Happy Springtime! by Roxanne Rustand

After a long, hard winter here in the Midwest, the arrival of spring has been eagerly anticipated.    The sense of new beginnings is upon us!
The snow and ice are finally gone, the grass is starting to turn green, the crocuses and tulips add a cheery, colorful note.  And Easter  is just a few days away.

In thinking about the glorious re-awakening in nature every spring, I found myself thinking about the elements of romance that draw me back, again and again.

I love to read about characters who must struggle through hard times, great challenges--and also overcome emotional damage from the  past that has kept them from enjoying a full and abundant life of love.

New beginnings--a re-awakening to the joy of life, when finding that one perfect person--is a story that never grows old for me.

What about you--what are the elements that you love most?

Do you have an all-time favorite novel on your keeper shelf, that you go back to re-read?

Roxanne Rustand is the author of thirty traditionally published novels with Harlequin, for the Superromance, Everlasting, Heartwarming, Love Inspired and Love Inspired Suspense lines, and now has two indie-published sweet romances available--Comeback Cowboy and Summer at Briar Lake.   www.roxannerustand.com

Easter by Mona Risk

We know that Easter must always occur on a Sunday and that Easter Sunday is a holy day for Christians. Many Christians view Easter Sunday as a day of new birth—the resurrection of Jesus Christ being the foundation of the Christian faith.

The councel of Nicea—the fist oecumenical held in Anatolia, modern Turkey—set the date of Easter as the Sunday following the paschal full moon, which is the full moon that falls on or after the spring equinox

But why the paschal full moon? Because that was the date of Passover in the Jewish calendar, and the Last Supper (Holy Thursday) occurred on the Passover. Therefore, Easter was the Sunday after Passover.

While Western Christians use the Gregorian calendar (the calendar that's used throughout the West today, in both the secular and religious worlds) to calculate the date of Easter, the Eastern Orthodox continue to use the older Julian calendar. This year, 2014 Easter occurs on the same day for Western and Easter Christians—as it was in 2010 when I visited the Holy Land. Our organized tour flew to Jordan.

After a short visit of the capital of Jordan, Amman, and a day spent to visit the ancient town of Petra, where the movie Indiana Jones was filmed, we drove to Israel.

After a lunch stop in Jericho where the aroma of the many orange and citrus trees wafted around us, we spent a few hours at the Dead Sea that is not bigger than a lake and padded in its muddy water, a water claimed to have therapeutically properties.

I bought several rejuvenating facial cream jars—that didn’t erase a single line from my face.

We arrived in Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. The city was incredibly crowded with a large number of Jews coming to celebrate the Passover and many groups of pilgrims traveling to attend the Holy Week in Jerusalem.

During the Passover —Holy Week for us—the hotel did not serve bread, milk or eggs in its restaurant as is the Jewish custom, and the elevators were programmed to stop at every floor as the Orthodox Jews could not operate a machine.

We visited Bethlehem, the Church of the Nativity with the Grotto where Jesus was born and the Shepherds Field where the Star appeared to the shepherds. The next day we drove though the verdant hills of Israel to Nazareth and visited the Church of the Annunciation, the Church of the Visitation, and had a lunch of fish at the Lake Tiberias (also called Sea of Galilee) where Christ accomplished several miracles.

On Holy Friday, we saw several groups of pilgrims trudging through the Via Dolorosa with big crosses on their backs. This narrow passage is now cluttered with small colorful shops.

We spent several hours in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, the holiest site in all of Christendom. Twice as large as the Basilica of St. Peter in Rome, it was built in 326 AC by Emperor Constantine at the site where the three crosses were found, damaged, neglected, and turned into a Moslem school for years, and then renovated in 1959.

The walk through the Via Dolorosa where Christ suffered his Walk of the Cross and the celebration of Easter in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher were the highlights of our trip. But we didn't encounter our Western traditions of coloring eggs and egg hunt for the children.

The word Easter has its roots in "Eastre," which was the name of the Teutonic goddess of spring. Eastre was originally a pagan festival that celebrated the beginning of Spring. The festival focused on fertility, and utilized the egg and the rabbit as symbols of the celebration. Early Christians adopted the pagan festival of Eastre as a time to celebrate the risen Christ, rather than the goddess of Spring.

