Happy Valentine’s Day!

Here am I, all dolled up in a T-shirt that my son’s already covered in disgusting who-knows-what, with no plans except a steak and shrimp dinner at home with my dad and siblings.

Last night I fell asleep at 11, which is unusual for me. (11 is REALLY early!) My husband decided to let me sleep in an extra hour, knowing I needed it, and left for a local sci-fi/fantasy convention without me at about the same time I woke up. No big deal; it’s the first day of the convention and we would have to leave before 1pm and that would also mean I’d have to drive a half hour to pick him up at 10pm tonight. With how this week’s gone, that sounds even more stressful than usual. So, I stayed back with our son and we cleaned and played and started watching “Miraculous: Tales of Ladybug and Cat Noir.” It’s my best friend’s favorite and she’s been raving about it for a couple years now. Anyway, it’s cute. But I’ve really been wanting to write something today, except all my big projects are on pause until one of those 8 posts reaches 100 likes. (Look for the posts with titles in quotation marks if you want to help vote.) Finally I got to thinking: a Valentine’s anthology would be fun! Super fun! And then I thought, well, I want to do something with current projects, and most of my current projects are not romances, and even if they are, I don’t think I want to publish the most romantic parts of their stories in an anthology.

I still liked the idea of a romance anthology, though, even if TODAY is Valentine’s day and I probably can’t write an anthology of that caliber in one day. This week would have been a great week to publish something like that for marketing purposes.

And then when I finally got a minute away from everyone (in the bathroom, of course), an idea hit me!!!

I’m going to take two characters from each book, put all their names in a hat, then draw out one of each gender* and write a romance about the two of them.

(*All my main characters are heterosexual so far. At least, all my main characters. I feel most comfortable writing what I know, and at this point in time I don’t know any homosexual people well enough to dive that deep into their head and represent them well. But someday I’ll be able to, I’m sure!)

I guess this means I’ll be sticking to characters from the first book in each series. I haven’t written the characters from “A Wish’s Means at all yet, so either I need to work more on that one first or just use this project as a writing exercise. It’s practically my own fanfiction, so it doesn’t need to be accurate enough to be canon anyway, right? More importantly, I’ll publish anthology for free and it’ll give people a look at what my fiction writing is like.

I’m super excited for this. It’s gonna be fun! Now I guess I’d better stop hiding in the bathroom with my phone and go start writing.