Author Archive

Guest Post

Guest Post: “My Crush on Lt. Joe Kenda” by Candice Gilmer

(All pictures from the Homicide Hunter Facebook page)

My name is Candice Gilmer, and I write romance. And I love watching Discover ID. Especially Homicide Hunter, and Lt Joe Kenda.

Yep, that’s right, Discovery ID is the channel that has all true crime mysteries.

And I do have a bit of a crush on Lt. Joe Kenda, both the real man, because, wow, that voice, and the actor that plays the younger version of Kenda in the show, Carl Marino, because, well, what a cutie. (Pictured is the real Joe Kenda on the left and Carl Marino kneeling on the right)

But that’s not the big reason I spend hours watching Homicide Hunter. I watch several of the shows on Discover ID. Some of my favorites are A Crime to Remember, Web of Lies, and Surviving Evil. There are more, of course, but I can’t think of all of them. I spend a decent amount of time watching just about anything they put up on Investigation Discovery.

Part of the reason I love Homicide Hunter is because they have a lot in common with what I write.

Do I write murder mystery romances? Nope. Though my husband swears I probably could with as many of these shows that I watch, and I can usually guess the killer in the end.

As Lt. Joe says:

“Murder is simple… People are capable of anything.”

And they are—if I’ve learned anything watching them, people are crazy and can do anything when their emotions go nuts.

And emotion is one of the things I connect with. I have to, in order to write stories. The idea of what makes people do what they do fascinates me.

What makes a person kill his friend? A wife murder her husband? How did she cross that line?

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Essential Beginnings Kennedy Layne
Q&A

Q&A + GIVEAWAY: Elizabeth Moss of ROSE BRIDE

Dual joy/pain of these Q&As? Our TBR pile is currently so full of books we’d have to be millionaires (though, I’d settle for several thousand-aires) to afford them all. And just when I think I’ve honed the discipline to resist, Elizabeth Moss, brilliant author of Rose Bride, comes along and—long story short, I have so much to read now, including Rose Bride, which is 1. amazing and 2. out now!

FAVORITE MOVIES

What are your five favorite movies with romance/romantic elements?

You’ve Got Mail

Pride & Prejudice

French Kiss

Casablanca

Kate & Leopold

Describe your favorite scene from each one (you can included a YouTube clip if you would like).

You’ve Got Mail – my fav scene is where Joe Fox visits Kathleen Kelly when she has a cold. He tucks her into bed and hands her tissues while she tells him about Elizabeth Bennett in Pride and Prejudice. It ought to be unromantic – but of course, it’s absolutely the opposite and shows that these two are meant to be a couple.

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Guest Post

Guest Post: Amanda Forester’s Top 5 Most Exciting Things About Starting a New Series

The beginning of a new series is an exciting time. The curser blinks at you on the computer screen and you pause a moment before beginning. This new book could be anything, the possibilities are endless. It’s exciting! It’s terrifying!

Here are my top five most exciting things about starting a new series.

1. Freedom of imagination. In writing a new series I get transported somewhere new and get to explore a whole new world with interesting new people. It is fun to let the wheels turn and see where it all goes.

2. Freedom from insistent characters. At the risk of sounding slightly insane, Lady Kate has been haunting me. I have been thinking about her story for years. YEARS. She demanded I write it and now that I have I can have a bit of peace. Well, now I’m bothered by Darington to write his story…

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Sisters in Love Melissa Foster
Q&A

Q&A: Rachel Kramer Bussel from BEGGING FOR IT

You caught us. We’re big nerds about the writing/publishing process, or How It Really Gets Made: Book Edition, so when we heard Begging For It was going to be an Erotica anthology written for all kinds of women, by women, we had to get just a touch serious. It’s a collection that’s immediately dear to our hearts and we’re so lucky to get a brief peek into the mind of its editor, Rachel Kramer Bussel. So we probed a little about the editing process along with our usual never-ending grill about Romance favorites and snack choices (because we’re still us). Love the glimpse from our Q&A? Lucky you, Begging For It is out right now!

