Welcome, Lin Holmes

I want to thank Ginger for inviting me to come and visit with all her friends here on her blog.

She asked that I tell you a bit about what it felt like to get my first contract with Muse.

That’s easy. It was like having ten years of back luck breaking in one fell swoop. My daughter’s editor sent my story, a holiday tale called SANTA IS A LADY to Muse on March 28^th. Five hours later on March 29^th, the contract arrived, and I’m not sure my feet have touched ground yet.

I had written a whole bunch of new stories ten years before that had gotten the “Clothespin-to-the-nose” award from my then editor and agent, so I hadn’t really held out any hope that things would change this time around. I’m older, after all, are far less naïve, but surprise, surprise, Muse is a wiser place to be. In fact, I have done some investigating of those two from the past, and I can’t find hide nor hair of them….so I’m sort of suspecting they might have been conning me. Why?

Well, they wanted poetry…but with a twist. See, according to them, my agent, Steven was a published author, so everything was going to have to published under HIS name, and I suspect, NOW, that he wanted to be published as a poet, but couldn’t write the stuff fast enough to meet whatever deadline they had…and that’s where I came in.

I was excited about the prospect of getting my own writing published and they promised to work on my favorite stuff, my stories, once the poetry was done. I’m really not happy writing poetry. It’s too confining, thanks to the rules of pentameter and such. To make a long story short, they DID look at my stuff every so often and told me I was writing crap there, but the poetry…? That was top notch. Oddly, I don’t know if any of the poetry ever made it, but come December 1, 2010, Santa is a Lady, my favorite stuff, IS going to really be out there for the world to finally see.

So, my feet are still bopping around from cloud formation to cloud formation because once that first contract came, eight more have followed in rapid succession. It’s incredible, and here’s the craziest…six of those nine contracts were manuscripts I wrote back then that those two told me were CRAP!

Would you like to know a little bit about my stories?

Sure, I’d love to tell you. Santa is a Lady is the first and it will be out on December 1, 2010. This story centers around a Christmas catastrophe. Santa is arrested five days before Christmas and Beck Cavington needs to replace the Santa she’s advertised for her sweets store, but all the professional Santas are already hired out. Her solution? Badger her best friend Angie Brightwell into donning the red suit. Nothing can go wrong with such a plan, right?

February is the month of Valentine and the month Forever With You will be released. Coryne has hired the all too handsome Keith Patterson and his crew to build a very special house for her within a limited timeline. She doubts he’s capable…he’s too good looking, plus he scrapes nerves she doesn’t want to have scraped, but friends convince her to hire him. Still she decides to move a small camping travel onto the site and oversee the crew. This of course, puts her in close proximity to a man who causes her to have powerful reactions and dreams she so does not want to have. Can she resist him, especially since he is giving off enough vibes to let her know he’s not the least bit against merging their interests? And can you guess what surprise ending is in store for Coryne?

The Pendulum Swings due out on March 1, 2011 is sort of a Time Travel with a twist. She wakes up with amnesia in a body she does not recognize surrounded by people who hate her. None of it feels right, and soon she knows why. Her last memory, her body being skewered to death in ancient Rome, and then waking here, in this body, in this future, married to a man who hates her so much he can barely stand to look at her.

May brings spring and change and change is about to befall Mick when Twilight Comes is released May 1, 2011. Mick is a successful stockbroker. Out there in the “world” he is polished, secure, and admired, but no one knows his secrets, but the lid on his secrets is about to blow sky high. Will anything he holds dear be left standing when the dust settles?

Winter in June? Well not quite even though the title of my story coming out on June 1, 2011 is In From the Cold. Mari is 50 and swore off men not downing Geritol on a regular basis a long time ago. On her mountain there’s her and Hector, her 90 year old neighbor until he ups and dies willing her the proceeds from his cabin. She tries to arrange it so only men with advanced prostate problems can buy Hector’s cabin but her son’s marriage out west requires her signing temporary Power of Attorney over to her real estate agent and that brings down her ruination. He’s 35 and moving in the day Mari returns. All through the spring and summer she’s forced to endure the hunk parading around her mountain in all manner of undress, stirring hormones Mari’d long ago buried. It had to stop. How? Only one thing…she had to jump his bones, so the deed, get him out of her system and get back to being herself. Yeah, bound to work, right?…Three nights later a big blizzard is coming their way.

The dog days of August will be heated up with the release of This Time Forever. They’ve never met in person although they have talked together on the Internet and phone for months. Finally he has business that brings him east and they agree to meet at the Hilton. From the moment he arrives at LAX he begins having strange daydreams of a lifetime, vivid images of a Roman warrior and his Grecian slave lover. Driving her car from her home to the Hilton she begins having these flashes of, she knows not what, a life, a strange life unlike anything she’d ever seen on the History channel, triple x-rated visions. Is she losing her mind? One minute she is sitting in a barrel chair in the lobby of the Hilton, the next she is in Pompeii watching the hottest passion and equally most virulent rage she’d ever experienced or observed in her whole life. Time Travel? Insanity?

September 1, 2011 Tricia is called like a homing pigeon back to the tar shack she grew up in after seeing the video Reba MacEntire did for her hit song “Fancy”. She hated growing up here, and hates being back here, but equally hates the mansion that is a dying testament to the bitterness of her grandparents who’d lived in that luxury while forcing their only son and his family to subsist in this squalor. About to turn away from all of this Tricia hears her name carried on the wind, reaching out like a fist to grab on and pull her relentlessly towards that hulking shell of what had once been grandeur. She couldn’t stop her forward trek. Something was forcing her to move Beyond Yesterday.

December 1, 2011 brings us back to Northeringale and Beck Cavington and the sequel to Santa is a Lady. This time Beck’s mother Irene is determined to get Beck married within nine days and thus we have The Christmas War.

February 2012, She’s Gone is a story that pits a man against the subtle clues to a mystery. He comes home to an empty house and confusion. He cannot…will not believe his wife has left him, and yet her side of the closet is empty…only his toothbrush remains in the bathroom…still there are clues…can he unravel them and learn the truth before it’s too late for both of them?

http://www.museituppublishing.com

That’s all I have for now. Every time I think my feet might get close to landing, another contract has come my way. So Muse It Up and Muse It Hot Publishing have given MY muse a glorious home and I couldn’t be happier.