What's Around the Corner?

Spring! I'm thrilled to report that the season has arrived in Tennessee. It's more than the date on the calendar this week; the flowering trees and shrubs are in bloom here, along with "a crowd, a host of golden daffodils" (as the poet Wordsworth wrote). The grass is lush and green.

Spring is always a cause for celebration but this week more than ever (drum rolls, please). On Tuesday my agent called with a two-book offer from Harlequin Next! I'm still floating on air, and very glad to have the opportunity to write these stories.

The first is called THE GO-TO GIRL (working title), a real-life condition that has become common among women of this Sandwich Generation. My heroine not only cares about her son and his family, her clingy father, and even her ex-husband, who was once a compulsive gambler, but she has made a career of helping everyone else too as--you guessed it--The Go-To Girl, a personal shopper. She handles it all, somehow, sustained by her sense of humor, and I hope you'll root for her to find happiness again along the way. Should she take another chance with her sexy ex?

In the second book it's April in Paris, no, make that Montreal, and while trying to save her job my heroine is at last falling in love...with the wrong man. Can anything else go haywire? Don't be silly. Of course it can.

With more trouble brewing for my characters (I do love to torture them), I can't wait to get started on that first book. Should be fun. I'm already rubbing my hands together in glee. I absolutely love writing first draft.

This season, with notebook computer raring to go, I think I'll just mosey on out to the deck to work. As it turns out, there was a method to my madness--ordering the new laptop before I stopped to consider how to pay for it--but as Kevin Costner said of his baseball field, "Build it and they will come."

In May for a week's vacation in Mexico that laptop is definitely going with me. And about a gallon of sunscreen, SPF 36. The sun will be blistering by then but sublime. Just add the occasional nice cold pina colada and I'll be in paradise. Sounds to me like just the right, restful preparation for a June working trip to Cincinnati for a very special readers' event there, and then the RWA conference in July in Dallas. Talk about hot weather.

And that's what's next--literally and figuratively--from here.

Happy Spring to all.