I love how passionate people get about tropes in books. Every reader always seems to have one or two tropes that they hate or that get a very visceral response from them. Mine is enemies to lovers. (no ganging up on me if you love this one) I’m just really sensitive to the idea that you shouldn’t fall for someone or even sleep with someone who isn’t nice to you. Period. Full stop. But I wrote the first Beautiful Shame book that’s technically enemies to lovers. So… I was talking to another author the other day and they love anime and manga and all kinds of fun naughty things, but they hate the accidental pervert trope that can show up […]

When writers get together to talk craft and practical things like marketing, there are always a thousand variations of questions debating writing a series or writing standalone books. But one thing I don’t think I’ve really heard authors mention in those discussions is how hard figuring out all the pieces in a series is. Where do all the side characters fit? Who goes with who? Why did someone random just show up and start wanting attention? What are they talking about? For me, the questions seem endless when I’m trying to put together a world like my dragon universe. I can answer all kinds of weird questions about the characters and what’s going on in the lore, but sometimes it’s […]

I hated reading as a kid. The books were boring and I just refused to do it and it was driving my mother insane. So she made the executive decision to bribe me with romance novels. She’d paperclip the naughty parts and tell me to skip over them, and I was such a goodie-goodie I did. Some of the first characters I fell head over heels for, and who felt so real to me, were from Jude Deveraux. She had the Montgomery family and their stories spanned probably several hundred years, but the ones that stand out to me now are about the old Highland castles and sexy lairds to more modern times in the American West. I had so […]

Why do you write? Why did you want to become an author?

I’ve gotten variations of this question a lot and it boils down to a few reasons that can be summed up in a few different ideas: it was very practical, it was so much fun, and it was a way to show my family I wasn’t as stupid as they thought.

After my divorce when my kids were still in early elementary school…

For the past couple of years, one of the conventions I’ve been going to is with other authors. It meets in Vegas in November, and that week is filled with classes and random discussions. It always gives me a boost and makes me so much more productive once I’m home, but one of the conversations that always crops up is what the future looks like. Newbie author? What does working full-time as an author look like to you? Established author? What does your next step look like? Kids in college and a backlist? What does the future look like for you? I’ve always liked playing What If and figuring out what something might look like. On a road trip one […]

One of the things I usually post when I do takeovers on Facebook (online events in groups to talk about specific things like a new release) is an ask me anything post. Sometimes the questions there are silly and sometimes they’re fascinating, but in a takeover I did the other day, one popped out at me and made me think. So I thought I’d share a bit more of a rambling answer than the one I gave on Facebook. What’s your favorite environment to read or write books in? My first response to this was that I’m a creature of habit. Sometimes that’s good and sometimes it’s terrible but I usually find something that my brain likes and keep doing […]