On January 30th our Color Box story, “Caribbean Blues”, will be released by Torquere. We received the author copies, and it looks great! Both of us have agreed that the cover for it is our favorite so far – it so perfectly captures the pensiveness of Jon, one of the main characters, and the beauty of the sky and sea in the tropics. I have a particular fondness for this one, too, since the location in the story is based on a place I’ve been to, the wonderful UNEXSO (Under Water Explorer’s Society) in Port Lucaya, The Bahamas. I won’t give too much away, but if you love the ocean, and dolphins, and stories about falling in love in beautiful places, I think you’ll really like this story!

We have two more stories to add to our upcoming publication schedule!  First, on April 22, we will have “The Whole Kit and Kaboodle” published by Dreamspinner Press in the “Closet Capers” anthology. This is a collection of light hearted mystery stories. Our second story, released on May 8 by Torquere, will be “Fennel and Forgiveness”, a semi-sequel to “Bay Leaves and Bachelors”. 😀 So stay tuned!  We have something coming up almost every month!

So we currently have two submissions in and are waiting to hear back about whether they’ve been accepted or not. It’s still hard to fret with anticipation, even with the nearly uniform good news we’ve had over the last few months! You just never know whether something is going to fit the bill the way you anticipate, so it’s still a rather nail-biting experience.

We currently have a just completed story awaiting edits, as well, and I’m about to go off on vacation for a week, and take the novel nearest and dearest to our hearts with me for another round of edits. I’m really hoping that when we submit it we’ll get an acceptance, but again… you never really know!

Now that January is well underway, we should be finding out soon how well our stories have done in the previous quarter — and a big thank you to everyone who has bought our stories and supported our work, it means so much to us! We had 4 stories released last quarter — A Hundred Lonely Halloweens, Bay Leaves and Bachelors, On The Rocks, and Santa’s Naughty Helper — which we are thrilled about. We never dreamed just over a year ago that we’d have so much success (and luck!) when we decided to take the big step to go pro.

For the future, coming up at the end of this month is “Caribbean Blues”, a story about a man who learns that safety and comfort don’t always mean happiness. Then in February will be “Fortune’s Slings and Cupid’s Arrows”, which is a semi-sequel to “Santa’s Naughty Helper”. We are waiting to hear back on a submission to Dreamspinner for their “Closet Capers” collection, and any day now we hope to send off a sequel to “Bay Leaves” to Torquere to see if they like it. So we’re on pace with our plans, although we both have wished for more time to write.

We also have a couple of other short stories either in process or in the queue, and then we’re excitedly waiting for “Heart of Stone”, our first published novel, to be released by Dreamspinner in the summer. This is a Big Thing for us, because it will be in print, and that is something we’ve both been eager for since we started writing!  I know it’s probably silly in this electronic age, but I think in some ways having a book that can be held in your hands makes me, at least, feel more like a “real” author. 😉

Well it’s been quite a year for us, writing-wise, and overall I have to say that our first year as “pros” has been far more successful than we ever imagined! Although we’re still waiting to hear back on one story, we’ve managed to sell everything else we’ve submitted this year, which I think is a pretty good start! Some things have been more popular than others, but we achieved far more than we expected to, and we’re looking forward to the year to come!

I personally am very excited about our first novel, Heart of Stone, which will be coming out this summer. It’s different for us, genre-wise, it being a historical Western, but it was a lot of fun to write, and I am pleased with the results. 🙂 We never set out to write the next “big thing”, just tell good stories that people enjoy, something to make them happy and forget about their troubles for a while. In that, I hope we succeeded.

I wish everyone the most happy and prosperous of New Years, and may love and romance always be a part of your lives.