Fresh FIction Box Not To Miss
Diane Whiteside | What Does He Look Like?
Author Guest / April 5, 2011

Readers always ask me what my book’s hero looks like.  I’m lucky enough to almost always have an answer for them, even if I don’t know how I got it.  Sometimes I “see” the hero’s face and sometimes I know how he moves.  But sometimes he reveals himself piecemeal – and only after I’ve started working on his story.  (The rat!) That’s the way Jake Hammond, the hero of THE SHADOW GUARD, told me about himself.  Astrid and his story rumbled around in my head for years before I could write it.  I knew all sorts of personal stuff about him – his blind dedication to being a cop, his love for his family and hometown, his fumbling inability to form a long-term relationship with women, you name it. But could I have recognized him on the street?  Not a chance. That’s very painful for a romance author who has to write scenes from her heroine’s point of view.  What kind of guy makes her swoon?  Tall and dark, with six-pack abs the envy of everybody else in the gym?  Blond and handsome, chased by women of all ages?  I had no idea because neither of them would tell me….

DIANE WHITESIDE | Special Places and Meals with Family and Friends
Author Guest / November 6, 2010

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…

Diane Whiteside | In Love With A Wandering Man
Author Guest / June 22, 2010

Here I am, on a cruise ship sailing across the Atlantic without a bit of land anywhere in sight. That pretty much describes exactly where I was when I started to plot THE DEVIL SHE KNOWS – adrift without anywhere to place my hero. Usually we think of a hero – or heroine – as being firmly planted in a single place. Where would Arthur be without Camelot? D’Arcy must have his Pemberly in PRIDE AND PREJUDICE, right? How could Harry Dresden live anywhere but Chicago in Jim Butcher’s THE DRESDEN FILES? I, for one, refuse to imagine Sookie Stackhouse living anywhere but Louisiana. Now put yourself in my shoes. I knew THE DEVIL SHE KNOWS was going to be about Gareth Lowell. After all, he told me at the end of THE IRISH DEVIL that I had to write a book about him. I just nodded and said, yeah, right, mister, you’re maybe eighteen years old, you’ve got some growing up to do before you’ve got enough angst to be interesting… Boy, was I wrong! Gareth reminded me he was still waiting during three more books. He only kept his mouth shut during KISSES LIKE A DEVIL because that…

Diane Whiteside | Dancers Make Magic
Uncategorized / November 2, 2009

Hi, everyone! Big hugs to everyone here at Fresh Fiction for asking me to blog today. CAPTIVE DESIRES, my new paranormal romance and the sequel to CAPTIVE DREAMS, is published today! CAPTIVE DESIRES is about Alekhsiy, the younger brother of Mykhayl, CAPTIVE DREAMS’ hero. Thanks to dragon magic, he boldly crosses the void between worlds in order to stop the ultimate threat to his people. Unfortunately, this dumps him in the middle of a science fiction convention on Earth. His sole ally is Danae Livingston, the fan fiction writer he’s always adored from afar – and who just may be enough of a sorceress to wreck havoc upon his home… Somebody whose creativity becomes reality. When I wrote CAPTIVE DREAMS, it was so easy to make the heroine a writer and a magic worker at the same time. Talk about wish fulfillment! Of course, there are good sides and bad sides to that, which Corinne certainly got to experience. (Oh my gosh, the payback for making an ice serpent bite Mykhayl!) To read more of Diane’s blog and to comment for a chance to win please click here. Visit FreshFiction.com to learn more about books and authors.

Diane Whiteside | Once Upon A Time in A Place Far, Far Away
Romance / February 26, 2009

Historical authors always write about someplace that can’t be seen or felt by their reader. For KISSES LIKE A DEVIL (just published in February 2009 by Brava), I always knew Brian, William and Viola Donovan’s second son, would find his true love in turn-of the-century Europe. But I wanted it to happen in a fictional country, not someplace well-known where I’d have to walk the straight and narrow path of rigid locations and dates set down in an almanac. No, I wanted the fun of making up a country’s map and history all on my own, just like I would for a fantasy. Yes! I decided to call it Eisengau, or “Iron Mountain” in German. Quite suitable for someplace that made topnotch guns and cannons, then sold them to the rest of the world at big time prices. Click here to read the rest of Diane’s blog. Visit FreshFiction.com to learn more about books and authors.

Diane Whiteside | Bond of Fire, or A French Lady Comes to Texas
Uncategorized / January 2, 2008

Hullo! Here it is, January 2nd, the Christmas sales are over, the New Year’s Day buffet has been reduced to a neat stack of leftovers, and BOND OF FIRE, the Texas vampires’ trilogy volume 2, has finally hit the bookstores! Yes, Hélène d’Agelet, the French secret agent and firestarter, just made it into the Texas vampires trilogy. Need I mention that she’s usually very well-groomed, as in very, very fond of designer clothing? No? Yes, I thought you might have guessed that, since she’s a French aristocrat. She enjoys a glass of good sherry but is willing to explore Texas’s unique ways of drinking beer. She’s also very bookish and prefers her flirtations take place in libraries, which isn’t where you’d expect to find one of those rare lady vampires. Oh, and she’s passionately in love with Jean-Marie St. Just, Texas’s chief diplomat, spy, and assassin. They fell for each other across a crowded ballroom at Versailles over two centuries ago. They’ve suffered through a lot of trials and tribulations ever since, including major pieces of nastiness like the French Revolution and the Peninsular Wars. In fact, matters became so bad Jean-Marie and Hélène have spent the past two centuries…

Diane Whiteside | Citizen Soldier
Romance / September 10, 2007

What do those two words mean, anyway? Strong, stalwart, dependable, intelligent, good in a fight. Oh, and definitely an alpha male – at least to a romance author! In fact, it sounds like an good list of things I’d want to find in a hero, doesn’t it? But when politicians talk about citizen-soldiers, they’re usually speaking about citizens who are about to leave their day jobs and go off to serve their country, probably to fight. That’s an extremely noble calling and I honor anyone who has done it. But hasn’t any such citizen-soldier also been changed – even hardened or scarred – by what he’s seen and done while he served his country? What interests me, as an author, is what happens when that citizen-soldier comes home and becomes more of a citizen than a soldier. I want to know how his military skills and personality blends into his peacetime world – for example, how he takes the strength and discipline he gained in the military into the civilian world, how his loved ones temper his cynicism, how he learns to sleep quietly at night again. It’s reassuring to know than an ex-soldier can still grab a gun and…