So what your traditions for Easter or Passover, or simply your family traditions?

About the Author: Mona traveled to more than fifty countries on business or vacation. Eventually she left a scientific career to share with readers the many stories brewing in her head. She writes contemporary romances, sweet or not so sweet, with suspense elements or medical themes. Sprinkled with a good dose of humor, her stories are set in the fascinating places she visited, from exotic Belarus, and historical France, to the beaches of Greece, the monuments of Egypt and the mysterious Islands of Seychelles--or more simply in Ohio, Florida, Boston and Washington, DC. Her titles garnered many awards. A winner of Best Romance Novel at Preditors & Editors, Best Contemporary Romance at Readers Favorite, Epic Award Finalist, first-place wins in Enchanted Quill, Launching a Star, and Wallflower. Find Mona on Facebook, or Twitter, or visit her website.

Holiday Babies Series3 bestsellers novels, about holidays, twin babies and humor.

While Making Other Plans by Patricia Knoll

You know that quote that says, ‘Life is what happens to you while you’re making other plans’?  Well, I think that’s pretty accurate.  For the past couple of years I’ve been involved with the Tucson Festival of Books, a wonderful event that takes place every year in March on the University of Arizona campus.  It involves hundreds of authors, dozens of vendors of all types and more than one hundred thousand visitors to the event.  It’s exciting, fun, and exhausting. 

As soon as my involvement in the festival was over, my plan was to finish revisions on a book, send it to a friend who is also a copy editor, then get started on the next book.

Life had other ideas.

Spring arrived with its irresistible need to plant things, clean out things, organize things – paint the guest room! -- so the book got put off for a while.  Then a friend needed me to watch her three young children for a few days and life has become even more interesting.  Since I raised four children of my own, I know what a challenge it can be, but I think I’d forgotten how much fun it could be, too. I’ve laughed every day that they’ve been at my house, many times a day.  Something is happening every minute.  We can’t walk through the house without stepping on Legos or Hot Wheels cars.  The children are a girl, ten, and boys who are eight and almost four.  The little girl is very smart, takes good care of her brothers, and understandably becomes exasperated with them at times.  The boys play well together until they both want the same Lego.  The little one is convinced my bathroom is haunted, or maybe the ghosts are under the bed.  He tells lengthy stories about cows or whales or space guy ninjas, or whatever else pops into his mind, and keeps us all in stitches.

These three will definitely show up in a book someday, maybe even the one that I’m going to start as soon as their mother picks them up – and I emerge from the deep coma I plan to fall into.

Plans change, life happens, and the surprises never end.  Excuse me while I go check under the bed for ghosts.

Give 'em what they want

A blog post from a fellow Sweet Romance Reads author a few weeks back got me thinking about romance and how while we think it’s a great genre, not everyone does. It’s a great irony that some of the folk who work with romance, often don’t like it one bit. Case in point – libraries. A few years back I was researching reader’s advisory and category romance for my masters degree and it was an eye opener.

One of the themes running through the research was a dilemma going back to the early days of romance and it’s still around. Do you give your library users what they want or do you try and “educate” them to read so called “better” fiction? I discovered a lot in my research.

That at one time some libraries actually refused to have romance novels in their collections – as recently as the 1970s. One librarian I interviewed actually said to me she felt sorry for the writers and the readers. (Yep, I had to ask her to repeat it, I couldn’t believe what she was saying.) Other librarians had no idea who local authors were, even though their books were in the collections, were well borrowed, and were even set in the same city.

In your public library you’ll generally find the library manager will have strong ideas on the best way to place romance. Do you put the romances on their own shelves so readers can find them easily? Or do you shelve them in with the general fiction so your romance reader might pick up some ‘better’ books as well. The implication being that romance readers won’t read anything other than romance. My local libraries have the romance separated out but at a library I used to work at, they were interspersed with the fiction. I can see pros for both – it’s good to read widely, after all – but my preference? To have the romances in their own shelves.

What about you? If you’re a library user, what is your preference for shelving romance novels? (And check out my staged "library" pic in my lounge, above, featuring a fellow Sweet Romance Readers author. I even alphabetised for the camera!)

