One week before THE MIDWIFE‘s book launch, I received an email from a woman who had been given up for adoption by a Mennonite with a last name that is found in my own family tree. The woman wanted to establish a connection with her biological mother, but her mother was unwilling to meet her. It even seemed that her mother’s family was trying to prevent the meeting taking place. At my book launch, I met this woman who had emailed, but the crowd prevented us from speaking until after the event. Pulling me aside, the woman softly told me more about her story. She told me her friend had tracked down a high school picture of her biological mother—to see if she had red hair like she had growing up—but the picture was in black and white. She told me that she’d found the medical records regarding her birth, and that each page instructed the doctor and nurses not to allow the Mennonite woman to see her own child. The biological mother still lived in the same town where she had given birth; she even had the same last name. Nothing had apparently changed in all those years—and yet…

As a fantasy author who enjoys writing about attacks, draining, and bloody fight scenes, I must confess — I hate violence and fear the paranormal. No, no, no; let’s rephrase that: I am a believer in the supernatural and the paranormal, I just try to avoid it. Just don’t be nominating me to go watch a scary, suspenseful movie with anyone because I can’t do it. I’m a scardey cat. Most readers don’t realise that as wild and vivid as my mind may be, I don’t have the courage to watch scary movies or become involved with an activity that may be too risky or haunting. I am scared of the dark, jump when someone says boo, and I become faint and ghost-white at the smell of blood. I have always been a visual person and my books contain a lot of fight scenes and feature a lot of supernatural abilities. Have I ever been in a fight? No. Well… I may have beat up the little sister now and then when we were younger. Do I enjoy writing about them? Yes, I do. Every fight is different. When abilities and the paranormal abound it makes the possibilities endless. I…

Romance readers are often accused of giving in to escapism.  You’ve heard those critics, the ones you want to roll your eyes at.  They don’t get it.  They seem to think that escapism is a bad thing!  In fact, reading a Romance set in a place or even a time far, far away from your own is the next best thing to taking a long trip and immersing yourself in a different culture. I first started reading Romance in high school, when I was definitely trapped in one spot.  My daily fantasies of running away from the mean girls and indifferent boys, hopping a ship, and going to England, where I would hide in the countryside until a handsome aristocrat noticed me met their imaginative match in romantic stories of Regency pirates.  The freedom that I found in reading about pirates (the ultimate gateway drug to the world of alpha heroes and feisty heroines) carried me through a difficult time in my life.  It also peeked my curiosity about the times and places I was reading about. Traveling the world is a prospect that most of us can only dream about, but just because we might not ever be able…

As a California native, I grew up on the beach. But not the typical beaches you might picture when you think of California. No palm trees, no oiled-up weight lifters, no boardwalk and no laying out for a tan. You see, I grew up in Eureka, happily situated between San Francisco and the Oregon border. The average summer temperature is around 65. The average winter temperature is around 55. We like to call that the temperate zone. As a current resident of Texas, I can’t tell you how much I miss that weather! The beaches I grew up on had one consistent attribute: gray. Gray skies, gray water, gray sand. But it was glorious. My early experiences with going to the beach were in sweatshirts, rolled up jeans and bare feet, soaked to the knees with seaweed between my toes and an ensuing earache. But surfing and swimming…never! There are sharks in those waters, dude. And jellyfish and weirdo slimy, gray sea life that bump against your legs and try to pull you down.  Plus, Jaws was, and still is, one of my favorite movies. Needless to say, I have rather polarizing beachy issues. This might be why—to this day—I…

With a summer movie line-up that looks like the shelves of the young adult section in my favorite bookstore, I guess I’m not the only one who thinks YA novels make excellent cinema. By June 11, 2014, the film adaptation of DIVERGENT had earned nearly 268 million worldwide. In one week, THE FAULT IN OUR STARS raked in 79 million. THE GIVER, a film adaptation of Lois Lowry’s Newberry Medal-winning young adult novel, comes out in August 15, 2014 and a film adaptation of THE MAZE RUNNER by James Dashner is coming September 19, 2014. Hollywood has taken an interest in the young adult market, and they’re looking to what teens are reading to find amazing stories that translate into movie magic. This is by no means a new trend, but it continues to be an advantage for book fans and movie fans alike. Fantastic novels reach a far wider audience once they’ve been adapted, and teens who might not normally read over summer break might be tempted to give the novels a try. YA novels that are adapted into movies are chosen in large part because of you, the fans. You talk about the books you’re reading. You recommend…

