I went to a wedding last weekend. The ceremony was lovely, the bride and groom, Dan and Lindsay, a striking couple very much in love, the reception elegant, the atmosphere festive. But, I got to wondering…if people could go back and do their wedding all over again, what would they change? Soon, I was asking the question out loud. Leaving out the jokester who replied, “I’d change the groom,” here are some of the answers I got. Katie, who married three years ago, wishes she had videotaped the ceremony so she could see everything she missed as she waited in the back room and as she walked down the aisle, too filled with excitement to notice much. Don, who married 55 years ago at the Carmel Mission in California, would go back and hire a professional photographer because the friend who took their pictures set the camera on the wrong speed and every picture was blurred. Teri, married 17 years ago, wishes she’d bought a wedding dress off the rack instead of having hers made. The seamstress kept insisting the dress was almost done and when she finally let Teri try it on the day before the wedding, not only…

I wasn’t thinking about Keats’ Ode to a Nightingale when I first started to write MISTAKEN MISTRESS. But when I conceive of a story one of the first things that I have to decide is where to set the book. For me, the atmosphere of the setting will permeate the entire story. The Saxon Brides is about a family who run a vineyard, Saxon’s Folly. So I knew I wanted the homestead to have a sense of family history and go back at least a couple of generations. I had a great deal of fun researching the locations where I could possibly set the books. My first thought was of the Napa Valley. I’d read about it, but because I like to be able to visualize the place where the story takes place my big stumbling block was I’d never visited the Napa and I wasn’t going to have time to go stake it out. Next, I considered the Barossa in Australia. It’s awesome. Named for the Battle of Barrosa which Colonel Light, Surveyor General of the day, fought in during 1811, it boasts some of the oldest existing Shiraz vines in the world. And then of course there is…

In this day of faxes, e-mails, instant messages, and texting, what a treat it is to receive an old-fashioned hand-written letter! The pleasure of unfolding crisp pages of stationery..ahhh. But what if you received a letter one day, and it was a letter you’d written to yourself ten years ago! My husband had a high school instructor who asked his students to write a letter to themselves about the things they wanted out of life and where they thought they would be in ten years. Then he sealed the envelopes and ten years later, sent them to the last address of record the school had for each student. My husband’s parents forwarded his letter on to him and I remembered how amazed and thrilled he was when he realized what he was reading. It was like a time capsule into his teenage mind, and he must have reread it a dozen times. It was a time of self-evaluation for my husband, comparing where he thought he’d be with where he was. As it turned out, my husband’s achievements had surpassed what he’d thought himself capable ofonly ten years earlier, and he said that revelation alone reinforced the idea of never…

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…

Thank you Fresh Fiction for allowing me to visit today. I’m having a great day because my book, BILLIONAIRE’S MARRIAGE BARGAIN, which features a hot, powerful, charming and RICH man is on the stands! Alex Megalos has the ability to charm women into his bed with no difficulty at all. When my shero, Mallory James tells him she’s not interested in him, he decides to prove her wrong. There is a lot of heat and a couple of scandals to keep things interesting. If you get a chance to read BILLIONAIRE’S MARRIAGE BARGAIN, please write me. I’d love to hear from you. I’m having a great day, but that got me to thinking about bad days… or odd days. …cuz you had an odd day… I changed the lyrics to that hit song American Idol played over and over again because I believe there are degrees to bad. Bad is a piano falling on you, incurable diseases, a plane flying into your condo, bombs going off in your town … You get the picture. I feel like a real whiner if I say I’ve had a bad day when I think about how tough a lot of other people have…

