My perfect beach town isn't a fancy resort or glitzy planned community. It's a place with a hometown grocery that has decent meat, seafood, and a deli; a couple of ice cream shops; and a handful of good restaurants - where the island-wide dress code is 'no shoes, no shirt, no problem.'

Mary Kay Andrews

Categorized in : Good Dress Community Shoes

You have more issues than National Geographic by Austin LeFleur in Hissy Fit

Mary Kay Andrews

austin issues fit

And that point is, it doesn't matter how long you've known somebody. People change. Or you don't really know them as well as you thought you did in the first place.

Mary Kay Andrews

matter long people

Never, ever ask a former clergyman to say the blessing over a holiday dinner. Not if you like your dinner warm, anyway.

Mary Kay Andrews

dinner holiday blessing

Technology and the internet have changed the world of publishing forever.

Mary Kay Andrews

technology forever world

Patti Callahan Henry’s THE STORIES WE TELL is a lyrical exploration of love and longing, secrets and suspicion, family and friendship, all told with the author’s trademark insights into the hollows and curves of the heart and mind of a working woman who must balance the demands of motherhood, wifedom, sisterhood, and yes, the deepest cravings for artistic expression. I always love the stories PCH tells!

Mary Kay Andrews

sisterhood motherhood heart

Many years ago I had two small children, and I wanted to be able to be home when they got home from school. And I didn't like the direction journalism was taking. I thought if I could write books, I could work at home and have the best of both worlds. I wrote my first mystery while still working full time, and it didn't sell, but the next one did sell, so I quit my job for the world of fiction. Scary, but I've never regretted it for a single day.

Mary Kay Andrews

jobs book children

I want characters I can live for in a setting that makes me feel like I'm there, my characters are turned upside down and trying to reinvent themselves but don't need a white knight. They can save themselves in a crisis.

Mary Kay Andrews

living

One of the things that attracts me to vintage and antique things is they have stories, and even if I don't know the stories, I make them up.

Mary Kay Andrews

things know me vintage

The best way to heal a broken heart, it turns out, is to find a way to move past the hurt.

Mary Kay Andrews

best broken heart past

As a hopeless romantic, I'm drawn to stories of improbable beginnings.

Mary Kay Andrews

hopeless hopeless-romantic romantic

I try to start drinking water as soon as my feet hit the floor in the morning.

Mary Kay Andrews

start feet morning water

The story of my holiday decorating is if Ralph Lauren was trapped in a 1950s Woolworth, this is what it would look like.

Mary Kay Andrews

story like look holiday

I was supposed to be working on 'The Weekenders,' but I was blocked. I got this crazy idea that I would make Christmas stockings out of blankets.

Mary Kay Andrews

make blocked crazy christmas

Modern love - in the movies and music - especially country music - is full of tales of women exacting sweet revenge on the men who done them wrong.

Mary Kay Andrews

women music love men

I want my fiction to seem real.

Mary Kay Andrews

seem real want fiction

We are writing fiction, but we are trying to create a world that's believable.

Mary Kay Andrews

create writing trying world

Critics will tell you the 'meet cute' is a tired old writing cliche, but the thing is, cliche's work - because they ring true with the reader.

Mary Kay Andrews

you tired work cute

Some of my most enjoyable moments as a writer have come while conjuring a meet cute.

Mary Kay Andrews

meet some moments cute

I always wanted to use my newspaper background in a novel.

Mary Kay Andrews

background newspaper always use

My protagonists have problems that a new pair of shoes won't solve. Retail therapy is not a bad thing, but it's not going to fix their lives.

Mary Kay Andrews

problems new bad shoes