I went to a wedding this weekend. It’d had been awhile for me since I was stuck in those years between one generation marrying and the next. When you’re in your twenties, there are tons of weddings as all your friends start getting married. Then, once they’re all settled, there’s the gap while you wait for your kids and your friends’ kids to start getting married. But this weekend, one of my nieces married, and I had the joy of sitting through a wedding again.

After eighteen years of marriage- exactly, since it’s my anniversary today- I have a new outlook on the wedding ceremony. As a twenty-something, you listen to the vows with all the enthusiasm of youth, certain you’ll overcome any obstacle. You’re certain your love will last and committed to a future together. You’re full of hope and dewy-eyed innocence about what the future holds.

But, looking back from an older perspective and thinking about what marriage means, it occurs to me that I had only the faintest of realizations what a lifetime commitment meant at the time that I made it. No small vow, that. If you marry in a church, you’re making that vow on holy ground, and chances are you’ve attended many meetings with church officials who quiz you about how serious you are in your intentions. Don’t get me wrong, that’s a great idea. But it can be intimidating to contemplate FOREVER.

Maybe more intimidating for a forty-something than a twenty-something. I believe every married couple in the church this weekend had a better idea what the kids at the altar were facing than they did. And I realized that’s what makes wedding so special for US, the older folks in the crowd. I had my tissues out, and it wasn’t just because the bride was so beautiful and her groom looked at her with love in his eyes. I was misty-eyed because I’m so grateful that I’ve kept the vows for eighteen years and that I still have a happy, fulfilling marriage to be proud of.

God knows- and those other still married couples know- that it hasn’t been easy. The marriage commitment is unique in that we are promising to love someone with no blood tie to us. Some days, the only thing keeping you together is a promise and, perhaps, blind faith. And that knowledge makes the commitment all the more fragile and worth celebrating. I wasn’t just clapping for the new Mr. and Mrs. on Saturday when the church bells rang. I was clapping for the unique joy of having grown a marriage. The long-term ones are battle-tested mergers, forged in fire and honed by hardship.

But they all started out the same way. With a promise and a lot of hope. Some blind faith and a trust in a commitment. It gets me misty-eyed just thinking about it.

***Three cheers for the newlyweds! Whether you’re married or not, I’d love to hear your best advice for the newly married. When I first got married, I had a magnet that said “Don’t go to bed mad. Stay up and fight.” But these days, I prefer to sleep on it first and see how I feel in the morning! How about you? I’ve got an advance copy of FULL SURRENDER for one random poster here or on Facebook.

www.joannerock.com

I’m in Anaheim this week for RWA. I am blessed to have been nominated for a Rita® in Romantic Suspense, which is overwhelmingly exciting, but also bittersweet on a certain level, because the book that’s nominated, WHERE ALL THE DEAD LIE, is the last in my Taylor Jackson series for a while. Several months ago, my team and I made a decision to let Taylor take a long vacation, and focus on a new character, Dr. Samantha Owens.

Suffice it to say, starting a new series was scary for me. After seven books with the same lead character, I was in a groove. I knew how everyone would react. It was simply a matter of creating a dynamic plot and a cool villain to confront them with.

But Sam had been knocking on the doors and windows of my Muse’s hamlet, begging to strut her stuff on the page. When at long last I relented, and decided to spin off her character, changes needed to happen.

To do the new series justice, it needed to be different. To start – a new setting. I settled on Washington, D.C., my former home of many years. And Sam needed to be unmarried, and unencumbered by children. I debated long and hard. Divorce? Custody arrangements? Multiple scenarios, but they all kept her tied to Nashville. There was only one choice.

Her husband and children had to die.

I fought against this reality for weeks. I couldn’t do that to her. And there are rules in writing. You can’t kill animals, and you can’t kill children. Except you can. And I did. The question became not if they died, but how. Car accident? Been done. Plane crash? Been done.

And then it hit me. The flood.

Nashville was stricken with a flood of biblical proportion in 2010. As it happens, A DEEPER DARKNESS released on the second anniversary of that fateful weekend, that moment in time where we lost so much. Synchronicity at its finest. I was able to both honor those hurt and killed in the real flood and give Samantha a chance to recover with everyone else. Recover we did. It hasn’t been easy, but we’re back on our feet.

