You all know that I adore Blaze. They’re fun, they’re sexy, and I just adore writing them. And, by the way, I’m really excited about my April release, Night After Night… Just got the cover and I love it! Sad for you, though, because that was a tease! I’m not going to show you the cover until next month. Bwahahahaha!

Now for the tell. For those of you who read my earlier blog about what to do about a lonely 11 year old cat? I made my decision. For Christmas, I got a new kitten. Her name is Ginger Snap and here’s a picture! A fluff ball with claws! Turns out, Ginger has two modes: psycho and dozing. Not asleep, just dozing. I just had to stop writing because she was going nuts trying to eat my feet. The older cat (named Tali) spent the first 2 weeks hissing at her, but I think last night they actually tried to play. Then again, it might have been that Ginger was playing, Tali was trying to kill. Hard to tell!

And now…the FREE BOOK! Yup, I’m offering the prequel novella to my new Bridal Favors series for free. ENJOY! Go to my website for all the information.  Here’s the back cover copy:

WILD CHILD – Lady Gwendolyn is playing with fire. She has a habit of wandering into illicit places with gentlemen just to see how well they kiss. It’s dangerous, but she can’t seem to stop herself and no one in her family is up to the task either.

THE QUIET ONE – Sir Edward Murray is the man who can tame her. He may be just a country baronet, in town for a spell then gone, but the vivacious Lady Gwen draws him as no other. So he devises a carefully plotted campaign to capture the lady as his own. But he never guesses the depth of the lady’s spirit or the power of her passion.

SECRETS! – Why is Lady Gwen risking herself and her reputation with her scandalous forays? When Edward uncovers the truth, he is caught in his own stratagems. She figures out his deceit and may never forgive him. Can Edward convince her that some things aren’t as wicked as they seem? And that love is the wildest ride of all?

Well, it’s just after Christmas but before New Years, so this is definitely the time when I feel fat, relaxed, and am trying NOT to join any family drama. Which means today’s blog is going to be really easy. (Apologies, btw, to people of other faiths. I have no idea how you celebrate the week before New Years, or if there is anything special going on beyond–hopefully–having time off)

 

During this week between Christmas and New Years, what is your favorite thing to do? Shopping is the fav of my kids. (Yes, I have girls. How did you guess?) Reading is my husband’s particular favorite next to watching sports. I love gabbing with my sisters and NOT getting assigned babysitting duties. (My sisters have LITTLE kids aged 9 month up to 6 years.) Much of my family loves games, games, and games. (Catan anyone?)

 

 

So…what’s your pick? One lucky commentor will get a copy of In Good Hands, by Kathy Lyons!

Hopefully you’re all recooperating from too much turkey and late night shopping. Let’s take an impromptu poll.

1. Turkey or ham?

2. Stuffing or dressing? (is there a difference?)

3. pumpkin or pecan?

4. early morning shopping or sleeping in?

5. Macy’s parade or Hallmark Christmas movies?

Everyone who does the quiz is entered to win a copy of In Good Hands!

I recently had the joy of exploring some of Europe with my daughter. She did a semester in Spain at the University of Salamanca and convinced me to join her at the end of it. We visited Barcelona and then London, and had the BEST TIME EVER! We laid out on the pristine Barcelona beach, wandered through a Gaudi house (fabulous!), and then in London saw THE LION KING (breathtaking) and visited Rigby & Peller, the corsettier of the Queen. In case you’re wondering, there was nothing–and I do mean NOTHING–about the bra I was wearing that was fitted correctly. In fact, my saleswoman at the end convinced me to throw it into the rubbish bin saying, “The item has served. Badly, but it has served, so we honor it as it passes.” Then she tossed it into the garbage…er rubbish. My daughter’s went in right behind mine.

In any event, it was a fabulous vacation, but then a horrible thing happened: we came home. OMG, I’m supposed to start working again? Really? Why? And excuse me, what do you mean no one comes into my room during the day and magically cleans for me?

