Teresa Hill
Finally settled on the cover I want for The Edge of Heaven, which I hope to have uploaded for sale in a week or so.
Mock-up of New Cover
Went back and forth between two cover possibilities. It’s so hard to have these people in your head for so long, to feel like you know them so well, and then, suddenly, they’re supposed to become these people in a photo.
I suppose writers could try to find photos first, but I don’t feel like I know my characters well enough to do that when I start a book. Hmm. Maybe I could do it about half-way through writing the book, and then I’d know the characters well enough to pick a photo, but not be startled by how they look. Or how they will look to readers.
But I am happy with this couple. Emma looks a little bit young and sweet, and like she absolutely adores Rye, which she does. And Rye looks adorable and sexy. Maybe a little too clean-cut, but… he’ll do nicely, I think.
This book is the second in a series that starts with Twelve Days. I’m doing some rewriting now on the third book, Bed of Lies.
What fun!
Click on the photo to go to the Reader Rally site. Lots of authors and reader sites participating.
I will be giving away your choice of books: Twelve Days, a sweet Christmas story and the beginning of The McRae’s series or Unbreak My Heart, a contemporary romance with the feel of a gothic novel, spooky, old house, scared heroine, sexy guy next door who might not be the person he seems.
Post a comment here for a chance to win.
I will confess, five days into the New Year, mostly all I’ve done about resolutions or goals is think about them and read a bit.
But I have found some gloriously cool, useful things on the ‘net so far, things I think I can use and that have me excited.
1. Zenhabits.net by Leo Babauta. What an incredibly cool guy. First, look at his website. It’s the simplest,
Take the Zen Path to Change
cleanest one you’ve ever seen. I mean, I like pretty when it comes to design. I can get lost in pretty. But I can still appreciate clean and simple design, too. His is the epitome of clean and simple. (No accident, the man is devoted to minimalism.)
Greatest tip to me so far: his post suggesting we give up New Year’s Resolutions, since so few of us keep them anyway. But it is a natural time to think about what we’d like to change about ourselves and our lives, and I like thinking we’re all capable of change.
So, from ZenHabits.net, the idea of adopting one new habit a month. We’ve all heard it takes 30 days of a new behavior to reinforce it enough that it sticks with us. So once he suggested it, it seemed a natural to not do a ton of big resolutions at once, but instead, pick a new goal or habit each month. If you stick with it, at the end of the year, you’ll have 12 new habits. Sounds like a ton of change for one year, but much less painful than making them all at once.
For January, I’ve vowed to get out and use the bread machine I got for Christmas one year ago and never opened. (Oh, so bad of me, and I picked it out myself. It was not a gift someone gave me out of the blue. I wanted it.) Will bake at least once loaf of bread. I have the mixes, the whole wheat flour, everything I need. I’ve had it for a while, just never used it. Why? I have no idea.
My pretty bike, beside my pretty Subaru, Annabelle. (Yes, I named my car.)
That’s January. Either February or March — depending on the weather — will be riding my beautiful red bike more. Also, will get a carrier for my car, so I don’t have the big, scary intersection between me and the glorious Swamp Rabbit Trail, old railroad right-of-way my county turned into a big, long, wildly popular bike path. I biked across the intersection a number of times in 2011, but it scares me, and I don’t need to be scared. I just want to ride.
I know there should be a writing goal in there, but I’m still thinking. Get The Edge of Heaven, The McRae’s — Book 2, uploaded for sale in January. Move next book, Bed of Lies, along toward uploading in February, hopefully. Keep working on final book in series, She Walked Into My Life, hopefully to finish and put on sale in April. Okay, that wasn’t hard.
2. Always need an eating plan. (I find I do much better with an eating plan, instead of a diet.) I know it’s partly just a play on words, but it’s better for me. I love having a plan, rather than a list of things I’m not supposed to eat.
A friend posted to an e-mail loop I’m on about Chef Alton Brown’s Plan of Four. It is the simplest thing I’ve ever seen and seems very workable. Basically, it’s four short lists. Things to eat daily, three times a week, only once a week and not at all.
I’m into simple, especially simple plans. I think I’ll try this. Did much better with my eating plan last year, but, as always, there’s so much more to do. I can see printing a copy of his list, posting it on the frig and checking things off as the week goes on. Very, very simple.
