Let Love Bloom: Bonnie's story

Interview with Bonnie Engstrom about her book “Restoring Love”:

Bonnie: Hi, Alexis! Thanks for having me. You sure do have a lot of questions for me. You plan to make me work here! (grin) Fire away. I will do the best I can.

Alexis: What or who inspired you to write this book?

Bonnie: This was one of the first stories I’d written, although not really a book at that point twenty-plus years ago. When I was browsing through my old, unfinished stories I came upon this one about Cambridge Springs and decided to play around with it.

Alexis: What is the meaning of your book’s title as related to the story?

Bonnie: My publisher and I decided since Jenni and Jake were once in love, now back in love, that their love had been restored. Seemed like a good title. Isn’t Jake handsome?

Alexis: Your story’s heroine and hero have been apart for 15 years. What draws them back together?

Bonnie: I think a combination of memories and that they still can’t resist each other. They both like to tease each other, too. That comes out a lot in the story. And, Jake is so handsome!

Alexis: Jenni (the heroine) and Jake (the hero) have very different careers. She is a teacher now and when they met, he was a stable boy. What does their work experience say about their individual personalities and how does it play into their story?

Bonnie: Becoming a teacher was not only an acceptable career but a safety net for Jenni. With a teaching credential, she could move to almost any state and get a job. Why she chose Arizona, though, is still a mystery. Teaching salaries there are almost the lowest in the nation. I hope she chose it for the weather.

Jake has an amazing work ethic and he had the wonderful opportunity to stay where he loved and fulfill his desire to be an entrepreneur, but mostly to be a loner and the boss. He doesn’t have the supportive family background Jenni has, but he does have a good relationship with his brother who helped him buy the vintage car. Maybe in a sequel, his brother could have his own story.

I would love to know what readers’ think about that.

Alexis: Who threw cold water over Jenni and Jake’s budding romance 15 years ago? Why?

Bonnie: Her stoic, old-fashioned dad believed she was too young to have a serious romance. Sadly, her mother went along with her dad – typical of tradition in those days. But, even then, Jake was so handsome!

Alexis: Why does Jenni still have a flame for Jake after 15 years of not seeing him?

Bonnie: She’s never lost it but pretends to herself it’s bygone history. Then when she sees him, how he’s matured and still drop-dead handsome . . . well. She can’t fool herself any longer. But, she tries to.

Alexis: Describe the town of Cambridge Springs, which is a setting for your story.

Bonnie: There really wasn’t much of a town years ago. Now, it’s still pretty small and uninteresting. The hotel was located way on the outskirts.

Alexis: Clearly Cambridge Springs is special to Jake because he never left. What makes it so special to him that he desired to stay?

Bonnie: Partly the comfort level he has and the opportunity to own the hotel. He is motivated to be his own boss and to own something he can claim.

Alexis: What brings Jenni home to Cambridge Springs? How long will she be in town?

Bonnie: It’s a memory trip for her (notice the subtitle), and she wants to “get away” all by herself and figure out what to do with her life. Is there life beyond being a teacher? A single thirty-year-old teacher? It’s also revealed in the story why her one former infatuation fizzled. Then, she sees Jake again, Mr. Super Handsome.

Alexis: Describe the scene where Jenni and Jake are reunited. What were their first thoughts when this happened?

Bonnie: Again, Alexis, I don’t want to spoil the fun of reading the story. So, no, I don’t want to describe it. Sorry. But, it does have something to do with food and eating. It’s a fun scene that involves a lot of chocolate. Yum.

Alexis: What was your favorite part of writing this book? Explain.

Bonnie: My own memories of Cambridge Springs and the funny old hotel played a major part, but I loved making up how Jake and Jenni are now. Remember, the story isn’t dated, just assumed to be somewhat in the past.

Alexis: Was there any scene in this story that was difficult for you to write? Why or why not?

Bonnie: I loved writing every scene. The story just seemed to flow. This is one of my favorites because it was so much fun to make up the two personalities. Especially Jake who is so handsome.

Alexis: What is your favorite moment in this story?

Bonnie: When the two of them are eating pasta and criticizing each other for how they eat. Their first lovers’ quarrel, and over table manners. It’s a hoot!

Alexis: What do you want readers to remember most about Restoring Love?

Bonnie: I want them to remember that real love does truly last, and love can be fun! Especially, if God is in the mix.