I tried all sorts of excuses to delay the inevitable pile of work. I had jet lag and needed to catch up on my tv shows or the DVR would explode. I had to do laundry, see some of my friends, drink coffee and maybe think about exercising again. (My first racquetball match coming back was DISMAL!) But in the end, I ran out of excuses. Then I ran out of easy busy work. Then I ran into–quite literally–my calendar. It was on my desk, and I tripped over a pile of books and…well, okay I FELL on it.

And on it, marked in bright red, were my book deadlines. OMG, time to get back to work. Instead, I’ve written this blog. So help me out! How do you force yourself back into work mode? I’m not talking about an email here, a blog there. I mean serious, 4000 words a day WORKING. Any secret tips for getting back into the right mind frame? Cause I haven’t got it. Not yet, at least. There was a time I worked six days a week because I was that disciplined. Right now? I’m thinking about getting a mani/pedi.

Help me! And the best suggestion will win a copy of my latest blaze: IN GOOD HANDS by Kathy Lyons

My husband is out of town this week. This is a rare event. Usually, I am the one flying off to conferences and the like, but this time, I am at home feeding the cats as he goes off to do his job. No problem. I have plenty of work to do and I’m perfectly capable of surviving on my own for a week without him.

Or so I thought.

Here’s the problem: I work at home and set my own schedule. No, let me rephrase that. My children and my husband set my schedule and I just write according to the time allotted to me in their days. Except I’m empty nesting now (yeah!). And with my husband gone, I don’t have him waking me up in the morning as he bumps around getting his coffee, showering, etc. I don’t have him coming home and saying, what’s for dinner? Want to order pizza? (Answer: yes!) And even my cats don’t wake me up since we have an automatic feeder. (Yes, I’m THAT lazy).

So with my husband gone, NO ONE sets my schedule. I get up when I feel like it (and I rarely feel like it). I work when the mood strikes–later and later every day. And I forget to stop when I get going. Lunch at 4pm? Okay. Is it midnight already? I think I’ll get a snack.

I’ve gotten a ton of work done this week. (Finished my next Blaze!) But I am so off schedule that I don’t know what time it is, what DAY it is, or even what I’m supposed to be doing when. There is NO schedule at all, and it’s throwing me. I never actually STOP working, and I fear that could build into a problem. Frankly, the whole thing is just weird. I’ve never before been completely on my own with no responsibilities beyond I have a book due in X number of months. It’s freaking me out!

So now it’s your turn. Any advice? Or is the advice: go ahead and enjoy the freedom. And if I’m working at 2 am, then at least I’m working. One lucky commenter will win a copy of my latest blaze, In Good Hands, by Kathy Lyons.

I am a social butterfly.  I love meeting people.  I’ll talk to a guy in an elevator because he might just have a fascinating story to tell me.  Besides, I’m standing in the elevator not doing anything, why not chat with the person standing next to me?  So you might imagine that conferences are like crack to me.  I’m on a social high that lasts me for weeks afterwards.  OMG, I love talking to new people!!!

So why is it that all I seem to do at conferences is EAT?  There’s coffee at Starbucks, because God knows I can’t function without that.  And I’ll have coffee meetings because I’m certainly not the only one who needs the caffeine hit and so that’s usually the first meeting of the day.  Then I go from Starbucks to breakfast, supplied with our conference ticket.  That’s continental breakfast and when I sit down with perfect strangers to talk books.  Heaven!  But I also eat a muffin and another coffee while I’m sitting there.  You can’t chat without something in your hand.

Then there’s the 11:00 meeting with agent or editor or web designer.  Not to mention the video person or PR somebody or the other authors with whom you’re writing a continuity.  Gotta hang with them.  And you can bet someone brings a snack.  It’s always a great time for chocolate or nachos.  Don’t care which.

