Thank you for having me. I’m very excited to be here and so happy that today is release day for my debut novel FIND MY WAY HOME. A contemporary story about a small town Southern gal wanting more from life and thinking if she could only hit the road for the big city, she might find what she’s looking for. *cough, cough* Well, we all know that’s not necessarily true. Bertie Anderson, wants to make it big as an interior designer. She’s three weeks away from reaching her goal when she’s given the challenge of redesigning the old Victorian in town she’s always dreamed about. But there’s a catch: if she finishes in three months, she’ll be rewarded with a big bonus. Big. Piece of cake, right? It would be if her client wasn’t bad boy Keith Morgan, retired tennis pro and single-dad-on-the-edge. Keith has moved to Harmony, NC with a huge chip on his shoulder (along with a ton of guilt) to make a better life for himself and his ten-year old daughter. What he’s not prepared for is small town, Southern quirkiness, his aunt’s ultimatum to get married in three months, and his uncontrollable attraction to his maddening…

I hear tell that some authors don’t like that question. Not me! Maybe because I have a great memory—but mostly because it’s fun to retrace, for myself and readers, how disparate images and incidents came together, shifted, and took shape on the page. In CRIME RIB, second in my Food Lovers’ Village Mysteries (out July 1), the TV show Food Preneurs comes to Jewel Bay, Montana to film the 35th Annual Summer Art and Food Festival and its centerpiece, the annual steak grill-off. My protagonist, Erin Murphy, manages a grocery specializing in local foods. After disaster struck the village in DEATH AL DENTE, Erin is content this time to stay on the sidelines, keeping her focus on the Merc and scouting festival vendors for new products. When the show’s producer is killed in a hit-and-run, Festival organizers beg her to step in and help out, to give Jewel Bay a shot at national publicity. How can a local girl say no? But when the host reveals a less than camera-ready side of himself, and a contestant is attacked and killed, Erin worries that the town’s reputation as a family-friendly, food-loving, vacation village will go up in flames. And when the…

Oh, Brody, Brody, Brody. #Swoon (hopefully you’ll be saying the same thing when you read SHARING YOU) Brody is a character you might want to shake, but you can’t help but falling in love with. He’s been married to a woman for six years, but he fell out of love with her long before they married, and he’s more than positive that his wife never loved him. By trying to do the right thing by her, he ended up entering into a life that would slowly break him. His spirit, his fire for life, pretty much everything that makes Brody Brody has been dying since he married Olivia Reynolds. But he feels responsible for her, he feels like he owes it to her to take care of his wife who is only a shell of the girl he fell in love with in high school, and what kind of a man would he be if he left her? So every day he goes home to where his wife may or may not be, and stays on his side of the house to avoid her unless she’s having one of her psychotic fits … we’ll call them “episodes” for now ……

HOW TO MARRY A COWBOY, Mason and Annie Rose’s story, is the final book in the Cowboys & Brides series that started out with BILLION DOLLAR COWBOY last year. Mason was one of four cowboys who showed up on my porch a couple of years ago. They were all sexy as the devil in blue jeans. They had hats in hands and were there to ask me to write their story. And I refused. They were all rich cowboys and I had no idea how to write about the rich and famous. But I did listen to them a little and it didn’t take long for them to convince me that they were really good old boys and that the money didn’t make them any different than the other cowboys I’d written about. I didn’t realize until I started writing HOW TO MARRY A COWBOY that Mason Harper had two personal rules and he’d never crossed the line before. The first one was to never get involved with a woman in the house, no matter who she was and the second one was to never get involved with the nanny of his twin daughters, Lily and Gabby. Then Annie Rose shows…

As summer heats up (at least in my corner of the world), it is time to head to the beach, the lake, or a comfortable chair in an air conditioned room, and prepare to fall in love—with your next book boyfriend.  I would like to recommend Eric Moore, the hero of FULL EXPOSURE.  And before you ask, yes, as the author of his story, I am biased.  But trust me readers, the hero of this sexy contemporary romance is worth your time.  Let’s begin with #10 . . . 10.  Tall, dark, and handsome?  Check.  Oh, and his eyes?  A perfect blue. 9.  Drool-worthy muscles that make a girl wonder if he spends more time wielding chainsaws alongside his crew than behind a desk running his timber company?  Check.  But seriously, every romance hero out there is well built.  Time to move beyond the superficial. 8.  Loyal?  Check.  He has had the same best friend since grade school.  Eric even offered his best friend’s little sister, Georgia—who returned from her time serving her country with a wild streak a mile long—a job as his nanny.  Admittedly, he is starting to regret that decision.  Keeping his hands off the twenty-something Georgia…

