We interrupt your regularly scheduled blog post...

I could tell you some boring story about how my cat is psychotic and has taken to running up and down the hall every night while sobbing uncontrollably, but that would only partially explain my general craziness and, to be honest, you probably don't care. Now that we've got that sorted out, I'll tell you what you should care about. This really awesome book came out yesterday and you should all go buy it.

Ice Princess by Jennifer Anderson is now available and is part of the Honey Creek Young Adult line. The cover is so gorgeous that I know you already running out to buy it, but in case you aren't sold, I'm going to give you 10 reasons why you must have this story on your e-reader.

1. There's a love triangle. Everyone loves a good love triangle. 
2. There's a high school dance that is probably better than any of the ones you went to. Or at least more exciting (or maybe you actually enjoyed going to your and I'm just making stuff up). 
3. The word princess is in the title. I don't know about you, but I love any book having to do with royalty, even if it isn't real royalty. 
4. It's by Jennifer Anderson. She's cool. And awesome. Also, she's awesomely cool. 
5. Pretty dresses. The only part of high school formals I actually miss. The cover model's dress is stunning, but when else are you going to wear something like that?
6. It's the first in a series. If you don't get in on the ground floor, you'll have to catch up later (no procrastinating allowed).
7. Your friends will all be talking about it and you'll feel left out of the conversation. They'll be all "Do you remember the first time X did Y?" and you'll have to shake your head in shame and go sit in the corner. It'll be sad and embarrassing for everyone. 
8. You can click the little button on Amazon and they instantly send it to your Kindle (or, if you are too cool for that, you can buy it elsewhere and load it onto your device). 
9. You shouldn't promise people 10 reasons before you've fully thought out your blog post. 
10. It's a Honey Creek Book. You know it will be good!

Ice Princess (Honey Creek Royalty Book 1)

Mya Newman never minded the routine or quiet that came with living in Honey Creek, Ohio. For her senior year, she craves something exciting to happen instead of it melting into a cookie cutter routine like the previous years.

When a new girl, Audrey Moore, moves to town, Mya finds herself caught in a triangle. She discovers hidden feelings for her best friend, Michael Graves, but he seems to have eyes for the new girl.

After Mya’s father becomes ill and eventually passes, she turns to her best friend, Michael. He never leaves her side, but she wonders if he’d rather be elsewhere. With fear of rejection and loss of friendship, Mya decides she can’t confess her recently discovered feelings.

When Michael and Mya share a dance at the Winter Formal, does she open her heart to him? Or does she shy away, forever longing to be the princess who finds her prince?      

Good, Bad, and Ugly Book Titles

Posted by Suzanne Lilly
Twitter @suzannelilly

Monkey at Cleveland Metroparks Zoo. Image by DEQ on Flickr.

What book titles attract your interest? Is it the plain and mundane, or is it the alarming and disarming? Be it a good title, a bad title, a funny title, or a scary title, the ones that step out from the pack are the ones we remember.

Last week, I posted five quirky and unusual romance quotes. Now we’re moving on to quirky and unusual book titles. I agonize over the titles of my books and stories. You'll see from this list that perhaps not everyone spends a great deal of time choosing that all important TITLE.

One of my favorite book catalogs comes from a family owned company that specializes in remaindered and out of print items. When I went through the newest catalog this week, the entries entertained me through two glasses of tea and a full hour of lounging about pretending to do research. Here are the top five plus another four titles I discovered for your reading pleasure, all in this one catalog.

• The Cartoon Guide to Calculus. Perhaps now those stuffy high school math teachers will let the kids read comic books in class.
• Stupid on the Road. I drive on I-80 everyday. Do I really need to buy a book to see this?
• Complete Ancient Greek: Teach Yourself. But who will you speak it with?
• Teach Yourself Electricity. Comes with a free, do-it-yourself last will and testament.
• The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Lawsuits. An alternate title for this might be, How to Get Yourself Thrown Out of Court.
• Turtles: an Extraordinary Natural History. It starts out slow. Don’t try to rush through it.
• The Utterly, Completely, and Totally Useless Fact-O-Pedia: A Startling Collection of Over 1,000 Things You’ll Never Need to Know! I’m startled to think anyone spent money to buy this book.
• Uglier Than a Monkey’s Armpit. ‘Nuff said.
• I'm Not Hanging Noodles on Your Ears. Could those be a monkey's ears?

Clearly, I've been struggling too hard to come up with unique titles for my Honey Creek Books. Next time, I might just pick up this catalog, close my eyes, and point.

Here's an example of a really, really good novel title that makes you want to pick up the book and read it right away.

