Somebody once asked me which of my characters I’d most like to trade places with. In THE VAMPIRE NEXT DOOR the answer is…none of them! Sly is a vampire whose maker Vorigan Malvant is after him. Morgaine is Sly’s honey who Vorigan kidnaps as bait to lure Sly. Roz and Konrad moved to a private school in Newton, run by werewolves. Merry is pregnant and Jason’s father had another heart attack, taking him away to Minnesota in the dead of winter. Gwyneth is fighting with Morgaine and Nathan is well…Nathan. Everyone’s favorite character seems to be Chad, the ghost. I love him too, and the idea of being the proverbial fly on the proverbial wall has its appeal, but to be so limited by the lack of a  corporeal form would be frustrating. No wonder he’s snarky! Sly and Morgaine have been friends for years and already know each other’s paranormal secrets, so that bit is out of the way. Morgaine didn’t have to freak out over Sly’s vampirism the way Merry and Roz did when they discovered the men they loved were shapeshifters. But no two characters were more flawed than Morgaine and Sly when they first considered (and…

August is my favorite month. Not because the weather is beautiful, or because my family and I can enjoy camping in the wilds of Alaska. No, August embraces a more mystical and near religious experience. The beginning of school. The excitement starts around the first of the month with school registration. I’m thrilled by this for a couple of reasons. First, the fact that both my children have successfully maneuvered through another year and will advance to the next grade is a reason for great celebration. The second reason I love school registration is that it’s a harbinger of quiet days filled only with the tapping of my keyboard. Don’t get me wrong, I love summer and bonding with my kids. It’s not as if I drag my children out of bed on registration day, bleary-eyed, throw them in the car, and park my lawn chair at the school’s front door like I’m buying tickets to a Lady Gaga concert. That thought has hardly ever crossed my mind. It’s the anticipation that in two weeks the fruit of my loins will again spend their days learning, laughing, and chattering to somebody other than me. So, as you might have guessed,…

In 1999 I first came up with the idea for the world of Elenchera and more than a decade later it comprises twenty-three lands, 500+ maps (I wish I was joking!), 47,000+ years of events spread across twenty-five Shards (or ages) of history. I wanted a fantasy world that had something unique about it just as Tolkien’s Middle Earth, Pratchett’s Discworld and Lewis’ Narnia all have. While I would never preach that Elenchera should be spoken in the same breath as those worlds I do feel after more than a decade of work that it has something special about it. I love history, always have and always will. It was my favourite subject at school and whatever aspect of history I had to study I never struggled to find something of interest. When I first began building Elenchera I turned to our own history for inspiration. Reading Cassell’s World History from cover to cover I not only learned about some interesting events but I gained an understanding of how many societies have developed, their innovations, reasons for fighting wars and how every powerful empire eventually falls with the passing of time. Elenchera is a world that begins with an almost…

Last year when I began writing my Immortal Series with Red Sage, I set out to create a different breed of immortals. I’d read vampires, shifters, fairies, and demons. I wanted something a little more human, with human traits and normal lives, but with the added complication that these characters didn’t die. I get a lot of questions about my immortals. So today, I’d like to introduce them to you. Making: An immortal shares his/her blood with the dying. Not through fangs, but by conventional means of cutting. My immortals have been known to run onto crash scenes armed with pocket knives to rescue victims. They’ve also used shards of glass to slice the flesh of themselves and a mortal, pouring their blood into their veins. Immortals can die at the hands of other immortals. If they lost their footing and fell off a cliff, they wouldn’t die, but if another immortal pushed them—delivering the death blow, so to speak—they would perish. Only with other immortals are their lives challenged, which sometimes makes for a volatile situation if a new immortal comes into their midst. In my latest release, TREFOIL, the heroine Lillian has mortal frailties, which can happen if…

As a child and young man, I was a voracious reader of 19th century seafaring novels and obscure early 20th century adventures about spies and bomb-carrying anarchists in Europe.  I had fire in my belly and the books I read helped fuel it.  But I always wanted to translate the escapism of the books into a life of real adventure.  So, when MI6 tapped me on the shoulder after I left university, I accepted its offer of employment without hesitation. I was an MI6 field operative who worked at the sharp end.  I travelled the world alone, met the bravest men and women, did great things, terrible things, hard things, witnessed unbelievable heroism, and saw deprivation, sorrow, love, compassion and death. Some of the things I saw and actions I made affected me but not as much as you may think.  I was young, fuelled by my passion for adventure and an unrelenting motivation to combat bad people’s intentions towards the west. I have the luxury of pausing and looking back at that life now.  I am older, wiser and have a few more inches on my waistline.  But I never paused for a moment in those days.  Not once….

