Normally, I would save the first fish picture for Skye to share on her blog, but A) we are not sure she even knows we have added to the family, because she has shown absolutely zero interest in her new finny brother, and B) I needed a prompt for today’s post. So, all that said, allow me to introduce Tuna Roll, aka Petit Monsieur:

Hi, I’m Tuna Roll. Nice to meet you.

I will state for the record that I lobbied for Julius as the name for our newest family member, but since said family member is also Real Life Romance Hero’s birthday gift this year, Real Life Romance Hero has the honor of naming him. Tuna Roll it is, though Housemate and I refer to him as Petit Monsieur when RLRH isn’t around.

Nearly a solid week of dropping flakes into Tuna Roll’s bowl twice a day has brought a few things to light. First, I’m not sure if they fed him pellets at PetSmart, but it took our li’l guy a couple of tries before he figured out those flaky things the humans drop into his water are edible. I don’t blame him. Big adjustment from living in a tiny cup, next to a bunch of other fish, also in tiny cups, to getting a nice sized bowl, all to himself, with gravel and a plant and everything.

During the process of transitioning Tuna Roll from the cup in which we brought him home (proud grammar nerd here,) we had to float his cup in the prepared bowl, set up days in advance of his arrival. Even while inside his cup, Tuna Roll had his eyes on one thing: the plant. I’m not sure if he ever had a plant before, but with all his swimming around, he always came back to the plant, and, the first thing he did, when settled into the bowl proper, was head straight for that plant. Then he zoomed around the bowl a couple of times. While there’s no way for sure to know what he’s thinking (unless there are any ichthyologists reading this, who want to help me out here) my educated guess is that it was something like “Whee, look at all this room! I live in a palace! Get a load of this, cup dwellers! I am living the good life now.”

I could be wrong, but I saw what I saw. It’s kind of like that with reading, and with writing, but that may be another post, so we will start with reading. My first nibble of the romance genre was The Kadin, by Bertrice Small, and it took a while before I ventured out to other authors, but once I did, whee, look, there’s a whole historical romance genre out there, with gravel and plants and everything. Okay, maybe plants and gravel aren’t as big a deal in romance reading as they are in fish décor, but that first rush of discovery was heady, and, decades after the fact, I am still running on fumes of wandering through a used bookstore in downtown Montpelier, Vermont, slipping my fingers along the spines of rows and rows and rows of historical romance novels.

These books were set in pretty much any period I could imagine, from the ancient world to the early twentieth century, and I’m still kind of drunk on the variety. At the time, one author writing in multiple periods was the norm, and that imprinted on me. I don’t think that’s going to ever leave. Though I’m concentrating on the eighteenth century right now, I’ve written colonial New York, English Civil War/Restoration, sixteenth century Cornwall, and the turn of the twentieth century, and those are only the currently available backlist. In the next couple of weeks, A Heart Most Errant will go off for a beta read, and I’m nervous. It’s been a long time since anybody besides me got to spend any time with John and Aline, #1linewed entries excepted, and that makes it uncharted territory. Will the story still hold? Will the characters make any connections with the reader? Will she gently suggest I consider another line of work? Probably not on that last one, but I’m anxious about this sort of thing. Also about a lot of things, but especially this.

Yesterday, I sent my co-writer, Melva Michaelian, my final notes on the last batch of pages for Chasing Prince Charming.  One more pass for formatting, and then we are done-done with this book, out of the cup and into the bowl. Queries are going out, to be followed by partials, and, hopefully, the full manuscript. I’m less nervous about this, possibly because I have an awesome writing partner willing to hunt down prospects and make contact, but still nervous. After this book is in its final form (until some lucky editor asks for a few tweaks, that is) we get to start the journey all over again, and start work on Drama King. 

It’s been a while since my last fiction release, and there have been significant changes to both author and industry in the years between. Maybe that’s how Tuna Roll felt when we first floated his cup in the bowl he now calls home. This is different, but interesting. He gets gravel and a plant and fish flakes twice a day, and he comes to the front of the bowl whenever he sees a person approach. He wants this. So do I.