So I’m sitting in my store today, eating the world’s most expensive hamburger, and typing furiously to finish the novel I’d meant to finish last month and my youngest calls me from home.

“Mom! You need to call your editor RIGHT NOW!” he says. Even at his young age, he understands that a phone call from my editor trumps a phone call from pretty much anyone else (except my agent, who is an absolute equal).

Editors only have a handful of reasons to actually make phone calls.

• To reject you
• To tell you you missed a deadline
• To tell you they changed your title
• To tell you that you need to do a bit (or a lot) more editing
• To tell you that there is no reason to do stress overeating, but that your novel is going to the review committee for final approval
• Or to tell you that your novel was accepted.

So my other son walks in through the front door of my store (he passes through the store to get home) at just this moment. “Watch the store for me a minute while I go home to make a phone call!” I command as I fly out the back door. I find my cell phone, see I have a voice mail, listen to the voicemail which is my editor asking me to return his call, and with the monarch migration going on in my stomach, hit the speed-dial button that connects me to my editor.

“Hey Jules.”  He answers before the end of the first ring.

“Hey Kirk.”

This is where we go off on polite chit chat for a moment before he says,  “So . . . the committee has discussed your novel Love Study and have decided to publish it.”

The monarch migration fly on as I exhale in relief.

So I have a new book slated to come out. YAY! Its release date is early 2011, so next year sometime. It’s strictly romance. It’s funny, sassy, smart, and filled with love–as is my heart when I think on how much I really like my editor and the acquisitions committee at Covenant. It’s an LDS novel and is so much fun that you are guaranteed to love it.  I’ll post the cover when I get it, but since it isn’t coming out for a while, you’re going to have to wait–just like I have to.

It used to be called The Day My Subconcious Betrayed Me, but I had to change it to something shorter (though I’m stubbornly keeping it the way it is on my website, because that’s the way uh-huh uh-huh I like it). For the purposes of just getting it to the committee, Kirk and I came up with Love Study. Love Study is a respectable title, but it doesn’t pop the way the novel does. So if you all come up with anything that sounds snappy for a sassy romance, feel free to let me know. I am totally open to suggestions. The first chapter is on my website. Go have a peek.