Joanne Hill’s new book “Return to Frazier Bay” is a sweet romance set in the South Island of New Zealand. It is available now on pre-order exclusively to the iBooksStore. It will be released on May 3rd. You can follow Jo on Twitter at @joanneauthor and also like her Facebook page.

Recipe for Love (Soup)

I have no idea why this is called Love Soup, but it sounds good to me. We still have a few cold days coming before summer hits, so I might just brown some ground beef and throw this all in the slow cooker.

1 lb ground beef or stew meat

1/3 cup beef bouillon granules

1 small onion, chopped

1/2 cup dried split peas

1/2 cup dry lentils

1/2 cup uncooked macaroni

1/2 cup barley

1/2 cup long-grain brown rice

1/4 cup tomato paste

olive oil

12 cups water

In large kettle, brown ground beef, or stew meat cut into bite-size pieces, and chopped onion in a little olive oil. Add the rest of the ingredients except for the macaroni to the kettle with the water. Let come to a boil and simmer 45 minutes. Add macaroni and simmer 15 minutes more. Serve with your favorite bread or rolls.

Time For a Detox? by Helen Scott Taylor

I don't know about you, but winter always gets me down. The dark dreary evenings and cold weather do not nourish my soul.

Normally about this time of year I start to feel much better with the brighter evenings, spring bulbs popping up in the grass, blossom on the trees and the birds starting to nest. This year things haven't gone as usual—this year I'm still feeling weary, lacking in energy and short on enthusiasm. I wake up tired often with a headache.

My poor health has even started to affect my writing. With a muzzy head the ideas aren't flowing like they normally do. When that happens it's time to take action. Searching for a way to feel better I came across Carol Vorderman's 28-day detox diet. (She is a British Television personality, so you might not have heard of her, but I'm sure there are many similar detox books available.) I'm not sure if this diet is the answer for me, but from the positive accounts I've read of people who've tried detoxing, it sounds promising.

The claims of success include better sleep, increased energy, waking early full of enthusiasm for the day, sharper mind and better memory. (And I so badly need the last!) Oh and shedding those extra pounds—always a welcome benefit.

So on Monday I started a detox diet. It's too early to say if it is having the desired effect, but in case any of you would like to try a 28-day, Spring detox, here are the basics.

What to Eat

Fresh Fruit & Vegetables & Salad

Nuts & Seeds

Fruit Juice & Herbal Teas

Oats/Brown Rice/Millet

Non Dairy Milk Alternatives

Beans/Lentils/Peas

Non-Wheat Bread, Pasta or Crispbreads

What to Avoid

Tea & Coffee

Alcohol

Wheat & anything containing gluten

Sugar

Artificial Sweeteners and Food Additives

Meat/Fish/Dairy/Eggs

Salt

The recommendation is to drink 6 to 8 glasses of water per day to help flush out the liver.

For breakfast I've had strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, chopped nuts, seeds and soya yogurt. This is delicious!

For lunch I have made soup from fresh vegetables. The soup has been tasty, but the preparation time is eating into my day. I also had a blender disaster the first time I made tomato soup. I took about twenty minutes to clean off the walls and cupboards. I won't make that mistake again!

For dinner I have so far prepared two meals that I normally make with meat, Peanut Chicken and Cottage Pie, but I used tofu and quorn as meat substitutes. The dishes worked remarkably well without meat. I can see myself using a lot less meat once my twenty-eight day detox is over.

It is too early to know if I feel any different, but I am hopeful that eating natural fruit and vegetables and drinking plenty of water will cleanse my system, give me back my lost energy and fire up my stalled brain to work on my stories.

I'd love to hear if you have tried a detox diet. If so, how did you get on?

Helen lives in South West England near Plymouth in Devon between the windswept expanse of Dartmoor and the rocky Atlantic coast. As well as her wonderful, long-suffering husband, she shares her home with a Westie a Shih Tzu and a burmilla cat. Helen's latest book is the sixth in her Army Doctor's series, The Army Doctor's Honeymoon Baby. Find Helen on FaceBook and Twitter, or visit her website.

Keeping Up with Sweet Romance Reads Authors

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