What Are You Waiting For?

by Kathy Damp

Oh, I am so very much Waiting for Sparks!

In junior high, once I was through the kid fiction wall in my Adirondack Mountain small-town library, I wandered across the lobby, past the curved circulation/information/librarian desk and into the adult section. They had potted plants over there, I noted. Now I was in the big time. 

On the bottom shelf, near the back, on perhaps the first (and second?) shelves were the Harlequin romances. Since this was the 70s, the romances there were sweet and covered lots of foreign countries. I read and read and even tried my hand later at handwriting a couple, each in their own spiral notebook. What a wonderful thing it would be to be published by Harlequin, I thought then. 

Those stories? They're still in a drawer in my filing cabinet, unfinished. But one I wrote as an adult, is going to bear the Harlequin name and debuts June 1: Waiting for Sparks. What? What's it about, you ask? So glad you did. 

How about this: Does the past have to dictate the future for broken hearts? In the small Rocky Mountain town of Heaven, Sparks Turner, a fireworks designer with itchy feet and a big secret, and Emma Chambers who's declared a man moratorium just to save her sanity, will find out.

The story came about one day while I was standing on the shore of Bear Lake that edges the village of Garden City, Utah, thinking I wished I lived in a small town again. So much better than suburbia, I thought. That's when a thought danced in: what if? (That's how most of my stories begin in my head, when I get a bit of an idea and it says, what if?)

What if having to come back to your small town was the LAST thing you wanted to do? What if you'd vowed never to come back under the tractor beam of control that your only relative, your grandmother, seems to wield over you and everyone else? What if everything changes with a phone call? Then what if you find...well, that's giving the story away.

Doug "Sparks" Turner leaped into the story just as he is, gorgeous, smiling, funny, and hiding a yearning that keeps him trotting the globe with a license to blow things up.

On June first, Waiting for Sparks arrives and I'm so excited. Secrets. Fun. Heartache. Villagers just the left of normal. A dog. A lake of strange blue in the Rocky Mountains.

I hope you like it. I hope you write and tell me what you liked best. Drop me a line at mailto://kathleen@kathleenwright.com

June first...eeeeeee. It's almost HERE.

~Kathleen