Alexis: Thanks for the interview, Bonnie! Do you have any final comments?

Bonnie: I do, actually a few comments. Although I don’t capitalize on it, the story does take place at Christmas time, and there are some fun scenes – especially the Scrooge play. Sadly, though, is the fact the hotel no longer exists. I only discovered that after the book was complete and I did an online search to answer one question.

For more information, readers can go to http://www.meadvilletribune.com/news/full-story-fire-ravages-historic-riverside-inn-cause-yet-to/article_8055438c-2fa1-11e7-8d49-9f78e0cf6d34.html to see pictures of the original hotel and the grounds and learn what happened to it.

The other comment is to encourage readers to leave a review on Amazon and Goodreads. Reviews mean so much to authors; they are our lifeblood, or as author Carolyn Brown says, “Without reviews, we would be on the top of the endangered species list.” (Paraphrasing is mine, but I agree.)

Thank you, Alexis, for this opportunity to share Restoring Love.

~*~
Author Bio:

Bonnie Engstrom holds a B.A. in English from the University of Southern California and studied Creative Writing at the University of Pittsburgh, as well as post-graduate work at the University of California at Irvine. 

She lives in Scottsdale, Arizona with husband Dave of fifty plus years, is the mother of three grown children and the proud grandmother of six grandchildren, four of whom who live in Arizona and two in Costa Rica where they surf. Pura Vida!

She is a member of American Christian Fiction Writers and a PRO member of Romance Writers of America, Christian Writers of the West, and the Arizona chapter of ACFW, where she recently was part of a published authors’ panel.

A former education columnist for two Southern California newspapers, she has presented workshops at the California State PTA and the National PTA Conventions.

For over thirty years she volunteered in education as a co-founder of a parent-cooperative preschool and a five-time PTA president. She wrote and published hundreds of PTA newsletters that she produced using X-ACTO knives and a hand-held hot waxer before computers made late nights easier!

Most of her stories are set in Arizona, and in Southern California where she and her psychologist husband lived for over thirty years. If you are trying to catch up with her, look for her at the local Starbucks or Menchies with a nine-year-old Chess champion and his three giggling sisters. Chocolate is always the flavor of the day.

She is published by Forget Me Not Romances, a division of Winged Publications, and is honored to be in the company of many award-winning romance authors.

~*~
Book Blurb for Restoring Love:

A sentimental journey! Can romance still flourish after fifteen years? Will a teacher and a former stable boy remember their first kiss? Jenni wasn’t sure why she was taking this journey back in time. Surely, she didn’t expect to see her first teenage crush, Jake the stable boy. She had moved on from fifteen years ago and sneaking kisses in the barn after trail rides. Undoubtedly, he must have, too. Who on earth would stay in the tiny town of Cambridge Springs? 

Looking forward to a peaceful respite from teaching, she planned to read, take quiet walks and indulge in delicious hotel meals. She hoped the old hotel still served the succulent roast pork, her favorite. At least no one knew where to find her, none of her friends, and not even her family. Odd that the name of the historic hotel had changed. She wondered who would have done that, who had the capability to do it. Maybe new owners. She hoped not much had changed and that the rooms were still filled with antique furniture. She wanted to soak up memories, alone. Unless by a Christmas miracle Jake was still there to share them.

Buy Restoring Love on Amazon

~*~
Connect with Bonnie:

Please visit Bonnie at her website (http://bonnieengstrom.com) to see her grandchildren and learn more about her books. You can also sign up for her quarterly newsletter there and win great prizes. Last time she gave away a Kindle Fire!

You can see most of her books at https://amzn.to/2qPjmML

Email her at bengstrom@hotmail.com. Please put BOOK in the subject line.

She loves to hear from her readers. So, please contact her.

~*~
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True Love Stories: Long Distance Love

They say long distance love relationships don't work. 

Max and Claudia's true love story proves the critics wrong.

Read how this couple made it work...

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Long Distance Love
Max Elliot Anderson's true love story

Some couples talk about their long distance relationships, but we took the concept to a whole different level.

I met my girlfriend early in the summer that year while working in my father’s film production company. She came from Virginia to work at a nearby Christian conference grounds for the summer.

We actually met, for the first time, on a movie set. Claudia, and a number of other summer workers, had come to the studio to sit in a restaurant set as background extras.

As the season continued, Claudia and I were together as often as our work schedules permitted. It was not long before our love grew.

