Ah, food. One of my favorite subjects. If you follow me on Pinterest, you’ll get a taste for just how much I love food in all its forms. Cooking, baking, eating, sharing, and even reading about it. It’s our fuel for life. We fuel our bodies, our spirits, and our relationships over food. Today, I’d […]
Why Christmas in July? by Deb Kastner
As I settle in to write the first story in my next six book contract for Harlequin Love Inspired (Yay, I was officially offered six books for the tentatively titled series A New Leash on Love!) I groan at the hundred degree heat and sigh. We have two fans running turbo on us but it’s […]
New Chapter and a Giveaway by Deb Kastner
With Her Forgotten Cowboy, my September release from Harlequin Love Inspired, I’ll be saying goodbye to a fictional Texas town, Serendipity, which I’ve inhabited through three miniseries and a novella for a total of 17 books. Naturally, I’m feeling bittersweet. I know this town and its people intimately, especially the boisterous old redhead Jo Spencer, […]
Convenient… or Not So Much?
You know what’s a tricky trope to write? Marriage of convenience in a contemporary setting! I mean, what makes two otherwise rational and engaging characters decide to get married in this day and age without love? Historical settings are rife with good reasons to do this. Women needed protection back then, whether from rogue men […]
Tropes are not Trite, They’re a Fact of Life
The word trope has also come to be used for describing commonly recurring literary and rhetorical devices, motifs or clichés in creative works. -Wikipedia When I first learned about tropes, I thought they were something to avoid at all cost. Then I noticed many titles in genres that I write for mention tropes. I […]
Grieving – and Moving On – in Romance & #Giveaway
We all know grieving is a part of life. It’s not a fun part, but it happens to all of us. In fact, the only way to avoid grieving is to never love anyone or anything. My next release is about two people who know plenty about loss. The heroine has been widowed for 14 […]
Celebrating 90 years of life and a Giveaway
Watching the beautiful sunrise from my back porch as I think about my mother’s mother. We celebrated her 90th year on this planet. Her five surviving children, many of her grandchildren and a bunch of her great grandkids were there. It’s amazing when I think of everything she has accomplished the many storms her faith […]
What Do You Look For in a Hero?
I love a good alpha male romance. I struggle, though, to find good alpha male romance stories in today’s contemporary Christian fiction market. I can freely admit that this might just be my problem. Maybe I’m looking in the wrong places. Who knows? I’ve given it some thought, though, and I’ve come to a conclusion: alpha […]
For the Love of Christmas
I was asked to donate a book that had a Christmas scene in it to a group project. As I thought through my books, I realized that 8 of my 22 fiction books have very prevelent Christmas scenes or themes. Eight! What’s so odd about that is that I’ve only intentionally written 2 Christmas novellas […]
Love at First Sight?
Readers often criticize romance stories and romance books for the concept of “love at first sight.” The consensus most often expressed is that “love at first sight” isn’t “love”, as in the true love of your soul, but rather just a physical phenomenon, a pheromone reaction to certain identifiers that your psyche recognizes on a […]