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…

Most novelists walk through life collecting stories and scenes and breath-stealing words like black knit pants collect cat hair. We can’t walk through a room or a day without something landing and sticking. When I sat down to write ALL MY BELONGINGS, I drew heavily on those stick-forever moments. The main character in ALL MY BELONGINGS, Becca, is a selfless caregiver. Even when rebuffed, shamed, and unappreciated, she kept caring. As I wrote scenes of Becca’s patience and kindness toward a woman who couldn’t remember her cherished son and flitted seamlessly from reality to a non-existent ballet class, I realized I was writing Becca as the caregiver I wish I’d always been for my kids, my husband, my grandkids, my mother… Some of Becca’s actions seemed so familiar. Where did they originate? Long ago, I visited an elderly relative in a nursing home. When she motioned for the nurse to take her to the bathroom, I stepped into the hall, but couldn’t help overhearing the nurse talking low and sweetly to the woman. “Bernice, why don’t I get you a dry pair of panties? You’ll feel so much better.” Tenderness laced every word that came from the caregiver’s mouth. At…

First painful rule of fiction:  Everything–dialogue, characters, plot, scenes–must move the story forward.  If it does not, cut with the ruthlessness of a film editor.  So, why include historic or well-known characters in cameo appearances?  What would make the research for credibility worth the trouble for a character’s one or two-time walk into the pages of your novel? Sometimes, it’s the cameo character that holds significance for your main character, and sometimes it’s their work, their passion, or simply their influence that permeates the story. In SAVING AMELIE, a WWII story set in Berlin and Oberramergau, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a well-known dissident German pastor makes two brief appearances.  But, those appearances carry tremendous weight. Bonhoeffer saw early the dangers posed by the Nazis and Hitler’s quest for absolute power.  He recognized the horrific ramifications for Jews in the Nuremberg Laws and the Aryan Clause which stripped German Jews of their citizenship and rights, and eliminated Hebrew Christians from public and church roles.  He saw the burning of synagogues for the hate crimes they were, and sterilizations and “mercy killings” of the physically and mentally handicapped for murder.  Bonhoeffer knew that the church, by not protecting Jews or anyone else outside Hitler’s…

I’ve loved all my characters. I’ve loved getting to know them and torturing them, getting to watch them fall in love, and seeing them tested by all the roadblocks in between. I love characters when they have huge flaws, because I love people when they have huge flaws. None of us are perfect, and fiction to me is like life with the volume cranked up. I think the two things I love most about writing vampires are the bond characters create when they share blood, and the extended lifespan. The latter, because so much of what shapes a story and the push-pull between two imperfect souls falling in love has to do with the lifetime of baggage they bring to the table. The older the vampire, the more the baggage, I figure. Or maybe it’s the bigger the hero, the bigger the baggage? Lee, my hero in HUNTER BY NIGHT, has been around for more than seven hundred years. That’s a helluva lot of baggage. Fun baggage. I don’t mean fun like he makes balloon animals and tells witty jokes at cocktail parties. But the kind of fun that allows for delicious tension between him and his heroine? Oh, hell…

You know you want an Alpha jaguar shifter, so I’ll make it really easy for you in case you’re just a little unsure as to how to seduce one of those really hot big cats! 1. Make him purr. A massage will help to ease the tension in those hard, taut muscles after all the physical activities he’s involved in. That will prepare him for more of a workout with you. Guaranteed. 2. Big cats love meat. A prime cut steak will have him eating out of your hands and will give him the sustained energy for much more—where you are concerned. Which is the most important thing! 3. Jaguars are one of only a few big cats that love the water. Others will swim in it when they need to, but jaguars love it. So take him to: a waterfall, a pool, a hot tub, a shower, a lake, the ocean—well, you name it. If it’s water, no telling how much fun the two of you can have. 4. Play chase. Cats love to play chase. But don’t let him do all the chasing. See what happens when you become the hunter. 5. Go climbing. It doesn’t matter if…

A good romance has to have a hunky hero who gets the heroine’s heart pounding. I personally find a lot of different qualities attractive, but when it comes to my romance heroes, here are 10 of my favorites. 1)    A tortured past – he might be surly, grouchy, or just plain mean, but as long as there is a reason behind it (especially one that can be worked through) then this gives the hero a little license to behave badly for a bit. 2)    A rockin’ bod – okay, this probably isn’t politically correct, but we are discussing heroes in romance novels and fantasy guys are just more fun when they are built 😉 3)    A heart of gold – like #1, he might be the meanest guy in the room, but there is a difference between mean and cruel. If he’s a jerk to the heroine at first because he’s just trying to protect himself but deep down he’s really totally in love with her and wants to ride off into the sunset and make her dreams come true, then that totally works for me. If he’s the sort that will kick a puppy just for the fun of…

It was more of a desire to ‘spin a yarn’. An old phrase for a story teller but one I feel fits me. When I was young, my family owned a motor home. We went everywhere in that thing. This was before ipods, Gameboys and even DVD’s…much less DVD players. We had board games and the radio but there were places there wasn’t even good reception. Filling those hours on the road came down to using your imagination. I used to tell stories to my younger siblings, creating characters and worlds. My mother was a Medical librarian by day. She often took a second job at night at the public or university library to keep up with unexpected expenses. I learned to enjoy reading young because she took me along. I began reading romance in my teens. Without a doubt it hooked me and I still read the gene today.  Writing these tales came about rather by chance. I was unhappy with an ending to a book I had been enjoying and sat down to write a book. Sounds easier than it was. Writing is a skill and one I had a great deal to learn about…still do. A smart…

I’ve been writing professionally for ten years, making a fulltime living at it for the past six. So why should I be so excited to have THE TROUBLEMAKER NEXT DOOR coming out with Sourcebooks? First of all, I’m ALWAYS excited on release day. I don’t care if it’s for a publisher or myself. Release day is the culmination of a lot of hours of hard, grueling work in the manuscript draft, editing, more editing, polishing, proofing and promoting. It’s exhausting but so worth it to see that cover ready to be opened. But this series with Sourcebooks marks the beginning of a new medium for me—mass market. When I started writing, if you didn’t have a book published in paperback you weren’t considered a real writer, an unfortunate happenstance considering I started my career in ebooks. *grin* Back then, ebooks were the redheaded stepchild. Today, they’re the new black. I’ve had books in electronic format, trade format, and audio. But never before mass market. And it’s a true thrill, I’ll admit, to line up my McCauley Brothers books right next to others on my keeper shelf. Unlike my others, these fit! What makes THE TROUBLEMAKER NEXT DOOR also special is…