If you haven’t heard of Ms. Fasano, you will after today! Take a look at her new work, Reclaim My Heart, enter at the end of this post for a chance at winning, winning, winning and visit the rest of the blog hop tour to meet everyone and show Donna some support!

Title:  Reclaim My Heart

Author:  Donna Fasano

Format:  Paperback and eBook

Publisher:  Hard Knocks Books

ISBN:   978-1939000200

Genre:  Contemporary Romance
Purchase Now:  Amazon / Barnes & Noble / Apple /  Kobo

About the Book:
Sixteen years ago, Tyne Whitlock cut all ties to her past and left town under the shameful shadow of a teenage pregnancy. Now her fifteen-year-old son is in trouble with the law and she is desperate for help. But reaching out to high-powered attorney Lucas Silver Hawk will tear open the heart-wrenching past in ways Tyne never imagined.

Forced to return to the Delaware Indian community where Lucas was raised, Tyne and Lucas are tempted by the heated passion that consumed them as teens. Tyne rediscovers all the reasons she found this man irresistible, but there are scandalous secrets waiting to be revealed, disgraceful choices made in the past that cannot be denied. Love is a powerful force that could heal them both—if the truth doesn’t rip them apart.
About the Author:
Donna Fasano is a three time winner of the HOLT Medallion, a CataRomance Reviewers Choice Award winner for Best Single Title, a Desert Rose Golden Quill Award finalist, and a Golden Heart finalist. Her books have sold over 3.6 million copies worldwide and have been published in nearly two dozen languages. Her books have made the Kindle Top 100 Paid List numerous times, climbing as high as #17.

What others are saying about Donna’s books:

“…complex, funny, and realistic…” ~Wilmington News Journal

“Excellent!” ~Bookreview.com

“Could not help myself from reading excerpts to my husband and friends. This book is well written, the characters are real, everyday folks. It is very easy to identify with them. Donna Fasano is a talented author.” ~Elizabeth M. Caldwell on Amazon

“…a fast paced riotous look at family life today. Donna Fasano is right on target!” ~Donna Zapf, SingleTitles.com

Follow Donna Fasano at  Website  §  Facebook   §  @DonnaFaz  §  GoodReads  §  Pinterest

Author Facebook: http://www.Facebook.com/DonnaFasanoAuthor

Author Twitter:  http://www.Twitter.com/DonnaFaz

Author Website/blog: http://DonnaFasano.blogspot.com

Goodreads author/book page: http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/1111480.Donna_Fasano

Link to Pinterest: http://www.Pinterest.com/DonnaFaz

a Rafflecopter giveaway

The post Donna Fasano Blog Hop (with prizes!) appeared first on Bubbles. Deux..

Maybe it just feels like a while, but really isn’t. I think I got it all out this past February. Everything I’d been holding in or trying to say was in print. And that made it all feel like it was time to pack up that story and write about other things.

In any case, it’s raining, I’m cleaning up my lists of things to do and have just counted over 1,200 downloads of “Wetsuit” so now I’m reflective. Well, not so much reflective as I am reading an article from last week’s New York Times about two bands, Lady Antebellum and Pistol Annies, and their musical chair lineup, while reading through this week’s tarot newsletter from Biddy Tarot. It says we’ve got the lover’s reversed and that communication between loved ones will be hard this week.

I wonder if I got that card every day for a year and just didn’t realize it.

The title of this post is a line from the song, “It Ain’t Pretty” by Lady Antebellum. The lyrics tell of a night when, after another breakup with a lover, our heroine (heroine to be at some point?) goes off in search of another pair of arms, another mouth to kiss, another brush of skin to make her forget that she’s suffering. She finds herself wondering if it is okay to want more than to be sad.

That’s a Lifetime movie in the making, right?

I prefer my songs a’la Pistol Annies. I want to kick in a door and walk through it now that I’ve experienced what it means to cling to blankets, Ben and Jerry’s and dark curtains. I wanted to write through it and travel through it and smile through it even when I don’t really feel like smiling.

That’s part of the beauty of music: You can find something for every occasion if you look.

For example, I am listening to Millie Jackson right now while I work on an essay for submission. She tells me it’s okay to want someone just as much as it’s okay to say ‘I blew your mind, and there ain’t gonna be no more’ – the original Ms. Jackson kicked down doors. In fact, she’s still kicking them down. You take your sad love songs and I’ll take mine. Sometimes, when I am writing about my mom, I put on her old records and think about what it was like to listen to these same records at five, six or sixteen. My mom had a record for every mood. Clearly, she rubbed off on me.

