Hi, everyone, I’m so glad to be here today. It’s March! The month of spring. I don’t know about you all, but I have had enough of being isolated. Between winter and covid, the days seem to drag on endlessly. I, for one, am ready for a fresh start. It’s a new year, full of new possibilities, and brand-new books! DARK SEAS (Coldwater Cove book 1) comes out on March 8th. The book takes place in a fictional little fishing village called Coldwater Cove in Maine. I’ve never lived in Maine, but I’m fascinated by the majestic state. I love the rugged coastline and cliffs, the powerful ocean, the quaint towns, the harbors filled with fishing boats, and the lighthouses. Maine lends itself as the perfect backdrop for a suspenseful book. I set Coldwater Cove to border Canada, with Nova Scotia right across the bay. With so much of Maine being remote, there aren’t enough border patrol agents to plug all the holes. Inspection stations and checkpoints are so spread out that many sections are unmanned for hours. Even with cameras and motion sensors in place, if an illegal immigrant, trafficker, arms dealer, or terrorist slipped through and was seen,…

Instead of trying to find your perfect match in a dating app, we bring you the “Author-Reader Match” where we introduce you to authors as a reader you may fall in love with. It’s our great pleasure to present Laura Brown! Writes: I write romances featuring characters with hearing loss. ABOUT THAT NIGHT is an unplanned pregnancy romcom between a hearing heroine and a Deaf hero. Izzy never caught the name of her one-night stand, due to her newbie ASL status. A year and half later she finally finds him, in the role of her new boss. She not only has to figure out how to tell him about the son he doesn’t know he has, but also navigate their agency’s no dating policy. About: A homebody by nature, I love curling up with a good book. Coffee dates are a must. As I’m Hard of Hearing, ASL knowledge is a bonus. Besides books, my conversations will include my three cats, kid, and the current state of my out of control TBR list. What I’m looking for in my ideal reader match: *Fan of the unplanned pregnancy trope *Enjoys a diverse cast *Funny bone intact *Enjoys some realism mixed into the fantasy and comedy of romance What to…

The new year is always a time to reflect on the past year while looking ahead to starting fresh. One of the things that stands out about to me from 2018 is the ending of some long-running and very beloved series. However, endings often signal new beginnings as well, so 2019 offers up some new series for me to love. How does one end a favorite series? Well, if you are Simon R. Green you take two beloved series and put all the characters at odds with each other and watch the mayhem that ensues. The hardest loss for me of 2018 was seeing the end of two series by Simon R. Green as he ended his Secret Histories and Nightside series in true Simon R. Green style. NIGHT FALL heralded the end of both long-running series as we saw the Drood family take on the Nightside, with all our favorite characters at risk of dying. Heck, Simon R. Green even throws in the Ghost Finders series, as we bit our fingernails and quickly turned the pages, hoping against hope that all would end well. I’m not going to lie- I cried a little over the ending of Secret Histories…

Last year around this time, I was getting ready to start promoting my debut, Fatal Fixer-Upper, first in the Do-It-Yourself Home Renovation mysteries from Berkley Prime Crime, featuring New York designer turned Maine renovator Avery Baker, and her boyfriend, hunky handyman Derek Ellis. The book came out in November 2008, and since then, my life has pretty much gone by at warp speed. Launching a first book was insane, and then came Thanksgiving and Christmas, before we sold one house and moved into another in January. Since then, we’ve been renovating what is our ninth house in nine years. All while we’re going about the dual businesses of real estate and writing, and while raising two boys under eleven and caring for the menagerie of pets they’ve accumulated between them. The latest house is a brick mid-century ranch, long and low-slung, with a big picture window in the front, situated on a large lot surrounded by tall trees. Chapter 1 of Spackled and Spooked has a description that matches that one in pretty much every particular. In Spackled and Spooked, Derek and Avery are renovating just such a house. It’s a local haunted house; I thought the idea of a…

Myths and legends and the paranormal world When I first conceived of the idea for the Demonborn series and Dark Hunger, I knew I wanted to write about strong men, demons, crime fighters and the battle between good and evil. Next, I needed to build my paranormal world and make it different from all the other paranormals out there. What could make mine unique — fresh? The answer to that for me was to write about a world that intrigued me, a setting that I felt at home with, but one that naturally lended itself to a dark, eerie atmosphere that enhanced my story lines. I also thought having the paranormal creatures appear in the normal world was even more terrifying than to have a completely fantasy world. What if demons actually existed on Earth? Born a Southerner, spooky stories about ghosts, local legends, cemeteries, and odd things that go bump in the night filled my childhood. Since my series is a dark, gritty romantic suspense filled with evil demons and murder, my setting had to reflect that same creepy feeling. Click here to read the rest of Rita’s blog, leave a comment or enter her blog contest. Visit FreshFiction.com…