Another challenges was finding the right tone, the right mood, to express Samantha’s loss without suffocating the reader in her grief. I needed to get in her head, and live there, trying to understand how hard it must be to lose a husband, and to lose her twins. How, and if, that sadness could be overcome.

I used a lot of music to guide me, mostly the mournful, melancholy cover of “Hurt” by Johnny Cash. The song makes me weep, and the video tears a hole in my heart. Imagining the loss of my own husband, how frightened and alone I would feel, helped me mine Sam’s grief.

With grief comes hope. With hope comes possibility. They say what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger, and for a young, dynamic, intelligent widow, simply surviving her loss makes her invincible. Samantha stares into the abyss, acknowledges its presence, and somehow, some way, pulls herself back from the brink. And is rewarded for her strength.

Ironically, without realizing it, I was writing the story of my past few years. My husband and I have struggled with infertility for half a decade. Multiple pregnancies resulted in multiple miscarriages. IUIs and IVF didn’t work. Over and over, I lost my own children.

I thought I was fine. Normal. Nominal. That I’d dealt with my own grief, my own loss. But it wasn’t until I read A DEEPER DARKNESS in galley form that I realized I’d used the book as therapy. All of Sam’s losses mirrors my own. Her strength, her hope, her will to continue on gave me the strength to do the same.

A DEEPER DARKNESS isn’t a sad book. Samantha Owens is all of us: our hopes and fears, our determination and our weakness. For the first time in my writing career, I’ve put myself on the page. And that’s possibly the most terrifying thing of all.

www.jtellison.com

When Phoenix Dye returns to Nottoway, Virginia after an eleven year absence, little does he know that the bothersome triplets who live across the road from him are his children by the only woman he has ever loved.

Karina Wallace, now a restaurant owner, once believed in love, too, but all that changed after that one incredible summer spent with Phoenix. He disappeared without a trace, leaving her pregnant and alone. Now he’s back and she’s torn between telling him the truth and leaving things as they are. She feels Phoenix will only be in town for a short time. Why let the triplets fall in love with him only to be heartbroken when he leaves? But when a blackmailer approaches her, will she be forced to tell him the truth?

The triplets are at it again in WITH THIS KISS, a re-write of the second title in the Welcome to Nottoway series. They are ten and up to their usual mischief while they search for a husband for their mother. Book three, INTIMATE SECRETS, featuring Karina’s brother, Jonathan, and Gladys Jones’ daughter, Johanna, will be out soon. If you’ve already read WITH THIS KISS and wondering what happened to Jonathan’s fiancée, all will be revealed in this book.

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I have two young adult daughters whose cooking skills vary widely. The oldest can maybe prepare a couple of dishes under duress. The youngest, an aspiring chef, only wants to cook when she’s experimenting with gourmet feasts for her future restaurant. My son cooks more than his girlfriend. But reality is, we have to eat daily and few people actually cook any more. When I was a child, my mother cooked practically every day. Eating out was a novelty. But today, in our fast-food nation, eating a home-cooked meal seems to be rare.

My heroine owns a restaurant. With the cooking shows and reality TV shows about food, do you think we are moving farther from cooking? I love to cook and will spend hours in the kitchen preparing meals, but I hate the clean-up afterward. Do you think that cooking shows bring more people into the kitchen? Or do you think it won’t have an effect on younger people?

Not only is mealtime for nourishment, but it is also a family gathering. Children learn proper etiquette and there is family-time conversation. It’s the one time many families can be together to discuss the events in their day. Schedules are so busy now that we rarely have time to spend in the kitchen.

Many kitchens have beautiful stainless-steel appliances, granite countertops, and top of the line pots and pans that don’t get used. With our change in lifestyle, are we losing an important element in our lives? What is your impression of the focus on food and food shows? Do you ever make any of the dishes that you see on TV?

