My book, AN UNLIKELY COUNTESS, came out at the beginning of the month and it’s great fun to see it do so well. It will be #17 on the New York Times bestseller list on Sunday, and the Sunday after, it’ll be #13. Onward and upward! The reviews have been mostly great, too, both from review sites and from individual readers. Some quibbles have surprised me, however. I want to make clear that I never resent negative opinions about my books. Of course I want readers to love them, but I know I can’t please everyone, and I respect differing opinions. In the end, a novel is a creation of both the author and the reader, and each reading is valid. But all the same, I sometimes don’t quite get the problems a reader expresses. A few readers find Prudence a snob. For those who haven’t read AN UNLIKELY COUNTESS, at the beginning Prudence Youlgrave has come down in the world and is living in a slum on very limited money. You can read the second excerpt to see what I mean. (I also have the opening scene here, of you want to read both.) As you’ll see, she doesn’t…

I’ve been writing a long time. My first published books were historical romances. Then I wrote books for young teens and middle readers. Now I’m writing historical fiction again but this time for the inspirational market. ANGEL SISTER is my twenty-first published book. Several more of my books are in the publishing pipeline and then, I regret to say, some of my manuscripts are stuck away on my “nobody loved the stories but me” shelf. That’s a lot of story ideas. At times I worry my story well might run dry. Especially when I need a new idea and I’m stumbling around in the dark of my mind just hoping I’ll bump into something to light up my imagination. Sometimes that new idea was right in front of my eyes all the time. A part of my life. That’s what happened with ANGEL SISTER. I’d written some stories with a setting based on my growing up years and had fun with that. So when I started trying to grab hold of a new idea, I recalled all my mother’s stories about growing up during the Great Depression. Wonderful stories of going to school barefoot, roller-skating on the highway, and taffy…

Thank you so much for inviting me to guest blog today at Fresh Fiction. St. Patrick’s Day has always been a special day in our family. My grandfather was extremely proud of his Irish heritage. His father came over from Dublin, Ireland June 19, 1871 when he was 8 years old. I recently discovered the passenger’s list on Ancestry.com and found out that he was a passenger on the ship Calabria. I wanted to add a special twist to the characters in all of my books, by using family names and my Irish heritage. The heroine in my first book, THE MARSHAL’S DESTINY, was named after my great-grandmother, Margaret Mary Flaherty. Three generations of the feisty Irish-American women in our family: Garahan, Flaherty, Daly and Purcell, with their sharp tongues, hard heads and big hearts have kept our family strong and definitely helped influence the creation of the fictional Margaret Mary Flaherty. My latest trilogy from Sourcebooks: The Secret Life of Cowboys begins with TYLER, the oldest brother’s story. I love writing trilogies and series, that way I don’t have to suffer through withdrawal when I have to say goodbye to the characters who have kept me company while I’ve…

“So tired of the straight line And everywhere you turn There’s vultures and thieves at your back And the storm keeps on twisting You keep on building the lies That you make up for all that you lack.” Angel – Sarah McLachlan Such a sad song. But so inspiring, so uplifting. I have strange affinity for this song. According to sources, Sarah McLachlan wrote it in response to the heroin overdose of Jonathan Melvoin, from Smashing Pumpkins. He was only thirty-four, another life cut short by addiction. It’s a fitting eulogy for a friend. Oddly, Smashing Pumpkins song Disarm inspired my very first attempt at a novel, so I find the symmetry agreeable, to say the least. As I was beginning to write SO CLOSE THE HAND OF DEATH, I heard Angel. I must have hit repeat fifty times. I knew, immediately, that this was how my main character, Taylor Jackson, was feeling. In a word, she’s miserable. And misery isn’t a normal state of being for Taylor. The story was conceived after I heard the song, and those particular lyrics. The words just spoke to me, the tone of the song overwhelmed my senses, and I knew exactly how…

Several years ago, someone in the blogosphere referred to me as a “veteran author” of romance fiction. This term caught me by surprise because even after a decade and a half as a published writer, I regarded myself as a newcomer, someone who still felt astonished to be doing this for a living and still a bit awed by her own favorite authors when she chanced to meet them at conferences. But when I began counting books and years, I realized (with some chagrin) that the moniker “veteran author” had become true. I’d been too busy writing to notice. Genre fiction is a relentless form of creative endeavor in the sense that the next book always looms on the horizon, whether you are ready to write it or not. Output is measured in pages per day, not pages per month. Books are counted, not by how many one can write during the course of a career, but how many one can write in a single year. For those of us with major publishers, genre fiction is also very specialized, with reader expectations and preferences always paramount, impelling the writer to weigh commercial considerations at least as heavily as creative ones….

