With Thanksgiving right around the corner here in the US and the holiday season upon us, many people are thinking about the things they’re thankful for. Family. Friends. Health. Steady work. Finding a twenty-dollar bill in the pocket of last year’s winter coat. I’m thankful for all of those things. (Well, except for the twenty-dollar bill, which I didn’t find. I checked.)  I’m also very thankful for romance novels. I’m not sure how I’d get through life without them. I’d survive, but my world would be a dreary place. Why am I so thankful for romance novels? That happily-ever-after. While I occasionally read horror or thrillers, I usually want to know ahead of time everything’s going to turn out okay and that the characters I’m about to grow attached to aren’t going to die gruesome deaths. Several years ago, when my husband was going through a health crisis and I needed to distract myself, I reached for a Nora Roberts trilogy I hadn’t read. I knew, no matter how tough life was for her characters or what hardships they faced, I could trust her with my emotions. The main characters would all be happy in the end. The variety! Dark,…

The back cover text for a book is meant to do just one things – sell you the book. I’m super excited about my second novella, HER KIND OF HERO, and the back cover text is… well, super exciting: Kissing him is better than nothing. Young widow Vanessa Bingham is ready to stop mourning. She misses the intimacy and tenderness of a man’s touch. It’s obvious her old friend Derek Lane wants her, so why does her first attempt at seduction cause him to flee? Kissing her is a dream come true. Derek has been in love with Vanessa forever. His feelings have kept him from having a serious relationship—or a casual one—with any other woman. So when she finally turns to him, he doesn’t want to settle for being friends with benefits. But Vanessa is a hard woman to resist for long… Someone doesn’t want them kissing at all. Just as things with Derek begin heating up, disturbing photos start to arrive at Vanessa’s door. Someone is watching her every move: someone she may know. Terrified by the stalker’s very real threats, Vanessa soon realizes that Derek may be just the hero she needs after all. That’s all true….

Hello and a huge thank you to Fresh Fiction for inviting me here to introduce myself and tell you a little about DATING MR. DECEMBER, my US debut for Sourcebooks. One of the best things I’ve found about my first blog tour is that I’ve asked myself as many questions as the bloggers and readers have asked me! The tour has made me think deeply about why I choose the stories and characters that feature in my books. What makes one story or character worth spending so much of my life with? In other words, what really inspires me? I guess I have three main sources of inspiration People I absolutely love watching and listening to them, in cafes, on the train, at the gym, in the queue at the supermarket. Being a writer is the perfect excuse to be nosy and listen to characters from all walks of life. For DATING MR. DECEMBER I visited a mountain rescue team base. Listening to the rescue squad gave me a clue to motivations of Will, the hero of DATING MR. DECEMBER.  The team’s jokiness hid a powerful sense of duty and camaraderie. Those guys see some terrible things and are often…

On the month that my 30th novel comes out I’d like to talk about dealing with being gifted. Over the years, when beginning writers come to me and say, “Do I have what it takes to be a writer? Am I gifted?” I always remember the night I followed my writing teacher out of class. I’d just read my first chapter of my first novel. Handwritten on yellow legal paper. I knew nothing of plotting, viewpoint, characterization or even manuscript format. I’d just signed up for a community class at the college and had dreams of hitting within months. While we walked to her car, I asked her one question after another. I’m sure she was wondering if I could be some kind of writer/stalker by the time we reached her car. With the door open, I blurted out my last question. “Do you think I can be a writer? I mean a real writer.” She smiled (or at least I think she did for we were standing on a dark parking lot) and said, “If you work really, really hard you’ll make it.” I danced back to my car thinking my writing teacher had seen something in me that…

Some stories just won’t get out of your head until you write them down. That’s what happened to me with THE CHRISTMAS CLOCK. Earlier in my career, I had written a spicy civil war Christmas romance set around Sherman’s occupation of Savannah on Christmas Eve. It was great fun to write. This was different, much more difficult, a story concept that began with an old woman stricken with Alzheimer’s and her grandson, soon to be orphaned unless she can find him a home. I felt compelled to write this book. My husband’s mother, beloved to us both, died of this terrible disease. Which is where the first inkling for THE CHRISTMAS CLOCK began. It was an interesting concept, but every time I tried to write the book, it seemed to sputter and die. Something was missing and it didn’t take long to realize that something was romance, the once-in-a-lifetime, forever kind of love that can bring a story together. And so Syl Winters and Joe Dixon came to life, two lost souls whose once-unshakable love had been destroyed. With Syl and Joe, I had finally found the key to telling Lottie and little Teddy’s tale. Still, being a different sort…

