Squirrelsville – An unnamed gray squirrel lashed out violently today when denied its normally easily obtained meal of sunflower seeds. Read the rest of this entry
May25
May18
Chatting With the Chicks of Chick Lit
May is International Chick Lit Month! The ladies of Chick Lit Chat are celebrating with a week of festivities (see my previous post to enter our contest to win a Kindle and Amazon gift card!) Today we’re chatting with some of my main characters!
Chuck: Ha ha ha ha welcome, welcome everyone to Chatting With the Chicks of Chick Lit. I’m your host, Chuck Lottateeth, and I am so thrilled to be able to introduce you to some of the most fascinating characters in literature today. I’m talking about the leading ladies of chick lit—those enchanting, romantic, darling, sexy, sweet, funny, headstrong—and, let’s face it, sometimes downright frustrating—modern women who headline this fabulously fun genre. I’m sure you’re going to love getting the skinny on these “novel” heroines, and who knows? You might just find your new BFF on the pages of one of these books!
Without further ado, please put your hands together and show some love for today’s guests, the heroines of Jayne Denker’s small-town series!
Welcome the main character of the first Marsden novel, Down on Love: Georgiana (“George”) Down! Georgiana’s a blogger whose advice column/anti-relationship site, Down on Love, is really taking off, but she gets in over her head when she moves back to Marsden after being away most of her adult life.
Our second guest, from the second Marsden novel, Picture This: Celia Marshall! We first met Celia in Down on Love, as the former girlfriend of George’s crush from high school, Casey Bowen. In Picture This, she’s moved to New York City to be a photographer’s assistant, and she’s caught the eye of a bona fide movie star.
Our third guest, from the third Marsden novel, Lucky for You: Jordan Leigh! Celia’s younger—and much more troublesome—cousin, Jordan settles in Marsden for the first time since her family moved away when she was a child, and she’s got some baggage. Namely, an ankle monitor. She’s under house arrest, and is being babysat by straitlaced but sexy police officer Will Nash.
What a threesome we’ve got here! Let’s get started, shall we? Read the rest of this entry
May15
Chick Lit May A to Z: X Is For…
Hooray for International Chick Lit Month! Hunting for prizes? You’ve come to the right place! Hop on the #ChickLitMay “A to Z” Scavenger Hunt and collect all 26 words for the chance to win a Kindle Paperwhite and a $100 Amazon gift card! My letter is… Read the rest of this entry
Apr22
The TV Character Bloodbath: Not White? Not Male? Not Safe!
Two weeks ago I was spitting nails about the horrible season ender of Sleepy Hollow. Yeah, yeah, spoiler alert. Everyone should know this by now: Abbie Mills, the main character, was killed off. You can read my reaction to it here—I can’t bear to go through it all again.
As is probably apparent in my previous blog post, I was livid at not only the actual choice to kill Abbie off, but also the sheer ineptitude with which it was done. As a writer, I boggled at the ham-fisted fashioning of the season finale (series finale? at this point I hope so)…actually, at the entire trajectory of the show after the creators left at the end of the first season.
I’m still pissed—yes, still! it was that poorly done!—but once I started thinking about the why of it all, my rage got even hotter. So here’s another blog post, rant No. 2. Buckle up, and don’t say I didn’t warn you. Read the rest of this entry
Apr12
Trainwreck TV: The Untimely Demise of Sleepy Hollow; or, Who Wrote This Sh*t?
I should have known something bad was going down with one of my favorite TV shows, Sleepy Hollow, when my literary agent sent me a tweet about the season finale. With three red angry faces in the tweet. Not a good sign.
Unfortunately, I can’t say I didn’t expect to be kicked around by the show. I’d been watching this season with shoulders tensed and eyes squinted, like a kid forced to share the back seat of the family car with a sibling prone to punching my arm at unexpected intervals. Sleepy Hollow had been punching the daylights out of my enjoyment of the series for the past two of its three seasons; why should it change its tune with the season 3 finale?
