The packages are all opened and some of you have probably already taken down your trees and decorations. Right now my living room looks like Christmas exploded everywhere. In addition to the decorations, we have new toys everywhere. We have a 2 year old and a 4 year old and so they got a lot of loot. In any case it’s a mess a mess that is beginning to close in on me and tomorrow said toys will find all their new homes in baskets and bins and shelves. So while we’re in these post-holiday days closing in on the end of the year, many of us will begin to reflect over this past year and consider the one approaching. Resolutions, goals, plans, whatever you want to call them, most of us make some sort of game plan on things to tackle in our lives. Whether they be of the professional, personal or spiritual nature, most people generally try to better themselves. I’m one of those. I love to set goals. I love fresh starts and organizing projects. It’s part of my noodly-brain I suppose. I’m geeky, I love calendars and color-coding and all that stuff. But I digress. In…

Ah, the big stress of the holidays is over! The shopping, the baking, the wrapping, the mailing, the decorating–done, done, done. Now it’s time to bask in the post Christmas glow and relax before New Years. To reflect on the past year and look forward to a fresh new one. Time to dream and escape. And speaking of escapes, this is my favorite reading week of the year. I live in the Pacific Northwest. The days here are incredibly short so soon after the winter solstice. The weather outside is gray and cold, perfect weather to snuggle inside with a good book without any guilt. And usually I have a fresh pile of books gifted to me for Christmas. Books I’ve been wanting and meaning to read. Or gift cards just waiting for me to use to buy any I didn’t get. If you’re like me and love to read and escape into a book, if you like romance and spies and adventure and love to laugh, I hope you’ll consider my January 2013 release LIVE AND LET LOVE, which actually came out on Christmas Eve and is available now. LIVE AND LET LOVE is the third book in my…

I’m wondering how this year went by so quickly.  Certain years I’m glad to say goodbye too-to the trials that left a sour note.  Last New Year’s Eve, I remember gratefully toasting away the end of 2011.  We’d had a move, a new school, and a cancer diagnosis that took us all by surprise.  This year though, it feels like we’ve turned a corner.  Last year’s worry has been replaced by gratitude and a new understanding of how quickly life moves, and how fleeting time with our loved ones can be.  This year, I know my family will be toasting to the wonderful news that after a successful round of radiation treatment, my father is cancer free.  We just received the news last week-and it’s the best Christmas gift we could have ever asked for.  The gift of health, the gift of time, of being able to create more memories has just been handed to us.  My children will have more time with their Nonno, my mother will have more time with her husband, and I’ll have more time with my father. Growing up in a North-American-Italian family, the holidays were always filled with an abundance of family, food, and…

What’s most important for me this time of year is feeling that rush of memories and smiles and hopes for another holiday season like my favorite ones from before. I’ve heard a lot from readers who’re enjoying CHRISTMAS ON MIMOSA LANE, and one of the most comment reviews or emails I get is about past and present phenomenon. Yes, folks are loving the book. But more than that, they’re feeling the characters experiences—dealing with Christmases past, dreaming of perfect Christmases future, and embracing the hopeful holiday they want to embrace today. Because we’re never really feeling only now this time of year. We’re also sensing those idealistic holidays we’ve had before and wishing for even better memories to come. In CHRISTMAS ON MIMOSA LANE our characters deal with their memories (both good and bad) so they can focus on the beautiful holiday they’re making now. This is the only way for them to have their chance to be happy. Some of us struggle with being happy, too, this time of the year, while the rest of the world seems to be celebrating non-stop. Pete and Mallory and little Polly’s story is about realizing that you can make your holiday now…

One of my favorite pre-holiday memories is heading to the craft store with my mom just after Thanksgiving. Every year there would be kits to make our own ornaments – paper and pictures, paints and markers, dough for some figures… The store was old and musty most days, but during the holidays the must seemed to lift, leaving only fresh air and possibilities. Over the year I made my own Christmas balls, a couple of disfigured horse attempts, but mostly stars or snowflakes. What I learned from those early attempts is that I’m not overly artistic. I can color with the best of them, but to draw my own pictures? Sad, sad, sad. So, as an adult, I’ve tweaked that tradition just a bit – we head to the mall on Thanksgiving weekend and pick out a family ornament from the ornament maker and have it personalized. Most years the kiddo (she’s 4) also picked out a personal ornament, too. This year it was a princess castle that looks suspiciously like Cinderella’s. One year it was a carousel horse on a candy cane…our family ornament this year is three owls sitting on a branch because, as the kiddo says, ‘it…

