Alison Kent's Blah Blog

So, I have a sale to announce, but I don’t know much about it. I know I’ll be writing the book after the first of the year. I know it’s due to come out around October. I know the publisher, HCI Books, who is probably best known for their Chicken Soup series. I know it will be a romance, but that’s about all I know. Oh, I know I’ll be involved in this project with two amazing authors who I’ve known forever! One made mention of the project yesterday on her blog. The other author is the fabulous Judith Arnold!

This is going to be so much fun!

Since HCI is a nonfiction publisher, these books will be “faction,” or novelizations of true love stories. The editor is gathering entries through the Take A Vow Contest website. I’m not involved in that side of the project. I just get to write!

My true life love story would probably best be told in instant messages as that’s how @cuppacafe and I communicated for the first few months we knew each other. My parents met through friends of my mother’s sister. And on my father’s side of the family, there is a romance involving a pirate ship. My business partner and her husband, both REM fans, met online. The cool part? She lived in Norway and he lived here. And though @cuppacafe and I met in our thirties, we discovered that I competed in a UIL competition during my senior year of high school that was held at the college he was attending at the time. Ships crossing in the night – what if we had met then?

A woman I once worked with married the ex of a good friend after her divorce, the two couples having hung out as couples do. I’m guessing they’re going on thirty something years now. Another woman I worked with hooked up years later with a guy she’d known in high school when he was coaching her son’s Little League team. They’re now married with four kids between them. The parents of one of the office secretaries there were in their nineties and had married in their teens! Can you imagine?

As much fun as it is to come up with our fictional characters and pull together the details of their lives, there are stories out there deserving to be told. Here’s one that just tickled me to read. Anyone out there have the Greatest Love Story Never Told?

Do you have The Greatest Love Story Never Told? Have you ever read a heart-stopping romance but thought your own real-life version was even better—a personal page turner that would be impossible to put down? If so, then here’s your chance to tell us what makes your story so riveting and unique that it should be recreated into a full-length novel by a bestselling romance author and published by HCI Books.

Did you meet the love of your life under unusual circumstances that defy the laws of nature and/or have a relationship that flourished against all odds of making it to the altar? Did your parents tell you a story so remarkable about themselves that it makes you feel lucky to have ever been born? Are you a military wife who stood by her man while he was oceans away, held down the fort at home, then had to rediscover each other upon his return? Did you lose a great love and think you would never survive, only for fate to deliver an embarrassment of riches a second or even third time around?

Drama, passion, humor, emotional poignancy and a happy ending are the hallmarks of the best romances ever told. Now it’s your turn to tell us a true love story that will tug at the heartstrings of lucky romance readers everywhere! Your name will be featured in conjunction with a novelized version of your story, and sold in major bookstores nationally.