Just like most women, I’ve always liked a man in uniform. They look crisp, clean, and very take-charge. They make a person feel safe. However, when I became an Army mom in 2017, I had a totally different opinion of soldiers. You see, my baby enlisted then. I didn’t know what was going to happen to him in the future. I wouldn’t be able to protect him. The military wasn’t so romantic anymore, although they can still put on one heck of a graduation ceremony. After my son graduated Basic Training, or BT as he called it, the worry over his safety backed off a little inside me, and the whole Army brotherhood angle began to interest me. I wanted to write a suspense novel involving soldiers. My plot was nebulous; I pitched it to my editor at Entangled. They came back with, “We want a terrorist thriller. If you do this right, it could be a series.” Whoa. I didn’t know anything about terrorists, except what you see on the news periodically. Could I write a book about them? I set out researching. I looked up Army Intelligence, counterterrorism, the most dangerous terrorist groups in the world, terrorist cells……
Writers are like magpies. They gather their own experiences, couple them with tons and tons of research, and come up with a distinctive realm that they hope will draw readers into their stories. How do they do it? The old adage, “Write What You Know” holds a lot of merit. As an author, I try to follow it whenever I can. For example, I don’t set my stories in Paris, because I’ve never been there. I couldn’t do the city, or the people, justice. And as much as I love to read Regencies, I’ve only been to England once. That doesn’t make me an expert on all things British. However, I do know the United States, especially California. Being a native Californian, I’ve travelled up and down and all around this state. Coincidentally, that’s where my latest release, UNDERCOVER WITH THE NANNY, takes place. The heroine, Kate Munroe, lives in a little beach community near the border of California and Mexico. I haven’t been down that way in a long time. When I did my research, I found that the town of Imperial Beach was the closest to the Mexican border. I scoured pictures of it on the internet, and…