until I finish the one that's killing me. :-) I hope the end result will be worth all the effort!

I promise to try harder to be a more regular blogger. I'll make it my November resolution!