1–What is the title of your latest release? MESSAGE IN THE SAND 2–What is it about? MESSAGE IN THE SAND is a love story: the love of small town life, teenage love, rekindled adult love, and what makes up the fabric of family. MITS is about a young war veteran suffering from PTSD, Wendell Combs, who returns to the sleepy small town of Saybrook, CT where he works on the lush and private estate, White Pines, for the Lancaster family. After a heartbreaking loss, all Wendell wants, and feels he deserves, is to be left alone. The Lancaster family, however, has different plans for him. Despite his best intentions, Wendell feels the pull of the family unit, especially fifteen-year-old Julia, their eldest and strong-willed teenage daughter. Julia has her sights set on a summer riding her horse, swimming in the lake of White Pines, and spending time with the boy next door, who she has never really noticed, but now fears she may be falling in love with. One perfect summer night, as Julia’s family hosts their glamorous annual gala, a tragic accident occurs that no one in the close-knit community could have imagined. The accident leaves Wendell and the…

Jen: What inspired you to write The Invisible Husband of Frick Island? Colleen: A few years ago I ran across a newspaper article about a woman in Australia whose husband had died, and she was in such denial about it, she left his body in their bed and continued to live her life as though everything were completely fine. It wasn’t until a neighbor noticed an… odor, that people found out. I know that’s so morbid, but as a novelist I found it fascinating—the idea that grief can make us do such strange things, and that no two people grieve the same way. And that woman’s story was the initial spark of the idea for The Invisible Husband of Frick Island, about a woman who is in such denial about her husband’s death, she wakes up every morning and lives her life as if he is right there beside her (fortunately, without the rotting corpse in the bed). Let’s talk about Piper and Tom Parrish. Who are they and what’s their connection to the island? Piper and Tom are high school sweethearts turned young newlyweds who live on Frick Island, a tiny strip of land smack in the middle of…

Jen: What inspired you to write THE SEVEN DAY SWITCH? Kelly: My contemporaneous parenting friends and I all have different varieties of lifestyles, with some of us working full time out of the home, many working from home, and a few working as stay-at-home mothers. I noticed that though we all had a lot in common, the grass always seemed a bit greener in someone else’s backyard. I had to explore this and the body swap genre was the exact right way for me to find my way into the story. How does Celeste Mason view motherhood? Celeste takes it as something natural she was born to do, and as something no one else could possibly do as well as she does. So, she brings a lot of confidence to the party that I personally have never felt, but with her daughter poised on the brink of teendom, we can be sure some of that confidence is about to be challenged. What is Wendy Charles’ take on being a working mom? Wendy is that frantic side of us who is going to do it all and be the best no matter what, even if she never sleeps again. She’s been…

Danielle: Welcome to Fresh Fiction, Michelle! We are excited to chat with you today. Please tell us a bit about your new series, Carolina Girls.   Michelle: Thank you so much for having me visit today—I’m excited to be here! The Carolina Girls series is a fun spinoff from the original Magnolia Sisters series set in the fictional town of Magnolia, North Carolina. The series features an unlikely friendship between three women all working to start over and create a new life for themselves. The stories are romances at their heart but also explore the importance of friendship, community and finding the right place to call home.  We love a smalltown setting! What do you love most about Magnolia, North Carolina? If you were to spend a day there, where would you visit?       Well, since I currently live in Colorado, which is a beautiful—but very landlocked state—I’d definitely make a trip to the beach outside of Magnolia. The town is based on a few coastal towns we visited when I was a kid vacationing every year in the Outer Banks area of North Carolina and also further south to Hilton Head, South Carolina. I hope I’ve been able to infuse Magnolia with…

Danielle: Hi, Wendy! Welcome to Fresh Fiction. Please introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about your new book, THE BREAK-UP BOOK CLUB.  Wendy: Thanks so much for inviting me to share my latest novel. It’s great to be here. THE BREAK-UP BOOK CLUB revolves around a book club that meets in the carriage house of a historic Atlanta home turned bookstore and explores the ways in which books can bring even the unlikeliest people together. At its core, it’s a story about the kind of friendship that gets us through the toughest times. Book clubs are almost like a rite of passage in life at this point! Have you been in book clubs over the years? What do you think makes a great “book club book”?  I’ve spoken to a lot of book clubs over the last twenty plus years, but I hadn’t belonged to one for almost that long. As part of my research, I joined a group led by a former independent bookseller and longtime friend. The book club lives on Meetup and attracts a more diverse group than the neighborhood group I once belonged to and many that I’ve visited. This opened up and impacted…

