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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…
…including Barnes & Noble, Waterstone’s, and even Walmart. Since I’m not a big-name author, it’s not stocked in the stores, but is easy to order from them, print on demand. The eBook is only available on Amazon (worldwide), for now. Kindle Unlimited subscribers can read it free of charge! For the rest of us, it’s only $4.99. If you think you wouldn’t like anything called “Romance,” this is a nice gift for someone who might. I hope you or your gift recipient enjoy In Your Dreams!.
I’d really appreciate it and THANK YOU in advance if you would leave a review on the book’s Amazon page (or wherever you bought it). Brief or lengthy, 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. The more current reviews a book has, the more likely people are to see that title in the results when they search for a book in its category or use the keywords associated with that title. So leaving a review for a book helps readers like you find what they’re looking for.
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 s
nappy dialogue.”
The stories are all set in the contemporary British Isles and North America, about 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 emotionally-stable, solitary life upside down.
I’m working on the sequel, which I hope to publish later this year. Eventually, you’ll find the whole series on my Amazon Author Page at https://www.amazon.com/author/Dana-Michaels. If you frequent Goodreads, I’d sure appreciate a review there, and any other book sites you like, too. Thanks!
P.S. To anyone who’s signed up for my “occasional newsletter,” I apologize for not having had occasion to write one, yet. (I did promise not to bug you with a lot of email, didn’t I?)
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 (no pun intended) 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!
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 enjoyed getting to know the characters and understood the main character’s reticence in getting involved with a celebrity. Liked the descriptions of Lake Tahoe and nature. Very enjoyable love story.” —An avid reader
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