Mark Your Calendars

For those of you who've said you can't wait until Once Upon Stilettos comes out and waiting for May seems too long ... well, I have good news.

The release date has been changed to April 25. Yeah, it's only a month earlier, but hey, it's a whole month earlier!

Apparently another book that was slotted for that release fell through, and the powers that be decided to move me up.

I'm still getting my head around the new timeline and will have to take another look at all my promotion plans to see how this changes things. I guess a month earlier is better than a month later, so even if there's still info with the old release date out there, people can be pleasantly surprised by stumbling on it a month earlier instead of going in search of it and not finding it there.

Mark your calendars, and all that.

I got a reminder this morning of how far I've come when I got a call from a former client with an offer of freelance work, and I was able to turn it down. There was a time when I'd have been eager for the job, but now I have books to write, an essay to write, promotional things to do, and while I'm not rich I'm also not so desperate that it's worth adding stress to my life to take on anything else. I really am making a living as a novelist, and that's something a lot of people dream about but not so many achieve. Go, me!

Meanwhile, I think I may have figured out the source of my odd attack of Target Angst yesterday. I blame the relentless onslaught of Valentine's Day merchandise. I don't really care much about Valentine's Day itself because I know it's mostly a meaningless commercial construct. I'd rather someone think of me because he's thinking of me, not because of multimillion-dollar ad campaigns on behalf of the chocolate, flower, jewelry and card industries (though I will accept gifts of chocolate at any time). But the pink and red hearts all over creation do seem to sink into the psyche and remind me that I'm not in love and that there's nobody who loves me in a non-friendship/non-family way. Most of the time that's not something I worry about, but every so often something comes up to remind me, and thus that odd sense of yearning that eased soon after I escaped the vicinity of all the cupid paraphernalia.

And finally, speaking of romance and all that, a big happy wedding anniversary today for my parents. I won't say how many years (mostly because that would require math), but it's certainly been an enduring marriage.