At the end of the summer, I drove her back home to Virginia so I could meet her family. In September of that year, my draft board sent me a “Greetings” letter, and I was inducted into the U.S. Army soon after. To complicate matters, this also happened to be right at the height of the Vietnam War. But after a few months on a post in Washington, I was reassigned to Germany.

It’s important to note that our relationship developed before the time of cell phones, computers, or any of the other communications methods young couples have available today. We had to rely on phone calls and letters. But, before I left for the army, I bought two small recorders. Ours were reel-to-reel tape machines. They enabled us to send recordings to each other, in the mail, which helped keep a more human connection between us.

Claudia and I had talked about getting married, but it didn’t make sense because there was always an uncertainty that I might be sent to a war zone.

My father’s film production work required him to travel the world. I knew he had a trip scheduled to Brazil for business. He also had a contact there who specialized in diamonds.

“I can get you a really nice one for a great price,” he told me. Before I was sent to Germany, I picked out a setting, but hadn’t seen the stone yet.

Off I went to Germany where my assignment landed me in an armored battalion. My first job was as the loader on a tank. The funny thing is, I’m a little over 6’ 4” tall. That meant, when I stood straight up, I could see out of the loader’s hatch when it was open.

Later my dad made the Brazilian trip and my new diamond was placed into the setting I had previously selected. I’d also asked Claudia’s father for permission to marry his daughter when I visited them a second time in Virginia.

“Yes,” he said, and promised to keep it a secret.

It turned out to be a good thing I’d had a typing class in high school. While in basic training, I took a typing test which showed how many words I could type per minute. As a result, my records indicated that a job I’d be qualified for was a company clerk. Not long after arriving in Germany, I heard that the clerk in my new unit would soon be returning to the states, so I put in for his job.

On a subsequent business trip, my parents later traveled to Europe and arranged to visit my base in Germany. There they were able to show me the finished engagement ring.

“It’s beautiful.” I said. The diamond sparkled in the early morning sun, and the setting looked perfect.

“What do we do next?” my mother asked.

“When you get back home,” I said, “mail it to Claudia. Be sure to include instruction not to open it until I call her, and I’ll tell her the same thing.”

About two weeks later, after I knew for sure the ring had arrived, I called and asked her to open the package while I was on the phone. I heard a scream as the phone dropped. She picked it up again but could hardly speak.

That’s when I asked, “Would you be my wife?”

The tears and excited screaming on the other end of the line told me she had accepted. We were engaged, over the phone, by long distance, with an ocean between us.

We decided I would return home on leave a few months later and we were married one year earlier than we had originally planned, allowing us to start our life together in Europe for the first year of our marriage. And because I had been promoted to the clerk’s position, I had a fairly normal office job for the rest of my time in Germany. We rented the off-base apartment, bought a very old Volkswagen Beetle, spent our first Christmas together, and traveled around Europe.

Looking back, we’re both amazed at the way God brought us together and how He has kept us together through forty-seven anniversaries since then.

~*~
Author bio: Max Elliot Anderson grew up as a struggling reader. After surveying the market, he sensed the need for action-adventures and mysteries for readers age 8-13, especially boys. 

Using his extensive experience in the production of dramatic motion pictures, videos, and television commercials, Mr. Anderson brings that same visual excitement and heart-pounding action to his stories. His books include different characters, setting, and plot as well as two series.

Ten middle grade books are published, sixteen more are under contract, with several additional manuscripts completed. Young readers have reported that reading one of his books is like actually being in an exciting movie.

Connect with Max: 

Books for Boys blog - http://booksandboys.blogspot.com 

Author website - http://www.maxbooks.9k.com/index_1.html

YouTube Channel - http://www.youtube.com/user/Maxbooks100?feature=watch

True Love Stories: Romance With the Help of a Matchmaker

It's a sweet yet daring story of a young man visiting a church and changing the course of his life. No, it's not because he found God though that is important. It's because he noticed a young lady playing the organ. 

However, it's not her skills as a musician that captivates him at first sight--it's her unrivaled "beautiful eyes." He determines that night that he wants to know more about this mesmerizing girl but there are challenges such as the fact that she's only 16 at the time and he's an experienced 23-year-old man. 

So how does a young adult man go about approaching and courting a teenage girl without causing all sorts of trouble?

