Hi everyone! Thanks to everybody at Fresh Fiction for having me back once again to blog! I always love coming here because I feel like I’m surrounded by fellow romance lovers. It always makes me think about family when I talk to people who love the genre as much as I do. Actually, I’ve been thinking about the entire concept of “family” a lot lately. As I’m writing this blog, I am sitting the Raleigh-Durham airport after a weekend in North Carolina presenting an industry retreat to the Heart of Carolina Romance Writers. Last weekend I was in St. Louis, presenting a workshop called “Write Like You Mean It”. So basically, I’ve been surrounded by the family of writers for the past two weeks. To read more of A FAMILY AFFAIR please click here. Visit FreshFiction.com to learn more about books and authors.

I am funny. Okay, I may not be stand-on-a-stage-do-The-Last-Comic-Standing funny, but I can tell a funny story and I have a quirky sense of humor. I really like to laugh and I am silly more often than I care to admit in a public forum. When people meet me and they find out what I do, they often assume that I write light-hearted romantic comedies with a sarcastic sense of humor that matches my life “voice”. They are wrong. No, I don’t write romps. I don’t do slapstick. I can’t tell funny to save my life. Instead, I write highly sensual, intensely emotional, dark historical romances set in the Regency period for Avon Books and Avon Red (erotic romances, those are written as Jess Michaels). People emailed me after my debut, Scandalous, came out in October 2005 and told me I made them cry. And I was happy about it! So how did this happen? How did I go from being a reasonably happy person with a high sense of the absurd and the amusing to writing super dark romance? I tell you what, I blame the men. That’s right, it’s not my fault, it’s my heroes. You see, I…

Well, I’m back! But this time it’s under my other name. Yes, that’s right, I’m one of those schizophrenic authors who has two names (actually three if you count my real name, which I really should since if I don’t that’s kind of scary). You already met and talked to me as Jenna Petersen earlier this month. Jenna writes historical romances for Avon. They are Regency-set and sensual. I hope they are also highly emotional and dark. That’s what I strive for, anyway, so if you like that sort of thing… well, look me up! But Jess… ah, Jess. She’s a whole other beast. Yes, she still writes highly emotional and dark stories, but she crosses over that sensual line and into the erotic. So if you like your love scenes a bit more adventurous and detailed, but you still want a story in there, too, Jess might be your girl. Luckily, both my names have books out in the next two months (Seduction Is Forever in October from Jenna, Everything Forbidden in November from Jess). It’s kind of weird being two (or three) people all at once. First off, there’s the name calling. Not that kind of name calling….

When the fabulous ladies of Fresh Fiction contacted me and asked if I would guest blog today, my first reaction was to be excited. We’ve all met a few times and they are, of course, lovely and fabulous and always fun to hang out with. So now I’m hanging out with them in a virtual world. My second reaction was to freak out because I realized I had no topic. I tried to sneakily ask for a topic, but was told that I could blog about ‘anything’! Oh boy! Anything. Which means I can blog about ANYTHING and that doesn’t narrow it down at all. So I went out in search of a topic. I went blog hopping. Yes, this was a travesty. To have to hop from interesting blog to interesting blog, reading fabulous authors’ words about a variety of topics. Yeah. Poor me, right? But as great as it was, it didn’t help me at all. A lot of authors were talking about writing, which I’m always happy to talk about (after all, I run The Passionate Pen , but Fresh Fiction is more about readers and authors coming together and I didn’t think that writing about plotting…