Howdy, Fresh Fiction fans! In my latest release, the erotic romance COWBOY RESURRECTION, Monica Kaur is a marketing executive who’s tasked with planning and promoting a rodeo. She’s also a city slicker who has no idea what a rodeo is. She enlists the help of a local rancher’s son, Dean MacKinnon, who’s a professional bullfighter. Together, they get the show up and running…and spend some private meetings getting to know each other one-on-one. So what is a rodeo anyway? I attended my first rodeo in my twenties, so I can understand a newbie’s confusion. You drive up to the arena, not knowing what to expect. You park your Prius among all the giant dusty pickup trucks. You pay for your ticket, find a seat in the stands, look around and think, “What happens now?” And maybe, “What am I doing here?” And also, “Who are all these cowboys?” No worries—I’ve got you. Here’s a quick and dirty city girl’s guide to rodeo. HISTORY In the 1800s, Mexican vaqueros and American cowboys worked the vast cattle herds in the west. A couple times a year, they rounded up the herds and drove them hundreds of miles to stockyards, where the cattle…

My debut novel with Entangled Publishing’s Brazen Books imprint–BEST FRIENDS WITH BENEFITS–takes place at a high school reunion. Those might be the scariest words in the English language, after We Need to Talk. But they don’t have to be. High school reunions can be fun, entertaining, or downright steamy. Some of my favorite movies feature high school reunions: In Romy & Michelle’s High School Reunion two best friends tell crazy lies about their lives now, and hilarity ensues. In Grosse Point Blank an assassin attends his high school reunion and renews an old romance. In Peggy Sue Got Married a woman attending her high school reunion passes out and goes back to high school knowing what she knows now. Something we’ve all wished for. In the case of my book, BEST FRIENDS WITH BENEFITS two best friends get to rekindle an out of control flame 14 years in the making. Maybe you have a crazy or fun story about your high school reunion, or something so embarrassing it would make an audience laugh. Comment below with the best or worst thing that happened at your high school reunion to be entered to win a $10 Amazon gift card. It’s the…

Ladies and gentlemen, we are ready for takeoff… Even though we don’t actually read this line every time we read a romance novel, it’s safe to say that a lot of times we hear that in the back of our minds. Or perhaps I do, anyway. Hey, stranger things have happened in my life. But now, let’s talk about traveling—through books! As a reader, I love to go places I haven’t been. As a writer, I love to feature some of my favorite destinations in books. Today, I’ll be taking you to Brazil, where BRAZILIAN REVENGE is set. Of course, it helps that Brazil is also where I’m from originally, even though I’ve lived in Austin, Texas for the last thirteen years. Brazil is such a resourceful, diverse country. There’s something for everyone in Brazil. To give you one example, BRAZILIAN REVENGE starts in glamorous and internationally known Rio, filled with breathtaking views and gorgeous beaches. (It’s also one of my favorite cities in the world.) But then we go to Northeast Brazil, which is a completely different area. In another book, KIDNAPPING THE BRAZILIAN TYCOON, I’ve even taken readers to the land of a Brazilian Indian tribe. Yes. That…

As a writer, I keep my fingers firmly on the pulse of the business. Novels, themes, and genres have an ebb and flow. The writer’s job is to keep up with, and hopefully ahead of, changes in taste. Agatha Christie is widely, if arguably, credited with inventing the cozy format. Her Miss Marple series introduced readers to an amateur sleuth, a closed set of suspects, a body, and of course, knitting. Actually, the knitting was a stroke of genius. Something about repetitive movement frees the brain to do other things, like figure out who the killer is. Christie found a formula that worked. In reality, Miss Marple came along late in the day. Christie had dabbled in various forms of locked room style mysteries well before she appeared. Tommy and Tuppence, amateurs and ne’er do wells, morphed into sleuths out of necessity. Poirot’s introduction came the next year. He was no amateur, but the feel and story lines were similar. Miss Marple, arriving seven years after the Belgian detective, was a definite beneficiary of Poirot’s literary legacy. Christie, Allingham, Marsh, and Sayers were more or less contemporaries in content and style. Lighthearted mysteries perked along quite nicely, but the tone…

A hidden gem, right near the beach, boutique shopping and four centuries of history, why not go there? If you are fortunate enough to find out about Amelia Island . . . it’s worth a visit. Last year, we found it by accident on our way home from Florida. Read the rest on Ingis About Gail Ingis Gail Ingis writes historical romance, loves history and romance of course, has taught history, and her weekly blog frequently covers historical content. A native of Brooklyn, New York, Ingis’s early days began and ended with writing, drawing and music. Her inspiration to write came from books gifted to her by an aunt. But life had other ideas. After graduating from the New York School of Interior Design with a BFA in Interior Architecture and Design and masters’ studies in Architecture and Design Criticism at The New School (Parsons). Her career in interior design and architecture led her to the other arts. Ingis founded the Interior Design Institute, a school of interior design, that she eventually sold, but during her tenure, she was twice asked by publishers to write a textbook, her efforts were thwarted by a heavy schedule. Ingis resides in Connecticut with…

