Thanks so much to the crew here at Fresh Fiction for inviting me to stop by during my TEMPTED blog tour! TEMPTED is the third book in the Eternal Guardians series, and I’m thrilled readers are enjoying it so much. If you’re new to the series, don’t worry. You can easily pick up TEMPTED without reading the first two books and figure out what’s going on. The Eternal Guardians are seven warriors descended from the seven greatest heroes in all of ancient Greece who defend the mortal realm from threats of the Underworld. Tempted is Demetrius’s book. He’s the biggest of the Guardians, a descendant of the famed hero Jason, and he harbors a dark and deadly secret. One that could destroy the world. But when the princess of Argolea goes missing, he’s suddenly the only Guardian who can save her. Fairy tales are packed with heroines who need rescuing. Most girls grow up fantasizing about the hunky prince who’ll ride in on a white horse and save the damsel locked away in the tower. In the eyes of many, Isadora, the heroine in TEMPTED, is that heroine. She’s timid, she’s shy, no one thinks she’s strong enough to rule,…

You know you’ve got one of these. The power suit that you feel you can take on the world in. That dress that always gets you compliments. We take on a different attitude and persona when we wear certain outfits and our characters are the same. Clothing was especially important in the Tang Dynasty. Though the 8th century is often considered ancient or medieval, but in China this period was a Golden Age and the height of Silk Road trade—which meant it was also the height of fashion. Elegant ladies wore flowing robes and experimented with gravity-defying hair styles. Bodices were elaborately embroidered and court ladies showed of a scandalous amount of skin. They wore lip stains and face powder and polished their nails. Women weren’t the only clothes hounds. Men also wore embroidered robes and it was fashionable to don vibrant colors as a show of wealth. There were even ordinances passed to regulate the length of sleeves  when fashion started favoring excessively long ones. At times, merchants, who were considered lower class, were prohibited from wearing colors as it seemed they were imitating the noble classes by doing so. Yet the wily businessmen continued to do so, wearing…

Angels and similar creatures are my favorite paranormal characters. I’ve been fascinated with the idea of wings on the back of someone who otherwise appears human since I was a little girl. I remember being enthralled in school by Egyptian art that showed a woman with wings longer than her arms. On the Cartoon Network, I watched shows such as Bird Man (self explanatory) and The Centurions (one character could fly with mechanical wings). I often had, and still have, flying dreams. As a fledgling writer, I dabbled in vampires before I settled into angels. Vampires and romance is a fantastic combination, and I doubt I’ll ever grow tired of reading such stories. In college, I took Vampires in Literature, an English elective, and have been hooked since. The vampire myth has had sexual elements since the earliest tales, and the leap of vampires to romance heroes and heroines feels natural to me. Angels, on the other hand, are not inherently romance characters. Many consider them religious characters, and while that certainly can be true, popular culture and many romance authors have taken them far outside that box. For me, the inherent conflict between what an angel is supposed to…

World-building is one of the most difficult parts of writing a world that differs in any way from ours. It’s easy enough to figure out the main changes, like “magic works” or “dinosaurs are still around”—you probably have them in mind from the beginning, or odds are you wouldn’t be writing that particular world—but then you have to think about what smaller changes they’d cause. Do the people in your world have surgeons, or does magic solve all health issues. If not, why not? How does the freeway system adapt when people are riding stegosauruses? And so on. That’s hard. It’s also a lot of fun—like putting together a puzzle, but generally without that moment when you realize that the dog ate three of the pieces. When I was writing NO PROPER LADY, I got to do two separate and intertwined pieces of world-building. One was Simon’s world, which was 1888 as we knew it on the surface—only with all sorts of secret knowledge and magic underneath. (I drew a great deal on actual occult societies of the time, though I took considerable liberties in the service of fiction.) The other was Joan’s world: a world very different from either…

Most writers are readers (I hope), and avid ones, at that. But I think we often read from a slightly different perspective than the general public. Sometimes it’s hard for me to turn off The Writer, even when I’m reading for pleasure, and I often find myself lingering on certain phrases or character choices. Sometimes it’s the small things that make the writer in me smile and nod my head when I’m reading. Just wee bits of genius–things that are deceptively simple, or fractions of world-building that dazzle me. I love finding these treasures in other people’s books. The following is a short list of five of those small moments in urban fantasy that moved me to raise a proverbial glass of champagne and say, “Well played!” 1) Charlaine Harris, Southern Vampire series: Sookie’s Word-a-Day Calendar It really bothers me when an author’s voice overrides the character’s voice in first person. Sookie is a small-town waitress, not very smart (but not dumb either), and her voice is fairly consistent throughout the series. But what does a writer do when she wants to use words that her character shouldn’t know? In Harris’s case, she gives Sookie access to a Word-a-Day calendar….

