Read Online A Valentine for Harlequin's Anniversary by Catherine Mann - Free Book Online
Authors: Catherine Mann
Tags: Contemporary
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and conferences. And inch by slow inch, the ice crystal that was my heart started to thaw.
It took a long while for me to even approach the notion that love wasn’t a Hollywood construct. That real people did fall in love, and that love could be real. I even entertained the thought that perhaps, just perhaps, it could happen to me.
I’m convinced that as my belief in love itself transformed, so did my novels. It didn’t feel as though I was writing science fiction any longer. I identified more and more with the heroines of my books. I had lost a great deal of my early cynicism and was a much, much happier person for it.
About six years ago, I got an email. It was from that guy, you know, the one I loved? The one who’d dumped me like yesterday’s paper? Yeah, him. He’d found my email address through my books. He wrote. I wrote back. We spoke on the phone, and there was still something there. Okay, there was still a lot there. Especially after her apologized. After he admitted that letting me go had been the biggest mistake of his life. I’m convinced that he came back into my life because I was finally ready for the real deal. I had a heart that beat, a concept of love that wasn’t just happy endings, but included hard work. I could trust again, not just him, but myself.
We got married at the RWA conference in Reno.
I know, for me personally, that I now believe in love. But only because love believed in me.
— Jo Leigh
www.joleigh.com
Why I Write
#39
When our oldest son was eight years old his kidneys failed. I had two other young children at home; I was pregnant. And here I was, on the Critical Care floor of a children’s’ hospital seventy miles from my husband, my other children, surrounded by sick children, injured children, dying children…and sleeping on a cot beside my own very ill son. For weeks on end. For nine long months, until his first transplant (and three weeks after the birth of our daughter), I performed dialysis on our son at home and in the hospital. I rode in too many ambulances, I watched too many children die, I sat, unable to sleep, in the Parents Lounge with other mothers going through their own hells—and I noticed something.
The nurses who lived with all this pain and suffering every working day, all seemed to have romance novels stuck in their pockets as they rode the elevators to the lunch room in the windowless basement. The mothers hid inside the pages of romance novels when they couldn’t sleep, knowing they could be interrupted when the words “Code Blue” blared over the loudspeaker, knowing one of those calls could be for their child. A librarian friend kept me supplied with romance novels—I had a special small suitcase for them and lugged it to the hospital with me along with my pajamas, maternity clothes, and stash of cookies.
We mothers would read, share, trade the books that kept us sane. We all lived in a real world in that hospital, a world too real; we all functioned at the highest level, because there was no choice but to function, to persevere—and we all occasionally escaped that world into the hope and happy endings of romance novels. Those moments of “escape” made it easier, never easy but easier, to deal with the real world.
I’d written my first book, THE BELLIGERENT MISS BOYNTON, just before our son’s kidney failure. It wasn’t a career move, it was just an idea I had and wrote with little thought to a career. I wrote my second book during those long nine months, staying awake all night twice a week, to scribble it in longhand at the dining room table. A Regency romance, a very funny romance, this book became THE TENACIOUS MISS TAMERLANE—and, looking back now, as I write this, I guess the word “tenacious” was, sub-consciously—a pretty good choice.
Years later I was told, by a reviewer, that she called this book her “rainy day” book, because if she felt down, she knew reading this book would make her laugh. I wrote that book
It took a long while for me to even approach the notion that love wasn’t a Hollywood construct. That real people did fall in love, and that love could be real. I even entertained the thought that perhaps, just perhaps, it could happen to me.
I’m convinced that as my belief in love itself transformed, so did my novels. It didn’t feel as though I was writing science fiction any longer. I identified more and more with the heroines of my books. I had lost a great deal of my early cynicism and was a much, much happier person for it.
About six years ago, I got an email. It was from that guy, you know, the one I loved? The one who’d dumped me like yesterday’s paper? Yeah, him. He’d found my email address through my books. He wrote. I wrote back. We spoke on the phone, and there was still something there. Okay, there was still a lot there. Especially after her apologized. After he admitted that letting me go had been the biggest mistake of his life. I’m convinced that he came back into my life because I was finally ready for the real deal. I had a heart that beat, a concept of love that wasn’t just happy endings, but included hard work. I could trust again, not just him, but myself.
We got married at the RWA conference in Reno.
I know, for me personally, that I now believe in love. But only because love believed in me.
— Jo Leigh
www.joleigh.com
Why I Write
#39
When our oldest son was eight years old his kidneys failed. I had two other young children at home; I was pregnant. And here I was, on the Critical Care floor of a children’s’ hospital seventy miles from my husband, my other children, surrounded by sick children, injured children, dying children…and sleeping on a cot beside my own very ill son. For weeks on end. For nine long months, until his first transplant (and three weeks after the birth of our daughter), I performed dialysis on our son at home and in the hospital. I rode in too many ambulances, I watched too many children die, I sat, unable to sleep, in the Parents Lounge with other mothers going through their own hells—and I noticed something.
The nurses who lived with all this pain and suffering every working day, all seemed to have romance novels stuck in their pockets as they rode the elevators to the lunch room in the windowless basement. The mothers hid inside the pages of romance novels when they couldn’t sleep, knowing they could be interrupted when the words “Code Blue” blared over the loudspeaker, knowing one of those calls could be for their child. A librarian friend kept me supplied with romance novels—I had a special small suitcase for them and lugged it to the hospital with me along with my pajamas, maternity clothes, and stash of cookies.
We mothers would read, share, trade the books that kept us sane. We all lived in a real world in that hospital, a world too real; we all functioned at the highest level, because there was no choice but to function, to persevere—and we all occasionally escaped that world into the hope and happy endings of romance novels. Those moments of “escape” made it easier, never easy but easier, to deal with the real world.
I’d written my first book, THE BELLIGERENT MISS BOYNTON, just before our son’s kidney failure. It wasn’t a career move, it was just an idea I had and wrote with little thought to a career. I wrote my second book during those long nine months, staying awake all night twice a week, to scribble it in longhand at the dining room table. A Regency romance, a very funny romance, this book became THE TENACIOUS MISS TAMERLANE—and, looking back now, as I write this, I guess the word “tenacious” was, sub-consciously—a pretty good choice.
Years later I was told, by a reviewer, that she called this book her “rainy day” book, because if she felt down, she knew reading this book would make her laugh. I wrote that book
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