Thanks so much for having me here on Fresh Fiction. I’m a huge fan of your site. I’m excited to be celebrating the release of my book, Story of Us. In the book, Sophia Strombi is the younger sister of a lifelong friend of Declan James. That isn’t the only thing that’s supposed to keep her off limits for his heart; he also hires her to be the manager of his pub, On Dec. With a background in marketing and promotion, Sophia is eager to bring in new business for the local establishment. One of her ideas is to bring in a speed dating company. I thought, for this post, it might be fun to have both of my main characters answer a ‘speed dating’ questionnaire. I’ve selected ten questions from an online questionnaire that I’ll put below and answer in character for each of the questions. Let’s see how well suited they are after the fact! Sophie Strombi 1. What makes you happy/sad/angry? Creating a really successful marketing campaign makes me happy professionally. Personally, being with my family and just sitting back and watching them all interact with each other brings me a sense of happiness. It makes me…

Parenting is tough. Understatement of the year, right? First, it’s the baby years of all-hours-of-the-day feedings and forever dodging spit up. Next, it’s the toddler years, when you’re convinced they’re going to trip and fall down any flight of stairs within a three-mile radius if you turn your head for one second. Then comes elementary school, where you’re trying to keep your sanity while trying to coach your kids through “new” math (which makes absolutely no sense whatsoever—why can’t five plus seven just be twelve without all these darned boxes and rounding and uuuuuuuugh). We’re now into the middle and high-school years at our home, and trust me, those each come with their own (frequent) moments of chaos and homework calamity. Add in two kids in sports that of course never meet at the same time or place, and yeah, insanity can quickly become magnified tenfold. So why do we let them do it? Because we love our kids (and we wouldn’t trade a moment of any of it for the world.) Band, choir, drama, sports—these are just a few of the extracurricular activities that threaten to gobble up those precious few minutes between work/school and bed. But they’re also…

Shannon moved up the beach by half a mile and settled into one of only two second-story suites the boutique hotel offered. With the uninterrupted views of the ocean and a private patio that had its own plunge pool, this hotel was exactly what she envisioned while staying in Tulum for a vacation. She was on the balcony when she heard Avery enter the room. Shannon stood from the shady spot she’d propped herself up on to greet her friend. Avery held her welcome drink in one hand and her purse in the other. “Eeeeek. This place is awesome,” Avery said, tossing her purse aside and offering Shannon a one-arm hug. “Beautiful, isn’t it?” The bellhop placed Avery’s bag in the room and asked if there was anything else he could assist with. Shannon tipped the man and closed the door behind him. “Check out the balcony.” Avery didn’t need to be asked twice. She wandered outside and tossed her arms wide. “A private pool?” More like an oversize hot tub, but yeah. “A great place to wash the salt water off after a day in the ocean.” “This is fabulous.” They talked briefly about her flight and drive from…

Being a military wife of seventeen years, I know a thing or two about writing a love letter. Between my husband’s five deployments, we have thousands of them stored in our basement, our own little time capsule from days where pen and paper were our only means of communication. Those letters have saved our marriage more times than I can count. The beautiful thing about love letters is that just like love, they come in all sorts of different varieties. Some are poetic, some romantic, some erotic, and some don’t even look like love letters at all. What all good love letters have in common is heartfelt emotion. In The Last Letter, Ella regrets writing in pen when her awkward nature gets the best of her during her first letters with Beckett. But that sincerity is what first draws Beckett to her in their letters. Start with your feelings, and you can’t go wrong. Some of my favorites didn’t read like love letters at all. They came from the front lines, scrawled on scrap pieces of paper between missions, the letters blurring from the touch of Jason’s fingers. They were short, and often held two distinct paragraphs—one updating me on…

When she put her hand on the horse’s leg, he snorted at the same instant his body tensed. “It’s okay, boy. I won’t hurt you,” she said. Audrey was careful not to get near the affected area as she inspected it with her eyes. Once the gelding calmed, she managed to get her hand several inches closer before he twitched his head. “I’m going to fix you,” she promised. “You have to trust me.” Another few tense minutes passed before she moved with agonizing slowness until her palm was over the knee. She didn’t feel any fluid, so it could just be joint pain. But since this was one of the ill horses, she wasn’t sure of anything. Audrey rubbed her hand softly over the leg again and again. The horse closed his eyes, letting her know that he trusted her. She sat cross-legged and continued to stroke him with one hand while adding notes to the chart on her iPad with the other. Though she didn’t want to leave the bay, Audrey knew she needed to get to the other two horses. She climbed to her feet and ran her hand down the gelding’s head to the soft, velvety…

