Author: Maya

Baking weekend went quite well as did Thanksgiving. I have to say that the rib roast I cooked was all sorts of yummy and I will likely never go back to plain ole turkey evah again. And the homemade mac and cheese mmmm. It was a day for comfort foods for sure.

So now we slide into Christmas, which means Christmas trees, Christmas music, fires, hot chocolate and pressies. Christmas trees are rather scarce around here thanks to two hurricanes in the last three years *sigh* And the ones we have, oy! Let’s just say I’ve never paid so much for a live Christmas tree in my life! But it’s gorgeous so I’m verra happy indeed. But still… ouch!

Speaking of pressies…I’m uhm behind the times. My brain can’t keep up and I only just realized that I have stuff I donated to the auction for Jo Leigh and those auctions are now live. I’m offering a critique, which I can’t imagine why anyone would pay for my opinion, especially when Amy has offered to pay me NOT to give my opinion on many occassions, but an opinion I will give! You can hop over to look if that sort of thing interests you.

The other thing I’m offering is a complete collection of all my print books, including my Sharon Long titles, all of which will be signed and shipped free of charge by me. So if you want my entire library, autographed, you can hop over to that auction and check it out. Oh and uhm I realized after the fact that I left off Long Road Home, so if you read this and happen to win the auction, email me and let me know I forgot Long Road Home and I will throw it in for you :whoo:

This weekend is going to be loads of fun. It’s been declared family baking weekend. We do this a few times a year and the kids absolutely love it. I talked about what we were doing for Thanksgiving over at Writeminded a few days ago and how we were foregoing the traditional turkey and dressing stuff, so this weekend we’re going to search out some new recipes and get all the fixings to make our Thanksgiving dinner but we’re also having baking day. We make homemade sugar cookies and homemade chocolate chip cookies. Lots of raw dough is consumed and lots of finger licking happens :woot:

The chocolate chip making is always fun because we make four times the recipe. Talk about a huge bowl of dough! But we freeze the dough in tubes so we have cookies for weeks to come. All the kids pitch in and everyone has an assigned duty. Hubby always has to do the mixing, because stirring and mixing four times the recipe is hard work. Seriously. He’s the only one with the strength to get it all mixed up good enough :lol2:

I’m leaning toward a rib roast for thanksgiving. I’ll make homemade bread of course because my rolls are to die for. Other then that, I’m not sure yet what else we’ll be making. Maybe some homemade mac and cheese. Part of the fun is looking up new recipes, so it’s no telling what we’ll come up with.

If I don’t make it back before Thanksgiving, I hope everyone has a wonderful holiday :hug:

Be With Me hit the BGI and BN trade romance bestseller lists and it’s all due to all of you who bought my book. So thank you. I’m not worthy! :worthy:

I’m extremely grateful to everyone who went out and bought the book. My readers rock. :hug:

and okay so there ended up being three, because A. I have three kids and when I asked two of them to choose a number, the other got miffed so I let them all pick a number and B. I have tons of author copies and I need room on my bookshelves for the books I’ve bought and want to read :lol2:

So here are the three winners of a signed copy of Be With Me:

Emily, comment #19
Monica, comment #7
Brandy, comment #29

If you guys will send me an email to mayaATmayabanks.com and give me your mailing addresses, I’ll get your books out to you this week.

Edited to add: I know some of you have trouble commenting on this blog, and I apologize for that. If you’d still like to enter for a chance to win a signed copy of Be With Me, you can email me at mayaATmayabanks.com and I’ll include you in the drawing.

I’m in sort of a mellow, reflective mood. I’m doing some work and I put on some Hagood Hardy which I tend to only pull out when I’m in a quiet and reserved mood. I’m ready for colder weather. It’s funny that as much as I love cold weather that I’d be such a die hard southerner with no desire to live anywhere else. I mean we only get a few weeks of cold weather every year and yet I crave it every single year.