Then there’s conference lunch to meet more new people.  Afternoon party with hors d’oeuvres, then dinner with friends before evening parties with booze and dessert.  And that’s only the first day.  Can you imagine how huge I feel by the end of a four day conference?  Especially if conference is in a fabulous city like NYC.  I mean, could you possibly go to a Manhattan restaurant with your editor and NOT eat something awesome?  Even though you’ve just come from cookies and coffee with your best friends?

So I end up feeling like I’ve just eaten my way through the conference.  Yes, I have a stack of meeting notes and things I plan to do.  But I’ve also just eaten non-stop for 4 days.  OMG, I feel huge!

Anybody else have this problem?  And while you sit down to tell me all about it, I’ll grab another muffin. Do you eat through all of your travels? (The day this blog goes live, I’ll be traveling to New York and beginning my foodfest. So, please comment but I may be late with mine depending on when the plane lands.)

I have discovered lately that I am a slave to my cat. And (here’s the shocker) perhaps that’s not so bad a thing. Here’s why.

Yesterday, I had a phenomenal writing day. I wrote 17 pages. Why? Not because I was inspired. Heck no! It was because my cat decided to sit on my lap and stretch her chin across my forearm. I thought it was rather endearing and sweet, so I let her stay as I

continued to type. Until that moment when I would usually stop typing and get up to wander about the house, check email, or do something else for a bit. Oops. Can’t do that with a cat on my forearm. And, btw, she has claws, so if I shifted too much, she dug them in. Not deep. She knows better. It was simply an “I’m sleeping, don’t bother me” message.

So I had a choice. I could dislodge her completely or keep writing. I decided to keep writing. This went on for hours and by the end of the day, I had 17 pages. Woo hoo! Thank you cat!

On the not so helpful level, the same thing happened a few nights ago when I was watching tv. Again I was faced with the choice of dislodging her to go to bed or just hanging out and watching more tv. Result: I stayed up way too late watching tv that wasn’t worth my time.

So here is the inescapable conclusion: I am a slave to my cat. If she sleeps on me, I am frozen in place unable to switch gears. This is completely ridiculous, I know. And yet the situation persists. Anyone else out there a slave to your pet? Please tell me I’m not alone! And some lucky commentor will get a copy of my latest Blaze: In Good Hands by Kathy Lyons.

I’m just back from vacation which was wonderful and a much needed break after the Romantic Times convention. (It was fabulous, BTW). But I came home to what I’m going to call Life on Slow. I have a book due, but not for months and months. I’ll get back to it, but I also need to start thinking about my next books. I need to clean the house, find the desk underneath all the papers, and maybe even clean out old clothes from my closet. Frankly, there are piles in my bedroom that I don’t really want to see, but it needs to be sorted out sometime, hopefully by me and not my heirs. I’m writing comic book scripts, so I ought to be thinking about those. It’s a whole other way of thinking, so that will be a challenge. Plus, I’ve got contest entries to read and judge for my local RWA chapter.

Stuff to do. Stuff to throw out. Stuff to finally take care of.

Who wants to do that? What am I really doing? Playing racquetball–my knee is so swollen it no longer fits comfortably inside my pants. Playing pogo.com – I’m up to 24 million tokens (and yeah, they’re relatively useless). And eating crap – do you know how absolutely YUMMY barbecue potato chips are????

Am I getting any cleaning done? Well, I just did the dishes because I ran out of clean bowls for my guacamole dip. Beyond that…no. Am I thinking of new story ideas? Well, always, but none of them in enough detail to do anything with. Am I even reading books? Um, yes. Some. But mostly, I’m just wasting time. Which is…well, a big fat waste.

So, anybody else struggle with life on slow? Because I seem to be at zero or 1000 mph. Life on slow translates to zero with the added minus that I’m not really enjoying myself. I mean, yeah, the potato chips taste great going in, but then I just feel sick. If I’m going to do NOTHING, then at least I ought to do NOTHING in ARUBA. *sigh*

Help me friends! Give me your strategies for getting off my increasingly large ass. One lucky commentor will win In Good Hands by Kathy Lyons!

