Getting by with a little help from my fellow authors

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They went behind my back. Yes, they planned all of it behind my back. It was only after a cover was nearly completed and a host of authors had signed on to be a part of it that authors Norah Wilson and Dianna Love told me about their idea — a box set to help raise money for my medical expenses.

I burst into tears.

For those of you who don’t know, I was diagnosed with breast cancer on April 21. After I had a bilateral mastectomy in June, they found that the cancer had spread to a single lymph node, making chemo and radiation advisable. I’m recovering from my last chemotherapy treatment now and will start five weeks of daily radiation treatments on Nov. 3. Sometime next year, I’ll be healed enough to undergo reconstructive surgery.

Although I have health insurance, I’ve used up my entire savings on co-pays and “co-insurance.” To make matters worse, I’ve been too sick to write. For a self-employed author, that’s bad news. It means, among other things, that I have no resources going into next year’s medical care, including reconstruction. My fellow authors know this, and that’s what led some of them to conspire together to create the LAST HERO STANDING box set.

[Read more about why these authors chose to act here.]

The box set contains 12 stories — 11 stories from 11 authors, plus a bonus short story from Dianna Love — and costs only 99 cents. That's 99 cents for the equivalent of 2,000 pages of fiction. Included in the box set is my novella First Strike , the erotic prequel to Striking Distance .

Participating authors include New York Times bestsellers Dianna Love, Cynthia Eden, Elisabeth Naughton, Joan Swan, Bonnie Vanak; USA Today bestsellers Norah Wilson, Adrienne Giordano, and Mary Buckham; and award-winning authors Stephanie Rowe and Tracey Devlin. The stories range from romantic suspense to paranormal to contemporary. So, although most readers of this blog have likely read First Strike , there are lots of other great stories to be found in this set.
 
It has been a hard road and oftentimes a lonely one. Chemo made my immune system crash. Even a cold could be life-threatening to me at this point. As a result, I’ve been on a kind of reverse isolation, restricted to my home, where I can receive very few visitors for fear that someone might be sick and not realize it.

Yet, despite the isolation, I've found so much support among my readers and fellow romance authors. They’ve reached out with cards, phone calls, emails and gifts to tell me that I wasn’t alone. While I sat here putting this blog post today, UPS arrived with Mrs. Fields cookies sent by author Julie James. I can’t tell you what the kindness of these remarkable people has meant to me in the darkest hours of fighting this terrible disease.

LAST HERO STANDING is available for one month only, and all the proceeds go toward my medical fund. Thanks so much for your support and concern!


Kindle: http://amzn.to/1x1oo3u
Nook: http://bit.ly/1CGXHEr
iTunes http://bit.ly/1x1qD6W
Kobo http://bit.ly/1xEK48M