Love Is In The Air

That’s the name of the Romance Authors’ Tea in which I’ll be participating on Saturday, September 29, from 2-4 PM at the Cerritos Library, in Southern California.  My fellow romance authors who’ll be there are Tanya Hanson, Jennifer Haymore, Charlene Sands and Patricia Thayer.

I’m going to moderate a panel with all of us on it, and we’ll be discussing our romance novels, how we write, what we write, and more.  I’ve been putting together a list of questions and soliciting ideas from my fellow authors. 

Some of the questions I’m considering are about the writing process, how we choose what to write, what our characters are like.  Some are about what we like to see in romances, and what we don’t like to see.  And others are about the publishing process.

Of course we want to talk about what our audience wants to hear.  Do you have any suggestions?  What would you like to ask a panel of romance authors?

And if you’re in the Southern California area, why don’t you join us?  It promises to be a fun event.  Thanks to my split personality of writing both mysteries and romances, I attended a mystery writers’ luncheon at the Cerritos Library earlier this year called Mystery on the Menu-- and it was great!

The Present and Past in Writing

Let me start with the present. I’ve got two really fun events coming up in the near future.

The nearest is Mystery on the Menu, a luncheon followed by panels at the Cerritos Library. It’s this Saturday, January 28. The cast of characters--well, writers--has been changing but it promises to be a really fun event. Check it out at the Mysterious Galaxy website: www.mystgalaxy.com/event/mystery-menu-cerritos-library-0128

Next month is Passion and Prose. It’ll be at the Westin Long Beach hotel on Saturday, February 25. The website (www.passionandprose.org) says, “Please join bestselling authors Meg Cabot, Christina Dodd, Gail Carriger, and 50 other fabulous romance authors...” I’m one of those 50 other fabulous romance authors!

Then there’s the past.

We’re spoiled, these days, with being able to research nearly everything on the Internet. It’s so easy, when I’m writing, to stop for only a few minutes and look up something I need for my story.

But, sadly, not everything is there.

I’ve been thinking about the past this week partly because my husband was running some old 8mm films about his family. He showed one movie that was shot in Miami in the early 1950s that had a picture of an old hotel called the Cromwell. I dashed over to my computer to Google it. Yes, it was there--sort of--but the best I could find was an old photo of it for sale on EBay. Apparently, it doesn’t exist any more.

That reminded me of trying to look up the delicatessen owned by my grandparents for years in downtown Pittsburgh. They sold it to someone who kept it up under the same name for several years before it was closed: Richest’s Restaurant. I’ve Googled it at different times, and the best I can find is a few blogs or articles where people reminisce about some of their favorite restaurants that aren’t there any longer.

There is a tad of information online about my relatives who once owned Richest’s--mostly just birth and death data. I’m sure the reason why this is on my mind so much today is that today would have been my beloved uncle Gary Richest’s birthday, but he’s no longer with us.

And there’s more that hasn’t been lost. Some additional things from our families’ pasts do show up on the Internet. Our older son was recently doing some research on ancestry on his dad’s side, and because those particular relatives were notable in history there was apparently quite a bit about them online.

I used to write time travel romances. I’ve also written a suspense novel loosely based on my family history and, yes, Richest’s Restaurant. The time travel romances were published but the suspense novel wasn’t. These days, I’m writing about the present and have gotten away from the past. But it’s still there talking to me, perhaps telling me to resurrect the time travel romances and republish them in e-format one of these days. And maybe I’ll even try the suspenseful version of family history.

What’s your favorite upcoming event? And have you found everything about the past that you’ve looked up on the Internet?