1–What’s the name of your latest release?  Worth the Wait 2–What is it about?  It’s about a flighty actress who returns to her hometown after her mother passes away and discovers she’s inherited half a house with the ex-stepbrother she hasn’t seen in ten years. They each have different goals for the house. She wants to sell it and use the money to move to Hollywood. He wants to keep it and renovate it to prove he’s still capable after a life-altering injury shattered the future he’d had planned for himself. There’s a definite opposites-attract vibe to the story, but it also deal with some complex issues like grief and mental illness and how sometimes the things you least expect are the ones that make all the difference. 3–What word best describes your heroine?  Optimistic 4–What makes your hero irresistible?  He’s got that whole brooding, wounded-warrior alpha-male thing going on. 5–Who are the people your main characters turn to when they need help?  For my heroine, it’s her half-sister, Gina. For my hero, it’s his siblings-Dave and Nicole, and also his two best friends-Mark and Jack. 6–What do you love about the setting of your book?  Heavenly Falls, the fictional…

I get asked a lot of questions as a writer, but one of the most common ones is what my process for writing each story looks like. Because I’m an organized soul, it’s typically the same for each book. I’m here today to share what that process looks like for me. I’ve written a lot of stories over the years, and after the first several, I started to develop a process that worked for me as I created a story from beginning to end. The beginning doesn’t start with writing, it starts with plotting. In fact, it just starts with an idea. A big idea. For example, with STING, I thought of one of my favorite classic stories, The Count of Monte Cristo, and knew I wanted to write a retelling. But I wanted to have a female heroine and a dystopian twist. So first I get my big idea. Then I test it. Testing it means making sure there’s a big enough conflict to sustain a whole story with twists and turns. With STING, it was a little easier because I wanted to stick close to the original plot, but typically I figure it all out from scratch. I…

Jen: What inspired you to explore Jackie O’s life through a work of fiction? Stephanie: After writing American Princess, I wanted my next story to be about another iconic American woman and Jackie Kennedy was the first to come to mind. I found that while people think they know her story, many of the details of her life–the deaths of her children, the monuments she saved, her many tumultuous family relationships–have already started to gather dust. Also, while there are enough nonfiction books about her and the rest of the Kennedys to fill an entire library, I quickly realized that there was an opportunity to transform her momentous life into historical fiction, to really let the reader feel what it was like to be Jackie Bouvier Kennedy Onassis. While I love a good nonfiction read, there’s something special about experiencing life through the eyes of the person who lived it. (I often joke that historical fiction is the closest thing to a time machine, but it’s true!) I loved being able to transport readers to see what it would have been like to be the one and only Jackie-O.   In order for the novel to be historically based, how…

Instead of trying to find your perfect match in a dating app, we bring you the “Author-ReaderMatch” where we introduce you to authors as a reader you may fall in love with. It’s our great pleasure to present Catherine Bybee! Writes: My newest novel, My Way To You, has a central romance between Parker, a strong, independent heroine and Colin a man who helps her get through the tragedies she faces. But beyond that, it’s about the journey of allowing Parker to love herself. About: I was born in Southern California. However, my parents divorced when I was two and my mother moved us to Washington State where I was raised. Four days after I graduated from high school I returned to So. Cal and never left. I was an RN who spent the majority of my career in a level 2 trauma center until a career ending injury.  I have always been a gifted storyteller. But it wasn’t until I was back in school to become a nurse that I was told I had the ability to ‘write’ a story. I had taken a creative writing course in college for my English credit and it was that teacher who pulled me aside and told me I should…