NIGHT PROMISES is available now Kelly O’Keefe first met a vampire when she was twelve. Now the pair are best friends and have opened Night Pleasures, an underground club that caters to vampires and their needs. When Kelly’s sister is murdered, she finds herself working with Connor, a vampire she’s been in love with for months. Unable to trust men, let alone a vampire, can she let him help her solve her sister’s murder? Connor has been watching after Kelly for seven months with the help of his sire and best friend Micah. Connor has kept himself at a distance even though he knows they are life mates. He’s afraid of losing control and turning Kelly against her will. When he learns Kelly plans on investigating her sister’s death, he steps in and allows himself to get close to her. But how close is too close? About Tonya Residing in Morehead, Kentucky, Tonya Renee Callihan is currently a 24-year-old college student seeking a degree in Nursing. She loves helping others and putting a smile on your face. Tonya has been writing all of her life. At the age of 13, on Christmas break, she snuck one of her mom’s romances…

Music is one of the keys I use to unlock the heart of a character. I don’t listen to music when I write, but when I’m driving or cooking the tunes are always cranked. There are times when the melody and the song’s emotions strike a cord that reminds me of one of my characters. I can’t explain why a song works, but I know when it does. Eva Rayburn, my heroine in SENSELESS was a tough character to get to know. In SENSELESS she is closed and guarded and only reveals herself to the hero and others in the book very carefully. Without even realizing it, I started to notice songs that were “hers.” Songs and playlists are so personal and so I decided to create a playlist for Eva. After I bought the songs, I made my own CD and when I was having trouble with an Eva scene, I’d listen to the CD. The songs unlocked emotions I couldn’t articulate at first. But once I felt the emotions through the songs, I could create the right scene for Eva. So what were the songs that caught my attention while I was writing SENSELESS? Eva’s Playlist Second Chance…

Thank you so much for having me today to discuss FATAL JUSTICE, book 2 in my new Fatal Series. I thought it would be fun to talk about some of the ups and downs of writing a series featuring the same hero and heroine in every book. Each time I come up against how really difficult it can be to write the same characters book after book, I remind myself I only have one person to blame for these challenges: ME! After all, it was my big idea to write a romantic suspense series featuring the same couple in every book. Luckily, with three books written, a novella under way and a fourth full-length book contracted, I still love Sam and Nick, my D.C. homicide detective and U.S. Senator who are trying to make it work in the Washington fishbowl. After I finished the third book in November, it became clear to me that I need a series “bible” with a list of all the characters, what book they appeared in, etc. In addition, I needed to create “character sheets” for each recurring character that include everything I know about them. To give you an idea of how involved this…

One of the hardest things about writing a story about magic is to have a story. See, when you have magic, it can do anything. Magic can make all your problems literally disappear. So how do you have something threaten your characters when one blink of her eyes (or flick of her wrists) can make it all go away? That was what I was faced with when I sold my genie series to my editor. I pretty much sold the idea on, “I have this idea of a story along the lines of I Dream of Jeannie meets Indiana Jones.” That was it; that was all I had. I knew the genie, Eden, had been sentenced to her bottle for 3,000 years, got out early, and then I heard the Indiana Jones’ theme music. That was it. So, yay! I sold a trilogy. Now I had to write it. And I quickly found out that like genie wishes, magic is not all it’s cracked up to be. Sure, it sounds good, but if the bad guy is after you, poof! make yourself invisible or take a long vacation to the other side of the world. If the guy you’re in…

One of the challenges of writing paranormal romance is finding a way to build a really different fantasy, yet get the readers to buy into it. After all, everybody’s doing handsome leather-clad vampires and cheeky monster-slaying tough girls. Readers love that kind of thing, but they’ve also seen it before. Repeatedly. It’s a lot more fun if you can find a way to turn the concept on its head, surprising readers and creating a whole new world for them to play in. Besides, I’ve got ADD, and I’m easily bored. I love leather clad vampires, but I have no interest in doing the same thing everybody else is doing. That’s no fun at all. Here’s one of the secrets of writing you don’t hear about: it’s fun. Shocking, I know. Everybody always talks about how much work it is being a writer, and how we get paid peanuts, and how the publishing industry is imploding. All of that is true, but it’s also true that creating a universe and moving into it for 400 pages is the best fun you can have with your clothes on. I love coming up with weird ideas and playing with them, like: What if…

