We all have our favorite genres, but it can be very rewarding to branch out and read outside our comfort zones. REDEMPTION SONG is my most emotional book to date, and is receiving rave reviews from readers. It is also my first new release in more than six months. If you read and love my romances, I want to challenge you to follow me into a new genre, where I promise to provide you the same voice, the same rich sense of place and all the sincerity of emotion I have always given you in a story. Never have I taken a character from such depths of despair to such great heights. If you’ve never read my Women’s Fiction books before, this is the one I hope you’ll start with.
Just so you have multiple chances to see if this is your kind of reading, I’m giving away an excerpt, as well as a prequel short story called REPRISAL that takes place before REDEMPTION SONG begins. And finally, THE GIRL WHO STAYED is a Bookbub featured book today, so grab it while you can!
Although I try hard not to post about politics these days (more often than not, it leaves me with heart palpitations), I think it’s important that folks with hearts and minds open them up, and speak. I’ve told this story before, but I’m going to tell it again.
If you recognize the title of this post, you know these poignant words aren’t mine; they belong to Nobel Peace Prize winner Martin Luther King Jr., one of my heroes. He also said, “In the end, we will remember, not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends”; and “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”
Today, I thought hard about what to say. “Nothing” was on that list, since essentially, my one opinion isn’t worth all that much by itself. But I cannot be a silent friend, so here’s my story: When I was a little girl — about 6 — we lived in San Pedro California. While you’d think Southern California would be the last place you’d find racial tensions against Spanish speaking people, unfortunately, you’d be wrong.
For those of you who know me, you know I was born in Spain to a Spanish mother. I spoke Spanish only until I was 5 years old. That first year in San Pedro we spent in terror, with my father in Vietnam and my diminutive mother in charge of three children under the age of 6. Our neighbor, you see, had decided my mother was a “dirty Mexican” and this woman terrorized us mercilessly. She put non-disposable diapers down our drainpipes (disposables didn’t exist then), flooding our home and the homes of others. She called social services on my mom countless times (for what, I have no idea, but they stopped coming, because every time they came, our home was spotless and her children were happy). Her nearly adult son would stand outside our patio in the evenings, and you could see his black dirty boots beneath our curtains. He’d stand there for hours, making us afraid.
The list of perpetrations is extensive, and I went to bed every night with my mom rehearsing a list of things I should do if “someone broke in” during the night. My mother understood very little English, and I was the only one with any English words in my lexicon. So, I slept with mom in her bed, beneath a window that was barely big enough for a child to crawl through.
“If someone breaks in,” she’d say (I’m paraphrasing, because she spoke to me in Spanish), “go out the window, go to the neighbor’s house across the street. Tell her to call the police. Do you remember what I said? Tell me what you will do.”
I remember this, night after night. The fear of having my siblings and mother all depending on me — a little slip of nothing — and me not able to help them, gave me night terrors for years thereafter.
One day, out in our front yard, I watched this bruiser of a woman kick my mom in the back. Can you imagine what that felt like? The woman who is your protector against the world — your very world itself — lying on the ground at the mercy of a screaming, racist monster? At the age of six?
I know what that feels like, and 50 years later, the memory leaves me with a sick feeling in the pit of my gut.
Eventually, people began to see what was going on and my father called from overseas to threaten murder if the situation wasn’t rectified. My grandmother, who lived in Chicago, called the police.
The Navy shipped these people to the Philippines (fitting), but while they were packing, my mother quietly made a pot of coffee and took it next door to offer it to the neighbor. I went with her, because, of course, it was my instinct to protect her.
The woman asked, “After everything, you’re offering me coffee?” My mother answered, “You probably don’t have time to make any yourself.”
This is what I recall: the astonished look on that woman’s face. I don’t think she accepted my mom’s coffee, but I don’t remember, because that’s not what mattered most to me that day. I only remember that my tiny mother was a giant in my eyes. Even after all that woman had done to her, to us, it was her act of kindness that gave me my moral compass.
So, today, this is what I have to say: It is far braver, far more powerful to answer hate with love. If you remain silent, you are taking sides. If you cast a vote for hatred, misogyny, racism and bigotry, you are a hater, misogynist, racist and bigot. It’s that simple. This is no time for hate, my friends. This is a time for love, and Martin Luther King Jr. also reminds us this, “‘An eye for an eye’ leaves everybody blind. The time is always right to do the right thing.” Let’s all do the right thing now. Tip the scales with love. That’s the only way we’re going to win.
