The characters in Neta Jackson‘s Yada Yada novels are definitely three-dimensional. But sometimes even she doesn’t know who she’s dealing with. Which is what I told my wife about the affable doorman she introduced in her YY House of Hope series. I immediately liked Harry Bentley and asked if I could tell his story while she dealt with Gabby Fairbanks, whose scumbag husband was kicking her out of her penthouse apartment in Harry’s building along Chicago’s beautiful lakefront. It turns out that Harry, who looks a little like Louis Gossett Jr., was a Chicago cop who’d risked his life crossing the “thin blue line” to blow the whistle on his corrupt boss. (Of course, we don’t have any corruption here in Chicago . . . but, hey, this is fiction, so I can do anything I want for a good story.) Harry had been given early retirement to keep him on ice until the trial. But his old boss found out . . . Wait a minute. This is turning into a spoiler. Suffice it to say that Harry’s life got a little complicated, especially when DCFS asked him to take in his ten-year-old grandson—who he didn’t even know he…

Publishing and promoting a book is definitely a team effort, and one of the teams whose work I am most fascinated by is the one who created the book trailers for my Civil War historicals, WEDDED TO WAR and WIDOW OF GETTYSBURG. The two trailers are quite different, yet both are compelling. Take a look at the trailers from this page and then read on for an interview with Phil Jacoby, creative producer of Mothlight Creative, the company who made this happen. Jocelyn: Take me through the process of creating a book trailer, from the time you accept the job to completion. Phil: It all depends on the project. We pitched a few directions to the publisher and the decision was made to proceed with the live-action option. Budget and time dictate (to an extent) what is possible in any project so we had to come up with a way to tell the story without overtelling it, lest we run out of time and/or resources. For Wedded to War, for example, from the time the project was approved to delivering the final product was roughly a month or so. Jocelyn: I read on your Web site that the music you used was an…

If you grow up in a less than a Leave-it-to Beaver home environment like Catherine and Thomas did without good role models, there are bound to be some adjustment issues. Heck even with good role models, there will be growing pains. Living and melding your life with another person’s is hard—then when you add in the complications of old emotional baggage on either, or both sides, it can really be really challenging and one has to keep a sense of humor and perspective to survive those early years where a couple is feeling their way around, trying to create their own rhythm—hmmm no sexual puns intended. But now that you went there . . . sex does serve to complicate things. Just sayin’. Anyhow, sex aside, trying to live with another person and be a good, roommate, companion, confidant, support, lover, etc. takes work, as Catherine and Thomas found out.  And there are bound to be a bunch of missteps—like Catherine making Thomas enough breakfast for four men, and the eggs that could be used as hockey pucks that Thomas gamely tried to choke them down, while trying not to look at his watch ‘cause he never ate breakfast and…

I think it’s safe to say there are moments for every writer when an idea flashes and we jump on that sucker with the force of a hurricane hitting land. For me, that idea sometimes comes from watching the news or reading a newspaper. Recently, it came from a place I hadn’t expected. Facebook. Yep, I was scrolling through my personal page catching up with my family and friends and spotted a photo album my sister-in-law had posted while vacationing in Italy with my brother, their kids and my mother. One of the photos was of my mother and a cousin she hadn’t met before. I guess I should be honest and say my mother is at a place in life where there are more goodbyes than hellos to people she loves. I imagine this must be hard. This getting older and losing loved-ones. But then there are moments that can only come with having lived a full life. Moments that are randomly captured by my photography obsessed sister-in-law who secretly located one of my mother’s cousins in Italy. While on vacation, my mother had no idea she’d be meeting a family member for the first time. She learned of…

When readers learn the nickname I use for the hero of my latest book—Sean Owens, the “stuttering hacker”—they usually get caught on the “stuttering” part. A romance novel hero who stutters? What the what? Yes. He stutters, and he’s sexy and awesome, competent, caring, somewhat screwed up in the head—all the great hero stuff. I promise. Today, though, I want to talk about the “hacker” part. Why write a hero who’s a hacker? What’s the appeal? The first thing I knew about Sean Owens was that he doesn’t talk to the book’s heroine, Katie, at all, and it drives her crazy. The second thing I knew was the reason why: he had an enormous crush on her in high school, and he’s afraid that if he tries talking to her, he’ll stutter. The third thing I knew about Sean wasn’t a thing, it was an image of a fifteen-year-old kid sitting all by himself at the front of the school bus, trying not to be too obvious as he watches the beautiful, popular girl he’s got a crush on make her way to the back row with her far-more-popular-than-Sean-will-ever-be boyfriend. This image is at the heart of how I see…

