Jamie Knight, British TV star, is ready to be a one-woman man for a trustworthy woman with compatible interests and a nice personality, who is his intellectual equal, shares his values, and is not star-struck or “needy.”
Kat Mancini, the American he met at the museum, didn’t care for his bad boy reputation, but he can’t get her out of his head. Did she feel the same spark he felt when they shook hands? Might she give an honorable man with a fake bad reputation a chance?
Read more…
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The eBook is only available on Amazon (worldwide), for now. Kindle Unlimited subscribers can read it FREE of charge! If you think you wouldn’t like anything called “Romance,” give In Your Dreams! a try. It also makes a nice gift for someone who would enjoy a love story.
I’d really appreciate it if you would leave a REVIEW on the book’s Amazon page (or wherever you bought it). Long or short, the more current reviews a book has, the more likely it is to appear when people search for a book in its category or use the keywords associated with that title. Amazon’s algorithms don’t care whether reviews are positive or negative; they only care about the number of reviews a book has and how recent they are. So leaving honest reviews of the books you read helps other readers find what they’re looking for. (And they help writers learn what readers do and don’t like in a book.) If you frequent Goodreads, BookBaby, or BookBub, a review there and on any other book-related sites would help my novel be seen by others, too.
Amazon categorizes my “Dreams” series as “Romance, Contemporary, Later in Life” and “Literature, Women’s Fiction.” I’ve even found In Your Dreams! in the Romantic Comedy category. One Amazon reviewer agrees, writing that it has “Lots of humor and snappy dialogue.”
The stories are all set in the contemporary British Isles and North America, and feature people older than 40 (because Love is Ageless). So, if you’d like to escape your own reality for a while, In Your Dreams! will take you to 2014 with two middle aged, never-married people who were unlikely to even meet. ♥ Read how a few days in London and an attractive (younger) British actor turn a very independent American’s comfortable, solitary life upside down.
I’m working on the sequel, which I plan to publish next year. Eventually, you’ll find the whole series on my Amazon Author Page at https://www.amazon.com/author/Dana-Michaels.
The Romance genre has expanded to include more than 24 subgenres, like historical and contemporary, romantic comedy, romantic mystery, suspense, thriller, sci-fi, fantasy, time travel, Scottish, Regency, horror, young adult, and more. And Romance novels now include all age groups, races, nationalities, personality types, religions, settings, etc.
Most now have strong, intelligent female protagonists, not helpless damsels in distress. Their “heat levels” run from 
sweet romance (chaste without even a hint of sex, like Hallmark movies) to erotica (explicit, X-rated), and everything in-between. In Your Dreams! is in the mid-range. Sex takes a back seat to the emotional story, and those few scenes are moderate, not explicit.
Romance is the most profitable book category on Amazon, earning $1.44 billion in 2021 U.S. sales. Contemporary Romance is the best selling and most competitive subcategory, so I need all the help I can get. If you’ve…
Never read a romance novel? (I was 60 when I read my first one.)
Wouldn’t be caught dead reading one? (I used to think that.)
Go on, try it. I’ll never tell. You might be surprised! Start with In Your Dreams! (…and please post a review. Thank you.)
What I CAN do is recommend we all learn more about these people, who have been and still are mistreated by American society and governments at all levels. Some interesting facts about Native Americans, courtesy of Mental Floss:
Nearly 4 million Americans identify exclusively as American Indian or Alaska Native, according to the 2020 U.S. Census. There are currently 324 American Indian reservations and 574 federally recognized tribes in the United States that have survived centuries of genocide and displacement. Did you know that these people, who lived here thousands of years before Europeans and others arrived, were not—according to U.S. laws—full birthright citizens of the United States until June 2, 1924? That’s when President Calvin Coolidge signed the Indian Citizenship Act into law. Geez, took ’em long enough! (as usual) So next June, there should be some BIG centennial celebrations.
Native American Heritage Month is a good time to learn about Indigenous history. According to Mental Floss, Native American history is preserved in government archives, ancestral places, museums, and by the people today. The National Park Service manages sites of cultural significance, such as Alabama’s Russell Cave, featuring 10,000 years of human habitation; and the Trail of Tears National Historical Trail, which traces the migration of tribes forcibly removed from their Southeast U.S. homelands in 1838 and 1839. The Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian locations in Washington, D.C., and New York City also preserve Indigenous crafts and ways of living. So do state and local Indian Museums throughout the country.
The California State Indian Museum is one of our state historic parks, in midtown Sacramento. It’s full of basketry, bead work, and regalia as well as other exhibits about the ongoing traditions of various California Indian groups. Details are on the State Parks website. As for the future…
The first Native American woman in space is a member of northern California’s Wailacki of the Round Valley Indian Tribes. Nicole Aunapu Mann is a U.S. Marine aviator and NASA astronaut who spent Oct. 5, 2022 to March 11, 2023 aboard the International Space Station—as its Commander!
We’ve come a long way, baby…
Bats are amazing creatures. There are more than 1,400 species of bats in the world, about 20 percent of all mammal species. About two-thirds of bats are insectivorous. They consume between 50 and 100 percent of their own weight every night. That voracious appetite for insects is worth more than $57 billion per year in protection for our food crops and the timber industry. If it weren’t for bats, farmers would surely use a lot more chemical pesticides than they do now.
Nationwide, the service bats provide by suppressing insect populations has been estimated to be worth something between $4 billion and $50 billion per year to American agriculture. Senior Environmental Scientist Scott Osborn (my former colleague at the California Department of Fish and Wildlife) told me, “Even the low end of that broad estimate, $4 billion, is an impressive amount. Bats are an important part of integrated pest management systems.”
Some bat species pollinate plants throughout the world, including agave, the main ingredient in tequila. Even their guano (feces) is valuable. It provides rich fertilizer across the landscape and is important for cave ecosystems. Without bats, the invertebrates and microorganisms that live in caves and depend on bat guano—and the amphibians that depend on them—couldn’t thrive.
Bats have contributed to human well-being in other ways, too. Stroke victims have been saved by a synthesized anti-clotting enzyme found in bat spit. Research conducted on bats has also led to advancements in vaccine development, sonar, and more.
Unfortunately, population declines have caused 17 of California’s 25 native bat species to need some level of state or federal protection.
In eastern North America, white-nose syndrome (WNS) has killed more than six million bats. It is caused by a fungus—Pseudogymnoascus destructans—that grows in and on bats’ skin during winter hibernation and spreads quickly through bat colonies. The 2016 discovery of a bat with WNS in the State of Washington suddenly brought this unprecedented wildlife health crisis close to home.
The fungus has since been found at more sites in Washington. CDFW and its partners continue to do surveillance and response planning for the disease, which almost inevitably will be here in California before long.
Bats need our help. To wrap up Bat Appreciation Month, Oct. 24-31 is Bat Week. You can be a hero for bats by joining in the celebrations during Bat Week 2022 and beyond. Things a Bat Hero can do:
There are many ideas for how you can be a Bat Hero at the Bat Week 2022 website, http://batweek.org. Look under the “Take Action” tab.
“I very much enjoyed this story. The author does a good job of revealing the needs that drive Kat and Jamie, so the reader empathizes with their worries and their hopes for happiness.” —Louise B.
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