Well, perhaps disability is too strong a word, except that I do truly feel “differently-abled.” I feel somewhat hampered by it, like I stand out more than I already do by being six feet tall. And at gatherings of writers and readers, like here at the Romance Writers of America conference in San Francisco this week, I feel my “freak flag” flying especially high. I’m an extrovert. A raging, card-carrying, put-my-photo –in-the-dictionary-next-to-the-definition extrovert. And introverts—not extroverts–populate the writers world by a huge majority. Why is that a disability? Well, it sets me at a disadvantage. All you thoughtful introverts are watching, observing cunning truths of human behavior, carefully selecting your contribution to the dialogue, and I’m…well I’m yakking away like that crazy uncle everyone tolerates at Thanksgiving. I’m on my ninth story, mistaking all your quiet for consent when I’m now rather sure you all were saying to yourselves (or maybe even each other) can’t someone rein this gal in? Take her volume and drama down a notch? I’m trying—perhaps too desperately—to pull you into conversations when you all would probably rather have a root canal than make small talk with the likes of me. Really, I’m starting to think…

Thanks to Fresh Fiction for having me today. I’ve had a terrific weekend with the release and signing of my second Harlequin American Romance, The Fake Fiancée. One question I’ve been asked at book signings that tickles me is, “Why did you keep writing?” (I hope the person asks this before they’ve read my work!) If you aren’t familiar with my story, I started writing when my kids were toddlers and didn’t get published until after they became teens. During this time, I finaled in several “prominent” Romance Writers of America chapter contests, had requests from editors to whom I pitched my work at conferences, and even landed on the senior editor’s desk. All to no avail. I guess it could be called a “lucky” thirteenth year when I sold. So why did I stick with it? Stubbornness? Blind faith that someday I would sell? Well, maybe the first explanation. Because for six years, I’d lost the belief I’d ever see my work in print. Those were dark times. It wasn’t until one day when I had “people” in my head again that I realized the characters who usually inhabit my waking hours had been AWOL. Even my family commented…

My favorite colors are…non-colors. And that’s so me. So TTQ. I’ve never been a joiner. Hard to believe from someone who was president of a large writer’s organization, huh? You’d think a person had to be part of the ‘in’ crowd to get to such an elevated position. Except that the position wasn’t elevated, and when I entered the board room for my first term of service, I didn’t know anyone well. And only two people by name. I hadn’t run for office, and had no idea how the current president had ever heard of me or why she thought I was the one she wanted to appoint to a vacated position. After eight years of service, I came away knowing a lot more names, but only a handful of people personally. It’s not that I like being alone. Or that I don’t want friends. I’ve just always been alone. I grew up with my nose in a book. Literally. By the time I was fourteen, I was reading a Harlequin romance a day. Throughout high school I attended class, did my homework, worked in the nursery at a bowling alley and then at Wendy’s, and I lived for those…

I started my career writing historical romances for Berkley and Kensington, under the name Cynthia Sterling. I’m a history buff and I loved researching the backgrounds for my books — figuring out what kind of clothes everyone wore, what they ate and what they did for entertainment. Those kinds of details are why I love reading historical novels as well. Then I switched to writing contemporary romance. I thought this would require much less research, so I was shocked to find out I was wrong. Yes, I seldom have to look up specific historical detail, but if I send my hero and heroine to a restaurant for a meal, I end up browsing menus of real restaurants for ideas. Many of my books are set in real cities. For example, my current release, A Soldier Comes Home, from Harlequin Superromance, is set in Colorado Springs. Many times while writing that book, I pulled out a map to find the name of a street or location of a landmark so that I could describe it accurately. While you can get away with fudging minor details in a historical novel, it’s much tougher to fake it in a contemporary book. Too many…

As I write for Harlequin Presents, I often have to decide on the nationality of my hero. And part of the fantasy of Mills & Boon Modern/Harlequin Presents is the fact that the heroes are more often than not Mediterranean men – Italians, Spaniards, and those so very-very popular Greek Tycoons. The Greek Tycoon books just fly off the shelf but I can’t always be writing a Greek hero – that would bore me, and my readers – and besides sometimes it seems that everyone else in the world is writing Greek hero story. There are characteristics that fit some nationalities, and some that are more suited to others, and so I need to take these into consideration when I’m choosing my hero. And that’s what I’m doing at the moment – starting work on a brand new story. My latest titles (my 54th) has just been accepted and my editor is ringing me this week to discuss future plans so I have to have some ideas to talk over with her. So right now I have just the seed of an idea. My hero won’t be a Greek though. I wrote a Greek hero the books before last and…