I’m actually a little late announcing this, but it’s been a busy week. I can finally say I’ve sold two more books in the Simpson Creek Brides series! The book I am presently writing, working title THE WEDDING TREE, will be the first book in the contract. It’s Prissy’s story. Prissy Gilmore was the best friend of Sarah Matthews in THE DOCTOR TAKES A WIFE, and I felt it was time she had her own story–and her own hero, Sam Bishop, a down-on-his-luck gambler who decides he needs a different location after he runs afoul of gambling hall kingpin Kendall Raney in Houston. He also wants a different direction in his life, and thinks nothing could be better than marrying a pretty girl who is also conveniently rich. Prissy is a girl who’s in love with love. She’s watched several others of the Simpson Creek Spinsters’ Club find their matches, including best friend Sarah, and she’s more than ready to find her own true love. Neither is what the other expected, and the course of love never does run smooth, to quote Shakespeare–but if it did, that would make for a mighty short book. My deadline for this book will be June 1, and I’m already revising the first part a bit per my editor’s suggestions.
Book 2 in the contract, as yet untitled, is Caroline Wallace’s story. She’d thought she’d found her forever true love, but the flu epidemic in THE DOCTOR TAKES A WIFE cost the life of the man she’d met through the Spinsters’ Club. Caroline is sure she’s lost her chance at love and is meant to live as a single woman the rest of her life. Since she will never have children, she throws her energy into teaching Simpson Creek’s children, but when the brother of her late fiance comes to town, unaware that his brother has died and expecting his brother and his new wife to watch his two children while he traipses off to Montana, the fireworks begin…
I don’t have publishing dates for these two books yet, but it’s nice to know I’ll be able to bring two new Simpson Creek Brides stories to you!
Blessings, Laurie
I just thought you might be interested to know that SOMEONE FOR SARAH, my January 2011 Love Inspired Historical, is now officially THE DOCTOR TAKES A WIFE. As I told you in my 1/14 blog, I knew the previous title was going to go. So I submitted several titles to the editors but they didn’t like them. I think the best titles included the word “Yankee” in them, for the hero, a doctor from Maine, but I’m guessing they thought it would sound like a Civil War novel and wanted to stay away from that. I wanted to stay away from titles that would make it sound like a 1950’s medical romance in which the ordinary girl becomes a Cinderella/great success if life simply because she managed to snag herself a doctor to marry. My editors suggested more titles. I didn’t like them, so I came back with a few more. THE DOCTOR TAKES A WIFE was one of the ones I suggested, and this time they decided they liked it. It does sound a little medical romancy, but not too much. I like the way it plays off the old nursery rhyme, “The Farmer in the Dell”–”the farmer takes a wife, the farmer takes a wife, hi-ho the dairy-o, the farmer takes a wife. (Apologies to those who now have that song stuck in their heads…) It’s a title that’s been used on books before, but not recently. I’d hate having a title that had been used many times before–I remember back in the early days of romance titles when DAWN OF DESIRE was done to death, and the year that there were three–count ‘em three–FORTUNE’S LADY’s.