The bookshelves at your local brick-and-mortar bookstores are teeming with how-to-write manuals. For the young fiction writer, there are classics such as E.M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel and John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction, plus whole series devoted to specific prose concerns like plot construction and character development. For the budding playwright, notable must-haves include Lajos Egri’s The Art of Dramatic Writing, with its dialectic approach, and Jeffrey Hatcher’s The Art and Craft of Playwriting, with its more Aristotelian approach. For the up-and-coming screenwriter, some selections would have to be Syd Field’s nuts-and-bolts Screenplay and Christopher Vogel’s hugely influential The Writer’s Journey. But what’s a person to do if they’re like me, suffer creative attention deficit disorder, and want to excel in fiction, theatre, and film? Surely there have to be some tools which apply to all three. And so over the years, I’ve distilled a list of ten hard-and-fast principles which can apply to all forms of contemporary storytelling, regardless of genre or medium. Now none of these principles, these commandments, are original to me. They have been collected and culled over years spent reading and studying craft, usually while curled up on a soft warm surface and/or…

It’s November and time to think about sharing a meal with loved ones. I’ve always tucked bits of my family history into my Devil books but I didn’t realize how many ways they’d crept in until I started thinking about Thanksgiving traditions. My grandmother was born in a sod house in the Oklahoma Territory, where her father was an itinerant farm worker. She didn’t remember the house fondly — it was more of a hut, really, especially for seven children. It was dark and scary inside, the roof often dripped clods of dirt or mud into her food and hair, and continually sweeping the dirt floor never improved it. Somehow, years later, that dark and scary place climbed out of my subconscious to become Viola’s first home in THE IRISH DEVIL. “The mud-brick hovels revealed themselves as a pitiful group, with ill-fitting doors and crumbling bricks”This hut was smaller than the others and its only window was broken. The ragged curtains fluttered gently in the rising breeze…; “He cautiously entered the tiny hut. Mud-brick walls were totally covered by peeling pages from magazines and catalogues, forming a poor man’s wallpaper. The roof was a canvas tarpaulin, split open over one…

Another Halloween has passed us by, and I’ve handed out the candy to princesses and cowboys and football players and teenagers in Scream masks. But as always my favorite costumes are the good old fashioned monster costumes. Not surprisingly I’ve got a soft spot for those old fashioned monsters. Give me a vampire, a werewolf, a zombie, a mummy, a witch. Please. I love monster movies, monster books, monster artwork, monster dolls and toys. My favorite monster movie, one I watch every Halloween, is Bram Stoker’s Dracula. What a romance! What a monster! Sometimes I troll the Internet observing great monster artwork. Some of my favorites are Native American renderings of werewolves. Considering what I write, no big shock there. I also have a freaky Barbie collection. I bet you didn’t know they had monster-ish Barbies. I’ve got The Munsters, The Addams Family, The Wicked Witch of the West and several others. And when it comes to books about monsters, werewolves are always my favorite. My most recent release, MARKED BY THE MOON (available now!)is a continuation of my popular Nightcreature Novels, and it has a great monster. Julian Barlow is an ancient berserker–a Viking warrior who, in the heat…

Don’t you love snow globes? I do. They’re so darned pretty. And fun. And fascinating. And even fun to make. Well, as long as you have a daughter who has the craft gene helping you. (I think that gene skipped a generation in my family. My mom had it. My daughter had it. Me. Not so much. Oh, heck, let’s be honest. Not at all.) My daughter Rose and my friend Theresia and I experimented with the art of making hand-crafted snow globes last month and had a great time. And, like all those great times, it went so fast! Have you noticed how hard times like illness, unemployment, and family troubles just seem to drag while the most wonderful, memorable times in our lives rocket past? What’s with that? Have you ever had a moment you wished you could freeze and stay in for a really long time? I guess that’s why we all love to take pictures. We want to capture those special moments so we can look back and enjoy them over and over again. I think that’s why snow globes appeal to us so much. The fun, sweet, idyllic scenes inside them are captured forever. Shake…

Writing humor is not for the faint of heart. It is a difficult task for anyone – stand-up comics, sit-com writers and even those who produce comic strips. However, humor writing is the hardest for the novel writer because body language, facial expressions, tone of voice, funny drawings, and sound tracks are not available for use. Novel writers are slaves to the power of their words. The problem inherent to writing humor is that everyone has a different idea of what constitutes a funny situation. You, as the writer, can’t tell someone what is funny. Each person is unique and therefore, has a different sense of humor. There are even some people who have no sense of humor at all (I refer to them as humor-challenged). You have to realize you can’t please everyone, so you have to write what makes you laugh. How can you effectively use humor in your writing? One way is to make an ordinary situation extraordinary. Shake things up with a surprise situation or an unexpected result to an otherwise normal day. Play with words by using metaphors, similes, irony or satire. Bring misunderstandings to the forefront of the action and incorporate a bit of…

