Readers may know, years back, I cut my teeth co-authoring several thrillers with James Patterson. Judge and Jury, Lifeguard, the Jester, and the early Women’s Murder Cub series. I always refer to it as a combination MFA/MBA in Thriller Management.   That was many books ago. I just published my eighth solo thriller, Everything to Lose, the story of a determined mother who is lured to do something wrong, indeed criminal, to protect her challenged son, who has Asperger’s syndrome, and then her world caves in.   I never set out to write Patterson-clones. What I have always wanted to do was to keep the pages turning. And to write twisty, plot-centric thrillers with lots of reversals and surprises, but about recognizable, every day heros and families with emotionally resonant endings. My first book, The Blue Zone, was probably pretty Pattersonian at that. With a hundred chapters, lots of unexpected twists and turns; lots of italics and exclamations. Then I was pushed to write frenetic thrillers like 15 Seconds and No Way Back, putting likeable people in situations that spiral out of control from the opening pages. This book I just took my time and let the reader live in…

Good guys chasing bad guys. Bad guys chasing good guys. They’re all armed with pistols, rifles and knives while sporting devil-may-care attitudes. Throw in the ladies doing their own chasing and saving lives while wearing (attractive) skirts and matching (lethal) accessories. Mix all this with lawless Delaware Bend, Texas, and even more lawless Indian Territory in the 1880s and you’ve got suspense, mystery and heightened emotions. Romance ups the ante. LADY GONE BAD LADY GONE BAD In LADY GONE BAD, a saloon singer called Lady consorts with outlaws to get a lead on her parents’ murderers. Rafe, Deputy U.S. Marshal, arrives in town to arrest her. Instead, his name ends up on a Wanted Poster. Together, they escape into Indian Territory to clear their names and hunt down murderous desperados. ANGEL GONE BAD ANGEL GONE BAD In ANGEL GONE BAD, Angel is a dime novelist determined to save a friend kidnapped by outlaws. She enlists the help of Rune, an Anti-Horse Thief Detective (http://digital.library.okstate.edu/encyclopedia/entries/A/AN012.html), hot on the trail of a notorious bandit. They brave the wilds of Indian Territory and an outlaw gang’s hideout for justice. BRIDE GONE BAD BRIDE GONE BAD In BRIDE GONE BAD, Tempest is after her…

You know those scented perfume ads that fill the pages of fashion magazines and spill out of beauty store fliers? The ones with the sticky flap, that once lifted, fill the reader’s nostrils with an olfactory overload? Yeah, I hoard them. Just to be clear, I am not a hoarder. In fact, I consider myself the very opposite. A clutter purger, if you will, who often times has to go out and buy the odd knick knack or doodad because I threw it out in my last decluttering frenzy. But perfume flyers are different. Those, I take and carefully stack in my office drawer, pulling them out whenever I need inspiration. Why? Because those little fragrance ads are far more than just a piece of paper with a bit of scent sprayed on their glossy surface. They are scene setters, writer’s block breakers, and character creators. Whenever I peel back that sealed flap, images appear, of a tropical paradise in St. Tropez, of an English rose garden in full bloom, of a silk tent in an exotic Oriental hideaway. Refreshing clean top notes, light floral layers, and musky overtones whisk me to foreign places and help settle me into a…

Romance readers expect the satisfaction of a happily ever after (HEA) at the end of a novel. As an author who writes contemporary romance novels, so do I … really, I do. I understand there’s an implicit promise between my readers and me that I will deliver a HEA – or else. Or else I’ll disappoint my readers. Or else I shouldn’t even bother starting a new novel because I’ve lost my audience by betraying them. The romance genre, by definition, promises an “and they lived happily ever after” of some sort or another. A kiss – with the promise of more. (And different authors provide varied levels of “more.”) An engagement, complete with a close-up of the ring. A lavish, Pinterest-perfect wedding. One of my goals is to balance romance and reality. Why? Because there’s more to happily ever after than the fairy tales tell us. Classic “and they lived happily ever after” stories often avoid the struggles you and I face here on this side of the printed page. Yes, there are evil stepmothers and dragons … but there are also fairy godmothers and magic potions – and a romantic fade into the sunset. In true-to-life romance, relationship…

Hello, and thanks for inviting me to hang out with you here at Fresh Fiction! Who brought the wine? This is my last stop on a blog tour that’s been devoted entirely to bad dates. We’ve all had them, right? In my new romantic comedy, FRISKY BUSINESS, my heroine endures more than her share. After vowing not to date any more wealthy men, Marley embarks on a quest to date only blue collar guys. While the plan makes it easier for her keep her distance from Will—the quirky, unlikely millionaire she desperately doesn’t want to fall for—it sends Marley down a path of truly terrible dates. But like most romance novels, Marley and Will’s story has a happy ending. I’ve been sharing my personal bad date stories throughout this tour, but now it seems appropriate to wrap things up with a happily ever after of my own. Not long before the release of my debut romantic comedy, Making Waves, I went through a pretty lousy divorce. Um, we’re not to the happy part yet. After the dust settled, I reached out to a male acquaintance who’d been through his own divorce a few years earlier. At first, I asked him…

