Being new to the job of a published writer, I thought I’d share the top five most exciting moments of my journey from the time I began chapter one of that very first story. Writing romance is something I’d dreamed of doing for so many years, but it was about eight years ago I sat down and seriously started to pursue that dream. It’s been a long road, with lots of highs and plenty of lows, too. One piece of advice I was given was to enjoy writing and the journey chasing that dream would take me on – and I did! 1. The first time I wrote “the end” – It’s a major milestone and should be marked accordingly. Whether that story makes it into print or not, you are a writer, so go and crack open a bottle of bubbly, or at the very least, give yourself a pat on the back. 2. There are other writers out there? – When I started writing it felt like I was the only unpublished writer out there, but as soon as I joined The Romantic Novelists’ Association I began meeting lots of women just like me, who were hooked on…

One of the great gifts I receive as a writer are the messages from readers who say they never truly understood the situation in Tibet or life on the colonial frontier –the settings of my two series—until they read my novels. It highlights an aspect of writing that we too often ignore. Good fiction can, and should, help us understand our world more effectively than nonfiction. Historians deal with sterile facts, on a macro, societal level—and our collective understanding of history slips lower every year. Skilled novelists translate those facts into personal human experience, providing the reader with an opportunity to viscerally connect with another time and place. Your mind may grasp the dreadful statistics of China’s occupation of Tibet but if you truly want to understand that world, your heart needs to grasp the anguish of the gentle lama who is tormented for sitting at an altar with his Buddha. You can find plenty of timelines and bodycounts reflecting life in the American colonies but they pale beside experiencing the power of an Iroquois shaman through the eyes of an exiled Scot sitting at his campfire. “Fiction,” Emerson wrote, “reveals truth that reality obscures.” For those of us who…

So…I have my own laptop. It’s where all the writing happens naturally. However, I forget that surfing the web comes with mapping and tracking your computer history. Not that it really matters…until you go on someone else’s computer. Let’s say, for example, my husbands. Surfing the web for “hot shirtless guys with tattoos” may be a normal thing in my world (because hey, a girl needs to have inspiration when writing about a ripped, sexy hero!) but when my laptop was out of commission for a couple days, I used my husband’s desktop computer. When I finally got through the week and was back to my precious, the hubby had some questions about the browser history I’d left behind. “Um, J?” he asks as he scrolls through his computer. “Why am I getting pop ups of…” tilts his head, “half naked dudes?” He clicks through to get to his Amazon account. “And why is Amazon recommending erotic novels based on a book ‘Owned By Fate’ to me?” Looks closer at the screen. “Is that woman on the cover naked? With a blind fold over her eyes?” Oh, I forgot to mention I ordered some E-books through his Amazon account. But!…

When I write a book, it’s pretty much as though I’m trying to describe the movie that’s playing in my head, so when Fresh Fiction asked what the dream cast of the movie version of BOUND TO THE BACHELOR would look like, I was ready to roll. Sort of. I’m not one of those writers who does story boards and collages and collects images to inspire me as I write, mostly because I can’t find images of men or women who fit the idea in my head, I guess. But! I do have a few go-to inspirations that get me started on my writing journey, and in the case of BOUND TO THE BACHELOR, those two starting points were people who just happened to be actors. How convenient! First up, a confession: I’ve always been a tall, dark and handsome kind of girl. Not sure why, but I just love a dark-headed man. There are, however, a couple of blond men that I think are just STUNNING. Paul Newman is absolutely at the head of that list. And since this is dream casting, I would totally want him to play the role of Beau Bennet. He’s got Beau’s essential qualities:…