Here I am, on a cruise ship sailing across the Atlantic without a bit of land anywhere in sight. That pretty much describes exactly where I was when I started to plot THE DEVIL SHE KNOWS – adrift without anywhere to place my hero. Usually we think of a hero – or heroine – as being firmly planted in a single place. Where would Arthur be without Camelot? D’Arcy must have his Pemberly in PRIDE AND PREJUDICE, right? How could Harry Dresden live anywhere but Chicago in Jim Butcher’s THE DRESDEN FILES? I, for one, refuse to imagine Sookie Stackhouse living anywhere but Louisiana. Now put yourself in my shoes. I knew THE DEVIL SHE KNOWS was going to be about Gareth Lowell. After all, he told me at the end of THE IRISH DEVIL that I had to write a book about him. I just nodded and said, yeah, right, mister, you’re maybe eighteen years old, you’ve got some growing up to do before you’ve got enough angst to be interesting… Boy, was I wrong! Gareth reminded me he was still waiting during three more books. He only kept his mouth shut during KISSES LIKE A DEVIL because that…

I’m a big fan of the teacher Socrates–you know, the Ancient Greek philosopher who had to drink poison hemlock because he drove everyone crazy through his constant questioning. Socrates never wrote anything, but his student, Plato, attributes these words to Socrates: Writing shares a strange feature with painting. The offsprings of painting stand there as if they were alive, but if anyone asks them anything, they remain most solemnly silent. The same is true of written words. You’d think they were speaking as if they had some understanding, but if you question anything that has been said because you want to learn more, it continues to signify just that very same thing forever. Phaedrus 275 d-e The enduring value of a good book lies in the questions it raises rather than those it seeks to answer. Books contain ideas that act as seeds that can take root in a fertile mind. To Sell Without Selling Out On the road to publication, I’ve frequently asked myself if I should write what sells–give the people what they want–or should there be a higher purpose to my writing, a value that endures and engages the hearts and minds of my readers? Can I…

Thank you, FreshFiction, for inviting me to be a guest on your blog! My 19th novel, The Lies We Told, is out this month and I thought you might enjoy a peek behind the scenes at how my significant other, photographer John Pagliuca, and I created the book trailer for it. Book trailers are hard to make. Movie trailers are easy (by comparison) because movies are visual and you can simply take carefully selected scenes from the film. You don’t have that luxury with books. It’s tempting in making a book trailer to try to interpret the story literally, using narrative either typed on the screen or in a voice over. She was beautiful and good hearted. (Cue image of beautiful, good-hearted woman). Until the night He appeared. (Image of scary looking but very handsome dude. With a couple of tattoos. Nice ones). On that night (Image of dark night, clouds drifting across a crescent moon) her young brother disappeared. (Image of young boy slowly fading to black). Okay, they’re not all that cheesy, but you get the idea. They’re a challenge to do well. I like my two previous trailers for Before the Storm and its sequel, Secrets She…

Young Dorothy wants to run away from home. Later, she’ll move heaven and earth to return home. Daniel won’t compromise his principles as an artist when he doesn’t like the way he’s directed to play a scene. When he’s later called to play an outrageous roll in order to be close to his children, he’ll perform in any way necessary. What happens to change the goals/outlooks/lives of these characters? An inciting incident. All good stories depend on an inciting incident to get them going. What distinguishes an inciting incident from other incidents in a story? The inciting incident, the event which jumpstarts the story and prompts protagonists to make lofty goals, is an event which will change a character’s life, his outlook on life or both. In the Wizard of Oz Dorothy wants to run away from home when a neighbor woman takes away Toto, her dog. Losing her pet is an “incident” in her life, but it isn’t a life changing incident. Landing in Oz is a major event, the inciting incident which is going to change everything about her outlook on life. In “Mrs. Doubtfire” Daniel gets fired from another acting job because he won’t follow the director’s…

A reading drought? Guilty! I never thought I would say that. I’ve been an avid reader all my life. On vacation, my suitcase hit the maximum weight limit due to the layer of books in the bottom. If I walk out the door, I have a book in my bag. Just in case, that line in the grocery is really long, or the dentist can’t see me quite yet, or . . . I haunt bookstores. Even when I was busy raising a family, I read, not only for myself but I read to my children, instilling a similar love in them. I started reading Golden books, Nancy Drew, children’s classics (I always wanted to go live with grandfather in the Alps, like Heidi, even though my lovely grandparents were firmly planted in Indiana and New York) and continued on into adulthood, with more grown up fare. Until recently. Oh, I still love reading good stories; I’m just not doing it much. I still love books, but I find it harder to get lost within their pages. For a proud bookaholic, that’s an embarrassing admission. I’ve been trying to figure out why the change, and what to do about it….

