First of all, thank you, thank you to Fresh Fiction for hosting me here today. I love visiting this site for scoop on all the latest romance novels by my favorite authors, so I’m thrilled to be blogging here on the release day for BETWEEN A ROCK AND A HEART PLACE, the third book in my series of funny paranormal romances.As you’d guess almost immediately upon reading the back cover blurb for this story, my heroine Daphne Forbes receives a truly unwelcome gift: renegade puca powers. Oh. Well, that explains everything. Or maybe not? A puca is actually a fantastical character derived from Celtic and British mythologies. In some traditions, the puca is a shape-shifting trickster who preys on travelers; half faery and half human, the creature has a distinctly mischievous, even malicious bent. Does my version of the puca accurately reflect all the mythological accounts? Some of them. Others I cheerfully warped and expanded to suit my own needs. The pucas in my stories have three specific powers: mindspeak (mind-to-mind communication), glamour (creating illusion/molding the thoughts of humans), and shape-shifting. Click to read the rest and enter Natale’s blog contest. Visit FreshFiction.com to learn more about books and authors.

And I mean that literally. The other day, I was out signing stock at local bookstores for my current release, The Druid Made Me Do It (Dorchester Love Spell, Aug. 2008), and had the good fortune to run into a reader who was really excited about my books and authors in general. It didn’t take thirty seconds for her to ask the question that writers field pretty frequently: Where did you get your idea for these stories? Well, I’d like to say I was off on some exotic adventure and based my books on personal experience. But, um, no. I was surfing the Internet. Geeky, huh? While procrastinating, I frequently find myself drawn to news stories and websites describing the weird, the wild and the wonderful. I was reading up on fun stuff like Druids and ancient monuments and mythology (another obsession of mine). That’s when I came across this piece about the Circle of Avebury in Wiltshire, England. The Circle of Avebury is like Stonehenge, except older, bigger and less well maintained. A lot of the stones are missing, many of them taken down by Christian authorities who insisted on replacing pagan sites of ritual with churches of their…