Since Sourcebooks will take care of sending a copy of THE LURE OF SONG AND MAGIC to two commenters on this blog, I think that’s pretty magical, so if I’m asked if I believe in magic, it’s obvious my definition of magic is pretty loose. Hi, my name is Patricia Rice, and I write romance, any kind of romance from historical to contemporary to paranormal. I have about fifty print-published romances under my belt, and my current one is called paranormal because most people don’t believe in the magic of psychic phenomena. Consider my definition above—I think Snow White with seven minions to take care of her comes under my definition of magic—I’m all in favor of invisible hands dealing with the packaging and mailing of prizes. Fantasy magic would be if I could wave a wand, and poof, the words wrote themselves. But we all know that’s not happening. Maybe we need a word that means possible magic as opposed to improbable. Given the title, it should come as no surprise that the heroine of LURE, Philippa Seraphina (Syrene) Malcolm James, has gifts that some might consider magical, but others think of as in the realm of possible. When…

I know the slush pile. I’ve been in it. Many times. About eighteen times in fact.  In the old days it was often the only option to get a story in front of an editor. The book was written, typed up, bound between cardboard and thick elastic or string and posted off. Then came the waiting, which was agonizing. A note would come in the mail to say the manuscript had arrived and was under consideration. Then more waiting. Some time later another letter might come in the mail.  In my case that was always another rejection. And for me the cycle started all over again. Until I figured a way out. Until I started thinking of myself as a professional writer, and as such, the proprietor of my own business. About four years ago I started doing research about who was getting picked up by the publisher I was targeting – and how.  I read blogs, websites, and any statistics I could find about what this publisher was looking for. Then I thought about contests. I’d entered a few randomly over the years, but without any real purpose. But my new found approach to my career got me thinking…

My mom often reminds me that I’ve always loved to cook. She also likes to remind me that every time she left me in charge of the kitchen, she had to call the plumber to clear the clogged sink afterwards – usually on a holiday. In fact, her plumber still talks about all the potato peels he unearthed from the drain the night I held my “Host a Murder” party in high school. (Sorry about that, Ma. I wish I could say I’ve learned a lot since then, but my husband would disagree, citing the great latke clog of 2008.) So take a budding cook who likes to write and always has a trashy romance novel hidden in her purse and send her to college…Pre-med. Ha! I switched my major to creative-writing faster than you could say calculus. However, I failed to write the literary short stories I longed to master. Every story I turned in was filled with post-adolescent lust and heartbreak, thinly disguised scenes from my own life. Even then, I was writing romance, and let me tell you, the group critiques of those babies were awkward, especially since I was usually dating someone in the class. Ouch!…

What’s so special about a guy in a kilt? Getting him out of it, of course. In SINS OF THE HIGHLANDER, “Mad Rob” MacLaren peels off his own plaid to take a bath after a sleepless night. The poor guy has had to flee from his pursuers, sleep in a cave without a fire, and fight off a wolf-pack. Of course, he brought all this trouble on himself when he abducted his enemy’s bride from the altar. To make matters worse, he’s having difficulty thinking of Elspeth Stewart as simply a means to a vengeful end. Exclusive Excerpt from SINS OF THE HIGHLANDER: Rob stripped off his filthy clothes on the loch’s shore and left them in a pile as he walked to the water’s edge. He squatted down and splashed himself all over, sucking a breath over his teeth at the cold. Normally, he’d have skipped a bath in this weather, but Elspeth Stewart was getting clean somewhere inside Angus Fletcher’s cluttered wattle-and-daub home. He didn’t want to smell like a boar pit beside her. Rob scooped out a dollop of soap from the stone jar Angus had loaned him and smeared his whole body with it. He even…

Call me crazy, but I love January. For me, January means getting over that winter hump and looking ahead to spring. The thing I won’t do in January is set New Year’s resolutions. Maybe I’m a party-pooper, I don’t know. All I know is that the last New Year’s resolution I set was giving up chocolate. If you know me at all, you know the idea of this is laughable. I have a ferocious yearning for dark chocolate. I eat one piece every day. That one piece is enough to keep my cravings satisfied and it’s only 52 calories (I did my research on that calorie count). Yet, I still tried to convince myself I could give it up. Forever. Forever lasted 22 hours. In less than a day I’d blown my New Year’s resolution. For whatever reason, when I call a goal a resolution, I tend to fail at reaching that goal. Sad, but true. So, instead of setting resolutions, I like to think of the new year as a chance to look back on the previous months and take stock of what I’d like to do differently going forward. It’s also a chance for me to think about…

