Writing had never been a linear process for me. My stories haunt me while writing them. Some of my favorite lines pop into my head at the worst possible times. If I ignore them, I have learned to my detriment, they will be lost to me forever. Therefore, I try as hard as possible to capture the words when they tap me on the shoulder. Here are some of the strangest places I write. I have a dictaphone for walks. I can dictate hundreds of words in a short amount of time while strolling down country roads with my dog Scout. I drive with lots of napkins in my car and if an idea comes to me, I pull over and write as much as I can fit onto the napkin. Sitting in the back of a homeowners association meeting, the notes on my laptop are more likely for my book than notes of the meeting. In spin class, I have a pen nearby and when I have an idea, I write it on my wrist until the class is over and I can get home to add it to the appropriate scene. The weirdest place a character ever spoke…

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…

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…

I’ve explored many themes over the years while writing historical romance. In doing so, I discovered the potential obstacles to two people falling in love and being together were pretty much the same in the periods in which my stories are set as they are now—family issues, economic/class disparity, job demands, etc. I’ve written about all of those. Another, perhaps stickier challenge when writing period romance is tackling societal approval for a so-called “unconventional” love. Except…it’s not an issue restricted to period romance. It’s an issue for romance, period. Although humanity has (generally) made great social progress over the last three hundred years, there are still some big societal hurdles to be leaped—for some, hurdles that have existed for millennia. I address one of these in my new release A Wicked Reputation. A Wicked Reputation features not one, but two romances, one revealed in the back cover copy, the other more subtly implied. Without spoiling too much, I can tell you that while both couples encounter immense challenges to achieving their happy ever after, the danger for one of these is far greater. For this couple, because of societal intolerances of the period (which, unfortunately, haven’t yet been entirely eradicated),…

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…

The last couple of years have been a challenge. 2016 saw a massive wildfire force the total evacuation of my home city (Fort McMurray, AB) for a month. Since then, I’ve had several family members become sick and/or pass away. It seemed like just when I thought things were going back to normal, some new horrible thing would happen. The stress was unrelenting and my creative output suffered as a result. Thankfully, I have an amazing editor who stuck with me, offered advice, and encouraged me to keep writing despite the often overwhelming grief I was mired in. Writing Sleight of Hand, the latest release in my Outbreak Task Force series, probably saved my life for several reasons: – It gave me an outlet for my grief and stress – It was something positive to focus on – I worked through some of my own trauma while my characters worked through theirs – Daily writing meant keeping a schedule, setting goals, and feeling a sense of accomplishment – Achieving a goal (creative or otherwise) releases dopamine in the brain (the happy chemical) All of this reduced my stress level, which had a direct, positive, impact on my health by: –…

As a Canadian, I love snow. I grew up with the white stuff and remember fondly going out for Halloween with my costume on over my snowsuit, carrying my goodie bag through the show. So, when I was imagining a place forWarrior Nights, my thoughts went to a small town that would be snowed in at least once a year. Just imagine—the perfect little town in the mountains, a lovely place that happened to get snowed in for a few days. Nothing big to worry about, right? You snuggle in, stay warm and read those books on your TBR pile, maybe binge on holiday movies until the plows come in from the Big City to re-establish communication… There’s a certain beauty about small towns. I grew up in Toronto, so I was a classic city girl—mass transit right outside the front door, a corner store within a few minutes walking and shopping… well, let’s just say that my credit card never had a chance to catch his breath. Add in an amazing number of food choices, most of them within walking range and you can’t beat a large city for making it easy to spend money! But there’s something to…

When I first started writing Bound by Danger, the story started out as a flirty rom-com about a flight attendant who hurries off the plane to meet a blind date. She rushed to the restaurant only to discover the man she’s meeting had been on her flight, and she’d forced him from the bathroom with a woman he was on the verge of joining the mile-high club with. Enter the weak excuse, add a desperate man needing a date for a wedding, and the first half of the book was complete. But something was off. My hero had engaged in very unheroic behavior. How could I give him a plausible reason for his actions at the beginning of the book and still make him worthy of my heroine? Turns out I couldn’t. I could, however, give him a reason for being on that same plane. Instead of him chasing after a girl, he could chase a bad guy who tried to take over the plane. Then he and my heroine could meet under fast-paced, exciting circumstances that throw them together…leaving both a little shell-shocked and dripping with attraction. Wait a minute, I write sweet contemporary romance. Not fast-paced, sexy suspense…

I’m very excited to be here on Fresh Fiction today to celebrate the release of A PROTECTOR IN THE HIGHLANDS! This book is the second in my Highland Roses School series about two sisters who journey into Scotland to start a school for ladies in the 1690s. The theme around the series centers on empowering women at a time when they were often treated as inferior. Women were left out of inheritances, business dealings, education, and decision making. Their purpose in life was to bear children and manage the home. And if a woman found herself in a domestic abuse situation or attacked, she was often blamed with no way out. When researching for my series, I read a wonderful book about two sisters living in the mid-1600s in England (A Court Lady and A Country Wife by Lita-Rose Betcherman). One sister birthed several children and managed her home mostly in the country while the other one became an influential woman at court. Both ladies were considered a success in their circles, although they had many limitations placed upon them because of their sex. Even though the court lady was a friend to the queen of England, she still had…

Thanks for having me on Fresh Fiction. My newest release in the Love Unexpected Series is NEVER EXPECTED YOU. This story features two veterinarians. Obviously, they love animals, but more than that, they both find comfort and strength in them. When Stella is hurting, curling up with her dogs soothes her. When Zach needed an outlet for his teenage frustration, helping Stella’s dad with the animals in his clinic brought him a sense of peace. I think that’s what animals can do for a lot of people. I will admit that I have not always been the biggest animal person. While I was growing up, we had a LOT of dogs. Actually, we had dogs, cats, fish, a ferret, gerbils, and hamsters. Sometimes all at the same time. When I got older, I wasn’t sure I wanted to have animals, but my now-husband really wanted dogs. In our twenty years together, we’ve had six dogs together. Each of them made an impact on us and our family. While I was finishing up the first draft of this story, last June, we lost one of our two dogs. Though we’d lost animals before, this one hit harder because she used to sit…