What I Love About a Small Town ~ @AuthorKristina Knight

Some of my favorite books - ever - are set in small towns. From childhood favorites like the Little House books to my friend Liz Flaherty's  Back to McGuffey's or One More Summer. As much as I love La Nora's city-based In Death series, its the books that are set in small towns - like Northern Lights or her Bride Quartet - that keep me coming back for more. I could list more small town authors, but I'm sure you know where I'm going with this. I love a small town romance.

I’ve finished up a 4 book series set in a small Missouri town on a lake...very similar to the town where I grew up. There are dairy farms and orchards around it, the lake type of stuff, and there are five men who grew up together. Each of them left town for a while, but they've all come home, and are finding that even life in a small town can be filled with twists and turns.

I’m getting started on a new 4 book series, also set in a small town, but with a hint of danger and suspense - and I’m super excited about it. 

One thing I started doing differently with my first small-town-series is keeping a series bible going - there are character lists and business lists and some general plotting information. I'm going to include blurbs of the different books when I get to that stage, too.

Setting up my town with the series bible is always one of my favorite parts of putting a series together. Figuring out how the town is laid out, where things were located, how those locations might feed into the plots of the different books...there is always a moment at the beginning where it’s just plain overwhelming, but once the town has its boundaries, I find it's much simpler to write without overthinking the location of the local bar or the grocery store in relation to the heroine’s neighborhood or how the residents would get from downtown to a local nature preserve.

I'm also having fun setting up my pinterest boards and finding hero (and heroine!) inspiration for the new series...I've also found some housing inspiration that is making me consider more real-life home renovations for next spring!

Mostly, though, I'm finding myself falling back in love with small towns and farmers and orchard owners...and all the lovely and cantankerous and (sometimes) obnoxious people who live there...and I can't wait to share the books with you all!

Are you a fan of small town romances or do you prefer big cities and a more jet-set lifestyle? And, in either case, what keeps you invested in the hero and heroine?

Kristina Knight’s sweet romance, Moonlight Match is available now! 

Moonlight Match is part of the Resort to Romance continuity project ~ 10 sweet romances, all set during a week-long matchmaking event in the Bahamas! 

Aster Harrington believes in love but love doesn’t seem to believe in her. She’s hoping Goldie and Ginny, the matchmakers who’ve matched on two generations of Harringtons, can work a little love magic for her…

Some call Ethan Talbot rigid, but he prefers to think of himself as prepared. Unfortunately, when he’s matched with Aster Harrington at Joy Island’s Matchmaking Week, all those carefully prepared plans go out the window. He can get back to finding a suitable wife once he’s home in New York. After all, how much damage can one week in the Bahamas do to his plans?


Kristina Knight is a contemporary romance author, part-time swim-kid wrangler, and full-time ThinMints enthusiast. You can find out more the book and Kristina on her website, and feel free to stalk follow her on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram.

Writer's Life Top Ten

by Joanne Rock

Writer conferences are good perks! With Catherine Mann

Being a writer isn’t all fun and games. The down side involves lots of isolation, not much affirmation, rejection no matter where you are in your career, and constant preoccupation that makes it tough to focus on anything but the work in progress. Being an optimist, however, I choose to focus on the positives. So here’s my personal top ten list for what I love most about being a writer.

1)     Work in pajamas. Every day. That’s as much fun as it sounds. My pajama game is strong, and I have cute pairs for all occasions.

2)     No alarm clock. Now that my youngest has finished high school, I have no reason to wake with the roosters and can sleep until I’m no longer tired. There’s no better recipe for mental clarity than getting adequate rest.

3)     Flexible schedule. Sometimes my family needs me—for days on end. I can put down a book and pick  it up later, which is a wonderful perk. As long as a book is done by the deadline, it doesn’t matter if I work hardest in the early days, the middle days, or if I write non-stop for the last week before a deadline.

4)     It’s a fun topic for cocktail conversation. If I tell someone I’m a writer at a party, it’s not a way for me to talk about myself. It’s the ultimate ice breaker for other people to chat about themselves. Because the line “I’m a writer” is always answered—sooner or later—with “Have I got a story for you.”

