Who’s Ready for a Romance Anthology?

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I have certainly dropped several balls in keeping everyone updated on my participation in the upcoming Love in the Lowcountry anthology. (Can I blame the ducks that refuse to stay in rows? I’m not sure all of them are even mine at this point.)

Anyway, y’all may remember my sadness at not being able to participate in this anthology because I just could NOT wrap my head around the story I wanted to tell. The draft just wasn’t drafting. But the amazing Powers That Be gave me extension after extension and granted me all the grace in the world. FINALLY, I was able to get the draft done.

Now, several months and rounds of critiques and edits later, we are only weeks away from the release of LOVE IN THE LOWCOUNTRY: A VACATIONS COLLECTION.

The release date is officially March 7th, but logistics of the release are still a little in flux. As soon as I have finalized details and preorder info, I will share it.

In the meantime, we are still welcoming ARC readers, so if you’re interested, you can sign up here.

Now to the fun part…. some details on my story!

Forever After at the Ever Rest Inn

Disillusioned with his career and reeling from a breakup, Max Andersen heads to a Lowcountry bed and breakfast near Georgetown, South Carolina, for time away to relax and determine the next steps in his life.

The Ever Rest Inn isn’t only a bed and breakfast. It’s Vivian Ravanelle’s family legacy. She’s inherited more than just the property. The inn comes with financial problems that must be solved if she doesn’t want to lose everything.

Vivi never forgot the boy who helped her overcome a lonely summer twenty-two years ago. But the boy has become a man—a handsome one who seems to reciprocate a new attraction. During Max’s stay, the two share more than family stories and personal problems. Perhaps Max’s next steps are tied to Vivi, who may find not only hope for the inn’s future, but happiness and love.

Stay tuned for more updates!

Some Unexpected and Bittersweet News

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Not quite ten years ago, when Babycakes was just a couple months old, I decided to submit a manuscript for consideration to a couple small presses who would accept unsolicitied work directly from authors. This manuscript was the result of an experiment in both first person POV and present-tense writing. Beta readers thought it was cute and funny. I hired a high school friend, who had started her own editing business, to give the manuscript the once-over before I sent it out in to the world.

Babycakes was about four and a half months old when an acquiring editor from Soul Mate Publishing offered me a contract for a multi-book series based on that manuscript.

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That manuscript became BETTER THAN CHOCOLATE, and that contract resulted in the four books that make up my Sweet Somethings series. With a publishing schedule of about six to eight months between releases, I soon found time – somehow, in the midst of raising an infant, moving 750 miles from my hometown, and going back to teaching full time – to write WHEN IN ROME, THE ONE I’M WITH, and HE TAKES THE CAKE.

Plans were soon made for a spin-off trilogy about Marissa’s three besties from THE ONE I’M WITH, but subsequent babies, family obligations, work, the stress of the COVID-19 pandemic, and prioritizing freelance work that gave us a little extra “fun” money kept pushing that project onto the back burner. But my editor, and later the owner of Soul Mate Publishing, Debby Gilbert, kept encouraging me, granting me so much grace and extending my original contract when I wasn’t quite ready to take on self-publishing.

About a month ago, the authors of SMP received some bittersweet news – Soul Mate Publishing is closing its doors, officially, on September 30th. All of us are receiving our rights back, and our books will be taken down from Amazon that day.

This is bittersweet news for all of us. I was a rookie author who didn’t know anything, and SMP opened the door to seeing my work in print. A lifelong dream come true!

The SMP authors have banded together to create something of a support group, both to mourn the end of an era but also to provide each other with support and suggestions as we all begin to decide how to handle our next steps. There are many ducks that need to be arranged in rows, and ducks keep arriving to join the lineup, from making sure we have the correct info from Amazon (ugh, metadata) as well as necessary steps to republish either wide or KDP-exclusive.

It’s a little scary. But I’d been mulling over whether to go indie for some time and using the excuse of “babies” to put off the leap. I kind of don’t have a choice with these books, though.

For me, here’s what I know will be happening going forward:

  1. I am allowed to use my current cover art, though if/when I set up POD, I will need to recreate the spine and back cover. So all front-cover images you will see on my socials, here on the blog, and my once-ever-two-years email newsletter will stay the same for now.
  2. There is no required timeframe for me to republish, and I have to decide whether I want to keep it simple and stick with Amazon, or go wide and have the option to be available anywhere books, be they ebook or print book, are sold. At this point, I don’t see this happening before the holidays, so keep an eye out for news.
  3. All four SMP-published editions of the Sweet Somethings series will be gone from Amazon and Kindle Unlimited on Monday, though exactly what time, I do not know. Anyone who thinks they want to purchase a Kindle copy before then…. hey I’m not going to say no to a final uptick in royalties.
  4. If you have previously left me a review, THANKS, and know that it will not disappear from Amazon. When I republish, there’s a process to link the new edition with the old, and all reviews should repopulate. (If you’ve read my books but having left a review yet, also wouldn’t mind if you took a minute or two and left one, please and thank you.)

