When I popped onto the Goddess blogs this morning, I saw that there wasn’t a new blog and I thought: “Hmm, wonder what slacker forgot she was blogging today.” Then I went to our special blog calender and saw it was me. I am that slacker. For some reason I thought it was Claudia’s day.

So since I don’t have anything intelligent and informative planned, I thought I’d ask you all a question that has been rolling around in my brain.

Why can’t Hollywood make a decent romantic comedy? They really haven’t for years. Why don’t they just take a good romance novel and adapted it? I just don’t get it. The book already has a built in audience.

And what romance novel would you like to see made into a movie?

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Was the story of how my parents met and fell in love and got married. Doesn’t every kid want to know those essential details? The details of how I got here? The unspoken wish that it will happen to me someday?

My mom and dad’s love story was so unique and so romantic that I was telling it routinely on the playground during recess. Even other seven year old girls knew it for the Love Story it was. So, here it is, one more time.

My dad was a Marine during WWII and became a paraplegic. It was while he was in the VA hospital in Manhattan that he met my mom. She was a student nurse. The patients and nurses weren’t allowed to fraternize, so they kept their budding romance a secret, which wasn’t easy. One time, my mom took my dad for a walk in his wheelchair through a field of grass. The MPs drove by, so my mom took a nosedive into the tall grass, hiding. If she’d been caught, she would have been kicked out of school. So there’s my dad, sitting in his wheelchair in the middle of this field he in no way could have gotten into by himself.

“What are you doing?” the MP asked, trying not to laugh.

“Just out to get some air,” my dad answered, lighting a cigarette.

“All by yourself?” the MP said.

“Sure. Yeah,” my dad said, taking a casual drag.

By this time the MPs are both laughing out loud, ignoring the sounds of my mother snaking through the grass on her belly. The MPs got my dad out of the field, kept their gaze averted from my mom, and didn’t say a word to anyone. Who says MPs are heartless?

To be honest, my mother’s mother was horrified that her daughter wanted to marry a paraplegic. To be honest, who can blame her? This was 1948. Being disabled was not as mainstreamed as it is now. There was no handicapped parking, no ramps, nothing to make it easier, no sensitivity training. People stared. And, if you’ve done the math, why was my dad in a VA hospital in 1948? The war had been over for three years. He’d been a paraplegic since 1942.

I’ll tell you why. His parents didn’t know what to do with him. He was damaged goods and they basically wrote him off. Their own son. Their first born.

So, here’s my mom, in love with a guy who can’t walk, whose own parents have left him to molder in a VA hospital, a guy whose life expectancy is about ten years and he’s used up six of them. What does she do? She marries him.

She marries him. And they stay married, and he stays alive, for another forty-three years.

My first love story was a great one, wasn’t it?

Is this why I write romance novels? I don’t know, but I know it didn’t hurt.

Shameless plug alert: The Courtesan’s Secret comes out tomorrow. I hope you buy it and have the fun of immersing yourself in another love story from another time and another place, because once upon a time is the best way for a love story to start.

What about your mom and dad? Grandparents? Aunts or uncles? How did they meet and fall in love? What’s their love story?

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Before The Goddess Blogs came to be, I was a serious, die-hard fan of Claudia Dain. Why? Because she writes some of the best heroes, hands down. Not just best, but grittier, sexier, and just . . . real. Now that I know her, I’ve come to realize why that’s so — she’s lived in a house full of men (and don’t forget the crew teams!), so the woman’s done her research and then some!

Claudia’s heroes aren’t pretty boys, but real men. Sharp men. Complicated and richly described men. If you like men, read Claudia Dain.

Because I’m SOOOOO excited THE COURTESAN’S SECRET is coming out this coming Tuesday, May 6th, I asked her to donate her inspiration pictures for FROS. And she has . . .

Ladies, let me tell you that these pictures are VERY inspiring. Not in the usual sorta distant beefcake way, but in the oh-my-gosh-I-want-to-know-him-better way. Which is the very best way of all.

So, without further ado, here are two pictures of the infamous, mysterious, complicated and sensual MARQUIS OF DUTTON:

Just look at those EYES! **sigh**

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I don’t really, but wouldn’t that be sort of cool? Okay, here is the deal: one day, I was out wogging, and there was a man ahead of me on the path. I was trying to quicken my waddle by maintaining the distance between us, but there is a point where the path joins a street on a neighborhood, and when I reached it, the man was nowhere to be seen.

