Not Low Maintenance

No, I'm not forgetting Bittersweet Farm for even 1 minute.  I'm just catching up on some of the things I've neglected over the past year.  I'm talking to someone about doing a cover for one of my adult contemporary novels.  And then I reverted to the original cover for this adult contemporary

Falling in love is easy.  Making love work is hard, especially when there are two lawyers and a defamation of character lawsuit involved.

The Blood and Guts Hunt Breakfast puts the Miller sisters' new catering business on the Litchfield County society map. This event is where Viva Miller meets the attractive, successful attorney Joel Bernstein, who just days later becomes the legal pitbull for Viva's ex-, the vile David J. Resnick.

Yes, Viva lies during the deposition phase before the trial. Then there's the unpleasantness when David turns up dead and Viva is the last person to see him alive.  But, what the heck, no relationship is perfect.  Bigtime love is not low maintenance.

Not Low Maintenance

If you'd like a free copy, send me an email and I'll be glad to send one to you.

Not Low Maintenance

It's not about a high maintenance Louboutin  high heel wearing slickchick.  It's about your life and how that's not low maintenance, you have to attend to it.  But it's also about being sued for defamation of character and a Blood and Guts hunt breakfast, apple cake and the sexiest attorney in New York City.

I changed the cover today.  It's a little more autumnal.

Not Low Maintenance

It's all maintenance, so I decided I was not very happy with the last cover.  I liked the international nullification symbol cover but I suspect people didn't understand it.

New cover.

We dodged the Sandy bullet and I was well prepared for it.  After Irene when the power was out for four days, I told my pal I needed a laptop so I could keep working.  He found a four year old business Dell coming off lease that was practically worthless to everyone else but very valuable to me.  That was ready, a thumbdrive with current files plugged into it.  All batteries were charged, I had flashlights everywhere, jugs and jugs of water, clean clothes, dog laundry done.  I was so ready and it was just some rain.  I'm very grateful and very sorry for those not as fortunate.

The unfortunate reality of life is that most of us have very little control over what happens to us.  We are exhorted to be powerful, but we waste more time on addressing things we have no control over and little time on addressing what we can control.

Don't do that.

Unspeakably Desirable

Yes, NLM2 is finished.  Its title is Unspeakably Desirable.
No, it's not live yet but it will be within hours at Barnes & Noble and in a couple days at Amazon.

This is the blurb:

A lot of people come to your door unannounced and unbidden when you're a pastry chef with a good reputation, but not many as handsome or as self-confident as Asher Lau.  He was sent by my brother-in-law because there was an emergency Thanksgiving Day feast required.  This was a crisis I was supposed to solve in four days.  Asher Lau was a lawyer, too, like my brother-in-law and had some kind of television show on cable.  So you can see how he had absolutely everything working against him--I don't like lawyers, I don't watch television and a pretty boy had just put me in many thousands of dollars in debt.

That was my green light to fall head over heels in love.  Ash claimed he was crazy about me, too.  Which all would have been fine if he didn't have a loony girlfriend with unbelievable appetites.  (Some of these acts I had never heard of before, I swear to you.  I thought you only did them to a turkey.)

I figured I would never hear from him again after Thanksgiving.  Well, then that extended to Christmas.  By the time the sanitation engineers were sweeping up confetti in Times Square, I was sure Asher Lau would be out of my life.

But by National Flashlight Day, I knew this was the man I had to spend the rest of my life with.  Unfortunately, the ex-girlfriend insisted on marrying him first.  And then there was that fan no one counted on.  People will do the nuttiest things out of desperation.

I could even understand why everyone fell in love with Ash the moment they saw him.  He was, after all, Unspeakably Desirable. –Bel Miller

This is the cover art:

I did do all the photography with my new Nikon D7000 which I love to pieces.  I did make all the desserts except the tiny tarts.  That means yes, I did make the banana tart on the cover!

And yes, I'm working on another book that I expect will be out this month or early next.  Now, before that confirms what some people think--that I'm just throwing words at the screen willy-nilly, it's a short cookbook and it's a ton of work.  I have to create the recipes, create the dish and then create the photo shoot.  Then I have to work on the image in the computer to make sure it will zing your eye in your reading device, as much as I was visually excited in real life.  So yes, it's very labor-intensive.

I hope you enjoy Bel's story.