Gina Wilkins

Harlequin Open House and Live Chat

Posted on December 12, 2011 by Gina Wilkins

I’ll be participating in a live chat with other Harlequin Special Edition authors from 7 to 9 December 14 at Harlequin.com. Those of you who know me through this blog are aware that I can be technologically challenged, so cross your fingers that I hit the right computer buttons during that hour — and feel free to join us to monitor my success! I’m sure it will be fun. I always look forward to chatting with readers and other writers.

Click the Books Available Now tab above for information about my next Harlequin release, DOCTORS IN THE WEDDING, which will be available January, 2012. And don’t forget to enter the drawing to take place on my birthday — December 20. Click the Enter to Win tab for instructions.

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A special teacher earns her wings

Posted on December 9, 2011December 9, 2011 by Gina Wilkins

A week ago today, my husband and I delivered our daughter and son-in-law to the airport for their return to Massachusetts after a lovely week-long Thanksgiving visit with us. On our way back home, we stopped in to a local store to do a little Christmas shopping. While we stood in line to pay, we were greeted by a long-time friend, Elaine Payne, a recently-retired schoolteacher who was on her way for a luncheon with other retired teacher friends. It was obvious that she was looking forward to that gathering. Telling her to have a good time, we added that we would see her again soon. Two days later, her husband called to tell us that Elaine had suffered a massive heart attack. Yesterday, we stood by her bed in the cardiac critical care unit to share in a prayer with her pastor and several dear friends as we bade her a final goodbye. She was 59.

Elaine and her husband, Ken, have been our friends for more than twenty-five years, and we’ve spent many pleasant hours with them, even taking a few nice vacations together. John and Ken are especially good friends, sharing several hobbies and community activities. When our daughter was ill, when John’s dad and my mother passed away, when our house was hit by a tornado — all the difficult times in our lives — Ken and Elaine were the first ones there to offer help and support. A little less than two years ago, they lost their only child, their son, Thomas, and we grieved with them, having watched Thomas grow up along with our own children.

For twenty-eight years, Elaine taught special education in local public schools. She dealt with sometimes very difficult students, but she loved her job and I know she made a difference in very many young lives. If you’ve read my earlier posts, you know how much respect and admiration I have for dedicated teachers, and Elaine was certainly among that elite group. Even after her retirement, Elaine continued to work in the school, spending countless unpaid hours volunteering in the library. She was also very active in her church and other community organizations. She will be missed by many.

During this busy, bustling holiday season, I hope you’ll all take the time to appreciate each fleeting moment with your own family and friends. Thank you for letting me share a few memories of my friend with you here.

Uncategorized, writing

Evergreen memories

Posted on November 27, 2011November 27, 2011 by Gina Wilkins

Our Thanksgiving leftovers are all gone now, and my daughter, Kerry, and I survived our yearly Black Friday shopping outing. We’ve headed out before dawn every year since she was twelve, with the exception of last year when our other daughter was just out of the hospital after her stroke. “Black Friday” is the day Kerry and I spend together shopping and having lunch out. She wanted to eat at Dixie Cafe this time; having spent the past two and a half years in New England, she was craving Southern food. Once again, the crowds we encountered were friendly and well-behaved, unlike the few ugly episodes shown on the news, and we had a wonderful day together. In a few days, she and her husband will be heading back north, where they’ll be spending Christmas for the first time because Kerry will be on call during the holidays. They’ll be greatly missed by their Arkansas families, but it’s been so nice having them here for Thanksgiving. Our other daughter will be home in two weeks to spend Christmas and New Year’s with us before going back to her job in the Pacific Northwest.

And now it’s time to prepare for the next holiday. I spent the past couple of days decorating the house while Kerry and her husband visited with his family in another part of the state. I hung ornaments on two artificial trees. One is in the living room, covered with the many ornaments I’ve collected during the years (I pick up an ornament as a souvenir every time I visit a new place). The tree in the den (pictured above) displays wooden ornaments my husband has made on his lathe and scroll saw for more than a decade. My philosophy is that one can never have too many ornaments on a tree — if there’s a tip, something might as well hang from it! Every ornament has sentimental value for me, bringing back memories of Christmases past as I place it just so.