Don’t you just love sequel characters? I know I do. I love returning to a series, discovering the new romance, but also learning more about the lives of the characters from an earlier book. LORD OF THE HUNT, being reissued this month in ebook form, is all about sequel characters. When I finished my historical romance, LORD OF THE MIST, I really missed the characters. The emails I received told me fans wanted to know more about the characters as well. I aim to please, so LORD OF THE HUNT, crafted around a character from LORD OF THE MIST, was born. Along with sequel characters, I also love SECRETS! LORD OF THE HUNT has lots of secrets. The hero, Adam Quintin, has two. First, he’s really the son of the banished lord of Ravenswood Castle. This isn’t a spoiler, you know this right away. His second secret could have two results…fabulous rewards or death! Adam must hunt down a traitor who is conspiring with the French king against England. Adam is willing to risk death for the reward of catching this traitor, but Adam doesn’t care about gold or silver. Instead, he wants to win back Ravenswood for his family….

Once in a while I write a story that touches my heart. When I finish the book, I feel like I’ve been abducted in the middle of the night away from my home and friends. How could I be stuck in a snow storm in the Texas Panhandle when I should be in Harmony, Texas, dancing in the rain? Where are Martha Q and Tyler Wright? Where’s my ranch? Where are my chili-cheese fries from the diner? That’s kind of how it felt when I wrote the end to CAN’T STOP BELIEVING. I lived there, found and lost love there, and the day I mailed the book in, they all left me. Cord McMillan looked like he’d be a hard man for anyone to love. He’s an ex-con thanks to a mistake he made when he was 17. He hates everyone almost as much as he hates himself. All he has is a rundown farm and even working all week in town then farming till dark, he finds he’s about to lose the place. Nevada Britain, Cord’s neighbor, has always had the best of everything only now alone, she fears for her life. Using her last chance, she makes Cord…

Dear Reader, I was talking to a friend last night at the wine bar and I was mentioning writing a college age heroine, and she just sighed and said, “Wow, college was the best and the worst time of my life.  I had a blast, made awesome friends, partied, crushed on the wrong guy, then fell in love with the right one and had him break my heart.”  She went on to say those four years still influence her now in her early thirties. For me the opportunity to write about those years was too exciting to pass up, because like my friend, that transitional phase of my life altered the course of it.  I almost failed out of college, I defied my parents, I ran off and got married.  It was all crucial to me discovering who I really was, how to manage my freedom and my responsibilities, and to accept that sometimes love can be so intense it’s painful.  All of those feelings went in to TRUE, my May release. When Rory Macintosh notices that Tyler Mann is suddenly paying attention to her, she just thinks the tattooed bad-boy feels sorry for her, the shy girl.  But she…

There are some taboo subjects in the Christian writing world—some that just don’t get discussed as if they don’t exist. Honestly, if you look at the inspirational book section at Wal-Mart, you might think we’ve all turned Amish. Women in the church today get boob jobs. Men struggle with porn addictions. Abortions are kept secret. And ministers have been known to cheat. It’s the truth. So I wrote about it. But, as my former agent would say, I wrote it in a way that “makes the tragic entertaining.” Yeah, Bethany is struggling with forgiving her father for running off with his church secretary. And yeah, she starts to fall in love with her own pastor who is counseling her to forgive him. But instead of focus on her own issues, she gets into an assortment of embarrassing experiences while trying to fix others—splitting her pants at a cosmic bowling alley and exposing her white underwear beneath the black lights, running into her crush when trying on maternity clothes over a fake baby belly, and overdosing on fruit punch when fasting with the results of acting drunk. It’s a humorous look at the lengths Christians can go to in the effort…

I researched the novel on Jezebel’s life, REIGN, for two years. Then I had to throw the first draft in the trash. When I threw that in the trash, after two years of research and writing, I thought I was getting a fresh start. This next attempt to tell her story, I thought, would be so much better. I was wrong. That draft ended up in the trash, as did the next. Three times I started fresh, and three times I had to admit that the final product stank. I had not yet figured out why the story was so hard to write, and I needed a faithful friend and editor to point out my blind spot. So why does bad writing happen to good writers? (If I may be so bold to include myself!) There are perhaps a thousand reasons, but I ultimately what I know is this: writers need community. We need other people to show us our blind spots and push us past our comfort zones. A great editor can do this, but I can never assume that I will be assigned a great editor. For me, a critique group has become a major saving grace, an…