Writing about domestic divas, Sophie Winston and her rival, Natasha, is always fun, but for my most recent book, I had the pleasure of planning an entire wedding without having to pay for it. Weddings used to be somewhat uniform. We expected the frou-frou bridesmaids’ dresses that would never be worn again, with dyed to match shoes, no less. The white cake was topped with a plastic bridal couple or flowers, and after a reception or dinner with dancing, the happy couple left for their honeymoon. Today, brides face a staggering variety of choices. Cakes are topped with rhinestone studded initials, if there is a cake. Cupcake tiers are all the rage as an alternative. And wedding festivities don’t necessarily end with dinner anymore. Some couples arrange for a lounge with dancing and go on to a brunch in their honor before taking off. I was shocked to learn that some brides buy two wedding dresses so they can change between the ceremony and the reception. Of course, a lounge and dancing necessitate a third dress. In the Domestic Diva Mysteries, Sophie and Natasha write competing lifestyle advice columns. Their tips are included in the books, along with recipes. Sophie…

This summer, the 9th Bones book, GREEDY BONES, will be released by St. Martin’s Minotaur. I’m hard at work on the 10th book. People often ask me if I grow weary of the characters in Zinnia. After all, I’ve been in relationship with them for ten years or better, which is longer than many marriages. I never get tired of the Zinnia gang. They’re old friends to me. Trusted friends who share wisdom, laughter, shenanigans, and a zest for life that I often find in my real life friends and in the letters of many readers who’ve written to me. Sarah Booth, Jitty, Tinkie, Cece and Millie bring out the best in me, I think. One of the most interesting things is how much these characters have grown and changed over the books, exactly as real people do. Click to read the rest of Carolyn’s blog and to leave a comment. Visit FreshFiction.com to learn more about books and authors.

It’s hard enough to write a solid first novel. There’s all that fear and concern that you won’t be able to navigate the territory correctly. But after you break through the angst, write the book and actually get an agent interested in it, you think you can sit back and take a break for a bit. Wrong! When I finally scored an agent for my first novel, Protector (the first book in the Jane Perry series), he asked me, “So? What’s next?” I remember stammering something about how I wanted to just take some time off since I’d put sixteen months into writing the book and a year prior to that researching it. “No, no, no,” he said, “I need to know where this story is going with Jane Perry.” Click to read the rest of Laurel’s blog and to leave a comment. Visit FreshFiction.com to learn more about books and authors.

I always describe myself as a writer of love stories rather than as a romance writer. One of my reasons is an obvious one—romance is not highly thought of in the writing community beyond its own genre, and I firmly believe that my books are serious literature and not to be sneered at as trash. More important, though, I believe that love is far more powerful than romance and that we can sell ourselves short as writers if we are content to write romances at the expense of telling true love stories. A great deal, of course, depends upon how those two words are defined. Here are my definitions. Romance is that wonderful aura that surrounds a couple as they meet (even if they initially feel hostility to each other) and interact and fall in love and finally commit their lives to each other. It’s the growing sense of rightness about the relationship, and the sense of joy we get out of reading about the building attraction they feel for each other on their journey to the happy ending. It’s a powerful reason for reading any book, and when it’s well done it can pull us in and leave us…

At the 2008 Romance Writers of America conference, a talented and prolific author entertained and informed attendees as a luncheon keynote speaker. We delighted in her anecdote concerning her husband. Relating that he had never read a single one of her impressive body of published novels, she declared that she always made a point to kill somebody in each of her books with her husband’s first name. The moral of her story for us is: real men should read romance for their overall health, oh yes, and enjoyment. Our contention is not as tongue in cheek as it sounds. Men are, of course, half the equation in the yin and yang of traditional romance genres. Our heroes yearn for equal measures of romantic fulfillment and personal happily ever after conclusions as do our heroines. Sensuality, present in varying degrees in romance, isn’t as tantalizing and stimulating to the…imagination…for men? Our virile husbands are delighted (forced) to read our books. In fact one of our husbands brought our latest release on a men only long weekend in the deep woods. By day, he and his friends blazed trails on ATV’s, fished and threw their catches back in the lake, canoed, hiked,…