One of the comments I frequently hear at book club events is, “This isn’t the kind of book I usually buy, but once I started reading it, I couldn’t put it down.”  These are very kind and gratefully received words that exhilarate me as an author… yet cause me to fret as an historical novelist.  Believe me, having a reader say that they stayed up past midnight or were late getting to work because they were so caught up in the story is the greatest compliment an author can receive, but realizing how close the same reader came to not picking up the book because of its genre worries me. My current novel, SHADOW OF A QUARTER MOON, is set in the pre-Civil War South, therefore it is categorized as historical fiction. Does this mean that someone who prefers mystery and suspense, or romance, or contemporary novels will not enjoy the book?  My answer is… a reader can love a book of any genre, because when all is said and done… it’s all about the story. In truth, it’s about the characters too.  I love writing about ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances, and though the premise and setting of my…

I’m here to talk about my novella, BREAK OUT, which is released by Entangled Publishing on 5th July. Entangled is a new publisher who launch in August – so I was thrilled that BREAK OUT was chosen to be their pre-launch release. BREAK OUT is a little hard to define in terms of genre. It’s primarily science fiction, with elements of paranormal, romance and good old fashioned adventure. Most novels fall into certain categories, such as romance, thrillers, science fiction. A cross genre novel is one that has elements of two or more of those categories. Crossing genres isn’t a new idea; it’s been around forever and has resulted in a long list of recognized sub-genres: paranormal romance, romantic suspense, historical time travel…  But in traditional publishing,  getting too creative with crossing genres hasn’t been encouraged–it’s too difficult to market, bookstores don’t know where to shelve the books, it supposedly confuses readers. I think that’s changing. I’ve always believed that you should write the sort of things you love to read, but that doesn’t narrow the field much for me. I read just about everything, romance, science fiction, historical, paranormal, thrillers–if it’s been written–I’ll try it. So it’s hardly unexpected…

You Might Be Dating A Werewolf If… Hi, everyone! It’s a pleasure to be at Fresh Fiction today.  Since the hero of my new paranormal romance, NEVER CRY WOLF, happens to be an alpha wolf shifter, I thought it might be fun to share a few signs that–yes, the guy you are dating just might be a werewolf. Hope you enjoy the signs! You might be dating a werewolf if… 1. Your guy has a tendency to growl, a lot, and at odd times that just don’t actually fit the mood. 2. He seems to have an obsession with the moon–and howling at it. 3. He keeps turning up naked. In the strangest places.  And the clothes that he *should* have been wearing? Well, they’ve been torn to shreds. 4. He hangs out with a pack–and those pack members are all pretty darn hot. 5. And speaking of hot…your guy always seems a bit warmer than normal. His skin is heated and just…awesome in general. 6. When you tell him that he has nice eyes, he replies, “The better to see you, my dear.” And when you comment on the odd fact that his canines are growing longer and sharper–uh,…

A common reader question is “where do you get your ideas?” I’m always at a loss to answer, because writing a book is such an organic process. I’ll see something in the news that makes me think of a tangential scene in the books, or I’ll read a news story and try to incorporate the gist of it into a paragraph or passage. For me, by the time I sit down at my computer, I’ve worked out great big chunks of the plot and have a general idea of how I want my characters will handle it. The surprises come when I realize that everything I planned won’t really work. That’s when the fun starts. So, in answer to where I get my ideas, it’s basically: I don’t know. With FALLEN, my next book, I can definitely point to one single event that gave me the idea for the opening of the story. I had the great pleasure of watching agents with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation train for a school shooting scenario. To practice for an eventual shooting, they took over an abandoned school building in a rural part of Georgia and set the stage with role players pretending…

In my personal life I try to be optimistic, but in my fiction I write about my fears. It’s been true since I sat down to write my first novel. At the time, Jeffrey Dahmer was in the news and my greatest fear was that a sexual predator would kidnap and kill one of my three young boys. So I wrote a story about a woman who tracks down her son’s killer. The experience was cathartic, and I continued the practice in future novels, because as it turns out, many readers share the same fears. Being kidnapped and held against my will is another dominant fear for me and millions of other women as well—because it happens!—so the theme occurs often in crime fiction novels, including two of mine (THE BABY THIEF,  SECRETS TO DIE FOR). Most of my stories though have elements of fears that are very personal to me. For example, when I wrote THE SEX CLUB, the first book in the Detective Jackson series, my son was in Iraq and I worried constantly that he would die. My sister had just succumbed to cancer and I grieved for her and worried for other members of my family….

