To paraphrase the late great John Lennon, life is what happens while you’re making other plans. To directly quote my mother—and mothers everywhere—”Don’t do as I do. Do as I say.” Both sage snippets segue albeit circuitously into my blog topic—how to write connected romance novels, or rather how not to write them, or at least how to recover from (cough, hiccup) going about it all wrong. My Men of Roxbury House trilogy—VANQUISHED, ENSLAVED, and now UNTAMED—is my first shot at writing connected books. Like anyone’s first anything, in the aftermath, there are lessons learned, battle scars to be shown off—and FYI, I’m not just in it for beads. 😉 Seriously, I don’t write like grownups do. Never have and likely never will. For starters, I don’t write sequentially, linearly, or well, in any reasonable, replicable fashion. You’ll never catch me at a writers’ conference touting my “process,” flashing charts and graphs, or God forbid, instructing others on how to write like me. If anything, I’m the textbook case for what not to do. I do it all wrong—and yet for me, it works. I write scenes out of order, the characters voicing firing off like canon shot in my…

Hello! (hello…hello) Yes, I am providing my own echo. This is what happens when you’ve been stuck inside waaaaay to long! (Come on, spring!) On the up-side, you tend to get tons of writing done. I’ve finished book four in the Jaz Parks series and am over a third of the way done with the fifth. But what I really want to talk about is the novel that just came out on February 11. The third of Jaz Parks’ adventures, Biting the Bullet shoves the CIA assassin and her vampire boss, Vayl, into the center of Tehran. Their mission is to partner with an elite team of soldiers to take down a terrorist mastermind called the Wizard. None of their assignments is easy, but this one could break them. Because not only do they have to unearth the mole in the soldiers’ unit, they’re under attack from demonic monsters, a manipulative Seer, and their own unresolved feelings toward each other. And you thought your job was stressful! I think you’ll like Jaz’s voice. Wise-cracking, smart-aleck, but always with a depth and vulnerability that lets you know she’s seen more at twenty-five than most people manage in a lifetime. Here’s a…

This one tiny word encompasses all from which romance novels are made. It doesn’t matter what genre, category or heat level. It all comes down to those four little letters. Now, the word itself may be small, but the concept is huge. The tiny flicker eventually turning into an all-consuming flame–now that is love…or at the very least, lust. As a romance writer, I have to admit that this fire is what sucked me into writing the genre. I love…love. The sex is great, but it is so much more than hopping in the sack. The thrill of the chase, the spark of the first kiss, the flame of the passion, and the sigh of the happily-ever-after ending make it the only category for me to read and write. There are many people who say romance is nothing but predictable, just because they end the same. I have one word for them: Duh! Mysteries end with a resolution to the mystery and horror stories are going to have gruesome scenes, yet for some reason, they generally aren’t lumped into one bunch and pooh-poohed as a whole. Writing a book is all about the presentation and figuring out how to flow…

I write in a room lined with beloved books – it’s like being with old friends. I know chunks of some of these keepers by heart. For some reason it’s usually dialogue I remember, some favorite exchange between the characters. I love the banter that takes place between a hero and heroine, particularly where they’re talking about one thing, but there’s a delicious sexual undercurrent underlying the whole conversation. I’m not talking about suggestiveness, but banter as a sexy duel, a form of courtship, a dance, a game that neither can lose. Good banter always makes me smile.Some books, some heroes, lend themselves to it more than others. For me, it’s usually the hero who starts it. For instance, here’s an example from my current book, THE STOLEN PRINCESS, where the Regency hero gets the heroine all hot and bothered with just a few teasing words. She gave him a severe look. “I told you, I have no desire to put myself under the thumb of any man, ever again.” “But it wasn’t my thumb I was thinking of.” He said it with such a— such a wicked, laughing look she was hard put to know what to say. So…

When I first started writing, I hardly dared to dream. I banged away on a semi-decrepit laptop in my attic apartment in New Haven, Connecticut (yes, really, an attic…servants’ quarters, actually; I kept looking with no success for the butler…), working on my debut novel, And Only to Deceive, with only the briefest someday-maybe-if-I’m-good-and-lucky-this-will-get-published thoughts. I’d chosen the location for the novel carefully—wanted to use settings familiar to me. Places I’d actually been. I studied abroad in college, living in London, and that seemed an easy starting point. Two trips to Paris had cemented the city in my soul, and a recent visit to Greece had wholly seduced me. I was confident I could capture the essentials of each location. But what next? I’d joked for a long time that my writing career was a thinly veiled attempt to justify my travel plans, but I’d never really let myself believe that someday, just maybe, I could be an author and jet about the world on research trips. I kept those thoughts far from my brain, focusing instead on writing. It’s the best thing an aspiring author can do—nothing is more important than crafting the best books possible—while all the while…

