Welcome to Fresh Fiction, Jill! Please tell us about yourself and your new book, IT STARTED WITH A SECRET. Hello, hello, I’m Jill Mansell, this is my 32nd novel and I’ve now sold over 13 million copies of my books worldwide. This one will hopefully make readers laugh and cry and is set in Cornwall in the UK, so it’s a nice sunny seasidey read full of fun characters you’ll enjoy spending time with. Oh, and they all have secrets! You’ve been writing romantic comedies for a long time – what has changed the most since you started writing? The internet! Smartphones! My older books tend to have plots that revolve around not being able to find out details about people or to be able to make contact with them. Nowadays these problems can be solved in a split second, and it’s a complete nightmare for all authors of contemporary fiction. Plotting is far more tricky than it used to be. There’s such a thing as having access to too much information! One of my favorite things about your books is the huge cast of characters, each one with a distinct personality. How do you manage all of them? I…

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 ROCHELLE ALERS! Writes: I write series, contemporary, and women’s fiction.  My diverse characters range in age from late-20s to early 60s.  I also focus on women of a certain age that are starting over and during their journey willingly embrace their happily ever after.  This is the recurring theme in The Innkeepers series and currently in The Book Club series. About: THE SEASIDE CAFE: Hospital psychiatric social worker Kayana Johnson is living her best life.  She is the envy of most women in Atlanta.  She lives in a mini-mansion with her renowned surgeon-husband, but gives it all up when she discovers he has been having an affair with one of his colleagues. She returns to Coates Island, North Carolina to help her brother run the family-owned Seaside Café,  moves into the apartment above the restaurant while sharing cooking duties, and befriends two vacationing women that share her love of books, and encounters a man destined to change her future. What I’m looking for in my ideal reader…

1–What’s the name of your latest release?  Careful What You Click For 2–What is it about?  Online dating. Four church members–in their quest for lust and love–do the unimaginable. Blinded by desire, the characters are determined to sex the lover of their choice. 3–What word best describes your heroine?  Fallible. 4–What makes your hero irresistible?  There is no hero in Careful What You Click For. 5–Who are the people your main characters turn to when they need help? Loved ones. Law enforcers. In some instances, as church members and friends, they depend upon one another. In a particular situation, one character has no means to communicate with the outside world and must rely upon God to deliver him from evil. 6–What do you love about the setting of your book?  Atlanta, Georgia, is intriguing. Churchgoers and politicians often share the same bed. I enjoy taking the characters from Sunday service to the bar to show how Christians are sinners. 7–Are you a plotter (follow an outline) or a pantster (write by the seat of your pants)? I’m an artist first. My characters are real to me. I don’t like to get ahead of them and dictate their direction. I outline four chapters at…

“Sisters, as you know, also have a unique relationship. This is the person who has known you your entire life, who should love you and stand by you no matter what, and yet it’s your sister who knows exactly where to drive the knife to hurt you the most.” Lisa See, author When I was younger, I was all about trying to fix what was wrong in my life. Smoothing out the rough edges. If I couldn’t fix my flaws, I’d figure out a way to hide ’em. As I’ve aged, I’ve accepted the messiness of life. Sometimes we fall, Humpty-Dumpty-style, and break, and the pieces don’t fit back together again. As an author, I love to delve into complicated relationships. Family relationships. Friendships. Does he-doesn’t she romantic entanglements. You want to try to unravel some problematic relationships? Try to understand the bonds between sisters. Some sisters are each other’s designated best friends, with their phone numbers on speed dial so they chat with each other multiple times a day. Some sisters are so hostile toward one another that they haven’t seen or spoken to one another in years. And some sisters are an oil and water mix of the…

Jennifer: What inspired you to write your new release, HELLO, SUMMER?   Mary Kay: A couple years ago I read an article in my hometown newspaper, The Tampa Bay Times, about the area’s long-time conservative Republican Congressman, who’d just passed away from cancer. At the Congressman’s funeral, his son gave a eulogy that mentioned his father’s “secret first family”–the Congressman’s first wife and his children with him, with whom he’d had no contact for decades. It was a stunning moment that sparked a family feud played out in headlines around the country. When I went looking for a juicy story for my newspaper reporter protagonist Conley to dig into, that story immediately came to mind. Of course, my fictional Congressman dies in a mysterious late-night accident on a remote country road, and there are lots of other differences, but that story kept me up at night, wondering “what if?”  Why does Sarah “Conley” Hawkins choose to return to her hometown? She doesn’t have any alternatives. She’s quit her job as a reporter at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, broken up with her boyfriend and given up her apartment–all in anticipation of a new job she’s accepted with a new digital-only investigative publication in…