Essentially, I’m about to strip down and stand naked and vulnerable in the middle of the road. But I’m going to do it anyway, because after yesterday’s news, I have something to say:
I grew up in what I believed to be a normal American military household. My father achieved the highest rank available to noncommissioned officers in the Navy. He was a Master Chief Petty Officer, a veteran who served in Vietnam, and to say he was respected by his peers is an understatement. He loved his job and only retired because of an accident that left him in a wheelchair for 6 months, never again able to scale the decks of ships. He received an honorable discharge—a release from his duties that heralded a bad era for my family.
At one point, my father was my idol. He was tall, dark and handsome, and oh, so smart. The fact that he wasn’t really a fan of MINE didn’t bother me so much as it did later. Enough to say he was the man in charge, and he ran our household under many of the same principles he’d learned in the military.
Until the age of 12, I didn’t make many close friends. We traveled a lot, but that’s the year my family settled in Charleston, South Carolina, newly arrived after a 5-year stint at a communications base in Ponce, Puerto Rico. After my father retired, he took a job locally, but still worked for the military as a civilian. My Spanish mother learned to drive. We—me and my brothers and sister—came out of our shells and began to make friends. During these years, my father received top-secret clearance for his analytics work for the military. I remember “those men” who came knocking on all our neighbors’ doors, asking questions. And for a while, we were a “normal” American family… until one day… we weren’t.
I’ll spare you dirty details, but I will say I am a survivor. I survived what turned out to be the most complicated and harrowing years of my life—hard years that shaped my adult life and gave me the aptitude to bleed for my writing in a way I wouldn’t have been able to otherwise. But, aside from telling you my father was a closet alcoholic, and extremely heavy handed, I won’t say much else, because much of our story isn’t only mine to tell. However, his fall from grace was one we ALL took with him—every member of my family. We became collateral damage in a war fought beneath our own roof.
I wasn’t always the mouthy, rebellious daughter I turned out to be. But with every smack of my father’s fist, I became that person, standing higher and stronger, fueled by righteous anger. One thing’s for sure, his military style of parenting didn’t work where I was concerned. The more he tried to beat me into submission (sometimes literally and sometimes verbally), the more I fought and railed against him.
But that part of my story isn’t unique, is it? Teenagers are defiant, infuriating beings. Whether I did, or whether I didn’t have a right to be as I was, isn’t the point I’m trying to make. The point is that life happens to us all.
One day, I was alone in my house with my dad—this man who’d achieved such high military honor. Silver haired and depressed, he sat on his bed with a gun in his hand… cleaning it. This wasn’t a gun he’d procured illegally. It was his gun. He pulled it apart, piece by piece and took his rag to every part until it shone.
I walked by his room, saw what he was doing and kept on walking, with prickles riding down my spine. I walked into my bedroom and sat on my bed, and felt so much turmoil. Why was his gun out? He certainly had all the right credentials to own one, but I hadn’t seen that gun in a while, and now, after a systemic failure of our family, I was terrified of the reason he was drawn to it. So there I sat, worrying about him, and after a while, I heard him begin to cry. All the while, he sat piecing his gun back together…
Should I leave the house? I wondered.
My relationship with him was by far the most tumultuous. As his eldest child, I bore the brunt of much of his fury. If my siblings didn’t tow the line, I was to blame. By the same token, I felt an underlying sense of respect from him, for me, although not perhaps evident in his everyday treatment of me. Responsibility kept me rooted to the spot.
That day, seated alone in his room, with his gun, he called my name, and I wanted not to answer… but I did. I stood in the door of his room, blinking away tears in my own eyes as my silver-haired father wept over his gun. Truthfully, I don’t remember what he said. His mouth was moving, but words were incomprehensible… until he lifted the gun, pointed it at me, and said, “Do you know how easy it would be for me to pull the trigger? Put an end to it all?”
But that gun was pointed at ME. My heart slammed into my ribs. I was 15.
I stood, looking into the small barrel of my father’s gun, realizing he could do exactly as he said. He wasn’t the type for idle threats. If he said something, he followed through, and he never minced words.
With that gun pointed at me across a shrinking room, I thought about what to do. Exactly where I got the strength to say or do what I did, I don’t know, except, that in many ways I am my father’s daughter. I looked at him straight in the eyes and said, “You’re not the kind of man who shoots an innocent person in the back—your own daughter. So, I’m going to walk away, and if you shoot me, you’ll have to live with that.” And that’s what I did. I turned my back on his gun and returned to my room. I sat on my bed and cried—and worried, because I half expected my father to put his gun to his head.
If you read The Girl Who Stayed, yes, I borrowed this scene for that book, and 40 years later, I sobbed as I wrote it, because that’s how deeply affected I was.
But wait? What’s this got to do with yesterday’s news? Well, we’ve had yet another shooting, but that’s not really “yesterday’s news” anymore, is it, because this is happening more and more, and becoming firmly entrenched in our daily lives. We can’t even feel comfortable going to church, a movie, school, or a concert, without fear of some crazy person pulling out his gun.