What’s the most exciting part of putting together an Erotic Romance collection (besides the obvious)?

I always look for the sweet spot in terms of variety so my readers remain interested. I want them to find the book something greater than the sum of its parts, where the stories do somewhat speak to each other in some way without repeating scenarios.

 

What’s the most difficult part?

It’s always tough to have to turn down stories, but I was really impressed with how the authors I did include tackled the concept of “fantasy.” That was the main theme but they took it and ran with it, so I think the final book has sexual fantasies readers have likely considered before, or possibly shared, and plenty readers haven’t.

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Autumn Thorns Yasmine Galenorn
Guest Post

Guest Post: “My Sister, Bro? Don’t Even Think About It!” by Kate Meader

Ah, the best friend’s sister Romance trope—it’s a favorite of Romance readers everywhere. It’s taboo. It’s bromance-threatening. It’s sexy as hell. We love it because the relationship is riddled with tension from the get-go. But I have to admit I was reluctant to delve into the troperific waters on this one for my latest book One Week to Score. Because as awesome as this set up is to kick start a story, relying on the brother-finding-out as the primary conflict feels like a cop out. Any hero who won’t stand up to his best bud and claim the woman he loves isn’t much of a hero. So a best-friend’s-sister romance done well should use this as the surface conflict but will peel it back to reveal so much more.

With Flynn and Olivia in One Week to Score, I knew I’d have to add a few more bumps to their road to true love. How about an old friendship that was blossoming into something else before it mysteriously upended? Or an acute case of hate-lust that can only be sated with a beach resort fling … on what should have been the heroine’s honeymoon? Add in a disastrous wedding day that imploded with a little help from our hero, and it looks like Flynn’s breach of the bro code is the least of his problems.

I always like a little gray in my heroes, guys who don’t always do the right thing but usually do it for the right reasons. That’s Flynn, whose heart (and another important part of his anatomy!) is so big that it rules his brain, leading to some pretty sketchy decisions. Sometimes things have to go a lot wrong before they can go a little right-and when it’s as sexily wrong as One Week to Score, that little bit of right can probably wait through a few sizzling bouts in the sack!

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Q&A

Q&A: Amy Andrews of PLAYING BY HER RULES

Amy Andrews, author of Playing by Her Rules (out today!), gives us so much to swoon about in this Q&A! Seriously, our weekend is already packed with movies and books we got nostalgic about just reading this. Join us as we pick her brain!

FAVORITE MOVIES:

What are your five favorite movies with romance or romantic elements?

  1. Notting Hill
  2. Love Actually
  3. My Big Fat Greek Wedding
  4. Saving Helen
  5. Bridget Jones’s Diary

 

Describe your favorite scene from each one (you can include a Youtube clip if you want as well).

Notting Hill – my absolutely favourite scene is the finale at the press conference. I’ve seen that movie at least 20 times and I swear, when She starts playing and they’re smiling at each other across the room I swoon every single time.

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Guest Post

Guest Post: “What’s Wrong With the Box Again?” by Amy Lane

I’ll be honest. My first warning usually comes when a friend or a colleague says to me, “Oh, you’re so brave!”

Sounds like a compliment, doesn’t it? Uh-huh. Brave—we all want to be brave, right?

It might be, but “You’re so brave!” for me is usually followed by an Amy Lane sized crap-bomb that could spatter a city block. When my nearest and dearest are saying, “You’re so brave!” they are not infrequently edging away from me, reaching into boxes for rain ponchos and checking to make sure their kaiju shelters are stocked for the shitstorm to come.

For example, when my bestie and beta reader got to the end of Immortal, she said, “Oh, Amy—you’re so brave to kill off both main characters and have their happy ever after happen as they wandered the forest around their homes after death.” This translated into, “People will hate this ending. They will loathe it. They will .gif bomb the crap out of you on Goodreads, and you won’t understand and cry on me until my cornflakes get soggy from 3000 miles away.”

