A Few Hometown Favs...

I suppose I should explain straight away, naughty Lila didn’t show up today…I know readers, it’s quite a shock, but I confess, Lila’s roots began on the softer side of the house and my very first series was in fact a run of the mill contemporary romance themed deal with a bit of hot lovin’ sprinkled in.

It’s been two years since the first book in the Slower Lower series came into existence and I actually thought A Slower, Lower Love would be a stand-alone until E contacted me and persuaded me otherwise. So, a series was born, but it was another few long months before book two was born, A Slower, Lower Leap…and then my career took a left turn into BDSM territory and much to my contemporary fans’ chagrin…book three never materialized…and never materialized…and never materialized. The idea was always here, lurking and teasing me, but my naughty muse kept shoving her much less naughty sister down and kicking her in the knee. Well, Arwen finally managed to get upright again, much to Bronwyn’s horror, and now here we are two years later and A Slower, Lower Leap is finally a reality.

I’ve been out on tour with it and the theme of the tour is all things Delaware and Delaware related as that’s where the series is set: Sussex County, the southernmost county of all three in the state and much a part of the slower lower culture residing on the Delmarva Peninsula. So, I thought today I’d share a few of my favorite things from my husband’s hometown of Seaford.

In all three books there is mention of a fictional Italian joint…but in real life there is a place that was my inspiration for that. Grotto’s Pizza located in Seaford and at the beach. Founded in 1960, it is my humble opinion there is no better pie on the planet and boardwalk fries? Now my mouth is all worked up for want of something from there…gelato, pasta…did I mention the pizza? We are so in love with this stuff, there have been occasions my MIL will buy them half-cooked on her way down for a visit (6 hour drive) and we’ll cook them off when she gets here. Is there any wonder I included a fictitious Italian eatery in the Slower Lower books?

The Country House…now technically…this is in the Mar part of Delmarva, but who’s splitting hairs. Right? I love, love, love this place. If you’re into primitive home décor…you have to visit this place if you’re ever in Salisbury. They have a discount outlet open on Saturdays…and if you just can’t make the eastern shore, they are online. Nearly all my curtains came from The Country House.

Rehoboth Beach…Really? Does a beach need explanation? It just happens Rehoboth is the beach I use as the backdrop for the Delaney family beach home where romance is made and so are babies on occasion. J

Pizza King…also known as PKs to the locals. Now I know…two pizza joints on the favs list? Well, actually PKs isn’t my fav pick for pizza…It’s my fav pick for breakfast. You’ll find my Delaney’s go out at times for breakfast to a joint very much similar to PKs where the scrapple is crisp, the eggs fluffy, the waitresses spunky, and the coffee is always hot. Before my husband’s grandfather died, it was tradition whenever we were in town we met at PKs for breakfast at least once while we were in town.

And last but not least…and you’re probably going to think how weird. Our Lady of Lourdes Parish. Our Lady of Lourdes is mentioned several times throughout the series and is a very real place and is indeed called Our Lady of Lourdes. This is the Catholic Parish my husband grew up in. It’s where he was baptized, confirmed…where he burned up the confessional as Logan so aptly puts it in A Slower, Lower Leap. It’s where we attend Mass whenever we’re in town. Our Lady’s roots run back to 1937, and when I enter the sanctuary I get a sense of just how deep those roots run. No matter how long we’ve been away, we see someone we recognize, someone my husband grew up with, took first communion with. It gives a sense of family…a sense of peace and embodies all that is slower lower.

Thanks for taking this little tour with me through Seaford and the surrounding community. J And don’t forget to enter to win some signed copies of the first two books in my giveaway posted earlier...

Have a realmantic day!

Lila

The Man Who Gave Me Firsts...

I’m so excited to be here today and talk about my new release A Slower, Lower Leap. It’s the third and final installment of my Slower Lower series. If you’ve not read any of the books and don’t know anything about them, they’re set in Seaford, Delaware, a very real place and home to my husband. Although, I must tell you, none of the people in my stories are real. They’re conglomerations of personalities I may have encountered at one time or other, but are absolutely not real individuals.

