I Took on Love

On August 21, 2015 I released Taking a Gamble, the first book in the Taking on Love series. On June 28, 2016, Taking Another Shot was released and the series has come to a close.

The Taking on Love series, which consists of four books, came from characters that were introduced in the preceding Time for Love series. The main characters in the Time for Love series originally appeared in my young adult novel Like You Mean It. Readers loved the characters and asked for more. That led to a four book series that followed the love story of Justin Jacobs and Chelsea Schumacher which brought new characters along with old friends.

I think it was around the third book in the Time for Love series that I decided I wanted to do a spinoff series for some of those characters because I wanted to flesh them out. From that idea came the Taking on Love series.

In Taking a Gamble, Marcy Larsen finds herself married to Nick Singer, her best friend’s brother, after a night of drinking goes way too far. Then came Taking a Chance, the story of Randi and Tom who have to learn to let the past go if they’re going to take a chance on each other. After that was Taking a Risk where we learned that Grayson Jacobs has been hiding a big secret from his family and meeting Cris Kinkaid changes everything for him. Finally, there was Taking Another Shot. Since Grayson got his happily ever after, there was no way I could let his beard and B.F.F. Shayla Hamilton be robbed of hers.

Just as it was with Time for Love, writing the Taking on Love series was a blast. I enjoyed developing the characters and watching their stories unfold, but there was one of the four that I had the most fun with. I know that parents shouldn’t play favorites, and any writer will tell you that our stories are like children to us, but I really enjoyed writing Taking a Risk. Grayson and Cris were a couple that faced a lot of adversity, which any story needs, but it was writing about Cris’s brothers that made that story a riot for me. And of course, it gave me an idea. Yep, you guessed it, the remaining Kinkaid brothers are getting their own series.

One young adult novel spawned all this. Eight books later, I guess it’s safe to say that I took on love and we all won!