Ernest Hemingway exuded a brand of masculinity and a philosophy of life that has been a fascination to both men and women. Men admired his adventures in World War I, the Spanish Civil War and World War II along with his legendary hunting and fishing expeditions. Women were charmed by his masculine self-confidence and good-natured story-telling. Marlene Dietrich called him “the most fascinating man I know” and said he “found time to do the things most men only dream about.”  She was right. He courted life-threatening adventures, glamorous friends while writing articles, novels and short stories that captivated the world. As a former English teacher at Hemingway’s alma mater, Oak Park and River Forest High School, I first explored Hemingway’s high school years as a means of my engaging students in his novels.  My students were quick to view Hemingway as a legendary author who led an action-filled life, but many felt that their own lives paled in comparison to his and that being in school was often “just boring.” My students’ attitudes inspired me to do some research on Hemingway’s life as a high school student.  I studied his yearbooks, his high school writing and even met some of…

As a historian, my historical romance novels have a firm grounding in reality. The settings, the events, the feel can be traced through research and research and research of the period, of the people, of events. In THE WICKED BARGAIN, Ethan’s story of being taken by the Barbary Pirates and sold into slavery in the Middle East is based on fact. The Barbary Pirates exist even to this day. These are not the pirates like we love in Pirates of the Caribbean, nor even Black Sails or the latest Crossbones. Pirating for hundreds of years, they strike fear into any ship they come close to. They raid, seize control of the ship, take prisoners and loot only to sell the people into slavery. History also shows they have arrived and landed on Greece, Italy, Sicily, Spain and up to the British Isles. They leech off the close seaside inhabitants, kidnapping them at night to make a profit off them to buyers in the Arabia and elsewhere. The Western European powers and the United States found the way to be left alone is to pay the pirates a bribe to do so, or, in Great Britain’s power, a well-armed navy escort…

It’s release day For ONCE UPON A HIGHLAND AUTUMN! It’s a pleasure to be here at Fresh Fiction to share this day with you. I also thought I’d share some of my deep, dark writerly secrets today, and tell you a bit about the story behind ONCE UPON A HIGHLAND AUTUMN. ONCE UPON A HIGHLAND AUTUMN is the second book in the Once Upon A Highland series, which began with Once Upon A Highland Summer. Each book in the series has a different magical theme, an otherworldly, mysterious edge. Highland Summer featured a pair of meddlesome ghosts, who return from the grave to see that their descendants find the love, fortune, and happiness they themselves missed out on. In ONCE UPON A HIGHLAND AUTUMN, it’s Megan MacNabb’s turn to be caught up by mysterious forces, this time an ancient curse. ONCE UPON A HIGHLAND AUTUMN is actually two stories in one. Megan and Kit’s love story is interwoven with the tale of how the dreadful curse that lies upon Glen Dorian came to be, a tragic story of love, loss, and war, that is still awaiting an ending when Kit and Megan’s story begins, some seventy years later. Now for one of…

All right, so I was only seven in 1966 — not a child of the sixties, but a child in the sixties. And I wasn’t one of those kids who knew about popular music. I spent most of my early years in the small Texas town of San Marcos, hardly on the cutting edge of pop culture. Music came to me in a spotty, haphazard and completely disjointed way, and it wasn’t until a few years ago, when I started writing the novel MONDAY, MONDAY, a novel that begins in 1966, that I found I had suddenly tapped into one of the richest veins in American music. I was, of course, a few decades behind everyone else. I had arrived at the sixties in my fifties. It’s not that music was unimportant to me as a kid: I liked singing. I sang along to Burl Ives records. I could sing as loud as the next kid. I remember standing shoulder to shoulder with other children on small bleachers in a small room at Crockett Elementary, belting out a song in French that none of us knew the meaning of. I thought the words were “Allawetta, John T. Allawetta.” My dad was a…

My friend Sharon and I sat watching the televised news conference of a political candidate I liked. The man had been accused of having an affair. Standing in front of reporters, he denied the campaign-ending allegations. I wanted to believe him. My friend knew better. Sharon Smith is a retired FBI agent and a forensic psycholinguist. She studies language, the words people use, in the context of criminal investigations. Detecting deception, analyzing kidnappers’ notes, and assessing threats are just a few of the areas in which she applies her specialized knowledge. What tipped her off that the politician was lying? Body language does sometimes provide clues to what a person is thinking, but more recent studies have shown words are more reliable indicators of what’s going on inside. For example, the use of qualifiers like “sort of,” “kind of,” and “possibly” indicate a suspect is backing away from the truth. A man suspected of killing his girlfriend may admit that he was “sort of” angry with her when neighbors heard the fight. These “minimal descriptors” also include words like “I believe” and “probably”. Not answering directly is also a clear red flag. For example, when an investigator says, “Did you…