As authors write, we get the opportunity to include any number of details. Some are vital to the plot of the story, some give us insight into the characters, some simply give us a sense of time and place, and some make us laugh, or cry. But some details are just for the author themselves. So I thought I’d share a hidden theme that runs through all four of my Second Circle stories, including the latest, THE DARKEST LINK, that releases today. To explain, I need to go back a few years and start with this…I LOVE STEPHEN KING! I started reading horror in high school when it was the cool thing to do. I began with a dog-eared copy of THE RATS by James Herbert, and quickly devoured (pun intended if you’ve read the stories) LAIR and DOMAIN. I’d meet up with school friends every morning, and we’d swap books before the school bell rang. One day I received a very beaten up copy of Stephen King’s PET SEMATARY (…yes, that’s the correct spelling of the book), and from the very first chapter, I was hooked. I worked my way through as many books as I could get my…

From the outside, Sycamore Glen, North Carolina, might look like the perfect all-American neighborhood. But behind the white picket fences lies a web of secrets that reach from house to house. Up and down the streets, neighbors quietly bear the weight of their own pasts—until an accident at the community pool upsets the delicate equilibrium. And when tragic circumstances compel a woman to return to Sycamore Glen after years of self-imposed banishment, the tangle of the neighbors’ intertwined lives begins to unravel. During the course of a sweltering summer, long-buried secrets are revealed, and the neighbors learn that it’s impossible to really know those closest to us. But is it impossible to love and forgive them? This is the question that Marybeth Whalen poses in her moving new novel, and she talks to Writing a Woman’s Life columnist Yona Zeldis McDonough all about how her moving new novel attempts to answer it. About Marybeth Mayhew Whalen Marybeth Mayhew Whalen is the author of five previous novels and speaks to women’s groups around the United States. She is the cofounder of the popular women’s fiction site She Reads and is active in a local writers’ group. Marybeth and her husband, Curt,…

Feeling down? Buy a new book. Seriously. Have you ever thought about the reasons we love to read? Sure, there are several, but lately I’ve been giving a lot of thought to the way stories comfort us. At our core, we all yearn to connect with others. And we do it all the time. We pet animals. We enjoy being held by and holding those we love. We like to share our energy in a calm, loving way because it soothes us and those we touch. As a child, did you ever press your fingers against a boo-boo or lie on the grass when you were upset? I did, too. Back then I didn’t think about the nature of energy, but innately I understood there was power within us and within the world. Power that could restore our emotional and even physical peace. As years passed and life brought me experiences, I explored that energy in different ways. Curious about the power of the mind, I became a certified hypnotherapist. I’ve received the attunements of reiki. I’ve sought healing from acupuncturists, massage therapists, and a shaman, among others. I was raised in Southern churches, have a relationship with God and…

Years ago I read a romance novel which, based on the title—and yes, I do sometimes judge books by their covers—made me expect a stepbrother/ stepsister romance. The stepsibling romance is a genre subcategory I enjoy reading. I think the book did revolve around a similar type of relationship but transgressing those longstanding boundaries seemed to be treated as humdrum, or certainly not as the illicit-temptation-being-vainly-resisted that usually drives my pleasure in those romances. Because of that (perceived) missing ingredient, I did not like the book. Since then I’ve toyed with the idea of writing a version of that story that pushed the taboo relationship theme to its boundaries. That’s why I wrote my latest erotic romance with Totally Bound, called BROTHER’S KEEPER. Feel free to judge BROTHER’S KEEPER on its title. I stand by it. But Alexa and Nik, the main characters in the story, are not stepsiblings. Uh oh. I mean, they are stepsiblings in reality but they were raised…or at least Alexa was raised thinking Nik was her half-brother. She also thinks he’s pretty terrible because he tried to make a move on her a couple years ago. Disgusting, right? Except Nik has always known what Alexa…