The Turkey Day Shuffle & Flappers & Jelly Beans

The Turkey Day Shuffle

My husband and one of my sons works in retail, so we’re well acquainted with irregular schedules and working weekends and holidays. But Thanksgiving was always the one holiday that seemed to work out. Mostly because stores close early that day.

This year, though, the unthinkable has happened. Not only is my husband’s store extending their hours, he offered to work so someone else can spend the day with their family. Which means…

Yes. We’ll be doing the Turkey Day Shuffle.

We’ve hosted our family dinner for almost a decade now, and we love doing it. So, we’ll be moving our Thanksgiving to Saturday. The calls have gone out, and the schedule shuffling has begun.

Books, books, books…

Goodbye, Tootsie Book Tour! Hosted by BVB Tours

Goodbye, Tootsie—the second book in my 1920s romantic mystery series—went on tour earlier this month and got some great reviews. I’m more thankful than ever for book bloggers who dedicate their time to reviewing and promoting books, especially those of indie authors.

Thanks also to the awesome Beck Valley Books, which does a fabulous job of organizing book tours.

If you have a moment, give these bloggers some traffic and enter my $20 Amazon Gift Card giveaway. Yes, it’s still running, and it’s free. (Expires November 29, 2015.) Do it. Do it now.  I’ll wait. 🙂

Follow the book tour. Read the reviews…

1.	Monday 9th November – Newbery and Beyond
2.	Tuesday 10th November – Cali Book Reviews
3.	Wednesday 11th November – Miki’s Hope
4.	Thursday 12th November – Elusive Red Tiger
5.	Friday 13th November – Notes from a Lady
6.	Monday 16th November – Mother Distracted
7. 8.	Tuesday 17th November – Gypsy Road Tuesday 17th November – I Create Purty Things

A Thanksgiving “Flappers & Jelly Beans” Tidbit

In honor of the upcoming holiday—no matter which day you celebrate it—here’s a remix from a Flappers and Jelly Beans post from Thanksgiving past…

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Think the trend for pushing the winter holiday shopping season on consumers earlier each year is a modern phenomenon? Think again.

The opening scene of It Had to Be You takes place in Herald Square in New York City on Thursday, November 27, 1924.

Mystery and Romance in 1920s Manhattan

It was Thanksgiving day and the first year R.H. Macy’s sponsored its Thanksgiving day parade. Except they didn’t call it that back then. They called it Macy’s Christmas Parade.

Here’s a peek back in time from the following day’s papers:

“Santa Claus chose Thanksgiving Day this year to come to town. With a retinue of clowns… animals, and floats, the bewhiskered man in red, in sight of thousands of persons, arrived at 9 o’clock yesterday morning and three hours later was crowned ‘King of the Kiddies’ on the marquee above the entrance to Macy’s new store in Thirty-fourth Street near Seventh Avenue…”

Most of the participants that day were Macy’s employees, but they were joined by many others, marching bands as well as floats featuring The Old Lady Who Lived in a Shoe and Little Red Riding Hood. There were also animals borrowed from the Central Park Zoo—bears, elephants, donkeys.

But no giant balloons. Animal-shaped balloons made by Goodyear wouldn’t begin to replace the live animals until 1927. One of the first? Felix the Cat.

Macy’s at Herald Square (1942). From the Office of War Information Photograph Collection

Another 1924 attraction that would feel familiar to us was the unveiling of Macy’s spectacular store window: “The Fairy Frolics of Wondertown.”

Some sources say a quarter million people attended the first parade. It was such a success, Macy’s decided to make it an annual event.

The world has changed, yes?
But maybe not as much as we think.
What are your favorite Thanksgiving traditions?

Macy’s Parade 1930s  – British Movietone Temp – Subscribe at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pmRpYigmLBc

For those who celebrate, have a wonderful Thanksgiving!

Photo and video credits:

Pumpkins – Delynn Royer

Macy’s at Herald Square (1942). From the Office of War Information Photograph Collection
Repository: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division

1930s Macy’s Parade
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pmRpYigmLBc
British Movietone Temp

It Had to Be You – Copyright © 2014 by Harlequin Enterprises Limited.
Cover Art used by arrangement with Harlequin Enterprises Limited ® and ™ are trademarks owned by Harlequin Enterprises Limited or its affiliated companies, used under license.

What Day is It? (Or… End of Summer Roundup & 99 Cent Book Sale)

Where my Feet Take Me: A scene in It Had to Be You takes place at night on this rocky beach in Montauk, Long Island.

“’What day is it?’

‘It’s today,’ squeaked Piglet

‘My favorite day,’ said Pooh.”

From Winnie-the-Pooh, 1926, A.A. Milne

 

What Day is it?

