Since BELIEVE IT OR NOT hit shelves in early March, I’ve seen one piece of feedback pretty consistently: Cool character names! It actually surprised me a little bit. To be honest, naming characters is one of those author tasks I always assume others have a much better grasp on than I do. Like maybe when the great muse handed out writer skills, I was off in the corner making penis jokes when all the other authors got the enviable ability to come up with clever names. That’s why I’ve been pleased by that particular piece of praise. BELIEVE IT OR NOT stars a hero named Drew, who owns a bar that features male strippers a few nights a week. When I originally began noodling the story in 2008, I started off calling him Andy. It didn’t take long for me to realize that was the wrong name. Andy plays tennis and has dimples. Andy wears polo shirts and never forgets to hold the door open for his date. Drew on the other hand, is more jaded. He masks it with dry humor a habit of juggling quirky objects, but he knows what to do when someone needs a shoulder to…

What’s the most important thing about a romance novel? Why, the romance, of course. Folks who’ve never read the genre seem to believe that all romances are alike. Boy meets girl, boy and girl fall in love, boy and girl live happily ever after. People persist in believing this even though the romances they’ve had in their own lives are never the same. Did your first love follow the same pattern as the love you have with the person you later married? Did your flirtation with a guy on the subway turn into a romance or into a pleasant memory or did you forget it the moment you got off the train? What makes each romance different, in our lives as well as in our fiction, is who we are now. And who we are is a product of our age, our live experience, and our environment. Which is, oddly, why setting is so important to any romance. Navy Seals are different from stockbrokers, in part, because of where they work. Drop your average stockbroker into a war zone—with guns and bombs and chaos—and that stockbroker might break. Drop your average Navy Seal into a brokerage, and that Seal might…