What’s the best, worst, or strangest book title you’ve ever come across?

FanFiction

My kids know I'm a writer. They're ages 3, 6, and 8, so it doesn't mean much to them. They all love books, words, reading and being read to. It's a major time consumer in our house. My 6 year old, the more tender-hearted of my clan, was saddened to find he can't write Fly Guy books. Fly Guy is the brain child...brain-fly? of the incredibly talented childrens author, Tedd Arnold. My son loves his books and we own every one. My son has a little light he attaches to his books so he can stay up reading them over and over. His kindergarten teacher says he reads above his grade level. She doesn't know I'm a Word Nerd and therefore, my poor kids have the genetic disorder as well. Anyway...he looked so distraught, hearing he couldn't write Fly Guy books for a living LOL. I racked my tiny brain to make it better. I knew telling him he could write another character of his very own wouldn't satisfy him. Then, the proverbial light bulb came on. *Blink* FAN FICTION!

I sat down with him and visited websites filled with stories about other things he knew and showed him how they were all written by different authors. We talked about how not everything, everybody, writes and publishes is done for money. Sometimes, people love a world or character so much, they want to see it go on, or they have an amazing idea for an adventure they want to share with other fans of the series/book/movie etc. New term for his growing vocabulary: Fanfic. He was immediately thrilled. He thought up a new adventure for Fly Guy and got started. He worked a long while on the story and spelling and asked lots of questions. Then he stapled the pages together and took it to school in his little-man backpack. The next day he announced, "You need to teach me to use the scanner, because I have orders for four more!" LOL So, he learned another new lesson, how to use the scanner/printer, and he did. He's working very hard keeping up with orders and teaching his kindergarten class about fanfic. AND he's making notes for his first sequel :) Love that kid! Thanks Tedd Arnold and FLy Guy!

Isn't it Almost May?

Can someone please tell me what happened to Spring?

Around here, we seemed to have misplaced it. First, we skipped over the worst of winter (only 2 days of snow?!?!) and went straight to 80 degree days that felt like summer, and now that it is almost May, it is pouring rain and barely above freezing.

Mind you, this drastic change in weather is not simply an inconvenience. It is screwing up several things.
Like all the hard work I put in on my first ever garden.

Which looks nothing like this.

And my attempts to see a meteor shower.

How's your spring weather treating you?

Top Five List of Not So Famous Romantic Quotes

By Suzanne Lilly
Twitter @suzannelilly

I love fun things, things that are quirky, whimsical, flamboyant, and unusual. So I made this list of not so famous romantic quips while I played this not so famous video of great kisses matched to the song U Make Me Wanna by Blue.

I love lists.They appeal to my organizational gene. I make lists of places I want to visit, things I have to do, and I obsess over my Twitter lists.

When I was single, I even made a list of the pros and cons of my dream guy.

But that’s a topic for another day.

On to the romance list!

My top five list of not so famous romantic quotes

• “A kiss is a rosy dot over the 'i' of loving.” Cyrano de Bergerac
• “Before I met my husband, I'd never fallen in love. I'd stepped in it a few times.” Rita Rudner
• “I have great hopes that we shall love each other all our lives as much as if we had never married at all.” Lord Byron
• "You make me wanna fall, you make me wanna surrender my soul." Blue
• “The best thing to hold onto in life is each other.” Audrey Hepburn

Your turn!
What are your favorite whimsical quotes from movies, books, songs, or videos?


Another list from me to you of posts you might enjoy:

•  Breaking Up is Hard to Do
• Holy Samoas! Fun Things to Do with Girl Scout Cookies
• High School Yearbook Photo Fail 

Shameless Shoutout!

Besides writing for TMP, I spend some time as the Review/PR Coodinator. I love my job! I love the authors!

Part of my job is handling some new programs that we have coming down the pipes. One of them, I'm proud to annouce and head up is our Beta Reader Program.

Do you like to read?  Do you like free books?  Do you often find yourself thinking about ways a story you’ve read could be improved?

Turquoise Morning Press sets high standards when selecting, representing and publishing written works.  To further our commitment to our readers to put out high-quality books, we are introducing the TMP Beta Reader Program.

If interested, please email me, Jennifer Anderson (jenniferanderson@turquoisemorning.com) to begin the application process.

*The TMP Beta Reader program is an un-paid, voluntary position.  Readers will be rewarded with free titles as compensation for their input.

Cover Art for Nursing Second Chances

I got my cover art for my first Honey Creek story, Nursing Second Chances, last week and I've been sitting on my hands to keep from sharing before now. I love the way the pictures match exactly how I feel about the book. Tell me what you think!

