This is a book I wrote in 1995, just after my youngest son passed away. I wrote two books during this time, one was the original Entangled that would one day become THE FULLERTON FAMILY SAGA. The other was a simple romance, complete with a HEA. At the time, I really, really needed one.
It was also the first book I wrote for a contest. One of the romance publishers back in the day had issued a call for romances focused on the written word. Somehow or another, the love story had to come from something being written.
I liked the challenge of that and mulled it over, coming up with a concept that turned me on enough I actually started writing. It was my idea of a romcom based on a simple premise: When a young woman moves to Los Angeles to begin her new career, she figures romance is close behind. When her real-life dates leave her disappointed, she begins to pine for an anonymous writer of romantic postcards that still come in for the former occupant of her new apartment. Then a mysterious new man falls into her life and she begins to wonder. Is her own fairy tale about to come true?
It was a lot of fun to write at a time when I needed it to be fun to write. I write on the nights where I couldn't sleep, which was basically all of them. It took me about five months to write the two books. The first, an emotional saga, helped purge. The second, a lighthearted romance, helped heal.
Though I never sent Picture Postcards to that publisher, it earned me my first agent. She shopped it around and the feedback I got was that my heroine was too "perfect," which was what I thought my heroines needed to be after so many years reading my aunt's old white-covered romance novels.
Thanks to life and other things, I shelved my romance writing career till the 2000s. In 2007, I began writing imperfect heroines because let's face it... write what you know. By 2012, I was ready to revisit Picture Postcards. I finally had the imperfect heroine down pat, but then I faced a whole new challenge: the thing that made the first plot plausible was no longer timely 16 years later. The mystery man would not have been away from his love for two months, where she could sneak out of his life in the dead of night, leaving behind all these romantic postcards for another girl to find. By the 2000s, we all became super connected. Did people even SEND picture postcards anymore?? How was I going to rewrite this and make it work?
It remained a challenge, and I was ready to meet it yet again. I even managed to keep one of my favorite scenes, involving lots of beer and a heightened moment between two good friends where a kiss hung in the air, the ultimate temptation whether or not to cross that line.
Delicious angst. And I love it.
Picture Postcards is one of my romance one-offs, a sweet story with a cinnamon roll book boyfriend, complete with a HEA, a true-blue romance book that helped me through one of the darkest parts of my life. My affection for the story runs deep, even though typically it is a much quieter title.
But it's so much a part of my history that you can't have Mevember without it. I'm pretty excited to share it with you.
I hope you read it. I hope you like it. Get your copy of PICTURE POSTCARDS today.
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