Ways to enjoy Dry January all year long

I love the culture of alcohol. I love pairing wine with food, going on distillery tours, visiting local breweries, attending wine tastings, discussing the ingredients in an elaborate cocktail, etc. I love it so much that I’ve based two series around the culture of alcohol: my first series is about a winegrowing kingdom, my second takes place in a family bar.

But the reality is that I have alcoholism in my family. My grandmother was one of the top drug and alcohol counselors in our county. We’ve all seen or experienced alcohol’s dark side. One of the issues my sisters in After Hours on Milagro Street and Full Moon Over Freedom struggle with is how their father’s alcoholism affected their lives. It’s even addressed in a mock-cocktail menu in Full Moon Over Freedom.
 
Like many people, I embarked on Dry January as a re-fresh for the start of the year. This has been the longest I’ve gone without a drink since I was pregnant with my youngest son two decades ago. 
 
I’ve learned that I enjoy going out, whether or not I have alcohol. I’ve learned I’m totally okay with other people drinking when I don’t. I’ve learned I’m comfortable choosing not to drink and still prepared to go out and have a ball.
 
Most importantly, I’ve learned there are lots of tasty non-alcohol options. Here are some that I’ve enjoyed this month.

Fancy mocktails at bars

Thank God for the mocktail movement. I’ve had some delicious drinks here in Houston at Angel’s Share, Hugo’s, and Bar 3. They were made so beautifully that I didn’t even feel like I was missing out. They fulfilled that enjoyment I have of sitting at the bar sipping something delicious. Even without a mocktail menu, I’ve learned that bartenders are pretty helpful coming up with something non-alcoholic on the fly.

Non-alcohol beer

I’ve tried a few non-alcohol beers during this month. The best, by far, have been from Athletic Brewing Co., a brewery whose entire focus is no-alcohol beers. If you like IPA, I highly recommend the Free Wave. I can find this beer at my local grocery store.

Alcohol-free stores

If you can’t find good non-alcohol beer at your grocery store, then you might have a shop focused on no-alcohol drinks in your area. Here in Houston we have Sipple. Rather than wasting money on something loaded with sugar or no-alcohol wine that tastes like grape juice, it’s great to go to this shop and get recommendations from the experts!

No-alcohol spirits

At Sipple, I discovered that there are lots of no-alcohol spirits that you can sip alone or with a mixer and feel like you’re having a cocktail. Because I also decided to embark on a healthy form of keto this January, I didn’t want something with a lot of sugar. The folks at Sipple recommended Pentire Seaward, this junipery, briney tasting spirit that tastes amazing by itself or mixed with club soda. It has zero calories and zero carbs.

Fake your brain

In lieu of all of these, I’m a big fan of Topo Chico and lime. I saw a TikToker who cleaned out a Miller Lite bottle, kept it handy, and filled it with sparkling water whenever she wanted to feel like having a beer. Sometimes it’s just the procedure of relaxing with a drink that signals to your brain that it’s time to take a load off.

I’m glad I’ve figured out some healthy habits to cut back on my drinking as I age without cutting back on the fun I like to have. With all that said, I am super looking forward to February 1!!!!

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Where to find me on social media

There are exciting things happening on the writing front for me and some very unexciting things happening in the world of social media. I will be making announcements soon on the exciting stuff, and I always strive to share it with my newsletter subscribers first. But in the mean time, here are the best places to find me on social media!

Patreon: https://patreon.com/angelinamlopez
BookBub: https://www.bookbub.com/profile/angelina-m-lopez
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/angelinamlo/
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Old-school romance recommendations

Recently, I made an ass of myself – in the most consensual, I-was-totally-on-board way – by being romance author Andie J. Christopher’s inaugural guest for her new Instagram Live program Drunk (Romance) History. Essentially, I drank sangria and got increasingly goofier and foul-mouthed as I told her about one of my favorite old-school romance books, Teresa Medeiros’ Fairest of Them All.

It was awesome. Not just because of the mid-Saturday drinking and being able to hang out virtually with Andie. But because it also allowed me to wax rhapsodic about my babies: My two-layer deep keeper shelf of old-school romance novels.

I’ve been reading romance since I was 12-ish. I’ve been buying it and relying it as a form of self-caring escapism since I was 14. Once e-books became a thing, I switched much of my purchasing to that platform. But my old-school keeper shelf is evidence of my early dedication to this incredible, female-centric art form.