What is a whispering dress? Venture inside the bridal boutique of my heroine, Fran Delaney, and you’ll find out. Fran finds vintage wedding dresses, gets to know their histories, then matches them to modern-day brides, helping them to transform their lives. In that sense, her dresses ‘whisper’ their secrets and wisdoms to whoever wears them next. I was inspired to write The Second Chance Boutique while working for the Victoria & Albert Museum, researching their extraordinary collection of historic wedding dresses. It wasn’t just the dresses that fascinated me, but the personal stories behind them. From demure to ultimate glamour, from the courtesan’s sack-back gown to the ever-changing Victorian silhouette, the thirties to the sixties to the nineties, these dresses were as varied in character as the women who wore them – and it struck me that the spirit of these women seemed very much present, embodied in the fabric and stitches. The idea of these dresses stayed with me until, not long after my own wedding, I decided I simply had to write a romance based around them. So here are some of the ones that inspired me: The Scandalous One This dramatic Norman Hartnell gown was worn by…

1–What’s the name of your latest release? (Im)perfectly Happy  2–What is it about? (Im)perfectly Happy tells the story of four friends who formed an accountability group to follow their dreams in college. However, ten years later, they can’t help wondering what happened to the hopeful, confident, driven women they used to be. Now, they are determined to get them back. Kara, Nikki, Raina, and Sienna: a wine expert, musician, radiotherapist, and an attorney have distinctly different dreams and issues to resolve. One is a mother, two are married and one…well, she’s avoiding the whole love and marriage thing. If you’re a fan of romance, friendship, and happy endings, I would be so pleased to share my book with you. 3–What word best describes your heroine? There are four of them. Kara is cautious, Sienna is a sweetheart, Nikki is spunky, and Raina is sarcastic. 4–What makes your hero irresistible? The focus of this book is on the heroines. 5–Who are the people your main characters turn to when they need help? They are friends and turn to each other. 6–What do you love about the setting of your book? It’s set in Atlanta which is where I live. It’s fun…

Flora was ten minutes early. Did that matter? Nerves were jumping around in the pit of her belly, but she always felt that way before seeing Jack. A man striding past gave her a wide berth and she realized it was because she was smiling at nothing in particular. Feeling positive, she walked up the steps and rang the bell. One day, she promised herself, she was going to have a proper front door of her own. Maybe flanked by olive trees, or pots filled with trailing plants. Jack opened the door. He was wearing jeans, and his shirt was open at the neck. His feet were bare and there was a hint of shadow on his jaw. Here in his own domain, he seemed younger and more relaxed. “You found us okay?” His gaze connected with hers and she felt a searing flash of chemistry that almost knocked her off her feet. Feeling a little disorientated, she stepped into the house. His fingers brushed lightly against hers, sending a shimmer of heat coursing through her. For a wild moment she thought he was going to simply kick the door shut and drag her against him, but instead he closed…

Jen: What was your inspiration for your latest release, Feels Like Falling? Kristy: It started as most good stories do… In the drugstore! (Just kidding.) It was two days before Christmas, our car was packed to the gills, and we were heading home for the holidays–right after we picked up the photo books I had had made for our families. The woman at the photo desk said she couldn’t give me the books without a signed photo release because some of them were from a professional photographer, but I begged and pleaded and she gave them to me, after getting permission for me to bring the form back later. A few days later, I took her the photo release and she put it on file, no harm, no foul. But then I thought, “What if something similar happened but the woman working had gotten fired because of it? What if there was some reason she had felt like she wanted to do a good deed and, because of that, she lost her job? And then what if these two women formed a bond because of it and it ended up changing both their lives?” Most of my stories start this…

Welcome to Fresh Fiction, Alison! Please introduce yourself and tell us about your debut novel, YOU AND ME AND US. Thanks so much for having me! My name is Alison Hammer, and during the day, I’m a VP Creative Director at an advertising agency in Chicago, and during nights and weekends—I write upmarket women’s fiction. You and Me and Us the story of a workaholic woman and her distant teenage daughter, and it’s about the way their relationship evolves as they go through a tough summer, losing the third member of their family. It’s a tearjerker, but there are parts that will make you laugh and smile, too! What had your publishing journey to your debut novel been like? What has surprised you about getting to the publication of your first book? While You and Me and Us is my debut novel, it isn’t the first book I wrote. I have a manuscript that I put in a drawer after trying to find an agent for about a year. While I was querying, I wrote and revised You and Me and Us. It took about seven months of querying to sign with my amazing agent Joanna—who happened to be the…