Wedding Brain – Guest Post by Victoria Pinder, Author of Chaperoning Paris

I’m going to write a wedding romance soon. After I finish the two I’m working on. Why? With my wedding in twelve days, I’ve been going crazy. This is ripe full of material to use in a book. So all writers just take notes of your own life, because we’re great at self reflection and stealing those moments that we just should.

Everyone starts arriving for this wedding in 5 days. I’m starting to freak out.

Why do families insist that they are all going to buy you the same thing on the registry? There are other things on the registry that we obviously want, so why the fight over the same item? I don’t get it. It just means in addition to everything else, we now have to plan a trip to the store to return one and then we get something else on the list.

And paying vendors for the wedding drove me insane. Perhaps other people enjoy writing out big checks. We have the money to pay as we saved, but even still handing that check over was hard. At the end of it, our let’s save money here or save money there didn’t amount to much in terms of overall savings. The hotel would have been $1600 more post taxes, and I wouldn’t have gone on amazon.com buying sprints. Or learned about the party planning site of orientaltrading.com. Or perhaps I would have? I like to think I’m a bit creative, as all writers like to think, and I would have insisted.

So what are fun things that will stress me this week?

The wishing tree. (Guest books are boring, and wishes are better!)

The candy buffet. I love all things chocolate, and offering candy to guests will be fun. But to save money we bought the candy and the glassware to hold everything. I never thought I’d have to figure out table setting so perfectly. I’m slightly nervous.

The priest. I don’t know the priest who’s to marry me now. June 1, 2014 was the date that the priests changed, and I’m unsure who the new guy is.

And the biggest nervous thing I have is setting up the sofreh aghd. What is that you might ask? My fiancé is ethnically Persian. To honor his traditions, I’m having a sofreh aghd. Everything on this has symbolic meaning. And we’re super lucky that everything is being shipped from his region of origins as his family had people going on vacation to pick up a few things. But I’ve not seen it yet, and I’m a white girl from Boston at the end of the day. I don’t want to knock something over that is important, so including his tradition is both exciting as it’s new to me and terrifying. Would I change it? Absolutely not.

So what advice would I give to brides?

Don’t go arguing over stupid stuff with the fiancé because of the nerves. We’re supposed to be happy right now, so let’s choose to be happy.

Don’t listen to anyone who wants to stifle the happiness.

All the wedding crazy stuff, just take notes that this would drive you crazy, but you can let it go. We should laugh at ourselves.

And unlike me if you’re a writer, hope your publishers choose dates other than the week of the wedding. Chaperoning Paris comes out June 11^th from Soul Mate Publishing. And Favorite Coffee, Favorite Crush June 12^th. Gigi and Sean are the first book in my Collins brothers series. The next installment is this summer. Then in Favorite Coffee, Favorite Crush, we have a circle of friends from Miami all returning home post college, and falling in love. Right now it’s a stand alone, but the friends can be written about too.

I’ll be back to writing post my own honeymoon. And in the meantime, I wish everyone who’s ever been married a reminder of the past and ask you to add advice to what you’d say. And if you are engaged like me, what’s been the toughest part? Please share. And if you are single, what changes are you willing to make in your life to let someone in?

(It’s not a rude question. Before meeting my fiancé, I changed jobs, opened myself up but had a sense of not settling for just anyone, and be open to listening to my heart and not my brain that can lie to me.)

Hope you don’t mind all the ‘I’s.’ Post wedding, everything will be fun again.

Chaperoning Paris Trailer:

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Favorite Coffee, Favorite Crush Trailer:

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Bio:

Victoria Pinder grew up in Irish Catholic Boston before moving to the Miami sun. She’s worked in engineering, after passing many tests proving how easy Math came to her. Then hating her life at the age of twenty four, she decided to go to law school. Four years later, after passing the bar and practicing very little, she realized that she hates the practice of law. She refused to one day turn 50 and realize she had nothing but her career and hours at a desk. After realizing she needed change, she became a high school teacher. Teaching is rewarding, but writing is a passion.

During all this time, she always wrote stories to entertain herself or calm down. Her parents are practical minded people demanding a job, and Victoria spent too many years living other people’s dreams, but when she sat down to see what skill she had that matched what she enjoyed doing, writing became so obvious. The middle school year book when someone wrote in it that one day she’d be a writer made sense when she turned thirty.

Besides her full time job of teaching, in 2013 and 2014, she sold on her own books to three different publishers. The Zoastra Affair, Chaperoning Paris, Borrowing the Doctor, and Electing Love will be published from Soul Mate Publishing. Mything the Throne will be published with Double Dragon Ebooks. Favorite Coffee, Favorite Crush will be published with Jupiter Press.

Now she is represented by Dawn Dowdle of Blue Ridge Literary Agency and she hopes to continue selling her novels that she writes. Moving up to the next level from hard work and determination is rewarding, and partnerships bring new opportunities.

Also she’s the Vice President of Programs for the Florida Romance Writers. She’s gone to multiple conferences and intends to continue. She learns and meets so many people at conferences. Her website is www.victoriapinder.com, and she’ll continue to grow my web presence. She is working hard on other projects and found the time to plan her wedding this year.

Before writing, her father had taken her to many star trek conventions and on her own she grew up as the only girl in the 90s at the comic book store. Science Fiction was her first love, but contemporary romance was her second. She’s sticking with contemporaries for the near future.

Member of Florida Romance Writers, Contemporary Romance, Fantasy, Futuristic and Paranormal chapter of RWA, Celtic Hearts and Savvy Authors.

You can find Victoria at:

Website: http://www.victoriapinder.com

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/victoriapinder1

Twitter: https://twitter.com/victoriapinder

Blog: http://victoriapinder.com/?cat=6