Sweet Romance Reads: Milou Koenings

Showing posts with label Milou Koenings. Show all posts

Friday, March 23, 2018

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Thursday, January 21, 2016

Who Are You? Shopping for Sweaters and a Title by Milou Koenings

Who are you? Who do you choose to be? Based on what criteria do you want others to judge you first?

Who knew shopping posed such existential questions?

All I wanted was a twinset.

I mean, that's a pretty conservative purchase by any standard, don't you think?

It should have been a safe shopping trip.

Especially since my kind of shopping involves a keyboard, a cup of tea and PayPal.

Plus, I had my BFF on WhatsApp to help me avoid disastrous color choices while she was shopping online from her own laptop, searching for kitchen-cabinet handles for her new house.

I was going to try a store I had never shopped at before, but which had been highly recommended to me by several people. Wow - the selection was amazing! Twinsets in almost every color I could imagine. And all the other sweaters ... On sale, too!

BFF and I oohed and aahed and finally chose pistachio over cabernet.

Everything went swimmingly until it was time to check out.

I had to create a profile.

I duly typed in my name. Then there was the innocuous looking little box with a drop-down menu that asked me to choose an honorific.

And this is when I discovered that I had been shopping in the wrong places all my life:

dropdown menu showing baroness and countess options

Mrs. Ms. Mr. Dr. ... what's that? Baron? Baroness? Countess?

Since when are those options on a drop-down menu? Not on any I'd ever seen before.

Huh. Not passing up this opportunity, I thought...

I pulled up WhatsApp and snapped a picture of my computer screen. "Which should I choose, dame or countess?"

BFF's response was swift. "Countess. Implies rank based on heredity or good marriage. Dame could be an actress!!!"

Good point. Dame could be so common!

Countess it is - good breeding or good choice in partner. Either one works.

But as I was about to click on it, I made another awesome discovery. If I scrolled down, there were even more choices! I mean, the sweater collection, ample as it was, paled in comparison to this array of titles from which to choose:

dropdown menu showing duchess and princess options

Golly this was tough ... Who did I want to be? Admiral? Squadron Leader? A nun devoted to a life of service? After a few elimination rounds though, I had it down to two.

Me: "Professor or princess? Hard call that one ..."

BFF: "Prof. is your own intelligence. Might be worth something."

Argh. She's always right that one.

So there went my chance of being a princess, even if only on a mailing label.

At the end of the evening, we settled on Ms. Because every woman is a princess, right?

And besides, less is more. For all they knew in the customer service department, I was The Duchess of Cambridge shopping incognito.

But sometimes, I can't help but wonder ... you think they'd have made me send the twinset back if they'd found out the Countess de Koenings was an impostor?

PS Where was I shopping? A store called WoolOvers. Google them and you, too, could reinvent yourself. And the sweaters are fab!

Milou Koenings is a USA Today best-selling author. She writes romance because, like chocolate, stories with a happy ending bring more joy into the world and so make it a better place.

Her Green Pines sweet romances, Reclaiming Home and Sweet Blizzard are available on Amazon and Amazon.uk.

You can find her on her website, www.miloukoenings.com, on Twitter, Facebook or Pinterest.

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Wednesday, October 21, 2015

The Finger by Milou Koenings

No, I'm not giving anyone one of those.

I'm hoping to get mine back.

I've always thought of myself as someone who doesn’t take things for granted.

Even as a kid, when leaving the house, I was the one who ran back to give whomever was staying behind a hug – just in case. When my parents or siblings were the ones going out, I'd walk to the door with them to make sure we had happy memories of our parting.

I suppose put like this, it sounds a bit morbid. As if I was expecting anyone of us to drop dead at any moment, Heaven forfend.

Perhaps people who grow up in a quiet, peaceful little town don't think like that. (Maybe that's why I like to write about them!) I grew up in East Africa in the midst of a civil war, with neighbors who often were there one day and gone the next, and where I went to sleep each night to the sound of shooting in the hills punctuating the rhythmic song of toads. So maybe I'm a little paranoid. But paranoid or not, when my kids leave for school in the morning, I walk them to the street, makes sure, (as much as possible and educationally wise) that no matter how mad we might have been at each other over breakfast, we are back on good terms before they disappear for the day.

