Silhouette Romantic Suspense Author Blog

My very first novella, KISS ME ON CHRISTMAS, is out this month in a three-in-one titled BLACKOUT AT CHRISTMAS. It was so much fun collaborating with two awesome writers, Beth Cornelison (STRANDED WITH THE BRIDESMAID) and Sharron McClellan (SANTA UNDER COVER).

Good morning everyone and Happy November!

Are you one of those who like to walk on the spooky side once in a while?  October seems to be the month people most enjoy trying to scare themselves silly.  For those who like the chills and thrills that can be gotten from traveling to reputedly haunted places, I’ve made a list of the places that intrigue me most:

The J.B. Moore house, Villisica, Iowa
In 1912, the J.B. Moore family, their four children and two overnight guests were murdered in their beds by an axe-wielding assailant.  The killer has never been brought to justice.  Local law enforcement found the doors all locked from the inside, which would suggest that the offender walked in the unlocked house and then locked it after him with the key that had been left in the lock.  The bloody axe had been left behind, after an attempt had been made to clean it.  All curtains had been closed and for those windows without curtains, the family’s clothes had been hung up to cover the windows.

The murders remain unsolved.

What's everyone reading these days?  I'm not reading anything, but I will be.   

Who knew that painting a house could cause such pain?  My arms hurt.  My back and neck hurt.  Even my toes and the soles of my feet hurt.  My knees are chafed from painting baseboards.  My shins and hips are bruised from dragging a big wooden ladder around the house.  I’ve climbed up and down that ladder so many times that my legs keep cramping, making it impossible to sleep.

At my last critique session, a discussion on pacing came up. How do you know when your pacing is off? Your head is stuffed with your story, so sometimes it’s hard to step back and see it with fresh eyes.

One of my critique partners has a story where the suspense doesn’t start until manuscript page 60. We thought the pacing was slow getting there but could be fixed by not spending as much time as she did on one topic. Get the story question out early, then move on to spicy character development full of tension and motives and driving dialogue that can carry everything to the moment of suspense. Maybe it takes another reader to tell you when your pacing is off, maybe you see it when you go to polish the rough draft. 

I thought long and hard about whether to write the blog I’d planned for this date, the one dealing with yet another of the comments and questions we writers get so often.  Finally, though, I decided it would be a copout, maybe even dishonest, after sharing so much of my journey over the past few months of my husband’s battle with cancer with you, not to share with you the journey’s end.

I lost my love, my Gary, ten days ago.

So I'm coming out of the writing cave for the day to blog about...too much romance in a romantic suspense.  I've been working on my latest SRS and decided to take a break this weekend and do some reading, and maybe get some inspiration for my story since it seems to be moving unbelievably slowly.

Remember:  These lists are subjective and have nothing to do with the author or the book itself.   Everyone feel free to add your favorite!

I'm currenty in the last heat of an impending deadline for my next Silhouette Romantic Suspense, the third book in The Cordasic Legacy, and the sister's story.  Sometimes books come easier than others.  This book has not been one of those.  It's been a very difficult book to write.

My apologies to Charles Dickens for paraphrasing his words, but what the heck is going on with titles these days? Or do titles really matter anymore? 

The very first library I ever walked into was a converted store front single story building (which later went on to become a Salvation Army outlet for used clothes) with uneven wooden floors and short, creaky bookcases. But I was seven and for me, they were a perfect height. And also a perfect place to let my imagination run wild. I don’t remember the first book I took out, but I remember the second. It was a biography about Jessica Fremont, entitled: Jessica Benton, Girl of Capitol Hill. Then and there I became totally captivated both with reading biographies and with the girl’s name. At the time, nobody was named Jessica. I hung onto that name for over twenty years, determined to name my daughter that lovely, unique name. Sadly, when my Jessi was born, every second girl was a Jessica, too (Jessi had three other Jessicas in her kindergarten class).

I just finished writing a great blog - wait, let me rephrase that: a really great blog - about writing series and how one book set in Mississippi with a hero named Lassiter led to 7 books in the Calloway Brothers/Copper Lake, Georgia series.

Then I previewed it.

Then I paged back.

Then I lost it.

Hi! Yes, it's me again. Our blogging schedule just happened to have me posting my regular ramble two days before the new releases for October were to be spotlighted. Since I have an October book to tell you about...here I am for the second time this week. But I'm back with a giveaway! Details in a minute...

For some reason I’m doing a lot of thinking about sin lately.  Not planning it, you understand but about forgiveness.  And what is and isn’t forgivable.

When I was younger I had more of a black and white view of the world.  But with age comes experience, and with experience comes…maybe an increased tolerance.  My dad, who is 85, is given to saying, “Well, those things happen.”  This from a man who used to epitomize a type A personality!