In her podcast Fated Mates, historical romance author Sarah MacLean said: “I think romance does so much important work in the world…. Romance taught me that women had agency, that heroines were proactive, that you can expect parity in a relationship, that you could expect love and devotion and intellectual stimulation from a partner, that you could expect sexual agency and sexual pleasure from a partner and that kind of lesson is so important.”

That quote was so meaningful to me, that I cried. 😅

This stack of books, read at a crucial period of growth as a maturing girl then young woman, taught me so much about what to expect as a woman, what to expect from the men I was with. I also read fantasy and horror and mystery and scif-fi and literature. Just as I was able to close those books and walk away with important lessons without thinking I needed to fly to the moon or turn into a giant bug to put those lessons to work, I was able to differentiate in a romance novel what was heart-poundingly entertaining and what was valuable insight into the human condition.

“ Just as I was able to close those books and walk away with important lessons without thinking I needed to fly to the moon or turn into a giant bug to put those lessons to work, I was able to differentiate in a romance novel what was heart-poundingly entertaining and what was valuable insight into the human condition.”

These old school books lack diversity. You’ll notice I have few books by authors of color. Sherry Thomas’ “My Beautiful Enemy” was published in 2014 and Beverly Jenkins’ “Forbidden” was published in 2016 – by then I was purchasing most of my books on my e-device. I was so accustomed to seeing myself absent from all the media that I consumed that I never even recognized that I and women with dark skin were missing from the books I read.

Issues of consent are real, too. I began to re-read the first book I ever bought for myself, a much-loved book in which I know whole passages by heart, but I had to put it aside. It was just too much for now. But I can appreciate what that author did for me then, writing with our “then” understanding, trying to appease a middle-American audience who fervently believed good girls said “no” but wanted heroines to be getting it, yes. I appreciate that the author, ultimately, showed me a journey where a heroine determined her course and a hero valued her pleasure.

These are some of my most-read favorites:

Teresa Medeiros, Fairest of Them All

I sold Andie on it by telling her, “This has butt stuff.” It was shocking at the time because NO books had butt stuff back then. It’s the gentlest, sweetest, most illusionary butt stuff you can imagine. But it’s HAWT!!!! Medeiros had this fantastic knack of writing intensely emotive books – truly funny, truly weepy – that were just so damn fun. And hot!!!! This book is about a beauty who shields her beauty to avoid an unwanted marriage, and then falls in love with the man who believes he’s married an ugly duckling who will break his family’s curse. You can get the drunken Cliff Notes here.

Nora Roberts, Tears of the Moon

Nora’s so good at writing big, sweeping books, but this is a little, tiny, hugely heartwarming tale of two people who’ve grown up together in a picturesque Irish village. She’s a handywoman and he’s the cook at his brother’s pub and they discover, out of the blue, that they have the burning-hots for each other. The sex of convenience becomes SO MUCH MORE. I want to bone the hero of this book, a dreamy Irish wanna-be musician, so hard. Apropos of nothing, Nora signed this book in 2005.

Bettina Krahn, The Husband Test

Bettina, like Teresa, could write in any genre and make it awesome. She wrote pirates like nobody’s business. This one’s set in medieval times and it’s a little Sound of Music-esque: The heroine loves being a nun, even though she’s bad at it, and hopes to prove herself by being the best husband judge the convent’s ever seen. When she’s sent to the hero’s broken-down estate to judge him, they both are drawn to each other, even though they both intensely resist it. Because of course. This is one of those books where the heroine pitches in to the community and ultimately makes the world a better place – I love those books.

Julia Quinn, When He Was Wicked

This book was part of the Washington Romance Writer’s retreat swag bag when Julia Quinn and Eloisa James came to our retreat – when I tell that story, I feel like I’m talking about the time I saw Mumford and Sons in a little club with 15 other people. Anyway, this best-friend’s-widow book grabbed me and wouldn’t let go – I stayed in my room to read it and missed the first half of the retreat! Bad boy Michael (gloriously hot Michael) is the new earl after his best friend and cousin died prematurely, leaving behind a widow that Michael has loved since he met her on her wedding day. He can’t have her – and she’s shocked when she discovers he wants her – and sometimes-prim Julia, who isn’t always my cup of tea, writes yearning SOOOOOOO GOOOOOOD in this book.