When I was a child growing up in rural Arkansas, we often cut down our own Christmas trees. I remember tramping through woods with my dad and my brothers, searching for the perfect pine or cedar. Of course, we would point to trees that had to be at least twelve feet tall, not quite comprehending that we had only eight-foot ceilings. Sometimes Daddy would overestimate, as well. I remember him having to cut the tops out of a few trees to make them fit in the room after he put them on a stand. We would watch Daddy struggle with the lights, then the four of us kids, supervised by our mother, would hang the ornaments and drape silver tinsel “icicles.” We quickly grew tired of the process and threw on clumps of tinsel that more resembled shiny hairballs than icicles. Still, no matter how crooked or clumpy our trees, they were always magical to our young eyes, as was the smell of sap and needles and the sounds of carols from the annual television Christmas variety shows.

Mother is no longer with us, and my own three kids are independent adults now, but I still cherish the Christmas memories of my childhood and theirs. It’s my favorite time of the year — which is, perhaps, why it shows up so often in my books. The story I just completed features a single mom who falls in love during the busy holiday season, and finds it hard to juggle family obligations, work demands and a new relationship with an man from her past. I’ll let you know the title and publication date soon. I’ll have two other Harlequin Special Editions available before that one — DOCTORS IN THE WEDDING in January, 2012 and HUSBAND FOR A WEEKEND in April, 2012.

For now, I’ll enjoy these last few days of Kerry and Justin’s visit, then it’s back to work on another book before the next set of festivities. I’ll try to remember to savor the moments this year that will become happy memories during future holidays.

♥♥♥

Don’t forget to enter for the special drawing to be held on December 20 (my birthday). In honor of the holiday season and my 100th book (my 99th Harlequin release), I’m giving away a book and a wooden pen turned by my very talented husband. Click the Enter to Win! tab above for details on how to enter.

writing

The play’s the thing

Posted on October 28, 2011October 28, 2011 by Gina Wilkins

I come from a family of game players. When I was young, my parents often had other couples over for card games and coffee. I would hang over the back of their chairs, watching and commenting and begging to play until they sent me off to play with my brothers (to my disgruntlement, since I thought I was so much more mature than the other children and should be considered an adult). Even after my three brothers and I moved out and started families of our own, holiday gatherings at our parents’ house usually included spirited games of Charades or Uno or Greed or Sequence. I still love playing board games and card games of all types.

Though my husband doesn’t share my passion for games, our kids enjoy playing when we get together now, and our son-in-law is another game player, so I’ve continued the tradition of pulling out the games boxes when we gather now for holidays. Apples to Apples, Settlers of Catan, Trains, Yahtzee, Phase 10 and Uno have all been spread on my kitchen table in the past few years, and we’ve whiled away many hours laughing and swapping good-natured challenges and insults.

Three years ago or so, I was enticed to open a facebook account by some internet friends I met through a television chat site. The reason they talked me into it? To play a game with them there. They sensed my weakness and took full advantage of it! I’ve enjoyed facebook for many reasons — primarily the chance to stay in contact with my far-flung, extended family members after the loss of my mother four years ago. Mom served as the “communications center” of our family, keeping me updated about siblings, nieces and nephews, aunts, uncles and cousins, and since I lost her, facebook has filled that void, for which I am grateful. Still, not a day goes by that I don’t get invitations to play new games with various facebook friends.

I have to admit, I’m often tempted. I do love to play, not so much to win — though I do enjoy the competition — but for the social aspect. Writing can be a lonely job, and chatting with my game friends is entertaining … maybe a bit too much so, at times. So, I have limited myself strictly to two facebook games. I can justify “Words with Friends” by telling myself I’m enriching my vocabulary and keeping my mind active — okay, maybe I’m looking for excuses. I play another little game in which my avatar can dress up and decorate imaginary houses with imaginary furniture I buy with imaginary money in an imaginary store and then visit the imaginary homes of my co-playing friends.

That one’s a little harder to rationalize. Basically, it’s paper dolls – but I always did love playing with paper dolls. When I’m stressed or blocked or just a little lonely for my scattered kids and other family members, I sometimes escape into my play world and decorate or chat with those friends I’ve never even met in real life. I remember hearing about those games a few years ago and wondering why anyone would get drawn into them, but I’ve found out it’s quite easy to do so, actually. Especially for someone who makes her living with make-believe, anyway, I suppose. I have to be careful not to spend too much time there, and not to be drawn into the hype to spend real money on those imaginary toys. And yet I’ve had fun with the game, and have “met” some truly lovely people of all ages and from several different countries.

Most of our lives are so busy now with work and families and chores and responsibilities, and watching the news can sometimes make us feel overwhelmed by fear and negativity. TV and movies, games, sports or — still my all-time favorite leisure activity — escaping into the pages of a good book can give us a chance to rest, reset, and ready ourselves for the challenges of the following day or the next workweek. Whatever your means of healthy relaxation, may you find time to laugh and play during the busy, bustling days ahead.

