THE SEDUCTION OF KINLEY FOSTER is a book that gets into full swing when the heroine ends up on a plane full of individuals who sell guilty pleasures. You know – those sex toys you have stashed in a drawer near your bed. What? You don’t have one of those drawers. What are you waiting for…get yourself some toys. No – you are not too old for such nonsense. I promise. Now that we all have the same drawer, or are in the process of getting such a drawer, I thought I’d share with you my top ten guilty pleasures in life. Calling in sick on a rainy day and reading a book from my to-be-read stack. I feel luxuriously sinful sitting by a window and listening to the rain and thunder while reading an awesome book on a day I should be at work. Not that I would ever do such a thing. Having an evening at home alone and no one to cook dinner for. I don’t mind cooking, but deciding on what to cook day-after-day-after-day wears me down. So any day I don’t have to decide what to cook is blissful. Dark Chocolate Dove bar every evening…

I’ve been skinny—or even average-sized—a vanishingly small proportion of my life. For a couple of decades, charitable observers might have called me chubby. In more recent years, though, chubby no longer suffices. I’m big. Fat. Plus-sized. Call it whatever you want, but I’m not the sort of woman who can simply stroll into a random store at a mall, pluck something off a rack, and expect it to fit. I’m also not the sort of woman who shows up on the covers and in the pages of most romance novels. But growing up, that didn’t stop me from searching desperately for heroines who resembled me. I hoarded the rare Silhouettes, Harlequins, and other books with plump lead characters. I didn’t always love the way their weight was addressed, but I was so desperate for any fictional representation of myself that I didn’t really care. Those books reassured me that I too deserved a happily ever after. I too would find love and have lovers—ones who wouldn’t simply overlook my weight, but find me beautiful. So I read and reread my stash of plus-size romances compulsively, hoping in their pages I’d find the certainty I lacked in real life. Over time,…

Sometimes (usually) when I sit down to begin a new mystery, I literally freeze. “Breathe,” I remind myself. So I do, slowly. In and out. That blank computer screen is sometimes as terrifying to me as rewatching The Shining. And that’s where I am these days—staring at the screen, trying to remember how I started MURDER AT LAMBSWOOL FARM (the newest seaside knitters mystery) as I begin the next one. What came to my mind first as I began writing MURDER AT LAMBSWOOL FARM? The murderer? The motive? The victim? The answer came to me with a start. It wasn’t any of those things. In the case of the Lambswool Farm book, it was an article I read about an organic farm that hosted dinners in a beautiful field, the well-set table groaning with the farm’s fresh produce. It had little to do with a murder, but was rather a place where I’d be happy to spend the months I would devote to writing the book. So I began creating the farm itself, its fields and lambs and a barn turned into my dream kitchen. Without a murderer. A victim. A motive. It’s the way I write: scene by scene,…

I’m actually not kidding. I was trying to write my first romance, but I came to the genre much later than to any other. I discovered action adventure with CALL OF THE WILD and MUTINY ON THE BOUNTY at age eight. I first read science fiction at ten and THE COMPLETE SHERLOCK HOLMES by the time I was twelve. NARNIA and THE HOBBIT opened up fantasy for me in my teens. I was hot on the trail of Ludlum and Follett from their very early books. Classics consumed much of my twenties. I didn’t read my first romance until attending RWA’s National conference in my mid-thirties. I chewed my way through a dozen of them before I was handed Susan Wiggs’ THE CHARM SCHOOL and Laura Kinsale’s THE PRINCE OF MIDNIGHT. That launched me into Nora’s Born in trilogy and I was gone. I already had written and sold a couple of science fiction and fantasy novels by that point and wanted to try my hand at a romance. But I’d also been dying to tackle a thriller. What I was waiting for was the right idea. I wrote a light-hearted foodie thriller entitled: Swap Out! It has a love…

Why did you decide to write your mystery series in the Hamptons and not a fictional location like many authors do? I love the Hamptons, especially Montauk, because it has it all: celebs, sandy beaches, fabulous restaurants and a rich history. Each book in my Hamptons Home and Garden Mystery series takes place in one specific Hamptons town–or should I say each murder. In book one, BETTER HOMES AND CORPSES, the murder takes place at the fictional Seacliff estate in East Hampton. Book two, HEARSE AND GARDENS, takes place in Montauk. In my third book, the mystery takes place in Sag Harbor. The setting for book four will be either Bridgehampton or Southampton, I can’t decide which. My protagonist, Meg Barrett lives in Montauk. What is it about Montauk that you love? I live on Long Island and Montauk has always been my favorite getaway spot. I may be prejudiced, but I think Montauk is one of the most beautiful spots in America. When I first vacationed in Montauk and climbed to the top of the Montauk Point Lighthouse (commissioned by George Washington) that sits on a rocky cliff next to the Atlantic on easternmost point of Long Island, I…

