I keep forgetting about my poor “Mainly Jane” blog, not giving it nearly the same amount of attention that I’ve been giving my “She-Fan” Yankees blog. So it’s high time I posted here!

After my move to Florida full-time in May, I was beset by some medical problems (I’m currently nursing a wounded leg), so I’ve had plenty of time not only to research the nonfiction book I’ve been intending to write but also to do some reading. And for the latter, I turned to my comfort food author, the incomparable Susan Isaacs. Her novels of romance, comedy and mystery inspired my own novels. I just adore her voice and her knack for telling a first-person story. She makes me laugh. She makes my heart clutch. She keeps me guessing.

Right now I’m re-reading – for the zillionth time – Shining Through, perhaps my favorite of her books. Oh, how I wish I could tell a story like that one. Isaacs manages to interweave an office romance with World War II spying, heroism, betrayal, a mother-daughter relationship and so much more. The book is flat-out brilliant, like the best 1940s-50s classic movies on TCM. Right now I’m at the part when Linda Voss tells John Berringer she’s pregnant, but it’s her interactions with Ed Leland that are so skillfully portrayed. I feel as if I know these characters because of Isaacs’s descriptions and dialogue for them.

As for my own book, I’m inching closer to finishing the proposal I will hand over to my agent. I just need to stop reading Shining Through and turn off the television and get down to business! Summers last longer in Florida than they do up north, but I do hope to be able to finish the proposal and move on to fiction in the fall.