Happy Valentine's Day!

Love is in the air today (or is that the smell of chocolate?) and I wanted to wish all of you a Happy Valentine's Day...whether you are celebrating the love of family, a furry one or a special partner (who could be four-footed and furry some of the time according to the plethora of paranormal books on the market).  I am blessed to have a wonderful husband who tolerates my fixation on books (and forgives the burned smell emanating on the times that he leaves me unsupervised in the kitchen with my nose in a book, steps around the piles of TBR books everywhere, and patiently tolerates being dragged to used bookstores in whatever town we are visiting) as well as a loving friend who accepts me as I am (absent-minded and prone to forgetting dates, opinionated and prickly and prone to odd quirks).  I am thankful for the opportunity to form new relationships with people this year and look forward to recovering from the losses that weighed down my spirit last year.  I hope that you all have a special someone or someones in your lives as well!

I started thinking about some of my favorite new books that have my kind of romance and think that most of them have a deep connection between the characters which reflect my own personality.  A regular theme seems to be the feelings of unworthiness that one person feels that is healed by the other who sees the underlying character...whether it is Dante, the prickly mage in Carol Berg's The Daemon Prism, snarky Cal in Rob Thurman's Doubletake, mysterious Rowan in Barbara Ashford's Spellcast, intensely overwhelming Gideon in Thea Harrison's True Colors, emotionally wounded Ezra in Shiloh Walker's If You Hear Her, rough-edged Spencer and survivor Arizona in Lori Foster's A Perfect Storm...well, the list goes on and on.  I hope that all of you find or have found someone who gives you that sense of forgiveness and self-worth and allows you to accept yourself for who you are--a work in progress who has some faults but is by no means irredeemable(and if not, adopt a dog...who will always love you unconditionally!)