3. Love, love, love DailyCheapReads.com, the list for bargain e-books on Kindle. If there’s a list like this for Nook, I don’t know about it yet.
Sign up at their site, and they’ll send you an e-mail once a day with a list of great books that are mostly free or 99 cents. Often, the sales are just for the day, so if you love to read, you want to look at this e-mail daily. I’ve found so may new authors to try this way, found some new favorites and then gone on to buy more of their regularly priced books.
Warning: you will buy lots more books.
4. Interesting, fun new blog of the year: ReinventingFabulous.com Writer friends Jenny Crusie and Anne Stuart are transforming and vowing to blog about it all year.
Jenny’s bought a fixer-upper in New Jersey that needs tons of work before she can move in, and she’s a packrat who’s downsizing from her current home. So she has work to do. Krissie, as friends call her, wants to lose weight, be more active and maybe give up trying to rescue everyone she loves — all tough things to accomplish.
The discussions so far have been fun and inspiring. Check it out.
5. Finally, absolute best list of what it’s like to write, what people need to do if they want to write, etc from Chuck Wendig. A truly kick-ass column. Bravo.
Happy New Year, everyone.
Dear Aidan,
I’m trying to be patient and not push, but it really is time for you to let me in on some things. Like 
what exactly happened to you in the helicopter crash? Were you in the helicopter? Or did you get hurt on the ground, trying to help the soldiers in the crash? Why was it so difficult for you to handle emotionally? Why do you feel so guilty?
I mean, obviously, it was really bad. And I’m sorry. I know you don’t want to talk about it. I get that. But it’s time, and I have to know. You’ve been through things like this before and handled it, so what was different this time? Why do you think you’re going to get kicked out of the military? Who’s looking for you? Why are they looking for you? Are you in danger right now?
I know it’s not easy to open up this way, and I’m sorry for that. But this is your story. We’re going to have to talk about some tough things, and things won’t get better until we do. That’s just the way it works.
But things will get better. I promise. You found Grace, after all, and I know you really like Grace. She likes you, too, but surely you realize she is not going to have sex with you until you tell her what you’re hiding.
Please remember, we’re all in this together. You want me to tell your story. I want to tell it. I want you to be happy, and you will be in the end with Grace. We just have to work through some of these things first.
I’m here. I’m ready to listen.
Oh, and knowing your last name would be really good, too.
Sincerely,
Your Author, Teresa
I think it takes incredible courage to take a child into your home and love that child and then not know if you’ll be able to keep that child. If you’ll someday have to send that child back to a home where you don’t know if the child will be taken care of or not.
I watched friends go through this process, and I wondered, how did they do it? I was in awe of their courage.
My friends got their hearts broken by having a foster child in their home for months, planning to adopt him, and then finding out they couldn’t. That they had to give him up. They decided adoption wasn’t for them. It was too hard. It hurt too much. Was way too risky.
They decided it was time to change their lives completely and joined the Peace Corps. They’d done all their paperwork and even had a date to leave: May of the following year. They were going to sell all their possessions — even their house — and just go.
But Christmas came, and the social worker called. They were still on the list of approved foster homes, and she had a child, a little girl, in desperate need of a home. It’s a crazy time of year, one I’m sure when families fall apart and lots of people have plans for trips and company coming and all sorts of things. So you can imagine, it’s not the easiest time of year to find people who can take a two-year-old into their home at the last minute.
My friends said no. They were done with trying to adopt. They were leaving for the Peace Corps in five months.
The social worker begged and begged. She’s not free for adoption, the woman told them. We haven’t terminated her parents’ rights, and I’m not sure if we will be able to. Don’t fall in love with her. Don’t plan on getting to adopt her. Just give her a home for a few weeks.
They finally agreed. The little girl arrived on Christmas Day.
Can you imagine a more perfect beginning for a story? (Yes, I know. Me, the writer, always thinking of story possibilities.)
Believe me, this child was more than a story to me. She’s a year older than my daughter, and for years, they were the best of friends, in and out of each others’ houses all the time. I babysat for her while my friends went to court again and again and again. It was an agonizing process that for them went on for a couple of years, knowing at each stage that something could go wrong and after having her in their home and loving her as they did, they might have to give her back.
I would look at her on those days, playing with my daughter, and wonder…. What if they they showed up at my door and said it was over, that they had to give her back? How would any of us handle that?