Fun Facts About Friday the 13th

TGIF! It's Friday! You can thank goodness it's Friday today unless you suffer from triskaidekaphobia, the fear of the number thirteen. People have been afraid of Friday and of the number thirteen for centuries. On the other hand, some view thirteen as a lucky number.

Image by HarshLight on Flickr

The Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, California is full of thirteens. Friday the 13th is an especially fun time to take a tour at this landmark mansion and see how many times you'll see thirteen of something. Sarah Winchester believed magical thirteen would keep all the evil spirits at bay, the spirits she was convinced were haunting her family for producing the Winchester rifle.

Image by HarshLight on Flickr

She installed windows with thirteen panes, stairs with thirteen steps, and you can even see the thirteen hooks in the tiny blue séance room where she kept robes for her guests to wear when consulting with the dead. Be careful when you visit, however. There's a nasty drop from the door of the séance room to the kitchen below. That step (or lack of it) is a doozy!

Did I mention the mansion has thirteen bathrooms? Each of these bathrooms has a drain cover with thirteen holes. Just in case you were wondering.

The house also has a recurring motif of spiderwebs, many designed in thirteen parts. You can see a hidden stash of furniture, window glass, and carpeting in the lower floors of the house with this design.

Honestly, you could spend weeks, perhaps months, counting all the ways the number thirteen is used in the Winchester mansion. As for me, I'll let the docents and the resident ghosts handle all the counting.

Did all these repetitions of thirteen help Sarah live a longer, safer life? Well, she had crippling arthritis, and modified her stairs and furniture so she wouldn't have to raise her legs so painfully high when moving about the house. In spite of her malady, she lived into her eighties, a hearty age for women in the last century.

What do you think? Is thirteen lucky or unlucky? For Sarah Winchester, thirteen may have been the one lucky thing in her life. At least she couldn't be accused of triskaidekaphobia.

Happy Friday the 13th, and may the best of luck be with you!

Here's another post you might enjoy:

Who Will Win the Battle of Katniss and Bella?
I could tell you, but that would spoil all your fun.

Post by Suzanne Lilly
On Twitter as @suzannelilly

Have you read this yet??

Some of you may know but Julie Anne Lindsey and I are writer besties. Like 4 Evah!  We met on Twitter and have been glued to each other ever since. Now, we didn't actually meet, face-to-face, until June 2011 but that never stopped the emails or tweets. Or the *spirit fingers*

LOVE HER!

We started as casual friends and turned into writer friends, sending stuff back and forth. We each have our own strengths and each of us catch those little mistakes the other has missed. Well, Julie sent me a short novella to read. She said I can't change anything involving the town, but let me know what you think. At the time, I totally didn't get it but shrugged it off and fell completely in love with her short story. I got to the last page and begged for more. Of course she *hugged* my response and sifted through my comments before submitting. I was then introduced to the world of Honey Creek where I too fell in love and currently have 4 waiting to be released!

But I have to give props to Julie's debut novella for the Honey Creek line, Bloom. Now I might be biased but honestly, if you love a story enough, aren't you always biased.

In a town filled with her past, she never expected to find her future….

Seven years ago Cynthia left Honey Creek with a broken heart. Three years ago Mitchell arrived with one. Now Cynthia’s come home, and these two hardened hearts can’t stop arguing. If they’d only take a break long enough to find some common ground, they might be surprised to find love can grow anywhere.

If they let it, love will find a way to Bloom.


For you GoodReads lovers, here's what I said...

Cynthia is a wonderful MC. She's fiery, strong and loving all rolled into a perfect package. But she has her flaws and those flaws are what makes you love her even more. And when Cynthia meets Mitchell for the first time you can almost feel the pages burn with passion. Bloom is a wonderful tale of secrets, regrets and new love. You can find love around every corner as long as you keep your heart and eyes open long enough to find it.

Bloom is Julie's debut novella for the Honey Creek line of Turquoise Morning Press and the launching book does not disappoint. Honey Creek may seem like a simple, quiet town in the Midwest but behind every little town is a whole lot of intrigue. Julie has captured the pure essence of Honey Creek in Bloom and like me, her fans will be wanting more. Lucky for us, we won't have to wait long. I believe her follow up novella in her Seeds of Love series will be out later in 2012.


If you haven't read this wonderful novella, you need to add it to your list. It's light, sweet and full of just enough to keep you from putting it down. Get your copy today!

Happy Late Easter

Happy late-Easter to those of you who were celebrating yesterday!

I'm hoping the Easter bunny was very good to you and brought you all the chocolate and marshmallow chicks you can handle for the year.

