In Which I Have News

*flings confetti*

I got word today that my revisions for Crash Test Spaniard were accepted! It’s always SO exciting to have a book all confirmed and finished. I just…I felt very passionately about some of the subject matter in the book so it’s a relief to have my editor on board with me.

These are characters that will stay with me. I feel like I learned something, particularly from the heroine, Hannah. Because I had to sit down and try to understand this woman who had been through things that I’d never given a lot of thought to. I feel like I came our of it with more compassion. With a greater understanding of how blessed I am to have been given the life I had growing up.

Readers will first meet Hannah (or rather NOT meet her) in One Night in Paradise when she fails to show up for a very important event: Her wedding to the hero of that book, Zack Parsons. I never intended to write her book because she was, in many ways, the nemesis of the heroine in One Night in Paradise. Beautiful, successful, tough-as-nails and marrying the man of Clara’s dreams.

But I couldn’t stop wondering about her. Mostly I wondered why she didn’t show up to the wedding. I didn’t know. I wrote two other books that had nothing to do with her. I still wondered about her. And then I got a scene in my head of Hannah, in her wedding gown, getting into the limo to go to her wedding, the driver being someone she never expected: her not-as-ex-as-she-thought husband.

Hannah is a woman who had to fight for every good thing in her life, and she didn’t always go about getting it in a strictly…legal way. *cough* But as I wrote this character I found myself feeling for her. Admiring her strength. A strength that came from adversity, some that she was born into, and some she created for herself with bad choices.

She was a difficult heroine, and more than once she made me question my sanity. But I’m glad I stuck with her.

Then there’s the matter of Eduardo, the man who married her in name only five years before the book begins. The only person who even knows a hint of her past. A man with a few secrets of his own. 😉

I could do a WHOLE new post on the subject of the revisions I did on this book, but I do want to mention that in the initial round I had left out something really key. I hinted at an issue Eduardo had without ever showing it. My editor pointed this out to me and I went back and wrote a scene that SHOULD have been there from the beginning. It’s the scene that will define this book for me. And without my editor I would have MISSED it. And THIS is why I love her, and why I LOVE revisions.

*sprinkles flower petals*

This book will be released (with a different title that I THINK I know but need to wait and have confirmed…) in the UK in October 2012.

AND I have another bit of news that I find REALLY exciting. In August, in the UK, my debut book His Virgin Acquisition is being re-released in a 2-in-1 anthology with Lynne Graham. *screams* It’s been titled Possession, and it’s already available for pre-order on Amazon UK!

Okay, really, now I have to calm down and work. Or maybe scurry around the house and drink more coffee. 😉