Beth Carpenter Books

It all started with a tweet. Well, that's not true. It started several years ago, when I first heard about a one-page contest for Harlequin Heartwarming books. I sent in the first page of my current WIP, and it was good enough to move to the second stage: three chapters and a synopsis. That was AFTER THE FIREWEED , which is now up for nomination on Kindle Scout. Turns out the mystery/romance ratio was a little high for Harlequin, but the encouragement I received got me excited about the possibility of writing for Harlequin Heartwarming. Several rejections later, I felt like I was honing in on what they wanted. My agent was highly encouraging after reading my latest stories. She submitted them to Harlequin. I knew Victoria had my manuscripts, and that's where the tweet comes in.  When I saw it Friday, my heart started racing. My daughter and mother-in-law were here for the weekend, and I read it aloud, assuring them it probably wasn't me she was talking about. S...

I grew up on peach pie. Thanks to the foresight of my grandparents, we had a peach trees that yielded bushels and bushels of juicy, delicious fruit. If you’ve never had a tree-ripened peach, you don’t know what you’re missing.  They bear only the slightest resemblance to the peaches you get at the grocery store.   My mother used to give away grocery sacks full, but there were still plenty left to fill the freezer and use in ice cream and pie. So, in honor of the end of summer, I decided to bake a peach pie, homemade crust and all. I did have to use grocery store peaches. We actually have a peach tree in Arizona that blooms profusely, but thanks to late frosts, we’ve never harvested a peach.  The pie wasn’t quite as good as my mother’s, but maybe that’s just fond memories of childhood. It was still pretty darn good. The recipe is below. So what are you eating these days? Are you still enjoying summer fruits or have you moved on to pumpkin lattes and apple pie?...

AFTER THE FIREWEED is up for nomination on Kindle Scout.  It’s a romantic mystery, or maybe a mysterious romance. Anyway, it’s sweet and cozy, and a fun read.  And it takes place in my hometown of Anchorage, Alaska. Fireweed is that pink flower on the cover. It blooms in spikes, starting at the bottom and working its way up the stem. Local legend has it that when the blooms reach the top, summer is over. And in this story, summer's end means the heroine has to leave Alaska and go back to her real life.  But if she does, an innocent man be be convicted of murder. If you’re not familiar with Kindle Scout, it’s a program where readers can read excerpts from books and nominate their favorites. If any of the stories you nominate is selected to be published by Amazon under the Scout program, you’ll get a free advance copy of the e-book. Anyone with an Amazon account can nominate a book, and you can have up to three nominations active at any time. More nominations ...

Lately, I've been thinking about miracles. Not the big ones, like a building collapsing around someone, but a beam falls in such a way that they're somehow protected. Not even the medium ones, like the odds of my future husband's college roommate happening to be a friend of my college roommate. I've been thinking about the ordinary miracles we see everyday, if we take the time to notice. Like the beautiful berries on the mountain ash trees in Anchorage this year. A warm summer coupled with lots of rain in August mean lots of berries for the cedar waxwings to feast on this winter. Or there's this view of the Little Su during a sunny break on an August day. Every year, salmon hatch here, and eventually make their way to the ocean. They'll spend their lives there, but eventually something sends them home, where they'll fight their way up this river in order to lay and fertilize eggs, and the cycle starts again. Isn't that amazing? On the flight fro...