I try to appreciate people around me. I am grateful for the little things, too - a warm sweater on a chilly night, a gorgeous flower. I'm always counting my blessings and being grateful for them. But I've learned this month that there are an infinite number of blessings that I've never given a thought to, things I've been taking for granted all my life and never really appreciated.

What brought about this somber train of thought?

A simple thing. A slip of the knife while making dinner.

Only it was a sharp knife.

And it sliced right to the bone.

In the grand scheme of things, some stitches on the tip of a finger really aren't a big deal, even if an index finger out of commission for a few weeks is a bit of an inconvenience when you're a writer, a touch typist who works at a keyboard all day. And it's a temporary inconvenience, too.

But I never gave a thought to how important that finger is to me – it isn't even my dominant hand! And yet, because of it, I've had to push back several projects – including a long-awaited book release – that had been planned for months. Everything takes so much longer to do.

On the bright side, I'm not allowed to get that finger wet. I can't say I'm not enjoying being relieved of dish-washing duty. I'm exploring Windows' speech-to-text capacities. I never knew before that my computer could do that. So I'm learning new things and the results, when my computer translates my voice into written words, are often pretty hilarious.

One of the best thing, though, is that I'm finally appreciating each one of my fingers individually. I'll not be taking a full hand for granted ever again.

And maybe each day, I'll try to think of one other thing I've never thought to be grateful for before.

Milou Koenings writes romance because, like chocolate, stories with a happy ending bring more joy into the world and so make it a better place.

Her sweet romance, Reclaiming Home, A Green Pines Romance, is available at Amazon. You can find her on her website, www.miloukoenings.com, on Facebook, or Twitter.

Her newest novella, Sweet Blizzard, is included in Sweet Christmas Kisses 2, a USA Today bestselling anthology of 19 sweet Christmas novellas by award-winning authors.

Here's a peek at all the enchanting stories awaiting you inside:

Amazon, Nook, Kobo, iBooks, Google

Monday, September 21, 2015

Perpetual Student by Milou Koenings

When I grow up, I want to be a student.

Okay, so I'm sort of grown up, but I still want to be a student. Few things rev up my excitement more than a course catalogue. I'd take it all: Philosophy 101, Make Up for Theater, Military History, Fashion Design, Advanced Biology ... pretty much everything (except math!)

High-school Russian? Check. Doctoral-level music theory? Sign me up.

And with the advent of the internet, anyone can learn practically anything online, and mostly for free. It's enough to make my head spin. Do I want to enroll in the Masters in intellectual property law (of course!) or continue learning Python?

I often have fantasies about what profession or career I'm going to pursue next, before I retire. (My retirement years, I've already slated for medical school. Why not, right?)

But the truth is that I already have the best career of all, one that allows me to pursue all of these interests, and lets me be what I really am - a perpetual student.

I am a writer.

It means yesterday morning I discovered Rai stones - thousand-pound stone discs that are legal tender on the Island of Yap. Actually, I simultaneously discovered the Island of Yap, which I had never heard of before. In the afternoon, I was digging up medical journal articles about the impact of sleep on teenager's immune systems.

Not long ago, I grilled a friend who is a drug rehabilitation counselor, consulted a physician about the after-effects of carbon monoxide poisoning, called my aunt for the accurate version of my grandmother's spice cookie recipe, and spend several hours discussing the pedagogical aspects of The Rainbow Fish with an expert on early childhood education, all in service of my holiday novella, Sweet Blizzard, part of the 19-book bundled set, Sweet Christmas Kisses 2, that we at Sweet Romance Reads are releasing later this month. September 29, to be exact, so mark the date!

Today, I was going through diaries of a sojourn in Lichtenstein, researching its history, and reviewing art auction procedures at Sotheby's, culling the details that will make my next story come alive.

So yeah, high school, college and graduate school may all have offered a cornucopia of fascinating courses, but nothing beats the constant learning and research involved in being a writer - with no final exam!

Whether we write non-fiction or romance, blog posts, novels or magazine articles, authors can never cease exploring, observing and studying the world around us, or the worlds that we create in our imaginations.

Fortunately, our universe is so vast and wonderful, there's no way to ever run out of new things to discover!