 Today I’m going to tell you a little bit about how I became an adopted daughter of the first state and what firsts followed. It’s really quite ironic it’s the first state, because the first man I ever met from there gave me many firsts and I ended up marrying him. (Anyone noticing a pattern here yet?)

My first glimpse of Delaware was at sunrise four days prior to Thanksgiving 1997. I woke up after being in the car for my very first long distance road trip with someone other than a family member to see we were barreling down a winding unmarked road and were headed straight for another vehicle. Welcome to Delaware!

“One of us will move, babe,” my beloved assured me just before the other car took to the side of the road and waved with a smile.

Really? What the hell was this strange land?

After that, my beloved took me on many firsts. He took me on my first plane ride, I saw the beach for the first time with him and I got my first overseas visit with him via orders from the USMC not a year after we married (the marriage wasn’t a first, but it was the first time I truly loved the man I married).

Through the years, we enjoyed many trips to the slower lower (now you know where the titles come from J ) eastern shore board and it was in those trips that unbeknownst to me, stories started to form. Many years later when I finally took up my pen once again after my muse being dormant for what seemed like an eternity, the faces, places, sights, smells, traditions, and landscape of Delaware kept haunting me…and wouldn’t you know it? Seaford, Delaware became the setting of my very first series.

Thank you husband and thank you Seaford for lending me inspiration and so many firsts…and readers, I hope you enjoy getting to know that part of the world through my eyes.

Lila Munro

One Writer's Long, Arduous Journey Home

One Writer’s Long, Arduous Journey Home

I want to thank LASR for hosting this release party. I’m thrilled to be part of it.

My latest book, “A Catered Romance,” was released February 23 and is available exclusively at Amazon Kindle. It’s actually a revised, re-titled, sensuous version of my first published book from Avalon Books.

Here’s the blurb:

There's more than business brewing between two old high school flames...Stubbornly self-reliant Mary Beth Kendrick needs financial backing to keep her catering business cooking. A looming corporate buyout forces her to accept help from Tom Sackett, the man who broke her heart and left her distrustful of men. Unable to forget Mary Beth, Tom sets out to win her forgiveness. As he gets to know her again through their shared business interests, he realizes he wants more than forgiveness from her. He wants her in his life.Grateful for Tom's support but unwilling to trust him, Mary Beth vows to keep their relationship strictly business. But his attentiveness, culminating in a night of passion, starts to melt her icy resolve and shows her the caring, sensitive man Tom has become. Can Mary Beth learn to love and trust again? Will she and Tom open their hearts to a second chance at love?

You may be wondering what the title of this blog has to do with my book. I want to tell you about my long journey to publication and why I had to come home to find success.

I’ve always loved to read and I’ve always been a sucker for a good love story. Ever since I was a young teen I’d dreamed of being a published author but life got in the way. Some years back when a friend and I were sharing Harlequin romances, we looked at each other one day and said, “We could write these.” Hah! Were we in for a rude awakening. Writing a romance filled with emotion is a lot harder than it looks when you’re reading one of the wonderful, seamless romance novels out there.

It took me ten long, hard years to publish my first book. The very first book I wrote (never published) was a sensuous contemporary romance set on a ranch in Wyoming. You know the old adage to write what you know. I didn’t pay attention to those words of wisdom when I wrote that book. I’m an East Coast girl, born and bred. I love the West, and I’ve spent time in the Southwest, but I’d only gone through Wyoming once by train when I was thirteen. I did my research on Wyoming, but I’ve never been on a ranch. I didn’t have a clue what I was writing about. I loved my hero. Still do. His name was Alec and he was half Cherokee, tall, with long black hair tied in a ponytail. Yum. That book went nowhere. One editor liked my writing but hated Alec. Said he was self-serving and arrogant. Contest judges were even meaner. Seems everyone but me hated Alec.

