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Hey everyone! I’m so thrilled to be ending 2023 on a happy and productive note with the Holly Oaks Holiday Collection recently released on December 29th. The reception for the book has been amazing and it has already hit the top 100 new releases on Amazon’s collections and anthologies. I have so much to be grateful for this year! Looking back, this year has been the most productive I’ve ever had writing-wise. Y’all readers really took Holly Oaks into your hearts with the Coming Home collection earlier this year. I also released two books in the My Obsession series. I’m looking forward to releasing more in this series in 2024. Crestwood University is also a world I’ve created that I enjoy joining time and time again. I always have mixed feelings about the end of the year. My babies are getting older, and this time of year reminds me of that. Like everyone, I lost some special people in 2023 including one of my favorite aunts. Aunt Carolyn was the epitome of a strong-minded Southern woman. She spoke her opinion no matter what. She would go toe to toe with any man for things that she believed in. Watching her gave me the strength to reach for some of my dreams that I otherwise would not have, including writing. She didn’t care what other people thought of her. That is something I have been working on, especially with my writing. I never got to tell her that so please, please tell your loved ones how you feel while they’re here. A new year means a new beginning and that’s exciting. I can’t wait to expand my writing and do more projects, including possibly writing for Vella. I’m looking forward to coming up with a schedule that maximizes my time with my family, but also gives me time to finish works that are important to me. I’m making a commitment to be more consistent with my writing. I want to continue to bring quality stories to my readers. I love you guys so much! Please hug your family close during these days and thank you so much for your support in 2023. I can’t wait for what 2024 brings! Thanks, Harper Michaels 
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Happy Fall y’all! This is my favorite season. From the pumpkin spice at Starbucks to the changing colors of the leaves, this season is beyond the best. Spring runs a distant second, then Winter, and finally the cruel summer (yes, that’s a Swiftie reference because I am one!) I especially love North Georgia in the fall and that’s where my Coming Home series is set. Coming Home: The Collection will be live on November 4th and I can’t wait for you to read these three short stories about powerful women coming back to their hometown and finding love. These stories will make you laugh and maybe ugly cry just a little.
I also have a story coming out in the Breaking the BFF Pact Anthology for The New Romance Café on November 14th. All proceeds of the anthology will go to The Breast Cancer Research Foundation. Each story centers on falling in love with a sibling’s friend, which is a trope I really love. I can’t wait for you to read these stories from an amazing group of talented authors. Enjoy the cooler weather everyone! Maybe curl up by the fireplace and enjoy a good book and a hot chocolate. Pull out your comfy sweaters and read some of my stories that are filled with heat, humor, and heart. Spicy stories will add extra heat to those cold days. Love y’all! Harper Michaels I can’t believe it’s that time of year again. Fall is almost upon us, and I’m so excited about it! I love this time of year, when school starts and it finally starts to cool down (hopefully, it’s 100 degrees here while I type this, lol). I adore the changing colors of the leaves, pumpkin festivals, and finding the right Halloween costumes for my kiddos.
I also adore writing about couples enjoying this season and part of my newest book, Only Yours, is set during this time of year. Only Yours is coming soon (September 29), and I cannot wait for you to read Brian and Reina’s story. It’s a part of the My Obsession series, and honestly, I’m more than a little obsessed with this couple. Reina is ballsy and seemingly open about everything but has secrets that she has yet to share with anyone. Brian falls first and hard but has a duty to his country and family that must come first. For this book, I had to do research on a few things including Indian culture and the military. I’m lucky enough to have wonderful guides in both. Friends of mine have shared their lives with me in order to bring these characters to life. Learning about new cultures and traditions is one of my favorite things about this job, but I want to bring authenticity to my readers, and I also want my characters to come from varied backgrounds. I think you’ll enjoy Reina and Brian immensely, so be sure and pre-order! Love, Harper Michaels  What a summer it has been so far! I just arrived back from an Alaskan cruise, and we had such a great time! My husband and I have our ten-year wedding anniversary coming up in October and we decided we wanted to go on an Alaskan cruise to celebrate it. Unfortunately, Alaska’s best weather is not in October, so we decided to go in June. It was amazing! Glaciers, dog mushing, local beers, kayaking…sigh. All of it was the best! I’m thinking an Alaskan hot men series is in my future because now I’m in love…only with the location of course. I still love my sweet, bearded hubby. There’s something about a man with a beard…anyway I digress!
