May the peace and gratitude of this day stay in your heart all day and throughout the coming year!

THANK YOU for being the most wonderful readers on this earth! I am so grateful to you all for your friendship and your support.

From me and my family to yours, Happy Thanksgiving!

Blessings,

Pamela

I have a holiday surprise for you!

UPON A WINTER’S NIGHT is a MacKinnon’s Rangers Christmas novella. I haven’t had anything for my historical readers since Defiant in July 2012, so it only seemed right that I end the year with a historical treat just for them. I didn’t say much about this because I wasn’t sure I’d finish it in time. But I have, and it will be out on Nov. 27. 

That’s this coming Wednesday! I wanted you to have it in time for your Thanksgiving Weekend, and I’m high-fiving myself for making it happen.

The most important thing to say about this book is that KARL is on the cover. OK, maybe that’s not the most important thing, but it feels very important. You will remember him as the mostly naked star of the Defiant trailer. He was the one running around the forest carrying a musket. I am posting a gratuitous photo of Karl from the trailer shoot to jog your ovaries ... er, your memories.



In fact, the image for the cover was being shot by Jenn LeBlanc at Studio Smexy™ while I watched in the background, waiting to film the Connor/Lord William sequence for the trailer. Karl got up off the model, put on a shirt, picked up my musket, and filmed that scene right after this sequence of photos was taken. 

Good times. So what was I talking about? Oh, yes!



It was a lot of fun to visit with these characters again and to move some of their story threads forward. There is a wedding at the end, but I won’t tell you whose it is. The story started as a 3,000-word mini-story that ran on a blog last year for a holiday contest. I’ve taken that blurb and transformed it, expanding it and bringing other characters into the story.

Upon A Winter’s Night will be out no later than Nov. 27 in all ebook formats via Amazon, B&N, and Smashwords, iBooks and Kobo. And here’s some good news for those of you who hate ereaders: The novella will also be available in trade paperback through Amazon, though that may take an extra week or so. Stay tuned for updates!

In the meantime, thanks for all of the emails and messages about Striking Distance. What a whirlwind this has been — from release day to learning the book was a nominee for RT’s Best Romantic Suspense of 2013 to making the USA Today best-seller list. I was trying to write in the midst of that excitement, and, on top of everything else, my sister is visiting from Sweden.

Who said the holidays are crazy?

Things have been pretty crazy at Casa Clare. Let’s see...

I had a major book release, a MacKinnon’s Rangers Christmas novella deadline, and got a lot of really fabulous news. My sister, who is a dual US/Swedish citizen, arrived from Stockholm to celebrate my mother’s 70th birthday and spend Thanksgiving with us. And in the middle of all of this, my poor blog went without an update for a very long time.

Sorry about that!

I’ll start with the good news.

I learned the Unlawful Contact has been picked up by J’ai Lu and will finally be published in French. This comes as good news to my French readers, who’ve been waiting forever for the I-Team.

Also, BookPages, a national publication for librarians and booksellers, featured Striking Distance (I-Team 6) as Christie Ridgeway’s top romance pick for November. That was a huge honor.

Publishers Weekly featured Striking Distance in its article about the popularity of military romance. (I’d post a link, but unless you have a subscription, it wouldn’t do you any good.)

Close on the heels of that announcement, I found out that Striking Distance was nominated by the reviewers at RT Book Reviews for Best Romantic Suspense of 2013. RT had given Striking Distance a 4.5-star Top Pick review in its November edition, and I was thrilled to see the story in such fabulous company.

And then today, I learned that  Striking Distance made the USA Today Bestseller list!



As Javier would say, “¡Wepa!”

I got the news from New York Times bestselling author and friend Thea Harrison, whose book Kinked, also made the list. She tweeted me, beating my editor and agent to the punch. Within seconds author superstar and friend Jill Shalvis, whose novel Rumor Has It hit both USA Today and the NYT, sent me the link. Then author/photographer Jenn LeBlanc, my bestie, posted on Facebook, and I knew it was real.

I was, of course, ecstatic. Squealing may or may not have occurred.

I immediately tried to call the two people who’ve done the most to support me — my sister, Michelle, and my younger son, Benjamin — but couldn’t get a hold of either of them. That’s exactly how it would work out, right? I had always imagined telling them to their faces. In the end, Benjamin, who is in Europe, saw it on Facebook before I could reach him. I did manage to tell my older son over the phone and then caught my sister later in the afternoon.

It means so much to me to hit the list with this novel. As most of you know, this story was very personal for me and took pretty much everything I had. It’s the first time I really explored the inner landscape of surviving trauma, in particular sexual assault. Sometimes we choose which stories we want to write, and sometimes those stories choose us. This was definitely the latter. It wasn’t easy to write, forcing me to dig deeper into myself than perhaps any other book I’ve written.


I feel incredibly grateful to have had the chance—and to have had so much support along the way.

Thanks to my sister, Michelle, and my son Benjamin, for their encouragement, weeks of handholding and long hours of listening me bounce the story off them.

Thank you to Arlene and Beatrice Rios and Wilson Cruz for the 15 months they spent working with me to help me get the Puerto Rican aspect of Javier’s character right. Any time they swear in their mother tongue, they will think of me.

Thank you to Officer Bryan Bartnes of the Loveland Police Department for his help in understanding explosives, the work of EOD teams, and the way authorities investigate bombings. Is it wrong that I was amused by people’s nervous glances as we talked about how to blow stuff up?

Thanks to Diane Grimaldi Whiting for walking me through the world of broadcast journalism. I’ve been interviewed on television, but I’ve never been on the other side of the camera. She helped me understand how a studio operates, essential information for a key scene in the story.

My heartfelt thanks to the active-duty SEAL who spent time between work-ups and deployments helping me understand the work and life of a special operator. His input and perspective over a period of almost two years were so essential to Javier’s part of the story. How he found time to answer all my questions and read the manuscript, I don’t know. But I am so very grateful both for his help and his service. I dedicate the book to him and feel honored to know he has a copy.

And, of course, a huge weepy thank you to the wonderful members of the I-Team Facebook group and all of my fabulous reader friends who have sent emails, posted on Facebook and tweeted to let me know how much Laura and Javier’s story mean to them. You make it all worthwhile!

I celebrated this evening by watching Raylan Givens get into trouble in Justified and enjoying some European chocolate with my dear sister — truly precious time for me.

As for that novella...

I hope to have a sweet MacKinnon’s Rangers Christmas story ready for you by the day before Thanksgiving. But more on that in my next post.