I love a great many things about romance, but I like the fantasy aspect the most. Daydreaming is such a wonderful pastime, isn’t it? And it’s free! I did get to indulge in a big way while writing SAVED BY THE MONARCH. Since I’m scared to death of flying, I make a point to do it at least once a year. If there’s anything I’ve learned from my intrepid heroines, it’s that life is too short to let fear win. When I travel, I see as people wait for their loved ones at airports, or for strangers holding up signs with names. And since I’m a writer, I see book ideas everywhere… What if someone went on vacation to Europe, to a small kingdom her parents had left behind when she’d been a very young child? And what if the surprise of a lifetime waited for her when she arrived? Click to read the rest of Dana’s blog and to leave a comment. Visit FreshFiction.com to learn more about books and authors.

One year at the RWA National Conference, I had coffee with an editor (not my editor) who told me that if you read an author’s books closely, you’ll be able to see that all of her heroes will share some common characteristics. Maybe it’s a core value or just their sense of humor, but it’s often unique to that author’s heroes and it shows up over and over again. And, she says, if you get to meet the author’s husband, you’ll often see that same quality in him. It makes sense – after all, the author has to fall in love with her hero before the heroine or the reader can. The same qualities the author loves in her real-life hero are going to be what she wants her fictional heroes to have as well. When I told my husband this, he got a cute little worried look on his face. He quickly ran down a list of common characteristics my heroes have: insanely rich, powerful, successful, tall, muscular, athletic. He figured he could claim “tall.” Click here to read the rest of Kimberly’s blog and to comment. Visit FreshFiction.com to learn more about books and authors.

I love lists. I am a list-maker, a list-keeper, a doodling scribe of anything on any surface. My kids have picked up a dinner napkin as we left a restaurant because I had jotted a few ideas down on the paper. Bless their hearts, they were afraid to leave behind one of Mom’s Big Ideas. Lists keep me organized, make me aware of how much I get done in a day or not done as life may have it. I also love bestseller lists, especially when one of my books or a friend’s book makes its way onto the hallowed spaces. Recently, my four-book series, The Morgan Men, was fortunate enough to make a few lists, one book being first on the eharlequin.com list, and another staying on same list for about eighteen days in various spots. Throw in a Waldenbooks/Borders list for three weeks in a row for my March book—culminating in the #2 spot in the third week!–and I began to ponder the scattered good fortune in the universe. (Remember, I am a student of listing—I try to figure out these random occurrences, whether or not I can find an answer being irrelevant). Greater minds than mine have…

The first, first. Last week delivered to my door, in five boxes, were my copies of my first, first printing hardcover. It’s not wholly mine. It’s an anthology of work by five authors. But my name is on the cover. My story is inside. I’ve had two other books in hardcover. One was a foreign edition. The other was a subsidiary sale to Thorndike Press who prints mostly for libraries. Both were cool. This is cooler. The book, More Than Words Volume 5 is due out in April. Heather Graham, a woman I’ve known and admired for years, is the headliner. I’m honored to be in the volume with her. Even more meaningful than being out in Hardcover, or being published with Heather, is having been a part of the work itself. More Than Words is a project that Harlequin started several years ago. Throughout the year, the company solicits applications from private women’s charities. Five are chosen. Each of the five authors, who are hand chosen by the publisher, are given one of the charities. I was given Sandra Ramos, founder of Strengthen our Sisters. Sandra founded the very first battered women’s shelter in the United States. She’s an…

If anyone had told me in the early 1980s that it would take me over 20 years to be published, I probably wouldn’t have kept on writing. Perhaps. Back then the world was much smaller, and living in Australia it was smaller still and very isolated. There was no internet, no romance writer organisations, it took two weeks for a letter to get to a publisher before waiting months for a reply, and it took me weeks to type up a manuscript on a typewriter from longhand. Patience was something you had to have. And that was a good training ground for the next twenty years as I tried hard to get published. In the early 1990s the fledgling internet began to trickle information through. Luckily I knew a computer guru who set me up with an internal modem with a speed that is laughable now but was sheer heaven back then, and I started to learn that there was a growing network of writers out there. It was fantastic. The world was coming into my home and suddenly Down Under wasn’t so far away. Click here to the rest and enter Maxine’s one day blog contest. Visit FreshFiction.com to…

