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1) I am an admitted coffee snob, and I roast my own coffee beans. A while back, an acquaintance opened a local coffee shop and what set her apart from other shops was that she roasted her own coffee beans. They were delicious, and I blame her for making me a snob because there’s nothing as good as freshly roasted coffee and I didn’t know that before she got me hooked. I really loved one particular blend she roasted, but after only a couple of years, she sold her business. The new owners cheaped up on the beans, and I think they quit roasting in-house altogether. (I can’t say for sure about that part; I quit buying their coffee when it started going downhill.) As I was whining and wondering where I was going to get good coffee now that Rikki had left the business, my husband said, “You should roast your own beans.” I responded, “I WILL roast my own beans!” He meant it as a joke. I took it as a challenge. The rest is history.
⟡𓌉◯𓇋₊˚⊹♡
2) I was asked if I have a favorite weird food combination, and I don’t really. But I did come up with a dish that a local Mexican restaurant has on their unofficial menu. They already had a unique way of making chile rellenos: they fry the stuffed pepper in tempura instead of just a basic egg batter, then top it with enchilada sauce. Theirs is my all-time favorite rellenos, but one night I couldn’t decide whether to order a chile relleno or a chile colorado, so I asked if I could order a chile relleno with colorado sauce (which has chunks of meat in it) instead of enchilada sauce (entirely meatless). And just like that, my new favorite meal was born.
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3) Who doesn’t have a book boyfriend, am I right? It’s hard not to fall a little in love with the love interest in whatever book you’re currently reading, but I have a hard time not falling in love with the love interest I’m writing at any given time. If you think about it, it would be hard for me not to. I mean, I’m creating the characters, so I’m giving life to the guys who I’d find interesting and attractive. Yes, flaws and all because, let’s be honest, a perfect character is a boring character. Maybe I’m not supposed to play favorites, but Ryder Blake from One More Last Chance comes pretty close. He’s hot, he’s romantic, and he’s a singer. And if I had to pick a fictional character outside my own stories, I have to admit to a pretty serious crush on Matthew Clairmont from Deborah Harkness’s A Discovery of Witches–the book, not the show. I haven’t watched the show yet, so the original literary Matthew is the vampire who captured my heart…
𝕃𝕠𝕧𝕖 ♡
4) …and as for the real man who captured my heart, we met at the gym. When I came home from college, I got a job at a local news station working the evening shift. I was out of shape and a little overweight, and one of the guys I worked with offered to workout with me. It only took a few months to lose the weight, but I accepted a job offer at a radio station working middays, so since my schedule changed, I lost my workout buddy. He was kind enough to set up some personal training sessions with one of the owners of the gym to make sure I kept up my workouts. Little did he know he was actually setting me up with my future husband. After our first session, he asked me out and 36 years later, here we are!
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5) Becoming a full-time writer is the achievement I’m most proud of. Of course that includes publishing my books and audiobooks, but I’m talking about taking the leap and becoming a writer. I’d spent most of my life working jobs I didn’t really like and wishing I could spend my days writing. And then one day a friend of mine quoted a Nike commercial to me: Just do it. She made me aware of freelancing opportunities I hadn’t known about and pointed out I could ease into it, taking on only the jobs I wanted to or as many as I could handle while still working my “day job.” And she also told me I was the only one who could make it happen. As satisfying as it is when I finish a book and it gets published, or when I complete an audiobook and it goes live, I still remember how great it felt that first day I spent writing a couple of articles for a lifestyle magazine. Plus, it got me here, so how can I complain?