Back to the Lovers Reversed card. According to the tarot, it’s time for a change. Not that I listen to the cards or anything.

The post Held Me Close While Our Old Song Played… appeared first on Bubbles. Deux..

     Gustave Flaubert, 1821 – 1880

I usually skip the Mother’s Day posts because I never feel as though I can do them justice the way other writers can.

Me? I write about love, in all of its forms. Even with that understanding of what I try to write well, I never seem to get the mothering posts right, or at least not right in the way I want them to be when they are finished.

A and my best friend took me out to lunch today. There are very few people that I love the way I love them. I’ve loved them for two decades now and no two people have ever understood me the way they do. They asked the tough questions today. You know, the ones about my love life. And they made me laugh. And I told them they sucked, even though they really don’t. And we planned a vacation for them. And we talked about A’s earlier years and the things she knew that I never realized until today. My daughter is a woman. She’s a lovely, smart, funny, thoughtful and caring woman. She wants to change the world. What I love the most about her is that she believes it’s possible.

One day, A will have a child of her own. I hope it’s a girl because she’s only thought up girl’s names. She will get to watch as a baby turns into a kid and a kid turns into a woman and it will feel like the time has flown by too quickly. A wants to move to California after college. She wants to start her career on the West Coast. I asked ‘what about me?’ and she said…’come with me until you move to Paris.’

Smart kid.

No, smart woman.

She’s on the phone with her Grammy now. I can hear them laughing and it makes me happy that she has this relationship that makes her feel so good. I wish I could have given her that but she never got to know my mom. When I die, and I look back on regrets that will be the biggest one,  I think. Perhaps by then it will be my only regret.

This is the perfect moment to wish all of the mothers out there a fantastic rest of the day. It’s also a good time to wish all of the single parents out there lots of love and respect – sometimes it’s hard to see how good of a job you are doing until, while you’re walking down the street, your 20 year old puts her hands in yours and says: I love you.

Oh, the pic? It’s two kinds of basil: Thai and Sweet. The Thai basil is flowering and I think that means I am supposed to trim the pretty purple flowers, but I really like them. This is the week I move on to writing about my urban garden – or, Utopia on the Hudson as I like to call it. But today…today you get basil.

Yes, that is a wine cork marker in the basil. I’ve got enough corks to mark a 100 plants.

The post Love is a Springtime Plant…Gustave Flaubert on Love appeared first on Bubbles. Deux..

That book was “Five Men Who Broke My Heart” by Susan Shapiro. I’ll admit that the title is what drew me in, but the stories kept me hooked. From the first page to the last kind of hooked. That’s not hyperbole.

As I read along with Ms. Shapiro’s stories, I thought about the men I have loved over the years. No two men were alike, unless you count the fact that they were men. And alive. Oh, and that they breathed air. No, they were all different. Often, I have wondered if that meant I was different at various times or if I was the same. I’m sure if you ask them they would all use similar adjectives to describe me. Maybe one or two would find new and creative ways of saying something, but, for the most part, the words would be very familiar.

I’d use almost none of the same adjectives to describe any of them. Some were short, some were tall. Some loved kids, some wished kids came with instructions. Some were athletes, some were gamers, some were patriotic, others were socialists in the making (not that this didn’t make them patriotic, of course). Some loved me and some didn’t.

And that’s where I was emotionally when I read “Five Men…”  I had finally come to the realization that some men loved me and some did not. And the shocking part was that at 39, I was okay with that. Maybe I hadn’t loved them in the way I had imagined when the relationship was happening. Or maybe I had. Did it matter? Had it mattered? Would it ever matter again? I read and I wrote so much last year. The words came easily to from my head to my fingers to my keyboard. Then, this past February, almost a year after I finished “Five Men…” I published “Wetsuit” and it all became so clear to me. Why hadn’t I noticed it before?

I remembered that, in the moments the relationships were happening, everything we said or did was real – maybe it wasn’t always good or nice or right, but it was real. And real is what happens when you try. Real was a fantastic mentor. Thank you, real.

I also understood that, in so many ways, I had been writing for others. I was writing what I thought would make them happy or make them feel good about whatever. I was writing to say ‘what happened was okay’ – even when I didn’t always mean that. Writing for others. That was a kick in the ass, let me tell you.

