My aunt owns a cabin in the Sierra Nevada woods. Every summer my family goes up for few days. We bring our hiking boots, bikes, bathing suits and floatation devices. Sometimes we float on the river for hours, yelling for the kids to come rescue us when our river rafts go too far down stream–why paddle when you have children for that? There’s a place called the Frosty that we go to get burgers, fries and soft ice cream cones dipped in chocolate. Every year we ride our bikes to a historical one-room cabin where the first trapper in the area set up shop. There’s a railroad museum and lots of Gold Rush exhibits, too. One year we went horseback riding with a guide who showed us the original route of the Western Pacific Railroad. He kept talking about his gelding in the third person, things like, “Red bought this ranch you’re riding on,” “Yep, we owe it all to Red.”  We had no idea who Red was, but eventually learned that he was a famous rodeo horse that earned a lot of prize money in his heyday. When we asked our tour guide why our horses’ tails were tied…

Sometimes life has a way of throwing up so many roadblocks at once that certain aspects of life can seem utterly hopeless. I know. This happened to me with my writing career. I almost gave up the pursuit because I gave up the hope that one day I’d be sitting on my front porch writing this blog about my name being on the cover of a new book that’s about to hit store shelves. 🙂 My love of reading and writing started as a young child, but it wasn’t until 2007 that I decided to pursue my dream in earnest. My husband and I made the decision that I would quit my day job and work on my writing full-time. It was a scary step—walking away from a job I’d held for many, many years. But most ventures are scary at the beginning. It takes courage to follow your dreams. I started off entering contests…lots of RWA contests that had a Harlequin editor as final judge. I learned so much from that experience. By 2010, I entered the Mills & Boon New Voices Contest but didn’t final. However, I won an editor critique. I was thrilled. I was so certain…

I have always had a predilection for female amateur detectives, ever since I first discovered Nancy Drew over forty years ago with The Secret of Shadow Ranch. That was the first mystery I read, and when I graduated to adult mysteries, I discovered Agatha Christie and her spinster sleuth, Miss Jane Marple. I was hooked. As much as I have enjoyed Dame Agatha’s Hercule Poirot, Miss Marple is still my favorite. Perhaps the root of my preference lies in my upbringing. My mother had four sisters, all of whom I knew well growing up. Then there were my paternal grandmother and her sister, my three paternal great aunts, and of course my maternal grandmother. They were all strong Southern women with inquisitive minds, and I learned many an interesting tidbit about human foibles and misdeeds by playing quietly by myself in the corner while these ladies chatted. (Or gossiped, whichever you prefer.) Spinster detectives – or “little old ladies” as they are sometimes called, not necessarily affectionately – have been part of the mystery genre since 1897, when Anna Katherine Green introduced Miss Amelia Butterworth in That Affair Next Door. Miss Amelia established the essentials for the amateur spinster sleuth…

My eleventh Superromance, NO ORDINARY HOME, is currently on bookstore shelves. I can’t believe I have eleven books out and ideas for more stories continue to pop into my head! One of the themes I explore in this book is the question of how much of themselves celebrities owe to the public. Have you ever wondered what it would be like to be a celebrity? To be so famous that most people would recognize you when you walked down the street? I know I would find it a nightmare to live in that kind of fishbowl, and to have paparazzi follow me everywhere I go. I can understand why some child stars have trouble navigating through tumultuous teen years into adulthood…and why so many of them lose their way. Unfortunately for them, their breakdowns are all too public. The media seem to relish exposing their flaws. My heroine, Gracie Travers. has experienced the nightmare of living in a fishbowl and has gone to great lengths to preserve her privacy and sanity as an adult. In the end, through the hero, Austin Trumball, she just might lose it all. Her fear of exposure is tangible. In her own words… “Do you…

Music is at the heart of FAINT PROMISE OF RAIN. The setting for the story—16th century Rajasthan in Northwest India—had already been laid down by multiple visits to that stunning part of the world, where temples and fortresses rise up from golden sand, where textiles are jewel-toned, and the sky is devastatingly blue. Take away the power lines, and everything else looks much as it must have five hundred years ago. The next story layer came in a very different shape: a class in kathak dance, a classical storytelling art from North India. The moment I set foot into the dance studio, I was smitten. Jingling ankle bells, syncopated rhythms of the tabla (drums), precise footwork, lightning fast turns punctuated by perfect stillness. The moments of silence in music sometimes speak more than the notes themselves. In kathak, the dancer becomes an instrument. In addition to studying dance technique and compositions, the dancer must become intimately familiar with the cycles in which Indian classical music is structured—the 16 beat cycle (tintal), the 14 beat (dhammar), the 10 beat (jhaptal) and many others—and develop an awareness at all times of where in the cycle she finds herself. Much as a writer…

