I’m thrilled about the start of my brand new series, beginning this spring for Harlequin Romantic Suspense, called Chance, Texas.  The series features rugged Texas men.  My all time favorite. The first book in the series is on shelves in print now (April 1 on Kindle and Nook!)  Called TEXAS BABY SANCTUARY, it features Sam Chance, the oldest brother in the large ranching family.  A strong, quiet man of the United States Secret Service, Sam’s job is to guard witnesses in the protection and security program.  The one witness that gets to him, running from his protection and changing his life, is Grace Brown.  Hiding from the Mexican drug king who kidnapped her, killed her parents and then made her his mistress, Grace wants to become self-sufficient enough to protect her baby son.  But she discovers she must also learn to trust Sam. Finding unique plots and interesting characters is always a challenge.  Yet I know those are the very things that make readers happiest.  I know because that’s what makes me happiest as a reader and a writer.  My favorite settings are in Texas.  The romance of the great American West stirs a passion in my soul.  I’ve told…

I adore my heroes in my romance novels. More so than my heroines, I must admit. But what makes a hero come to life on the page and make a reader fall in love with him? Hotness. Ah, but I’m not talking just physical. Sure, I want my hero to be physically appealing in my mind, but a skilled writer can make any hero come alive by using certain qualities women for centuries have been lusting after. Sex appeal. Humor. Confidence. A soft spot for babies and animals. A good man’s heart wrapped up in a bad boy’s attitude. The list goes on and on. When I’m sketching out my own hero, I allow him to take the lead and tell me what his inner demons are. No man is complete without some bad ass demons causing him inner conflict. This builds character. Personally, if a man never had any problems in his past and skated through life happy go lucky, I don’t want to read about him. Sorry. So, I build up a past with conflict and sketch out what made him who he is today. I throw in a dose of sex appeal, whether it be a sharp…

Since BELIEVE IT OR NOT hit shelves in early March, I’ve seen one piece of feedback pretty consistently: Cool character names! It actually surprised me a little bit. To be honest, naming characters is one of those author tasks I always assume others have a much better grasp on than I do. Like maybe when the great muse handed out writer skills, I was off in the corner making penis jokes when all the other authors got the enviable ability to come up with clever names. That’s why I’ve been pleased by that particular piece of praise. BELIEVE IT OR NOT stars a hero named Drew, who owns a bar that features male strippers a few nights a week. When I originally began noodling the story in 2008, I started off calling him Andy. It didn’t take long for me to realize that was the wrong name. Andy plays tennis and has dimples. Andy wears polo shirts and never forgets to hold the door open for his date. Drew on the other hand, is more jaded. He masks it with dry humor a habit of juggling quirky objects, but he knows what to do when someone needs a shoulder to…

What’s the most important thing about a romance novel? Why, the romance, of course. Folks who’ve never read the genre seem to believe that all romances are alike. Boy meets girl, boy and girl fall in love, boy and girl live happily ever after. People persist in believing this even though the romances they’ve had in their own lives are never the same. Did your first love follow the same pattern as the love you have with the person you later married? Did your flirtation with a guy on the subway turn into a romance or into a pleasant memory or did you forget it the moment you got off the train? What makes each romance different, in our lives as well as in our fiction, is who we are now. And who we are is a product of our age, our live experience, and our environment. Which is, oddly, why setting is so important to any romance. Navy Seals are different from stockbrokers, in part, because of where they work. Drop your average stockbroker into a war zone—with guns and bombs and chaos—and that stockbroker might break. Drop your average Navy Seal into a brokerage, and that Seal might…

One day three sisters – with no better sense – became accidental writers.  It happened on a whim at a seaside café with a staggering view of the Olympic Mountains.  We were hunched over a bucket of clams, crusty sour dough bread, and a bottle of wine.  A guy played jazz on the saxophone and a hunky waiter got hotter as the night went on.  (OK.  It was Happy Hour.)  Our sister Kristen was visiting from Chicago.  We talked about the books we’re reading, the men we’re seeing, and Uncle Hal’s god-awful toupee.  We wanted to find something that would help us stay connected when we got home.  That’s when we decided to write a book. Growing up, we created our own Nancy Drew dramas.  We sisters have always been passionate about mysteries.  Regretfully, we knew nothing about writing them.  But we figured if you write as a team, you only have to be 1/3 as smart as a real writer.  Do the math. Julianne called the hunky waiter over and ordered a round of mojitos.  We scribbled notes on a napkin.  Soon we had Cat DeLuca and her Pants On Fire Detective Agency.  Cat’s a lot like us but…

