Setting the Record Straight

I’m taking a moment away from writing, in spite of a looming deadline, to go over a few things because first, I am a dirty rotten procrastinator who puts off work, but mostly because some reader misperceptions have come to light and I really would like to address them. It seems the point of some scenes were misinterpreted. Here are the two specific instances I’m referring to… In Valentine Cowboys there is a scene in a calving shed.  The two young ranch hands have to help a young cow deliver her first calf because this is a high risk birth. The cowboys take care of their work while the heroine watches, and in the end, they have sex with the heroine right there in the calving shed. There are many reasons I wrote this scene. They are… 1) To show how these two young ranch hands had to, for the first time in their lives, handle a difficult birth on their own because their boss had been pulled away. The two young cowboys are hard workers, but they can be jokers at times, and to have them be completely responsible for the life or death of not only the cow […]

A Prince Among Men: Prince Harry in Afghanistan

It was February of 2008. I’d written my military romance MODEL SOLDIER, set in Afghanistan, and as I watched the morning news, one story caught my attention. Britain’s Prince Harry had secretly been deployed to Afghanistan for 3 months. The news had just been leaked by the press and, now that he was exposed, Harry was being yanked out of the warzone. My writer’s brain was spinning. Can you say sequel? How perfect was this? I knew the Brits supplied air support to the forward operating bases where US and Afghani troops were stationed. A plot began to form–facts, wrapped in fiction. What if? What could have happened in this situation? That is the basis of A PRINCE AMONG MEN (March 2013) , the follow-up book to MODEL SOLDIER (Dec 2012) in my Red, Hot & Blue series, being rereleased through Samhain Publishing (originally put out back in 2008 by Linden Bay Romance). And how timely too, because as opposed to the climate in February 2008 when the 23-year old Harry was first, and secretly, deployed to Afghanistan (read about it in the Guardian), today, in 2012, the 28-year old Prince is in the news daily. Unfortunately, his presence is […]

Just Noodling Around

For my books I’ve done my fair share of research into things off the beaten path. The porn film industry for BUCKED. Clit piercings for FLANKED. Aphrodisiac sealife native to the Channel Islands for GILLIAN’S ISLAND. But nothing, NOTHING compares to today’s research for sheer WTF and OMG value. Today I researched hand fishing for Catfish. It’s called Hillybilly Handfishin’ on the Animal Planet TV show. Or noodling by the Oklahoma Wildlife Department. But the Bivins family, who have been perfecting this sport/skill for generations, just calls it grabbling. In fact, they start their kids off catching catfish by hand at 4 years old. The New York suburbonite in me, the one who is afraid of putting my hand in a pocket or my foot in a shoe without checking for spiders first, calls it insane! I guess I’m just a sissy that way, but if the concept of sticking my hand into an underwater hole in a riverbed so a catfish could bite it hadn’t already scared me off, this warning from the Big Fish Adventures website would have… “You definitely don’t want to go alone because it can be dangerous… You have to also watch out for the […]