Years and years ago, when I still played with Barbies, Saturday nights were a magical time. They were all about steak dinners with the family around the candlelit table and my dad smoking his cigar in the backyard afterward. Saturday nights were also when IN SEARCH OF… aired on TV, and I remember watching it, enthralled, and oftentimes, scared to death when Leonard Nimoy told us about things like The Loch Ness Monster and Bigfoot. Of course, I was young, and I freaked out at everything. So when a certain episode about vampires aired, it left an indelible impression that’s stayed with me until this day. Long claws, sharp teeth, a woman in bed with a gnarly shadow creeping over her…. I was hooked, and it’s no surprise that I’m writing about vampires now for Ace Books. In keeping with what scared me when I was younger, my own vampires usually have a mean streak and will do anything to survive. In fact, my first vamp book THE HUNTRESS (for the defunct Bombshell line from Silhouette) featured a tribe of female bloodsuckers, feral and hard to slay. I loved those gals, but the real villain in that story was vampirism…

In one of my favorite films last summer (Paris, je t’aime, which is actually a series of short films about love, set in Paris), there is a vignette in which a long-married man is about to leave his wife for his mistress. Years of mutual apathy have rendered the couple’s marriage stale and wilted. All of the little idiosyncrasies that he once found charming and endearing about his wife have become irritants that make his skin crawl. He fairly loathes the woman. Nothing short of an injection of a serious dose of “I actually give a care about you” could save it. But (without spoiling it!) the husband learns something that completely alters his approach to their relationship. As their relationship evolves, the narrator intones, “Once he began to act like a man in love, he became a man in love.” I love this line, and the concept behind it. It is, in fact, this very kernel of an idea that grew into my novel, SLEEPING WITH WARD CLEAVER. So I found it interesting to hear it verbalized in the movie. There is, to me, such a simple truth to it. Most everybody starts out in a marriage happy (I…

Some years ago I sat in a movie theater watching, The Perfect Storm. I must have been the only one present who did not know this was a true story, therefore the ending set in the proverbial stone of historical fact. Up until the point all three of the heroes perished, I had been waiting for that miraculous intervention, anything that would save them. When the movie ended, I was so aggravated that I had sat through the entire movie and had nothing but a sense of doom to show for my time. So my question to you is: what is the point of a movie or a book if it does not end with at least the hope that the characters we suffer with will be happy when the story ends. This is one of the reasons I don’t trust mainstream fiction or movies that are supposed to have a meaningful message to us poor, beleaguered souls of humanity. Too often, such entertainment leaves me depressed. In addition, because I am a writer, I have concluded that it is a lot easier for an author to give a book or a movie a sad ending than it is for…

Do blondes have more fun? Having had two or three other hair colors over my lifetime, I should be a good judge as to whether a blonde has more fun than a brunette. However, I haven’t been able to see any difference. I do know when confronted with something beyond my immediate understanding, I can point out that I’m blonde or say I’m having a blonde moment. I am always granted a smile and unbelievable understanding and patience. The truth be told, I tried to make it as a brunette, but it just didn’t work because people expected me to know things. To be honest, this blonde writer’s ignorance doesn’t have to do with hair color as much as the fact that I’d never befriended an author and hadn’t a clue of what being a writer entailed. Without a writer’s group in the early years to steer me along, I had to learn things the hard way. I set out to write the perfect inspirational book. I had a hard time thinking about changing anything I’d written as it came to me upon inspiration. Which is all well and good, but was told after my first critique that people didn’t…

What is it about the tease that’s so hot? You know what I’m talking about. That tingle you get between your thighs when someone exciting catches your eye, or when you catch his. The lingering looks, the hair toss, the silent communication. That time when your blood heats up and your body awakens as you feel the magic of “what if?” It’s almost … intoxicating. I used to flirt a lot. Men used to flirt with me. Then I got married. I haven’t gained weight or let myself go, but somehow, I’ve changed. I know it, and they know it. I think it’s because the chase is over. The magic of flirting, the heightened awareness that arcs between two people, the building of anticipation… it’s gone. And I don’t know exactly when, or how, it disappeared.The sad thing is, it also seems to have disappeared between my husband and me. Now, don’t get me wrong. I love my husband. Grant is still very attractive in every way, and leaving him has never occurred to me. I’d never cheat on him, either. Yet, I can’t deny that a certain restlessness has been building in me for some time. That was the…