To celebrate the publication of You May Kiss the Bride — yesterday! wow! — Avon Books and Tasty Book Tours are hosting a virtual tour, featuring excerpts, reviews, a Q&A, and a giveaway. Click here* to check it out!
*Link removed, no longer active.
I admire and adore the Ripped Bodice bookstore, so I’m thrilled they’re carrying You May Kiss the Bride! Plus, they’re offering a special gift with purchase for the first ten people who order, whether in store or online. Click here to visit their beautiful website.
The gift includes this necklace – which has a special meaning you’ll understand when you read Chapter 5 – and two postcards, one of which is stamped if you’d like to tell a friend about You May Kiss the Bride. The rumpled bedsheet, however, isn’t included. ;)
It’s release day for You May Kiss the Bride, the first book in the Penhallow Dynasty series! Picture me throwing huge handfuls of confetti up into the air!
If you’ve preordered — thank you! — you’ll be able to start reading/listening today. And if you’d like to order You May Kiss the Bride, click here to see your various options for print, ebook, and audio.
Isn’t this beautiful? It’s especially nice on a cool, gray, Pacific Northwest kind of day. 
By the way, there’s a “secret sauce” which makes it especially good: mango juice.
I recently had the pleasure of reading a fantastic contemporary romance novel, Recipe for Redemption, by Anna J. Stewart. Anna’s writing style is so compulsively readable, and her characters so vividly drawn, that I absolutely had to read this in one sitting.
And Anna’s got a new book coming out in May, which I’m super-excited to read. Check out this stunning cover!
To learn more about Anna and her other books, click here.
If you’ve been following my blog you know I’m a big Jane Austen fan. And so when this hilarious graphic floated across my Twitter feed, I pounced on it so I could share it with you here. 
The brilliant mind behind it is Mark Brownlow. More about him and his work here.
I like this word a lot; it’s a fun way to illuminate a character’s hostility. 
I used it in You May Kiss the Bride, in a scene during which my protagonists, Livia Stuart and Gabriel Penhallow, are discussing his high-handed decision that theirs is to be a marriage in name only. Livia says:
“You’re supposed to be marrying in order to—how did your grandmother put it in her letter to Lady Glanville?—oh yes, to ensure the succession. How will you do that now, I wonder?”
He took his time responding, for he was analyzing her tone. It wasn’t one he heard often. It was—impudence. Brazen impudence. If he had hackles, he thought, they’d be rising right now. Coolly he said, “That’s my problem, isn’t it, Miss Stuart? Not yours.”
This scene takes place in Chapter 5, but if you like, you can read all of Chapter 1 here.
So happy to share with you these kind words of praise from a fellow writer I admire so much — the wildly talented Lenora Bell, author of the acclaimed How the Duke Was Won and If I Only Had a Duke. Here’s what Lenora has to say about my own You May Kiss the Bride:
I’m super-excited to read Lenora’s third book in the Disgraceful Dukes series, Blame It on the Duke, which releases April 17th (soon!). More about Lenora here.
In our house, it’s one of the hap-hap-happiest times of the year. :)