Captivated by You, my book with author Ellis Worth, is Available Now on Amazon. Get ready for Christmas in July because this book will bring you the gift of steamy romance for your summer. Forced proximity between enemies to lovers…getting stuck on a college campus has never been so much fun! Love you guys! Thanks for reading! Harper Michaels  I was reading something from one of my favorite authors one time and she said that she has trouble writing when her muses are not cooperating. The statement made me laugh. It sounded like such a kooky, new-agey kind of thing to say. In my old-style southern practical world, the thought of muses sounded way too hokey. You write when you have to write, am I right? If you have a deadline, you write. Muses be damned.
Now that I’ve been writing and releasing for a while, I actually understand what she was saying. I write romance. My real life is not always romantic. I have two kids who often are snot-producing, accident-making messes most of the time. Lovable messes, but messes just the same. During my day job, I listen to people complain all day long. Romance is just dead for me sometimes and writing does not come natural at all on those days. The muses disappear, my mojo departs, and I’m left with nothing but stringing mindless words together in order to try desperately to make a deadline. Sigh. The world is not romantic in general. People don’t exchange longing glances in the grocery store or exchange steamy kisses very often. More people argue than seem to fall in love these days. I love my own husband more than anything, but even we have our very non-romantic days where we mostly try not to kill each other. Creating a make-believe world is not as easy as it looks, but for me it is necessary. I’m one of those people who will get mired down in reality if I don’t create that inside world for myself. I like to imagine a world where love is as prevalent as it is in romance novels. Where cowboys fall in love with city girls, curvy goddesses fall in love with billionaires, and local librarians make love behind the stacks to the local hero. Doesn’t that sound better than the real world? In my real world, things are always going fast. My kids are growing up fast, my work life is quick task to task, and every deadline looms a little bit closer. Sometimes I just want to say, slow it down. For God’s sake, just slow it all down. So, I create my worlds and do my best to make time go away. If you get a chance, make time to slow down for yourself a little bit too. Read and drift off into another world that’s perhaps a little slower than ours. I’ve got lots coming up soon, including a sequel to Keeping You and The Growing Pains series in anthology format. Please feel free to follow me on any and all social platforms, especially Instagram where I’m hoping to get to 2k followers soon! (Hoping to do a giveaway also!) As always, thanks for the support, you guys! Love, Harper  I’ve wanted to be an author ever since I was a little girl. It’s been a faraway dream, kind of like the dream of becoming a princess one day. Unless you’re Meghan Markle or Kate Middleton, that dream probably won’t come true. When it came time for me to choose a career, I thought that I had to do what was most important at the time, which is to make a steady income. I grew up in South Georgia without a lot of money. We had food and a roof, but we always knew we were one step away from transitioning from lower middle class to official poverty. My house was the one people made fun of on the block: the one with the peeling paint and sagging porch swing. My parents worked hard, blue-collar jobs: my dad in a factory, and my mom as a postal carrier. So, I knew when it came time to choose a career that I had to choose one that made a decent income, not only for me, but for my family. I chose a career in healthcare.
My shifts are long and sometimes brutal. Twelve-hour days back-to-back, followed by a few days off where I want to do nothing but sleep. I have two small children who still need their mom so that’s not possible. I never thought I could fit writing into my schedule, but as I’ve gotten older I’ve learned to separate my days into blocks of time. And most of all, I’ve learned that writing to me is worth putting in the time. It’s not at all about the money, because in case you don’t know, most indie authors don’t make much. Sometimes, we operate at a loss. But writing feeds my soul and gives me an opportunity to explore a part of myself that I let remain hidden for a long time. My dad’s death in 2020 taught me that we only get one life. If we have a dream, we should pursue it now. Sometimes that later that we keep talking about never happens. I try to prioritize. My kids are always first, but when they’re in school and I have a day off, I sit down and write. Sometimes, I have to make myself because yes, muses are not always readily available. That means that the laundry in my house may pile up, the dishes may sit a little longer, and the vacuum may not go vroom-vroom for a few hours. I know it’s annoying as hell to my husband at times, but I think he understands that in a busy mom’s life, something has to give and sometimes that has to be the housework. I wish I could say I’m always disciplined and that I have a strict regimen. My writing isn’t like that. Some days it will flow, and I can write thousands of words. Other days, I’m lucky to spit out 200 words. But I’ve never missed a deadline and I aim to never do that. It’s a promise I made to myself when I first started this. I’ve got a lot coming up so please stay tuned, you guys. I’m going to release both my Growing Pains and Coming Home series in anthology form with extra content so I’m really looking forward to that. I also have the long-awaited (at least by me) sequel to Keeping You (Crestwood University series) coming out in May. I plan to have it up for pre-order within a month or so. You’ll be the first ones to know! As always, I love you guys and thank you so much for your support. You keep me going! Love, Harper Michaels  Have you subscribed to my newsletter? I officially sent out my first one. My goal is to keep y’all informed and up to date with all the works I have coming up. There are so many exciting things in progress for 2023!
