I've been a romance book nerd since the 70s. I don't just love the sizzle and the smile that comes with a great romance, but the journey of romance writing has mirrored the journey of women and I find it fascinating. Nothing says You've come a long way, baby, better than 50 Shades. 40 years ago, women wouldn't have admitted to owning that book let alone having read it.

Now, women are out there saying, yep I'm a romance novel junky, give me naughty, give me raunchy, give me sweet. I am woman I want everything! I look at the twitter handles and they make me smile: smutty book friends, Just a book whore, etc.

Is it now cool, now chic to have a passion for the once dismissed romance novel. Why do you read that junk? men used to say. Now I don't know a man in LA, young or old, even my big tough old guy, who doesn't know about 50shades. They ain't asking why we're reading it any more.

So is that the real accomplishment of FSOG: women are back into the romance novel and proud of it no matter the variety they read?

The Girl on the Half Shell
Top 100 list Bestselling The Signature
Last Day Free Rewind

The Siganture, the book that sat in my computer for fourteen years, was selling well yesterday. I thought, oh crap I could make Amazon Best Selling List in Romance. I didn't want to fall asleep and miss it. If you are an Indie author, you understand. Things move fast in the Indie world. One moment on list and the next moment who knows.

The first three months of self-releasing I really didn't plan anything I did. I  just sort of followed a crazy release schedule and sent my work out. I really debated releasing this book. It's clean romance and the market is so complicated now. I didn't know if there was even a place for it.

Last weekend I was chatting with some gal pals and they were telling me I needed to change the cover. I admit, not a very good cover. But this book I released because it's special to me,  I didn't think it would sell, and it definitely falls into my early phase of making mistakes. One of my pals texted me last night: Imagine how well it would be doing if it had a nice cover.

Laughing.

I wish my mom didn't have dementia and could understand when I call her to tell her, "Mom The Signature made a best selling list."

It's funny. No matter how old we are, in all moments we still want to run first to our mothers and say I did it.

Every author knows this moment. It's like that moment before you step down the aisle to get married. You are no longer in the cave writing, searching for words, wondering if people will accept how your characters behave. It's the days after you type ~THE END~ when you send your work to your trusted circle of readers and the editor, and wait, wait, wait to find out if your creation is OK.

My tone, my mood, my voice, my subject matter changes up from book to book. Romance isn't a one size fits all kind of thing, and I like to think that by tapping in to things that matter to me and things I've experienced, I'm connecting with more readers than I would if I had a formula, cookie cutter style story. It's a little risky how much I change up, but that's me. I'm not a one size fits all kind of woman.

But today I am waiting with butterflies in my stomach wondering if I have created something that people will want to read. It's a glorious feeling, a rush, but terrifying! One Last Kiss: Release date September 1, 2014.

I've never understood the blogging thing. I do it because someone told me I was supposed to. Authors have blog pages. So I post my weird, random Susan thoughts every day and it's become part of my morning ritual.

Then, over the weekend I wasn't feeling so great so I didn't blog for a few days. Last Sunday would have been my Sunday morning Book Reviews with Susan. In my email, I got questions from friends and some people I don't know asking me if I were OK. You haven't been blogging. You are not your normal self.

I was deeply touched that people noticed that little ole me disappeared for a few days. And suddenly, blogging makes sense to me. In this increasingly complicated world, where it is difficult and yet extraordinarily easy to have human connectivity, sometimes the speed of life makes it necessary to send out your thoughts in bites of zeros and ones, just to have time to connect.

It makes the isolated life of writing bearable I think. I guess that's why my author pals all told me to blog. If there is another reason, I don't know it. And frankly, it really doesn't matter to me.

So, I've finally come to the realization that to release 26 books in 24 months I need help. So I've started working with a wonderful girl out of Sacramento and her job is to keep what I do structured and organized.

I call her the Princess of my Universe because she cracks the whip and I jump. I guess I've done everything in wrong indie process for my first 3 releases. I'm excited to find out if utilizing right process will be a good thing.

The Problem is I function better in the world of the flaky. I write. When I think it's OK I send to BETA Read. When I think it's OK after that, I send to edit, and while I wait for edit I shop for  book cover. And then, when I have all the piece I just hit release. No pre-promotion, no blog tour. I just send out into the world and see what happens.

But now I have timelines, expectations, whip cracking, and must do's. Somehow this has turned into a grown up job, and I'm rolling back my age 5 years at a time each year until I'm a teenager again.  I'm practicing in anticipation  or reaching teenage again by leaving my dirty clothes everywhere and never taking a dish to the kitchen.

But I do so love the cover mock up that she sent me. And if the rest of her whip cracking works this well I'm going to call hiring  a PA: "winning"

That is what I'm discovering with The Girl on the Half Shell. I set out to write a romance that ends happy~ though not in the typical happily ever after, not in book one of the series~about people with lives we would envy and issues we would never see.  A wonderful looking life doesn't mean an easy life or a pain-free journey. I wanted my characters to have real issues and experience the healing power of love.