Susan Elizabeth Phillips, Dream A Little Dream

I’ve met SEP five times and I’ve cried every single time. Her writing… If the job of a horror writer is to make you scream and the job of a mystery writer is to make you puzzle, then a job of a romance writer is to make you feel. Viscerally feel the sensation of falling in love. No one does that better then SEP. She creates complicated characters and gives them joy and anguish and humor and irritating habits and makes them fully fleshed creatures we can deeply empathize with. In Dream A Little Dream, the heroine and her young son are as destitute as they can be – her scraping the thinnest layer of peanut butter out of a jar is a detail I can never forget – when their car breaks down in front of what looks like an abandoned drive in. The drive-in’s surly, damaged and HOT owner, whose half-heartedly trying to fix the drive-in up, wants nothing to do with them. Of course. This is a fantastic gut-wrenching book of two broken people finding peace together.

Laura Kinsale, The Shadow and the Star

I’m pretty sure I picked this book up for its Fabio cover. But the incredible insides…Kinsale was a literary romance writer, always pushing herself and the genre to its limits. One of her books was written in Middle English. Another was about a man’s debilitating brain hemorrhage – he loses his speech, ability to reason, control of his movements — and the woman who nurses him back. The Shadow and the Star is about a man who was sexually violated as a child before he was rescued by an aristocratic family. Now, he seeks peace and knows how to commit stealthy violence. He meets a Jane-Eyre-type woman – although she’s beautiful – who finds her strength and peace in propriety. It’s an incredible and unlikely pairing and a beautifully written book. Kinsale writes sentence that you want to lick.

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I’m taking a social media break for the month of October, but I’ll still be blogging.

Supernatural and self-care: The value of escapism

(Author’s note: Join me Saturday, June 12 at 5 pm CT/6 pm ET when I celebrate the release of Serving Sin with Clif Kosterman, the bodyguard for Jensen Ackles and Jared Padalecki for the last thirteen years.)

Every time there’s a crisis in my life, I escape into pop culture. After 9/11, I read all three books of The Lord of the Rings and spent hours watching Star Trek: Next Gen. When my dad died, I got addicted to Bones (yeah, I know it’s weird).

And when a social anxiety disorder brought my fantastic son home during his freshman year in college, forced him to put on hold his dream to be a physicist and made me learn new skills to be parent and person, I turned to a little, weird show that my romance author friends had been talking about for years: Supernatural.

Sam and Dean Winchester. The boys. Baby. Chuck be with you. Or not.

“This bonkers, escapist show is my self care.”

This November, this little cult-ish show will air its final episode after 15 seasons. I was a late adopter and didn’t start watching until 2017. But when it bit – phew – it bit hard. I went to my first Supernatural convention in the fall of 2017. I went to my second in 2019, where I asked co-star Jensen Ackles to pose my book cover with me. The smoldering look he gave me has become famous in some circles (called my friends) and is the basis of my next book in The Filthy Rich series, Serving Sin. I am currently in the middle of my THIRD Supernatural re-watch. THIRD. And the show has more than 300+ episodes!

You can click the link here to view the Twitter thread about this ridiculous image.

I don’t know what the special sauce is that has made Supernatural such a phenomenon for myself and so many others (yes I do, it’s two hot good ol’ boys totally devoted to each other without love interests so there’s no chance of jumping the shark). But what I do know is that the show got me through a particularly hard and sometimes scary three years of my life. It didn’t “solve” anything. It didn’t teach me anything. It didn’t improve me.

What it did was allow my brain to rest and relax when I was overwhelmed and scared, when there was so much I couldn’t fix or control. Watching an episode – apocalypses and all -- before bed relaxed me enough to sleep. Reading the fanfiction kept me from fixating in the middle of the night. Adding the stars’ gorgeous images to my ridiculous Pinterest page “Supernatural is Lady Porn” gave me an endorphin shot and made me smile.

This bonkers, escapist show is my self care.

I learned the value of self-care in escapist form in the eighth grade. I’d just moved to San Francisco and it was my first experience with mean girls. I didn’t understand them. I couldn’t reason with them. I wouldn’t change for them. And I knew, for the course of that year at least, I couldn’t escape them. So I had to withstand them.

The way I did that was by going to B. Dalton after particularly rough days, buying a romance novel and a bag of Ruffles potato chips, and camping out on my bed for the next seven hours. My mom let me skip coming down for dinner. But those classic romance novels were the one thing that allowed my brain to relax and freed me mentally from a situation I couldn’t change and had to withstand.

To this day, I believe those books helped me to learn an important skill at an invaluable time.

Part of the reason I’m a romance writer is because I believed in escapist self care, of getting lost in fantasies that allow your problem-solving brain to relax. And, oh baby, there is no better fantasy than that of the handsome Jensen Ackles smoldering at you. I want to give adults escapist fairy tales because I believe they have value.

