Once when we were caught in the constant traffic jam that is Austin, Texas, my family began tossing around possibilities for family mottoes. You know, like the Windsors’ “God and my right,” although that one’s kind of snotty. Finally, my younger son suggested “Peace, Love, and Sarcasm.” That struck all of us as a great […]
My big news for the week is that Samhain will publish Wedding Bell Blues, the sequel to Venus in Blue Jeans, sometime this summer (tentatively in July). In a lot of ways Wedding Bell Blues picks up where Venus leaves off. Cal and Docia are getting married, Reba is running the show, Wonder is sitting […]
My first novel for Samhain Publishing, Venus in Blue Jeans, releases today, January 27, 2009. I’m still sort of stunned about that. I started working on Venus three years ago and now it’s actually going to be published. Whoopee! The whole Venus saga is kind of an illustration of the way romance publishing works, which […]
The cover for Venus in Blue Jeans is up, and I’m so excited I can hardly type! It’s one thing to think about what your cover might look like. It’s something else to actually know. Having seen the process for the cover creation (and having done some research to let the artist know what […]
I once made the mistake of taking a Mary Balogh novel with me on a long flight. Don’t get me wrong—reading Mary Balogh’s novels definitely isn’t a mistake. And I usually get so engrossed in her books that I can overlook minor inconveniences like my fear of flying. But the thing about Mary Balogh and […]
I love old movies, and by that I mean really old movies—movies from the thirties and forties. One mainstay of thirties comedies is the “madcap” heroine. The kook. The flake. The one who keeps doing nutty things that nobody expects. The hero (like Cary Grant in Bringing Up Baby or Henry Fonda in The Lady […]
I just finished a draft of a novel where the heroine has a nine-month-old son, and I feel a little like W.C. Fields–“Never work with children or animals.” Actually, I have lots of animals in my books and they’ve never caused me any trouble. If they’re not needed in a scene you can send them […]
I actually enjoy doing revisions more than doing the first draft—it’s less work! I’m a planner, which means I try to work out as much of the plot in advance as I can rather than waiting for inspiration to strike (sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t—I find my muse takes vacations at the least appropriate […]
I not only write romances, I read lots of them. And like most romance readers, I’m very particular about what I like and don’t like. One of my major peeves is the Big Misunderstanding. You know–the plot where the hero thinks the heroine has been unfaithful because he saw her kissing that guy at the […]
Normally, I’m a very disciplined writer. Honest. But over the past month, it’s gotten harder and harder to keep myself on the page. Life keeps getting in the way. I mean to get my quota of pages done, but then I think, I’ll just check the blogosphere, see what’s going on with the election, maybe […]