♥♥♥

Click the ENTER TO WIN! tab above for details about my newest give-away contest to celebrate a momentous release for me in January, 2012 (more information to come soon). I’m taking entries now.

♥♥♥

For occasional updates about my writing and books in progress, “like” my facebook page at the link provided in the sidebar to the right of this post. (I promise not to “spam” you with game requests there.)

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Back to work

Posted on October 17, 2011October 17, 2011 by Gina Wilkins

Three and a half years ago, John and I helped our older daughter move to Seattle by driving a UHaul truck and pulling her little Saturn on a trailer. We traveled through Oklahoma, Kansas, Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, Idaho and Oregon before arriving in Seattle — several states we’d never driven through before — and we had a great time seeing that part of the country in the early spring. A year later, we drove the UHaul for our next daughter and her husband when they moved to Massachusetts, our path taking us through Tennessee, North Carolina, Virginia, Pennsylvania, New York and Connecticut (with a side trip into Rhode Island while we were in the area). Again, we loved seeing parts of the country we had only flown over before, watching the landscape and building styles changing as we moved farther away from Arkansas, where my husband and I have both lived all our lives.

Three weeks ago, John and I flew to Seattle to spend some time with our daughter, who survived a brainstem stroke a year ago this month. Still in a wheelchair most of her days, she needed some help with some things around her apartment, wanted us to accompany her to a few appointments and we decided to drive her little car home and sell it for her. She is unable to drive currently (she hopes to do so again eventually) and owning, insuring and parking a car are expenses she doesn’t need for now. We had a very nice two-week visit with her, enjoying the refreshing Pacific Northwest coolness after a brutally hot Arkansas summer, and then we set out last Tuesday for the drive home. We chose a different path this time — through eastern Washington into northern Idaho (breathtakingly beautiful), through Montana and the northeast corner of Wyoming, through South Dakota, down the border of Iowa into Missouri and home from there (with a few hours stop in Branson, three hours north of home, because I couldn’t bear to pass that close and not at least pop into some of my favorite places there).

Having never been to Montana or South Dakota, John and I had a wonderful drive home. We explored tiny, historic Wallace, Idaho, where we spent our first night at the vintage 1960s-era Stardust Motel. After a second night in Hardin, Montana, we whiled away several hours at the Little Bighorn battlefield in Montana, soaking in the somber atmosphere and the impressive scenery and imagining the sights and sounds of that terrible battle between two conflicting cultures. The museum there is fascinating, as was the short film that presented both sides of the conflict quite comprehensively. I haven’t studied Western history extensively, so I learned quite a few facts I hadn’t known before and found intriguing both as a writer and an American.

Following a three hour delay at the Wyoming/South Dakota border to replace a tire ruined when something punctured the side (we still don’t know what), we continued on to Keystone, S.D., to see Mt. Rushmore, arriving there in time to view it both in waning sunlight and then after dark with the lights on the faces. We spent that third night in Rapid City, then put in many hours of hard driving the next day to make up for the lost time with the tire, though we couldn’t resist spending a couple of hours at famous Wall Drug in Wall, S.D. (home of free ice water and nickel coffee — if you haven’t heard of it, look it up — fascinating place! I’ll spare you the photo here of us posed sitting on a six-foot tall “jackalope.”) After staying just outside Kansas City, Missouri that night, and our short stop in Branson, we were home by eight p.m. on Saturday — tired but feeling so blessed to have experienced even more of this amazingly diverse country.

It’s funny that we used to dread long car rides, seeing them only as a means of arriving at a destination when we couldn’t fly. Now that all three of our children are out on their own, John and I both love setting out to see new places, new landscapes, to chat with friendly strangers along the way, to stand at the site of events we’d learned about in long-ago history classes. We’d still like to go back to Yellowstone and the Badlands (two stops we had to pass by because of time restraints), and up into Minnesota and Michigan someday. Next fall, we’d like to drive up into New England to visit daughter number two and her husband and see the foliage (we’ve never been north of Massachusetts, so Vermont and Maine would be on that agenda).

But for now, it’s back to work on another Harlequin Special Edition. My next book, DOCTORS IN THE WEDDING, will be available in January, 2012. This will be a momentous release for me (more about that in my post next week, as well as details for the next contest).

Don’t forget to check my re-releases for Kindle and Nook, and through eHarlequin.com! And for occasional updates, “like” my facebook page (click the Contact Me tab above for details).

Until next week …