Snowdrop Kisses - Tomorrow is the BIG DAY!
A serialised holiday romance involving a plucky florist and a tall dark and handsome entrepreneur
Hi everyone! I am so excited for you to start reading Snowdrop Kisses!
If you signed up months ago and have forgotten what is happening — Snowdrop Kisses is a serialized Christmas love story that will come out every day from December 1st to December 25th. A new post will land in your inbox at 6 am Eastern Standard (Daylight?) time.
If you do NOT want this to happen, you can unsubscribe and escape!
If you’re PUMPED about this happening, here is an excerpt from an article I wrote for the long defunct Hairpin.com (RIP) back in about 2015:
My road to romance-writing began in a used bookstore in Sydney, Australia. I was Down Under to backpack for six weeks before starting my Masters in English Lit. Being the freckly little keener that I was, I’d decided to get a jump on my Fall semester reading list, so I sashayed into the store to buy The Sound and The Fury. Obviously nothing would suit the beach-side lolling and hangovery mornings I was anticipating like a breezy read through Modernist stream-of-consciousness familial turmoil.
I’d grabbed the book when a giant bin of used Harlequin romances caught my eye. These were old school Harlequins from the 70s and 80s. Covers featured soft-focus drawings of pensive ladies in pastel with angry looking sheiks, or pipe-smoking doctors looming behind. These were the Harlequins I grew up on. Reading them as a kid I’d had no idea what a gold digger was and never managed to successfully visualize a pantsuit, but I had sighed over all those jerky men being redeemed by a lady’s love.
Once I started rooting through the bin, I knew there was no going back. At fifty cents apiece, I could buy 20 romances for the cost of my Faulkner. Benjy and Caddy were discarded in favour of The Taut Tycoon and Her Dark Desire. It was the best $10 I ever spent. My travelling buddy and I read Harlequins all the way up the east coast of Australia, making friends wherever we went by giving away books and then happily comparing weird outfits, sex scenes and degrees of passive uselessness in the heroines.
By the time we’d reached Cairns, we were convinced we could write our own. We came up with the plot on the back of a napkin – Wendy Blake, plucky florist, spends years delivering “Love ‘em and Leave ‘em bouquets” for entrepreneurial cad, James Crofton.
I flew back home and set to work. I loved writing dialogue, hated descriptions, and glossed over the one sex scene as quickly as I could. I found writing about sex surprisingly difficult… how do you talk about all of the licking and thrusting and het-up-ness without sounding like a tool? Plus, I kept thinking how embarrassing it would be if my mother or brother ever read it.
Over the next couple of years, in between drinking too much; reading too much; kissing too much; causing an accident with a friend’s dad’s car; leaving the oven on for my entire week-long spring break;discovering Goldschläger, eating canned oysters on my living room floor after drinking too much Goldschläger; and failing to get “up” while waterskiing; I got my Master’s and finished my first novel.
I was cocky and obnoxious and figured that if I, a person who (eventually) studied Faulkner and had a GRADUATE degree in English Lit, wanted to get a Harlequin published, it would be a doddle. It wasn’t. My book was terrible, of course. Also, the romance field had changed since those 50 cent Harlequins had been published. Category romance was no longer the domain of drippy women and masterful men, but the stories were more complex, the characters more rounded and while a happy outcome was guaranteed, the writing was much better. I soon learned it was a tough field to break into.
Eventually I took some writing courses, found an amazing group of critiquers and made the book better. After spending years revising god damn Wendy Blake and her god damn plucky personality, I gave up. Love’s Bouquet had come close. An editor at Harlequin had read a much later draft, liked it and requested a few tweaks. When I finally sent it back to her, the romance/humour line it was aimed at had been discontinued, and there was no place for it.
My failure to get published had been humbling, but all was not lost. In addition to getting my richly-deserved comeuppance, I had begun to think of myself as a writer.
So, Love’s Bouquet was the first book I ever wrote (I’ve now traditionally published four) but I wasn’t able to get it published… I still think it’s pretty good, so I have repackaged it as a Christmas romance and I hope you enjoy it!
Amy
P.S. I know the title is NOT GOOD — if you think of something better — please let me know in the comments! I was thinking maybe “Near Miss Kiss" — but then it’s not Christmassy…
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