5)     Research trip! Exploring new places is one of the best ways to heighten creativity and inspire new stories. It’s not quite the same as a vacation, but it’s darn close.

6)     I write what I love. I choose the storylines and the characters, so there’s no one to blame but myself if I’m not having fun with a story. I try to mix up tropes and character types to keep my storytelling fresh and my Muse engaged.

7)     Sexy times. Does that ever get old?

8)     Romance. My genre is the best one because the hard work my characters put into their relationships always pays off. I realize that’s not always true to life, and that good, deserving people have their hearts broken. But those aren’t my stories. I can focus on the relationships where effort and sacrifice are rewarded.

9)     Readers. Love of romance brings a wonderful group of like-minded book-lovers into my life every day. I have made lifelong friends because of what I do.

10)  The emotional reward of creating something meant to be enjoyed. Hearing from a reader “I loved your book” or “Your book gave me a welcome escape when I was going through a hard time” is incredibly fulfilling.

So I’m on deadline this week, and even though this is when writing is toughest, I choose to focus on the positive. I feel fortunate to do what I love every day. What about you? Do you have a favorite aspect of work that you do? Share with me for a chance to win a copy of any book from my 2018 backlist!

Five Steps to a Becoming An Author

I've been a published writer for a heap of years and I'm often asked how I started. I'd dabbled as far back as school. Started stories but with no idea how to finish them.

This is my first published writing ever. It was bought by a magazine (still going strong) called Women's Weekly and they paid me £20. I was finally in print.

Ambition # 1 ticked.

I wrote an article about having a baby in Bahrein (she's now the lovely Mummy Blogger Hooked), was paid £40 for that and I had the money for a portable typewriter. Two articles meant it wasn't a fluke. I was a writer!

Ambition #2 ticked.

Every afternoon the BBC broadcast an iconic radio programme for small children called Listen With Mother that began "Are you sitting comfortably? Then I'll begin...'

I had small children and every afternoon we sat comfortably and listened. There were songs, poems and a story and I thought - as you do - how hard can it be to write a little story like that?

The answer was, is, that's it's a lot harder that you think. Starting is easy... Of you go with a lost button, a plain coathanger, a homeless cat.... Finishing it was the tough one but I battled through with the plain coathanger. It was a rubbish but I'd written a beginning, a middle and an end.

My second attempt, with the homeless cat found a home with D C Thomson, a famous British company publishing magazines and comics. A New Home was published in their Twinkle annual that year. Twinkle was a "picture paper" for little girls and I wrote a lot of stuff for them. (This is one...) Poems (they paid best), short stories for the annual and a ton of comic strip stories for the picture paper itself. I just wrote the words (and described what should be in the picture) - I didn't draw the pictures.

It looks very simple but you have to cram a lot into a very few words. It's direct, active and low on adverbs. Very good training. I was earning an income from writing, having meetings with a publisher to discuss what I might to do next. I was being taken seriously as a writer.

Ambition #3 ticked.

I also had half a dozen stories accepted by Listen With Mother and still have tape recordings somewhere of the programmes in which they were read out. That was huge. Really. And my son's Reception teacher had the whole class listen to one of them - and I made the local newspaper!

Ambition # 4 well and truly ticked.

It was fun and I loved doing this but it was no way to make a living as a writer. I needed to move on. I sold a few more articles to women's magazines, including the iconic The Lady.

The next big step was winning a competition in the magazine Writing with a short ghost story, which was a huge confidence boost. But where next?

I wanted to write full length fiction. I had just embarked on a children's story (involving a magic carpet and sheikhs....) when I read an article in a British newspaper about Anne Hampson and Charlotte Lamb (both living in tax exile - Charlotte in the Isle of Man, Anne in the West Indies.  Ambition #5 was to be Anne Hampson!

It was a very steep learning curve. I completed three manuscripts, got encouraging feedback from Mills and Boon and finally, with my fourth attempt - this time just three chapters and cheeky note saying that I'd like to know if they liked it enough for me to bother finishing it - I hooked the interest of an editor. She liked the writing, wasn't convinced by the plot and told me to start again.

I walked around in a daze for a week.

This was huge, my big chance and if I blew it...

