My Recent Comments

Hi Girl_28, so glad you liked the book! I'm just about to start writing one of the sequels to Back on Track, so time to get stuck into all that research again...
Abby

Thanks, Jan, nice to see you here! Yeah, gotta love that Tessa Radley - a great writer as well as a great friend and kicker-in-the-pants!

The fun thing about writing NASCAR-themed stories is that when you have such a specific world, you can let your imagination run riot within that world...
Abby

Hi Girl_28

Getting the technical stuff right is made a lot easier by the internet. Everything from car specs to pit notes to transcripts of in-car communications is online somewhere. The bigger problem is the amount of time you can spend reading this stuff - it's fascinating!

Glad you're enjoying the book.
Abby

Karina, I try to only give technical info when it's important to the story, or when it adds tension to a scene. Otherwise, you're right, it ends up an info dump It can be nice to give that info in dialogue, but you need to be careful you don't have painfully obvious  conversations like,

"Wow, Joe, you were going pretty fast out there"

"Yes, Susan, I hit one-ninety down the backstretch. But before NASCAR introduced restrictor plates to improve safety at the super-speedways, I would have been doing more than 200 miles an hour."  !!

The question about how much race talk readers like is a good one. It seems to vary, but if any race fans out there would like to say something about this, go ahead!
Abby

Elaine, I agree, it would be great to watch from one of the suites. I went into one of the suites at Texas Motor Speedway (not on race day, it was empty), and I could just imagine myself kicking back with a glass of wine to watch the race... Dreams are free!
Abby

Cynthia, I agree, I think my cover guy is pretty hot!

Eileen, I think the thing about Kasey is his eyes...very nice! (of course, he's also not bad at driving a race car...). Research is the fun part of writing a NASCAR romance. I have visited several tracks around the country, been to Charlotte to visit Roush Racing (I fell in love with Charlotte, BTW, what a lovely, vibrant, not-too-big-and-not-too-small city!), and went to a race at Daytona. Usually, though, I just watch the races on TV - to be honest, I think the view is better!

You're right, there's always a lot going on in NASCAR that sparks story ideas! I also find that if you thing of something that hasn't happened yet, it tends to happen the very next week...
Abby

Hi Missy, the villain romance was fun to write, but I'll be interested to see how readers feel about it.

I'm looking forward to reading your book too - it's on my wishlist, but I'm wondering if I should wait and get it at the literacy signing in San Francisco if you're going to be there, so I can get a signed copy
Abby 

Hi Sandra and Karina, thanks for stopping by!

I enjoyed writing the subplot in Fully Engaged (for those of you who haven't read the book, the subplot is a romance between the two "villains") - it was an interesting challenge to create a love story that was believable between two such disillusioned people, without softening them up so much that they couldn't fulfill their bad-guy roles in the rest of the story.

I think both of them did stay true to character. As a reader, it's important to me that characters stay true to themselves and their beliefs. Actually, the same goes for real life! :)

But falling in love with someone who has different views from you (which happens all the time in romance novels) sometimes means you need to compromise. Question is, what should you be prepared to compromise on, and what do you hold on to no matter what?
Abby

Rae, I'm having trouble linking to this discussion from the Forums welcome page. It was working fine earlier today, but now the link doesn't work (the links to the other forums work okay though...).

I had to get to the board just now by going to your profile and clicking on your recent comments. Would you mind checking if the link isn't working, or if it's just me? :)
thanks
Abby

Hi Kate, nice to see you! Re the horizon...actually, it's a lot clearer than it was a couple of months back!

I have another book coming out in this NASCAR series in August, but even more exciting to me personally, is that I'll be writing the stories of Chad and Zack Matheson, brothers of Trent Matheson from Back on Track, for the 2009 series.

Lots of readers emailed me to ask when those Matheson brothers would get their own stories, and I've been champing at the bit to write them!

I'm just finishing a book that is very loosely linked to Married by Mistake, one of my last year's Superromances, and it's been nice catching up with those characters again too.

My new Superromance this month, The Diaper Diaries, also has a sequel in the works.

Phew, that sounds like quite a lot on the horizon!

I hope you enjoy Fully Engaged. Although I said earlier that there are a lot of similarities between my Supers and my NASCAR stories, Fully Engaged is quite different from The Diaper Diaries...I'll be interested to hear which one people like best!
Abby