I write about vampires, immortals. So I got to thinking about what a New Year’s Eve might mean to them. Not much actually. Of course they notice the passage of time. But in big gulps, not in nibbles. Take Glory St. Clair, my vamp in the Real Vampire series. She was turned in 1604. Now she’s coping with 2011. Hmm. The girl’s seen some serious changes in her long lifetime. Think about it. As a woman, she’s gone from an illiterate chattel to an independent business owner. Now that kind of change could give you whiplash if it had happened overnight. Fortunately she’s had over four hundred years to get used to high heels and a checking account with her name on it. Luckily she was smart enough to survive and thrive. That’s the fun in writing about paranormals. I can put myself in the fantasy and imagine what it would be like to have lived that long, done so much, and, best of all, known so many hot guys. Speaking of… What about the men who are just as ancient as Glory? We’ve all known men who we think of as macho chauvinists. But one who actually wore a…

As I write this 2011 has already been spotted for some of our friends in the Pacific Rim and is slowly methodically working its way across the planet. So Happy New Year to all! At the end of the year, I usually reflect on the good things of the past year and look forward to even better opportunities and life ahead. What’s past is past and the future is bright and shiny, a silver ball. Yesterday I spent looking at some of my books, because I’ve also decided I really need to be honest and clean out some of the ones I’ll never read again or that have no specific meaning in my life. Not being cruel just realistic that even with more bookcases I am NOT going to be able to keep every book. It’s a sad decision but one that had to be made. However in my throes of feeling strong about eliminating “clutter” I came across some of my collection of Georgette Heyer books. Not the popular ones that are reissued over and over but the medieval ones like THE CONQUEROR and SIMON THE COLDHEARTED. Wow, these were old ex-library books I’d collected, printed over 50 years…

This blog is for those of you who want to write, are struggling to write and who want to publish. My latest book, DEADLY IDENTITY, HQN, December 2010 is out. It is book #2 of the my next saga-series, Jackson Hole, Wyoming. When I turn around and look at my zig-zag path to publishing, then I feel anyone can do it. I’d like to share some tips with you that may support your dream of writing a book. For five years I taught at Kent State University and Akron University, Ohio in their adult education programs. I offered classes in Fiction Writing, Nonfiction Writing and Manuscript Evaluation. My classes were always packed to the gum stumps with a maximum of thirty students. My first rule for them was: one did not pass through the door to my class the following week unless they had ten pages of fresh (not edited or revised) writing material. I told them if they didn’t think if they could meet my requirement, to get their money refunded and don’t bother coming back for class number two. I created Writing Boot camp. It wasn’t for sissies. It was for people who had a dream deep in…

When my husband walks into the post office, Deb the postal clerk says, “So…who are you in COWBOYS NEVER CRY?”  Sometimes this idea that people think I’m writing thinly veiled memoir scares me – who do they think I am?  After publishing three novels, a schizophrenic is the only possible right answer! Readers often assume that fictional characters are really based on actual people.  It’s hard for those who don’t write to imagine a person could conjure a completely original character.  This is how it works with me: I never write about real people in my life, but I do write about real characteristics of people in my life. But try to tell that to Deb at the post office. I haven’t consciously written about myself, my life or the people in it in any of my novels.  Yet all those years of inappropriately thinking everything that occurred in the world had to do personally with me helps now that I’m writing.  Also, all that empathy I experienced earlier in my life, before learning how to hold psychic boundaries has given me insight into others.  That’s one nice thing about being a writer: even your failings are eventually useful. If…

When I first started writing, I heeded the admonition to “write what you know,” even though it severely limited my topics and focus. As a result, most of my novels were set either in Southern California, where I was born and raised and currently live, or up in the Pacific Northwest, where I also lived for several years. My characters were a lot like me and/or the people around me, and their lifestyles and circumstances often paralleled my own to some degree. But somewhere along the line I had to ask myself, Is that all there is? Can I move beyond my own little corner of the world in my writing, even if I can’t actually do so physically? With the Internet at my fingertips, I decided I could. That’s how my Extreme Devotion series with New Hope Publishers came about. RED INK, the third book in the series, is set in China, and though I’ve never been there myself, my readers tell me the book reads as if I have. The same is true of NO GREATER LOVE, set in South Africa, and MORE THAN CONQUERORS, set in the San Diego/Tijuana area (been there!), but also San Juan Chamula…