As many of you know after finding a character accidentally renamed in my Trinity Harbor trilogy, I am very much a right-brain writer with a terrible tendency to lose track of such pesky little things as names. Imagine, then, the challenge of creating a whole new world…and then trying to keep everyone straight. Even so, I’m so excited to be welcoming you to Chesapeake Shores and the completely dysfunctional and complicated O’Brien family. Kicking off with THE INN AT EAGLE POINT, this new series captures everything I love about family dynamics, romance and the kind of small towns in which we all wish we lived. As the oldest of five siblings, Abby O’Brien Winters took her role as surrogate mother seriously when her parents divorced, especially when it came to Jess, her youngest sister. So when Jess’s dream of renovating The Inn at Eagle Point is threatened by a bank foreclosure, financial whiz Abby comes home to Chesapeake Shores to set things right. Abby’s exactly the kind of take-charge woman that Jess needs, but her bossiness grates and threatens their strong bond as sisters. Add in the complicated relationship each of them has with their father, famed architect Mick O’Brien…

When you’ve lived as long as I have and in as many different places, maintaining friendships takes a lot more time and energy than it did when I was a kid and my best friends lived right upstairs and next door in the same apartment building. Or even when I reached my teens and so many of my friends were at school or in the same youth group at church or just a few houses away in the town where I spent my summers. These days they’re in Denver and Ohio, in California and Vermont and even in Egypt. Email makes staying in touch easier, but there’s nothing like sitting in the same room with a cup of tea or a margarita and talking over old times or current problems, laughing about whatever strikes us as funny (trust me, the number of things that qualify for laughter increases as the margaritas flow). At any rate, friendships matter. They make our lives richer, provide much-needed comfort and support in times of tragedy and hours of shared laughter through the years. Given how I feel about all this, it’s not surprising that I wanted to deal with the deep friendship shared by…