Hello, everyone!

It’s been a while since I’ve updated you on my current work in progress, and I’m happy to report that I finished my latest manuscript this week, a second-chance romance/women’s fiction hybrid called The Girl He Used to Know. It always feels wonderful to type the words THE END, and this was certainly no exception.

You might be curious about what I mean by romance/women’s fiction hybrid, and I’ll be talking about that in greater detail in a forthcoming post about branding. But the short answer is that this book will combine the things I love most about the two genres. Women’s fiction holds a huge appeal for me because I’m drawn to the depth of the stories, and I thoroughly enjoy the heroine’s journey outside of the romantic relationship. But I also love watching the romance unfold between two characters, complete with a happily-ever-after ending. Some may categorize a book like this as commercial women’s fiction or even mainstream contemporary fiction. Regardless of what it’s called, the combination of these two genres provides exactly what I love most as a reader, and I’m hoping there are others who feel the same way.

Although I’ve completed the manuscript, this is only the first draft which means there’s more to be done before I’m actually finished with this book. The revision stage is hard work, but it’s also my favorite and I typically spend another month revising, editing, and polishing (and that’s before I turn the manuscript in for professional copyediting).

I don’t have a publication date yet, but if you’re wondering what the story is about, it follows two people who meet via the campus chess club and fall in love during their senior year of college The second-chance part comes into play when they run into each other at a Chicago grocery store ten years after they broke up. The book is structured in a series of past and present chapters so you get to experience what happened to them in the past and also see what happens now that they’ve reconnected in the present. I have mentioned this several times already, but I was inspired to write this book based on my love of Dan Fogelberg’s “Same Old Lang Syne,” the song about running into your old lover in the grocery store, and I decided to write my own interpretation. However, the hero of my novel is NOT a musician. The characters don’t buy a six pack of beer and drink it in the heroine’s car. Both of them are single. But I wanted to capture the spirit of what it’s like to give a relationship another try. To really explore what happens when you rekindle a past love using all the hindsight of the first relationship with the personal growth and maturity that comes with being ten years older.

I’ll post more information and publication details as they become available, so please stay tuned!

Tracey

P.S. Here are the lyrics if you’re not familiar with the song.