Print books haven’t been available via Amazon in quite some time (if you see one available, it’s through a third-party seller and the pricing seems to be all over the place). I have a small inventory of print copies I got for book signings, so if you think you’d like print editions (either individually or the four-book set), please do contact me directly for info on how to buy them. I hope to get something set up in the next month or so to more easily facilitate this. For now, just email me at jlynnrowanliterature@gmail.com and put “Sweet Somethings Print Editions” in the subject line.

In the meantime, you can still grab a copy of my historical fiction short, THE FURLOUGH, and find my historical romance short, “Let Me Call You Sweetheart”, in LOVE IN THE LOWCOUNTRY VOLUMN 2: A WINTER HOLIDAY COLLECTION,

Going into the next couple months, I’ll be wrapping up another romance short for the next anthology from Lowcountry RWA and getting my full-length historical romance FINALLY sent out on submission (I only have room for so many ducks).

Make sure you’re following the blog and/or receiving my newsletter (I seriously don’t send it out unless I have something real to share) to stay up to date with announcements!

Knowing One’s Limits

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It’s been one of those years, it seems, when things just keep coming one right after another.

When I last posted in May, I shared that Little Bro was dealing with a bout of HFM. This, of course, coincided with all of the insane end-of-school things that happen in May.

Babycakes had her sixth dance recital and her final band concert of the year (which was essentially a huge “all-county” type deal for the elementary bands across her school system).

We’ve been working through some, how shall we say, challenging things with Sugarpie – it’s getting better, but slowly.

I took on a couple of relatively easy freelance projects, but it’s tricky to find time to work on this stuff in the summer. I can utilize naptime, but then the other two kids want and need time with Mommy, too.

We had a big three-week trip planned for June and early July. But then my grandmother passed away at the beginning of June, so the three weeks turned into four weeks with way more back and forth driving than we planned.

We were all just done by the time we got home.

Little Bro’s schedule has definitely suffered for all the traveling, and while I’ve got him pretty well resettled into his usual routine, his nap and bedtimes are all messed up. It’s been literally months since I’ve been able to consistently get him to bed before 9pm. So by the time all three kids are tucked in and kissed good-night, I’ve been lucky to get a half hour or so to be an adult without a small person trying to climb on me.

Or merge with me. Sometimes it feels like they’re trying to get back inside.

I am very touched out.

And as for me and my writing.

HA.

I have hit the wall.

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I had hoped to join in on an anthology project this year. I had a great idea and a great start. But I just do not have the energy, either physical or mental, to finish it right now. The folks in charge were even gracious enough to give me an extension, but it wasn’t enough. I have sadly had to pull out, though I do hope to help out with beta reads if they need extra eyes.

I’m not sure if it’s lack of motivation or if I’m just that tired. It’s been over two years since I’ve written something new, and I almost feel – out of practice.

Maybe things will get better once school starts. Oddly, despite the fact that the school year is really so much busier than the summer – someone always has to go here or there, there are projects and people get sick, plus extracurriculars – I always feel like I have more time to breathe when the kids are at school.

Does that sound horrible? I don’t mean it to be. Maybe it’s that there’s more structure to the day so I know what to expect. I know when this kid has to be to this place, and the other kid needs to be to this other place, and I know when the baby is going to need a nap and what time to pick everyone up. So with all that structure, I can almost plan the time I need to get things done.

It’s been an emotionally hard summer, and I’ve been fighting through a lot mentally, for a lot of reasons, and unfortunately, my little story for the anthology project ended up being a casualty of war.

Hopefully the fall will bring better prospects and more creative energy. Because I have none right now.

Toddler Tantrums Version 3.0

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It’s been a whopping six months since I last blogged. Obviously life threw me a couple monkey wrenches that derailed my literary plans for the last few weeks of 2023.

But that’s all right. Onward and upward.

Things around here are generally settling down, at least in terms of everyone’s immune systems. Mostly. Babycakes is just about over an allergy-induced ear infection. Sugarpie seems to have avoided the last cold of the school year. On top of having produced copeous amounts of nasal secretions for the last month, Little Bro has managed to pick up hand foot and mouth from somewhere unknown.

Freelancing hit a black for much of the past year, but things are looking up as I finally have a project slated to start later this week. I’m hopefully going to be participating in the next anthology from Lowcountry RWA (more on this down the road, fingers crossed). And I’ve got the post-Civil War historical romance in the hands of several beta readers in preparation for a fall submission.

