Friday night and it’s an author book signing night! And best of all, they had CAKE! Okay, maybe I’m a bit harsh, but let me tell all the authors touring out there, cake works! Have a signing, get the baby bottles of water and a HUGE cake. You’ll get people out of the woodworks. Honest! So, on a warm Friday night in June, we went to Legacy Books to meet the other half of Claire Avery. For background, Claire Avery is an author duo, two sisters: Michelle Poché and Mari Hilburn. Both sisters live in the area, which makes the cake more convenient. Am I talking too much about the cake? It was delicious by the way. A flat cake with two layers, very light and fluffy and Gwen gave the icing a thumbs up. She started checking out my slice to see if there was any left! She’s addicted to icing! But back to Claire Avery. Michelle is a screen writer and has worked in Hollywood as well as in Texas, Mari is an attorney. They left the chill of Chicago and settled in Texas, a familiar story for some of the people I know including me! It is…

I’m so pleased to be here with you all today at Fresh Fiction to share my latest release Seducing the Knight. Seducing the Knight is the second book in a new series that combines treasure hunting and those oh-so-fabulous Templar knights. For the series, I created a group of men that are based partly on historical fact and partly on fiction. In Scottish history, there were a group of men known as Robert the Bruce’s special guard. These men who were loyal to their king, went on a crusade for him after he died. Their mission, to cut the Bruce’s heart from his chest and take it to the Holy Land for burial in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre as their king requested. They never made it to the Holy Land. They were forced into a battle with the Moors and were destroyed. Five of the ten Templars lived through that battle, but hundreds of their men died. In the pages of the Brotherhood of the Scottish Templars series I explore how three of these surviving knights put the pieces of their lives back together. But along with exploring how to a man comes back to life after such…

No Shot was Fired, no Blood was Spilled (or even Sipped) in the Making of this Book That’s right, my dear friends. I write what we’re calling these days “straight contemporary romance.” There’s nothing supernatural, otherworldy, or paranormal going on here. No asses getting kicked. No highwaymen, no carriage accidents, no brotherhood of Regency spies. It’s life sort of like we know it. If we lived in California’s wine country. In the middle of a hundred-year-old vineyard. While struggling to keep the family winery afloat. And if we were nicknamed the “Nun of Napa” ever since a wedding-that-wasn’t five years ago. And finally, if we had to turn to the man-next-door, Penn Bennett, the star of Hollywood’s hottest home renovation show, to complete the work on the winery’s historic cottage in order to host a wedding there at the end of the month. It’s a hard job, this straight contemporary romance writing. Okay, so the research wasn’t so bad (reading about winemaking, drinking wine, spending a long weekend in Napa with my husband), but what do you do to get a reader’s pulse racing if there are no knives, no fangs, no men running around in the jungle with their…

I’m currently living in a small town in the Midwest. I’m not really a small town girl. I have nothing against small towns; I’ve just always lived in cities. I feel at home in the city. I like having a lot of things going on around me. I like choices. Lots of choices. I’m a shopper and need the stimulation of many different stores within a short distance from me that I can wander into on the spur of the moment just to see and touch pretty things. I’m a people watcher and love knowing that every day when I go out into my world there will be many new people to observe, in many different walks of life, doing many different things. I need an international airport nearby so I can fly off to exotic places. And I like city living because of the anonymity. I can be out in the city and never be seen. Never be noticed. I can live in the city and not have anyone else in my business. You can imagine then, my culture shock, when I find myself living in my husband’s hometown, population 12,000. I’ve learned to love many things about small…

In June of 1988, I created the beginning of the Morgan’s Mercenaries/Morgan Trayhern saga series. Back then, no one had done three books in a row and I was the first to do this with  Harlequin/Silhouette. Now over 50+ strong, I have set my sights on creating a second one. This is the Jackson Hole, Wyoming saga-series. It is about Wild West, stories about cowboys and the hardy men of this region. I refer to the second saga in short hand as JHW. I often get questions from readers about “How do you create a saga?” It’s not easy. There’s a tremendous amount of thought and planning that goes into it.  The first prerequisite is to have a backdrop large enough to put a whole cast of characters on. Secondly, there has to be a focal point that readers want to read. In Morgan’s Mercenaries, these were about men and women who were on the edge of danger as they fought and loved. In JHW it involves a fascinating town set beneath the shadow of the mighty Teton Mountains of western Wyoming. And forty miles north of Jackson Hole is our most well known park, Yellowstone. I spent many years…

