Kindle Love Stories Game Showdown: Romance Draw (Part 2)

So it's widely known I'm a geek and I'm a lover of glee. But did you know I'm an artist??? LOL

Holly

Throwback Thursday...How to Catch a Groom

How to Catch a Groom

#TT Throwback Thursday

How to Catch a Groom

A friend just posted another fun science picture to my Facebook wall the other day.  My love of geeky things is obviously well known!

On that geeky note, in 2002 I wrote a scientist hero for Harlequin Duets.  He was awkward and logical.  And he had a cat named...wait for it...wait for it...Schrodinger.  Now, if you're not laughing you probably don't get all geeky gleeful about a physicist who had a postulate about a cat in a box being alive and dead at the same time.  It's known as Schrodinger's cat.  And if you didn't laugh, you're not alone.  I talked to my editor, laughing my butt off because I'd named the cat Schrodinger.  She didn't laugh either!

But I loved that cat.  And the nerdy hero.  He won an award from RT that year

So fast forward a couple years...the book came out as Manga in Japan.  The didn't send me a copy, so I found a way to order it through Amazon's Japanese site.  It cost me more than $40 with shipping, but I really wanted it.  First thing I did was check to see if good old Schrodinger made it...

He did!!

I loved that book...and Schrodinger!!

Holly

http://amzn.to/1DbVosn

Salmon Spinach Bowties

Another quick, easy, healthy meal.  
(I did my normal, non-recipe method while cooking...the measurements are close, but not exact)

Salmon Spinach Bowties

1 lb whole wheat bowties
1 package fresh spinach
Leftover salmon (maybe 12 oz)
1/4 cup butter (well, it was actually a little less butter and olive oil balancing out the remainder)
1 cuppish skim milk
1 cuppish parmesan cheese
a good dash of basil, oregano and parsley

Cook the noodles, drain them. Heat the butter & spices, add spinach and salmon. When just spinach is just starting to wilt, take it off the heat, add noodles and then parm.

That's it.

Now, if I was cooking for me, I'd have added a bunch of garlic. My finicky eater wouldn't have liked that, so I didn't.

We're really working at next to no pre-made food this year. (Trying out a rule if it has more than 3 ingredients, rethink it.) We've never done much, but we're doing less than not-much. And as always, we're trying to utilize leftovers. This recipe would work well with any leftover protein. I've done something similar with white beans. When you add those to the whole grain pasta, you have a complete protein.

Holly

Found and Lost

‪#‎TT‬ Throwback Thursday

One of my first mystery-ish stories was.Found and Lost. It's a comedy that features an appearing/disappearing dead body...uh, and it's a romance. Now I rarely complain about titles, but I lobbied for...Can't Find NoBODY. I got Found and Lost. SIGH. 

That being said, I had so much fun with this book! But it would have been cuter if it was called Can't Find Nobody!  smile emoticon And of course, the cover's a bit different. My youngest called it my French cover.

Cover Reveal, Carry Her Heart

I love getting new covers!  I've been updating April 28th's release, Carry Her Heart, on my website.

Sometimes true love may be as close as next door

Carry Her Heart
by Holly Jacob
Montlake Publishing, April 28, 2015 

“Maybe we live our lives constantly becoming and rebecoming. Maybe we’re always in the process of metamorphosing into something new."

In her journal, writer Piper George notes the change of seasons. Each entry marks the passage of time since she became a teen mother and put her baby up for adoption. Her words flow together, painting a picture of loss, hope, and enduring love. But one autumn, a new presence appears in its pages and in her life: her neighbor, Edward “Ned” Chesterfield.

As winter thaws to spring, Piper and Ned develop a friendship that could be something more if only Piper will let it. But the loss of her daughter has shaped her life. And having given so much of herself away, she’s not sure if she can give Ned all that he deserves. But with him at her side, Piper just might learn that a heart’s love is never truly lost!

Preorder Carry Her Heart at Amazon.

Excerpt:

Copyright 2015 by Holly Jacobs

I sat on my front porch and took a sip from a bone china teacup with tiny forget-me-nots painted on the side.

It was a civilized, proper cup.

I looked down at my laptop, which was balanced on the holey jeans that covered my outstretched legs. My legs were propped on the porch railing.

There was nothing particularly proper looking about me.

I didn’t need a mirror to know that my carrot-red hair had gone Medusa again and was breaking free of its twisty. As for my jeans, I swear my knees must be knobbier than the average woman’s, or maybe because I worked at home and wore them daily, they just gave up more rapidly. Either way, my three favorite pair of jeans all had holes in the knees . . . again.

I’d have to go shopping.

I hate going shopping.

I could buy most of what I needed online and avoid the stores, but jeans were an item of clothing that must be tried on.

I stared at my blank screen and took another sip of my tea.

I liked working on the porch.

I watched all the cars that stopped in front of the school across the street. Passenger doors opened and children were disgorged from them at regular intervals. Tall, skinny kids, short, roundish ones. Loud ones who started shrieking friends’ names before their feet hit the pavement. Quiet ones, who could seem alone even in the midst of the morning chaos.

