The Sweetest Kisses contemporary romance series is built around three brothers who are partners in and co-owners of a western Maryland law firm. They have divided up the legal pie—Trent Knightley does family law, MacKenzie handles criminal defense, James does the civil and commercial cases—but family history and that dear, strange beast, brotherly love, unite them. All three brothers show up in each of the novels, and not simply because I adore these guys. A hero walks a challenging path, from an existence that might be predictable and safe, but lonely, to a more courageous life, lived from the heart, come what may. A journey that difficult shouldn’t be undertaken without support, for several reasons. First, we all need help from time to time. Our stubborn independence might fool most of our friends, but our siblings usually know us longer and better than anybody else does. Siblings support us despite our yearning for self-sufficiency, and despite our pigheadedness. Second, siblings often cut us the least slack. They know what we’re capable of, have faith in us, and don’t pull their punches. When a hero needs a serious talking to or a reality check, his brothers are the guys for the…

I have a weakness for writing bold, independent heroines with unusual hobbies. My ladies are often drawn to the extraordinary and the forbidden—at least for their time. From an educated number-crunching business partner in my first book, THE DUKE’S OBSESSION, to an independent dog-breeder in my latest release, MISS WINTERS PROPOSES, my heroines broach the unexpected and the near impossible with their interests. So, what constitutes a deviation from the norm, especially in the late Georgian through the Regency era? Pretty much everything. A typical lady was meant to be educated—but only just enough to secure a husband and claim the role of his wife. Anything beyond the expected basic arithmetic needed to balance household budgets was considered superfluous. A woman’s job, her sole purpose in life, was to perpetuate her husband’s line through the delivery of an heir. Anything else, was, well…scandalous. To have an opinion was frowned upon, especially when it was in contradiction to your spouse. To possess wit, discouraged. To breed dogs, and therefore comprehend anatomy, vulgar. But despite the numerous social mores, a few bold, brave, women went against the grain, and gave the phrase faux pas, a run for its money. Mary Wollstonecraft did…

A couple of weeks ago I was talking about books with my eighteen-year-old daughter, and I mentioned how much I’d enjoyed a young adult book I’d recently read. My daughter instantly picked up her phone (to which she is surgically glued, I’m convinced) and Googled the book. She read the blurb and informed me that it sounded like a very sappy book and not for her. Sappy? Me? I was momentarily taken aback, but after I’d thought about it for a while, I was okay with that. What to my daughter sounded sappy and sentimental, was moving and tender to me, and I absolutely loved that book. We all have different tastes in reading, and thank heavens there are so many books out there catering for so many varied palates. I love reading romance, and even when I pick up a non-romance book my interest is always piqued by the relationships between characters. (Maybe that’s why I’ve never really gotten into non-fiction.) To me these relationships deepen the reading experience and bring the characters to life. We all know about those books that suck us in and pull us away from our everyday lives, making us stay up late as…

I almost titled this Paralyzed by Fear, but that sounded too negative, and I want this to be a positively uplifting blog.  Just so you know, I’m using the word “bliss” to reference what makes us happy in life, what makes us want to get up in the morning, what fulfills us as human beings. Stalled careers are a big problem among writers both published and unpublished. I’ve met people who want to be published, who have the ability to write, but can’t bring themselves to send their work out to a publishing house for fear of rejection. I’ve met talented musicians and artists with the same problem. The only thing keeping them from achieving their bliss is fear. They are afraid to trust their talent. They’re afraid of how bad rejection will feel. They’re afraid they’ll be humiliated. Ask successful writers/artists/musicians about those fears and they will tell you they had to let go of them or they never would have made it. Being out in the public as much as I am, I encounter so many people who are stuck in a cloud of fear and negativity—from stalled careers, money troubles, relationship issues, parenting problems, and on and…

People often ask me if I use real people as my characters. Some ask with a bit of a grin and sly wink, as if to say, “You could use me, if you wish.” The answer is always no, and often receives a disappointed sigh from the person who asked. But using real people as characters could be libelous. And while everyone has some interesting aspects to their lives and/or personalities, fictional characters need a ton of fascinating traits to really hold readers’ attention. So, what I like to do is “borrow” a few of those attributes from the people around me and merge them into my fictional characters. For example, the lady who lives down the road and wakes at the crack of dawn every spring day to painstakingly clip the yellow heads off dandelions in her yard—all million gazillion of them—well, I find her fascinating. What motivates her behavior? (Besides the fact that she doesn’t like dandelions.) What type of person has the tenacity, or perhaps the compulsiveness, to do such a thing? What other compulsions might she have? And how does she feel about the guy who lives next door to her with the field of weeds,…