On the day this blog goes live, I’ll be flying out to California.  I’m going to the Romantic Times convention in Los Angeles, but that won’t start until April 6.   I’m flying out early to visit family including a new nephew!  (I gotta say, I love being an aunt.  I get to bring gifts, be the cool adult, and then give them back when the kids become annoying!  My guess is it’s a lot like being a grandmother!)

Anyway, some of you may know Cindy Dees.  She doesn’t write for Blaze, but she’s in a lot of the other category lines.  She does incredible work.  A lot in military romance (aka Suzanne Brockmann before she went single title) but also a bunch of other stuff.  She even won a Rita last year!  Here’s her latest book, btw.

She and I were talking about RT, and she has decided not to go this year.  There were many factors (time, family, deadline, etc) but we started talking about whether RT was the best conference for category readers.  Certainly there have been times when I’ve thought that RT was dominated by the small press.  Other times I thought the major presses were everywhere!  I’ve been going for ten+ years, so I’ve seen a lot of changes over the years.  Ten years ago, I hadn’t even heard of Ellora’s Cave!

But RT has always (as far as I can remember) had a few workshops on category books.  Carina Press (Harlequin’s e-imprint) was launched at RT.  This year will include “Lights, Camera, Action, the Series Romance Way.”  And let’s not forget that I will be there as Kathy Lyons (not just Jade Lee).

So now here’s my question to you: are you going to RT?  (If you are, make sure to find me!  I have kitch for anyone who tells me they love my work!  And even for those who say they can’t wait to read my work!)  And do you think RT does enough to support us category readers/writers?  One lucky commenter will get a copy of my latest IN GOOD HANDS, by Kathy Lyons.

March is here! March is here! Well okay, so it’s not really here. It’s almost here. But in theworld of publishing, March books are hitting the shelves already. And in the marvelous world of Harlequin Blaze, subscribers have already gotten my March Blaze, In Good Hands by Kathy Lyons. And, to make this month extra knuckle-biting, my latest Jade Lee book, Wicked Seduction hits the shelves too. Now, I have to say, I love Wicked Seduction because I’ve wanted to do a pirate comes home book forever! And the hero is extra yummy (he even got an RT KISS award). But this is a Blaze blog, so I’ll tell you about In Good Hands. And lest you think I’m all about shameless promotion, I’m gonna talk about the reason I wrote the book.

So…why did I write In Good Hands? Because I know this woman. She had a lucrative career as an Orthopaedist. Well respected, did a ton of research, and…well, that research led her into the wild, weird world of energy healing. After decades of more research, she ended up leaving her practice to devote her considerable brain to energy healing work. In her words, Western medicine doesn’t get the whole picture. In some ways, it doesn’t even get close.

Far from being a condemnation of modern medicine, her example gives me great hope. We need more people like her in medical fields, constantly exploring wherever their research takes them. Even if it’s into energy healing. So, since this woman is my inspiration, I ended up writing a book based on that concept.

Now, don’t be afraid. I don’t go deep into medicine or the energy aspects that (incidentally) I have been studying for about a decade. In Good Hands is a romance story and a Blaze. My heroine is a doctor turned energy healer and my hero has a big problem that western medicine hasn’t helped: very high blood pressure. They wander through a variety of different energy healing traditions in search for a cure with hilarious results. It’s funny and it’s hot, and I had a blast writing it!

So, everyone, tell if you’ve experimented in the wacky world of the woo woo! One lucky commentor will get a copy of In Good Hands. (Or a copy of Wicked Seduction if you prefer!) And, btw, if you want to learn more about In Good Hands, here’s a link to my website. And for those who like pirates coming home, here’s the link for Wicked Seduction.