But I didn’t come here today to talk about any of that.

I am here to discuss the onset of Toddler Temper Tantrums, version 3.0.

That’s right. Little Bro is into the tantrum stage of babyhood.

He’s actually got a rather extensive vocabulary for his age and is quite good at letting us know what he wants, needs, or feels.

But as parents across the world know, tantrums and meltdowns occur when a child does not have the verbal capacity to express their emotions in an adequate way.

Little Bro hasn’t been feeling well lately, understandably if you recall our house’s last brush with HFM disease in 2021. So that’s just made things worse. But yesterday… Ooooo boy.

So what set him off?

Well, lately he’s been rather obsessed with cleaning tools. Like mops. The electric sweeper. The Roomba (or at least he was until he pressed the button on top and accidentally started it, thus terrifying himself). The vacuum cleaner.

He also hates being confined and/or blocked or locked out of places.

Has that set the stage well enough?

I needed to run the vacuum cleaner in the living room, and he was insistant that he HAD to do it himself. This thing isn’t heavy, it’s a stick vac, but its length is like two and a half times his height, and it’s not like he can actually maneuver it.

I do hope his enthusiam for the vacuum (and the sweeper and emptying the dishwasher) continue into his teen years. I have my doubts, but we’ll see.

So I let him “help”. But he couldn’t really handle it, as expected, so he kept getting stuck in the corner and wouldn’t let me help him back up to try a different area of the floor. It boiled down to the floor needing to be vacuumed and me wanting to get it done so we could have lunch and a nap. So I just kind of took it away from him and tried to finish as quickly as possible, while Little Bro, wailing indignantly, chased me around the room.

At last, the job was done. I put the vacuum away. We had actually had to add a child safety lock/strap to the closet door, so he was doubly mad when I put it in there.

And then, I told him quite lovingly that we were all done.

Well.

This was clearly the most tragical injustice of the not-quite seventeen months he’s been alive. He wasn’t just crying. He wasn’t just yelling.

This boy was voicing his abject despondency at the top of his lungs – for a full twenty minutes – while alternating between trying to open the closet door and just running about the house with his head thrown back, wailing.

So what did I, his loving mother, do?

I laughed my ass off.

Sorry. It was the most hilarious thing.

I legit got to the point where I could neither stand up straight nor produce any actual sound while laughing.

Eventually I got him upstairs, where my mom (whom he calls “memaw” right now, but that’s another story for another day), read him some of his favorite books while I got lunch ready.

Of course, we are also gluttons for punishment around here. So after dinner, I decided Little Bro’s epic hair was a little too epic and took the hair clippers to his curls. Which meant more vacuuming.

This time I just put him in the playpen, so at least he wasn’t chasing me and getting tripped up on the cord while he voiced his displeasure.

Then today he gave us an encore performance because I took away the bottle of baby gas drops.

Fun times.

Three Kids is Not for the Faint of Heart

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Please let me preface this entire post with the clear and unabashed statement that I love my children. They are amazing gifts and I cannot imagine my life without them.

Well, I can, and it’s a horrible existance to imagine. I know this because I spent YEARS dealing with infertility while desperately wanting children.

With that being said, I am here to tell you that life with my three wonderful children, all of whom are in vastly different stages of child development, is also one of the greatest challenges I have right now.

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Getting through our crazy days takes a lot of prayer, a lot of patience (which is in short supply sometimes), and a lot of tears some days. I know I’m luckier than a lot of people because my Romantic Hero of a Husband is a great dad and I have my mom here, and I also have the privilege of not needing to work right now. So I don’t want to come off as whiny or ungrateful.

I had great aspirations of carving out dedicated time to work on my writing once the school year started back up. Babycakes is obviously school age, Sugarpie goes to preschool three days a week, and Little Bro is finally on a solid two-nap schedule. HOWEVER, Little Bro’s favorite place to nap, still, is ON ME. Heck, his favorite place to sleep, period, is on me. Which has meant little to no time to take care of household business when he’s napping, let alone writing. And night time? Whoooo boy, I’m happy if I get a two hour stretch where he’s in the crib instead of in our bed, because if he’s in our bed, I don’t really sleep.

Add two almost back-to-back trips, visits with and from family, two colds and a nice round of RSV in the mix, well…

Let’s just say I’ve been literally trying to find time to properly write a blog post since July.

I haven’t even been able to commit to more freelancing hours, which stinks because I was bringing in some nice extra pocket change with freelancing the past couple years.

Anyway, I am determined to produce SOMETHING with my pen before we close out 2023. Stay tuned, and hopefully I’ll have an announcement to share soon! (Here’s a little hint!)

Wassail