I wrote “Wetsuit” for me. I wanted to put it all out there – the feelings, the hurt, the pride, the emotions, all because I couldn’t find any other way to embrace it all. Writers are so dramatic. I wrote it for me, but I also wrote it for anyone who ever cried themselves to sleep for far too many nights. For everyone who reaches over in the middle of the night and touches empty space. For anyone who has ever said, and meant, “I love you.”

Today I’ll spend three hours with Ms. Shapiro and she will either say I suck or there is some potential or some mix of both. No matter what, her writing had reminded me that the most awesome stories are the real ones. And real is awesome.

The post Writing for Others… appeared first on Bubbles. Deux..

I started reading at a very early age and, in a lot of ways, I wouldn’t be here today without books. When my mom was suffering through her depression, I read. When she beat me, I ran to my room and read. When once, she accused me of being a ghost from her past, I ran under my bed and pulled books out of the secret spaces I’d made inside of my box spring foundation. And I read.

I was 10 when I first saw the episode of the Twilight Zone with Burgess Meredith and his books. I cried when his glasses broke because I never wanted to imagine a world where I couldn’t read. I was 12 when I read Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 and, once again, I was moved to tears over the thought that a society might want to ban the one thing that kept me going when everything around me turned to chaos.

A few months ago I signed up to be a giver on World Book Night and here we are, April 23^rd – and it’s time to give away books. There were so many books to choose from this year, but the moment I saw Mr. Bradbury, I knew that was the one.

As a little girl, I wanted books to take me away. I wanted them to bring me to places I thought I’d never see. Through them, I saw the holiest places in Israel, but I never dreamed I’d one day walk those streets, placing my hand where Veronica placed hers when she held up Christ. I only imagined seeing a bullfight because I read about them in pages of old books my grandmother gave to me as a little girl. Until, one day, I saw a bullfight in Mexico and cried because I didn’t want the bull (or the fighter) to die. I read about Billie Holiday singing in nightclubs in Harlem, and, just a few months ago, I threw a party in her old apartment.

I dreamt of Paris – and the books got it so right.

Books have taken me places, given me hope, and changed my life. When A was very little, no, even before she was born, I would read to her. It’s no wonder that she loves reading and has become a writer in her own way. She understands the power of words and my mom would be proud to know she gave me something to pass on to her grandchild.

Today, on World Book Night, I want to share with you, the people who read what I write and make me think it makes sense – I’ve got three copies of Fahrenheit 451 to give to three random (but awesome!) people who tweet, Facebook, comment or text me with the title of your most favorite book.

Let’s all find more time to read.

For, as Cicero said: “If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.”

The post The Banning of Books. World Book Night 2013 appeared first on Bubbles. Deux..

This is my sixth year blogging. In real time, that’s just a blip on the blogging radar. I know plenty of people who have blogged many more years than I have. In some cases they’ve had the same blog for years and years and in others, they’ve changed blog homes until they found just the right space.

Me? I’ve been the same blogger for years. I talk about a lot of the same things, I share the same joys and sorrows with everyone and I consider so many of my readers to be more like my family. They text me after posts or they talk about things over lunch or, sometimes, we travel together and reminisce over long ago stories, which is what happened this weekend.

There’s so much about a blog that people don’t realize. I know who comes here and when, or at least I know where they live within a certain area. I’ve never written that here.  I assumed people know that the analytics on a website are pretty detailed. I can tell that France loves me and, it makes sense, I love France. I also know that New York gets a kick out of what I write. That’s kinda cool. It’s nice to see my adopted home show up so often, or at least parts of it.

For a few months, I thought about hosting a blog tour – see which countries had the most visitors, then hold a contest. I haven’t worked out the details yet, but I’m still thinking that could be fun.

I’ve started my garden. For a girl with a set of brown thumbs, it has been amazing to grow fruit and vegetables for the past few years. This week, in time for Earth Day, will mark the start of gardening season here in my abode. I’ll share pictures, show you what’s working and what isn’t and you’ll help me meal plan when we start to get real veggies over the next few weeks.

I’m working on my list of ‘what’s in that pot over there?’ and will share that, too.

And in return, I want to hear all about your brown thumbs and green thumbs. I once spent an entire summer nursing one small tomato plant. It took a lot of love, but when it finally started to grow, I felt like a proud tomato mom.

What have you grown? What do you want to grow? Have you ever noticed how a garden is so much like a relationship? No? Well, that’s what I think about every time I put on my gloves and go outside.

And one last note…come back tomorrow for a World Book Night Treat!

The post And Then There’s The One About a Blog… appeared first on Bubbles. Deux..

