Congrats to Kim Golden and Maybe Baby!

Loyalty-contributor Kim Golden has done it again--her self-published women's fiction novel Maybe Baby has been awarded Bronze in the Readers' Favorite 2014 International Book Awards! You can find her book in the Fiction-Drama category, but what I recommend most strongly is that you get yourself a copy, digital or print, and start reading. It's escapist, page-turning reading at its best, complete with a healthy dose of armchair travel, but as a very important part of my childhood says, you don't have to take my word for it.

Imagine finding out you could never have a baby with the man you love...

Expat American Laney Halliwell finds out the hard way when Niklas tells her he had a vasectomy before they met and isn't interested in reversing it. Why should he? They've got his kids from his first marriage and an enviable life in Stockholm.

What if you fell in love in the most unexpected way...?

But Laney wants more. So when a friend suggests she look into an alternative sperm bank in Copenhagen to find a potential father for her baby, things don't go exactly as planned. Especially when Laney meets Mads and finds herself falling in love.

Congratulations to Kim!

An Interview with Kim Golden, Author of Maybe Baby

Kim Golden has already had a busy year. She released her most recent full novel, Maybe Baby, began her new serial novella Maybe Tonight, and is currently at work on a third book in the series. If you don't usually read women's fiction, now is the time to begin, and Kim is where you want to start. Maybe Baby follows Laney, an American expat in her thirties living in Stockholm with her Swedish boyfriend Niklas. Laney has just realized that she'd like to have a child, and Niklas has just revealed that he's had a vasectomy that he doesn't want to reverse. With that, Laney's off to Copenhagen to check out a sperm bank with some slightly unorthodox methods, which is where she meets Mads.

Think you know what's going to happen? I admit that I did, too--until I started reading. 

What makes Kim's success even more compelling is that she publishes under her own imprint and does the vast majority of the work--which extends well beyond writing the actual book--herself. Kim lives in Stockholm, where she is the love refugee of her husband Tord. You may recognize her and her writing from an earlier post in The Loyalty of Water; read on for a glimpse into her process, imagination, and plans for the future.

Interview edited for clarity. 

Emily: First off, it's been really exciting to see from here how well Maybe Baby has been doing. Did you expect this? And where is it today? What's been the best placement on Amazon?

Kim: No, I didn't expect it at all! I hoped that people would like it, but I was more worried that people would hate the infidelity storyline.

Today it's at #18 on the Kindle Bestsellers List for African-American Women's Fiction. The highest it's been was #8. I think if I do a bit more marketing, it'll be back up again.

Emily: You know, that's not a reaction I ever had...even though I would in real life. Have you run into that before in anything else you've written? 
Or is that something that's often a third rail with readers?

 For me, at least, part of why it didn’t bother me was just how Niklas was drawn. I did feel his pain, but it was also apparent that he had been living his life without making any real effort on behalf of Laney for a long time.

Kim: People who read romance novels often swear by these unwritten rules and one of them is that the hero or heroine must not cheat. But, since Maybe Baby isn't a romance, I didn't care about that rule. There were still some people who bitched about it. With Snowbound, there were readers who completely flipped out about the infidelity there.

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The Loyalty of Water: That Old Familiar Feeling

Guest post by Kim Golden 

Picture this: a scruffy sports bar in Richmond, Virginia in the early 1990s. A group of young writers talking shop over pitchers of Sam Adams and bowls of greasy fries. We are all drunk on youth, on beer, on the freedom to write when and where we want. The warm summer night air is heavy with promise—of words written and words to write, of sex, of stories longing to be told. And yet…we didn’t care. Or perhaps we did, and just didn’t understand the gift we’d been given. 

Back then, we could spend all day, all night, writing and talking about writing. As students in Virginia Commonwealth University’s MFA program, we spent our mornings teaching or working in the Writing Center, our afternoons in cafés or in seminars, our evenings in creative writing workshops, and our nights in various bars imitating the writers we admired, writing drunk, editing sober. We took for granted that our lives would always be like this. I think we all imagined we’d continue our careers in the academia, teaching classes, hopefully on tenure track at some point, with our summers always free for road trips or writing in parks. The idea of having to balance our lives—of actually needing to carve out time for writing—never occurred to us. And most of the time, we wasted all of those precious hours when we could have been writing—we were too busy with our social lives or talking about writing instead of simply writing. 

Now fast forward fifteen-odd years.

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