It took me a long time to decide to write a second mystery series. I’d heard that although readers want their favorite authors to produce more books, they also tended to be very upset with the author if her new series was too different from her previous one. I’d also been told that some readers might feel that if an author writes more than one book a year, she was just being greedy and “cranking” them out. So I used these fears as an excuse I to stick to what I was comfortable doing—writing one Scumble River mystery every twelve months. But then a character named Devereaux Sinclair popped into my head and started telling me about her life. Dev, which she assured me was what most people call her, was a financial advisor for six years before buying her hometown dime store. Her boss viewed the glass ceiling as a protective barrier and her colleagues committed most of the seven deadly sins before their first coffee break. She lives in the fictional town of Shadow Bend, Missouri with her grandmother, Birdie. Her father is in jail for vehicular manslaughter and her mother is hiding from the shame in California….

Shadows and Strongholds is largely set in a part of England very close to the Welsh border, in a beautiful county called Shropshire.  Much of the story takes place at Ludlow Castle which was once a great medieval fortress and still consists of substantial ruins today in the town centre.   It was begun in the late 11th century by the de Lacy family and continued to be built upon and maintained until the 16th century. The de Lacy family rebelled against the king and Ludlow castle was taken away from the male line and given  instead to a lady of the de Lacy bloodline called Sybilla Talbot.  King Henry I married her to one of his own men, Payn FitzJohn.  She bore  Payn two daughter, Cecily and Agnes. Payn was killed by Welsh raiders in 1137, leaving Sybilla a widow still of child-bearing age and in possession of a major Welsh border fortress.   At this time, old King Henry had died and the throne had been taken by his nephew, Stephen.  However, Henry’s daughter, Matilda also felt she had a right to the crown and set out to try and topple  Stephen from his throne.  The disinherited male de Lacy…

Hi there. Thanks for having me here. I hope you don’t mind that I brought a hunky cowboy along. He’s been feeling a little lonely since Sophie gave him the cold shoulder that he’s looking for ways to win her back. I told him he could come on this blog tour I was attending and hopefully you lovely people will have some ideas on how a drop-dead gorgeous cowboy gets the woman of his dreams to realize he’s not a playboy anymore and he really can be a father to the child she is taking care of. I am all out of ideas here because Damon has really been a bad boy and he has dated every single girl in Paradise Falls, not to mention the woman in that town look like they were hit by the honey stick so I’m not sure if Sophie shouldn’t give up and move on. So what do you think? Do you like bad boys? And do you think they can change and what should Damon do to win Sophie back? Are those handcuffs really going to cut it(you’re going to have to read the book to see what I’m talking about 🙂 I…

Lá Fhéile Pádraig s ona daoibh go léir! Before you think I’m babbling, that means “Happy Saint Patrick’s Day” in Irish.  The first book in my new County Cork Mysteries, BURIED IN A BOG, came out last month and I’ve been astounded by the response.  It debuted at #14 on the New York Times Paperback Bestseller list, which was great, but more important, I can’t tell you how many people have written to say that they love the Ireland I describe and are ready to plan a trip there. BURIED IN A BOG is about Maura Donovan’s introduction to Ireland.  She was raised in Boston by her grandmother, and her Gran’s last wish was that Maura visit the country Gran had left decades earlier.  Maura grudgingly goes to the small town of Leap on the south coast of Ireland, with no expectations—she plans a short trip before returning to Boston to figure out what she’s going to do with her life.  Instead she finds a warm welcome from an extended family she never knew she had.  She’s both an outsider and an insider; all the local people seem to know everything about her, but she knows little about them. And…

I write mysteries and I write romance and I write romantic women’s fiction. Pretty much everything I write has some degree of humor in it. That’s what I love to read, and I can’t seem to write without including some element of those things in everything I do. There are those who think that mysteries and romance don’t go together and should remain separate. While there are others who love a bit of mystery within their romance and vice versa. I think you can do anything so long as you don’t lose focus of what genre you’re writing in at the time. When I write a mystery, solving the mystery has to be the main focus of the book. If the book spends equal time on developing the romance, then the lines become blurred as to which genre to classify the book in when it comes out. Same goes for writing romance. The romance has to be the main focus of the book, with the mystery taking second stage in the background. Readers want to know what they are getting when they buy a book, and the whole point as an author is to please our readers. I love fun…