Did you ever wake up in a panic before the alarm clock went off and wonder what day it was? Is it Monday? Saturday? Wednesday? Holy cow! Am I late for work?  (And, no, in that instant, the word on my mind is not “cow.”)

I woke the other day wondering for a split second not only what day it was but what month it was.  It couldn’t be the end of August already… could it? Nah! Wasn’t it July, like… a week ago?

With a non-writing job that expects me to show up regularly, a family that expects me to talk to them regularly, a house that expects me to keep it presentable regularly, and friends who expect me to have fun regularly, it’s an inevitable fact that the one thing that’s only mine—the writing—too easily drops off the radar. That fact is never more true than in the summer when family and social gatherings and vacation get tossed into the schedule.

Yes, time for writing was in short supply this summer, which is why my blogging has been more non-existent than usual, but the summer is indeed coming to a close.

Does that mean I’ll be visiting my own blog more often? Well… 🙂

Are you as productive in the summer as you are at other times of the year? If not, what gets sacrificed?

The WIPs

WIP is an acronym for Work(s) in Progress. I haven’t been a complete washout with the writing. I took a break in August from editing the third book in my 1920s romantic mystery series, Goodnight, Angela, to try my hand at writing a short story.

Authors… do you write both long and short fiction? If so, how do you do it? Are you better at one than the other?

Here’s why I ask.

This has been an interesting experiment since I’ve never completed a piece of fiction shorter than 85,000 words. The suggested word count for an anthology I’d like to participate in is a flexible 7,000 to 10,000 words.  I’m at 14,000 and counting. (That’s… seven tons of words, right?)

Yeah. And I’m not even sure I like how the story is going.

Its working title is “Heart of the Dragon.” It’s about a big city, smart ass private eye and his overly optimistic small town secretary. It’s set in the Bowery and Chinatown in 1926 New York City.

Will this little darling ever see the light of day? Maybe. Maybe not. I’ve got more than a few stories living on the Island of Unfinished WIPs.

Authors… do you have any WIPs keeping mine company on the Island of Unfinished WIPs? Any favorites you secretly hope to rescue?

I’ve got one sentimental favorite I plan to finish one day, an untitled reunion historical romance that’s been percolating for–I kid you not–two decades.

In fact, I worked on that one a bit this summer, too. Anything but work on the project I’m supposed to be finishing, right? There’s a word for that…

Procrastination

I think–if you’re a writer–you should be able to count procrastination as work.

• Surfing the Net = Research
• Napping = Plotting
• Tweeting = Promotion

Ahem… One pastime I can’t fool myself into classifying as work is Pinterest. Any pinners out there? That’s just too fun to call work, isn’t it?

Hey… maybe I’ll start a new board called PROCRASTINATION.

What would you pin on your Procrastination Board?

I did start a new board this summer. It’s called “Where my Feet Take Me,” and it was inspired by one of my new wellness resolutions—to take a solitary 30-minute walk every day when the weather is decent. (I reserve the right to define “decent.”)

Can taking a walk be procrastination? Sure! But I prefer to call it “Refilling the Well.”

This nifty graphic is a prime example of double procrastinating. It’s procrastinating on Canva to illustrate procrastinating on Pinterest. (Don’t try this at home unless you’re at least a brown-belt level procrastinator.)

The Pinterest board has expanded to include photos taken not only on my walks but on vacations and research trips. I’ll be adding to it as the spirit moves me.

If you feel like procrastinating now, check out my new board here. 🙂

What do you do to Refill your Creative/Spiritual Well?

And in Other News…

I guest posted on some blogs this summer!

“The Yin and Yang of Fictional Sleuthing” (about the built-in conflict in “he and she” detective teams) at Book Babe.

• Book Babe is a unique book review site, specializing in books (often historical) that feature strong, smart heroines. Do visit!

“The Duck’s Quack… 20s Speak” (about 1920s slang) at Cats, Roses and Books!

• Cats, Roses and Books is where best-selling mystery and romance author Karen Rose Smith blogs on cats, gardening, cooking, and writing. Stop by!

A 1920s Romantic Mystery

Beck Valley Books hosted a successful book review tour in July for It Had to Be You. If you’d like to take a peek, find the links here. 

Goodbye, Tootsie is featured  now in the Choosy Bookworm‘s Read & Review program.

What’s Read & Review?  A program for  indie authors to get their books into the hands of interested readers willing to write an honest review. (Publishers have their own ways of distributing free copies to readers and reviewers. This gives indies a chance to do the same.)

If you’re a reader of historical mystery and romance and think you may be interested in Read & Review, check out the FAQs here and Goodbye, Tootsie‘s page here. (Limited time only.)

A 1920s Romantic Mystery

The Choosy Bookworm also offers a Daily Deal e-newsletter that lists indie books for free and bargain prices. The newsletters are brief and fun. Give them a try.