I last blogged at Fresh Fiction last September–about Animals, Novels and Me. I’m back. And I’m still at it–obsessing and writing about animals, that is. March 1 is the debut date for BEAGLEMANIA, the first in my new Pet Rescue Mystery series from Berkley Prime Crime. It’s a spinoff series from my Kendra Ballantyne, Pet-Sitter mystery series. Yes, both series contain animals. So do my Harlequin Nocturnes about Alpha Force, a covert military unit of shapeshifters. The protagonist of my new Pet Rescue series is Lauren Vancouver. She was introduced in the eighth Kendra book, HOWL DEADLY, and she also appears in the ninth, FELINE FATALE. She is the head administrator of HotRescues, a no-kill private animal shelter in L.A.’s San Fernando Valley. She doesn’t have to worry about funding, since HotRescues is under the auspices of Kendra’s new guy friend Dante DeFrancisco, who’s really rich. But she has plenty of other things to worry about. Worrying, and doing something about it, is at the heart of pet rescue. It’s also at the heart of being a protagonist in a cozy mystery series. When I tell you that, in the Pet Rescue Mysteries, “no-kill” means pets, not people… well, I’m…

I don’t know about the rest of you but I am tired of reading stories about vampires, werewolves and fairies. I realize the paranormal craze has reached new heights since the release of Meyer’s TWILIGHT series but I have to ask, how much is too much? Don’t get me wrong, I have purchased and enjoyed several new paranormal reads (Twilight being amongst them) but lately it seems I can’t walk into a bookstore or library without seeing an elaborate table display for books about vampires. It reminds me of when the Sex and the City HBO series first aired and everyone fell in love with Carrie’s fabulous lifestyle. Before you knew it, new TV shows were popping up on every major network about a single white female who lives in a thriving metropolis. When she is not on the search for true love, she manages to squeeze in enough time to write an article for the trendy magazine she freelances for. I’m sure you can think of a few shows that easily fit this criteria. My point is, when ‘the power that be’ see a formula that works, they will beat it into the ground. Thus … the flood of…

Ask ten different scholars of rhetoric to define the word, and you’ll get ten different answers. Dictionary definitions usually say something along the lines of “the skill or study of using language as persuasion” (the one I give to my students gets even more specific: The art and skill of using language to communicate and/or persuade”). I suppose the key words in these definitions are “language” and “persuade”. Analyze any piece of writing—be it fiction or non-fiction, a bumper sticker or a political speech, a text message or a tweet, a lab report or a love letter—and you’ll find that each one is designed to move the reader in some way: to thought, to action, to response. The language may make an emotional appeal, a logical appeal, or an ethical appeal. What’s more, each one of these aforementioned texts tends to be in response to something else and is part of an ongoing conversation. Moreover, when we write, be it a novel or a blog post or a marketing analysis or a resume, we write with purpose and an audience in mind—even if we keep a private diary, we write “Dear Diary,” implying an intended reader, even if that reader…

I’ve lost count of how many romantic comedies I’ve seen over the years. Dozens, at least. Most of the classics and pretty much every major motion romantic comedy since like 1985. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m still firmly camp Action Movie. But what is it about romantic comedies that just draws me to the screen? Dissecting this love affair has made me see a few similarities in what I like to read. And write. So let’s explore. First up, heroes. Have you ever noticed the heroes in romantic comedies? Of course you have! You’re supposed to. They’re these perfectly imperfect men. Good looking. Often funny, boy next door kinds of men. Even the wealthy ones are fairly approachable and yet, flawed.  I’m thinking of Hugh Grant’s character in Two Weeks Notice. Poor man. Handsome. Wealthy. And he didn’t know what he had until she was gone. The heroines. The gal we’d all like to be. Or be friends with. An underdog. Perhaps not the prettiest girl in the room (yet.) Just an all around likable person.  Kate Winslet in The Holiday, anyone? Of course, she is the prettiest girl in the room but she’s so conflicted all while being…

That’s me.  Evil Overlord of my characters. It’s kind of just like that. Evil Overlord: Plans to interfere with his targets’ lives. Me: Plan to interfere with my characters’ lives. Evil Overlord: Is constantly thinking, “What can I do to cause trouble for these people?” Me: “What can I do next to cause trouble for these characters? Evil Overlord: “In fact, what can I do to tear them to shreds?” Me: In fact, what can I do to make things as difficult as possible? Evil Overlord: “HOW SHALL I KILL THEM?” Me: HOW SHALL I– No, no no.  Wait a minute.  Here’s where we part ways. For me, it’s How will they get out of it? What new depths of themselves will they plumb to climb out of this personal disaster I’ve created, possibly while also saving the world? (Possibly.) Because the thing is, as the author, I don’t usually have any idea how they’re going to get out of what I put them into.  I’m so focused on getting them to the point of ultimate internal and external disaster (because, you know, that’s just the way I am) that when I reach it, I often go… Me: Uh, durrrr……