Inventing your own country is a lot of fun. If you like hunky Mediterranean men, you can make sure it’s densely populated with them. Naturally all your favorite foods feature prominently in local cuisine. And if you’d like to take a sensuous mental dip in the warm waters lapping against the crystal sands of your imaginary locale—who’s to stop you? I had all this fun and more in creating the nation of Caspia for my new book Prince of Midtown. It’s the third book in Silhouette Desire’s “Park Avenue Scandals.” The editors at Silhouette chose a different Desire author for each book in the series and gave us the plot and characters to make our own. In my case they also gave me a country. I was handed the name Caspia and informed that it was in Europe and “like Venice.” It came complete with handsome prince Sebastian Stone, a spirited playboy in desperate need of reform by the love of a good woman: namely his down-to-earth American assistant Tessa Banks. I’m the kind of writer who likes to know ALL the details, even if they don’t actually end up in the book, so first I had to figure out…

Hello Fresh Fiction, I have written five full-length novels, three fantasy novels, The Stone of the Tenth Realm, Gaea’s Keeper and the sequel to The Stone of the Tenth Realm, Alchemist of the Tenth Realm, a science fiction titled Post-Apocalyptic Genome, and Werewolf Sanctuary, a paranormal romance in my Wolf Maiden Chronicles. The Stone of the Tenth Realm is my first published novel. My second romance fantasy, Gaea’s Keeper is due out next summer. I have a BS in Zoology and graduate studies in Biology. I have taught Biology, Environmental Science and Anatomy/Physiology in both public and private high schools. My background in science and passion for wildlife biology inspires my writings. I moonlight as a faculty member of the Grey School of Wizardry, an online school for kids and adults interested in magic and lore. I am in the departments of Beast Mastery. I am passionate about wildlife and the environment. I combined my love of animals and writing by being a guest speaker for the Silicon Valley Romance Writers last summer. My topic was on Wolves and Ravens as Archetypes in Science Fiction and Fantasy Writing. I also teach at The Grey School of Wizardry in the Department…

From the time I was a little girl, I was terrified of the house I grew up in because I knew it was haunted—by what I couldn’t say, but a malign energy tainted that house. It didn’t help matters that I’ve always been somewhat psychic. I could always sense whatever was there watching me. To this day, that house shows up in my nightmares and in my nightmares, it’s usually filled with tens of thousands of spiders (I’m arachophobic) and I wake up screaming. Granted, I had a lot of serious baggage to deal with in childhood, but the house stands out in my mind as the ‘haunted house on the hill’ even though it was smack in the middle of a lower-class suburb. Scared of the house or not, that didn’t detour me from falling in love in love with the paranormal, and from becoming a total fantasy/SF freak. When I was five years old, I stumbled over Dark Shadows and went nuts over it. I’m not certain why my mother let me watch a vampire soap opera but wouldn’t let me watch ‘the man with the funny ears’ (Spock, on Star Trek, which started the same year). I…

One of the wonderful things about writing fantasy is that you can make up your own worlds – and all the names. 🙂 Sometimes naming things – planets, continents, rivers is fun (Huckleberry Finn River, Great Platte Ocean, Hard Rock Mountains). It can be easy. I knew I wanted a Celtic background for my “Heart” series so naming the planet Celta didn’t require much thought. But naming the planet in my Summoning series (average American women summoned to an alternate dimension to fight invading evil) was harder. This planet was sentient (and who’s to say they aren’t?), it’s weak because an evil, alien Dark has been feasting on it for years. But it loves the people who are trying to save it and themselves (oh, and creatures – the flying horses and magical shapeshifter animal-companions). The language is French based, and I tried several names that didn’t work. I finally decided that the defining characteristic of the planet was love, so it became Amee. It’s also very cool to map the planets. I did a hand drawing of Celta, found software to make it more real looking, then have recently gone beyond my drawing of two continents to the whole…

Years and years ago, when I still played with Barbies, Saturday nights were a magical time. They were all about steak dinners with the family around the candlelit table and my dad smoking his cigar in the backyard afterward. Saturday nights were also when IN SEARCH OF… aired on TV, and I remember watching it, enthralled, and oftentimes, scared to death when Leonard Nimoy told us about things like The Loch Ness Monster and Bigfoot. Of course, I was young, and I freaked out at everything. So when a certain episode about vampires aired, it left an indelible impression that’s stayed with me until this day. Long claws, sharp teeth, a woman in bed with a gnarly shadow creeping over her…. I was hooked, and it’s no surprise that I’m writing about vampires now for Ace Books. In keeping with what scared me when I was younger, my own vampires usually have a mean streak and will do anything to survive. In fact, my first vamp book THE HUNTRESS (for the defunct Bombshell line from Silhouette) featured a tribe of female bloodsuckers, feral and hard to slay. I loved those gals, but the real villain in that story was vampirism…

As a writer, I’ve found the misconceptions about writing fascinating. Now, as a rule, I don’t tell people what I do, but somehow or another it almost always eventually comes out–at which point there are several typical responses. 1. “Who’d you know? You have to know someone to sell a book.”– This is utterly false. I wrote a book, researched agents, queried, wrote another book, queried some more, signed with an agent who shopped my book. Then I accepted an offer. There were no secret passageways, networking, muttered passwords, or any of those things. No tricks. Write, research, repeat as needed. It’s pretty straight-forward.2. “Who are you in the book?”– I’ve been astounded by how many people ask this. I write multiple points of view, so there are various guesses. Ash likes photography, so do I . . . so maybe she’s “me.” Hmm. I have friends who like photography too, but I’m not them either. Having an interest in common with a character isn’t being that character. Those commonalities help me write the characters, but each character has something of my beliefs or interests or ant-interest or anti-beliefs. It’s an exercise in adding veracity, not a mirror into the…