Something pretty interesting happened to me last week.  I got an email from a man with the same name as the hero of my upcoming January book, Gage Parrish. 

September has been a good month for me! After a crazy summer, it’s a welcome reprieve. I appear to be off that loopie, hilly roller-coaster ride and on a little flatter ground. Which I will take! Maybe that's why I just feel like babbling today....

DH and I spent yesterday afternoon taking care of our 23-month-old grandson while his mom ran some errands, and I remembered once again why God gives babies to young people. Holy cow, he never stopped moving except for the thirty-minute power nap that left him ready for more activity.

He's such a sweetie -- blond-haired, blue-eyed, and utterly determined to call me Memaw, no matter how many times we tell him "Grandma." I think it's payback for when our son was little and my mom said he could call her anything in the world except Granny. Naturally, that was Brandon's choice. (Granny Fanny, to be exact. Even though her name is Wanda.)

Yep, procastination is an art--how do I know?  Because I've mastered it.  I am in fact very, very good at it, and this past summer proves it.  I wrote a list at the beginning of the summer of all the things I wanted (or had) to do before September (when I start work full-time again).  Well, it's September now, and how many items are crossed off the list?  Zero.

Ever heard of the mushroom effect? Those of you who’ve ever renovated a house know exactly what I mean. You start a modest project, like caulking around the kitchen sink, and you decide hmmm, you could use a new sink. So you hunt one up (in my case on Craigslist because the prices of new sinks just about leave you gasping on the floor from sticker shock ) and are about to install it when you think, well, the garbage disposal has been acting up so why not go all out? So you watch Ebay like a hawk and get an outstanding deal on a new one, and are all ready to install both sink and disposal when you realize the old faucet looks really tacky on that shiny new sink, and... Well, you get the idea. The whole project just mushrooms until you end up with a new sink, faucet, disposal, granite countertops, glassfront cupboards, ceramic floors, and why not a

It poured all weekend.  Perfect writing weather, right?  But, even though my next Silhouette Romantic Suspense (working title Lea's Story - the third Cordasic book) is due November 1st, I did not write.  Not one single word.

This Sunday is my birthday!  I don’t intend to celebrate.  I never do.  

The idea of the 'list of five' came from an episode of Friends. I could go into the whole long story but to sum: if you’re in a relationship, you’re allowed a list of five celebrities to sleep with and not get in trouble. This is my list. Not a whole lot of what I consider 'pretty' men. I admit I like them manly—like the men in my books.  And hey, if he isn't "hero" material, then he does NOT belong on this list.

ALL DRESSED UP AND NOWHERE TO GO

Just a frinedly reminder that tomorrow night at 9 p.m. ET is the SRS chat in the eHarlequin chat room! I hope to be there and I'll give away a book as a prize! Hope to see lots of you there!!

Beth Cornelison

We pause now to envision me on my knees, penitent, rhythmically hitting my left breast with my fisted right hand and simultaneously accepting blame while asking for forgiveness.  It is with horror that I realized this morning that my blog is not due on the 7th, but was, rather, due on the 3rd. And the 3rd has come and gone. 

Many of you may have already seen the Staples commercial with the dad skipping down the aisles as he tosses back-to-school supplies into the cart to the tune of the Christmas song "The Most Wonderful Time Of The Year." I even saw one person had posted a link to the video on Facebook. In the ad, the kids follow dad, dragging their feet and somber faced. Yes, it is back-to-school time!

The first time I saw this commercial, I had to laugh out loud. It matched my opinion– and apparently many other parents'– of how wonderful it was to be sending the young ones back to school. The end of the constant interruptions to my writing. "Mom, I'm bored. Mom, I'm hungry. Mom, can I call (fill-in the blank) to come over? Mom, when are you gonna be done writing?"

Have you ever gotten tired of a particular plot device?  Ever wondered why more originality
can’t be infused into your favorite stories?  Editors are always asking for something new, but different.  Here’s your chance to try your hand at
creating familiar but unique plots. 

One of the toughest things a writer has to do in a book is capture the speech patterns of a character.  We want our characters to have a distinctive voice.  And yet, we can’t make a character too distinctive -- or at least not in a negative way -- particularly if it's the hero or heroine of the book.

Take dialect, for example.  Mark Twain did a masterful job of cataloguing his characters’ dialects.  In Huckleberry Finn, one of the characters says:

"En all you wuz thinkin' bout wuz how you could make a fool uv ole Jim wid a lie. Dat truck dah is trash; en trash is what people is dat puts dirt on de head er dey fren's en makes ‘em ashamed.”

Can you believe it’s already the end of August?  The start of school had me thinking about summer and vacations.  My husband and I just took one, the first I’ve had in five years. 

