Was your proposal PERFECT? You know. Flowers, starlight, candles, down-on-one-knee perfect? Straight-out-of-a-romance-novel perfect? Well, mine wasn’t. Are you confused? I was, too. You see, my then-boyfriend and I had been dating for over two years. He was getting ready to graduate in a month, and everything was up in the air. I was stressed out […]
Character Hometowns: Jasper Alabama #giveaway
Characters all need a hometown plus a life history, and it can become challenging to give them each a unique place to come from. An author needs to have some basic knowledge of that setting, so I mostly write about places I know. In Tackling the Fields, I went back to my mother’s roots to […]
What About Setting? #Giveaway
I write in layers. That means, my first draft is mainly dialogue, character thought, and emotion. Once I complete the book, I go back in and add setting, description, movement, body language, and timeline. I used to weave my setting and timeline in as I wrote the first draft. Until my editor asked if I […]
A New Leaf #Giveaway
So I got a new desk. I didn’t mean to. It was supposed to be for my husband. I do most of my furniture shopping on Facebook Marketplace and flea markets. I’d found a white desk just like it a few months ago, but it was three hours away. So when I found this one […]
One More Question
Dating can be stressful. I’m so glad I’m no longer in the dating game. If first dates are awkward, blind dates are on par with prying broken sticks beneath my fingernails. First dates could end in a number of ways. She liked him, but he wasn’t interested. He liked her, but she put him in […]
My Regards to Elvis
My Regards to Elvis Sometimes an author will add an element to book one in a series and then decide to carry the theme through to the end of the series. For example, Vivian Emerson in Irresistibly Yours liked to collect seashells and make stuff with them which she sold in The Clever Mermaid. Both […]
Revisiting Characters
A Texas Bond, book three in my Texas Hill Country series, officially released last week. It was inspired partly by my husband and I dabbling in flea marketing after shopping them for years. The picture I included is the booth we had full of items we created or repurposed. It was fun fitting our […]
Family Connections + Giveaway
Family, where would we be without them? I asked the authors of InspyRomance if they had any books based on family and got a hailstorm of information. We all seem to love seeing family connections in books and writers are glad to oblige. I always said, if I could only have one child, I wanted […]
A Valentine Excerpt & Devotional
You might be surprised to learn that this romance author doesn’t love Valentine’s Day. Hold off on the pitchforks and mob for a sec, I’ll explain. I don’t love Valentine’s Day for the same reason I don’t love Mother’s Day. See, my mom always used to tell us that while she appreciated the nice things […]
Double Trouble # Giveaway
With eighteen, soon to be nineteen Contemporary Romance titles under my belt, there isn’t much I haven’t put in a book. But never twins. Until A Texas Bond. When I was a teenager, I had this fantasy world in my head where I’d get married someday and have twins. After my son was born, I […]