I’m a sucker for a marriage of convenience story. I love everything about them. I’ve written quite a few of them and read heaps, and one thing I love is that no two stories are the same. It all boils down to who the bride and groom are, under what conditions have they married and what expectations do they have about each other — and the marriage. Also, since I mostly write historicals set in the Regency, it’s very suitable to have MofC stories, as they were so common then. Marriages then were less about love and romance — they were practical arrangements, made to protect property, to consolidate wealth, to make alliances, to maintain class barriers, or to achieve a rise in class. It wasn’t always the upper classes who made convenient marriages, either. Poor people and those of the middle classes married for security, or to improve family status, too, Even a milkmaid had to have some sort of a dowry to attract a good match. And a good match meant security. But for me as a romance writer, marriages of convenience are glorious opportunities for fun. I love it when the expectations of the bride and groom…

One of my new year traditions is to take a look at the list of books I read in the past year. How many books did I read? In what genre? And most importantly, how did I like them? I immediately noticed that the majority of the books I added to my reading list were rated 4 or 5 stars, with the odd 3-star book here and there. There were no 1 or 2-star books. Does that mean I like all the books I read? Well, yes and no. It really just means that I don’t finish the books I’m not enjoying. You know those people who always finish a book they’ve started reading, no matter what? I’m not one of them. Sometimes, if I don’t like the author’s writing style, I will stop reading within the first 10 pages (Kindle samples are great!). If it’s a book I really want to like, then I might read as much as 100 pages before giving up. Either way, if it’s something I probably won’t rate more than 1 or 2 stars, then I don’t finish. There are just too many books out there that I haven’t read, and I have too…

Names in fiction, as in life, are important. While they may not tell you what sort of person someone is, they can tell a lot about where/when they were born. Tarquin and Fred may have been born at the same time, but I suspect into very different families. Diminutives maybe hint a little at the person – someone who insists on being called Anthony is probably a very different Anthony who tells everyone to ‘Call me Tone.’ So in fiction, what your character is called is a reflection of when and where he’s born. Sometimes the characters tell me their names – in my first book, Ilfayne just turned up with the name. Sometimes I give the character a placeholder name, and it sticks – in my second book (and the first where he was a secondary character) Hunter was named that as a placeholder, mainly at my husband’s insistence he be ‘Like Triple H, Hunter Hearst Helmsley. Only more badass’. It stuck. Only, Hunter’s a duke and it didn’t really fit his background or culture, so I had to come up with a reason he was given the nickname, because he refused to be called by his given name….

For me, what makes a story hot is when we see the attraction build between the main characters, bit by bit, as they get to know each other. And as the sexual excitement increases, they discover something new that makes their love life sizzle. There’s a lot of talk about how gorgeous the hero and heroine have to be. While they do have to be attractive, especially to each other, I don’t find it necessary to read that over and over again through the story. I’d rather see the attraction grow as they make new discoveries about each other–the sparks from the first kiss, the beauty of an exposed leg, the sensation from a touch in a newly discovered erogenous zone. Sexual tension should build before their first love scene, but I think it’s lots of fun to keep it up (so to speak) during each sexual encounter. In “Power Play,” when Sergio gets his payback, he arrives at Liz’s home on one page, strips her naked on the next, but then spends more than twenty pages seducing her through every room of her house. (I had intended this to be a short story, but once I started writing that…

Theoretically, I know that turning the calendar from December to January doesn’t really change anything. It’s just another month and here in Iowa it’s a dreary one at that. But I do love the idea of a new year, a fresh start and new beginnings. For me, I’m starting off the year with the release of a new book. DEMON CROSSINGS is a paranormal romance that’s based on Norse mythology and set in the Midwest. The basic premise is that centuries ago, Ragnarok (the apocalypse of Norse mythology) occurred when fire demons overran Asgard (home of the Æsir). Our ancestors considered the Æsir to be gods because of their ability to manipulate the fabric of space and time but the Æsir refugees who managed to escape to earth lost much of that ability. Their power was tied to Asgard and on earth they need to live in places where the wall between worlds is thinnest. The power that seeps through from the ruined Asgard is just enough to sustain them and enable them to fight the fire demons that occasionally cross into our world. So, DEMON CROSSINGS starts out with a shattered world and a broken people. Death everywhere and…