Now, my first thought was that the dude had run home. But my stepdaughter had a different theory altogether: He was a ghost. A man who had died on the path (which was probably constructed in the last five years), who died running, who runs every day because he’s caught between heaven and hell.

I thought that was pretty clever imagining, and was telling some friends later—laughing, naturally—but my friends, grown woman like me, did not laugh. They began to talk about ghosts in their houses, or their grandparents houses, or weird things that had happened to them, as if those things happened to everyone. I’ve never had an experience like that. I asked them if they seriously believed the man ahead of me on the path was a ghost. Two said no, one of them shrugged and said, “Maybe. Who knows?”

Well I know—the guys was real. But whose to say there wasn’t some other ghost wogging with me that day? I was fascinated by the tales my pals were telling me about weird occurrences in their houses (things moving, doors closing, cold or hot spots), or around their person. It made me wonder about the supernatural world. Are some people more in tune with it than others? Are there really souls wandering around between us that can’t get to their eternal resting place? Have you ever had a supernatural or otherwise ghostly experience?

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At the best of times, naming a book is difficult for me. What usually happens is that I give Avon 50 or so titles and they reject all of them and come up with one on their own. The only title I’ve ever kept for any of my books is Tangled Up In You.

Yesterday my editor at Avon emailed me. They’re having a cover conference for my May 2009 book and they need a title. As always, I gave them a bunch and they rejected them all. So, I am appealing to all you goddesses out there to help me name my new book. Here’s a short synopsis:

Heroine Faith Duffy was a stripper turned playboy playmate. For the past five years she has been married to a man fifty-one-years older than she is and living as his trophy wife. The book opens with the death of her old rich husband who leaves her his hockey team. Until the death of her husband, she’d been socializing with the Seattle elite and doing charity work. After her husband dies, she becomes persona non grata in that society and gets kicked out of their clubs. Now she must figure out where she belongs, and what she’s going to with the twenty-two hockey players she suddenly owns.

Hero Ty Savage is captain of the hockey team. His main goal in life is to win the Stanley cup championship. He is not happy that the new owner is a trophy wife who knows nothing about hockey. He thinks she’s a gold digger and a bimbo, and the last thing he needs is to feel an overwhelming attraction for the new owner.

Yeah, I know that the synopsis pretty much sucks. Which why I never write a synopsis anymore. But here’s the deal. If Avon uses one of your titles, I’ll announce it here in the Goddess Blogs and send the winner a copy of my very first hockey book, Simply Irresistible.

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During the entire writing and publication process, there’s only one part that requires almost no work from the author and is just plain ole fun . . . sometimes. That part is the development of the title and cover, both of which come from a mysterious mechanism known as The Cover Conference.

It’s fun if you get a great title and an eye catching cover. It’s not so much fun if you find out they want to name your book THE GRANNY WHO LOVED ME and the art department is ‘excited’ about the possibility of using ‘Depends’ on the cover.

I’ve been very fortunate in the covers and titles I’ve gotten. VERY fortunate. More fortunate than, say, these poor authors . . .

This is probably a great anthology. It’s probably witty and humorous and well-written . . . but somehow, somewhere, someone thought the title BIG SPANKABLE ASSES would make the book leap off the shelf.

It certainly caught my attention. Due to my family’s unfortunate allergy to chocolate, desserts, and food which causes various parts of our bodies to swell to ginormous sizes, I’ve seen a lot of big asses in my life (and some spankable ones, too, but that’s another story). So I’m something of a ’spankable ass expert’. As such, I have to say that the one on this cover . . . nuh uh. That ain’t ‘big.’

In fact, I think it’s actually quite petite. Perhaps they should have called this book TINY SPANKABLE ASSES. At least then it would have been anatomically correct.

Just sayin’.

Ok, if you’re through admiring that Big (Tiny) Spankable Ass, go vote in the cover contest and let us know which covers you loved and hated. By the way, you just might see some of your goddesses listed on the pages and, just for the record, we ALL have BIG SPANKABLE ASSES.

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