When you write fiction as I do, you rely on your imagination to make the story come alive, creating a setting readers can visualize, characters people can root for, and a plot worthy of escape. But when you’re writing a series, you have yet another task—crafting characters that people want to follow from one book to the next. The creation of interesting characters is doubly important in my Southern Sewing Circle Mystery Series because the books, themselves, use relationships as the hook. Sure, these women sew, but it’s the coming together as a group—and the friendships that are formed as a result of a common interest—that’s truly at the heart of these books. Think about it… Friendships tend to form over a common interest—similar aged children, a particular sport or hobby, or even a favorite cause. These interests provide a common ground that often supersedes a host of other differences (age, ethnicity, religion). It’s this common ground (sewing) that I use to bring nine unlikely souls together, thereby giving myself a more colorful palate from which to work. Let’s take a look… Tori Sinclair is the protagonist in my series. She’s in her late twenties, hails most recently from Chicago,…

I’m so pleased to be here with you all today at Fresh Fiction to share my latest release Seducing the Knight. Seducing the Knight is the second book in a new series that combines treasure hunting and those oh-so-fabulous Templar knights. For the series, I created a group of men that are based partly on historical fact and partly on fiction. In Scottish history, there were a group of men known as Robert the Bruce’s special guard. These men who were loyal to their king, went on a crusade for him after he died. Their mission, to cut the Bruce’s heart from his chest and take it to the Holy Land for burial in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre as their king requested. They never made it to the Holy Land. They were forced into a battle with the Moors and were destroyed. Five of the ten Templars lived through that battle, but hundreds of their men died. In the pages of the Brotherhood of the Scottish Templars series I explore how three of these surviving knights put the pieces of their lives back together. But along with exploring how to a man comes back to life after such…

No Shot was Fired, no Blood was Spilled (or even Sipped) in the Making of this Book That’s right, my dear friends. I write what we’re calling these days “straight contemporary romance.” There’s nothing supernatural, otherworldy, or paranormal going on here. No asses getting kicked. No highwaymen, no carriage accidents, no brotherhood of Regency spies. It’s life sort of like we know it. If we lived in California’s wine country. In the middle of a hundred-year-old vineyard. While struggling to keep the family winery afloat. And if we were nicknamed the “Nun of Napa” ever since a wedding-that-wasn’t five years ago. And finally, if we had to turn to the man-next-door, Penn Bennett, the star of Hollywood’s hottest home renovation show, to complete the work on the winery’s historic cottage in order to host a wedding there at the end of the month. It’s a hard job, this straight contemporary romance writing. Okay, so the research wasn’t so bad (reading about winemaking, drinking wine, spending a long weekend in Napa with my husband), but what do you do to get a reader’s pulse racing if there are no knives, no fangs, no men running around in the jungle with their…

I’m currently living in a small town in the Midwest. I’m not really a small town girl. I have nothing against small towns; I’ve just always lived in cities. I feel at home in the city. I like having a lot of things going on around me. I like choices. Lots of choices. I’m a shopper and need the stimulation of many different stores within a short distance from me that I can wander into on the spur of the moment just to see and touch pretty things. I’m a people watcher and love knowing that every day when I go out into my world there will be many new people to observe, in many different walks of life, doing many different things. I need an international airport nearby so I can fly off to exotic places. And I like city living because of the anonymity. I can be out in the city and never be seen. Never be noticed. I can live in the city and not have anyone else in my business. You can imagine then, my culture shock, when I find myself living in my husband’s hometown, population 12,000. I’ve learned to love many things about small…