Instead of trying to find your perfect match in a dating app, we bring you the “Author-Reader Match” where we introduce you to authors as a reader you may fall in love with. It’s our great pleasure to present MK MOORE!  WRITES: Filthy Contemporary ABOUT AUTHOR: I live in Tennessee with my amazing husband who inspires me every day. There is a little bit of him in every man I write! I have always been writing something. I took the plunge and self-published my first book in July 2017. WHAT I’M LOOKING FOR IN MY IDEAL READER MATCH: Someone who loves love! My couples are head over heels for one another pretty quickly! WHAT TO EXPECT IF COMPATIBLE: No cheating, steamy love scenes, and a delicious happily ever after! About the 425 Madison Series Welcome to 425 Madison Ave the perfect place to fall in love. Nine delicious romances set in fast-paced & sexy NYC just waiting for you to read. The series features stories from some of your favorite romance authors: Leigh Lennon, MK Moore, Allie York, Aubree Valentine, Kay Gordon, Lauren Helms, Sylvia Kane, Katy Ames, and C. Lesbirel. Join these authors as they come together, each with a…

What fun to pick five favorite cowboy heroes . . . particularly with so many tantalizing choices. Now, it’s been a tough, hard, sweat-inducing job, but I got it done and here are the final results. 1. Trace Adkins. Oh my, can that guy sing . . . and look like a cowboy hero while he’s doing it. I fell head-over-heels when I saw this cowboy-musician-actor perform live in the intimate outdoor theater at the Choctaw Nation Labor Day Festival. Twenty-plus of his singles have charted on the Billboard country music charts, including his Number One hits: “This Ain’t No thinkin’ Thing,” “Ladies Love Country Boys,” and “You’re Gonna Miss This.” He also recorded a duet with country legend Ronnie Milsap called “My First Ride” to benefit firefighters and police officers. Now I listen to this bass-baritone, Grand Ole Opry inductee most days while I write my cowboy firefighter hero novels. He sets love-inspiring, life-affirming stories to music in the best country tradition that warms my storyteller’s heart. 2. Virgil Cole. Nothing is simple for a cowboy hero, but he also lets nothing get him down in his quest to make things right. Ed Harris directs, co-writes, and stars in…

I am SUPER excited for The Chai Factor by Farah Heron, which is out in June 2019. It’s everything I love in a romance: a heroine who makes her own rules, a ton of “opposites attract” tension and a fun situation that brings the characters together. This fun story also touches on some serious and important topics, like dating someone of a different culture and how opening minds will open hearts.  This is an #ownvoices romance and Farah’s debut is at the top of my ‘to read’ list for 2019! Summary: Thirty-year-old engineer Amira Khan has set one rule for herself: no dating until her grad-school thesis is done. Nothing can distract her from completing a paper that is so good her boss will give her the promotion she deserves when she returns to work in the city. Amira leaves campus early, planning to work in the quiet basement apartment of her family’s house. But she arrives home to find that her grandmother has rented the basement to . . . a barbershop quartet. Seriously? The living situation is awkward: Amira needs silence; the quartet needs to rehearse for a competition; and Duncan, the small-town baritone with the flannel shirts,…

I’ve heard people talk about owning your crazy. I appreciate this notion. I have a lot of crazy to own. But today, I want to talk about something else. I want to talk about owning my lazy. In some ways, I’m a pretty hardworking gal. I hold down a job, keep my house tidy, do the occasional load of laundry, and even crank out a book here and there. (Hello Heartbreaker!) But when it comes to my face? Wow. That’s a lot of lazy. I could tell you the things I do for my face, but it might be easier to tell you what I don’t do. I don’t wash my face before bed. I don’t use fancy moisturizers, despite having entered those golden mid-forties where the wrinkles and sagging and bagging seem to grow up overnight. I don’t wear makeup—not because my face doesn’t need it, because of course it does. More because I’m too lazy to take it off at night. I don’t pluck my eyebrows. (I do pluck the hair that grows out of my chin. Is that TMI?) I don’t exfoliate. I’m not even entirely sure what that is. The heroine of Heartbreaker, Tess, is a…

Taking on a K-9 series has been one of the most rewarding, yet challenging endeavors of my writing career. Sure, it’s easy to select a breed for my K9 characters or to pick a cool name for the dog, but writing dog-speak? Trust me, it’s not so easy. Not if you want your canine characters to be just as much a part of the show as your human ones. As authors, we have two intrinsic ways of “showing” readers who and what our heroes and heroines are as people and what their personalities are like. One way is through action, and the other is via conversation. What a character says is a fundamental way to convey who that character is and what’s important to them. But how do you do that when one of your main characters isn’t human and can’t talk? English, that is. A dog has basic language skills he/she uses to get its point across: bark, woof, snort, whine, whimper, growl…you get the picture, but there’s no language as we (humans, that is) know it. So how can it be done? How does an author get across to the reader what kind of personality a dog has?…