A snippet from what I’m working on right now. Working title: A Man for Grace. (What role does loneliness play in forming new relationships? I wonder about this…)

Being lonely sucks. 

A new tenant would take over Emily’s bookstore any day now. Workmen had been in there for the past couple of weeks, stripping out the bookshelves, dry walling, painting, getting it ready for its new occupant. All of which made her feel worse.

Admit it Grace Whitby you’re flat-out lonely.

That was all she could think to call her state of blue. Lately it was as if her chest had been hollowed out and her heart light set on dim.

Both of her best friends were married and gone. Well, not gone, gone, but off Salt Spring Island more than they were on it these days, and the Island, small to begin with, was positively claustrophobic without them.

…

Odd how you took your friends for granted, when they were close by or a local phone call away. Friends filled in all the fissures and cracks in your life, smoothed them over. Those cracks yawned like bottomless chasms when there was no laughter, lunches, and woman-talk to help you cover them up.

…

Still… Life might not be perfect, but it was good. She had no right to complain.

Maybe she should stop dreaming about him—her very own perfect man. Just because Emily and Lynn had won the male lottery didn’t mean she’d have the next winning ticket. She needed to get real and stop feeling gloomy and down about something she had no control over.

But that stop dreaming thing? She had trouble with that. Dreams kept her motor going, kept her up and doing, kept a smile on her face on those days when what she really wanted to do was pull the covers over her head and stay in bed.

Dreams were her only antidote to this…thick gray soul-creep she’d been feeling lately. Stop dreaming, you stop living.

Trouble was sometimes you were lonely even in your dreams.

_______________________________

This book will be the third book in my Salt Spring Island Friends trilogy. (Of course I have to finish it first!) The first was Emily’s story, California Man. The second was Lynn’s, Man for the Morning.  Both are on Amazon.

http://amzn.to/Lgyz0m

 

 

Love, a one-syllable word heavy as a heartbeat …

Our long history of ambivalence towards love is rooted in the necessary vulnerability and uncontrolled surrender true love requires:

We think of it as a sort of traffic accident of the heart. It is an emotion that scares us more than cruelty, more than violence, more than hatred. We allow ourselves to be foiled by the vagueness of the word. After all, love requires the utmost vulnerability. We equip someone with freshly sharpened knives; strip naked; then invite him to stand close. What could be scarier?

From Diane Ackerman’s amazing: A Natural History of Love.

IN GOOD HANDS

A sun-drenched island. A secluded estate. A reluctant promise. Ten days. A love story between a man and a woman who have good reason to distrust one another.

Esme Shane, a strong, self-assured woman, once a sex therapist now a book illustrator. Dane McCoy, a magnetic, secretive man, once a billionaire businessman now…

An instant and incendiary attraction.

An attraction easy to satisfy—impossible to contain.

Available on Amazon: http://

amzn.to/Yquqvm

Gandhi says: Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.

I need to find this place!

 

New short romance up on Amazon—not my usual style of cover.

When I saw this character, I just knew it was Ginger, my strong-willed, determined heroine. Like Ginger, she’s striding confidently toward her future—with what she wants on the deepest level emblazoned on her shirt for all to see.

It should be noted that in the story, Ginger had to learn a few things—get a new attitude—before she earned this t-shirt. :-)

The book is here:  http://amzn.to/XIglvu

“Laughter is the shortest distance between two people.” Victor Borge