Here’s the fairytale version: Our heroine has lost her way in the forest. She’s been trudging along for far too long and is of course, tired, hungry, and losing sight of where she was headed in the first place. And then, magically (because this is a fairytale, remember) a tiny cottage appears up ahead. It is warm, light, and stocked with delicious food. Perhaps even a writing desk. Real life isn’t like that. Or I should say, life isn’t usually like that. But sometimes, when we’re in the thick of it, a moment of grace presents itself. And that moment carries with it exactly what we need. Maybe even exactly what our hearts desire. Let me back up a bit here to tell you about my own trudging along through a forest’s worth of manuscript pages. THE UNDERSIDE OF JOY is my debut novel. But I’ve been writing fiction for years–decades, even–ever since I graduated with a degree in journalism and promptly realized that what I really wanted to do was make things up. I took a lot of workshops, wrote short stories, wrote a novel, wrote another novel, then wrote yet another. I worked as a copywriter, writing advertising…

I’m lucky enough to live in a small community inside a much larger one. My little part of big-old-Melbourne-town is small enough to know the shop-keepers and greet the school-crossing guards with a wave. In summer, it deals with an influx of tourists and visitors, keen to hang out at the beach, or visit some of our gorgeous restaurants or groovy bars. Every now and then, the roads get closed for a festival, or a marathon, or a street party. I like my neighborhood so much, it’s not a surprise that it ended up as a “character” in my book. My first novel, CASSIE’S GRAND PLAN, a Harlequin SuperRomance, is out on 6 March. And my hero and heroine, Ronan and Cassie, take a business trip around Australia that sees them visit Melbourne, Perth and Sydney. But it’s their time in Melbourne that’s the key changing point for them – and I’m not going to say any more on that front, or I risk giving away spoilers! I can talk more about the places they visit, though. They go for a leisurely walk down Acland Street, St Kilda, and they take a ride on a rollercoaster at St Kilda’s Luna…

Having a SEAL in a wolf title probably doesn’t sound like that big a deal, right? Hot and sexy SEALs are the rage right now. I almost feel sorry for the Rangers and Special Forces men, or others that go through so much rigorous training, but aren’t getting all the rave publicity. My son is in going through some now for the AF even. When you combine SEALs with wolves, sounds like the perfect combination, right? But there’s a problem. Mentioning the title means the listener can’t see the capitalized SEAL, as in Navy SEAL, and that’s a whole ‘nother story. Ohmigod, she’s flipped out. That’s the look I get. She’s now writing about seal shifters? With wolves? Really? No one is ready for that. And I have to smile before I go on and explain. SEALs as in US Navy SEALs. Oh. I can see the relief on their faces. I’m going to be all right. I haven’t gone off the deep end. Yet. Titles are so important in marketing a book. It can catch your attention and make you read the blurb, then want to go further and read the book. So I can just envision the images…

Thanks for inviting me on to your blog to talk about my new novel, THE NEEDLE IN THE BLOOD. The novel is a love story set against the backdrop of the Bayeux Tapestry which – for readers who aren’t familiar with it – is a strip of embroidered linen over 230 feet long which tells the story of the Norman invasion of Britain in 1066. Its survival for nearly a thousand years is little short of miraculous (and it has had some hair-raising adventures during the various wars that have been fought in Northern France over the centuries, not least at the hands of the Nazis!), and what it tells us about military and social life in the eleventh century is invaluable. Despite all this, in England, we take it very much for granted. 1066 is the one historical date everybody knows, and the Tapestry’s images are almost the wallpaper to our history. They crop up everywhere, from mugs to mouse mats, and have been lampooned in all kinds of ways from political cartoons to one image I found recently of Batman stitched into the narrative! (You can see this on THE NEEDLE IN THE BLOOD‘s Facebook page.) What made…

I know a lot of readers enjoy going over the music playlist a writer listens to while writing a particular story. One of my favorite writers, Laurell K. Hamilton often talks about what music she’s blasting as she’s writing a scene.  I’ve tried this…It doesn’t work for me. See, the problem for me is that if I blast music, or even play it very very softly, I’ll start singing along. (And who wants that, right?) I mean, I like to think I have at least a little bit of skill, but I’ll admit I don’t have the kind of coordination it takes to sing while trying to follow the scene playing out in my head and search for the best way to put it to paper. More often than not, I end up typing out the lyrics. I do, however, use sound to block out other distractions. And I am SOOO easily distracted. I’m talkin’ borderline ADD—oh look, a chicken! Conversations between family members, movement too close to my desk, the random floating fuzz…whatever, it all bumps me out of my writer’s head. And since I can’t use music—or at least music with y’know, lyrics, I use mundane sound. White…