I had a really successful May. I read and loved BLOWN AWAY by Sharon Sala. I have to be honest here, and say that I’ve been stockpiling Sala, but haven’t really had the desire to read them. However BLOWN AWAY was a wonderful book, and really reminded me about what had drawn me to Sala in the beginning of my reading journey. I also read the concluding book in the Chicks With Sticks trilogy by Heidi Betts. KNOCK ME FOR A LOOP was a fun romantic romp. If you haven’t yet read this trilogy I strongly suggest reading in order so that by the time you get to KNOCK ME FOR A LOOP you understand the relationship between the hero and heroine. I hope that Ms. Betts continues to write romantic comedies for a long time to come. I could go on and on with the titles that I read and had trouble putting down in May, but I don’t want to bore you. I will however tell you that I read THE LIES WE TOLD by Diane Chamberlain. I believe this book to be classified more as Women’s Fiction than romance, but was swept up in the story, and…

HarperTeen kicked off the first week of summer with the Supernatural Summer Tour.  This is a six day whirl wind tour that includes Kansas City, Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, Chicago, & San Diego with five of HarperTeen’s top young adult authors. When I caught up with the tour at Borders in Dallas, Texas, the participants for this stop were Kim Harrison (EARLY TO DEATH, EARLY TO RISE), Ellen Schreiber (VAMPIRE KISSES 7; LOVE BITES), Aprilynne Pike (SPELLS), and Kimberley Derting (THE BODY FINDER).  Kelley Armstrong (THE RECKONING) would trade off with Aprilynne Pike starting in Houston.  For at least three of these ladies, it was day three out of the six in the non-stop tour, yet they all greeted their fans with energy and enthusiasm. The evening started with all four ladies perched upon their signing table, giving short introductions of themselves and their books, followed by a Q&A session.  Those in attendance got to find out a little about their favorite authors.  Such fun facts were that Aprilynne was the only one of the four that actually went to school to be a writer but she felt she learned just as much working in critique groups and reading.  Ellen’s biggest…

Good morning! Thank you for inviting me to stop by on my blog tour this month. I Love This Bar is on the book shelves ready for my readers to bust down the book store doors to get at one. Did I mention that my imagination often times runs wild and free and I get these amazing images in my head about how much my readers love my books? I Love This Bar is the first in the four book Honky Tonk series with Hell, Yeah coming out in August; My Give A Damn’s Busted in October and Honky Tonk Christmas in November. The series is centered around an old beer joint in Mingus, Texas called The Honky Tonk and the four bar owners who have no intentions of ever giving up their saloon…and the four sexy cowboys who are determined to change those sassy women’s minds. Daisy O’Dell is the first bar owner you will meet. And Jarod McElroy is that amazing cowboy on the cover of I Love This Bar. Want to read an excerpt that will tell you exactly what happened between them there at the first? Is that a big “Hell, Yeah!” I hear surrounding my…

Have you ever pretended you were someone you’re not? Have you ever masqueraded as someone famous or gone along when you were mistaken for someone else? I haven’t, but I’ve always loved stories where the heroines were in disguise. Think of Shakespeare’s THE MERCHANT OF VENICE, TWELFTH NIGHT, or AS YOU LIKE IT. Those are some of my favorites. And the best part? When the ruse is discovered, of course! And maybe reading Shakespeare all those years ago in high school and college was part of the inspiration for Sarah in my next novel, THE MAKING OF A DUCHESS. Sarah is an orphan and a governess for one of the top men in England’s Foreign Office. She’s a quiet, unobtrusive sort of woman who minds her own business until one day her employer tells her he needs her to become a spy. And the man he needs her to spy upon? Julien Harcourt, duc de Valére. Sarah doesn’t know anything about Julien, which is a good thing. If she knew how wealthy he was, how powerful, how intimidating, or how handsome, she would never have accepted the assignment. She’s pretty reluctant to accept anyway, but her employer makes her an…