Romancing the Hop With True Love

Welcome to one of Carrie Ann's Blog Hop creations

Romancing the Hop- Aug31st-Sep3rd.

http://carrieannbloghops.blogspot.com/p/romancing-blog-hop.html

   Starting on Friday August 31st, over 100 Authors and Bloggers will share their favorite things about romance, reading romance, and dating. And while we do that, we are EACH doing a giveaway. Yep. There will be over 100 giveaways on each blog hosted by that Author or Blogger.

  I'm giving away a copy of my e-book Old Dreams, the first book that started the Zogone series, my first book published and my personal favorite of all the ones I've written so far.

  But that's not all.... We have THREE grand prizes. You as a reader can go to EACH blog and comment with your email address and be entered to win. Yep, you can enter over 100 times! Now what are those prizes?

  1st Grand Prize: A Kindle Fire or Nook Tablet
  2nd Grand Prize: A $130 Amazon or B&N Gift Card
  3rd Grand Prize: The following Swag Pack!

 

  Yep. ALL of that! Whoot! Be sure to come back here on Friday and over the weekend to enjoy some stories and facts about our favorite Romance events and reads and enter to win! And don't miss the talk about it on Twitter (Hashtag #RomHop)

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  What does romance mean to me? When I think of the word romance, my grandparents always come to mind. As a child I heard millions of stories about the perfect love I had missed out on. Since my grandfather, Adrian died five years before I was born, so my grandmother Lettie told me all about him and their great love story, so I wouldn't miss out. These are memories of hearing them as a child, so please forgive anything I haven't remembered correctly.

   When they were very young they met, fell in love and quickly married. Over the years they moved about through the Carolinas. They had four children, oldest Annie Frances, then Margaret Anne, whom everyone called Tootsie (my mother), then Linda and finally baby number four was a boy and Jack was always thought of as the sweetest thing. They eventually settled on a small farm in North Carolina were my mother grew up. During the day Adrian worked on the farm, while Lettie kept house and tended her pack of wild girls and one tiny angel. When Adrian wasn't working he was spending time with the family he was so devoted to, chasing boys away from his girls and taking his boy fishing.

   Obviously running a farm was hard work and nothing is going to get acomplished with three giggling teenage girls in a field. So, here is where one of my own personal hero figures steps in. Adrian met a young man looking for work. Tommy was another Native American with a big family looking for work to help out at home. Lettie and Adrian loved the young man to death like he was family. Of course Tommy met Totsie and as they say, the rest was history and Tommy really became family.

   By the time Margaret Anne (Totsie) was twenty, Adrian had become a grandfather. Over the next few years there were a number of little boys chasing after Grandpa Adrian, begging to go fishing. Grammy Lettie showed me pictures one time of Grandpa Adrian and my two oldest brothers as really tiny children and it was a sight to see. Grandpa was closer to seven feet than six feet tall and looked close to four feet wide. With his dark Native American skin and huge build the two tiny guys on either side of him looked almost like elves barely reaching two feet tall each. But they were happy as can be, hanging on Grandpa's overall legs grinning happily, while swinging red cane fishing poles.

   Grammy said there wasn't anything Grandpa loved more than all his little grand babies. But that wasn't true. The thing Grandpa loved most in the world was Grammy and no one ever doubted she felt the same.When she looked at him her face shined and she might as well have had hearts painted in her eyes, or so my mother always told me. Farm boy Tommy who I call Papa, told me Grandpa Adrian looked at her like she was the most preious and beautiful woman in the whole world. *SIGH* They were beautiful together, loyal, loving and happier than any other couple I ever heard of.

   But every great love story has a tragedy that is unchangeable. When Totsie was 35, she had given birth to five boys and was heavily pregnant with her first girl, my older sister Barbara Anne. Grandpa was out in the field working and when he didn't come in for supper, someone went looking for him, but it was already to late. The doctors said he had a brain anuresum, a blood vessel in his head burst instantly killing him.

   In the seventies, being still pretty young, you would think my Grammy would have remarried. Absolutely not! When I asked her why, she told me Adrian had been the love of her life and he always would, alive or dead. She never once looked at another man, never wanted another man. All through my life she stayed alone, helping her kids and loving all 14 of her grand children and her numberous great grandchildren.

   In 1999, I had my own son T.J. and vividly remember the day I took him to see Grammy. My mom laid him next to Grammy in her hospital bed and I took pictures of them snuggled next to each other. Every time I see the pictures it brings tears to my eyes and I think God I took them for my son. He was only a few months old when we lost her.

   It was the strangest thing. My mother went in to see her one afternoon and called me as soon as she got home to tell me to prepare myself. As you can imagine I was horrified and refused to let up until she told me why. Grammy had asked her that afternoon if my mother had seen Daddy with the angles. She swore Granpa Adrian had came to her and told her to get her afairs in order, because he would be back in a few days and she would be going home with him.

   Three days later I got the call at 1am. My Grammy had died in her sleep with a smile on her face. Happy because she was finally being reunited with the love of her life.
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   Having faith, loyalty and undieing devotion, those qualities mean true romance to me and now you can understand why. So, when I write a romance it has to be worthy of the love I was taught. A perfect example of these qualities are the main characters of the first book in my Zogone series, Old Dreams.

   When Brian's wife is murdered, he cryogfenically freezes his body for almost five hundred years, waiting for the day Colleen will be reincarnated. When he wakes he rushes to find her, an Earthling named Arlene along with a group of the alien Zogone soliders for back up. He will stop at nothing to get her back. But, when he realizes this new young woman doesn't remember him or even her past life as his wife, he has to be patient as memory by tiny memory resurfaces for her through nightmares and vivid daydreams, even the occasional nasty haulsination.

  Arlene had a fresh start, in a different town, with new friends and a sweet, handsome roommate. Brian seemed to be a great guy and she was extremely attracted to him. The only problem was since the first day she had met him, her mind was filled with fantastic nightmares so powerful they made her physically ill-fantasies of Brian and a woman who wasn't her but strangely, at the same time, was.

　
To win a copy of the first book in my Zogone series- Old Dreams- leave me a comment and tell me what romance means to you with your e-mail address. Good luck and enjoy the blog hop. Thanks for stopping by and I hope you loved hearing about my grandparent's great love story. Don't forget the other 100+ authors and jump over to their sites for more chances to win.
Can't wait to win a copy, grab yours here!

 Want to read excerpts from Old Dreams? Check the links below.
Excerpt #1
Excerpt #2
Excerpt #3

And if you were curious, here are the covers for the rest of my Zogone Series!

Book 2-Past Regrets

Book 3- Ancient Enemies

And Book 4- New Beginnings