Last week I found out that Sarah Wendell, book blogger and author of Beyond Heaving Bosoms and Everything I Know about Love I Learned from Romance Novels, picked Mistress by Marriage for September’s Smart Bitches Trashy Books Sizzling Book Club. Ever since I was an wee baby romance writer, I’ve lurked at the SBTB site, where one is guaranteed never to be bored. The participants are large in number, strongly opinionated and, well, smart. :) I’m really looking forward to what they have to say about Caroline and Edward’s rocky journey to their HEA. The online discussion is tentatively set for September 27 from 9:00-10:30 EST. For the last half hour, I will get the opportunity to answer questions/defend myself, LOL.

Am I a little nervous? You bet. But this week I heard from two readers who spent their weekend reading Mistress by Marriage instead of watching New Zealand play in the Rugby World Cup (bigger there than football here, apparently) and a blues festival in Missouri. I have led good women astray and am proud of it. ;)

The e-book format has been deeply discounted. For more info, with links, click here. All three Mistress books are bundled for nook and Sony for $16.49. Links are here.

Okay, enough with the shameless self-promotion. Next Friday is the first day of Fall, my favorite season. I once used to be smart myself, and couldn’t wait for school to start. Maybe it was because of the stiff new clothes, sharp pencils and empty marbled notebooks that held so much promise. I walked to a neighborhood elementary school from kindergarten through eighth grade. That kind of school just doesn’t exist anymore, but I swear I can still sometimes smell the heat from the boilers and wet raincoats that hung on hooks in the hall. There wasn’t much teacher turnover, so you knew which dragon you’d get as the years advanced. These were the women (except for Mr. Rollender, the science teacher who failed spectacularly in making me scientific) who made me diagram sentences and learn the parts of speech. I don’t think they’d approve of the contents of my romance books, but they’d appreciate the sentence structure. :)

The heroine of Mistress by Marriage is a romance writer too, but she wasn’t lucky enough to have the dragons for teachers. Here’s an excerpt:

But when she looked in her pier glass, she was still relatively youthful, her red curls shiny, her gray eyes bright. She might have been stouter than she wished, but the prideful Parkers were known to run to fat in middle age. For some reason Edward had let her keep some of the lesser Christie jewels, so there was always a sparkle on her person even if there was no spark to her life.

She made the best of it, however, and had some surprising success recently writing wicked novels that she couldn’t seem to write fast enough. Her avocation would have stunned her old governess, as Caroline had showed no aptitude whatsoever for grammar lessons or spelling as a girl. Fortunately, her publisher was grammatical and spelled accurately enough for both of them. Her Courtesan Court series was highly popular with both society members and their servants alike. There were happy endings galore for the innocent girls led astray, and the wicked always got what was coming to them.

She modeled nearly every villain on Edward. It was most satisfactory to shoot him or toss him off a cliff in the final pages. Once she crushed him in a mining mishap, his elegant sinewy body and dark head entombed for all eternity with coal that was as black as his heart.

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So, did you like school as a kid? Can you diagram a sentence? Were your teachers dragons or pussycats? What’s your favorite season?