If you haven’t already, make sure you check out the anthologies from The New Romance Café. I currently have stories in two of their anthologies, Mine This Winter and Love and Other Kerfuffles. On April 19th, my story The Melody of You will be part of Rock My World: A Rockstar Romance Collection. The New Romance Café is made up of an amazing group of romance writers and some of the anthologies, such as Love and Other Kerfuffles, are done for charity. I’m also working on re-releasing all the Growing Pains collection with some notes interspersed from my favorite heroine: Ronnie. Like Ronnie, I believe in the power of love, and I adored writing all the stories in the series. A woman’s journey with love is complicated and at times, heartbreaking. I truly believe that in the end everyone finds their own path, even if you have to endure some hard things along the way. I’m also happy to announce that I will be releasing a new series, The Survivor’s Club, featuring characters from Loving You, Lily’s story. I love writing about women overcoming adversity and these women are truly prime examples of that. The first story in this series should be available on Amazon in the fall. I want to truly thank all of you. I never thought that at age forty, I would finally get to follow my dream of becoming a writer. Please keep following! As long as someone is reading my books, I’ll keep writing! Never give up on your dreams guys and always believe in yourself. Love, Harper  The first story I ever wrote was about two dinosaurs falling in love. I believe there was a girl stegosaurus and a boy T-rex involved. (Not the best pairing, obviously). But my first-grade teacher enjoyed it and told me that I would be a writer one day. My mother, in her usual no-nonsense Southern manner, told me that writers didn’t make any money. So therefore, I determined that I would be a doctor to make money and a writer on the side because I wanted to keep writing my stories.
My writing progressed as my love for reading grew. In the midst of complete teenage angst, I wrote really horrible poetry and stories about misunderstood nerdy teenage girls (aka me) falling in love with their crushes. And in the stories, their crush loved them back. In real life, not so much. I was an awkward teenager, unsure how to talk to boys and oftentimes more immersed in daydreams than real life. I was great at getting good grades, but ugh, social settings were hard to navigate. Still are, honestly. I’m an introvert with occasional extrovert longings. One thing I’ve always believed in is love and falling in love. My parents divorced when I was thirteen, but even that didn’t discourage me. I wholeheartedly believed in the fairy-tale ending. And I greedily read every romance I could get my hands on, starting from the age of about twelve when I would steal my mom’s Harlequin novels and read them under the covers late at night. I looked at romance authors such as Nora Roberts as celebrities and women to admire. Instead of rock stars, my heroes were writers. Imagine getting to write about love every day. What could be better than that? For years, I would start stories and then never finish them. So many couples are still in limbo because of my tendency to stop writing mid-story. For a long time, I couldn’t figure out what the point in finishing would be. I was in the medical field. No one wanted to read my stories. They weren’t good enough. I wasn’t good enough. Then 2020 hit and the year started with my father dying in January. My dad was a complicated person. He was not an introvert with extrovert longings. He was well and truly lodged in the introvert camp. He very rarely left his home. But the one thing he loved more than anything was my sister and I. We were the center of his life, and I never doubted his love for us. He loved hearing about my accomplishments and worried himself sick when anything went wrong in my life. He never followed his own dreams, but he desperately wanted us to follow ours. When he passed away, I thought long and hard about what was holding me back from writing all the stories in my head. My dad let fear of people’s judgment hold him back from doing all the things he wanted to do. He let fear effectively cut him off from so many opportunities. Was I doing the same thing? So, for once I finished a story. I sat down and wrote and wrote and as my friend Carol says I decided to finish the damn thing. I wanted to write about a heroine who was obsessed with love stories, but a little skeptical about real-life love. I wanted her to experience some of the ups and downs I had as an eighteen-year-old. I loved writing Ronnie’s story, and after Ronnie, I found myself writing about all of her friends too. The Growing Pains series is my ode to that time in my life when I was so damn awkward and trying to figure things out, especially guys. Now I try to write the stories that get stuck in my head. Strong heroines overcoming obstacles to find themselves and falling in love with men that are their equals. That’s what happened to me. It took a long time and a lot of really awful relationships to get there, but I met my equal and he truly is my best friend. And I’m a little biased but our love story is pretty darn funny too (I’m sure I’ll write about it one day). I’m just beginning on this journey and no, money is not rolling in, but the satisfaction I get from writing a good story is incomparable. Like any journey, there will be bumps, but I’m hopeful you’ll take this journey with me. Come fall in love with worthy heroes and heroines and lose yourself in their stories for a little while. You won’t regret it. |
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