I visited Wyoming for about a day a long time ago, and I liked the looks of the state. When I decided to write a romance about a rich but entirely too self-confident man, I set it in Wyoming and made him a rancher. In real life, ranches have boundary…
And I didn’t even realize it at the time. I worked on the story I now call Second Chance Reunion for many years off and on. I titled it Desert Wind and started with a simple idea. Then after a while it stumped me. When I began writing the story…
“Meanwhile, back at the ranch,” was a cliché by the mid-twentieth century, and it probably was used for another fifty years previously, the heyday of the American Western. This phrase in the old movie serials switched focus from one scene to another. With Book 4, the Selkirk Family Ranch series…
Discussions about pen names versus real names keep coming up. I use my real name, not merely because it is unique in this country, but also because my name has a history in the comics biz. So why not let people who know me learn about my novels? I’ve used…
Writing Defiant Diva was a challenge–because the heroine of this romance novel is the villain of the previous book in the Singers in Love series. That’s right. The villain. How could I get into the head of a destructive opera star and make her sympathetic and believable? They say a…
Such is the love modern readers have for Jane Austen’s witty and romantic novels that many authors have dared to write alternate Jane Austen novels, novellas, short stories, and so on. In fact, there has been in recent years a large outpouring of fiction that attempts to satisfy the fantasy…
This news deserves an exclamation point because I wrote the first draft of Haunted Tenor in 2007, and here it is the end of 2017 and it is finally releasing. The backstory: My favorite opera is Verdi’s Don Carlo. The reason it’s my favorite might seem obvious: I’m an…
I found this fascinating. In Robert Tombs’ The English and Their History, I came across a line that actually caused me to think of Richard III in a new light. Hard to do, considering the dozens of histories and novels I have read that exhaustively discuss Richard III’s villainous (and…
In 2016, I wrote the first draft of Cowgirl Rescue and then found a lovely cover for it and bought it. That was in July. I didn’t know for sure what the title of the third Selkirk Family Ranch book would be, so I had the cover designer dummy up…
In my newest guest blog post talking about writing, I discuss writing series books. As you may know, I’ve been writing the Selkirk Family Ranch series for a while, and I’m currently finishing up Book 3. At the end of the post, I mention that I’m looking for opinions and…
