Post a Comment Enter Our Contest Three of our Story Gardeners celebrate April showers by chatting up one of their favorite topics. Heroes. We know readers want to be the story’s heroine for a time, and they want to be with the hero. How do we create a wonderful hero? What kind of a hero makes a believer out of you? Cathy Maxwell: I was charmed by the recent video of the firefighters who were dressed in prom dresses and riding in a float to promote a beauty pageant fundraiser. When a nearby pickup truck caught on fire, they weren’t afraid to jump from their float and set to work–still wearing red and blue prom dresses. A hero isn’t about his pecs or his height or his bank account. Heroic status is about his attitude, about what he values and is willing to protect, and what he stands for. A six foot six guy without any of those things might as well be a rubber dummy no matter how odd looking we think he is. When it comes to heroes, character count. I’ll send a copy of my newest book, LYON’S BRIDE–the first of the Chattan Curse series—to the author…

To celebrate the release of TROUBLE ME, Book Three of my Rosewood Trilogy, I thought I’d introduce you to my newest hero, Rob Cooper. Rob Cooper is a cop who possesses a strong sense of right and wrong. He’s also a widower, who’s busy raising his six year-old daughter. His wife Becky died five years earlier and Rob grieves for her still–so much so that he hasn’t let himself get close to any woman since then. He realizes the situation is unhealthy, for him as well as his young daughter Hayley, but no woman has been able to capture his interest, let alone touch his heart. His world changes one wild, stormy night when Rob finds himself in a Norfolk hotel bar waiting out the storm so he can drive home to Warburg, Virginia, and a woman walks in and orders a drink, settling into a stool not far from his own. The woman is beautiful and though Rob of course has no intention of approaching her, the other male patrons are soon taking turns trying to their best pick-up lines. When one man becomes coarse and aggressive, Rob decides he’s had enough. He crosses over to where the woman…

Lots of people have asked me about the title of my latest romance. THE DEVIL AND MISS JONES is out in Presents Extra this week – on April 4th actually. And the title seems to have grabbed at people’s imaginations. THE DEVIL AND MISS JONES? What’s that about? It’s an unusual title – how did you come by that? they want to know. They’re intrigued and wanting to find out what the story is behind that atmospheric title. I have to admit that I’m really glad that Harlequin Mills & Boon have made a pretty radical rethink on their approach to titles a while back. They decided that those multiple, built up ‘buzzword’ titles no longer worked (thank goodness!) and the billionaire/blackmails/revenge/greek/whatever titles had to go. (You could hear the cheers from the authors for miles!) If they’d kept to that system of naming a book then I would probably have ended up with The Argentinian Billionaire’s One-Night Lovechild or some such and we all know there’s so much more to a book than just that! THE DEVIL AND MISS JONES was my own working title for this story, the one that gave me the right mood and atmosphere for…

Hi all ya’ll! Happy Easter everyone! Spring! Romance! Weddings! Doesn’t that all come to mind about now? Romance and weddings just naturally go together…add a touch of spring fever and boom, wedding bells are ringing and happy ever after is what it’s all about. Right? Not always. ONE HOT COWBOY WEDDING turns things around and upside down. It starts out with a wedding right at the start of the book and there’s doubts that HEA will ever even happen. Shhhh! It’s a secret! That line had run around in Jasmine’s mind all day on a continuous loop. She imagined two little girls playing out on the grassy lawn with their Barbie dolls and it was a secret where Barbie and Ken were going for supper. Then two middle school girls in her bedroom gossiping about boys, and it was a secret. Oh, the secrets she and Pearl had shared through the years, and now she had one that she couldn’t share with anyone, not even Pearl. “No one in Texas is ever going to know. Not even Pearl. I’ll go home and everything will be the same. I’ll wake up Monday morning, open the Chicken Fried Café, and business will…

I blame the Van Wickle Gates. See, my college has these giant iron gates that are only open for matriculation and commencement, per wacky ceremonial tradition, and also per wacky tradition, there’s some kind of urban (is it really urban on a college campus? Whatever) legend that, should you pass through them at any other time, lo, you will be CURSED and condemned to STAY AT COLLEGE FOREVER, or not graduate, or something. Said curse couldn’t really apply to me, because the time I walked through them the wrong way was after I’d been graduated, for which I blame my friends Jamey and Mike: we were coming back from the ceremony, discussing who’d won various bets regarding the valedictorian speeches ($5 each on “community,” “diversity,” a gratuitous mention of 9/11, and “Jesus Christ, my personal savior”, and I still think I could’ve swept the pool if we’d bothered to write this stuff down) and…we went the wrong way. As you do. Since I already graduated, clearly, the curse instead decreed that I’d never get away from academia in general, and…I really haven’t. Definitely not in my writing: my first book, NO PROPER LADY, is one of the few things I’ve…