Living in a cultural melting pot gives people in the U.S. a wide range of holidays and traditions to celebrate.  At our house, Christmas is the favorite.  We do the traditional things like put up a tree, wrap gifts, and decorate the house, but those aren’t our only ways to enjoy the season.  We also read.  I’m working on revisions to GUARDIAN, my second book, but I’m also making time to read holiday-themed romances.  The festive settings and happy endings add to my generally good mood. Lately I find myself also looking back at the stories we read our son when he was small. He’s in college now, well past the age of being read to, but he seems open to the three of us reading A CHRISTMAS CAROL aloud again.  This is the dh’s favorite Christmas story.  His father read it to their family every year. My favorite story is a shorter, simpler one, O. Henry’s “The Gift of the Magi.”  I don’t want to spoil it for anyone who hasn’t read it, so I’ll just say it’s about the depth of love at the holiday season.  I found a beautiful picture book of that story when the boy…

Mary Strand says: We’re wrapping up a fun-filled year of the Story Garden on Fresh Fiction, and many of us right now are also wrapping gifts to put under the Christmas tree. Or, to be a bit more realistic, we’re THINKING about buying gifts that we’ll somehow wrap and get under the tree by, oh, say, 2 a.m. on Christmas Day. But in the midst of all that thinking and buying and wrapping for others, we decided to put a little thought into what WE would like — as writers and readers — under the Christmas tree this year. I got my own Christmas gift a couple months early, when I sold my first book, COOPER’S FOLLY, to Bell Bridge Books in October. Oh, happy day! If I’m allowed to be greedy and ask for more, I’d ask for books (and I still like them in real paper, not on a screen) filled with adventure and wicked humor and brainy characters and romance. And I’d ask for a trip this summer to Italy. And, for those who know me, it goes without saying that I’d ask for Hugh Jackman. What the heck: he doesn’t even need to be wrapped. Ho…

When I began writing The Brunson Clan trilogy, I was struck by the way the history of the Scottish Borders was captured in its ballads.  Long before books were commonplace, the stories of the Border Reivers (raiders) were immortalized in song.  In the midst of a bloody era, when family was more important than country, these men “prized a poem almost as much as plunder, and produced such an impressive assembly of local narrative songs that some people used to label all our greater folk poems as ‘Border ballads’” (A. L. Lloyd, Folk Song in England.) Poetic, stirring, memorable.  But accurate?  Not always. At least, that’s what my Brunsons discover during the course of the trilogy.  The story each believes – about the family, the enemy, or even about him or herself – is ultimately upset when the truth is discovered to be slightly different than oft-told tales. CAPTIVE OF THE BORDER LORD, the second book of the three, centers on the youngest child and the only sister.  She has grown up thinking that life is duty and that the valley where the Brunsons have lived for centuries is the only place she, or any Brunson, can truly call home….

What makes a Holiday tradition? It’s what families pass down to their children over the decades, even over the centuries. By necessity, oftentimes in the city, modern families give up some of those valued traditions, things like cutting their own Christmas trees, singing Christmas carols through the neighborhood, big family dinners, impossible in many city-size apartments. Living out in the country in Montana, we’re fortunate to be able to enjoy a lot of old-fashioned traditions. A seven-foot evergreen tree, a fire in the big rock fireplace, snow-covered mountains outside the windows, deer wandering through the fields. We always have a big family supper on Christmas Eve, and everyone opens a few of his gifts. Christmas morning, the grandkids come over to open whatever is left beneath the tree and enjoy a Sunday brunch. This year, along with the usual celebrations, I’ll be doing some Holiday promotions for my new book, AGAINST THE ODDS, the seventh book in my Against Series. It’s in bookstores December 18, just in time for Christmas shoppers. In the novel, Christmas was once the heroine, Sabrina Eckhart’s, favorite time of year, a holiday she and her mother always eagerly awaited–until Rina’s Uncle Walter died on his…

A good man drowning in bad deeds  . . . A bad girl denying a good heart . . . I love stories about complex characters with dark pasts searching for the means to personal redemption, so that’s what I write.  When choosing secondary characters to step into the roles of hero and heroine in BETRAYED BY SHADOWS, the 7th book in my dark paranormal shape shifter “By Moonlight” series, readers were surprised by my choice of Giles St. Clair, the steadfast rock of advice for Max Savoie who goes from thuggish knee breaker to pseudo-CEO in Max’s ‘absence.’  They never considered him hero material and, until the later books, I probably would have agreed.  But there were things about Giles I really liked.  His loyalty.  His wry sense of humor.  His practicality.  And I got to thinking, what’s this guy’s story?  You won’t believe what I found in his past!! Talk about getting pulled off the right path . . . So I’ve got Giles, hero in the making, with his soft protective spot for Charlotte Caissie and Tina Babineau – females who will never belong to him.  What kind of woman should I throw in his path?  Someone…