Some stories just won’t get out of your head until you write them down. That’s what happened to me with THE CHRISTMAS CLOCK. Earlier in my career, I had written a spicy civil war Christmas romance set around Sherman’s occupation of Savannah on Christmas Eve. It was great fun to write. This was different, much more difficult, a story concept that began with an old woman stricken with Alzheimer’s and her grandson, soon to be orphaned unless she can find him a home. I felt compelled to write this book. My husband’s mother, beloved to us both, died of this terrible disease. Which is where the first inkling for THE CHRISTMAS CLOCK began. It was an interesting concept, but every time I tried to write the book, it seemed to sputter and die. Something was missing and it didn’t take long to realize that something was romance, the once-in-a-lifetime, forever kind of love that can bring a story together. And so Syl Winters and Joe Dixon came to life, two lost souls whose once-unshakable love had been destroyed. With Syl and Joe, I had finally found the key to telling Lottie and little Teddy’s tale. Still, being a different sort…

As I started this I was reflecting on the first day of Readers ‘n ‘ritas 2010. It was a rather full day that started at home. with attempts at prepping my home and family for a weekend without me. The dogs I think understood fairly well what was happening, but my son said, “you didn’t tell me you were going away for the weekend.” My response…”what do you think I’ve been talking about for the last several months?” Oh well! Got to the hotel and finished prep work for the actual convention. Finally the convention started, and while I worked registration it sounded like the party in the room behind me was in full swing. Thanks to a great team I was able to sneak in for a few minutes here and there, and got hugged by Dakota Cassidy, Sherrilyn Kenyon, and Dianna Love. Could it get better than that? Well, for me it could. For several years now I’ve been fascinated with the works of Tara Taylor Quinn. Her current work is a four book series titled The Chapman Files. When Tara arrived I was pretty excited to be the first to greet her. I got a few minutes…

Before I started writing the novel that comes after The Forever Queen, I Am The Chosen King (Harold the King in the UK), I had not heard of Emma either. You see, I wrote the Harold novel first, the story of 1066, the Battle of Hastings from the English point of view. Queen Emma was one of the more dominant characters, but in this book, she was introduced almost at the end of her life. I still had to research her though – and what a fascinating, intriguing woman she turned out to be! The only woman to be Queen of England twice, married to two different kings and the mother of two more kings, with different fathers. The next claimant to this sort of accolade is the more famous Eleanor of Aquitaine, who was Queen of France and then Queen of England. She also saw two of her sons crowned as King, Richard I and John – but they shared the same father, Henry II. Emma was a Norman, from Normandy – North Man’s Land – in other words, of Viking stock. She was married to King Æthelred II of England her marriage occurring probably between the age of…

Of course, no one is really perfect, despite attempts to appear that way. But we all know people who seem like it on the surface. Hair is always completely in place. Slip is never showing. They always know just what to say and when to say it. They sort of make us want to smack them J. But other than annoyance, they don’t really elicit much emotion from us, because they lack depth. Scratch that perfect surface and there’s not much beneath. We can’t relate to them because we’re not perfect and neither is our world. Our lives are messy and complicated. Our children misbehave and sometimes make bad choices. Likewise our spouses . We screw up occasionally. And that makes us interesting. So it’s really no wonder that writers created flawed damaged characters. Who wants to read about someone with no problems? Someone who has never ever had something miserable happen to them? What intrigues us are the people who encounter obstacles and find ways to overcome them. Those who draw on an inner strength to triumph in the end. Those are the characters we root for, draw hope from. Those are the sort of characters I tried to…

There are times in life when things happen that we couldn’t possible orchestrate. Things that take extraordinary circumstances to come to be. My father told me when I was little, and during all of my growing up years, that I could do anything I wanted to do, I could be anyone I wanted to be, as long as I put my mind to it and kept it there. And I have always believed that if I do all I can do, and keep my mind on what matters, then everything will fall into place as it needs to do. Not necessarily how I envisioned it, but as it needs to do. Right now, this fall, I am a living example of all of this. Circumstances were put into place, starting thirty years ago, and have culminated in a huge way. I couldn’t possibly have envisioned, or constructed the things that have come together, but I am accepting them and running with them just as fast as I can because I recognize that forces stronger than I am are at work here. From the time I was fourteen I knew that I had to write for Harlequin Books. I put my…

The definition of fiction the dictionary gives is, “novels or stories in which the characters and incidents are wholly or partly imaginary.” As an author, I write women’s fiction, so what I’m referring to here doesn’t necessarily involve other genres and what I want to discuss is the “believability” of characters and plot. Where do you get your story ideas, I’m often asked. And your characters, are they real people? My story ideas come from everywhere….snippets of conversation I might overhear, real life stories from the news, anywhere and everywhere. And about my characters being real people…..yes and no. Of course, to me, they’re very real while I’m creating them. Once fully developed, they also come from a multitude of places. That patient I had many years ago when I worked in the Intensive Care Unit, that cashier at a supermarket, a family member no longer here, a stranger I observed in an airport and the list goes on and on. Which brings us to the question, “What makes a plot or character believable?” The longer I’m an author, the more I’m beginning to think that the answer to this is simply, “Whatever the reader might feel.” In other words,…

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…