Last weekend I went to San Francisco to visit one of my best friends and writing inspirations, Hal Katkov. (That’s his lovely cousin Elizabeth next to him, who has very toned arms.) It has taken me an entire week to recover from my trip, which is why this blog has been so lonely. Hal and his partner Ted were wonderful hosts!

Hal and I have led similar lives since meeting 100 years ago in grad school at Northwestern, when we were forced to sit next to each other all day, every day during an entire stifling Evanston summer. You really get to know the person seated to your left when the person seated to your right doesn’t speak to you and has terrible body odor (see “stifling Evanston summer,” above).

We both moved to New York and became advertising copywriters. Our friendship flourished, and Hal was there to set me up on blind dates, counsel me through relationships (“Don’t call him!”) and nurse me through breakups (usually assisted by chocolate and/or vodka). I didn’t know it at the time, but this was all fodder for my romantic comedies, because believe me, many of those dates were comic. Hal moved to California, I moved to Colorado, but our friendship remained vibrant.

When he wasn’t writing award-winning ads, Hal wrote screenplays and I tried my hand at it too—as a writer and movie lover, I couldn’t talk to Hal about his scripts and not want to write one myself. The difference is, I wrote one; he wrote many. He always had a new idea, and churned out script after script. I had no clue how someone made that happen (see previous post, glass half empty and half full).

Hal tired of the perpetually locked door in Hollywood and decided to turn his favorite scripts into novels, which I believe subconsciously compelled me to write a novel. Hal was like an icebreaker ship in the Arctic, clearing a path for my fiction career. “Thrown” started life as a 15-page treatment (outline) for a screenplay, only instead of writing a script, I wrote a book. So besides Hal being a great friend over the decades, an inspiration for writing just because he never made excuses—he just flat-out wrote—in a very concrete way he is responsible for me finding this new passion of mine.

I can’t thank him enough! I hope you have someone or something in your life that inspires you to discover and pursue a passion. It’s a thrill a minute.

I am struggling with time management issues. (I ask those of you who know me well to refrain from making jokes about my tendency to run late. I’m much better than I used to be. Ask anyone. No really. Ask.)

I am having trouble finding time to write. I have that pesky full-time job and a commute of at least one hour each way. Then there’s a horse that needs to be ridden and a dog that needs to be walked. Oh and friends. Trying to see friends. And trying to go to the gym to fend off the ill effects of aging, in addition to death and disease. Not to mention needing to spend time with my husband, who does, after all, inform all of my fictional heroes and could therefore be considered research.

This would be the half-empty part, the struggle to find time to write.

The half-full part is, this never used to be a problem. I never used to have trouble finding time to write because, well, I didn’t write. I talked about writing, I complained about how I should be writing but wasn’t, I beat myself up because I thought about writing every single day and never wrote. I saw myself as a writer, but one who never actually wrote anything, just one who whined about a deplorable lack of self-discipline and an abundance of self-loathing.

It is a joyous problem to have. Now I love to write and find the other necessities of my life to be intrusions upon my writing. I hear people tell me how I have to buckle down and finish my novel, and I think to myself, ‘that’s so not the problem anymore. I can’t wait to work on it, whenever I can steal a few minutes.’ Perhaps I have finally found my voice and writing is no longer a heinous chore that is fun only every once in a great while. Perhaps I’ve found a genre I can embrace. Or maybe my initial theory is true and I was abducted by aliens and given a new brain. I don’t care. I love to write. I’ll find the time.

One can only hope. We both wore green. This is a me (the shinier one) and New York Times bestselling author Susan Elizabeth Phillips last week at the “Readers for Life” literacy autographing (a fund-raiser for literacy charities). I refer to Susan as my patron saint, because when I started writing Thrown, I knew it was going to be funny. (Funny haha, not the other kind of funny.) Problem was, I hadn’t read many romances and I had never read a funny one. Enter my friend Kathryn, who told me about Susan’s books, and I also saw her It Had to Be You on several “top romances ever written” lists. Lo and behold, there was someone writing funny, and that someone also scaled the heights of the bestseller lists! As they say in those old movies about those drought-ridden farms, “The crops are saved!”

Oh yeah, and she’s hilarious in person, very nice, and her books are great fun—her newest is What I Did For Love. (I have an autographed copy…)  Check out her website at susanelizabethphillips.com.

This is me and Meg Cabot, the author of The Princess Diaries. I went to her author “chat” at the RWA conference. I asked one question, made one quippy comment, and had my picture taken with her. I’m fairly certain she now wants to be my best friend.

But seriously folks, she wasn’t serious at all—she was hilarious. I found I preferred going to author chats over regular workshops because they were more inspiring. For instance, Meg wrote The Princess Diaries as an adult book, with “smut” in it—her words. Then her agent suggested de-smutting them and positioning it to a YA audience. She did, and still…nothing. It got rejected everywhere. THEN her agent sent it to Whitney Houston (Meg said this was before Whitney’s recent decent into drugdom) and BAM! Disney bought it and made the now-famous film. Oddly enough, the book did not come out before the movie. Now Meg writes mostly YA and middle-school stuff, but just came out with Insatiable, an adult paranormal story.

Meg gives me hope!

So here we are, my dear friend Darcy Eikenberg (coachdarcy.com) and me, in front of the lovely dolphin-encrusted (not real dolphins) fountain in the lavish lobby of the Dolphin Hotel in Walt Disney World in Orlando, attending our first Romance Writers of America national conference. Those orange rectangles on our name badges are not indicative of our great love for the Dutch, but rather our “First Timer” ribbons. If we ever looked lost or confused, someone would come up to us and ask if they could help. It was very nice. I’m thinking of getting a “First Timer” ribbon every year.

This fountain was a terrific meeting spot, and I can’t tell you how many fantabulous conversations we had with other writers in the vicinity of the dolphins. In the evenings I had to prevent myself from “accidentally” knocking over the singer at the piano and grabbing the mic, but as Darcy will tell you, I refrained from belting out some Gershwin.

My brain is overflowing with newfound tips on the craft of writing, how to market myself as an author, the names of new friends I made over the past few days, and—notably—details from bestselling author Linda Howard’s workshop on the documented stages of sexual attraction. I was gratified to know that so far, my characters are behaving as they ought.