We’re heading out west (West Texas that is) to go hunting in two weekends. We usually go later in the year or early January when it’s colder than a witches tit. Last year I damn near froze to death and I loved every minute of it. So anyway, we’re going hunting for a long weekend and I plan to let my daughter have more fun than a human being should be allowed. She totally showed up her older brothers last year and she’s looking forward to doing it again. Besides, Amy has decided that it’s my job to feed her this year. She’s put in an order for deer meat, and me being the sap er uh I mean good friend that I am, have agreed to slay some deer on her behalf. It’s a hardship but someone has to do it.

I got lots and lots of shiny author copies of Be With Me on my bookshelf, and so I thought I’d give a couple away. Im terrible at updating this blog since I spend most of my time over at Writeminded or on our Yahoo Reader’s Group so I figure if you actually come by here and read this, you deserve a shot at winning a signed copy of Be With Me :lol2:

So I’ll give away two copies and I’ll leave this up until the end of the week or when I get bored with the entry, whichever comes first. Just drop a comment to be entered.

I’ve posted an exclusive excerpt of Be With Me which officially releases today.

Today, everyone should vote first and then go buy books :lol2:

I’m finally making progress on Amber Eyes, which if you don’t know, is the sequel to Golden Eyes. Amber Eyes is about the “lost” sister, Kaya who is mentioned in Golden Eyes. It was slow going for awhile because shit happens and that’s just the way it is sometime :idontknow:

I also had some smoothing out to do on Piers’ story, which is tentatively titled The Tycoon’s Elusive Lover and is book 3 in the Anetakis Tycoons series for Silhouette Desire.

All of which is to say that the release of Be With Me has completely snuck up on me. It’s not that I totally forgot but with NY print books, it’s not like there is one select day when everyone can get their copy and not a day before. Bookstores will often have books out early. Or online sites start shipping them early. There’s never any way to predict when the books become available and I’ve had readers emailing me since last week to tell me they’d found Be With Me. Barnes and Noble online has been shipping the book for a week now. So the excitement over the “official” release day is just semantics.

At any rate, official D day is tomorrow. I really love Be With Me. I like all my books but I love some more than others. Be With Me is one of my favorites. I had so much fun writing it and hated when I came to the end. I just hope readers will like it as much.

Which starts next week and at last count was going to last for three weeks. We have lots of shit to give away and lots of fun to be had by all :whoo:

To get a start on the festivities, I have some fun news. My new agent and I just wrapped up a deal for the next two books in my “Sweet” series with Berkley HEAT. Sweet Seduction (Nathan’s story!) and Sweet Temptation (Micah’s story!) will release in October 2009 and April 2010 respectively. I’m very happy with the way things shook out.

I also got new release dates and delivery dates for my Kelly series that I sold to Berkley Sensation earlier in the year. These books will be mass market originals instead of going the trade to mass market route which means they won’t release in trade in 2009. They’ll release in 2010 as mass markets and will have a close release schedule for the trilogy that kicks off the KGI series :woot:

So it’s been a good day and I get to settle down and do some rearranging in my writing schedule which will be fun.

Now less than two weeks until Into the Lair releases and just a month until Be With Me releases! Fun times to be had :banana:

to release day for Into the Lair :woot: I’ve re-entered the blogging world and have a post up over at Writeminded today. I’m still busier than a one armed paper hanger, but hopefully things are starting to calm down around these parts.

Starting to get some wonderful reader feedback on Into the Lair and Be With Me. Getting some nice reviews too. These were two books I was worried about for very different reasons. One was a whole lot easier than the other to write, which brings it’s own set of concerns.

Some books are hard. Really hard to write. I put everything I have into every single book I write, but sometimes they come easy and the words flow and the characters speak to me and it’s all I can do to keep up as the words spill out. Other books it’s like pulling teeth. Each and every word is agonized over, second guessed, reworked. I tears stuff up, tell my editor I quit, tell anyone who will listen that I can’t do it and that I’m currently penning the worst piece of shit ever known to man.

It’s THOSE books that are soooo satisfying when they turn out okay and readers tell me they love them. I’m always so surprised, shocked and so very grateful when a reader tells me they enjoyed one of my books, but when it’s a book that I’ve struggled SO much with, it makes me even more grateful that I fought so hard to get it right.