You'll have to read today's featured true love story to find out. :)

~*~
Romance With the Help of a Matchmaker

Sandra Robbins' true love story

I grew up in a small college town, and every fall my girlfriends and I would get very excited when time for school to start rolled around. It wasn’t because we were glad to be back in class, however. The beginning of school meant that new college boys would be arriving in town, boys who were much more mature and more interesting than the ones we’d grown up with and known all our lives.

Although my parents would have grounded me for the entire school year if they had thought I even set foot on the college campus, there were other places like the local movie theater or the drive-in restaurant where all the kids hung out that chance meetings might occur. And then there was church, the last place I expected to meet the love of my life.

I was a sixteen-year-old high school junior that fall when he transferred from two years at another college to the one in my hometown. He had grown up in a rural community about sixty miles away and had decided he didn’t want to live in the dorm. Instead he rented a room in the home of an elderly widow who was a good friend of my parents. I don’t remember the first time I saw him, but he has told me he remembers. He had come to our church, having been invited by the lady he rented a room from, and he saw me playing the organ. He said he thought he had never seen such beautiful eyes in his life, and he wanted to know me better.

Over the next few months he returned to church again and again, and I got to know him better. I could tell there was an attraction between the two of us, but he didn’t ask me out. I was about to give up hope that we would ever be more than friends at church when one day my mother received a surprising call. The lady who rented him the room was calling to ask if my parents would object if her young boarder asked me for a date. By the time she got through extolling his virtues and how he respected me and my parents, my surprised mother could do nothing but agree to his asking me out. Needless to say I was elated.

That first date turned into more, and before long I discovered the reason it had taken him so long to come to a decision about starting a relationship with me. I had known when I first met him that he was older than me by a few years since he was a junior in college, but I was shocked when he told me that he had also served in the army. So the young man I thought was about four years older than me was really seven years older. I was a naive sixteen-year-old-girl, and he was a twenty-three-year-old man who had a lot more life experiences than I had. He couldn’t help but fear my parents would think he might be the sort of man who would see a quick conquest in their daughter and leave me with a broken heart when he moved on to someone more sophisticated and worldly. But that wasn’t his motive, and he wanted them to see him for the Christian man he was—one who was already falling in love with their daughter and wanted only the best for her. That was why he paved the way to mine and my parents’ hearts by enlisting the help of a lady we all loved and respected to be his matchmaker.

Now years later I can only shake my head in wonder. What would I do if my sixteen-year-old daughter wanted to date a twenty-three-year-old man? I doubt that I would have been as understanding as my parents were. But then I think they saw in him what I did—a young man who loved the Lord, who respected and loved me, and who honored my parents’ concerns about me.

Through the years he’s been a loving and faithful husband, a dedicated father, and a respected member of the community. I wonder sometimes how different our lives would be if he hadn’t come to school in my hometown, hadn’t rented a room from our family friend, or if he had gone straight through college after graduating from high school. I often tease him that I was in fifth grade the year he was a senior in high school, and he just smiles. We both know that God had a plan for our lives, and we’re still living it each day until ‘death us do part.’

~*~

Author bio:

Sandra Robbins, former teacher and principal, is a best-selling and award-winning multi-published author of Christian fiction who lives with her husband in Tennessee. To date she has published ten romantic suspense novels, one cozy mystery, one novella, and eight historical romances. Angel of the Cove, her first book in the historical romance series Smoky Mountain Dreams, was named the 2013 winner in the Single Title Inspirational Category of the Gayle Wilson Award of Excellence. This award is given by the Birmingham Southern Magic Chapter of Romance Writers of America for excellence in writing romance. 

Also in 2013 her Love Inspired Suspense books Shattered Identity and Fatal Disclosure were both awarded HOLT Medallions in different categories of the Virginia Romance Writers of America contest to honor outstanding literary talent. 

In addition, her books Final Warning (Love Inspired Suspense) and The Columns of Cottonwood (Barbour) have been finalists in the ACFW Carol Awards, and her cozy mystery Pedigreed Bloodlines (Barbour) was a finalist for the Daphne du Maurier Award given by the Kiss of Death Chapter of Romance Writers of America. Sandra's novella Christmas Comes to Bethlehem Maine released in November, 2014, and made the Evangelical Christian Publishing Associations BestSeller list.

Sandra's latest book Fugitive Trackdown in the Bounty Hunters Series released in February, 2015, and will be followed by Fugitive at Large in May, and the third book December.