Here’s a little secret about me and my writing:  when it comes to how my stories unfold, I’m not always the one with my hands firmly on the steering wheel. What’s more, I like it that way. Yes, I know just how crazy that sounds, but that doesn’t make it any less true. When I sit down to start a book, at the most all I’ve written is a short summary of how I envision the story unfolding. This synopsis is only about seven or eight double-spaced pages long. Considering my final manuscript will top out at around 380 pages, there’s a lot of room for new ideas and even new characters to pop into the flow of the story. While true for all of my books, it was definitely true when I wrote HER KNIGHT’S QUEST. I knew Duncan, the hero, would be travelling alone to a distant abbey. I knew the heroine, Lady Lavinia, would be there. But starting out, I didn’t know anything about the sisters who lived there–not even their names. I was aware there was a young girl living at the abbey, but I didn’t know why and certainly never expected to have Sarra play…

I’m very glad to be here at Fresh Fiction today! I thought I’d take a minute of your time and tell you how THE GEEK GIRL AND THE SCANDALOUS EARL went from an idea, to a manuscript, to a real, live book. As I was thinking about this, holy cow, it just occurred to me when this whole thing started. In the summer of 2011, I decided to attend my first writer’s conference. The only book I had ready at the time was out on submission, and I was hoping for a “yes” that never came. I wanted to hedge my bets, so even though there was barely two months before the conference, I started writing THE GEEK GIRL AND THE SCANDALOUS EARL. I wrote quickly, and I poured myself into the story. I’ve never written that feverishly. But the holy grail of a face-to-face with real live editors and agents was a powerful motivator, and I got the story done. It wasn’t polished as perfectly as I liked, but it was done, and it was enough to be able to pitch it. I did lots of research about pitching. I came up with a one sheet, sort of a…

One of my favorite parts of writing my Amish Mysteries is the time I get to spend in Lancaster County, PA, prior to each new book. The tidbits I learn each and every time I visit the area where the largest contingent of Old Order Amish live (followed closely by Holmes County, Ohio) can—and do—fill pages and pages of my research notebook. And, sure enough, somewhere in those notes is the beginning of my plot. Take for instance my newest release, ASSAULTED PRETZEL (book # 2 in the series). That story was birthed around the following facts: * Old Order Amish families average about seven children each, with some homes having as many as twelve. It is because of these large families that the Amish population is doubling every 20 years. * With such rapid growth, the amount of available farm land in Lancaster County is shrinking. It is for this reason that many Amish either a) move to another part of the country to find land or b) find alternate ways to make money. I believe it was shortly after hearing that second fact that the story-generating wheels began to turn inside my head. Within days, I had the…

I’ve written a number of pets into my books. In part, because, well, I love animals.  But also because I think animals bring an interesting and fun element to the stories and insights into the characters. There is only so much we, as writers, can show of a character through introspection or even action.  It’s often in their interactions with other characters that the readers come to know them best.  The interaction between the hero and heroine is what the story is all about, of course.  But secondaries bring so much to the story. They are the confidante, the sounding board, the challenger or possibly the instigator that give the reader that extra peek into just what this character is made of. Does the big, bad, tough cop melt over a cuddly cat—but only in secret? Does the heroine have a fear of dogs brought on by a bad experience, but tries to hide it so the hero doesn’t think less of her?  Does one of the characters kick at an animal, treating it badly?  All of these actions give us an instant snapshot into what kind of person that character is.  Yes, we can definitely use other methods to…

When you mention the words “cozy mystery” these days, what probably comes to mind most often is “female sleuth.” That’s because 99% of cozy mysteries these days do have female main characters, usually amateurs, who do the crime-solving. Two writers who have bucked that trend recently are Jeffrey Cohen, with his Elliot Freed series, and Miranda James (aka me), with the “Cat in the Stacks” series featuring not one, but two, males as lead characters: Charlie Harris and his Maine coon cat, Diesel. Charlie Harris is a widower with two grown children, and in the first book, MURDER PAST DUE, he has moved back to his hometown, Athena, Mississippi, after the death of his wife. About a year after the move he found a kitten in the parking lot at the public library. He named the kitten Diesel for his rumbling purr and discovered that Diesel was a Maine coon. The average male Maine coon often weighs about twenty-five pounds, but Diesel (based on an actual Maine coon I once met) weighs closer to forty pounds in OUT OF CIRCULATION. Charlie is also a librarian, and when that word is mentioned, most people probably again think “female,” since the profession…