Please comment on any of the above questions and you will be included in a random drawing. The prize winner will receive a $20.00 Amazon or Barnes and Noble gift card. Please visit my web page at www.CandicePoarch.com

I don’t think it is possible for me to properly describe how much I love summer. Not just for the obvious: the long days, warm weather, and water sports that I love so much. For me, the reasons run deeper than that, following a trail of happiness that winds through my youth, back to the days when summer breaks felt as though they lasted forever and days were filled with imagination so pure, only a child could conjure it.

In particular, I think of those trips to Chicago we used to take to visit my grandparents each summer. Nana and Papa’s rectangular house squatted in the middle of their postage stamp-sized property, a sensible house in all its post-WWII utilitarianism. The backyard, however, was another story all together. Bordered by chain-link fence, it was small but magical, with roses blooming in proliferation, ceramic woodland creatures dotting the landscape, and a small vegetable garden offering up its continuous bounty.

Tucked behind the garage was another patch of dirt that somehow provided all the entertainment my brother and I could want. Some days it was a crocket field, on others a place to line up our army men and dive headlong into battle. We searched out bugs, scratched out games in the dirt, and basically let our imaginations run wild. It was here that one of my most distinct memories from childhood originated.

“Why don’t yous kids see if yous can dig to China? It’s a long way, but Papa has faith in you.” Papa usually referred to himself in the third person when he was talking to us, and sometimes deliberately messed with his grammar. His most famous line was “Poooooor Papa! Pooooor Papa!” whenever he teased us for some imagined slight.

Andy and I collected the small gardening tools that Papa offered us, and set to work digging the biggest, deepest hole anyone in the Chicagoland area had ever seen. We worked feverishly, united in a common goal of seeing the Orient for ourselves. The thought that this world could have been beneath us all this time was beyond fascinating, and tiny trowelful by tiny trowelful, we were determined to unearth it. A while later Papa came around the garage to check on our progress, his blue eyes twinkling with merriment. We were sweaty and panting, dirt stuck to every pore on our bodies and every fiber of our clothes, the original color of which was completely indistinguishable. We looked to him with hopeful eyes, asking him for his opinion on our glorious hole.

In all seriousness, he examined the pit from several angles, nodding his head and absently muttering “mmhhh, mmhhh,” to himself. Finally, with the two of us leaning forward with suspense, he pronounced. “Why, that is a fine looking hole. I’ll bet you can hear the Chinese music if you try hard enough.”

“Really?!” I asked incredulously. He nodded sagely and I quickly laid down on the edge of the pit and stuck my head in as far as I could get it. The earthy scent filled my nostrils, and I could almost taste the damp soil. Holding my breath, I listened hard. The blood was starting to rush to my head, and my lungs were anxious to be filled, but still I listened. After a few moments, I swear I began to hear the twangy, harp-like plucking of some exotic instrument and the rhythmic beat of a drum wafting from beneath the dark, moist dirt.

“I hear it!” I exclaimed, awestruck at the discovery.

I laugh now when I look back on that day. Papa was so clever, knowing exactly how to tap into his grandchildren’s sense of adventure and imagination. He always was the one who made the fantastical believable and the impossible possible. I must give much credit to him, for he knew exactly how to encourage one’s imagination to run away with oneself.

I only wish that he could see me now. When he passed away, I was still working in the science field, toiling away at all the truths and absolutes in this world. I’d like to think that he would be delighted by what I do now: Making a living by virtue of digging deep into my imagination, exactly like he used to encourage me to do. Believing that the world of make believe has an element of truth in it, and striving not to take myself too seriously. I’m indebted to him for finding exactly the right way to foster my imagination, and I like to think that a piece of him lives on with every story I write :)

So tell me, who was it that made the biggest impact on who you are today? And I wonder (since I don’t have kids of my own), in today’s world of technology, do you think children today rely as much on imagination as they once did?

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Erin Knightley’s debut novel, MORE THAN A STRANGER – A Sealed With a Kiss novel, is in stores now. The second book in the series, A TASTE FOR SCANDAL, releases in December 2012. For excerpts, blurbs, and more, visit her at www.ErinKnightley.com. She’s also on Twitter and Facebook.