The Marriage Jinxis finally here! The first book in my new Love in Abbottsville sweet romcom series.
Here’s what it’s all about:
A secret romance with my boss and a dating jinx … what couldn’t go wrong?
I never expected to move back to my hometown after losing my job, but when the perfect position practically fell into my lap, it seemed meant to be. Now, my new boss is Lucas Abbott—my high school crush and the town’s most eligible bachelor—and the attraction I feel is definitely not one-sided this time.
There are just a few problems.
He’s not allowed to date employees.
His ex-wife won’t keep her nose out of his business.
And then there’s the jinx.
My best friends think I’m crazy for believing we jinxed ourselves. But ever since we made a marriage pact, our dating lives have been one disaster after another. That can’t be a coincidence, right?
Now that THE guy might finally be in my life, I’m nervously waiting for the other shoe to drop. But is the jinx really the problem, or are deeper issues standing in our way?
The Marriage Jinx is a heartwarming closed-door romantic comedy with plenty of cute flirting, swoon-worthy kisses, small-town charm, secret office romance, a fun cast of characters, and a town turkey.
A secret romance with my boss and a dating jinx … what couldn’t go wrong?
I never expected to move back to my hometown after losing my job, but when the perfect position opened up at Abbott Farms, run by our town’s founding family, it was meant to be. Now, my new boss is Lucas Abbott—my high school crush, recently single—and the attraction I feel is definitely not one-sided this time.
There are just a few problems:
He’s not allowed to date employees due to a family scandal years ago.
His ex-wife wants him back.
And then there’s the jinx.
My best friends think I’m crazy for believing we jinxed ourselves, but ever since we made a pact not to get married before we turn thirty, our dating lives have been one disaster after another. That can’t be a coincidence, right?
Now that THE guy might finally be in my life, mishaps and misunderstandings ensue, leaving me to wonder … is the jinx really the problem, or are deeper issues standing in our way?
Besides Natalie’s gymnastics being inspired by my daughter, there are a handful of other true-life inspirations in 18 Hours to Us.
– Colton’s yellow Camaro was inspired by my sister-in-law Brenda’s car – only, hers is a convertible. So fun! Natalie’s grey Honda Accord was inspired by my hubby’s car at the time I wrote the book.
– Some of the character names were inspired by my kids’ friends and classmates. Grant, Olivia, the two Hannahs, Trinity. Only their names were used. The personalities of the characters are all fiction.
– Natalie’s dad served in the Army on a peacekeeping mission in Bosnia, just like my hubby did.
– In reality, there’s no way Natalie could have climbed up on the railing by Brandywine Falls to do balance beam skills because the board railings there are installed at an angle, probably to keep people from doing that very thing.
– The stop at Italiano Grill was inspired by a conversation my mom, Aunt Deb, and I had when we were out at Pizza Hut. Our menu had a sticker on it, and we joked about it looking like those old scratch-n-sniff stickers. I thought it would be funny if it smelled like pizza (we get silly sometimes!), which made its way into the book. Then somehow we got to talking about ventriloquist dummies, and I told her I was going to write that into one of my books, which became Deb and her good friend Davey. LOL!
– I often get name inspiration from signs I see along the road on my travels, and on that same visit to my aunt, my mom and I saw a sign for a little town called Wilmot and we later saw a car repair place called Beezleys. And just like that, Wilmot Beezley was born.
– I’ve enjoyed a couple of trips to Virginia Beach over the years and included some of the places I visited. We took the kids to the Jamestown Settlement while there, which was fun to add as a day trip in the story.
I think family series are my favorite kind of romance novels. I love getting to know the characters, their parents and grandparents and friends, following them as they fall in love, then building on their story in the background of subsequent books so you can see what’s happening with them even though the story is no longer about them. Love that. And there’s often potential to continue a series with other side characters or write a spin-off series, which always makes me happy because I can live in their world a little longer.
By this time next year, I will have the entire Schultz family series (officially entitled: A Billionaire for Every Season) completed! This series came to be as many of my story ideas have … during a drive to pick my daughter up somewhere. I love to drive. It’s always my time to think or listen to music or brainstorm my stories. When I got home that day, I started an idea file, named all the characters, came up with the basics of their stories. It was so fun how quickly it all came together. I had been thinking about trying my hand at a billionaire romance, but I wanted to focus on a wealthy family with a few siblings, not just a singular character who was rich, and each sibling would get their own book and find their forever love. And I have come to love the Schultzes so much as I’ve written these stories.
