“Love Notes” in Love Letters
I thought, since my most recent historical novella released in January, it would be fitting to highlight my first historical novella published, “Love Notes” in Love Letters, a 4-in-1 generational romance collection published by Barbour in 2007. It is a collection featuring stories with unusual “love letters”.
In” Love Notes", Laurel Rivers has lost her father in a bank robbery of his own scheming. Ashamed of his behavior, Laurel finds her only solace in a sheet of music she discovers propped up on the piano in the church. Each week, a new line of music or lyrics appears, drawing her closer to the writer. But can she bear the truth when his identity is revealed?
So where did this idea for a non-traditional love letters collection come from? At a writers conference, a fellow author asked if I’d be open to co-authoring with a newer author. I said I would. When I met with her, she said she didn’t want to write the story nor co-author but to give it to someone else to write because she wrote nonfiction. Then she told me her idea of an unusual correspondence between a man and woman that caused them to fall in love. She spoke with such passion about her idea, I told her that she should write it. She said she’d think about it. Over the next few days, I couldn’t get the idea out of my head and felt the theme of unusual love letters would make an nice novella collection, so I queried the editor at Barbour with a basic idea of unusual love letters, and she was interested. The gal who had the initial idea wasn’t interested, so I gathered three other authors and we, together, created the initial collection that went from one generation to the next.
Since it’s original appearance in 2007, “Love Notes” won a Carol Award and has been re-released in two more collections and a German addition: A Prairie Romance Collection (2009), Prairie Romance Collection (2012), and Musik meaner Seele (German addition, 2010)
When I received a handful of the German additions, I couldn’t figure out what they were. It was my name on the cover, but I’d never written anything called Musik meaner Seele, and there was a picture of a contemporary gal on the cover, and she wasn’t me. I figured the publisher had sent them to me by mistake. I stared at the cover and studied it, trying to figure it out and why it had been sent to me. Since I couldn’t read German, the book held no answers. I finally realized that my story had been published by its lonesome in German. How cool was that!
The original Love Letters volume is still available. It’s also available in the Prairie Romance Collection with eight other stories that weren’t in the original volume.
“Holly & Ivy,” my #HistoricalRomance novella in A #BouquetOfBrides, takes place
in 1890, in Washington State. It’s about a young woman who accompanies her impetuous younger sister on her trip across the country to be a Christmas mail-order bride and is helped by a gallant stranger.
#BouquetOfBrides
#ChristianRomance #HistoricalRomance #Romance
MARY DAVIS is an award-winning novelist of over two dozen titles in both historical and contemporary themes. She has five titles releasing in 2018; "Holly & Ivy" in A Bouquet of Brides Collection in January 2018, Courting Her Amish Heart in March 2018, The Widow’s Plight in July 2018, Courting Her Secret Heart (Working Title) September 2018, & “Zola’s Cross-Country Adventure” in MISSAdventure Brides Collection in December 2018. She is a member of ACFW and active in critique groups.
Mary lives in the Pacific Northwest with her husband of over thirty-three years and two cats. She has three adult children and one incredibly adorable grandchild. Find her online at:
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