I have two left feet. And no rhythm. What does that mean? For one, I can barely walk and chew gum at the same time, and for sure, I can’t dance. Believe me — I’ve tried. Isn’t going to happen. I’m so uncoordinated I can’t even keep up with a workout video, even the ones that aren’t dance related. Zumba? Forget it. This is also the reason I didn’t make even the Pep Squad in high school. I just couldn’t shake all the different things that needed shaking at the same time — not without causing serious harm to those around me. I know. It’s sad. However, I’ve learned to live with my physical limitations and don’t think I’m missing that much. You’ve heard the saying, ‘Dance like no one’s watching.’ Well, what can I say? That’s the only way I dance! So, if you come by my house and the music is turned up loud, don’t peek in the window. You really don’t want to see it. Really. One of the advantages of being a writer is I get to live vicariously through my characters. In the third book in my Lothario series, LOVE ME TWICE, I had my…

Because it is summer, and because a woman at Oberlin College, Ma’ayan Plaut, gave me adjective sandwich recipes for THE ORPHAN SISTER, as I wait for the kids’ camp bus I am thinking of bread, and wondering what my mother used to do in the summer. There were three of us, my sisters and I, and mostly we didn’t go to camp, we went to the summer house and were creatively, actively, deeply bored in the sweet green timothy grass and lupines. We drew pictures and pretended moss banks were enchanted beds. We bickered and cleaned a thousand dead flies from the windows. Claudia and I made face paint from ground-up rocks: mica chips silver, iron oxide red. We read, and read, and read and made birthday ice cream with a wooden hand-crank machine and cream we got from working on the dairy farm. We grew. We used to ride up to Greensboro, Vermont from our house in Newton, Massachusetts, three girls, parents and the dog, taking turns in the way back of the Jeep Wagoneer, bouncing on the wheel well that sounded like going, going, going and made your bones buzz. Once we were there, dad would go back…

There are some authors I’m drawn to because of their smoking hot heroes. Yes, I like the heroines and secondary characters and I need a solid, entertaining plot but for some books, it’s the men that really draw me in. I don’t know what that says about me and I don’t plan on analyzing myself to figure it out either. I just know I love reading about hot, heroic, alpha men. So what makes a man heroic? In some cases it’s very easy to identify a hero and some characters’ professions have that heroic quality built right in. A firefighter for example. Men (and women) who run into burning buildings for strangers are definitely heroic, even if they don’t see themselves that way. People like cops or military men who put on a uniform every day and deal with less than savory people on a continuous basis so the rest of the public can feel safe at night—now those are my heroes. Aside from what I consider heroic professions, sometimes it’s the small things that make someone heroic. Even a hero who borders on being the anti-hero can have incredibly heroic moments. On the flip side, a normally heroic character…

Somebody once asked me which of my characters I’d most like to trade places with. In THE VAMPIRE NEXT DOOR the answer is…none of them! Sly is a vampire whose maker Vorigan Malvant is after him. Morgaine is Sly’s honey who Vorigan kidnaps as bait to lure Sly. Roz and Konrad moved to a private school in Newton, run by werewolves. Merry is pregnant and Jason’s father had another heart attack, taking him away to Minnesota in the dead of winter. Gwyneth is fighting with Morgaine and Nathan is well…Nathan. Everyone’s favorite character seems to be Chad, the ghost. I love him too, and the idea of being the proverbial fly on the proverbial wall has its appeal, but to be so limited by the lack of a  corporeal form would be frustrating. No wonder he’s snarky! Sly and Morgaine have been friends for years and already know each other’s paranormal secrets, so that bit is out of the way. Morgaine didn’t have to freak out over Sly’s vampirism the way Merry and Roz did when they discovered the men they loved were shapeshifters. But no two characters were more flawed than Morgaine and Sly when they first considered (and…

August is my favorite month. Not because the weather is beautiful, or because my family and I can enjoy camping in the wilds of Alaska. No, August embraces a more mystical and near religious experience. The beginning of school. The excitement starts around the first of the month with school registration. I’m thrilled by this for a couple of reasons. First, the fact that both my children have successfully maneuvered through another year and will advance to the next grade is a reason for great celebration. The second reason I love school registration is that it’s a harbinger of quiet days filled only with the tapping of my keyboard. Don’t get me wrong, I love summer and bonding with my kids. It’s not as if I drag my children out of bed on registration day, bleary-eyed, throw them in the car, and park my lawn chair at the school’s front door like I’m buying tickets to a Lady Gaga concert. That thought has hardly ever crossed my mind. It’s the anticipation that in two weeks the fruit of my loins will again spend their days learning, laughing, and chattering to somebody other than me. So, as you might have guessed,…

