I wanted to do a bunch of new things with this romance. First off, I wanted to write a main character who was really close to my own age. Emily Rauch is in her early sixties, a newly-retired music teacher who is free at last to devote herself to playing the pipe organ and conducting choirs, the things she loves the most. I like writing characters who love love--but who also love creating things: good food, music, or art.
The setting is my beloved Hudson River Valley, and the time (for the first time in any of my fiction) is now. Which means I'm writing about technology for the first time, too. I have a lot of fun with an Amazon Echo in this book; Alexa is a minor character.
Anyway, Emily Rauch is finally moving in to the tiny house she had built because she's now an empty-nester: divorced from her now-deceased husband, her daughter flown and very successful. Em's got her dream house, her dream job...but she's haunted by her past--literally, it turns out.
There are a few really fun men vying for Emily's attentions--a sunny but shy Episcopal priest (uh-oh--fishing off the company pier?) and her bad-boy ex from choir school, suddenly reappeared. Is the local pot dealer, a beardy retired fire chief everyone calls Santa Claus interested, too? Emily wants to be too cynical to fall in love again--but is anyone, really?
And then, of course, there are the ghosts, and two of them just don't want to pass on to the next sphere quite yet and seem to be...attracted to our heroine...a little too attracted, perhaps...
The big old pipe organ in the spooky pic off above is about the age of the one Emily plays in the book. That is, in fact, my dashing husband playing, not Emily. There's quite a bit of classical music in this romance--some rock and roll, too--and another organist friend is recording a video of the music from one of my favorite scenes in the book, which involves a mash-up of an organ piece by Widor (you've heard it if you've ever been to church on Easter) and a certain Mexican folk song about a bug. Blame it on the ghosts!
I've written enough books that I know some of them are a slog to get through. This one kind of wrote itself. The characters introduced themselves to me early on, and they were very emphatic about what they wanted. And they also weren't afraid to be totally, completely silly....
So I'm just starting to get the word out: THE GHOST OF HER EX--on EVERNIGHT PUBLISHING--coming to a Kindle (or any e-reader) near you very soon, and hopefully in paper not long after that!!!