When you think of wine country vacations, lazy days of wine tastings, Michelin-starred meals and gatherings at art bars might come to mind. This is what my U.S. Marine husband thought and why he distinctly did not want to go – at first. After I promised to create an itinerary designed to please his Alpha male temperament, he relented and decided to look forward to a vacation sans children. And I eagerly went about researching the various ways a man, who does not like wine, loves comfort food, has a fetish for log cabins, and would rather join a pickup game of basketball than rub shoulders with elegantly dressed aficionados of the grape, could have a good time. Check out my findings below! Winecation: The Alpha Male’s Guide to Napa – Where to Stay Winecation: The Alpha Male’s Guide to Napa – Where to Eat Winecation: The Alpha Male’s Guide to Napa – What to Do About Magnolia Smith With a father who was a former member of the Vietnam-era 82nd Airborne, a cousin who was a Green Beret in the eighties and nineties, another cousin who currently works for the CIA (albeit in an administrative role) and a brother…

A few years back I was writing a women’s fiction novel with a strong romantic twist. My only problem was that the guy my protagonist loved was boring. He was dependable, handsome, and said all the right things, but he lacked charisma. I was brainstorming with an author friend about my lackluster story when she asked me something like, “What if he is this totally hot guy that exudes masculinity?” I laughed. The man she was describing was straight out of a romance novel, and I didn’t write straight romance. My women’s fiction always has a romantic thread, but I admit that I’m a pretty straight-laced girl. My books have never been considered hot or steamy. Writing about anything hot would make me blush, so at first I didn’t think I’d be able to write the kind of man into my novel that my author friend was talking about. I didn’t even know if a man like that would interest readers of women’s fiction, even they do tend to like romantic threads in their stories. Around the same time that I was trying to enliven that novel with a stronger love interest, my husband and I attended a Professional Bull…

You know those interviews on blogs, where the author reveals something about themselves you probably didn’t know? I’m about to do that. (Deep breath, clearing my throat.) I was on a dance team during my senior year of high school. This may not seem like a major revelation to some, but if you knew how utterly uncoordinated I am, you’d gasp. I have two left feet and ten big toes. It’s tragic, really. The team’s director had only one reason for allowing me within fifty yards of her national-championship dance team: I could twirl a rifle—you know the color guard fiberglass rifle-looking thing? Yep. I could spin it, toss it, catch it, hoist it, and set nice crisp angles on call. And Ms. D. wanted her dance team to incorporate rifles into their routine for that year. She and I struck a deal. I would teach her petite, graceful beauties to twirl those fiberglass sticks. In exchange, her best dancers would teach me to move in some sort of rhythm without falling on my face. Her dance instructors got the raw end of that deal. Why am I telling you this? Because in MIRIAM, my new release, the title character…

When I started writing THE LOOKING GLASS, a sequel was the furthest thing from my mind. Then I signed a two-book deal with Month9Books, and the yet unwritten book two suddenly became a concern. I’d always thought of THE LOOKING GLASS as a stand-alone story. And here’s the thing about stand-alone stories—they end. Isn’t it nice when a story just ends instead of dragging on forever and ever and on and on …. and making you think about things like consequences and whether the people who were happy at the end of Book 1 could actuallystay happy forever after? Happily ever afters don’t happen if the story doesn’t end. Into the Woods is one of my favorite musicals ever created. You’ve probably seen it or heard of it and if you haven’t seen it or heard of it you should go forth to Google and fix that right now. It’s a fairy-tale mash-up in which all the characters get their happy endings at the end of Act I. Then, in Act II, the characters have to deal with the consequences of getting what they want. They have to deal with uncertainty. They have to venture out into real life, where…

I read a lot. Like, really a lot, over 200 books a year. The majority of my reading is paranormal, fantasy or SF. Which means I have read a LOT of books about werewolves and vampires. I still love both of those tropes, but every so often it’s fun to leave behind the comfortable tried-and-true in favor of something a little more unique. So when it came time to design my fantasy worlds I deliberately chose some more exotic supernatural beings. Like dragons, sirens and gargoyles. And phantoms. Why those ones? My Otherselves series is one of mirrors and magic and parallel worlds. Each Mirror World has its own elemental magic—Air, Fire, Water and Stone—as well as the mirror magic that joins them. The Mirror Worlds are imperfect copies of each other. Rare people, known as Callers, have otherselves—mirror twins—on each of the Mirror Worlds. The villain of the series is a sorceress named Qeturah who was exiled from the True World to the Fire World for killing her Fire otherself. Qeturah seeks power and uses a magic ritual to bear the child of a fire elemental. Her child is dragon shifter. But because Qeturah has otherselves, they also conceived…