I get to hang out with them on the page for a while longer, but it’s going to be sad when I finish the final book next summer.
CLICK HERE to get to the series page and learn more about Sebastian, Gus, and Skylar and their best friend Adelia.
The first two books are available now for sale and in Kindle Unlimited, and the last two are up for preorder at a discount.
It was a busy week around here and, dare I say, somewhat normal.
Jake and I celebrated our 25th wedding anniversary on Wednesday. That seems crazy to me. It feels like yesterday, yet also like it was twenty-five years ago. 😉 I can still remember the day and the excitement of starting our life together. And we’ve been through so many things over the years, good and bad, and it’s taken a long time to get to this point. I can only imagine what our future might hold.
We didn’t do anything major to celebrate. Just Applebee’s takeout with the kids that night. And my mom brought over some mini cupcakes and ice cream for us. We’re talking about heading north in the fall for a weekend, which sounds glorious since fall is my favorite season.
Our girl started her senior year of high school on Tuesday, which looked completely different than years past. She said it was kind of depressing. Everyone wearing masks, not able to hang out with friends by lockers (not even allowed to use lockers this year), can’t eat in the cafeteria together, no congregating in the halls or outside in the parking lot after school. No football (it’s been postponed until spring, which is so weird). No spirit week or homecoming game/dance. None of those usual beginning of the school year kind of things that are memorable moments, especially senior year. But we are just very thankful that she’s able to have in-person learning with her teachers and get to see her classmates. Praying for the health and safety of all the students and that there are no outbreaks that cause the school to close again.
We also moved our boy back to college this week. On one of the hottest days this month. I totally melted going up and down the stairs with my mask-covered face. It was so humid that it was just overall hard to breathe when exerting ourselves anyway. So the mask didn’t help. But we got it done, and I know he’s super happy to be back on campus after coming home for Spring Break in March and never returning. It’s his junior year already. The majority of his classes are online, but he does have one in-person class that has a lab. He’s starting to get into the classes that really apply to his major now, which is exciting for him.
Having both of them back in school, along with Chloe now having a job, is definitely giving us that “back to normal” feeling. It’s been the four of us stuck in this house together for months, so I think it will take a little while to get used to actually having a quiet space again. 😉 I’m thankful for my kids and the time I have with them, for sure. But an empty house is good sometimes too.
After our busy week, I went out to my parents’ farm with my laptop and sat on their porch to edit my upcoming book, More Than a Billionaire. It was a beautiful day. The bluest blue skies with puffy white clouds. Highs in the low 70’s. Perfect. I really spent most of the time chatting with my mom, but I did get a little editing done on one chapter and Mom let me talk out another chapter that I thought I might need to add.
A FREE eBOOK for you!
Another fun thing on the writing front this week … my billionaire bodyguard novella, Lawfully Secure, is now FREE if you sign up for MY NEWSLETTER. It’s only for a limited time, so if you’ve been thinking about subscribing, now’s a great time. CLICK HERE to sign up. Once you verify, you’ll receive a welcome email with instructions to log in to the readers only area of my website and there you will find the link to download Lawfully Secure for FREE!
It’s so fun and exciting to see both of my young adult novels on audiobook over on Audible. 18 Hours to Us was narrated by Sarah Puckett and published by Tantor. And The Truth About Drew was narrated by yours truly.
I have plans to narrate more of my books as well, but with my hubby working from home and the kids here during the quarantine, those plans got set aside for the time being. But I plan to start working on that again soon.
In the meantime, you can find my audiobooks at the following links:
Did I always want to be a writer? I don’t think I consciously made that decision, but writing was a constant in my life, mostly in the form of diaries and journals, with the occasional short story or poem or song lyrics. I don’t know what caused me to want to document my life in that way, but from the time I was about ten years old, that’s what I did. I wrote down the silly everyday things, wrote my first name with a boy’s last name behind it and drew lots of hearts when I had crushes, wrote for hours to get down all the details of a fun youth group event or trip, wrote my feelings – the happy, the sad, the hurt, the ups and downs, wrote about married life and the every day stuff of raising kids.
Along the way, journaling by hand became less and less, especially with the busyness of life, my wedding photography business, the kids, etc. and my documenting changed. I started scrapbooking a few years before Zach was born, and that became a different way to tell my stories. But I rarely made time to sit down and write about the everyday anymore. And I missed writing. It felt like I had all these experiences and memories trapped inside my head, all bottled up, and they needed to be let out.