As I started this I was reflecting on the first day of Readers ‘n ‘ritas 2010. It was a rather full day that started at home. with attempts at prepping my home and family for a weekend without me. The dogs I think understood fairly well what was happening, but my son said, “you didn’t tell me you were going away for the weekend.” My response…”what do you think I’ve been talking about for the last several months?” Oh well! Got to the hotel and finished prep work for the actual convention. Finally the convention started, and while I worked registration it sounded like the party in the room behind me was in full swing. Thanks to a great team I was able to sneak in for a few minutes here and there, and got hugged by Dakota Cassidy, Sherrilyn Kenyon, and Dianna Love. Could it get better than that? Well, for me it could. For several years now I’ve been fascinated with the works of Tara Taylor Quinn. Her current work is a four book series titled The Chapman Files. When Tara arrived I was pretty excited to be the first to greet her. I got a few minutes…

Before I started writing the novel that comes after The Forever Queen, I Am The Chosen King (Harold the King in the UK), I had not heard of Emma either. You see, I wrote the Harold novel first, the story of 1066, the Battle of Hastings from the English point of view. Queen Emma was one of the more dominant characters, but in this book, she was introduced almost at the end of her life. I still had to research her though – and what a fascinating, intriguing woman she turned out to be! The only woman to be Queen of England twice, married to two different kings and the mother of two more kings, with different fathers. The next claimant to this sort of accolade is the more famous Eleanor of Aquitaine, who was Queen of France and then Queen of England. She also saw two of her sons crowned as King, Richard I and John – but they shared the same father, Henry II. Emma was a Norman, from Normandy – North Man’s Land – in other words, of Viking stock. She was married to King Æthelred II of England her marriage occurring probably between the age of…

Of course, no one is really perfect, despite attempts to appear that way. But we all know people who seem like it on the surface. Hair is always completely in place. Slip is never showing. They always know just what to say and when to say it. They sort of make us want to smack them J. But other than annoyance, they don’t really elicit much emotion from us, because they lack depth. Scratch that perfect surface and there’s not much beneath. We can’t relate to them because we’re not perfect and neither is our world. Our lives are messy and complicated. Our children misbehave and sometimes make bad choices. Likewise our spouses . We screw up occasionally. And that makes us interesting. So it’s really no wonder that writers created flawed damaged characters. Who wants to read about someone with no problems? Someone who has never ever had something miserable happen to them? What intrigues us are the people who encounter obstacles and find ways to overcome them. Those who draw on an inner strength to triumph in the end. Those are the characters we root for, draw hope from. Those are the sort of characters I tried to…

There are times in life when things happen that we couldn’t possible orchestrate. Things that take extraordinary circumstances to come to be. My father told me when I was little, and during all of my growing up years, that I could do anything I wanted to do, I could be anyone I wanted to be, as long as I put my mind to it and kept it there. And I have always believed that if I do all I can do, and keep my mind on what matters, then everything will fall into place as it needs to do. Not necessarily how I envisioned it, but as it needs to do. Right now, this fall, I am a living example of all of this. Circumstances were put into place, starting thirty years ago, and have culminated in a huge way. I couldn’t possibly have envisioned, or constructed the things that have come together, but I am accepting them and running with them just as fast as I can because I recognize that forces stronger than I am are at work here. From the time I was fourteen I knew that I had to write for Harlequin Books. I put my…

The definition of fiction the dictionary gives is, “novels or stories in which the characters and incidents are wholly or partly imaginary.” As an author, I write women’s fiction, so what I’m referring to here doesn’t necessarily involve other genres and what I want to discuss is the “believability” of characters and plot. Where do you get your story ideas, I’m often asked. And your characters, are they real people? My story ideas come from everywhere….snippets of conversation I might overhear, real life stories from the news, anywhere and everywhere. And about my characters being real people…..yes and no. Of course, to me, they’re very real while I’m creating them. Once fully developed, they also come from a multitude of places. That patient I had many years ago when I worked in the Intensive Care Unit, that cashier at a supermarket, a family member no longer here, a stranger I observed in an airport and the list goes on and on. Which brings us to the question, “What makes a plot or character believable?” The longer I’m an author, the more I’m beginning to think that the answer to this is simply, “Whatever the reader might feel.” In other words,…