Last December while I was balancing on a rickety ladder to hang a string of lights above my fireplace mantel, I got ‘the call.’ I almost didn’t answer. I’d left the phone lying over on the kitchen counter—within sight, but out of reach. I told myself by the time I scrambled down and dashed over there, whoever it was would probably have already hung up. But what if it was New York? (It was never New York, but still, that’s what I’d been hoping and praying for ever since sending my manuscript out weeks earlier.) When I left teaching, there was already a fully formed story in my head, begging to be put into words. So what if I’d never taken a writing course? I had a master’s degree. I could do this! For the next two years, I wrote and I wrote…making every mistake a writer could possibly make along the way. I was clueless. When a fellow member of my local Romance Writers of America chapter asked me what genre I wrote in, I replied, “genre?” The manuscript was rejected a dozen times, and rightly so. Only then did I realize that there’s an actual craft to putting…

A few months ago, a dear friend approached me about being in a charity box set. My first reaction should have been to question whether I had the time, but it wasn’t. Because some things just have to happen. 🙂 In reality, I responded with a resounding yes. Pets for Vets, the charity we are raising money for, is one I truly believe in. PTSD is a very real problem facing our country in near epidemic proportions. Several studies have shown the use of service animals help with the symptoms that can otherwise tear apart the life of a returning veteran. Pets for Vets saves both the lives of animals that would otherwise be euthanized and soldiers coming home in need of a companion that can offer unconditional love. I’m delighted that the other 15 authors (yes, you read that right…15!!!) in this bundle are amazing people and fabulously talented writers. But I’m also really happy to be part of this because readers have been asking when Come Up and See Me Sometime would be released in ebook. Newly edited with some fabulous previously deleted scenes added back in, the book got a new title CHANGE THE GAME with its…

I love Halloween, but I particularly love the many masks of Halloween. Scary, magical, campy, thrilling, and haunting, Halloween reveals its many faces in delightful and creepy ways. That’s why the entire month of October I’m dedicating this column to Halloween! From magical to hilarious to horrific to revisionary, I’ll select books that delight, terrify, charm, and amaze. So grab your Trick-or-Treat bag and get ready beg for these books that will put you in the Halloween spirit! This week is all about the magic—because what Halloween would be complete without a witch or two and a ghostly romance? SALT & STORM by Kendall Kulper SALT & STORM Sixteen-year-old Avery Roe is a witch of Prince Island, and like her grandmother, she wants to make the charms and spells that keep the island’s whalers safe at sea, but her mother has other plans. She’s forced Avery to give up magic for a life of respectability. When Avery dreams she’s to be murdered, she knows she must unlock her magic and save herself. Becoming a witch might stop her murder and save her island, but magic always requires a sacrifice. Fresh Fiction Reviewer Samantha Randolph says, “For those looking to have…

BY WINTER’S LIGHT is an unabashedly holiday-themed novel. How did that come about? The concept was fortuitously created by the characters, rather than being a deliberate choice made by me. In the Epilogue of the preceding Cynster novel, THE TAMING OF RYDER CAVANAUGH, at the Cynster Summer Celebration in August of 1837, the older group of children go off in a group to discuss some subject – and the most obvious subject I could imagine them discussing  was where to hold their family Christmas gathering later that year. The older group is dominated by males, and the notion that they would vote for a Christmas in Scotland, where they could ride in forests and hunt, again seemed an obvious tack – and thus BY WINTER’S LIGHT, the Cynster holidays of 1837, held at Richard and Catriona’s manor in the Vale of Casphairn in snowy Scotland, came to be! Can you describe the Norse, pagan, Druid, and folk customs that feature in the story? Because we are looking back so far – in some cases possibly a millennia or more to the beginning of some of these traditions – it’s not always easy to say this custom derived from this tradition…

I often notice that writers who visit Free Literary Mentor, my blog about new fiction seem very aware of fear: fear of not being able to finish a novel; fear that the path to their goal is not clear; fear that publishers and agents won’t be interested … My heartfelt advice is: always remember that no work ever springs from fear—it springs from passion. If you believe in your characters, your message and your story, writing is one of the most inspired and inspiring things you can do, because readers can sense that passion at the core of what you offer them. Passion makes everything possible, even a journey that at first looks too daunting for words. Once upon a time I lived and worked in a beautiful French château, with the pleasant job of looking after the little daughters of a marquise. Being with them in their elegant heritage home made it easy for me to imagine the glittering world of their ancestors. A few months later I found myself in the nearby town of Chevreuse, teaching English at three primary schools, and there I met a new friend, a teacher who had been born in Martinique and was…