I’m addicted to writing books. Reading them, too. Writing and reading and true love and chocolate–life doesn’t get much better than that. Well, maybe watching The Princess Bride while munching crème donuts. When I was in grade school one of our assignments was to read a poem in front of the class. I couldn’t decide between Alfred Noyes’ “The Highwayman” and Shakespeare’s “Venus and Adonis” (I love horses). Why yes, I was an overachiever, why do you ask? I chose Alfred Noyes. The bell rang before I finished and no one moved. At that moment I decided I’d be an actress when I grew up. And I’d write a romance inspired by my favorite poem. I’ve achieved both goals, although THE LANDLORD’S BLACK-EYED DAUGHTER took longer (I played Nellie is South Pacific at age 19). First, I want everyone to know that THE LANDLORD’S BLACK-EYED DAUGHTER has a happy ending. And now…here’s an excerpt:   1 April, 1787   Elizabeth Wyndham gazed at her reflection in the mirror above her dressing table. Dispassionately, she scrutinized her ink-black hair, which fell in ringlets on either side of her face, not unlike a spaniel’s ears. A scowl caused her delicately arched brows…

Q: Your newest book takes us back to Fool’s Gold, California. It’s a town with more men than women and yet you never seem to have a hard time working in smart, hunky guys. Tell us about Finn, the brooding pilot who makes our heroine Dakota swoon in ONLY MINE. Do you find it’s harder to write the male or female characters, and why? I don’t find it difficult to write from the male perspective. In some ways, it’s easier because men tend to cut to the chase more quickly than women. They think in straight lines, whereas we women take a circuitous route. One of the things I love best about writing is the freedom to slip into my characters’ heads and to look at the same event from different perspectives. I think it makes me more empathetic in real life, too. Q: When you first created Fool’s Gold and started writing novels based there, did you have upcoming characters–like Dakota and her sisters–in mind, or has that come since you created the town? How has the series evolved? I tend to think about a year ahead. So while I wrote the 2010 Fool’s Gold books, yes, I did…

I have a confession. OK, I probably have a lot of them. For the sake of this blog post though, we’re focusing on the fact that I’m an utter moron when it comes to movies and television. I lack the attention span for either one, so when I’m asked the inevitable, “which actors and actresses do you imagine playing your characters in the movie version of your book?” I freeze. I was asked to blog about this a few weeks ago at The Debutante Ball, and spent hours browsing online so I wouldn’t look like a complete idiot. I eventually came up with a photo of a younger, curly-haired Meg Ryan and another shot of Pierce Brosnan. It was as close as I could come to my mental picture of my heroine and hero from MAKING WAVES. A friend emailed right away to remark on my choices. “Um, have you actually seen any movies in the last ten years?” Define “seen.” Does falling asleep halfway through count? So my friend helped me assemble a cast list I must grudgingly admit is much better than mine. Here are the ideas… Juli, my plucky, spunky, smart-as-a-whip heroine: Kate Hudson. This actually makes…

My life this year so far has been something of a blur, starting with the release of MIDNIGHT CALLER, my debut novel, in early February. Looking back, I don’t think I’d been fully prepared for the breakneck pace of writing a three-book series with a planned release of a novel every six months! Writing, revising, going over galleys and promotional work (much of it happening at the same time) for multiple books has required me to embrace my inner multi-tasker. It’s August, and promotional activities are once again in full swing – this time for MIDNIGHT FEAR, book two in the Chasing Evil trilogy, which was released early this month. With all three books now completed, I’ve made a commitment to myself to breathe and try to take it all in this time. To relax some and enjoy the view. As a new author, I can’t tell you the thrill of bringing characters that previously existed only in one’s heart and head to life. MIDNIGHT FEAR introduces Reid Novak, another agent working for the FBI’s Violent Crimes Unit, and Caitlyn Cahill, a former D.C. socialite who played a prominent role in bringing a serial killer to justice two years earlier….

I’m a list-maker. I love making lists and crossing items off them. And yes, I’ll admit to adding items that I’ve just completed to the list for the sole purpose of crossing them off. My problem lately, however, is that I’m drowning in my cherished lists. There’s a lot of good stuff going on in my world, and it’s been a busy year-and I’m not complaining. I’m grateful to be able to do all I’m doing. I’ve just had my debut mystery novel published, which means I’m doing lots of promotion and online networking. I’m (theoretically) working on the next book. In addition, I have a day job, and I volunteer for two annual literary events. And then there’s the rest of life, including food, shelter, family, husband, husband’s career, rental property we own, and so on. Believe me, lists help, and I have a lot of them. But then there are the days when I feel like my head will explode from everything That. I. Must. Do. Rationally, I know I can’t do everything. That some of my lists-particularly those to do with book promotion-represent everything I could possibly do, not everything I will do or need to do….