When I was a younger and much harder on myself, I wanted my Christmases to be perfect. I wanted professionally wrapped gifts (I made my own intricately looped handmade bows!). I wanted caterer-caliber iced sugar cookies (I applied silver dragées with tweezers!). I wanted a picture-perfect family to go with everything else (I frog-marched everyone to a photographer to take a stiff-looking holiday-card photo, sporting “dress up” clothes we only wore twice a year, at most!). You know what I mean: I wanted a Martha Stewart holiday…but I had a typical working mother’s time, energy level, and expertise to accomplish it with. And the bad news is: I’m not Martha. But the good news is: I’m not Martha. I learned pretty quickly that gingerbread men always taste delicious, even if their little legs are snapped off during marathon decorating sessions with six year olds. I learned that Christmas trees actually look better if you pile on lots of (mismatched, shiny, and potentially tacky) decorations…including the ones your children make and hang by themselves on all the lower branches, giving your tree the kind of “pear shaped” effect I usually only associate with “skinny” jeans. I learned that, in proper gift-opening…

I don’t know if this ever happens to you, but as a romance writer I often have family and friends anxious to tell me of their latest romance dilemma. From the perspective of most people, romance writers are thought of as the go-to person for love advice because we know how the guy can get the girl. But romance writers do not have all the answers when it comes to love, even though, we do have the ability to create heroes who can fly through the air, rule over kingdoms and woo women, in only a few hundreds pages. So when a friend of mine told me that her husband had given her stainless steel pots and pans for her birthday, and that she couldn’t believe how she could marry someone who has no sense of romance, I just shrugged. It was not exactly the reaction she was seeking. Then I said to her, “What did you tell him you wanted? Did you tell him you wanted pots and pans?” After mulling it over for a few seconds, my friend replied, “Well, not exactly.” And right there was the beginning of the dilemma. So I shared with her what I…

Dear Reader: I love writing romances. And for me, it’s always about the hero. It doesn’t matter what he looks like, or what he does for a living, or even who his family and friends are— it’s about his heart. So it’s funny to me that my new contemporary romance series centers around three sisters—three disenchanted, estranged sisters who don’t know each other and aren’t even sure that they want to. And just for fun, I had them inherit a dilapidated beach inn that they’re forced by circumstances to run. Together. A difficult concept for them to say the least. The first book is Simply Irresistible (out now) tells the story of the middle sister, Maddie “The Mouse,” who decides she’s done being mousey, thank you very much. She’s tired of being too accommodating and too trusting. Her transformation begins when she takes a stand with her sisters Tara and Chloe and hires a contractor to help renovate the inn. Enter hot and handsome Jax Cullen, whose laid-back, easy-going personality matches the ways of the sleepy Washington beach town of Lucky Harbor. Only he’s not nearly as harmless as he seems, but much more like a very sexy sheep in…

Every romance reader knows that a hero can make or break a book. Being the author of more than 25 novels I’ve had a bunch of heroes. The latest, Sean Gallagher, is on the cover of my current novel, AN ACCIDENTAL SEDUCTION. Now, I’ll admit that he doesn’t look quite like I saw him in my mind’s eye while I was writing the book. Because, even though Sean is bent on ruining the heroine, Savanna Hearnes, in an effort to avenge his brother, I envisioned him a little less dour, a little less intimidating and somber. I saw him with an unruly shock of dark hair, a killer grin and a devil-may-care attitude. But once my publisher sent me the cover, I was like…oh, yeah (slobber, slobber, swoon) well, that’s good, too. And look, Savanna seems to agree with my assessment, because she’s obviously drooling on his shoulder. The hero of my Christina McMullen mystery novels has never been on a cover, so he’s all my to create. I see him like this. Yummy, right? But with a lot of attitude and angst. He’s a lieutenant named Jack Rivera who causes no end of trouble for Chrissy from the first…

Since I’ve published seven Jane Austen-related novels, people often ask me why there’s such a fascination with Jane Austen in general and Pride and Prejudice in particular. I’ve developed a number of stock answers having to do with the brilliance and universality of her characterizations, the appeal of escaping to a different era, and the assurance that love will always triumph in Jane Austen’s world. And how can you not love Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy? But the current appeal, with new Austen-related novels being published every month, may have to do with something that goes beyond Jane Austen herself. Most women readers I run into already know the story of Pride and Prejudice. Either they read it in high school, or they saw the 1995 miniseries with Colin Firth or the 2005 movie with Matthew MacFadyen, but they all know the basic story. I can walk into any bookstore and start a conversation with a woman I’ve never met about Mr. Darcy, and chances are good I’m going to hear how much she loves Pride & Prejudice. It’s as close to a universal that we have for women who read. In today’s fragmented world, we’re always grasping for sources…