Sure enough, the last episode was far from pretty, culminating in (do I still have to say “spoiler alert”? okay: spoiler alert) the death of…oh, nobody special, just Abbie, the main character. That was several days ago, and the fandom hasn’t calmed down yet. Nor should it. Not only was it an untimely death, it was…hm, how to put this…a stupid, stupid move.
Why did it happen? The accusations are still flying: Read the rest of this entry
Apr5
Happy Blogiversary, Hello Chick Lit!
Yay! It’s Hello Chick Lit’s blogiversary month, and I’m part of the celebrations all week!
Today I have a guest post about…letters. The honest-to-post-office kind. When was the last time you received a handwritten letter in the mail? Or wrote one? I got one a few weeks ago, and it was a doozy.
So stop by Hello Chick Lit and check it out and, while you’re there, be sure to enter the contest to win digital copies of all three of my Marsden books! See you over there!
Mar29
Okay, Now What?
Gather ’round, kids—I’m going to let you in on a secret. Okay, it’s not really a secret, because I’m not one to hide this sort of thing: On January 2 of this year, I turned 50.
I KNOW!! Shocked me too!
So I guess I’m an old lady according to some (like my 12-year-old son, who won’t get anywhere close to middle-aged himself if he doesn’t stop calling me that), although I don’t feel very old.
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- Not so much this (unless Chris Pratt wants to help me cross the street—then I’ll reconsider)
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- More this
However, whether I feel 50 or half that, it’s still a milestone, so I thought I’d do a little soul searching, a little assessment, to figure out how I’ve been doing so far. What did I dream of doing when I was a kid? Did I achieve any of my goals? Or should I be downright ashamed of myself for squandering these fifty years (so far)?
(Psst…I did have a drink. Quite a few of them, in fact, over the years.)
So let’s check on Jayne’s Life So Far… Read the rest of this entry
Feb24
In Which Jayne Gives the Hell Up
Okay, you know what? I’ve got nothing today. No blog topic. No big idea. Nothing. I’m tired—exhausted, really.
• From finishing the draft of my sixth romcom and consequently wrestling the manuscript to get the word count down to a respectable number that won’t make potential publishers faint dead away.
• From the winter blahs as we drag ourselves out of February and into March, knowing full well March in the Northeast US is always made up of thirty-one days that look remarkably, depressingly like February.
• From dieting to get rid of my holiday poundage. (Why do I do that to myself every year?) Read the rest of this entry
Dec14
When Your Christmas Tree Is a Rat Bastard
I never thought I’d say this in reference to a Christmas tree, but I did yesterday: “I’m scared.”
Yesterday was our annual trip to the Christmas tree farm near our house to cut down a tree. The place is called Stokoe’s, and it does a bang-up job, with food, activities, decorations, wreaths, petting zoo, tractor rides out to the fields…you name it. We’ve gone there for our tree every year for the past decade. We go there to get pumpkins, too. I love it so much I modeled Bowen Farms, hero Casey’s pumpkin patch/inn/conference center/etc., in my Marsden books, on it. I got to interview a member of the Stokoe family and everything!
This one might have been a little ambitious…
Anyway, back to the tree. Clan Denker has a size problem. Namely, Casa de Denker has 11 ft. ceilings and a bay window in the living room, and the space must. be. filled. We tend to get monster trees—not just tall, but also fat. Every year, we seek out the biggest, gnarliest tree we can find and nearly kill ourselves cutting it down and getting it into the house.
But this is the first year the tree fought back. Read the rest of this entry
Oct28
Pumpkin This
Credit: MomminItUp.com
I like pumpkin stuff.
Yeah, I said it. I’m so far from a basic bitch I don’t even own one pair of yoga pants, but I never turn down a good pumpkin spice latte if I can help it. What’s more, I’ll have a slice of pumpkin loaf or a pumpkin muffin with cream cheese frosting right along with that latte and not even bat an eyelash.
It goes deeper than that, however. I love sweater weather. I own, and frequently wear, many garments made of fleece. I fire up the woodstove way too soon. I put up “black” strings of lights for Halloween. I regularly devote hours upon hours to making my son’s costume fabulous (while he’s thinking it’ll be good enough to cut something out of cardboard). Read the rest of this entry