Actually, it's a beautiful day here in northeast Oklahoma.  Late August, and the temperature is in the low 70s with a nice breeze blowing to cool it even more. A welcome change from the high 90s and low 100s that usually characterize our Augusts.

Hi Everyone!

     RISK TAKER is my debut book of Black Jaguar Squadron 60 stationed in Afghanistan.  It is an all-woman Apache combat helicopter squadron.   I usually try to give my manuscript a ‘working title’ so that it has SOME name.

When I was only a reader rather than a writer, I assumed that writers sat down at their typewriters (yes, it was that long ago <G>) and started typing.  I thought the story came to them the same way watching a movie unfolds.  Now that I'm a writer, I know that's not true.

I am a Tiger Woods fan. I am currently watching the PGA Championship and his competitor has just taken the lead. My stomach is jumpy. I can’t sit still. I’m writing this blog now to distract myself. I think... why do I do this? Why do I sit on the edge of my seat glued to the TV locked in the suspense of the moment?

Because I love it. Without a doubt my favorite thing about sports is the idea that anything can happen at any given moment. There can be triumph or there can be defeat. In some games a clock ticks down. In others there’s only one swing of the bat left, one last putt to win or lose it all. The suspense kills me. But it also thrills me.

One thing I like to do when researching a new character is to read online dating profiles. I know...a little weird. But I can browse the pictures for different "looks",  find out what makes men tick, etc. I learn a lot about the masculine gender this way--some of it really disturbing.

I have never missed a deadline. Actually, ever since I stayed up until the wee hours of the morning, working on a history paper due the next day in junior high school, I have been neurotically early, whether it involved turning in an assignment or showing up for an appointment.  The upshot is that I’ve spent half my life waiting for other people to show up, but that’s a small price to pay for feeling that I’ve delivered at least on time if not early (yes, I was early with my second child—and delivered on my due date with the first—I did use the word “neurotic,” right?).

However, today my record is gone—unless I can finish this blog and post it in the next eight minutes. 

Today, I'm celebrating my (mumble-grumble) birthday by offering a free online romantic suspense short story to readers over at Romance in the Backseat, where I'm this month's featured author. I had the honor of leading off this month's round robin short story, a beach-themed romantic suspense set at my native Jersey shore. (Yep, that's where I'm really from, in spite of spending the last twenty years in Texas and setting all of my other romantic suspense in my adopted state).

Best of all, I'm getting to work on the story with some very talented mystery and romantic suspense authors, such as Joyce Lamb, SRS's own Kylie Brant, Margaret Carroll, Maggie Church, Susan Shay, Denise Robins, and Judi McCoy to create one sizzling summer read.

"Crimson Surf" is the story of Big Sandy paramedic Andrea Whitaker, whose marriage to the love of her life, police chief Jake Boone, crumbled in the wake of last summer's gruesome unsolved murder of Andrea's beloved young cousin, Dara. With the arrival of a new shore season, can Jake win Andrea back... or will the returning killer take her from him forever?

Looking for something romantic to do with your honey tonight or tomorrow night? Just go outside, in the back yard or on a rooftop with a blanket and a bottle of wine. Earth is entering the debris field from the Swift-Tuttle comet. Some are saying that up to 200 meteors per hour may be seen between midnight and dawn, though the full moon and local cloud cover may reduce that pretty dramatically. Personally, I'm setting my alarm for 3 am, the height of the meteor shower (NOT!).

Really...what do you do for real-life romance (remember this is a family show!)? Do you prefer dinner out at a fancy restaurant, or a quiet night in? Dancing in high heels or...a blanket and meteor shower?

I've been thinking a good bit about the concept of a writer's voice lately. Finding and honing your personal voice is so important, and yet explaining voice is so hard to do. Then I thought of this analogy...maybe it will help people understand voice (or my interpretation at least).

I have a confession to make.  I'm not a romantic.  I know, that's an embarrassing admission for someone who has written nearly thirty romantic suspense books.  I can *write* about romance.  But in my real life I'm a pragmatist, who certainly appreciates the little romantic touches but rarely thinks about them.

It was a hectic evening at our house, the night I got “the call.”  My husband’s three sons were here, and two grandkids, and I’d just finished fixing dinner—if you can call several different kinds of quick foods dinner—while the kids and the “boys” milled around between the kitchen, garage, and the living room, where their dad was resting up after a family-filled day. When the phone rang and I picked it up I had no idea who was on the other end—the kitchen phone doesn’t have caller ID—and quite frankly I’d forgotten all about it being “The Day.”

Gail’s voice, saying “Kathleen?” I said, “Yes?” and she said, “Do you recognize my voice?” “Yes,” I said, still clueless. She laughed and said, “I don’t suppose you have any idea why I’m calling you?”