I think it took two and a half years, maybe three, before the day finally came when they got to go to court to adopt her. We all cried as we watched her father answer the judges’ questions and then finally grant the adoption.
So, Twelve Days is truly not their story. But it starts out the way their story does. With a social worker showing up at Christmas with kids in need of a home, begging a couple who’ve been burned before in their efforts to have a family to take one more chance that this time, everything will work out.
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Twelve Days is Book One of The McRae’s story.
Emma’s story, The Edge of Heaven, is in production now and should be uploaded by mid-January, 2012.
Zach’s story, Bed of Lies, is also in production, hopefully to be uploaded in February, 2012.
I’m still writing Grace’s story. If she and Aidan cooperate, I may make my self-imposed deadline of March, 2012.
Click cover to buy.
I was born and raised in Central Kentucky, and I still miss it. It still feels like home, even after living in South Carolina for more than twenty years.
I go home (and I still say I’m going home when I go to Kentucky) and it’s like I feel it in my bones. I see it in the sky and the beauty of the rolling hills, how blue and green everything is.
It’s a cliche to write about Central Kentucky and horse racing or the Derby, and in truth, I was 19 or 20 before I ever went to a horse race, despite the fact that one of the most beautiful and famous race tracks int the world was maybe twenty-five miles from my home.
It wasn’t until I met a man….
The man I eventually married, in fact. He’s the one who loves horse racing and proceeded to convince me to skip classes and go to the track with him instead. (I tell him he was such a bad influence on me.)
Fell in love with this Oak Tree at Keeneland in November, 2011
He took me to Keeneland in Lexington, Churchill Downs in Louisville, River Downs in Cincinnati and what was then Latonia in Northern Kentucky. I got him to New York City for the first time because the Breeder’s Cup was being held there.
So, cliche or not, when I finally wrote a book set in Kentucky, there had to be at least one horse, and a horse farm, and it was really hard to resist Keeneland completely. It is one of the most gorgeous places on earth in the fall.
When the hero on Unbreak My Heart, Stephen Whittaker, wants to show the heroine, Allie Bennett, something of Kentucky to remember and love, he takes her to meet his horse, Wish, at his grandfather’s horse farm. And they eventually end up at Keeneland, although it’s not to see the horse races. But it was fun to put so many familiar places into a book.
Allie’s family has so many secrets, and she’s trying to find answers to them, answers she believes are waiting for her in the family home. Her mother dragged her away from there in the middle of the night when Allie was a girl, and she hasn’t been back since. Stephen is the boy next door, all grown up now, handsome as can be and either trying to help her or keeping a secrets from her. She doesn’t know which. It’s a romantic suspense with a Gothic feel, because of the house that may or may not be haunted.
Swann's Nest in Lexington, Ky.
My husband and I just made a trip to Kentucky, this one much more pleasant, and we stayed for the second time at a beautiful bed and breakfast at the back gate to Keeneland, Swann’s Nest, complete with horses in the paddock and horse racing trophies all over the house.
If you’re ever in Lexington and need a place to stay, go there. It used to be a horse farm, so you’re in the middle of green pastures with horses lazing in the fields. Rosalie Swann will make sure you have a great time. My favorite time of year to be there is October or early November, when the fall colors are at their peak. Spring is gorgeous, too, and the horses run at Keeneland in April and October.
Kentucky in all its Fall glory.
I was working on a new book, Grace’s Story, the third child of the couple in Twelve Days, when I needed to do some research, because I’m pretty sure Aidan, the hero, is a wounded Navy officer. (Characters don’t just tell me everything I need to know. You’d think that they would, but they don’t. Sometimes I think they like to torment me.)
So, yes, I think he’s a wounded Navy officer, but I’m not sure, even though I have about two hundred pages of the book. This is the life of a writer. And I want to hear some stories of wounded veterans, so I end up on the internet and stumble upon the blog of Karie Fugett, Wife of a Wounded Marine.
Her story is amazing, beginning in 2006 when she was only 20 years old, newly married, and her husband got blown up in Iraq. He survived, but what follows is an incredible, harrowing journey for her and her husband to try to get him healthy and whole again.