“So, about Book Five…” Sara’s attorney, David, finally stopped fiddling with his glasses. He clasped his hands together, swallowed hard, and fixed his gaze firmly on Sara. “Your mom wants you to write Book Five.” Sara laughed. David didn’t. Sara laughed again. More like a confused sputter. Then with a quick gasp, the whole amusing absurdity of the joke settled in and Sara laughed fully and deeply. This was actually a very funny joke. “Aww, David. You know the Graysons too well. You did get my attention, though, with the hands-clasped-together and that scary attorney look—like I’m going to find out my mother is broke.” David laughed nervously. “No, your mother isn’t broke. But yes…she did choose you to write the book.” That’s when Sara noticed David’s sweaty brow and how he wasn’t wiping it. Two beads of sweat hung there, practically defying gravity, and David didn’t budge. Sara’s stomach dropped to her toes, and disbelief washed over her entire body. “David, you can’t be serious. The book’s already written. It has to be. Mom’s a finisher, a closer. I heard Anna-Kath ask her about the final book. Mom said it was taken care of. I heard it myself.” David…

Jen: What inspired you to write DON’T MAKE ME TURN THIS LIFE AROUND, the follow-up to Life and Other Near-Death Experiences? Camille: Of all the characters I’ve ever created, Libby, the protagonist of Life and Other Near-Death Experiences, has always been my favorite—her wry but optimistic outlook is arguably the closest to my own—and I knew even before finishing the first novel that I’d write about her again one day. Even so, the ending of Life and Other Near-Death Experiences was deliberately ambiguous, so I didn’t want to pick right back up where she left off, which was finding the courage to begin cancer treatment and start a new family. I wanted to wait a while and find her at a different stage of life. Jen: What is happening in Libby’s world at the beginning of the novel? Camille: Thirteen years have passed since Libby’s cancer diagnosis; she’s now 46 and by all accounts, her life is going swimmingly. Though she suspected her cancer had returned, she’s just received a clean bill of health. Her marriage is happy, if a bit routine, and one of her 12-year-old twins, Charlotte, has been successfully managing her own health crisis. Yet if Libby’s…

Maybe it was the low cloud cover this morning, but the ocean sounded so much louder today. She had a feeling it would be a brief stay the way the wind was whipping. The kids ran in circles at the shoreline, letting Denali chase them until he needed a break and ran to lie by her feet. She got up and met them at the water with their pails. “Y’all ready to find some shells?” They began scouring the sand. She knelt down and picked up a handful of tiny vibrant-colored shells. Most of them were broken, but a purple one caught her eye. She tucked it inside her pocket while the children quickly filled their pails with shells at every step until their buckets got heavy. When she looked up, she noticed they’d walked farther down the beach than they’d ever gone before. “Let’s head back,” Amanda said. Denali lay down in the sand. “We can’t leave him,” Hailey whined. “He’ll catch up.” At least she hoped so. There was no way she’d be able to carry him. “Do you want to stop and go through your shells? Lighten the load by getting rid of a few?” Jesse lugged…

Danielle: Welcome to Fresh Fiction, Georgia, and congrats on the release of your new book, IT HAD TO BE YOU! What has it been like working on a book and releasing it during a pandemic?  Georgia: Thanks so much, happy to be here! Of course, the past year has been a sh*tshow and writing about fictional people’s love lives during a global pandemic feels a bit like playing music on the deck of Titanic as it plunges into the North Atlantic. I feel extremely lucky I was able to do what I love—write—during lockdown, and that my close friends and family made it through. It was a difficult but valuable perspective shift. IT HAD TO BE YOU begins with a bombshell—Liv’s husband unexpectedly passes away AND he had a secret girlfriend… on top of these revelations, the successful wedding planning business she had with her husband has been left to both her and Savannah, his younger mistress. Where did you get the idea for this hilarious setup?   To be honest, most set-ups emerge as hazy, dreamlike things—a combination of my life, what I’m paying attention to, what I’m reading/watching/daydreaming about—but okay here goes: I wanted a set-up that’d let…

Jen: What inspired you to write Under the Southern Sky? Kristy: I was at a party and one of my friends pulled me aside. She was visibly upset because she had been to the doctor that day and he had told her that she and her husband needed to make decisions about their leftover frozen embryos. She said, “When we were freezing these embryos, all we could see is the babies we wanted. We never thought about what would happen next. We never thought about what we would do with the ones we didn’t have.” And then she said the magic words. “A lot of people are going to be going through this. You should write a book about it.” I remember where I was standing and how I got chill bumps all over, as a sure sign that she was, indeed, correct. I knew there was a story there. Only, I didn’t exactly know what that story was What happens in Amelia Buxton’s professional career that brings an old friend back into her life? Amelia is researching for a story about what people do with their unused, frozen embryos when she is sneaking around and accidentally finds out that…