So I began to type in a file on my computer. Because I’ve played the piano since I was eight, I have great hand/eye coordination and I can type much faster than I can handwrite, which meant getting a bunch of my stories out of my head and onto the page. I had done a little bit of this when we got our first desktop computer when stationed in Germany (Jake was in the Army in our early married years), so it was nice to get back to it.
And since I brought up that first desktop computer in Germany, I should mention that this was when I wrote my first novel. It was a little story about a girl at her youth group’s summer camp, and I never did anything with it. It was silly and romantic and based on some of my own camp experiences. But that was the first time I sat down and actually wrote a book. So I knew I had it in me.
Ten years later, my husband participated in National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) for the first time. The point of this month-long writing event that takes place every November is to write a 50,000 word novel in 30 days. It sounded like a fun challenge, and in 2008, I decided I would try. I was deep in wedding photography editing at the time after several fall weddings, and I had an idea for a story about a heartbroken wedding photographer who was always the photographer, never the bride. I went for it. And it was the most fun I ever had. I fell in love with the process and couldn’t wait to sit down to my computer every evening and see where my characters took me. And I did it! I completed the first draft of that novel in November 2008.
The following October, my husband asked if I was going to do NaNoWriMo again, and I said no. I didn’t have another idea, and I thought I had already met that goal so I didn’t care to do it again. But not long after, I was driving my kids to school and started thinking about this story idea I’d had years before about a girl with a friend nobody else could see but her. Was he real? Was he an imaginary friend? That sort of thing. I let my mind wander and thoughts and ideas formed until I was really excited about an updated version of this idea with a twisty ending, and I decided to go for it once again! And I finished my second NaNoWriMo novel first draft.
And then I did nothing. For four years. I didn’t write another novel during NaNoWriMo. And like my first summer camp story, those stories sat on my computer collecting virtual dust. 😉
Around that time, I had become burned out on wedding photography. The editing process took so much time away from my family when my kids were young, and I always felt like I was missing out. So I decided to step back from that, not really knowing what I was going to do next.
And then my ex-fiancé’s brother took his own life. When I look back now, I believe this was what woke me up and made me realize that life can change in an instant. It can blindside you. And it’s so short. I had been going through the motions of life for a while, not being fully present, just floating along. God gives us a set number of days, and I didn’t want to waste mine. And when I thought about what it was that brought me the most joy in recent years, writing my novels was the very clear answer.
So, I opened up the file for the “imaginary friend” story first (even though I wrote it second) because I truly believed God had given me that story and inspired me to write it, and I loved that little story so much. It was the one that brought tears to my eyes while writing it, so I decided to begin editing and see where it took me.
When I was happy with it, I let Jake, my mom, my mom-in-law, and my sister-in-law read it. My mom loved it, of course, but I thought, “Well, she’s my mom. She’s biased.” 🙂 And then my mother-in-law read it and she basically told me if I didn’t look into getting it published, she would kick my butt. LOL! My sister-in-law told me she was reading it on an airplane and she had to put it down because she started crying while seated next to a stranger. And then Jake read it. And he came downstairs after finishing it with tears in his eyes and told me it was really good and I needed to do something with it.
So I did. I began researching how to get a literary agent, etc. but the idea of receiving a whole bunch of rejections didn’t sound appealing. At all. So I looked into self-publishing, found Amazon’s self-publishing platform, and the rest is history.
That first book became The Truth About Drew. My wedding photographer book became Goodbye, Magnolia. And I have gone on to write and publish nine more novels with three more on the way as of the date of this post. And many more planned for the future.
This is my joy. Writing stories, sharing them with you, connecting with readers. And most importantly, using this gift God has given me.
If you’d like to learn more about the books I’ve written, you can find them all on my AMAZON AUTHOR PAGE HERE.
Hope you’ve enjoyed this little peek into the beginning of my writing life. 🙂
Good morning, friends! How was your week? It was a hot one here. In the 90s and humid daily. We finally had some rain this weekend, which knocked the humidity levels down (for now) and it’s been a nice couple of days. I’m currently sitting in my living room with the window open, enjoying a nice cool morning breeze coming in. It’s nice not to have to turn the air conditioner on as soon as we get up.
I did a lot of writing in my “mobile office” this week and finished the first draft of my upcoming novel, More than a Billionaire, Skylar and Franky’s story! It felt awesome to get to their little happily ever after moment. Now to dig into the edits and really make it good! I’m excited.