So, let me, once again, be like my father, and not mince words:
People change throughout their lives. Just because they once qualified to own and operate a gun–EVEN if they had an entire team of “men in black” checking to give them clearance–doesn’t mean they are owed that right for life.
Just because they served in the military DOES NOT mean they are owed the right to own a gun.
Guns in the home DO NOT make those who live beneath the same roof feel safe. I did NOT feel safe, and to this day, I shy away from people who feel the need to own guns. You might have the license to own one, but I have a right not to be around you, and so the next time you feel the need to open carry, think about the fact that you are hurting me, despite that you may never use your gun in my presence, because every time I see YOUR gun, I will think about the time my father nearly killed me, and if you carry it openly anyway, you’re no one I want to know.
Good men go bad. Good women go bad. Shit happens. Life gets crazy; people should have to periodically requalify to own a gun, if they must.
I’ll end this by saying I do not advocate taking away people’s guns. All we’re—me and people like me—are asking for is gun control, stricter qualifications and periodic testing to be sure mentally ill people to not have access to them, and to disallow the use of automatic weapons (why are these needed anyway? The mass extinction of human life is the only purpose these weapons have).
Eventually, I made friends with my father, but he was a sad, broken man, who, although once might have qualified to own a gun, in the end, should not have had access to one. The fact that he did not use it that day is not the bar by which this truth should be judged. By grace alone, I am not a statistic, but how many others walk in my shoes? I don’t know. But I do know this. Those who were not spared by grace are now a growing list… one I’d like to end. Come on people, let’s vote for gun control. Please.
I have been a published author since 1989, although my first book didn’t hit the shelves until 1992. That’s 28 and 25 years, respectively. Amazingly, some of you have been reading me for as long as I’ve been published, and for your support, I thank you, immensely. (You know who you are!) That kind of support is incredibly rare, and I can’t tell you how much you mean to me.
My sixth book for Avon Books, THE MACKINNON’S BRIDE, was published in 1996, so technically, Ian and Page’s story has reached the legal drinking age-woot!. Despite that it’s not a flesh and blood child of mine, my books are in a sense my children. I put so much love into their creation, and their birth dates are nonetheless miracles to me–all of them, but none so much as THE MACKINNON’S BRIDE.
In its conception, THE MACKINNON’S BRIDE was simply intended to be a story about a man and a woman, with timeless themes I felt must span the ages—love, abandonment, grief, fear, betrayal and vengeance. It was the second of my books to be published under a brand-new imprint called Avon Romantic Treasures, an imprint my fifth book, Once Upon a Kiss was fortunate enough to launch. (more…)
What am I? people so often ask. Really, as a first-generation American, it’s a question I’ve gotten too often. I’ll be honest: I generally find it annoying. My answer to people seeking to hear about my nationality, is this: I’m American. Even more salient a point: I’m a human being. I occupy the same earth you do, and its wellbeing affects us all.
Similarly, for those wanting to know whether I consider myself Indie or Trad, I generally feel the same way: Why are we segregating ourselves? We are all writers and authors. Why do we need labels? Why do we need to draw lines in the sand?
I’ve been published now for going on 28 years, which means that my publishing roots are 100 percent Trad. But I don’t consider myself either Indie or Trad. If you really need a label, the term Hybrid author most applies to me, but I dislike the word as well, because it’s just another label.
The next question I sometimes get, is: Why did you go Indie? Were you unhappy with Trad? People seem to expect an outcry. It ain’t comin’ folks. Okay, sure, I found frustrations. But I also learned a lot, and I have truly loved all my editors (I was lucky that way), and learned a lot from them. I wouldn’t trade the experience, and, yet, I have no regrets about my current path. The great news for writers is that there are more great choices available to writers than ever before.
Essentially, I don’t believe there is any one right path for an author to take and under the right circumstances traditional publishing is still a fabulous option. For me, I came to a point in the late nineties that I no longer enjoyed what I was writing. That, and life got in the way, so I took a hiatus from writing. When I came back to the industry, it was a different world, and I was determined to love writing again. For me that meant telling the stories I most wanted to tell and that was easier to do as an indie author.
In the simplest terms, I chose indie when I returned, because I’m a control freak. (It’s true; just ask my husband.) I love being a part of every aspect of publishing. But there was always a certain part of this business that we were not privy to, and I hated being in the dark. I love, for example, my current relationships with vendors, and feel extremely fortunate to be able to send an email to them and say, hey, this is working well, but how can I make it better? I’m thrilled to be able to cultivate these relationships. I also love being able to control which cover I use where, and I love having the ability to grow my presence in audio and foreign markets.