“The show got me through a particularly hard and sometimes scary three years of my life. It didn’t “solve” anything. It didn’t teach me anything. It didn’t improve me. What it did was allow my brain to rest and relax when I was overwhelmed and scared, when there was so much I couldn’t fix or control.”

Now, as an adult with two adult-aged kids, I feel like there’s even less under my control. Many of us Americans are feeling this way as we stare in shock and awe at the way our federal leadership continues to ignore this pandemic. I’m not advocating we be like them (him) – I’m not saying we throw up our hands and stick our heads in the sand.

I’m saying that after you’ve worn your mask and washed your hands and helped your kids and finished that Zoom call and registered to vote, you allow yourself to sit down with a good romance book and embrace it as one of the things that allows you to take care of you.

Or turn on the tube and start watching a weird little horror sci-fi show. With 300+ episodes, it’s that escapist fantasy that you won’t get tired of anytime soon.

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Join me Saturday, June 12 at 5 pm CT/6 pm ET when I celebrate the release of Serving Sin with Clif Kosterman, the bodyguard for Jensen Ackles and Jared Padalecki for the last thirteen years. Click here to learn more and register.

Letting the Writing Journey Takes Its Time

(Authors note: I wrote this article for the BookRiot website, where it was published in November 2019. I can’t find it now, however, so I’m republishing it here.)

In my mid-20s, I decided I was going to take my secret love for romance novels out of the closet and begin writing them. I joined my local chapter of Romance Writers of America and went to my first RWA conference in 2000.

My debut book, Lush Money, came out fall of 2019.

I understand that sounds like a horror show for most, a tale of dejection and woe. And yes, while there were moments of that in this 20-year journey, the one piece of advice I’ve been sharing most often with aspiring writers is: Let the writing journey take its time. That’s probably easier for me to say and swallow because I began writing when traditional publishing was the only option; my mindset was that it was a slow process. In the era of self-publishing and Twitter pitches, we expect quick results.

But as arduous as waiting is – and I know many of you feel like you’ve been waiting forever -- I believe there are tremendous advantages when the journey from aspiring writer to published writer takes some time.

1. You can build up a network of writer and industry friends who will support and promote you.

During those 20 years, I was an active member of my national and local writing chapters. I met aspiring writers, published writers, and industry folks, and learned so much from every single one of them. I wouldn’t be a debut author with a book reviewed in some really amazing places without those contacts. Really. Use this time to meet, support, and engage with the hard-working writers in the trenches beside you. I can’t stress how important this has been to my career.

2. You can write enough to feel confident in your writing abilities and routine when facing the daunting pressure of a publisher’s deadline and expectations.

Those 20 years gave me lots of time to practice the craft and discipline of writing without anyone breathing down my neck. When I suddenly had a three-book contract, I felt like I could rise to the challenge without freaking out. Freaking out is bad when you’ve got deadlines. Practice the craft, understand your voice, and learn the art of ass-in-chair now before an agent and publisher – people whose paychecks depends on your words – are looking over your shoulder.

3. You can learn the online marketing skills all authors need before the chaos of a publishing schedule.

The cold-hard truth: All authors need to know how to update their website. All authors need to understand how to post to social media and engage an audience. And life is a ton easier if you also know how to create graphics and use a scheduler and put out a newsletter. You will not be the two percent of authors with a huge promotional budget from your publisher. You just won’t. So learn those skills now, when you have the time and patience for the learning curve.

4. You can practice taking care of your physical and mental health so you can sustain a long writing career.

Publishing is overwhelming physically. You’re sitting for hours on end, forgoing exercise and sleep to write and market, and eating what’s easy instead of what’s healthy. And it’s daunting mentally: When your life’s dream comes true, it also creates something you can screw up. So implement those self-care habits now – exercise, meditation, work-life balance, a good sleep schedule – that will help you withstand the physical and mental pressures of publishing and enjoy a long career.

5. You can enjoy the journey.

I know how obnoxious this is. It’s like when parents of older children tell parents of young children, “Enjoy it. It goes by so fast.” Yeah, not fast enough. But right now, you have the opportunity to explore what’s important to you, to write your bliss, to find your voice and words. You have the space and the freedom to create your own special brand of magic on the page. Embracing that space, that freedom, is what will get you a publishing contract or a breakthrough indie book.

Embracing this waiting time is what will bring the wait to an end.

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