As an author, I’ve found that inspiration for books can come from anywhere. And I truly mean anywhere. For example, the idea seed for the Magic Potion mysteries sprouted at a rest stop off I-75 in southern Georgia. More than a decade ago, my family was making its way from Ohio to Florida (16 hours in the car—have mercy!), and we were somewhere in southern Georgia—the part of the trip where slap happiness and delirium sets in and snacks have run out—when we knew it was time to stop for a bit. Walk around. Guzzle caffeine. Restock Peanut M&Ms. We’d just begun looking for a place when we spotted a roadside attraction billboard that contained the magic road-trip words: Clean Restrooms. It was called Magnolia Plantation, and I’m not even sure if it’s still there. Back then, it was a delightful oasis of sights (aisles and aisles of stuff) and smells (pecans, mostly) and sounds (love a Southern accent), and it did, in fact, have clean restrooms. As we wandered around, our delirium slowly wearing off, I spotted a small section of books. And I found this gem (see picture!). I knew immediately that it had to come home with…

So much about the Christmas holidays is wonderful. We get together with friends and family we might not see at any other time of year, cook our favorite foods, decorate the whole house, sing the good old songs, give and receive thoughtful gifts…. Even if we also sometimes wish we could find a place to hide and take a three-day nap. Then there’s the weather, which means we can be traveling at the least convenient time of year. And the budget, which must accommodate travel expenses, holiday shopping, holiday meals (with libation), holidays guests, and holiday heating bills. And the folks who react to the holidays by over-imbibing, or channeling Attila the Hun in the mall parking lot, or the children who MUST come down with the flu on December 20th, or the relatives who revive the feud that should have died a quarter century ago (the feud, not the relatives….). And that’s all before Christmas itself. The holidays, in other words, can be stressful. Really, really stressful. The characters in my Scottish Victorian holiday romance, WHAT A LADY NEEDS FOR CHRISTMAS, have added to their yuletide stress by becoming engaged. Dante Hartwell is a Scottish mill owner who seeks…

For me, writing Victorian mysteries is pure joy! First of all, I love the Victorian age. There was so much going on then; so many new discoveries. Transportation was fascinating, going from the horse-drawn age into the age of the horseless carriage. Gaslight was slowly giving way to electricity. Fashions had great variety, both women’s and men’s. Manners – now so many lost – were de rigor. The class system was alive and well, for good or evil, yet there were endless opportunities for anyone with ambition. Without question there were many dark sides to nineteenth century life, yet for the writer this can only be considered a plus. One can certainly focus where one wishes and the very knowledge of aspects of the darker side of Victorian life play well into the potential plots and stories of the mystery writer. My protagonists are Bram Stoker and his assistant Harry Rivers. Stoker is very much the fount of knowledge while Harry is the ever-willing partner/associate. The relationship falls somewhere between Holmes-and-Watson and Wolfe-and-Goodwin. Stoker, coming from Ireland, has a vast store of occult knowledge – together with a belief in leprechauns, ghosts, magic, and the sixth sense – and finds…

If the question is where I get the ideas for the stories I write the simple answer is…people. All of my writing is pretty much character driven. That is not to say that I’m not concerned with the other elements of literature…plot..setting etc. but these things concern me fundamentally in how they interact with the characters in my stories. Description as in the case of a beautiful sunset i.e. the watery glow slipped beneath the sea causing the last light to radiate across the shimmering water turning the world for that brief moment into an impressionist painting-works to my mind much more when seen through the eyes of a character. What is the mind-set, the emotion, the internal conflict going on? How does this visual effect or affect the character? I try to create characters in the context of the story that are believable and real. Even with their quirks, they are the kind of people that you could meet in the course of everyday life. My favorite bumper sticker is…we’re all dysfunctional deal with it…or as Virgil Dalton, the central figure in DEATH AT THE BLACK BULL says, “We’re all broken just in different ways”. I’d venture to say…

For me, the main difference between writing YA (young adult) and adult romance is the narrative voice. When I write romantic suspense, I use what I call “deep point of view” — every scene is written from the perspective of one of the main characters in the story. So in each scene, it is as if the reader is inside one character’s mind, sharing his or her thoughts as he or she describes what’s going on in. And of course, since the main characters in my adult romances are, well, adults, that means every scene is told through a filter of adult priorities, adult vocabulary, and adult experience. But when I co-wrote NIGHT SKY— my first YA novel — with my daughter, Melanie, we wrote in an entirely different narrative voice. First of all, unlike any of my adult romances, we decided to create NIGHT SKY in the first person. The entire story is told by our main character — sixteen-year-old Skylar Reid. And there’s another huge difference: NIGHT SKY takes place in a paranormal futuristic world, where certain young women — including Sky herself — have been targeted for abduction because they possess super-human powers. Most of my adult romances feature…