Jane Bennet and Mr. Bingley. Willow and Oz. Betty and Barney Rubble. You’ve probably figured out by now what the couples from the book Pride and Prejudice, the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the cartoon The Flintstones have in common: They’re involved in secondary romances. Now here’s my shameless confession: I adore secondary romances, often considerably more than the main event. In THE HERO’S SIN, my February release from Superromance that starts a new series, the secondary hero relentlessly — and, I hope, charmingly — pursues his ex-wife. Part of the reason their marriage broke up was because his favorite pasttime was getting drunk with his buddies. I wouldn’t give the primary hero that flaw unless there was a deep, dark reason he was drinking. Click here to read the rest… Visit FreshFiction.com to learn more about books and authors.

I love writing. I feel fortunate that I get to make my living at putting words to paper. It means that I get to indulge my love of doing what I enjoyed when I was a child, which was read every single word I could get my hands on. Now I get to read wonderful works by other authors and friends, and sometimes I feel like I have a front-row seat to the ever-changing publishing world. I see a book make a bestseller list and I think, “Wow! I met that author!” Call me perpetually star-struck because I suppose I am. I root for everybody’s careers and the state of the publishing industry because this is my team, the team that allows me to stay at home and do what I love to do most: Write, read, be a mom, a wife, a good neighbor and friend. Click Here To Read More Visit FreshFiction.com to learn more about books and authors.

I love writing historical romance, researching the backgrounds and working out how my hero and heroine are going to resolve their dilemmas. Although the majority of my books have Regency backgrounds, I have also used the English Civil War, the Jacobite Rebellion, the building of the railways (Working Man, Society Bride) and the outcry for and against building the Crystal Palace in Victoria’s reign (A Desirable Husband). Romance can be found in the most unexpected places. For instance, the conflict between Roland, the Earl of Amerleigh and Charlotte Cartwright in The Earl and The Hoyden, just out in the UK, involves a quarrel over the ownership of a Shropshire lead mine. Click To Read More Visit FreshFiction.com to learn more about books and authors.

The most common question writers are asked is: Where do you get your ideas? Generally the people asking it are perplexed because they can’t quite fathom how such ideas come or how they are different from other ideas or what writers can possibly do with them when they do turn up. Usually I say, “Ideas are everywhere.” But that doesn’t really help. So in case you’re wondering how things come together, let me just illustrate with my January Harlequin Presents, Antonides’ Forbidden Wife. It certainly didn’t come as a full-blown story. No IDEA (in capital letters) popped up in my head. In fact, it wasn’t supposed to be a story at all — because PJ Antonides is not what is commonly considered “a Presents hero.” He was a surfer, for heaven’s sake! He made an appearance in an earlier book. As the younger brother of the uptight, determined, severely responsible hero, PJ was by turns annoying, misunderstood, breezy and charming. Pretty much everything his brother was not. He also didn’t own any multi-national corporations on the side. He was also, in that book, called Peter because that’s my husband’s name and I called him that because I wanted a name…

When I sat down to write A Christmas Wedding, I had a lot of different things in my head that I wanted to get across to my readers. I wanted to create a super-strong female character who wasn’t afraid to take on the establishment—and win. I wanted to tell a story about horseracing and the world of thoroughbreds. And I wanted to tell a story of love—with all its ups and downs, a story that showed how difficult marriage can be sometimes, but also how worthwhile. But as I was writing the book, something else worked its way into the pages, and it became not just the story of a relationship between a man and a woman, but the story of that woman’s—of Desiree’s—relationship with her father and husband and children and the very male-dominated world in which she lives. It became a story of old and new, of borrowed and blue. Of hanging on to old traditions and making new ones—something I think is particularly apropos to the holiday season beginning to unfold around us. For Desiree, keeping old traditions and making new ones was often a matter of necessity—playing hardball in a man’s world often requires a blending…