This is a HUGE thank you to everyone who bought Gift of Magic. It was #2 on the Barnes and Noble trade paperback list last week.

I don’t get too worked up over numbers, but they make my publisher happy, which makes me happy, and we sign more contracts which hopefully makes everyone else including us happy. Life is good!

(And #1 on that list was Nora Roberts–how surreal is that, to be on the same list with Nora Roberts??)

Here’s the final cover for All For You:

Aimee, who posts on the forum, has a great review blog going and was kind enough to ask me to answer a few questions for it. She’s supporting Penguin’s Read Pink program by offering a book giveaway, so please help me support her by checking out what she has going!

Click here for the details . . .

J from 7Scribes tossed a few questions my way a couple of weeks ago that I was happy to get to answer. Because short is not my natural writer mode, the interview is in two parts.

If you’re interested, go here.

It’s a great blog!

Penguin is doing a promotion for The Breast Cancer Research Foundation and while I don’t usually get involved in causes per se, this is something I think is really important.

I’ve had cancer invade the lives of both friends and family. Anything I can do to get women especially to take care of themselves, I will happily do. Our kids, husbands, family and friends need us well and happy!

Penguin has already donated a hefty sum to the foundation so you don’t have to buy anything, but the Read Pink books are loaded up in the back with information about how we can make a difference in this fight. If you decide your favorite coffee shop or other conspicuous location needs a dash of romance, buy one and leave it!

I have the feeling my local juice bar could use a copy of Nora’s latest!

Read Pink linky

Just an update. We’re working on figuring out what’s going on with older editions not being out for the Kindle. No news in this case is just no news, but I’ll get it fixed.

Thanks for being patient, all you kindlers!

Go be my friend!

All right, so I’m dragging myself into the 21st century. I signed up for a Facebook page. I’ll put a button up when I figure out how to do it.

Thanks to everyone who nudged me in this direction. I think.

PS. I am on FB — I haven’t posted anything yet and still haven’t had time to figure out how to put a cute FB button here. For the moment, if you want to be my FB friend, just search for me on facebook, I guess, then do the FB friend thing. My page has the One Magic Moment bookcover as the avatar thing. Do I need a web-keeper, or what?

Brenda Novak does an auction every year to benefit juvenile diabetes — actually, it might just be diabetes in general. I think it’s a very worthy cause and am happy to help in some small way to generate some cash for her.

The auction’s over at the end of the month, so I should have posted something about it long before now. Here’s the link to Brenda’s site.

I am really slightly appalled to see where the bidding has gone . . . I have managed to put together a few books, but I’m not sure my advice is worth that much. I’d rather give any modest insights I might or might not have away for free and make everyone happy, but since it’s for a good cause I’ll just gulp, think very kind thoughts about everyone who’s willing to support Brenda so generously, and keep my fingers crossed I can say something useful to the winner.

As for the rest of us–and just because I think we all need to hear this OFTEN–here’s my writing tip for the day: Write What You Love. Really. It was tempting to try to outguess the market when I first started, and I think it’s just as tempting now. But unless you’re writing something that speaks to your heart, it’s not going to speak to anyone else’s heart. The path might be a little rocky and take some patience, but I truly believe that no time spent writing is ever wasted. Even if all you do is write your books for yourself, the effort will be absolutely worth it.

I wrote Stardust of Yesterday because I wanted to do a sort of Ghost and Mrs. Muir meets Ivanhoe, but I wanted to do it the way I wanted to. I wrote it in spite of the market advice at the time that said no thank you to romances with a ghost as the hero, because I wanted a ghost as the hero. After 15 years, Gen might seem a little goofy and Kendrick a little over the top, but I still laugh when I think about her first sight of his sweatshirt with “Death to the Buchanans!” written on it. Periodically when the top is about to pop off my blender or we’re fighting with saranwrap, someone in the fam will mention Kendrick fondly. If Berkley had actually bought my first book (a vampire romance that I’d written to chase the market — yes, let’s all be extremely grateful my first beloved editor didn’t want THAT thing!), I would have been stuck on a path that wasn’t the right path for me and no one would ever have met a medieval knight turned modern earl and all his crazy relatives.

Write what you love and worry about selling it later.

I’ve disabled the comments temporarily (unless you’re a spammer then it’s permanently! yes, permanently!) for the journal.

I just want to know where those spammers are who’ll either give me a cut of that $20M that’s floating around in cyberspace, a new beach bod by June 1, or the new iPad 2.0 with the 64 gig so I can let my young’uns play angry birds on a great big screen . . .

In other news, I killed the blog because I’m a lousy blogger. I’m considering other less time-intensive things–maybe here in the journal.

And THANK YOU to everyone who took your hard-earned money and splashed out on John and Tess. OMM opened at #16 on the NYT list and #14 on Publishers Weekly. Editor and publisher are happy, I’m very grateful, and I hope you enjoyed the story.

And in even more random news, isn’t the OMM cover lovely? It’s the same artist who did Till There Was You and One Enchanted Evening (and With Every Breath, as well, now that I think about it). I think he really outdid himself on this latest effort.

Happy reading!