If you're on a diet, I hope he brought you plenty of carrots to eat while the rest of us polish off our chocolate eggs.

Traditions are very important to my characters in Honey Creek, especially traditions that surround holidays. They are a time to get together without worrying about all the other things that need to get done. That's how they always were for my family when I was growing up. My brother and I would spend Saturday dying Easter eggs to leave for the Easter bunny to hide.

Come Sunday, we'd both rush around the house, trying to find the most eggs. Of course, no one in my house actually liked to eat them, so they mostly went into the trash the next day.

What traditions do you have?

Spring Recipe for Leg of Lamb

Around my home, we love to have a feast for every holiday. We have our traditional favorites, and then we have favorites that we've grown to love in recent years.

I never tasted, let alone cooked, a lamb dish until after my thirtieth birthday. My husband had never eaten home cooked lamb either. It was love at first bite.

This year for Easter we're having a leg of lamb. For our two children who are reluctant about embracing its deliciousness, we'll be having a ham as well.

The basic traditional way to cook lamb is to grill it or roast it with herbs. Since my husband loves to garden, we have fresh vegetables and herbs most of the time during the year. Here's my own recipe with a mixture of herbs that I pick fresh from the garden just before cooking. If you don't have fresh herbs, dried will do. You only need to use about 1/3 as much dried as fresh herbs.

Herb Roasted Leg of Lamb

1 leg of lamb, bone in, 3-6 pounds
1 sprig of rosemary (about 3 tablespoons chopped)
1 small bunch of fresh thyme (about 2 tablespoons chopped)
4 or 5 leaves of mint (about 1 tablespoon chopped)
3 cloves of garlic, sliced thin
1 tablespoon sea salt
1 teaspoon of fresh ground pepper
Small amount of olive oil (less than 1/4 cup)

Mix the herbs and place them in a blender or food chopper with just enough olive oil to moisten them. It takes about 2-4 tablespoons of oil. Process the herbs till you have a finely chopped paste.

Spread the herbs and oil over the outside of a leg of lamb. If you like garlic, you can also cut small slits in the meat and place slices of garlic inside the meat. Place the leg of lamb in a roasting pan.

Roast the lamb or cook it on an outdoor grill at 350 degrees for about 13 - 15 minutes per pound. Using a meat thermometer, check the temperature of the meat. Medium rare will be 135 degrees. Medium well will be 145 degrees. Well done, the way we like it, will be 150 degrees.

Place the lamb on a platter with mint and thyme as a garnish. We serve this with roasted red potatoes and red bell peppers, a spring mix salad, and and fresh green beans lightly steamed.

I hope that whatever holiday you celebrate this time of year will find you gathered around a table enjoying family, friends, and fabulous food.

I'd love to hear about your favorite meals.

Happy spring holidays!

Posted by Suzanne Lilly
Follow me on Twitter as @suzannelilly

Cleaning and Creepy Dolls

Last summer, my mom finally got tired of looking at all the junk I still had at her house. The solution: ship it to me. In November, a truck full of boxes arrived at my front door and unloaded everything from a bedroom set to books to trash. No seriously, trash. They were instructed to pack up everything in my old room, which included the trash can that had yet to be emptied.

Let's pretend that today isn't the second day of April and that it didn't take my husband and I a grand total of 4 months to actually get all this stuff unpacked (because it really did). I've been cleaning out the guest bedroom and that meant actually putting all this stuff away. Hidden among the huge box of Beanie Babies, the five (5!) Furbies, and the collection of CDs were a few gems that I'd all but forgotten about.

One of these things was a little clown (not the creepy kind) doll. It's bald now, thanks to one of my family's dogs, but it used to have bushy white hair, a white face, and cute pink and purple pajamas on. I bought it the summer before I started fifth grade. Actually, I bought a different one. My friend bought this one and we switched. It was just before her family moved overseas for three years (which has turned into a permanent arrangement) and we thought that having them would remind us of one another.

Turns out the only thing I forgot was the doll. We were pen pals for the longest time, sending letters back and forth across the Atlantic Ocean and waiting upwards of a month for a response. Around high school, we both got email and our response times became much faster. Since then, we've stayed in touch through Facebook and other social media outlets. Considering that we were only kids at the time she left, I find the fact that we are even still in touch pretty amazing.

So back to the doll. It's hideous at this point. I know I said it wasn't creepy, but with the mostly bald head, it kind of is. It's still going on the shelf (at the very back though) in the new guest room. Not as a reminder of a friend that I rarely see, but as a reminder that certain things, like love and friendship, endure no matter what.

Do you have any little mementos?