At the heart of the County Cork Mysteries is the second book I ever wrote, set in a small pub in a very small town in southwestern Ireland. It was inspired by a real pub called Connolly’s, which I’ve come to know well over the past decade (especially after having tea with the owner in the back room, with her Irish Wolfhound by the fire and her cat in my lap). I chose to write about Ireland because I never knew my father’s parents, both of whom were born there (although in different counties), and I thought seeing the country might be a way to get to know them. My grandmother and grandfather came to New York separately, in 1911, and connected when he made milk deliveries to the back door of the house where she was a servant. They didn’t marry until 1918, and they had my father a year later. My grandmother was 38 at the time. They went on to have two more children. My father became a chemical engineer and earned a master’s degree. His younger brother was a nuclear engineer at Stanford, after getting a Ph.D. at Cal Tech. Their baby sister worked in television…

I love, love, love the Elizabethan period!  The music, the clothes, the houses, the sense of adventure and discovery, the poetry—it’s all so exciting.  Writing the Kate Haywood Mysteries lets me live in the time period for a few hours every day, see it through Kate’s eyes, talk to Queen Elizabeth, sweep around in farthingales and ruffs—and then come back to my own cozy house, with running water and electricity.  The best of both worlds! My love of the Elizabethan era started when I was about ten years old, and found a magical box full of paperbacks at my grandmother’s house one summer.  That box was full of wonders, and started me on a lifelong love of reading and history.  Jane Austen’s Emma; Jane Eyre;  Little Women; 1960s Harlequins set in mysterious places with names like Cornwall, where young, innocent secretaries encountered dark, brooding millionaires; Victoria Holt Gothics with crumbling castles and dark, brooding dukes (who may or may not have killed their wives).  These treasures kept me gloriously busy for weeks. One of the best finds was a Barbara Cartland story called Elizabethan Lover.  I was no newcomer to Cartland novels by then.  My grandmother had an endless supply…

The heroine of my new historical novel, EARLS JUST WANT TO HAVE FUN, isn’t your typical Regency heroine. Marlowe is a thief who grew up in the slums of London and runs with a gang called the Covent Garden Cubs. “Cub” is a slang term for a young thief. When she’s suddenly mistaken for the long lost daughter of a marquess, she has a lot to learn in order to fit in with her “betters.” But what Marlowe learns is that sometimes street smarts are good for more than just survival. In fact, those lessons she learned on the street, come in handy when she’s introduced into Society. Lesson #1: Trust no one. Growing up in the rookery of Covent Garden, Marlowe quickly learned not to trust anyone. One false move, and she could end up with a knife in her back. Literally. Even the Bow Street Runners, the police of the era, weren’t above using unsuspecting cubs for financial gain and then abandoning them to face time in prison or hang for their crimes. So when Marlowe meets the Earl of Dane, she doesn’t trust him or anyone in his family. Dane might claim to want to help her,…

One of the biggest challenges I faced in making the leap from my genteel Georgian set historical romances to the rough and tumble world of rodeo was to find the right voices for my characters. My answer to that dilemma was to spend time with the real deal. I was fortunate to make two extended research trips to Montana and Wyoming for a hefty dose of genuine cowboy where I got my characters’ voices straight from the proverbial horse’s mouth. Although ROUGH RIDER is at times raw, gritty and a little coarse, it’s also very realistic in the characters, situations, and dialogue peppered with western witticisms and dry cowboy humor. Excerpt from ROUGH RIDER Grady Garrison leaned over from his perch on the adjoining pen and spat a wad of dip. “Good thing pretty boy scored so high on the broncs cause he sure as shit won’t make the cut on the bulls.” “That so?” Dirk paused in prepping his rope, his ice blue eyes meeting Grady’s for only a second. “Funny, as I recall it just last week in Red Lodge I made the whistle while your ass hit the dirt.” He went back to work, crushing the lump…

I have been a quilter for many years and enjoyed making an intricate, scrappy beauty more than any other hobby. Until I began to write. Now here was a craft I dearly loved. But wait, I loved quilting, too. In fact, I couldn’t decide which I liked better. Writing or quilting? Quilting or writing? Both of them held me captive. I simply had to quilt. And write. Combining the two crafts in my new book, A Stitch in Crime, I wrote a whodunit set around a quilt show with a no-show judge and a stolen, legacy quilt. And I thought of five ways the two pursuits are very much alike. 1. They have a similar starting point. Writing: I wanted to write a mystery, but what kind? A police procedural? Locked room/puzzle mystery? Hard-boiled detective? I decided on a cozy – which has been defined as “cats & quilts and not a lot of blood.” Now I had the direction I needed to move forward. Quilting: I wanted to make a quilt, but what kind? A bed cover? A wall hanging? A miniature? A table runner or Christmas tree skirt? I decided on a blanket-type, something the family could use…