WINGS OF FIRE is the latest book in my Guardians of Ascension series.  It’s a great title, isn’t it?  I can say that, because I had nothing to do with it. The creation of the title was a collaboration between my agent and my editor, and a back and forth that took some time.  I interjected ideas now and then, but mainly the inspiration came from them.  However, the moment the title became official, my mind started shooting off fireworks about what I could do with those words:  wings…of…fire!  Wings on fire, wings erupting in flames, powerful wings, and on and on it went until one day an entire plotline emerged around that title. I can’t give too much away, though!  If I told you what I did with all that fire, then you’d know how the story develops and ultimately how it ends.  So, I’ll leave it there, fearing to spoil the fun. I love writing paranormal romance, more than I can say!  When the genre emerged, I thought I’d died and gone to heaven.  I’m sure many of you who read paranormal probably feel the same way.  I can remember reading the first book of Sherrilyn Kenyon’s Dark…

One would think when one is writing a book where the premise comes from a movie, the casting would already be complete. Yes, well that would make sense if the author was someone who did things the easy way. That author is not me. I vividly remember the moment of inspiration for LORD AND LADY SPY. I was watching the Pitt-Jolie film Mr. and Mrs. Smith (yes, that one. Poor Jennifer Aniston). And I started thinking, what if this story took place during the Regency? What if the hero and heroine were not assassins but spies? Out of work spies… I was intrigued by the idea of writing about a married couple where not one, but both partners, had a secret identity. Could I write steamy scenes for a couple who’s been married five years. I found that yes. Yes, I could. When I started writing LORD AND LADY SPY, I didn’t have Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie in mind for my characters. Well, I have to admit, Brad kind of sticks in a girl’s mind. But Adrian Galloway, Lord Smythe is a little more dangerous than Pitt and a little less pretty. I was thinking more Daniel Craig with…

Been thinking about interesting people of late.   The things others do that make me wish I was doing that too.   I suspect that lives viewed from the outside always seem more exciting than they are.  I know when someone introduces me to speak and I hear all the stuff I’ve done, I always wonder who the speaker is –oh…me. It’s so easy it seems to let our lives get sidetracked into “what ifs” –instead of “I haves”.   Our pasts have a way of dictating our present.   And some (me included) can let that paralyze them into losing self-esteem.  Which is hard enough to come by in the first place. Conversely there are also people who are ruled by the future.  Must do this, must do that, and all of it before I reach a certain age or it just won’t count.   Again, I find that I am prone to this particular human weakness.  I often think why didn’t I start writing earlier in my life, then I’d be like so and so.  (Another trap we often set for ourselves — contrast and comparison). But you know the truth is the only moment that counts is the now.  It’s the only…

Thank you for inviting me back to Fresh Fiction! I’m a sucker for houses – big houses, stately houses, old houses, and even miniature houses. When we decided to move, I looked at more than seventy old houses before settling (of course) on a new one. When I asked my husband if he’d build me a dollhouse, it turned out to be a miniature gem from the Georgian period – a one-inch-to-the-foot equivalent of a small gray stone manor house with hardwood floors and copper flashing in the roof gutters and brick fireplaces and hand-thrown chimney pots. (You can see pictures of it at my website) But mostly I’m a sucker for fictional houses. The house in my new book, THE WEDDING AFFAIR, is called Halstead, and it’s the country estate of the Duke of Somervale. Though I made up everything on the inside, I tacked up a photo of the exterior of a real house to inspire me as I wrote. Here’s what Olivia – one of the three heroines in this triple story – sees when she arrives at Halstead: The central block of the house was a full four stories tall, built of red brick trimmed in…

Ever heard of the Air Force’s Pararescue Jumpers? PJs for short. If the answer’s no, I’m not surprised, since they don’t get much recognition in the media for all the amazing things they do. But, I have it on good authority they prefer it that way. PJs are Special Ops trained medic commandos that go into harm’s way to perform risky search and rescue operations, like extracting a downed air crew behind enemy lines. They put their lives on the line every day to save others, whether during natural disasters here at home or in combat overseas, and will protect their charges at all costs. Their motto “That Others May Live” is the ironclad code they live and die by, and it gives me goosebumps when I think of it. DEADLY DESCENT features a PJ hero and a Medevac Black Hawk pilot heroine. Writing about a Spec Ops hero is nothing new for me, but I felt strongly about highlighting what some of the women in our armed forces are doing in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. DEADLY DESCENT is the first in my Bagram Special Ops trilogy, and I’m giving away a digital copy here at Fresh Fiction. Any…