My upcoming military/paranormal/romantic-suspense-thriller from Sourcebooks, HER PERFECT MATE (Book One of the X-OPS Series) is set within our own world in the current time. In this series, the fictional Department of Covert Operations (DCO for short) is an ultra-secret government agency that pairs the very best soldiers, law enforcement officers, and spies together with shifters—humans that possess special animal attributes, like claws, fangs, fast reflexes, speed, endurance, and heightened senses. Humans and even animals as different from us a mice share a tremendous amount of DNA (something like an 80% match). Each have about the same number of genes, and it’s only a relative small number of genes that make us unique. For example, both humans and mice have a gene for a tail. In mice, it’s turned on. In humans, it’s turned off. This is how shifters exist in the world I created. They simply have certain animal-specific traits that are turned on—like claws, fangs, muscular strength, etc.). These shifters hide themselves in our world, rarely even knowing that others of their kind exist, and doing everything they can to keep their secret from the rest of society. The DCO stumbled over a shifter early in its history and…

I’m writing this post on Mother’s Day, after having spent a wonderful day with my daughter, and I’m thinking about my heroine in my current book, ALWAYS EMILY. Emily doesn’t have children of her own, but the hero does. Five years older than Emily, Salem married years ago, breaking Emily’s fourteen-year-old heart. He and his wife had two daughters. His wife is now dead and the girls are at a vulnerable stage, one smack dab in the middle of adolescence and the second just entering into it. When Emily returns to her hometown after years away, the elder of the two girls is in trouble. She is having serious problems at school and with a boy. Emily is thrust into the center because Salem asks for her help. His daughter needs a woman to help her sort through confusing, overwhelming emotions. Things were so much easier when he was handling simple problems like scraped knees. Now, dealing with teenaged girls and their adolescent issues, he feels out of his depth. It was interesting for me to imagine how a woman would feel when having to deal with someone else’s children, when she has had no experience with her own. She…

This past weekend, I taught a class about writing a sex scene for non-romance writers. The Writer’s League of Texas had been so gracious as to ask me to come explain how the mechanics, the terminology, and every little detail of how “those” scenes are created. During the creation of my Keynote presentation, I pulled videos from movies to emphasize my point. We discussed details from when the sex should happen, why, how, who, and what is the motivation other than just getting off. To emphasize some of the points, I used video clips of the many movies I’ve watched and fallen in love with over the years. No, I didn’t show clips of Debbie Does Dallas or How I Did Your Mother, because any well seasoned romance reader knows that’s just the sex and we all really want to see amazing sexual tension. In the over three hour presentation, I showed clips from Don Juan de Marco, Mask of Zorro (with Tyrone Powers), the Mark of Zorro (with Antonio Banderas), Ghost, Pretty Woman, Easy A, 9 1/2 weeks (eating scene), and True Lies (strip scene). All illustrated the different aspects of what’s needed when writing “the scene.” I explained…

I live in fear of making a major historical boo-boo in one of my books.  The tiny slipups don’t bother me so much. Perhaps I referred to a color that wasn’t in existence in 1839 (apple-green chartreuse) or mentioned a breed of animal that had yet to have been bred in 1800 (Persian cats). My fragile world will not shatter. But I bolt up in bed at night, my body drenched in a cold sweat, my heart racing, terrified that I’ve unwittingly committed some grand-scale faux pas along the lines of getting Queen Victoria’s birth or death wrong or tangling up my hero’s title and address (Those blasted titles get me every time) or centering a plot around the incorrect date of an important election (Okay, I admit that I actually did that one.) and I’ll be banished from all good historical fiction society. At some point in the development process, I will have dinner at a Middle Eastern restaurant with my good friend and historian extraordinaire, Nancy Mayer. She is so kind and patient, she lets me gab on and on and on about my book-in-progress. It is so much more fun to talk about my book than to…

I have to confess that starting a new series—even a spin-off one—is a harrowing event, at least for this author. The exploits of the Night Stalkers had become a comfort zone. I know these characters, I know their world as well as any outsider is likely to. New adventures and new romances arose, and will continue to do so as that series continues, but its more like slipping on a really broken-in pair of hiking boots and off we go on an adventure. Suddenly I’m dressed in Nomex fireproof gear. It’s hot, sweaty, and no matter what I do, the itch of heat and ash get down into my cotton long johns that must be worn for protection even on the hottest days when fighting wildfire. In trading military attack helicopters for wildfire attack helicopters, I had to learn new technologies, new tactics, new definitions of what was safe. But perhaps the biggest thing I had to learn was what distinguished Wildland Heli-aviation Firefighters not only from my military Night Stalkers, but also from their city-based firefighting brethren. It wasn’t the danger. Despite the disastrous lose at Yarnell of the 19-man hotshot team, wildland firefighters are obsessed with safety. No,…