This week, we had a giant 10-yard dumpster dropped off in our driveway and spent some time this week emptying our trailer that we’ve been adding trash to for a while now and gutting our creepy old basement of a ton of trash that’s been living there for years. It was a ton of hard work, but it felt awesome to get all of that out. We still have lots more purging to do before the trash company comes to pick up the dumpster, but just throwing out stuff we’ve been storing for no good reason for so long feels amazing!
It was also a week of healthier eating around here. Tried several recipes from the Instant Loss Cookbook, including the loaded sweet potato pictured above. It was so yum, cooked up in the Instant Pot, so soft, topped with turkey bacon, blueberries, and walnuts, and then you mix up a little syrup for over it with maple syrup, cinnamon, and a tiny bit of almond milk. It was so good. HERE is a link to Brittany’s book, with lots more good healthy recipes for the Instant Pot.
Our weekend ended on a nice note with Jake’s sister and her hubby and their girls doing a drive-by visit on the way home from visiting with the grandparents. 🙂 It was nice to see them and chat for a few minutes.
This week is going to be all about editing on my book and filling up that dumpster. 🙂
Welcome to a new week, friends. Are you ready for it? I would say this past week was uneventful yet productive. Got a lot done—both workwise and around the house—and that’s always a good feeling, but nothing major going on, really. Hasn’t that been the story for the past three months, though. 😉
Had some nice walks with my mom most mornings of the week. We’ve been at this new habit for the past few weeks, and it feels good to get out and begin our day that way. We’re up to 2.2 miles daily. A pretty good start. We even met a little “friend” along our walk one day. (bottom left)
My lovely peonies (bottom middle) got busted down by some storms we had mid-week so I had to cut them off and bring them inside (that’s an oversized coffee mug for the vase, by the way.) 😉 Enjoyed having those on display for a few days. They come and go so fast every season, but I just love them so much.
One thing that is really cool to look at but not so cool for allergies is the fluff falling from the cottonwood trees. (bottom right) There was so much of it coming down that it almost looked like snow falling around me. Had to stop and take a quick picture of it settled along the sidewalk like a fluffy white border.
Our Saturday was spent removing our old mattress and cleaning up all the dust bunnies that had collected underneath (yuck!) in preparation for our new “mattress in a box.” Have any of you ever had experience with one of these? I did a bunch of research ahead of time on companies that offer their mattresses this way, and I was a little worried about ordering a mattress that we didn’t try out first. But in the end, we went with Brooklyn Bedding, and it is AWESOME! (top right) We ordered their medium firmness option in the signature hybrid, which has these little tiny pocket coils along with memory foam and all sorts of layers of comfort goodness. Plus, it was super fun to unroll it, break the plastic open, and watch it expand from its flattened, vacuum sealed form to its normal size. 🙂
Is it weird that I’m so happy about a mattress? It was way past time for a replacement, and my hubby (who was having back issues from the old mattress) is already sleeping better and waking up less achy. Yay!
This week, I have another FREEBIE for you. The first TWO BOOKS in my Cornerstone Series are FREE through Friday, June 19th. These two books go together and should be read in order as Hello, Forever is the sequel to Goodbye, Magnolia, picking up with Maggie and Simon from the end of the first book.
This week’s FREEBIE is my Lawkeepers novel, Lawfully Secure. While I was doing research for this book, one of the locations I chose for a trip for Paige and her bridesmaids was Maui, and I came across the bamboo forest, which I am dying to visit one day. I thought I’d share a little “almost kiss” moment with you today that takes place in this very unique location.
Enjoy this scene from Lawfully Secure:
He hadn’t realized they’d both stopped walking and were now standing face to face, their hands brushing against each other’s. His heart was racing as she gazed up at him. He took her in. Hair pulled away from her face in a ponytail, wispy hairs falling along her cheek that he was dying to reach up and push behind her ear, wide brown eyes gazing up at him, rosy cheeks from hiking, and full pink lips parted just so. This would be the perfect moment to see what her lips felt like against his. He knew without a doubt they’d be soft and heavenly … but he couldn’t. Could he? She wasn’t moving away. She seemed as locked into this moment as he was. One kiss. Just to know what it would feel like.
Her small hand suddenly found its way into his, and he stepped closer, until they were nearly pressed together.
“He’s not the one for you, Paige.” His voice sounded strangled as he fought himself from pulling her against him and taking her lips with his.
“You’re just saying that because you want to kiss me right now.”
He leaned his head closer, their foreheads brushing softly, but not resting together. Her soft breaths fell on his face. “I do want to kiss you.” The words coming out of his mouth seemed to snap him back to reality. “But I can’t, Paige. We can’t.”
