Valentine's Day and the "Song of the Fay."

I've been married for three years and have celebrated four Valentine's Days with my husband. However, prior to meeting Nathan, I never had a date on Valentine's Day, which made it a rather emotional holiday for me for a long time.

That said, I was tremendously blessed to have a father who was dedicated to making his wife and children feel cherished all year long. Valentine's Day was no exception, and he worked very, very had to do something special for us every year. One year we got our first DVD player on Valentine's Day! The year we were all obsessed with "The Lord of the Rings" he diligently tracked down our favorite characters in action figure form. I still have my Galadriel. And, the year I was down in Florida with my grandparents, he conspired with my grandfather to make sure there was a beautiful bouquet waiting for me when I got up in the morning.

So, even though there were a lot of years when I felt sad at being single, I look back and now feel tremendously blessed. It was much, much better for me to grow up feeling loved and cherished by my father, than to have a string of boyfriends prior to Nathan.

In "The Mermaid and the Unicorn" I created a main character who is quite different in personality than me--but her strong relationship with her father absolutely was inspired by my own relationship with my father. Although I did give her a Valentine's Day date (which was far more adventurous than any Valentine's Day I've ever experienced!), she, like me, is thankful for the blessing of having a steady father in her life. We both feel extremely blessed to have fathers who strive to follow the example of our heavenly Father.

I should note that I adore my mother and she's one of my strongest female role models. I just happen to be focusing on the strong Father-Daughter relationship in this book and post. However, in the next two books I'll be dealing with new characters, who have entirely different relationships with their parents. This, in turn, affects both their romantic relationships and their faith walk. For those of you who may have felt Daphne was a little too perfect and not relatable to your own journey...don't worry. We'll be having new adventures in "The Professor and the Siren" and "The Selkie and the Queen."

Now, as I noted on this blog earlier, since "The Professor and the Siren" is being expanded into a novel, it will not be released tomorrow (and probably not until 2018 at least). However, I still wanted to mark Valentine's Day, as my series centers strongly around the discovery and nature of sacrificial love, in all its forms. So, I'm marking the Kindle Version of "The Mermaid and the Unicorn" down to just 99 cents on Amazon for today and tomorrow. No coupon code necessary, just go to the Amazon page and you'll see the temporary markdown.

If you already own it on Kindle, and have been wanting to share it with friends, this would be a good time to gift it! Which, by the way, you can easily do on Amazon. Full instructions here.

(And, of course, if you already bought the paperback on Amazon, you can get the ebook for free. Or read it at no additional cost if you have Kindle Unlimited.)

The $.99 price will be good until the end of Tuesday, February 14th, 2017.

Not reading this post until the 15th or 16th? You can still get it at the reduced cost of $1.99 until the end of the 16th, when it will revert to $2.99.