New York Times bestselling author Kate Carlisle is a native Californian who worked in television production for many years before turning to writing. It was a lifelong fascination with the art and craft of bookbinding that led her to write the Bibliophile Mysteries, featuring Brooklyn Wainwright, whose bookbinding and restoration skills invariably uncover old secrets, treachery and murder. Visit Kate online at www.KateCarlisle.com. Have you ever browsed through the old books at antique stores or flea markets or estate sales and wondered about the stories those books could tell? Not just the story in the book, but the story of the book. Who owned it? How did they acquire it? What did it mean to them? What sorts of people bought the book and then safeguarded it for 100 years or more? That very intriguing idea is what prompted me to create the Bibliophile Mysteries. At the center of each mystery is a rare book being restored by preeminent bookbinder Brooklyn Wainwright. As I craft the plot, I echo the themes of the rare book, but with a modern twist. I think of it as a puzzle within the mystery, a bonus gift to my readers. In RIPPED FROM THE…

I’ve always had a fascination with the paranormal, so it’s really no surprise to me that I started writing witches, psychics, and empaths… My early love of I Dream of Jeannie, Bewitched, and more recently, my slight addiction to Long Island Medium have all have influenced me. But alas, I’m not a witch. Or a genie. Or a psychic. Instead of writing what I know (a common phrase in fiction writing), I simply write what fascinates me. Beyond pop culture influences, I’ve also had some personal incidents in my life that have made me take note of the paranormal. When my twenty-two-year-old son was three, it was early morning when I heard him talking in the other room, having a full conversation with someone I couldn’t see… When I asked him who he was talking to, he said quite seriously (yet calmly), “The man.” Spooky, right? It was for me too—at first. But my grandfather had died the week before, before he’d had a chance to meet my son… I like to believe that they were getting to know each other. For years, I’ve noticed that when I get into my car, my rearview mirror is tilted. If I run…

First of all, I have to say how much I love Fresh Fiction and how thrilled I am to be here today talking about my June release, LOVEGAME 🙂 LOVEGAME is a little different from my normal books—it’s darker, twistier, more psychological and suspenseful—but from the moment I first had the idea, I knew I had to write it. What I didn’t realize at the time was that it was going to take me three years—and fifteen other novels—before I would actually get it done. And if you want to talk about coming full circle, I actually first had the idea for Veronica and Ian when I was in Dallas at a 2013 Fresh Fiction event—which is why it seems fitting that the first place I talk about the book is here on this blog 🙂 Every writer, at some point in their career, has an idea that scares them. That keeps them up at night. That matters to them so much that they are terrified they’ll never be able to do the idea justice. That—in the writing of it—makes them grow as both a writer and a person. I am lucky (and unlucky, lol) enough to have had two…

Every writer expects criticism of his or her work. All of us are warned about this early in our careers. Something I heard years ago has stuck with me, and I think of it when I encounter such criticism: “I cannot expect to be universally loved and respected.” My first one-star review was given to my debut novel, CODE BLUE years ago. And I expect to hear this particular criticism again as reviews appear for my latest novel of medical suspense, MEDICAL JUDGMENT. Certain people will complain because I write “Christian fiction.” I’m prepared to have my writing style criticized. Perhaps the reader doesn’t like medical novels. Maybe I don’t pack my work with enough suspense. It’s possible that the characters are one-dimensional. All these are valid criticisms. But I was surprised and disappointed the first time I had my writing criticized because it was written from a Christian worldview. I’ve noticed lately that the genre in which I write is now labeled “Inspirational” fiction. Perhaps that’s appropriate in our politically correct climate, but it doesn’t fully solve the problem. If we use this label, should we then also use terms like “Smutty fiction” or “Fiction containing lots of cursing?”…

As I drove my daughter to school yesterday, I was distracted (at a stoplight) by a sticker slapped on the bumper of the van waiting in front of us. Where Does a Woman Belong? In the White House. My daughter said, “They must like Hillary.” “Maybe.” Then, trying not to sound like an old codger, I mentioned how grateful I was that messages like this were part of her everyday life. “When I was your age, the response to that question would have been . . . In the Kitchen.” “Wow.” My daughter gave me a compassionate smile. That was then. This is now. Thank God. She turned the music up, and we drove on. I am a pre-Title Nine woman, raised in a community that didn’t take kindly to the likes of Betty Friedan or Gloria Steinem. In my world, Billie Jean King’s defeat of Bobby Riggs was greeted with bemusement. When Helen Reddy sang “I Am Woman,” people looked heavenward or changed the radio station. Maybe women were strong, maybe invincible, but they didn’t make a big deal out of it. They didn’t roar. I came to assume that, with a few exceptions from the nineteenth century, women…