So I took a deep breath and decided to write what I know. What I know is my home state of Delaware, a really boring place except for the beach (more about that later). I like to say I escaped twice (to Toronto, Canada and Pennsylvania) but they found me and brought me back. I wrote “A Catered Affair,” set in my home city of Wilmington. A little tidbit - the heroine and her friend are named after my two best friends growing up, Mary Beth and Gail. The hero, Tom, is named after a boy I liked in grade school and high school. That Tom once said something very hurtful about me, something that haunted me for years. I took that hurtful feeling and used it for Mary Beth. Writing “A Catered Affair” was cathartic. That book flowed. It was so much easier to write about a place I had intimate knowledge of. I wrote the book sensual and targeted Silhouette Desire. Imagine my joy when a Sil editor asked for the full after I’d sent her a partial. I was sure Sil would buy my book. Imagine my depression when I got the rejection from them.

Someone suggested I query Avalon Books. Avalon publishes hard covers and they’ve been in business over sixty years. Their romances are sweet - no sex, not much sensuality, no cursing, very little, if any, alcohol consumption. I didn’t think I could write “sweet,” but I was willing to give it a shot. I pitched Catered to the Avalon editor at a conference. By this time I’d felt as if I’d been through a war with all my rejections. I wasn’t about to change my book to sweet unless the editor asked to see a full of the book. She asked, and I changed it - took out the sex, the cursing and the alcohol. I was shocked at how many curse words I’d used. Changing this book from sensuous to sweet taught me two valuable lessons: one, you really should write what you know; and two, when I couldn’t rely on the sex to bring the couple together, I had to increase the emotion between them. I ended up with a stronger story.

I have the digital rights to my book and have published it on Amazon. I added back a few curse words, added some wine drinking and one love scene, but I kept the book close to the Avalon version. I like my new cover better though. If you want to see the original cover, go to my website, www.caramarsi.com, then go to Bookshelf, then go to “read about my other books.” You’ll see the cover for “A Catered Affair.” That book was also written under my real name because I always wanted to write under my name. However, as most people couldn’t spell or pronounce my last name, I now use a pen name. Tell me what you think of the old cover compared to the new one.

Most of my books and all of my short stories (I’ve published a dozen short stories in women’s magazines) are set in places I know: Delaware, Philadelphia, the Delaware beaches, the New Jersey shore. My paranormal, “Cursed Mates,” from Noble Romance Publishing, is set in Maine. I visited Maine once and loved it. The Maine coast lends itself to scary stories. We all know Stephen King lives there. I didn’t have a problem writing a story set in Maine since I’d spent some time in that beautiful state. My romantic suspense, “Murder, Mi Amore,” from The Wild Rose Press, is set almost entirely in Italy. I’ve visited Italy twice and still have relatives there. Every location in “Murder, Mi Amore” is authentic. The story ends in Las Vegas, where my son lives. I’ve been to Vegas many times.

I’m not saying authors should write only about places they know. Most authors do an excellent job of adding veracity to places they’ve never been. When I wrote that first book, I didn’t have the skill to pull it off. The setting felt forced.

I don’t know if I’ll set another story in a place I’ve never visited. I’ve been writing long enough now that I believe I could make a Wyoming setting real. I want to rewrite that first book because I love Alec so much. I will be sure that he’s not so arrogant this time. Maybe I’ll set the story in the mean streets of Philadelphia where Alec can be a fish out of water, so to speak, rather than my heroine, a New York decorator, being a fish out of water in Wyoming.

Here’s a fun fact. We refer to the beach area of Delaware as “the beach.” If you’re in northern Delaware, where I live, eighty miles from “the beach,” you’ll say, “I’m going to the beach.” But if you’re going to the New Jersey shore, no matter where you are, you say, “I’m going down the shore.” In New Jersey you only use the word beach when you are actually walking on the sand at the beach looking at the ocean. A very clear distinction that we who live in the Philadelphia-Delaware region know.

I hope you enjoyed my little writing journey from Wyoming to Delaware. Please visit my website for information on my other books.

I’m on Facebook at: www.facebook.com/carolynmatkowsky
On Twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/CaraMarsi

“A Catered Romance” is sold exclusively at Amazon Kindle:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B007CB5X5M