I am pleased to welcome author Carol Maloney Scott to the Celebration of Chick Lit Tour. I love how she was inspired to rediscover her love of writing during a reunion with her girlfriends. Girl power!

In March 2009, I visited with a bunch of girlfriends from high school back in New York. We had all reconnected on Facebook, after many years. Many of us hadn’t seen each other in the more than twenty years since we had graduated. One of my friends hosted the girls’ weekend at her expansive, beautiful home.

While I was thrilled to see the familiar faces and swap memories, I didn’t love getting caught up on each other’s lives. I was the only one of the six of us who was divorced, and I was feeling like a failure. And while my job in human resources is nothing to be ashamed of, I also felt like I had failed professionally. Everyone else was doing something amazing, or at least in line with their dreams.

I know, sickening, right? I don’t like to be jealous, but I couldn’t help but feel like I had wasted a lot of the previous forty-one years, especially when one friend said, “Hey, Carol. I am so surprised you’re not a writer. Remember how you used to write those soap operas in elementary school?”

Everyone went on to share their memories of my writing skill and interest. While that should have made me feel better, it only served to sink me deeper into my feelings of inadequacy, mourning wasted time.

But…it planted a seed. I started buying craft of writing books. I began to look myself in the mirror and face my fears.

It took another four years before I began to see an idea take shape in my mind, and to summon the courage to begin. Once the flood gates were opened, I couldn’t have stopped the flow of words if I wanted to. And I most certainly didn’t want to.

Why do I write chick lit? A series that resembles a very funny soap opera? I was reminded by a group of ‘chicks’ who were vital to my formative years, and still good friends today, that the bonds of women’s friendship are strong, and the trials and tribulations of being female provide endless material for stories worth writing…and devouring.

I write chick lit to lend a voice to my own stories, and those of my sister chicks, the ones I know and love, and the new ones I am meeting along this journey.

I write chick lit for the chicks.

Novelista Girl – Coming January 6, 2016

Readers first met sassy Kimberly Long in Blogger Girl, and now the feisty New Yorker is back in a sequel packed with quick wit, friendship, heartache, and, of course, romance.

Kim runs the most popular chick lit book blog on the web, loves playing house with her sexy lawyer boyfriend, Nicholas, and is finally pursuing her lifelong dream to become a published author. At first glance, her life is five-pink-champagne-flutes worthy. 

But is there more to the story than meets the eye?

 After hearing the phrase “chick lit is dead” more times than she’s read Bridget Jones’s Diary, Kim is driven to desperate measures, seeking advice from up-and-coming chick lit author, Hannah Marshak, her high school nemesis and resident “mean girl.” As if Kim doesn’t have enough on her plate balancing her secretarial duties with her blog Pastel Is the New Black, shrugging off the growing pile of agent rejections, and keeping her best friend from turning green over Kim’s budding friendship with Hannah, Nicholas is so blinded by his career ambitions, he doesn’t see that their home sweet home could use more than a dash of sugar. 

This is the year when all of Kim’s dreams—professional and romantic—are supposed to come true, but will the story have a happily ever after, or will Kim end up unpublished and all alone?

This novel can be read as a sequel or as a standalone and is best accompanied by a cocktail, preferably a pink one.