Boys. Girls. Nerds. Jocks. Happy. Sullen.

They were all my inspiration.

They were also my audience.

In a sea of young adult books that dealt with paranormal elements, from wizards to vampires, I currently wrote reality-based books for preteens. I’d written books for much younger children in the past, but as my audience aged, so did my writing.

Maybe it was time to move my books from elementary and middle schools to high schools?

I tried to concentrate on the scene in front of me. I only had a few more weeks before the Erie, Pennsylvania weather got too cold to work outside. I always hated moving inside for work. This porch was where I found Julie and Auggie, Terry the Terrible, and Beautiful Belle.

This porch was also where I tried to imagine Amanda.

There.

A girl with auburn-brown braids that thumped up and down on her back as she walked to a group of girls and joined in the talk. She was new. I know I’d have remembered her. She was talking to a group of bigger kids. Probably eighth graders, the oldest class at this school. She was animated as she spoke. She’d work as a character. I . . .

I was distracted from the scene playing out across the street by a moving van that pulled into the driveway next door. The Morrisons had moved out three weeks ago. The For Sale sign on the front yard had a Sold sticker plastered across it for a few weeks longer than that. But after the Morrisons moved out, no one else had moved in.

The door of the van opened and a man got out.

I only needed that first quick glance to know he was cute.

I tried to study him circumspectly. And I immediately thought of him as a fictional character. If I were writing him in a book, I’d make him a . . . coach. He had that every-man  sort of look to him. He was good-looking, but not intimidatingly so. Still, he was good-looking enough that there was a spark of attraction.

I’ll confess, I don’t go out a lot and don’t meet a ton of eligible, single men. I meet even fewer who give me that zing of awareness. The sort of feeling that reminded me I was a woman in her prime.

I took another glance at the man I was zinging over. His hair was . . . neat. Not too short but not long by any stretch of the imagination. And it was brown. Not dark brown bordering on black and definitely not punctuated with blond highlights. No, this man’s hair was a straight-up, use-a-Crayola-brown-crayon-if-you-were-coloring-him sort of brown.

He was tan. Not in a lies-out-in-the-sun sort of way, but rather he had a skin tone that came from ancestors who came from sunnier climes than mine. I made people who were pale look swarthy.

Judging from the van, he was not overly tall, nor was he overly short. Average.

I tried to ignore my zing and concentrate on my book. This man would make a perfect coach. Put a baseball cap on him and give him a whistle and a glove . . .

At some point I’d started typing.

“Couch,” Felicity called. “Your name’s funny.”

“Coach,” Coach Divan responded, correcting her pronunciation.

“Couch Divan. I bet people pick on you. My grandma calls her couch a divan. So you’re really Couch Couch.”

“Coach,” he repeated.

“I like Couch better. Couch Divan. Yep. Couch Couch. Yeah, I like it—”

 “Hi.”

That one syllable pulled me from my story and I realized the man who had reminded me I was a woman and was my potential new neighbor as well as an inspiration for a new character was standing at my porch railing.

“Sorry. I got caught up in . . .” I wasn’t going to tell him what I’d been caught up in. It’s better not to scare new acquaintances with my profession. Some worry they’d become fodder for my fiction.

Frankly, some did.

I started again. “Hi. Are you my new neighbor?”

He nodded. “Edward Chesterfield. Ned, to my friends.”

I couldn’t help it. I started to laugh. Really, it was more of a giggle than a full-out laugh.

I’d written an article years ago about the evolution of the modern sofa for a historical magazine, which was the only reason I know that a variety of couches are known asChesterfields.

Given what I’d been writing, it was funny. Well, maybe not in a standup routine sort of comedy way, but to a woman who spent a lot of her time entertaining herself, it was hysterical.

My new neighbor, Ned, looked at me like I was nuts.

“Sorry. Really. It’s just that . . .” Man, I was making a muck of this. I’m pretty sure that telling a man you were amused that there was a type of couch that bore his family name wasn’t going to convince him of your sanity...

Available April 28, 2015 

Pre-rder your copy here. 

Throwback Thursday

In 2001's Do You Hear What I Hear? the heroine's daughter is hearing impaired. That was my Easter Egg in the book. The first bio I ever read was Helen Keller's. I spent part of a school year learning braille, and later took some ASL classes.  I loved being able to incorporate that into a book!

Holly

Holly Jacobs' January Giveaway

I love my readers.  And I appreciate all of you.  With that in mind, I decided that 2015 was going to be my year of the reader!

I gave some thought on how I was going to do that. People hang out with me on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and now Tsu, and while social media is great, it's easy to miss something because there's so much info flying around.  So many of you have signed up for my newsletter.  I thought that was the best way to make for a painless giveaway.  Rather than having to enter monthly, everyone on that newsletter list is automatically entered in any of the giveaways I do this year!

I put last month's giveaway mugs in the mail yesterday!

This month, someone will win a set of Valley Ridge books!
Not subscribed? The form's here. 

As always, thanks everyone!

Holly