“The Call”
by Gayle Callen

Okay, so I didn’t get “The Call” recently. But NEVER MARRY A STRANGER (on sale 8/25/09) is my 20th published book and this is my tenth year of publication, so I’m feeling a little nostalgic.

For those of you who haven’t desperately tried to sell a book, “The Call” is when an editor offers to purchase your manuscript. It is a day that no writer forgets. It took me 13 long years and three completed manuscripts before I sold, so I had been waiting for that magic moment a long time. It was January 22, 1998, and my agent told me the good news at 2:45 in the afternoon. See, I remember everything!

And another reason it’s so easy to remember is because I was the mom hosting my son’s high school swim team for dinner that night. Twenty-six starving young men. I received a message to call my agent when I was in the middle of grocery shopping. When I arrived home, I called her back (at 2:45) and heard the wonderful news that Avon had offered to buy not just the completed book I’d submitted, but a second as well.

I was stunned and overjoyed as I waited for my new editor to call me. But could I savor it? Nope. I spent the rest of the afternoon with the phone crooked between my head and shoulder as I talked to my husband and family while cooking four pans of ziti, making salad, and finding places in my house for 26 teenagers to spread out.

When the boys descended, I was too busy to think anymore about my burgeoning writing career. But I have a great memory of the house becoming quiet several hours later, then sitting down on the couch next to my husband and just staring at each other. Life would never be the same.

NEVER MARRY A STRANGER, which hits the shelves August 25, is the next step in the journey that started that day. It’s the third book in the “Sons of Scandals” trilogy. Matthew is thought dead in the first two books but now returns from the war to find Emily, who’s been posing as his wife. Would a good hero expose her and thereby expose his whole family to scandal? Heck no! He pretends he has amnesia from his war injuries where his wife is concerned. He’ll figure out the truth while Emily is desperately trying to show him what a good wife she can be.

So how did you feel when something you’d wanted for so long finally happened to you?