Category: Life

Life, Romance Novels

The Story Behind the Story – Midnight Cowboys’ Rohn

A lovely email from a reader this morning prompted me to write this post. She had just finished reading Midnight Ride, featuring Tyler Jenkins as the hero and Rohn Lerner as his boss and future hero of Book 2 in the Midnight Cowboys series titled MIDNIGHT WRANGLER. She was curious to know how to pronounce Rohn’s name, because of the odd spelling with the ‘h’. I totally get that!! I hate when I’m reading a book and I don’t know how the name is pronounced so I decided to clear up the doubt for readers of the series right now. ROHN IS PROUNOUNCED LIKE “JOHN” Why the added ‘h’? There’s a good reason. Picture it… I’m in Vegas for the PBR Finals a couple of years ago (that’s Professional Bull Riders, for you city folk) and my friends and I are sitting in the bar at Mandalay Bay, if memory serves. There are bull riders and fans alike swarming around like bees on a summer day, and good bar real estate was hard to procure but we managed to grab a table and four stools, and the drinks were flowing. Next to us in that crowded bar sat a sexy […]

Life

Go, Cowboys! Ooh Rah!

My life is pretty damn surreal and amazing, if I do say so myself. In the course of researching and writing 50+ books over the  past 9 years or so, I’ve met some pretty fabulous people, from cowboys, to military, to restauranteurs, who provide me with inspiration and fodder for my stories. Sometimes, all of those folks collide. And sometimes I get really cool stuff too! Case in point… the lovely folks I met from Oklahoma through Joseph’s Fine Foods in Drumright while researching my cowboy book set at OSU in Stillwater through one of my Army contacts who was then a student there. Add to that one of my old USMC contacts who happened to be a door gunner on a CH-53 and deployed to Afghanistan and you’ve got the makings of a really cool freaking story of how in 2013 a romance writer from NY ordered an OSU Cowboys Pistol Pete flag from Amazon and shipped it to Camp Bastion to be flown in a helicopter appropriately called a ‘Super Stallion” over the Helmand Province during combat operations for Operation Enduring Freedom. The crew reportedly ‘had a little excitement’ during that flight. Hand to God, it’s all the truth. I’ve got the documentation […]

bull riding, Cowboys, Events, Life, writing romance

#RWA2014 San Antonio, TX – What I did on my summer vacation

My trip to San Antonio, TX was hot (well over 100 degrees daily), interesting, amazing, exhausting, eye opening and unforgettable. I went from meetings with industry professionals at the conference at the Riverwalk, to culinary adventures in Market Square, to a video filming for Amazon Kindle Love Stories and Kindle Worlds, to absorbing local color at the Cowboy Dancehall.  I now know there are more cowboys and tortillas (for breakfast lunch and dinner) in the state of Texas than anywhere else, that Prickly Pears are purple and that you can indeed have bull riding, dancing and live music all simultaneously under one roof. All in all, there were many things learned, new friends made, and old ones revisited and it was well worth the trip from NY and the time spent away from the WiP. Below are a few highlights in pictures.