First of all, I want to say thank you to the Fresh Fiction crowd for having me today!  I absolutely adore these people and am so thankful that I have them in my life!!!!!  I love to read and the Fresh Fiction team always has a million reviews and recommendations on what I should be reading—something I really appreciate now that my crazy writing schedule doesn’t let me read quite as much as I used to. That’s one of the reasons I’m so looking forward to Thanksgiving this year.  I’m usually a mess when it comes to planning (anyone who knows me can attest to this), but something about the holidays brings out the compulsive planner in me—which means that once the turkey is on for Thanksgiving dinner, I’ve got everything else done.  All I need to do is kick back, watch the Macy’s Thanksgiving parade with my kids and start on my #bingereading (which, let’s face it, is one of the best parts of the holiday season). This year, I’ve already got three books on my Nook just waiting to be binge read—Sylvia Day’s CAPTIVATED BY YOU, Jandy Nelson’s I’LL GIVE YOU THE SUN and Patricia Cornwell’s FLESH AND…

1 Swoon-Worthy Hero That pretty much goes unsaid I guess, but it is one of the most important ingredients. In AN OFFICER AND A REBEL, we have Nate Walsh. He shows up right after former town-rebel Kelsey wrecks her car dodging a deer on the snowy road. He’s a cop, but he’s also the kind of guy who would stop to help anyone. He looks good in his uniform, and the hours he spends helping his dad on the farm on top of his job means he’s good with his hands, too. A Heavy Dusting of Snow I suppose you could have a holiday story without it, but there’s something about snow and the white wonderland it leaves behind that says Christmas. Plus it’s a good reason to stay inside & cuddle in front of a warm fireplace. See what other sparks you can get going 🙂 Holiday Treats (Use generously) Whether you’re a fan of fudge, caramel popcorn, cookies, eggnog, or all of the above, the holidays are a good time to indulge in eating. Kelsey believes all cookies should involve chocolate, and when Nate helps her out, the oven isn’t the only thing heating up the kitchen. They…

Tomorrow, all over America, families will convene to celebrate Thanksgiving. There will be cooks in the kitchen making old family favorites. There will be football, family gossip, and getting down on the floor playing with the grandkids. There will be family togetherness and family drama too. And most of us wouldn’t miss it for the world. At its best, Thanksgiving reconnects us to the people we love. We celebrate our blessing and all the ties that bind us together at this season of the year. This kind of traditional family get-together is something that Mike Taggart, the hero of LAST CHANCE FAMILY has never known. Mike’s early years were painful. He left home at seventeen and became a successful professional gambler living in Las Vegas – not particularly the most family-oriented locale. He’s never had anywhere to go or be on Thanksgiving. There are no ties that pull him home because he has no real home. And then his estranged half-sister passes away, leaving him with legal custody of her five-year-old daughter, Rainbow. Mike knows he will never be the father Rainbow needs. So he sets off to find his other half-sibling, Tim, who is now a Methodist minister serving…

“A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” – Steve Jobs As of today (November 22, 2014 when I’m writing this piece), I have written seven full-length Original Sinners novels, seven Original Sinners novellas, and approximately twenty Original Sinners short stories for a grand total of over 1 million words. When writing a series of this scope with stories that span three decades, the challenge is how to keep things fresh and interesting for readers when they know your characters and this world almost as intimately as you (the writer) knows them. That’s where the Steve Jobs quote above comes in. Now it may seem strange to take writing inspiration from a computer designer and CEO, but the late-great Steve Jobs was the man responsible for the smartphone which I assume 99% of people reading this article own. You might even be reading this article on your iPhone (or another brand of smartphone, but let’s be honest, Steve Jobs is responsible for even the non-Apple smartphones). Apple was a computer company that turned into a phone company because one day Jobs and his team were sitting around a table complaining about how…