I attended my first reader event in March. The Tucson Book Festival in Arizona. It was so great seeing the hundreds and hundreds of people roaming around talking about the thing they love: Reading. And since I love to write, it was a good fit. We got to chat it up about demons, angels & Guardians, give away fun prizes, and I got to answer questions from readers. One question that frequently came up was, “How do you come up with your stories?” I get asked that a lot, especially when people find out I’ve written twenty-five novels. For me, ideas can spring up anywhere. At any time. I just need to be ready for them, because an ordinary situation such as strolling down the grocery aisle can turn into a scene of a book in a matter of minutes. You never know when you’ll meet interesting people that’ll trigger some unique ideas for a novel! That’s what makes this whole writing thing so exciting. Next up, Romantic Times reader convention in Chicago! I hope to see you there! Coming in May AWAITED (Wasteland, #2) The voice is a powerful thing. . . Russell Leonard is a centuries-old Guardian who’s…

Somebody asked me the other day in an interview why so many of my characters have suffered something horrible. Wow. Gut check! I looked through my backlist of forty books and realized I do write a great deal about people who have been through rough times. The loss of a spouse, infertility, the loss of a child, a terrible accident. Hmmm. Definitely a pattern there! As I dug a little deeper, it wasn’t so surprising. I find it inspiring to write about people who have faced difficult things and yet have still managed to overcome, to move forward with their lives and still find joy again. I suppose I am heartened by the many examples in my own life of friends and family who manage to face hard times with grace and dignity and come through to the other side with a beautiful strength. One of my favorite songs is sung by Martina McBride. The chorus has a great message that rings more true every time I hear it: “Love’s the only house big enough for all the pain in the world.” Like my characters, nobody gets through this world without suffering pain of some kind. But I find great…

Raise your hand if you’re in the midst of prom season! I have two daughters who started going to prom when they were freshmen in high school. Yup, I had 8 years of gowns and make up and hair. When the youngest girl went off the college, I breathed a huge sigh of relief as spring came around and I had no daughter at home to spend my money. Who wants to do all that shopping? Who can listen to the giddy laughter of teenage girls or hear the breathless sigh of delight when the boy finally asks her to the prom? One year, a boy actually serenaded my daughter. He wrote a song asking her to the prom. Oh wow, I miss it. I miss my girls, I miss the pictures and the tuxes, I miss the excitement and specialness of it all. And frankly, that’s a bit of a surprise because I was never a very girly girl. And yes, I went to my prom, but back then it was not nearly as elaborate as it is today. I think it was in a fit of longing for my daughters that I created a series set in a…

What is it about romantic heroes that draws our mind’s attention and our heart’s affection?  Whether it’s Mr. Darcy or Edward Cullen, James Bond or Braveheart, our fantasy men may reveal much about a woman’s hardwired needs. Nora Roberts, the bestselling romance novelist of all time, says that romance novels “are about the celebration of falling in love and emotion and commitment, and all of those things we really want.”  That is the question that has been plaguing men since the dawn of time. What do women really want? I’ll admit that on some days, I would really like this: But as gratifying as this would be, this is really not enough.  I know I don’t speak for all women, but I make it my business to know what women want in a man.  I’ve written five romance novels, and read thousands more.  The most satisfying part of my job is getting to create characters so wonderful and so believable that my readers fall in love with them.  So speaking as a woman–and as an author–I think I can help to answer the question: What do we look for in a man, and more importantly, what does that reveal about…

When people say “road trip” do you conjure up visions of people chanting “Vegas baby” while crammed into a beat-up, two-door car? Or maybe it’s The Ricardos and The Mertzs singing “California Here We Come.” Whatever your vision of a road trip may be, it usually spells adventure in books and movies. Often it’s in the form of comedy, romance, disasters or even horror. Readers love to share the adventures of these characters as they travel from place to place, experiencing the unexpected. When I came up with the idea for IN SEARCH OF LUCY, I hadn’t planned on putting a road trip in the book. But as the story progressed and Lucy needed to reunite with her sister the idea of a physical journey was appealing given that my character was going through an internal journey as well. For years Lucy sacrificed her own needs to care for her half sister and alcoholic mother, only to be abandoned by both. But when her sister needs a kidney transplant, Lucy is the only one who can save her life. When she realizes she must travel to Houston where her sister is, she is reluctant to fly. She’d never been on…