A good romance has to have a hunky hero who gets the heroine’s heart pounding. I personally find a lot of different qualities attractive, but when it comes to my romance heroes, here are 10 of my favorites. 1)    A tortured past – he might be surly, grouchy, or just plain mean, but as long as there is a reason behind it (especially one that can be worked through) then this gives the hero a little license to behave badly for a bit. 2)    A rockin’ bod – okay, this probably isn’t politically correct, but we are discussing heroes in romance novels and fantasy guys are just more fun when they are built 😉 3)    A heart of gold – like #1, he might be the meanest guy in the room, but there is a difference between mean and cruel. If he’s a jerk to the heroine at first because he’s just trying to protect himself but deep down he’s really totally in love with her and wants to ride off into the sunset and make her dreams come true, then that totally works for me. If he’s the sort that will kick a puppy just for the fun of…

It was more of a desire to ‘spin a yarn’. An old phrase for a story teller but one I feel fits me. When I was young, my family owned a motor home. We went everywhere in that thing. This was before ipods, Gameboys and even DVD’s…much less DVD players. We had board games and the radio but there were places there wasn’t even good reception. Filling those hours on the road came down to using your imagination. I used to tell stories to my younger siblings, creating characters and worlds. My mother was a Medical librarian by day. She often took a second job at night at the public or university library to keep up with unexpected expenses. I learned to enjoy reading young because she took me along. I began reading romance in my teens. Without a doubt it hooked me and I still read the gene today.  Writing these tales came about rather by chance. I was unhappy with an ending to a book I had been enjoying and sat down to write a book. Sounds easier than it was. Writing is a skill and one I had a great deal to learn about…still do. A smart…

I’ve been writing professionally for ten years, making a fulltime living at it for the past six. So why should I be so excited to have THE TROUBLEMAKER NEXT DOOR coming out with Sourcebooks? First of all, I’m ALWAYS excited on release day. I don’t care if it’s for a publisher or myself. Release day is the culmination of a lot of hours of hard, grueling work in the manuscript draft, editing, more editing, polishing, proofing and promoting. It’s exhausting but so worth it to see that cover ready to be opened. But this series with Sourcebooks marks the beginning of a new medium for me—mass market. When I started writing, if you didn’t have a book published in paperback you weren’t considered a real writer, an unfortunate happenstance considering I started my career in ebooks. *grin* Back then, ebooks were the redheaded stepchild. Today, they’re the new black. I’ve had books in electronic format, trade format, and audio. But never before mass market. And it’s a true thrill, I’ll admit, to line up my McCauley Brothers books right next to others on my keeper shelf. Unlike my others, these fit! What makes THE TROUBLEMAKER NEXT DOOR also special is…

All writers have a cave, that place where they get sucked into another world. One without dishes and dust and carpools, just characters trying to find love and escape death. The cave can be a good place. We can block out the outside world and focus completely on our stories and our characters. Fix those nasty holes in our plots. Wear our pajamas, and if we’re really on a tight deadline, we might skip a shower and a meal. Our characters don’t mind. They don’t really care if we’ve eaten today, if we missed a doctor’s appointment, or we’re late picking up the kids. They just want their story on the page. But we’re more than just writers, more than our characters and stories. We can’t get so busy with our characters and plots that we forget family. Remember those people who keep knocking on the door asking “where’s dinner?” and we yell out, “Just one more paragraph. My heroine is dangling off a cliff. For heaven’s sake, I can’t just leave her there.” There needs to be a balance. If we spend all our time in the cave, we’ll burn out. Our lives and our stories will suffer. It’s…