Leaning in? I was leaning in, to the side and sometimes standing so upright it hurt. Yet I couldn’t find any type of balance. Like all good relationships that are in a death spiral, I had stayed too long, listened a little too closely and allowed too much to be left unsaid.

A year later and I am in the middle of one of the biggest launches of my career. A few months into my job and I am still in awe at where I work and with the constant brilliance I get to witness each day.

Tomorrow night I will be at a five star restaurant with a group of well-known philanthropists. This is a dinner I asked to organize because I felt that it was important to start looking at our public events in new ways. I am nervous, just like I am before every event I have ever run over the past twenty years.

I’ll worry about conversation starters and I’ll worry about the service, even though both will be impeccable. And I’ll worry that I haven’t remembered everything or that I haven’t remembered enough. I’ll worry until the last guest leaves and I head home. On the way home I will have a few minutes to breath and be thankful that I work in one of the greatest cities in the world, with some of the most intelligent and committed people I have ever met, doing what I love.

Say a few good thoughts for me as you’re heading home from work tomorrow.

Then, come back later this week to see the latest in re-purposing old things in order to make something new and beautiful. It’s garden season and I have been hard at work.

The post All Work and No Play… appeared first on Bubbles. Deux..

First, a big happy birthday to Alice Hoffman. Ms. Hoffman doesn’t know this (yet), but she helped me through two very difficult times, both having to do with divorce and starting over. I am forever grateful to have found her books right when I needed them. I wonder if that’s the sign of a great author: Giving you what you need through words, all without truly realizing the impact they might have on so many.

For those of you who read my blogs over the years, you may remember my “Practical Magic” series on our old site. I loved writing that and always wanted to find a way to repurpose the posts to have them be timely. For new readers, the short story is that I was in the middle of the longest breakup, ever, and one night, like magic, I found Practical Magic on TV and remembered that the thing that I’m always trying to explain is that far too often, we build a perfect person in order to never find them.

Isn’t that the worst part of love? Not wanting to get hurt again, or not believing you deserve more than you’ve gotten and letting doubt become the reason you can’t fall again.

I had forgotten about that. Then I remembered it again. And I owed it to Alice Hoffman’s words.

That night, just about 3 years ago, I set out to find a way to rebuild the magic I knew was inside of me and all of the women I know. I wrote for the women who had been divorced (sometimes, more than once, like me) and for the women who worked multiple jobs and never got to see their kids and for the women who couldn’t make relationships with their own mothers work and, ultimately, for the women who deserved so much more than life gave them.

That wasn’t the first time Alice Hoffman made me think. In 1998, I was just divorced from A’s dad and trying to think of what to do next. A came to me and said we had to watch Practical Magic on our clunky old VCR. I told her that was a good idea, but that we also had to read the book. We spent a cold weekend in our New York apartment, just the two of us, one eight, one twenty-eight, with a cat, bowls of popcorn and lots of hot chocolate, and we talked about what it feels like to have dreams. She and I are older, a little wiser, and still looking for ways, each day, to find a bit of magic.

If I were to sit down and really think about ways in which words have changed my life, I would list Ms. Hoffman’s work in the top five. When I wrote Wetsuit, I knew that I would have a way to take my original “Magic” posts and turn them into something new for new people to see how one person’s words can change another’s life.

Thank you, Ms. Hoffman, if you happen to wander by a house in New York this morning and smell an ocean-scented candle and the soft strain of Q1043.FM playing some Stevie Nicks, that will be me, a loyal fan who has now read all of your work, except for the Dovekeeprs, which is in my purse right now.

I hope this is truly a magical birthday for you. You’ve changed so many through your words and while we should be sending gifts your way, I want to thank you for sharing your gift with us.

And, thank you, to Heidi Garrett, for letting me join in today. What a fantastic idea, what a great way to celebrate and what a great new blog I have found in yours!

The post Dee Dee Mozeleski Hearts Alice Hoffman appeared first on Bubbles. Deux..

Sometimes, when I think about a title for a post, I try to find a song title or a quote that fits the tone of what I’m writing. Then there are times when I go with whatever pops into my head. In the case of today’s post, nothing popped into my head. Nothing at all.

In fact, since I release Wetsuit I haven’t really felt like writing here, and instead I’ve focused on reading and working on Doliski, which seems to be the hardest thing I’ve had to write, or at least one of the hardest things.

I found the process of writing and editing Wetsuits so emotionally draining. I had no idea that I would feel so much during the days leading up to, and the two weeks after, the launch. I felt lighter.