What the reader brings to the reading process determines the journey they go on with my book. I've discovered in 3 months that there is going to be a range of journeys I never anticipated.  I chatted for quite a while last night with a woman who finished my book and said hasn't been able to stop thinking about it. We talked for several hours and the connectivity in the digital age is an amazing thing for a writer.

For twenty-five years I've written in silence, isolation and without sharing my work. And now I can get  instant feedback from a reader who has finished a journey we've gone on together with my book.

The issues I write about are at times difficult to write. They have to be done with just the right touch to be honest and real.  As a writer you never know if you've created something that breathes with true emotion for the reader...unless it's the digital age and they can chat with you and let you know that you did OK.

My father was this totally cool, goof-ball, wonderful, fun loving man. He was an advocate for peace in all aspects of his life which is quite a contradiction given the work he did.  He was scientist and designed weapons for the DOD. 29 Patents on many things the US military still uses. But he was the gentlest and most predictable soul I've ever known.

He'd wake at 430 a.m. every morning and have breakfast. He'd walk the family dog Muttly. He'd leave for the office at 530. He'd return home at 430p.m. to have dinner with the family. He'd walk the family dog. From 6-7 p.m. he'd sit in his chair and read the Bible. From 8-10 he'd go to the neighborhood pizza parlor and shoot pool. At 10:30 p.m. sleep.

I could set my watch by my father and there was something comforting about seeing him every night reading the bible, even though I'm not what I'd call an overly religious person. When my mother sent me the Bible I was so happy. It's like having my father still in my house, and because he was raised in the south, it's one of those great family history things. I can open to the front and see every marriage, every birth listed for 150 years.

The book mark when he died(they have these really cool bookmarks in the Catholic church, little gold paperclips with circle pictures of the saints on top) was on 1 Corinthian 12: when the perfect comes the partial will pass away. It's been 16 years since his death and I've never moved the bookmark.

Instead I wrote a book series, with that passage of the Bible and my father in mind: the Deverell Series. The first book When the Perfect Comes will be released in October.

And to this day that Bible sits on my desk. I like to remember my father. He was a happy and kind man.

So on my iPod while I was working popped up an old song from the 70s, Romeo Void Never Say Never. And I started to laugh. I use to have to listen to this on underground radio, because it was too scandalous from mainstream radio... I might like you better if we slept, but there is something in your eyes that says never say never....

Now I find myself singing along to lyrics on the radio networks and every once in the while I stop and go, oh my did I just say that? Oh shoot, that's what those words mean. One of my favorite aha moments was with that song Butterfly about 15 years ago, and after saying the lyrics I realized what the song was about and I was driving around town on business singing about oral sex. 

Culture changes quickly. I don't know if it's good or bad. I do know that the speed of things is making it harder for us to be socked and wowed. I can't imagine my grandmother driving down the street singing rap like I do or one of my favorites Indie bands to rev up for working,  Kaiser Chief's I Predict a Riot. But the world is fun if you let it be and don't take yourself too seriously and  I can't wait to find what out my first grandchild thinks of me...

So, an author buddy of mine is about to release a new book, Twitter Girl, through HarperCollins and I discovered his character has a twitter account. How cute is that? So I followed her and she immediately followed me, and in record time we were conversing yesterday.

I thought, dang now I have a fictional character from a book doing social media better than me. The pressures of trying to learn every and to keep up are quite enough without getting bested by fiction.

I have a character coming out in the spring who creates chaos with a YouTube blog. But I'm not going to teach my fictional character how to video blog. Oh no. It's enough that there is already one fictional character using social media better than me. I'm not letting my documentary filmmaker have access to her own technology. I gave her her own novella(Rewind) so that's going to have to be enough with the novel to be released in spring. No video blogging on You Tube for Kaley. I can tell you that.

I wonder if Twitter girl is out there, looking for me. She probably has more followers than I do already. I've got to step up my game. I refuse to be left in the dust by @TwitrGrlCassidy

I spent a lot of time doing research on what was popular in current romance publishing, and by the time I was done I started to feel a little worried about my good guys. Was there a place in today's market for the loveable, nice man?

Confident? Yes, there is a place for that. Mean? Yes, there is a place for that. Naughty? There is always a place for that. Successful? Yep. Driven? Yep. Troubled?Yep. But what about the tender, gentle steadfast good guy? I wasn't sure.

Over the weekend my nice heroes have been slugging it out with my troubled, bad-boy rocker, and it's been exiting.See, I don't have a prototype of what a romantic hero should be.  A sexy nice guy who knows what he wants, can knock my socks off as fast as a mercurial, troubled bad-boy searching for love. Both the romantic and the cynical man can be sexy if he's the right man.

The journey of love is not one size fits all.  Sometimes it's a journey through passion's cellars and other times it's floating on a cloud.

Alan Manzone~The Girl on the Half Shell: The troubled bad boy who wants what he shouldn't have.
Devon Howard~The Signature: The hopeful romantic Reporter who knows what he needs.
Bobby Rowan~Rewind: The nice guy dog rescuer who knows want he wants.