A much bandied question goes: Who do you prefer, Superman, or Batman? My answer has always been Batman. Because he’s fallible, he’s gritty, and he’s flawed. I’ve never been able to empathize with Superman. He was too good, too black-and-white with his ethics, too invincible. He lived in a world of sunshine and total darkness, where my visions ran in shades of gray. I couldn’t believe his character because it seemed far too one-dimensional to me. I love playing in the dark. Shadows and mist, gloomy clouds and drizzling rain make up my environment most of the year here in the Seattle area, and it’s the environment in which my characters live. I’m at my best writing dark fantasy, with characters that face overwhelming odds but somehow make it through this battle to face the next one. There’s an old saying that once your characters are down, you kick them again. While it seems cruel, this is how compelling fiction is written. In dark fantasy, urban fantasy, and paranormal romance, if there is no conflict and if the stakes aren’t high enough, then no one will care much about your characters. If you know the characters will come out unscathed,…

I love chatting with book groups, and one of the topics they ask about most often is how much liberty I’ve taken with Victorian society. They point out that my characters don’t always fit in with the stereotypes we have of how people in the 19th century behaved. I have married characters who enjoy working partnerships with each other; I also have characters who engage in illicit sexual relationships. I have women making their own decisions about money, and I have characters who are gay. Sound outrageously modern for Victorian times? You might think so, but the truth is that Victorians were far more like us than we often think. The 19th century was a time of tremendous change in every possible aspect of daily life. From technology to property rights, the Victorian age was marked by vast changes. A person born at the start of Victoria’s reign would have been accustomed to candlelight and ox carts; by the end of her life, electricity and motorcars were fast becoming the norm. They invented department stores and escalators; they started the practice of seaside holidays and ski vacations. Women who would have scorned cosmetics in the early 19th century were discreetly…

Some years ago, when I was a newspaper reporter near Joliet, IL, I had the chance to chat with a man who was on trial for killing his wife. And not just killing her. He strangled her, then put a sheet on the kitchen floor, got out the power tools, and chopped her into six pieces. He doubled bagged the pieces in garbage bags, and dumped them in his trash can. The next day when the trash collectors came, they smelled the decay, and through a rip in the bag, saw an arm. The police were called, and the man was arrested. This fascinated me. Why, I asked him, didn’t you just dump her body on the side of the road, and claim that she had never come home that night? The man told me that his two-year-old son was asleep upstairs and he didn’t want leave him alone in the house, so he had to get rid of the child’s mother without leaving. He told me this with pride, because even though he was a bad husband (obviously) he wanted to make the point that he was a good father. Another killer I interviewed years later, this time as…

That’s how I feel when I write these days.  It’s an amazing experience.  I’ve never written a series like this before–Guardians of Ascension–in which I’ve built a world I love, populated it with extremely hunky warrior vampires and oh-so-deserving women, created a villain and his minions that are both heinous and sympathetic, and created new ways to enhance all sorts of *ahem* physical experiences.       The whole thing is awesome and unexpected, and at times overwhelming–the spreadsheets alone that I’ve concocted to keep track of things like wing color and which character has which power is enough to squeeze a few brain cells to death. But when I sink into the day’s writing, when I engage the characters of the moment, euphoria is what I feel, this marvelous sense of joy and delight, of great meaning and love.  Which means that I hope that when readers delve into this series they get to experience these sensations as well. So, yes, this is a debut series, with ASCENSION opening things up in January of this year.  The second book, BURNING SKIES, released in May and the third book hits the shelves in September.  A novella, BRINK OF ETERNITY, will be available in…

It’s always said we read more in the summer, but it didn’t used to be true for me. As a mother, summers were when I worked and figured out how to occupy my children’s time which became more than a full time job. I did send them off to the “country” to stay with their grandparents for a couple of weeks, and some day camps, but the majority of the time they got bored with themselves and me. Also, we didn’t do many family vacations during the summer, it was always the busy time at work for my husband and me, so our family vacations were in the fall and spring. So, I was very happy when they got older and started working during the summers because that meant I had more time to read. So, why bring this up? Well, I’ve been reading more this year than in recent years and very excited about my prospects. Perhaps it’s because the turn of a century happened just eleven short years ago, but I’ve been fascinated by stories set in times of change. For me it’s the late 1900s as people tumbled into the United States, countries were changed and formed…