Goodbye, Tootsie is on sale for just $.99 at Amazon!

Sale price is good through Labor Day  (Perhaps longer if I procrastinate on making the price change. 🙂  That’s the beauty of indie publishing.)  Give as a gift or keep for yourself. Buy it Here!

Have a great week!

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Photo Credits:

Where My Feet Take Me – Photography copyright © 2015 by Delynn Royer.

It Had to Be You – Copyright © 2014 cover art used by arrangement with Harlequin Enterprises Limited ® and ™ are trademarks owned by Harlequin Enterprises Limited or its affiliated companies, used under license.

Goodbye, Tootsie Cover Art by Fiona Jayde Media

New Release, Ebook Tour, Giveaway & Other Summer Doings!

Goodbye, Tootsie is Here!

A 1920s Romantic Mystery

It’s been a long road, baby!

I’m bleary-eyed and sleep-derived but also dang happy to announce that Goodbye, Tootsie–the sequel to my 2014 romantic mystery, It Had to Be You–has gone live at Amazon and will soon be available under the Kindle Unlimited program.

If you’re so inclined, you can give it some Amazon love by:

→  Checking out the sample pages at U.S. Amazon HERE. (Every love-tap on that book link is appreciated!); or

→  Tweeting the book page… New! #Mystery & romance in #1920s Manhattan! GOODBYE TOOTSIE @DelynnRoyer #romanticmystery getBook.at/20SMYS

Plans to release at other ebook retailers—iTunes, Barnes & Noble, and Kobo—are in the works for Fall, 2015.

It Had to Be You: All Grown Up! (And Going on its First Summer Book Tour Vacation)

Where does the time go? It’s hard to believe It Had to Be You is already over a year old. To celebrate, we’re doing a $25 Amazon gift card giveaway and sending it on its own Mid-Summer Book Tour Vacation.

It Had to Be You Book Tour

Its overnight bag is all packed and it’s ready to go for a book tour hosted by Beck Valley Books from July 6th to July 10th. Below is the itinerary, and the Book Tour Page is HERE.

• Monday 6th July – Miki’s Hope
• Tuesday 7th July – Life as Leels
• Wednesday 8th July – Book Babble
• Thursday 9th July – A Soccer Mom’s Book Blog
• Friday 10th July – I Create Purty Thangs

Don’t forget to enter the rafflecopter $25 Amazon Gift Card Giveaway!

Appreciation for Book Bloggers

If you’ve ever written a book or a movie review, you know firsthand that it takes time and thought to dash off even a thumbnail review if you want it to be useful and of good quality. An hour, maybe?

What about an in-depth review for a book or movie review blog? More than an hour? Easily.  (If I count writing, editing, hyperlinking, and layout, it takes me about half a work day to do a blog post.) Oh, and don’t forget to add the time to actually read the book or watch the movie.

In today’s online book market, reviews are important to authors for sales and to readers for making buying decisions. Yet, most book bloggers receive no compensation for their reviews beyond review copies of books. That’s what’s called a Labor of Love, and it’s appreciated.

If you have time, please consider popping by to visit Beck Valley Books and the other sites hosting It Had to Be You on its first summer book tour vacation. 🙂

Best Surprise of the Week

Speaking of book bloggers, eagle-eyed Ava Quinn, the chucklemeister behind Tongue in Cheek blog, tweeted me last week that my first book–A Touch of Camelot—was reviewed at Dear Author.

Gah!  What a cool surprise!  (Truly, this tweet came at a time when I’d just birthed Goodbye, Tootsie, and I still resembled the Bride of Frankenstein–little sleep, bad hair, blurred vision from staring at the Kindle previewer for, uh, like, days. ) I believe the pic above accurately captures the expression on my face when I read Ava’s message… whaaat?)

My favorite line from Jayne S’s review?

“As a western rom com, ‘A Touch of Camelot’ hit the spot for me…” I’ll take it. 🙂 (Read the full review here.)

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And so, what’s new with you? Have you gone on any summer vacations? Any excursions coming up? Did you have any fun surprises lately?

Thanks for visiting, and have a great week! 🙂

 

Photo Credits

 It Had to Be You – Cover Art used by arrangement with Harlequin Enterprises Limited ® and ™ are trademarks owned by Harlequin Enterprises Limited or its affiliated companies, used under license.

Goodbye, Tootsie cover art design by Fiona Jayde Media. Learn more About Fiona here.

Goodbye, Tootsie Custom Photo Shoot and Cover Model Image from  RomanceNovelCovers.com

By Trailer screenshot, from DVD Bride of Frankenstein, Universal 2004 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rYD3-pIF9jQ) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

A Touch of Camelot cover art design by Hot Damn Designs

Against the Odds. She’s Gone Indie!

