A book about love, loss, goats and the adult onset growing pains associated
with turning thirty.
Status: Complete (unpublished)
Genre: Women’s Fiction
Word Count: 80,000 words
Daphna Shapiro has had it already with random acts of chutzpah and is on the verge of admitting defeat in her ongoing struggle to live like a grown-up in New York City. She doesn’t have a high-powered job like her best friend Gen (or any job for that matter), or the status of being a rabbi’s wife and mother of three like her sister Hannah.
What she does have is a tiny walk-up with rent higher than the mortgage on her parents’ four bedroom house, a perpetual rain leak, a four dollar bottle of Pinot Noir, a string of job rejections so long it’s eating away at the memory on her computer, and a diploma from Columbia that seems to be about as valuable as her certificates from summer camp. As if that weren’t enough, she has so much envy she’s surprised she hasn’t turned green.
But at least she has plans to go to Santorini, Greece with her boyfriend Shel.
Or at least she did, before Shel ditched her for her evil ex-boss Yvonne.
Daphna’s brain is telling her that she should stay in New York and look for another job. But her heart is telling her to go to Greece without Shel. Which is exactly what she does. Her sister arranges for her to work at a hotel in Loutro, Crete, a village with a surplus of goats, no cars, limited phone reception, and Internet access so limited it makes her feel like she’s traveled back to 1996.
Upon her arrival, Daphna immediately finds herself so entrenched in village life she’s talking to the local animals and making the best frappes on Crete’s southern coast.
One day, on a boat trip to a nearby beach, Daphna discovers that her sister has had a trick up her sleeve.
In this so-called paradise where Apollo once fell in love with Daphne, Daphna comes face to face with Joel, the man who broke her heart ten years ago.
Only now, he wants to be more than “just friends.”
Oh – and the Greek gods seem eager to get them together too. But that’s just Daphna’s imagination. Probably.
But before Daphna can commit to a relationship with Joel, she’ll have to make some major changes in her life. Will she find the tools she needs to become the person she wants to be? Or will she always feel like she’s “in the rough?”
Works in Progress
Working Title: The Muse and the Single Girl
Genre: Contemporary Romance
Status: In Revisions
Target Word Count: 85,000
Life’s not easy when you’re named after a muse. . .
Polyhymnia has a big hair, a long name, and impossibly large shoes to fill. She also has a huge voice. Not that anybody would know that, since she refuses to sing anywhere but the shower.
Polly hasn’t performed since she played an orphan in the Broadway cast of Annie, which, as everyone knows, wasn’t a gig that ended on a positive note.
Now that she’s returned the ring to her loser of a fiance, she’s ready to face the muses and get back to the stage. Problem is, according to YouTube, her once-famous mother is about to blow back into town and complicate things.
But not as much as the arrival of Aristides.
Aristides has finally graduated from the conservatory and is moving from London to New York. The plan? He’ll stay with Polly’s family (“the home for wayward singers”), and fight tooth and nail to make it as an actor.
If only Polly didn’t see him as the immature pain in the neck she grew up with. If only he could still see her as the shy, mousy introvert he’d grown up with, instead of the goddess-like woman with the wild hair and big eyes.
It doesn’t help that she has the voice of a siren.
The sparks are there, but they begin to fade when Polly finds out her mother has been sucked into the elaborate scheme Aris’ father has crafted.
And the muses aren’t happy.
Working Title: Somebody Else’s Paradise
Genre: Women’s Fiction
Status: First Draft Complete
Target Word Count: 80,000
Evi, former host of the hit travel show Urban Nomad and primary blogger at NomadicMommies.com, understands the appeal of the whitewashed houses and blue shutters of the tiny Cretan village on the sea where she grew up. The place is so authentic there are goats and chickens walking around. It’s even got a resident village idiot.
But one person’s paradise is another person’s dusty, hot, bug-infested recurring nightmare, which is why Evi hasn’t been back to Agia Marina in five years. When her beloved grandparents ask Evi to bring their two year old granddaughter Anna for a visit, she can’t say no. Especially since they’ve announced that the owner of their cafe, which has always been more of a home to Evi than her parents’ house, wants to sell, so they’re planning to retire and move out of the village.
Returning to the traditional village after five years with a daughter born out of wedlock isn’t easy. Evi gives herself six weeks to find a way to buy the cafe from its original owner so she can keep it in the family, and then she’s going back to Brooklyn.
Everything changes when Evi finds out that Mathaios, the quiet, mysterious, slightly geeky science teacher and keeper of the village’s archaeology museum, has recently inherited her grandparents’ cafe from his father. She wants to hate him, which isn’t so hard to do. Until she accidentally comes across a playlist on Mathaios’ computer, which leads to the discovery that there’s more to him than meets the eye.
And their pasts are intertwined in ways Evi never could have imagined.
