Since The Beginning of Time (Tara Taylor Quinn)

I am a loyal member of the Harlequin family. That's me over there - at fifteen - on vacation. I'm lying on a quilt up in the hills of Michigan with a sleeping bag on top of me to keep me warm. My very best friend in the world took that picture. Our families were spending a week together at my family cabin. My grandfather bought 17 acres in the middle of nowhere because of the little cabin situated way back in the woods on a trout stream. My folks honeymooned there. I spent every vacation of my growing up there. I knew our property and the surrounding forest as well as I knew my arms and legs. I loved it there. (Still do!) And what I loved most was to have days and days where I was allowed to bury myself in Harlequin romances to my heart's content. I introduced my best friend to Harlequin books and that year , we spent our week together sharing our love of Harlequin Books. We'd breakfast with the family in the morning and then pack our lunch and our quilt and sleeping bags and mostly books, and we'd head up into the hills, into undeveloped forest land, we'd make our camp and we'd read until dusk. We were reading Romance and Presents back then. The two books in the picture were Presents. I still have them. Here is one of them! This is actually the first romance I ever read. You see up in the corner where it says Introductory Copy? I picked up this book at my hometown grocery story when I was fourteen! If you've never read it - look for it! It's a classic. I picked up a free book and found a life!

I was in college when Harlequin Books decided to give us longer romances. These new books were similar in feel to Harlequin Romances and Harlequin Presents, in that there was a guarantee of a happy ending. And a guarantee that no matter how bad life got, there was always hope, always beauty. In Harlequin Books good always prevails. Love is real and true and strong enough to overcome any challenge. These longer romances incorporated all of the treasures that I knew I would get in a Harlequin read and there was more story, too.

I loved the longer books. They weren't actually published under the the Harlequin brand at first. They were published by Worldwide Library - a subsidiary of Harlequin Books. I think they were testing the market. If the books hadn't hit with success, then the Harlequin brand would not have been tainted. I only read Harlequin books back then, for my pleasure reading, but I bought one of those Worldwide books because it looked so much like on of my Harlequin Books and after that first read, I read every single one of Worldwide Library longer romances. Imagine my surprise when, just a short time later, these Worldwide books that captivated me even more than the Romances had, suddenly had the Harlequin name on the cover. They were called Harlequin Superromance.

And this morning I sit here, after just having come off a mammoth, forty seven page day, the sequel to two solid weeks of twenty-five page days, with my fifty-eighth book complete. All but one of those 58 published books are published by Harlequin Books and its subsidiaries. The new book is the first of three Superromances that will be out back to back in the summer of 2012. The books revolve around a twenty-five year old cold case involving a missing child. A box of evidence has been stolen out of the vault and the police want to know who took it and why. Today I start book two.

In the midst of my writing marathon, I had a Superromance out this past month!

Full contact is a Shelter Valley Story. It's the twelfth book set in the small Arizona town I created back in the late 90's. All of the Shelter Valley stories stand completely alone. No prequels or sequels that grow into one big story. But in every single book, you see some of the same people on the outskirts of the story. You see the same town.

Shelter Valley reminds me of Harlequin books. Each story is different, and yet, when you come home to Shelter Valley you feel part of a community that will not let you down. Shelter Valley is a place where people care about each other. Where you really do love your neighbor as your own. The people in Shelter Valley are not protected from the bad things in life - but they have the means and the support to deal with them. The people in Shelter Valley have the key to happiness. As do Harlequin books.

I love Harlequin Books. I love what they stand for, I love the promise they deliver, and most of all, I love that the hope that they give us is real and the love that the books depict is more real than the earth on which we live.

I have a couple of copies of Full Contact to give away today to anyone who wants to test me on this. To be entered to win, simply leave a comment!