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,…

Hey there Fresh Fiction readers! It’s release day for RISKY GAME, my fourth title in the Out of Bounds series and my fourth release in the past 364 days! It’s been a whirlwind, but I’m really excited for readers to finally get Brody’s story. I know I’m not supposed to admit it, but Brody is my favorite child among all the players on the fictitious Baltimore Blaze football team. But if I’m telling the truth here, the book I was supposed to release today was never going to be Brody’s story. As a matter of fact, my favorite child was actually *cough* an accident. You see, I never saw Brody on the horizon when I was plotting out the books I was contracted for. He just appeared on page thirty three of FOOLISH GAMES, wearing his trademark neon sneakers and lounging on Will Connelly’s sofa. Loose-limbed and carefree, the blue-eyed jock breezes through life with his charming smile and athletic grace. I was immediately smitten. But there’s more to Brody than just his cover boy good looks and all-pro ball handling skills. He’s vulnerable on many fronts and he’s trying his best to hide it from the world. But as…

You wouldn’t think there’d be a connection. Grungy guys wearing jeans so dirty that they’d probably stand on their own. Beards, long hair, scary … we’ve all seen the type. And having done research on real outlaw motorcycle gangs (OMG), it’s not a pretty or sexy world in reality. Apparently, though, there’s a big appeal for these bad boys, as evidenced by the surge of popularity for OMG series. I didn’t even know about this trend when I turned an idea I’d had in my files for over a decade into my second book in the Justiss Alliance series. WILD WAYS, however, is not about OMG heroes. It’s about two Navy SEALs who lost their careers when a covert mission went wrong and end up riding Route 66 for some much needed R & R on their Harleys. And yes, they encounter several of those bikers along the way. Just when Julian Cuevas is ready to pack it in and start his new job with The Justiss Alliance, though, he overhears a woman in dire need of a hero. Mollie Reagan’s hired escort has just tucked his tail between his legs and hauled butt, leaving her on her own to…

Love blogging with the Fresh Fiction people. As I pondered what to write about today, I realized that the question below was the core of at least three of my novels. How far would you go to protect someone you loved, especially if that someone happened to be a child? MORTAL DECEPTION tells the story of a sister who goes to a bar dressed in slutty clothes for the sole purpose of seducing an anesthesiologist so that she can walk away with his DNA sample. You see, her nephew is dying, and this last-ditch effort may be the only thing that will save his life. Think about that. Could you have sex with a perfect stranger if it meant saving a child you love? Would I? In a heartbeat. But what if you find out that the man is suspect number one in the murder of his wife? Without blinking — in a heartbeat. In SHATTERED my heroine finds herself entrusted with three orphaned Colombian children that somehow, she has to get past the cartel checkpoints. She makes no bones about the fact that despite only knowing the children for a short time, she’d die before she allows them to…

Shannon Ridgeway awakens from a ten-year coma to a whole new world of madness where reality television has taken over the planet and everyone’s life appears to revolve around a tiny screen on their cell phones! This is the inciting incident for Book 2 of my Contemporary Fairy Tales series for River North Fiction. RISE & SHINE is based (loosely) on Sleeping Beauty, and Shannon adjusts to the changes around her about as readily as her creator embraces change. Not so much. I like to know what’s ahead of me. If the road sign reads, “Curves Ahead,” I want to know what kind of curves, how many there are and how steep they might be. I know this isn’t how life works – the lesson has been brought home to me time and time again – but what can I say? If information is disbursed on a need-to-know basis, then I’m all in because I need to know. The beauty of my life as a fiction writer (and there is a lot to love about that sentence fragment!) is that my books have taught me to live a little more spontaneously. I mean, plan as I will, my characters have…

Everyone deserves a happy ending. We all have our own tragedies to survive, large and small, so we all need the reminder that hope and love are all around us. I believe this so deeply that I built two entirely separate—and surprisingly successful—writing careers so I could make that happen for all my characters and all my readers. Twelve years ago, in one of the darkest periods of my life, I desperately needed hope. My daughter was born very ill, and in her first few years of life, she faced so many crisis-level medical problems that I held her life in my hands more times than I want to remember. At some point, a nurse handed me a romance novel: KISS AND TELL by Cherry Adair. That novel—with its message of hope fulfilled and of happy endings emerging from the darkness and chaos—saved my life. It, and other romances like it, were my escape, my antidepressant, my hope during hopeless times. So when I started thinking that maybe I could write one of these books that had saved my life, my only goal was to help someone else the same way I’d been helped. If I could do that for…