Dear Readers,

Giving Myself Away is finally here, published, for real!  I am going to write as myself today rather than Adrienne… She’s funnier and sassier, but she also gets into a whole lot more trouble than I do.  I’m the one with common sense.

I highjacked Adrienne’s blog today to tell you what it means to me to be published.  Until two years ago, I would never, ever show anyone the fiction I had been writing.  It sounds funny, considering I’ve had more than a hundred articles published, but they were all nonfiction and they were observations about people around me rather than characters I had made up.

With the help of a life coach (thank you, Cathy Colangelo!), I decided to make my theme for 2013 to “Put yourself out there.”  Whenever I had a choice to make, I applied this standard and went for it in both my professional and personal life.  I joined a small group of friends and work colleagues in a writer’s critique group and I remember panicking before emailing them my first pages, but they encouraged me to send more.

Then I saw an ad in Writer’s Digest for the The Write Stuff annual conference of the Greater Lehigh Valley Writers Group.  I registered for the conference and met lots of other published and hoping-to-be published writers there.

It was here that I met Deborah Riley-Magnus, an editor for Assent Publishing who asked me to send my manuscript.  A few months later, I got a call from Les Denton, publisher at Assent, with the news that she’d like to publish my novel.

Since then, it’s been a crash course in “putting myself out there,” something that would normally be uncomfortable for me, except that I am willing to do what it takes because one of my fondest dreams from as far back as I can remember is to be able to bring others the same kind of comfort I’ve always gotten from reading.

One of the best feelings is to come home from a long day of work and know there’s a good novel waiting to get back into before bedtime.  Or to wake up early on a weekend morning, make some coffee, and let the characters envelop me in their stories.  I love finding the next book that will keep me company for a few days.

I hope you will enjoy Adrienne’s story.  She’s as real as anyone I’ve ever known and I made a promise to her that I’d do whatever I could to bring her out of my head and into other people’s hearts.

Thank you for your support.  If you’d like to purchase Giving Myself Away, here are some helpful links.  If you enjoyed it, I’d be ever so grateful for some good reviews!  The publishing market is huge, and books, like everything else, are sold by word of mouth.

Available at Amazon.com in paperback and Kindle format

Available at Barnes and Noble in paperback and Nook format

Coming soon to Apple iBooks, Sony Reader Store, and Kobo Books