All that said, I have come full circle to write for Lou Aronica, whom I first met during my stint at Avon Books. Lou is a fabulous editor/publisher/writer, and while he’s also someone I consider to be a dear friend, he’s a fair-minded business partner who has a vision of a publishing experience that is not divisive in its makeup. It encapsulates the industry as a whole, and works symbiotically to promote a healthy marketplace and a better reading experience for readers. What does that mean? Well, more simply put, we’re all in this together, folks: Indie, Hybrid, Trad. Therefore, we should make no decisions that would devalue ourselves OR our fellow writers, or undermine the industry we hope to keep thriving well past our own lifetimes. As I determined upon coming back from my hiatus, I want to love what I’m writing, I want my readers to love what I’m writing, and I want to be doing this for a very long time.
At the risk of sounding like a broken record, since we are all in this together, we should start acting like it. Amazon is not our enemy. Trad publishing is not our enemy. Amazon is a business, and its greatest concerns are its customers and its bottom line. If they can help us out in the meantime, great. But they are not necessarily our allies. Neither are traditional publishers. They too are a business, and they, like Amazon are concerned with their bottom line. Some of them realize that nurturing their authors is good for their bottom line, and some of them haven’t figured this out yet. It’s up to us to do the research to determine where we best fit. But, I do believe this: We do have potential allies in this business, and they are also our competition. Only the day we wake up and realize we are the masters of our own fates, and it’s not our competition that will break us, it’s the decisions we make, we’ll be better suited for success. Write the best book you can. Take the path that will suit you best. Then build up your fellow authors and the market itself rather than tear it down.
This blog isn’t necessarily speaking to everyone. Some of us seem to get the principle of building up our friends and peers (where possible), instead of tearing them down, because as a whole we offer more to the world together. Does that mean you won’t sometimes be overshadowed by someone who is temporarily shining brighter? No. Does it mean we are assured a place in a very competitive market? No. But the answer to these questions is still “no” if you decide to take a scorched earth policy and firebomb the world to get ahead. Because, hey there, Mr. or Mrs. Nuclear, guess what? You might shine for 15 minutes, but you’ve created an environment where your star will cease to shine at some point, and then what?
It’s time for writers in this industry to stop segregating ourselves, and start bolstering each other. I love this quote from George R. R. Martin’s Game of Thrones (Yes, I’m a GoT freak, and you knew it would come up eventually), “when the cold winds blow the lone wolf dies and the pack survives.”
I wrote this post because, in the wake of the latest RWA controversy, with rumors that this person resigned and that person resigned because of Indies, and, on the other side of the fence, “Trad authors know nothing” (like Jon Snow), and Indie is the way to go. [Notice significant eye roll here] To me, this all sounds no different than other divisive propaganda. So, let’s all get back to loving the craft, AND the industry, because it is the ultimate symbiotic relationship.
You really wanna know what I am? I’m an author, who is fortunate enough to have lived long enough to write under many circumstances. I’ve written for Avon Books, Harlequin, Kensington, and now for The Story Plant, and I’m so grateful for each of these experiences. I also continue to write under my own imprint, because, well, I can, and because my readers seem to want me to. But one thing I can promise at this point in my life, and hopefully it’s a promise my readers will take to heart. I will write as long as I love it, and I will write with passion, from the heart. And maybe, if I’m lucky, and I feel that way at 90, maybe I’ll still be writing the stories you want to read.
Photo credit: Stolen from Glynnis Campbell, whom I met in Dallas Texas, and with whom I shared an agent. Glynnis and I are still friends, and bolster each other when we can. It’s been a great ride, Glynnis!
„Magie von Anfang an.“—InD'Tale ReviewsBegeben Sie sich auf eine Reise in das magische, mittelalterliche Schottland zurück in die Zeit der Pikten, die in Gefahr sind aus den Geschichtsbüchern zu verschwinden, und in die Zeit, in der Schottland sich aus der Asche des Verrats als Nation erhebt...
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We all have our favorite genres, but it can be very rewarding to branch out and read outside our comfort zones. REDEMPTION SONG is my most emotional book to date, and is receiving rave reviews from readers. It is also my first new release in more than six months. If you read and love my romances, I want to challenge you to follow me into a new genre, where I promise to provide you the same voice, the same rich sense of place and all the sincerity of emotion I have always given you in a story. Never have I taken a character from such depths of despair to such great heights. If you’ve never read my Women’s Fiction books before, this is the one I hope you’ll start with.
Although I try hard not to post about politics these days (more often than not, it leaves me with heart palpitations), I think it’s important that folks with hearts and minds open them up, and speak. I’ve told this story before, but I’m going to tell it again.