I also felt sad. I was sad that that woman who wrote those essays is gone now, she’s moved on in a lot of ways. I learned so much about her – about myself – over the three years in which the stories behind those essays were taking place – and I love her. A lot.

I was 37 before I did anything truly just for myself. My doctor and I had been discussing a pre-cancerous issue and in a matter of minutes my doctor went from listening to saying she wanted me to consider having a hysterectomy. I left her office in a daze. I had just received my divorce papers and was planning college visits with A and all I hear was that my doctor was saying I was going to fundamentally change who I was, even though that’s not what she meant. I resisted for about two weeks, and then went for my second opinion.

It was during that consultation that my soon-to-be surgeon asked me to name the last time I had done something simply because I needed to do it for me. Not for a husband or a child or an employer. I couldn’t think of anything and that’s when I made the decision to have the surgery one week before Thanksgiving. I went to sleep on a Friday morning feeling one way and woke up a few hours later feeling like I had just taken control over something, but I didn’t know what that meant.

A few months later and I was planning to celebrate A’s high school graduation while holding on to a crushed heart. I was changing every day and the more I resisted, the faster changes came. One year after my hysterectomy and I was planning my first trip to Paris. And, once again, I made a decision that would change how I see the world and my place in it. I didn’t know that the simple act of putting myself first could change so much – if someone told me that was possible I sure didn’t listen.

And now, just over three years later and I love my body more today than I did before the surgery. I know what it’s like to give up something so important – the ability to have children – to allow for the possibility to really live. That’s powerful. Every day I am thankful that A and I have each other. Yes, sometimes I wonder what it would have been like to have more children, and then I remember that A and I make a perfect number for our own little family.

Three years later and I have healed both my body and my spirit – each day feels like something is possible and I thank whoever forced me to stop, for just a few moments, and really think about something bigger than I had allowed myself to imagine.

When Wetsuits came out I thought about how to say things I had held in or things I had already said, but not I a way that was easy to understand and I decided to go with my gut. I knew what I wanted the book to look like from start to finish and I held out for what I thought was important. That lesson I learned way back in 2009 has become a habit now. I used to do things even when my gut told me not to. Now, I listen in a way I hadn’t thought possible.

What’s next? Who knows. I think I want to write about friendships and how women need each other, yet don’t always realize it and I want to write about my mom, because I am grateful every day that I learned to understand who she was before she had me and that she knew I loved her before she died. And I know she loved me.

And I want to write about love and more love. And I want to experience so much love that when I get old, I’ll smile all the time thinking back to the many times love came in and hung out in my life.

What about you? What do you want to write about? What moves you? Where do you want to go? Who do you want to be? What do you want to remember?

The post How a Hysterectomy and Broken Heart Saved Me… appeared first on Bubbles. Deux..

In the days leading up to Valentine’s Day of that year, my boyfriend, the great love that he was to me, bought me presents each morning before we walked to school. One day it was a Pee Che folder and the next morning it was Hello Kitty erasers. A day later it was a bag filled with little Mexican candies that we ate on the walk back home from school that afternoon. And on the day before Cupid would make his arrival in our little National City apartment complex, it was a pink bracelet with a charm on it that looked like a deer.

In return for each of the gifts I received, I gave presents that I thought showed how much I liked my cute boyfriend. I gave him a baseball and mini Padres bat (ironic that on my first Valentine’s Day heartbreak, that I would give something from a team that breaks my heart each year) and then I bought him bags of Big League Chew so he could have all the gum he needed. On the day before Valentine’s Day we sat in a tree near our school and talked about all of the things we were going to do when we got older. I don’t remember most of it, but I do know that we were going to live someplace even more beautiful than San Diego and we were going to be famous.

And then it happened. On our walk to school the next morning my chatter was met with silence. The silence continued until we got out of school that day and then on our walk home I got the news: My boyfriend was breaking up with me.

See, he had gone home after our date in the tree and realized that we wanted different things. He didn’t want to leave San Diego when he got older and he wasn’t sure he wanted to be famous or just rich. It all sounds sort of silly now, but at ten it was very important. It was big.

And that began a long history of me and St. Valentine not being the best of friends. I don’t hate Valentine’s Day, no, not at all. I love that people love this day so much. I always get A something today to remind her that she is my most favorite person in the world.

And this year, I decided to release a book – my first – on Valentine’s Day because for a woman who has had a lot of love and a lot of heartbreak, I thought it was inspired to do something just for me today.

Happy Valentine’s Day to all you lovers out there.

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