It was so compelling that I did something I’ve never done before — went back to very beginning of her blog and read the whole thing. Took me three days, between life and writing and everything else, but I had to know what happened. Research was completely forgotten, although I will say, reading her story definitely changed my hero. First thing I realized is — his situation is not that bad. Okay, it’s bad, but he will know there are people who are a whole lot worse off than he is.
You can read Karie’s story on her blog or, if you’re not ready to give it three days of your life, in one of a series of articles at the Huffington Post called Beyond the Battlefield, about issues facing veterans and their families. I was in awe of her courage, her honesty and even her humor in describing the years that followed for her and her husband, Cleve.
Click on cover to buy.
All I was doing was looking for a new house on Craigslist. (Among other places, of course.) And once I was there, I tended to drift to other things for sale. (Anything to procrastinate a little longer before starting to write.)
I kept noticing women selling their wedding dresses there. An astonishing number of women selling their wedding dresses. Go ahead. Do a quick search, and you’ll see.
Soon, I really wanted to talk to those women and ask them why they were selling their wedding dresses. Had they cancelled their weddings at the last minute? Found other dresses? Were they getting divorced? Had they gotten married and either didn’t care to keep the dress any longer or maybe found themselves broke and really needing the money?
I didn’t know. Really wished I could take a survey of their reasons for selling. (And I admit, I tried, but I couldn’t get people to talk to me about it.)
Then I started thinking about PROJECT RUNWAY. Love the show. Love watching the creative process (and am so glad no one films writers in the midst of deadlines madness.) Love how messy it often seems, how it looks like it will never work, that disaster is looming, and then, they pull it together and make something gorgeous.
But what if the designers made wedding dresses? One designer, and she’s on the brink of getting everything she wants. A show at Fashion Week. That’s what designers want. She’s having a show at Fashion Week, but something happens. Something bad. Women are afraid of her dresses. They’re trying to dump them on Craigslist or in any other way possible.
Why are they selling her dresses? Because the brides think the dresses are cursed! There, I had it. The dresses are cursed. How would it feel to be a wedding dress designer about to have her dreams come true, only to have people decide she’s bad luck? And that her dresses are cursed?
That’s how I found poor Chloe Allen, cursed wedding dress designer, losing Fiancé No. 3 in a very public way. On the runway during her show at Fashion Week, actually, and then fears she’s about to lose everything, But then, Fiancé No. 2, James Elliott IV, charges back into her life, claiming he wants to help her through her fashion disaster, when what he really wants is another chance with Chloe.
Dear Readers,
In case you didn’t know, in another life, I wrote for Silhouette under a different name, Sally Tyler Hayes, and this book was originally published under that name, under the title Magic in a Jelly Jar.
It was a sweet, family story that has been re-edited to be even sweeter, which now means no love scenes and a few other changes for readers who want a kinder, gentler story. It’s available now will be available now from Harlequin Heartwarming.
So, I’m trying to figure out what will be my new book, and I know my heroine leads seminars on getting over divorce, and I realize she’s had a long background as a counselor of some kind. But she’s frustrated, because some of her patients just aren’t getting over things. They’re stuck. They talk and talk and talk, and they’re still stuck.
Which is where she got the idea for her seminars, some more intense, different kind of group therapy, plus some creative… activities to help them get on with their lives. I know where she has them, and they fit in perfectly with my little, old lady matchmakers and their estate that’s become a popular wedding venue. If she’d tell me her name, I’d be really happy, but that’s a different topic. (How can I write about these people if they won’t even tell me their names?)
Anyway, the idea is in that gelling state, where it ends up parked in my head while it simmers and comes together and I’m eventually able to write.
Meanwhile, I’m reading, and I find a glorious book by Cathy Lamb, The Last Time I Was Me, which I loved. Her heroine is out there. As in, in a very bad place in her life and letting it all hang out in this book. Painfully honest and open, in a gutsy way, which I really love and appreciate as an author. I mean, sometimes life is bad. Big and bad and hard things are going on, and seeing people deal with those times in their lives and triumph — that’s what great books are about.
And I’m both in love and inspired by her character’s Anger Management Class. It sounds like so much fun, I think I’d like to go to this Anger Management Class, and I don’t think of myself as a particularly angry person. But art therapy for anger management, boxing for anger management, scream-therapy for anger management… who couldn’t enjoy some of that.
Plus, it also makes me want to really push it emotionally for my own character, whatever her name is, and her off-beat, getting-over-divorce seminars.
Available Now
