←Return to Chapter 10: Dialing Up the Pressure
It was 1999 and the entire planet was consumed with the countdown to the year 2000 and the assured chaos and anarchy that would surely follow when computers spontaneously detonated. (In case you weren't born yet, none of those things happened. The worst part was it took everyone several months to learn to write "20XX" on their bank checks instead of "19xx"… back when writing checks was still a thing!)
I was still doing signings for my February '99 release CLUB CUPID (newly updated and re-released if you missed it) and gearing up for my next release ABOUT LAST NIGHT in October of that year.
February 1999 article in The Daily Independent written by Cathie Shaffer about me and the KYOWA chapter (in the KY, OH, WV tri-state area) of romance writers.
An Atlanta Journal-Constitution article written by Paul Donsky about me and other romance novelists signing our books at the 1999 Georgia Romance Writers Moonlight & Magnolias conference.
Roswell-Alpharetta Herald article written by Anne Thomas and postcard about a romance booksigning at the Margaret Mitchell House & Museum sponsored by The Bohemian Club February 1999
In About Last Night, a bride-to-be sneaks into the hotel room of her intended groom to "force the issue" of intimacy, and instead climbs into the bed of the Best Man! That's awkward enough, but then they're quarantined to the hotel room!
Back when I wrote About Last Night, the worst pandemic in recent memory was the 1976 outbreak of Legionnaire's Disease in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, which resulted in dozens of deaths and kept the medical community guessing for weeks as to what it was and how far it might spread. But that event was over twenty-five years prior. Fast forward to now and I'd gotten the rights back to the book. Honestly, I kind of dreaded re-reading it and updating it in the wake of the Covid outbreak of 2020.
BUT to my surprise, the story of Janine Murphy and Derek Stillman who are thrown together accidentally and in the most awkward of ways, then forced to endure each other's company in the confines of a hotel room had held up pretty well! I had to update some references to technology, of course, and some cultural references. And I decided to add a couple of scenes showing how the couple gets to know each other more. On top of that, this story takes place over a short period of time—days. To show the slow passage of time, I added timestamps to the chapters and scenes.
Oh, and the cover!
In the last chapter of STORIES BEHIND THE STORIES, I presented the original cover of About Last Night, which wasn't my favorite Harlequin cover:
The original cover of About Last Night
And I presented two choices of updated covers that I created, and asked you to vote on the one you liked best by emailing me and by posting on my Facebook page.
The test covers for About Last Night that had readers divided!
And guess what—half of you liked one cover and half of you liked the other cover! Seriously, the voting was 51% vs. 49%! Some of you even commented that you liked the "note" on the first cover AND the rose boutonniere on the second cover. So… I decided to combine what you liked about each cover into an entirely new image. Voila!
The new cover for the updated version of About Last Night—thanks to you!
The updated version of About Last Night with new packaging is available for pre-order now to be released Tuesday, September 24! I hope you like it! (Available in ebook exclusively on Amazon and through Kindle Unlimited until mid-December, then it'll be available at all online bookstores. Print version coming soon!)
Back to the "story"…. at the same time my career was bumping along, I was undertaking a change in my personal life by moving from the suburbs of Atlanta to midtown. Downsizing from a spacious house to a loft condo was a long, painful process and the upheaval of a move really made a dent in my writing schedule. Getting used to a smaller, less private workspace was another adjustment. (This is a warning to writers—do not underestimate the impact of a relocation!)
But deadlines do not wait, so as the year turned to 2000 and the world didn't implode upon itself, I prepared for the release of two more projects:
First, the release of It Takes a Rebel (the sequel to About Last Night). In It Takes a Rebel, a slacker former athlete (and brother to Derek in About Last Night) has to up his game in order to impress the heiress to a family department store empire and land their ad account to save his family ad business. I got the rights back to It Takes a Rebel a few years ago, so it's already been updated.
The updated version of It Takes a Rebel (the sequel to About Last Night).
Click here to buy if you missed it! Available in ebook, print, and audio!
I generally don't have favorites among my books; that said, It Takes a Rebel is one of my personal favorites. 😊 It was so fun to write, plus it's set in Lexington, Kentucky, which holds a special place in my heart. Also, It Takes a Rebel won the Rita Award of Excellence, the highest award given in the romance industry at that time. It was a sweet moment shared with my editor and my writing friends from Georgia Romance Writers:
From L to R: Harlequin editor Brenda Chin, Wendy Etherington, me (holding the RITA award), Jennifer LaBrecque, Rita Herron, Jennifer St. Giles, and Jacquie D'Alessandro at the Romance Writers of America conference
The other project I was looking forward to launching in early 2000 was a first: Harlequin's very first interactive story published on their website. (Here's where I'd like to point out that Harlequin was one of the first publishers to put up a website; the idea of a huge company not having a website is unfathomable these days, but in 2000, websites were still a fledgling marketing tool and popular domain names were still up for grabs.)
I was so honored to be able to write the story titled "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Wedding." The gist of how things would work was that I would write a mini-chapter that was posted on the Harlequin website. The chapter ended on a cliffhanger and for one week readers were asked to vote on the direction the story would take. The secrets results were handed over to me, and I had maybe two days to write the next mini-chapter so it could be edited and posted. A new chapter was posted every two weeks.
I have to be honest with you—I can't remember much about the premise of the story; I have a vague recollection of a bride on her way to the wedding who keeps getting waylaid by a series of mishaps… and there was something about Karma that threaded through the story. I no longer have the manuscript file, and I couldn't locate a hard copy in my files. I found a mention of it on a piracy site, but I couldn't access the site to read it!
A Courier Herald article by Mary Lowery in her "Love Potions" column and a Publishers Weekly article "Romance and the Single Computer" about Harlequin's first interactive novel... written by me!
ANYWAY, the story was well received because it was such a new concept at the time. Later I would learn that a question I posed to readers asking them to post a "karma-cleansing" story led to over 40,000 postings in a bulletin board area of the site, which at that time was a stratospheric number. I'm not saying it was a brilliant question; what I'm saying is it was a very early sign to how eager readers were to interact with other readers. Harlequin was an innovator!
And for those of you who know how much I love to write serials, writing the interactive story was my first foray into serialized fiction. Writing "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Wedding" would later inform my annual serials.
I'll close for now to finish some other projects I have underway. Thanks so much for following along! Next time: The book that garnered the WORST most controversial reviews of my career! ~