8/26/19, Coming Soon

Hi Everyone,

I Hope you had a good week. I had a busy one with lots of work, meetings, and appointments. If you were at the beach instead or still on vacation somewhere, good for you!!! I wish I were too!!!

I have some new work and projects coming your way soon, as we head into Fall, and the atmosphere of “Back to School”. I’m stunned by how early kids go back to school now. My children always went back to school after Labor Day, and I did too—now by mid-August, or the third week in August, kids are back in school, and summer is over, for parents and children alike. I don’t know if that’s a good thing or not. By the end of the summer, my kids were always a little bored, and had been on vacation for three months. They seem to get less vacation now, and it seems odd that they go back so early!!! But maybe everyone is ready by then.

“Coming soonest” , THIS week, is my new novel in hardcover “The Dark Side”, which is suspenseful and exciting, about a young mother with complications in her own early history and childhood. She has the psychiatric pathology of Munchhausen by Proxy, where parents (mostly mothers) either feign illness in their children, or actually make them ill, or cause them to have accidents. They appear to be perfect mothers, and are in fact harming their children, secretly, and it’s very hard to catch them at it, even for mental health professionals. It’s often very difficult to detect and can have disastrous results. The real life stories of it are terrifying. It’s a fascinating and alarming phenomenon—–and hopefully makes for an exciting book. I hope you really enjoy it!!!  It will get my fall books off to a suspenseful start!!!

Also happening this week is a new (for me) element of social media I’ll be engaging in. Instagram. I’ve been debating about it for a while. It’s so popular, and I see how much my children are involved in it, and enjoy it, posting photos on it constantly of things they do, see, and like. I hesitated for a long time about it, because I thought my own daily life isn’t “visual” enough. I spend long periods of time (weeks sometimes) in my office, going nowhere (except in my head or on the page), and I thought I’d have nothing much to show you visually—-except the mess on my desk, of papers everywhere, of my research or the outline, or the pages coming out of my typewriter. But Instagram is so extensive now that it really appealed to me as yet another way to reach out to you and include you in my life. So I am going to start doing Instagram this week. Brave New World!! It’s exciting to try something new!!! And I’ll try to share a little more of my life with you that way!!! And not just the mess on my desk!!

And also coming soon—though not quite soon enough but in the future is the quotation book I’ve mentioned to you. I’ve collected quotes that I love for many, many years, since my teens. I frame the ones I love and put them on my office wall in San Francisco, and in my bathroom, dressing room and kitchen in Paris—-wherever I can fit them in, to inspire me or make friends laugh when they read them. I’ve wanted to do a book of them for years, not things that I have said, but that either famous people present day and in history have said, or even graffiti I’ve seen, or from magazines or greeting cards, or anonymously. Some are funny, and some quite serious and have really inspired me. I hope you enjoy the book when it comes out. It’s scheduled now for Christmas a year from now, in 2020. I wish it were sooner but it took time to gather the best ones, and check the sources out, and get permissions to use the quotes where necessary. I hope the quotes will inspire you as much as they have me!!! I LOVE words in all forms, I love words in art forms too (paintings or sculptures). I’m really looking forward to that book, and I hope you love it too!!

There will be more new books/novels this year of course, and I hope you love those too. I’m working on several new books now, and have worked hard this summer. I always seem to be working, and I really enjoy it. I get wrapped up in the stories and the characters, and they become very real while I’m working on them. I love the time I spend with my family, and have fun with my dogs, enjoy seeing friends, and reading when I have time (not often enough)…and art shows and museums, and travelling to the places I love….but whatever I do, I always come right back to work, and am so happy when I’m writing, and it’s what I do most. I just finished my 183rd book, which seems like a crazy number. I wrote my first book at 19, and have been at it day and night ever since!!!

This weekend is Labor Day, which really does mark the end of summer. It’s been a busy one, not very restful or lazy this summer for me, it’s been a mostly working summer —–and I hope you love the new books I’ve been working on.

Have a great week, and enjoy the long weekend!!

love, Danielle

PS, and also on the “Coming Soon” list of things that I enjoy is the movie version of “Downton Abbey”, the latest addition after the long and successful TV series that I loved. I was so sad when it ended after only 6 seasons, and I wasn’t ready for it to end. It was the first TV series I fell in love with. And now they are making a movie of it, due out in September. I can’t wait!!! As soon as it’s out, I’ll be there!!!!