Goodbye, Tootsie. Putting it Together: Part One
Going Indie…

It’s been quiet around here, and there’s a reason for that. I’ve been working hard, wearing a lot of hats—author, editorial director, copy writer, proofreader, art director—and that’s because…

Yep. I’ve gone indie.

Deciding to go indie with a sequel to It Had to Be You was a no-brainer in some respects and difficult in others.

Backstory alert…

A Trixie Frank – Sean Costigan 1920s Romantic Mystery

When I started  It Had to Be You, I’d been away from fiction writing for over ten years. That’s one serious case of writer’s block, even if it was self-imposed due to Life Stuff.

When you neglect something so fragile and creative for that long, you wonder if you still have “it.” You certainly doubt that you deserve to have it. You wonder–when you skim back over your old books–how in the world you ever did that unquantifiable, Mount Everest-climbing thing in the first place.

So, after over a decade, I stared at that brand new, empty white computer screen with its frighteningly patient, forever-blinking cursor and wondered… What am I doing? And Where do I start? And Am I crazy?

I’d had similar doubts when I was thirty and started to write A Touch of Camelot. The edge I had back then that I didn’t have this time around was a big one. Blissful ignorance. I didn’t know the odds against getting published, and I knew even less about the craft of fiction writing. So, I just wrote.

The result of that blissful ignorance was a marvelous fluke—a contest win, an agent, a publisher, and four historical romances published within three years. It ended pretty fast too—that’s a whole other story—but, wow, it was still very cool. As my dad always says, “They can’t take that away from you.”

Ten years flew by fast. Kids, work, remarriage, graduations…

So, there I was again. More wrinkled but game. Fingers  poised on the keys, staring at that intimidating white screen. I’m not going to lie. It was harder this time. The writing was bad. Every sentence oozed like mud. No emotion. No spark. No voice.

And I knew this…how?

Because I knew about good writing and bad. I’d found my voice once before, and I now recognized it by its absence.

Still… I had an idea for a heroine I loved and a setting that fired up my imagination. But no plot. I wasn’t even sure what genre this would be.

And I knew this was a pathetic way to start a book… why?

Because I knew a book needed to be labeled for the market in order to sell it. And what’s the point of writing a thing if you can’t sell it?

Yeah, I was a cynic. I’d lost my writing virginity, and there was no getting it back. I did the sensible thing. I put the manuscript away. For about a year.

Then I got it back out.

Well… it might be a mystery, I thought. Or a romance. Or, worst of all…a Mysterious Romance.  But, heck, why should that worry me? It was set in a time period everyone knew would never sell. In a way, that double whammy freed me to do the not-so-sensible thing. Write it.

Was it easy? No. Fast? No. Fun? Yes!! But the best thing was, I got my voice back.

Which has exactly what to do with going indie?

Going against the odds.

I could have left Trixie and Sean at the end of It Had to Be You and simply moved on to something more marketable to pitch to a digital publisher. Time-wise and market-wise, that would have been the sensible thing. But…

It was Trixie who’d helped me find my voice again. How could I leave her back in 1924 when I knew her love story with Sean wasn’t done? Her next murder mystery case was drafted. All it needed was to be polished, edited and readied for market.

So, once again, I’m doing the not-so-sensible thing.  I’m going indie.

Want to tag along? 🙂

 Have you ever taken a leap of faith and done the “not so sensible” thing?

How did that go? Regrets? Or are you glad you leapt?

 Cover reveal and launch date coming soon.

In the meantime, here’s the blurb!!

GOODBYE, TOOTSIE

It’s after midnight on New Year’s Day, 1925, and the richest girl in America has just fallen to her death from the top floor of the posh Cleveland Hotel in Manhattan.

When Detective Sean Costigan arrives at the scene, he learns it’s the day after Abigail Welles’s twenty-first birthday— the day she inherited a family fortune. It’s not the kind of coincidence that warms a detective’s heart. Neither is the fact that she wasn’t alone when she fell. Her new husband, Long Island party boy Nick Welles, lies incoherent in the master bedroom.

Sean’s girl, tabloid reporter Trixie Frank, is the first newshound on the scene. It’s a bigger scoop than she dreamed. The young heiress’s death will make national headlines. More importantly, this story hits close to home. And heart. The victim’s husband is Trixie’s ex-fiancé.

When Sean focuses on Nick as his prime suspect, Trixie is certain he’s dead wrong. But will saving her first love from the hot seat prove fatal to her new romance?

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Photo credits:

Goodbye, Tootsie title graphic by Fiona Jayde Media

It Had to Be You – Copyright © 2014 by Harlequin Enterprises Limited.
Cover Art used by arrangement with Harlequin Enterprises Limited ® and ™ are trademarks owned by Harlequin Enterprises Limited or its affiliated companies, used under license.