No Fooling...It's April Love!

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April debuted with some interesting literary news. Last week I learned that my stories, "The Valentine's Sweetheart" and "Baby Book Bloopers," originally printed in 2009 in HCI's Ultimate Mom, had been reprinted in a revised version (sans photographs and helpful hints), titled For the Love of Moms. Though I hadn't been contacted to update my bio, when I called HCI, I found I could receive a contributor's copy upon request. It arrived today. It's heartwarming to see these stories in a new book, and to know new readers will be learning about Mama's love of dancing and my eagerness to record my toddler's first complete sentence.

I'd thought that the 75th anthology on the entertainment center would be the one with my name on the cover as co-creator, Not Your Mother's Book...On Travel. I've learned now that it has been delayed for a few weeks because Publishing Syndicate has changed distributors. So For the Love of Moms is the landmark book instead. On the plus side, On Travel, now scheduled to be #76, will arrive before my 76th birthday in late June...probably in the next couple of weeks. And we're still set for a book reading/signing at Barnes & Noble in St. Peters, Missouri, just outside St. Louis, on June 1. At that event I'll be joined by four local contributors, Sheree Nielsen, Sioux Roslawski, Linda O'Connell and Gregory Lamping.

With my editing and promotion responsibilities on hold for a while, I hope to concentrate on writing several new stories. Of course, I always am on the lookout for potential homes for the yet-to-be-published orphans languishing in my file. I'd never consider these stories as rejects, eternally hopeful that I eventually will find an editor eager to adopt them. I take them out, rewrite, polish and send them out to audition again and again. Nonetheless, I'm most rewarded when I remember an incident that I've yet to put into words.

So here's what I'm going to work on this month:

• How I measured out my late husband's final months in my Wednesday's chore of taking out the trash.
• How boogying to disco in a Jacki Sorenson's aerobic dance class saved me from despair in 1980.
• How David Copperfield walked out of the pages of the eponymous Dickens novel and into my life, sweeping me up in a Victorian romance.
• How lasting friendships can be sustained across decades and continents.
• How I once celebrated St. Patrick's Day in Chinatown with too many grasshoppers, despite a warning from a fortune cookie.

No fooling...I plan to get these stories written...and submitted...in April!