Alfred Hitchcock drew a useful distinction between shock and suspense. Shock, he said, would be a bomb going off without warning at the family breakfast table. But if you show your audience the bomb in advance, and if you intercut that with images of the oblivious family breakfasting, if you juxtapose the normality with the horror in store – then you have suspense. I try to keep this rule in mind when I’m writing. Here are five tips for how I created suspense in SOMEONE ELSE’S SKIN.   #1 Be visceral This is about engaging the reader senses – taste, touch, sound, smell – but it’s also about pulling the reader headlong into the story, getting under their skin, making their pulse race. In SOMEONE ELSE’S SKIN, I put Marnie Rome’s sidekick into a deadly situation towards the end of the book. Noah Jake is in danger, in pain, afraid for his life. I kept the chapters short. I ditched conventional sentence structure. Got right inside his head. We’re as scared as he is that he might die, and not a nice death. #2 Keep it real Having horrors in store for your characters is all well and good, but…

One of my favorite mystery series of all time is Joan Hess’s Maggody series. She is the master of creating weird, wild, and yet lovable characters. Anyone who has taken the trip to Maggody, Arkansas and lived a while among the Buchanons knows exactly what I mean. I’ve read all the titles, and some more than once. So when I set out to create the folks of Autumn Vale, New York, for the Merry Muffin Mystery series, it was with an eye to creating a unique world of people who had lived in an insulated environment for so long they had kind of a short hand in dealing with each other. Merry Wynter, I figured, would arrive like a visitor to a foreign country; she doesn’t speak the language and she isn’t sure how to deal with the natives. I carefully say it was with an eye to creating it, because I found in writing the books that my own style, so thoroughly grounded in reality, didn’t lend itself to the wonderfully weird characterizations that Hess manages. It could easily have become a case of an author shooting for the stars and managing only to launch a few bottle rockets….

I’m thrilled to be here today on Fresh Fiction in honor of my newly released historical, paranormal romance, CRIMSON HEART! CRIMSON HEART is my ninth completed full-length novel and the third in the Highland Hearts series (which also contains two novellas). The circle of family and friends in the magical world of the Macbains and Munros continues to grow. Every time I turn around a hero and heroine from an earlier book have created another baby (those virile Highland warriors tend to do that) and wa la – I have new characters to raise. It’s extremely important that all of these characters (both people and animals) are fully colored in with untold (or eventually told) past baggage, oddities, and personal preferences. Otherwise they fall flat as cardboard cut-outs or stereotypes (yawn – close book). So just as our infinitely diverse gene pool stirs up new human beings, we writers must shape our unique characters. Where do all these little persona details come from? My characters are mosaics, built from personality shards of every creature I have encountered mixed with a generous portion of my own vivid imagination and past experiences. Characters are everywhere. I used to have weekly coffee with a…

In my upcoming novel ANNIE’S STORIES, Annie is mourning the loss of her father, Marty Gallagher, who was a well-respected seanchaí. A seanchaí is an Irish storyteller. My favorite historical resource on Ireland is A Smaller Social History of Ancient Ireland by P.W. Joyce, a second edition published in 1908. Here is what Joyce had to say about storytellers: “There were professional shanachies and poets whose duty it was to know by heart numerous old tales, poems, and historical pieces, and to recite them, at festive gatherings, for the entertainment of the chiefs and their guests…for though few could read, the knowledge and recitation of poetry and stories reached the whole body of the people. This ancient institution of story-telling held its ground both in Ireland and Scotland down to a period within living memory.” All cultures have storytellers for the same reason: literacy was not always common. What better way to convey information than with a story? You may have read about this tradition in books such as Frank Delaney’s Ireland. The tradition of Irish storytelling was still very strong into the late nineteenth century, so I decided to make that a part of my novel ANNIE’S STORIES. Annie’s…

I love being a mom, but I have to admit that motherhood involves many unpleasantries (which according to my spell check, is not a word). My two least favorite things about being a mom are potty training and driver’s training. Potty training was the single biggest test of my patience as a mother. First of all, it’s hard to know when your toddler, who can’t cross the street by herself, is ready to use the toilet. Some of us just hope we can manage it by the time our kids enter kindergarten. Potty training my boys, I often carried the faint scent of urine with me when I went out in public. But don’t get me started on boys and their bathroom habits. What girl would stand on the bathroom counter and try to hit the toilet from three feet up? I always thought I would rather have a root canal than potty train one of my children. Well, I’ve potty-trained six children and have yet to experience a root canal. Even though driver’s training is not usually messy or stinky, it carries the added hazard that YOU COULD DIE. I do not do well under these working conditions. I…