Sourcebooks Casablanca Romance Authors

Twenty-six years ago, I was a bride.  It seems like a lifetime ago and let me tell you, I didn't spend a lot of time planning my wedding, I didn't spend a lot of time being part of many bridal parties and overall, I haven't gone to a lot of weddings.  However...I love to write about things that are wedding related. I have a series - The Enchanted Bridal Series - which is really more about friendships (a little more women's fiction with romantic sub-plots) but the stories are all related to a bridal shop.  And really, I just love the thought of having an excuse to dress up in pretty dresses!  Crazy, right?  Did you used to watch the TV show Friends?  Remember the one with all the wedding dresses?  HUGE inspiration for me! So the latest book in that series - THE BRIDAL SQUAD - came out in May and we were trying to come up with a fun promo idea for it and ended up having my sassy pug Maylene play the part of the bride!  Because really, what's ...

Last weekend I had a birthday. This in itself wasn’t a surprise. My birthday, like that of most people, happens every year around pretty much the same time. No, what surprised me—in an amazed and delighted way—was the variety of sweets involved. And my threshold for being surprised by sweets is pretty high, being descended as I am from a father who invented his own praline recipe and a grandfather who liked to consume four cookies with his midmorning coffee each day. Here, take a look at the weekend’s bounty: A friend and I escaped our kids for an afternoon and sampled these French macarons , made with almond flour and filled with ganache. The flavors, clockwise from top, are chocolate hazelnut (like Nutella, but handmade), chocolate orange, cherry lime, and coconut caramel. Being a fan of coconut, this last one was my favorite. That buttery dark caramel was one of the best things I’ve ever tasted. These are Indian ladoo , made with besan (chickpe...

I've never spent much time in Palo Alto. Back in my childhood when we still took long car trips during our summer vacations, Palo Alto was some place we passed through on our way to San Francisco or heading back towards Los Angeles. I can't recall even seeing their renowned Stanford University, much less explored the town itself. Last month, however, I had the opportunity to do both, during a short but intense trip up north to visit an old family friend--she and my mother have known each other for more than 50 years--who was having a celebration of her 99th birthday. And the day after that, her great-granddaughter was celebrating her 1st birthday, making for a century of living between them! So am I going to bore you with pictures of my travels? Absolutely! Caveat: this will also be known to me as the trip on which my trusty Nikon camera finally let me down, so all surviving photos were taken with my cell phone. My inexperience with cell phone cameras resulted in several ...

and it's spilling all over the furniture. I'd like to say I'm speaking metaphorically, but, sadly, the dog growled at the cat, who took three leaps: one from the sofa to the coffee table, then the coffee table to the chair--where the other dog is--then onto the end table, where she went skidding off and knocked my glass of grape juice over. It's 10:00 at night when I'm writing this--do you know how much I DON'T want to get up and clean up the grape juice. (Chat amongst yourselves; I'll be back. Grape juice does stain after all.) I'm back. The cat is sufficiently chastised from the barrage of words that frothed from my tight lips (and she does look somewhat similar to this picture, only Pagan is black and doesn't have a smushed face) and the dogs are grinning that they aren't the ones getting in trouble. And this is just the last five minutes of my life. I started a day job the other day. For the past almost 2 years I had been laid off from my day...