This April feels so much better than last April already, doesn’t it?
This year, we were able to go to the store at the right time for tomato, pepper, eggplant, herb, and cucumber plants, and flowers. Already we have little tomatoes setting on the vines. My friends in the Midwest are out preparing the fields for planting, even though we all know there will be at least one more big snow before Memorial Day arrives. With most of my neighbors vaccinated, I’ve been able to gather and juice dozens of grapefruit off our community trees.
It feels like a real spring.
Last year, when quarantines and isolation were the watchwords for the season, I found myself struggling to stay busy. My novel, The Rebel Nun, was still months away from release by Blackstone. (It's out now.) My next novel was finished, and I was waiting for my agent to take it to market. It seemed too early to start on a new, ambitious project.
So, what did I do? What millions of American women do every day: I watched Hallmark movies. And as I watched, it was easy to discern the structure of the stories and the expectations of Hallmark movie fans. Of course, I decided to write my own.
I started out with three screenplays: Everyone Loves Zelda, Love Between the Vines, and Love on the Links. As you might imagine, the plots and settings of all involve dogs and two or three of what I consider the other three basic necessities of life: wine, books, and golf. Then over the fall, I turned them into novellas under an umbrella title, Romancing the Dog. Finally, just before Christmas, I decided to put them together in a paperback for a few friends and family.
Now, as summer fast approaches and summer reading beckons, I have put the novellas up on Kindle as three separate e-books ($1.99 each, and on Kindle Unlimited), and I have edited and published the paperback, which is available now on Amazon and from me. They are published under my romance pen name, Marjorie Pinkerton Miller. (If you want a paperback but don’t want to buy it from Amazon, email me, or use the contact page of my website, https://authormarjcharlier.com. It’s $15.00 plus about $2-3 shipping.)
They’re oh-so-not-serious, quick reads. I hope you’ll check them out.
And happy spring!
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