Guest Blogger: Liana Laverentz

Today, it is my great pleasure to introduce you to another of the talented and wonderful authors from The Wild Rose Press. They're a great bunch of people, and so many of them have generously made time to be here and say hello. So, today the party belongs to Liana....

Thank you for the invitation to guest blog, Denyse. It’s a pleasure to be here, especially today. I’m also really pleased about how Thin Ice is doing, more than a year after it was released by The Wild Rose Press. I don’t think there’s anything more gratifying, short of being my son’s Mom, than putting your heart and soul into a book and having the people who read it love it as much as you do. Since so many people have asked me the story of how Thin Ice came to be, I’m going to do a little recap, here.

I finished Thin Ice for the first time eighteen(!!) years ago. It made the rounds of the traditional publishing houses, with no luck. After a few years, and after my first novel was published in 1993, I re-wrote Thin Ice from beginning to end, and tried again. This time I got glowing rejection letters, but they were rejection letters all the same. Finally my agent said, “What you need to do is win some awards, get some name recognition. Then they’ll buy it.”

So I put Thin Ice away, and moved on to writing several other manuscripts, one of which became the murder mystery romance Ashton’s Secret, which will be re-released by The Wild Rose Press later this year. Then I had my son, and stopped writing for a while. But Thin Ice was the book of my heart, and I wanted people to read it, so I started passing it around to friends in manuscript form in a three-ring binder.

One friend who read it loved it so much, he insisted I needed to send it out again. And I mean insisted. But it had been nearly ten years since I’d last sent it out, and it needed to be completely revised again. The world had changed. For one thing, nobody had cell phones when I first wrote Thin Ice. I had to add them in. For another, Emily, my heroine, needed a very large car for a special reason, and they’d stopped making the car I had chosen for her. This was before the advent of SUVs.

So I had to go car shopping for her, which was great fun, actually, and sparked many a friendly argument with another friend, a car buff. Also, the hockey team Eric plays for was in Minnesota. When I originally wrote Thin Ice, the North Stars were the only NHL team in Minnesota. So I created the St. Paul Saints, to be their arch-rivals. But by the time I was sending out the manuscript a second time, the North Stars had moved to Dallas. Then, this last time I re-wrote it, the Minnesota Wild was in St. Paul, where my original team, the St. Paul Saints, had originated.

So I had to go back to the original concept of two teams in Minnesota who were arch-rivals, but this time my team was the Minneapolis Saints, instead of the St. Paul Saints. And in between, the national hockey league had added and moved teams and re-structured their divisions and added new Stanley Cup champions, and so all of that had to be re-written to reflect the most recent situation in the NHL—which I’m sure has changed again since then.

It took about a year, but I eventually got it done. Right around that time, Rhonda Penders and RJ Morris were opening the doors of their new publishing venture, The Wild Rose Press, (which turns two years old today, May 1, and boy are we having a party…so head on over to http://www.thewildrosepress.com/ for details!) and it was one of those serendipitous moments in life. I sent the manuscript in to Rhonda, and within days she’d offered me a contract. She later told me it was the first book she personally contracted. It was released nine months later, and since then has won a NJRW Golden Leaf Award and an EPPIE for best contemporary romance.

Proof positive that persistence pays. So if I were to have a message for today, that would be it. Persistence pays. Never give up on your dreams. Ever.

Thanks again for hosting me here today, Denyse. It’s definitely a day to celebrate. If not for Rhonda and RJ and The Wild Rose Press, Thin Ice might still be collecting dust bunnies under my bed.

Liana Laverentz:

Thin Ice (NJRW Golden Leaf and EPPIE Award Winner)

Jake's Return - Available in e-book, print, and on Kindle Ashton's Secret (coming in 2008)http://www.thewildrosepress.com/

http://www.lianalaverentz.com/

www.myspace.com/authorlianalaverentz