In 1999 I first came up with the idea for the world of Elenchera and more than a decade later it comprises twenty-three lands, 500+ maps (I wish I was joking!), 47,000+ years of events spread across twenty-five Shards (or ages) of history. I wanted a fantasy world that had something unique about it just as Tolkien’s Middle Earth, Pratchett’s Discworld and Lewis’ Narnia all have. While I would never preach that Elenchera should be spoken in the same breath as those worlds I do feel after more than a decade of work that it has something special about it. I love history, always have and always will. It was my favourite subject at school and whatever aspect of history I had to study I never struggled to find something of interest. When I first began building Elenchera I turned to our own history for inspiration. Reading Cassell’s World History from cover to cover I not only learned about some interesting events but I gained an understanding of how many societies have developed, their innovations, reasons for fighting wars and how every powerful empire eventually falls with the passing of time. Elenchera is a world that begins with an almost…

Last year when I began writing my Immortal Series with Red Sage, I set out to create a different breed of immortals. I’d read vampires, shifters, fairies, and demons. I wanted something a little more human, with human traits and normal lives, but with the added complication that these characters didn’t die. I get a lot of questions about my immortals. So today, I’d like to introduce them to you. Making: An immortal shares his/her blood with the dying. Not through fangs, but by conventional means of cutting. My immortals have been known to run onto crash scenes armed with pocket knives to rescue victims. They’ve also used shards of glass to slice the flesh of themselves and a mortal, pouring their blood into their veins. Immortals can die at the hands of other immortals. If they lost their footing and fell off a cliff, they wouldn’t die, but if another immortal pushed them—delivering the death blow, so to speak—they would perish. Only with other immortals are their lives challenged, which sometimes makes for a volatile situation if a new immortal comes into their midst. In my latest release, TREFOIL, the heroine Lillian has mortal frailties, which can happen if…

As a child and young man, I was a voracious reader of 19th century seafaring novels and obscure early 20th century adventures about spies and bomb-carrying anarchists in Europe.  I had fire in my belly and the books I read helped fuel it.  But I always wanted to translate the escapism of the books into a life of real adventure.  So, when MI6 tapped me on the shoulder after I left university, I accepted its offer of employment without hesitation. I was an MI6 field operative who worked at the sharp end.  I travelled the world alone, met the bravest men and women, did great things, terrible things, hard things, witnessed unbelievable heroism, and saw deprivation, sorrow, love, compassion and death. Some of the things I saw and actions I made affected me but not as much as you may think.  I was young, fuelled by my passion for adventure and an unrelenting motivation to combat bad people’s intentions towards the west. I have the luxury of pausing and looking back at that life now.  I am older, wiser and have a few more inches on my waistline.  But I never paused for a moment in those days.  Not once….

I’m addicted to writing books. Reading them, too. Writing and reading and true love and chocolate–life doesn’t get much better than that. Well, maybe watching The Princess Bride while munching crème donuts. When I was in grade school one of our assignments was to read a poem in front of the class. I couldn’t decide between Alfred Noyes’ “The Highwayman” and Shakespeare’s “Venus and Adonis” (I love horses). Why yes, I was an overachiever, why do you ask? I chose Alfred Noyes. The bell rang before I finished and no one moved. At that moment I decided I’d be an actress when I grew up. And I’d write a romance inspired by my favorite poem. I’ve achieved both goals, although THE LANDLORD’S BLACK-EYED DAUGHTER took longer (I played Nellie is South Pacific at age 19). First, I want everyone to know that THE LANDLORD’S BLACK-EYED DAUGHTER has a happy ending. And now…here’s an excerpt:   1 April, 1787   Elizabeth Wyndham gazed at her reflection in the mirror above her dressing table. Dispassionately, she scrutinized her ink-black hair, which fell in ringlets on either side of her face, not unlike a spaniel’s ears. A scowl caused her delicately arched brows…

Q: Your newest book takes us back to Fool’s Gold, California. It’s a town with more men than women and yet you never seem to have a hard time working in smart, hunky guys. Tell us about Finn, the brooding pilot who makes our heroine Dakota swoon in ONLY MINE. Do you find it’s harder to write the male or female characters, and why? I don’t find it difficult to write from the male perspective. In some ways, it’s easier because men tend to cut to the chase more quickly than women. They think in straight lines, whereas we women take a circuitous route. One of the things I love best about writing is the freedom to slip into my characters’ heads and to look at the same event from different perspectives. I think it makes me more empathetic in real life, too. Q: When you first created Fool’s Gold and started writing novels based there, did you have upcoming characters–like Dakota and her sisters–in mind, or has that come since you created the town? How has the series evolved? I tend to think about a year ahead. So while I wrote the 2010 Fool’s Gold books, yes, I did…