And because I was me, I put my little tin hat on, grabbed my broomstick, mounted my dying pony and galloped right into that windmill and got knocked right on my ass.

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Cover Reveals

Cover Reveal: HOW TO IMPRESS A MARQUESS by Susanna Ives

The room was filled with audible sighs (mostly from me) when we first read about How To Impress a Marquess (out November 1st, 2016). The latest from Susanna Ives is the perfect storm of everything we love: tragic childhoods, humor, an edge-of-your-seat romance, and fancy Victorian gowns! We can barely wait to get to the cover, so we’ll turn things over to the author herself, Susanna Ives:

I’m an armchair actress. I grew up on the stage and regard writing as a surrogate theater. Being a writer allows me to mentally play every part despite being a petite, middle-aged writer with a soft southern accent. My favorite plays are farces such as The Nerd, Noises Off, and of course, The Importance of Being Ernest. The first books in the Wicked series, Wicked Little Secrets and Wicked, My Love, reflect my love of farce comedy. So I wasn’t sure what I was diving into when I started How to Impress a Marquess because the hero and heroine suffer from childhoods of neglect or abuse—not the material of light farce. I had to strike a delicate balance between the humor and serious emotional elements. The hero and heroine fought their mutual attraction for years because if they gave into their desire, they would face painful personal demons. Yet only through surrendering to their love and owning their hurt could they achieve their deserved Happily Ever After. Despite my early reservations, I found I enjoyed drilling into the emotional lives of the characters, expanding my armchair theatrical horizons.

Alright, we know what you’ve been waiting for! Here’s the cover to How To Impress a Marquess:

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Giveaway, Guest Post

Guest Post + GIVEAWAY: “Summer, Summer, Summertime!” by Julie Ann Walker

As anyone who lives in Chicago will tell you, winters are a bitch. We’re talking bundle up, hunker down, and simply endure. Which is probably why I began writing my Deep Six series, set in the Florida Keys. It’s a way for me to escape all the ice and snow and wind — even if that escape is only in my mind. I always tell my husband that, December through March, I could live anywhere but Chicago.

On the flipside, come summertime, there’s nowhere I’d rather be than the City of Broad Shoulders. And to celebrate summer in Chicago and the release of Devil and the Deep, I’ve compiled a list of my top five favorite things about Chicago in the summer.

  1. The Chicago Cubs! Those lovable losers — although they’re big winners this year. There’s nothing quite like walking onto Wrigley Field, noshing on a traditional Chicago-style ballpark dog, and watching the “boys of summer” play nine innings.

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Cover Reveals

Cover Reveal: WHAT THE DUKE DOESN’T KNOW by Jane Ashford

We were so delighted when we got the sneak peek to What The Duke Doesn’t Know‘s cover we just had to ask the author a little more about it. So, without further ado, we turn the (metaphorical) microphone over to the amazing Jane Ashford!

Why am I so excited about the release of What the Duke Doesn’t Know? The book has a very original heroine. Only half English, Kawena grew up in Polynesia, giving her an outsider’s view of Regency culture. It also has a charming hero, Lord James Gresham, who’s been sailing the seas in the British Navy since the age of sixteen. He’s not fully at home in England either. The two have that in common. Several of James’s beguiling brothers make an appearance. Missing jewels turn up in a humorous place.

Through it all, James is very glad that his father the duke doesn’t know: that James was called a thief and nearly shot; that James is traipsing all over England with a South Seas beauty; that James has thrown the idea of a ‘proper English bride’ to the four winds. Because what else can he do when he’s bowled over by the most dazzling woman?

You heard it straight from the lovely Jane Ashford herself. There’s so much to be excited about for this Cover Reveal and we are thrilled to host it! The minute we saw it, we knew it was one of our favorite Historical covers, possibly ever. There’s just so much charm and—You know what? We’ll stop teasing! Check out this stunning cover below and get What The Duke Doesn’t Know September 6th, 2016:

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