I rethought my heroine and gave her some sound motivation, put her in the most uncomfortable situation I could imagine and nine months later - after three rewrites! - I finally got the call to tell me that they would be publishing An Image of You.

Ambition #5 ticked and nailed to the wall!

I loved the original cover and I also love that Mills and Boon have recently reissued this book in digital format so that it's available again.

My next book, The Sheikh's Convenient Princess, published early next year, will be my 65th title for Mills and Boon.

So do I have any ambitions left? Well I've never made tax exile like Anne Hampson and Charlotte Lamb, but yes. There's always something bigger, something just over the horizon to be reached for. I'll keep you posted!

Liz Fielding's A Summer's Lease will be free on Amazon from 8th-12th September.

The Sheikh's Temporary Princess?

The good news is that my latest book is now going through the long procedure that starts after I've finished it and my editor has said "Yes!"

Copy-editing (to catch the boring stuff like typing errors, spelling mistakes, whether I got into a muddle with my time-line and check that my heroine's eyes didn't change colour half way through. (None of that happened!)

It's still without a title, although in my head it will always be The Sheikh's Temporary Princess. I'll let you know what the combined might of editorial, marketing and the tealady decide when they've made up their mind.

The publication date - so far - is February 2017 which seems a very long time to wait here's link to my Pinterest page where I gathered loads of lovely inspirational pictures of jewellery, clothes, shaded courtyards and of course my hero.

Meanwhile, allow me to introduce Sheikh Ibraham al-Ansari (Bram to those who know him), former downhill race ski champion, superb horseman whose string of polo ponies are named after the brightest stars, The disgraced and disinherited heir to the throne of Umm al-Basr.

He's in a jam. (Make that another jam.)  He's got a temporary PA from the fabulous Garland Agency  - the uber efficient Ruby Dance - but what he really needs is a temporary wife.

"Garland Girls" have a legendary status, but will this "Girl" live up to the billing and save him from an arranged marriage?

Serial Liz Fielding fans will remember that Amanda Garland first appeared in her brother's story, Dating Her Boss and I thought she was so interesting that I wrote her own story. It's told in the The Baby Plan.

Oh, and her step-daughter, Sadie Redford, runs the car hire company that gave things a helping hand in the Sheikh's Unsuitable Bride. Which reminds me. Sadie really deserves her own happy ending.

Eve Gaddy: Procrastination Redux

Yes, I've talked about procrastination before. But since I'm procrastinating again it seemed like a good time to write another blog about it.:)

I'm sure there's a very good, subconscious reason for procrastination. For instance, last night, instead of writing (which I hadn't been doing all day because I was, you guessed it, procrastinating) I flipped on the TV to the show Nashville. No, I don't watch Nashville but something caught my eye so I started watching the last ten or fifteen minutes of the episode. And I heard a song that I not only love but that is a great song for the playlist of my current book. Fate. Or magic. Or maybe kismet. It's called Longer by Clare Bowen and Sam Palladio. Here's the link. http://bit.ly/1IDRdvA . I also post a song for the day on my social media sites and this is a brand new song I can post. Good thing all around, right?

See, there was something in the air that told me to watch it because I needed a song that will drop me right into my story. When you are highly distractible a trigger song is very helpful. And yes, I'm highly distractible. Where was I? Oh, yes, procrastination.

Today I found I couldn't write a scene until I knew a particular word one of the characters would use. (A twenty-eight year old cowboy and the word, I now know, is awesome.) Anyway, I had to email my friends, ask my kids and solicit suggestions on my Facebook author page for "the perfect word." Sometimes I'm able to write a word that's close and just make a note and come back to it. That might read something like this: good-looking (not exactly but sorta, more like hot but not that either, FIND WORD)

Yesterday it was the pool table. My characters are playing pool and I needed the perfect pool table. Very cool, over the top antique pool table. I found it fairly quickly but I wanted to be able to put that picture on the website for the new series that the story is a part of, and the only pictures of that table I've found are copyrighted. This involved an exhaustive look through the Internet and on a list of websites with royalty free images and that sort of thing. So far I haven't been able to find it.

Sometimes I simply don't want to do something so I procrastinate--I'm talking about writing mostly, but of course, it carries over to all facets of life. But very often I find there is a reason I can't do X, Y or Z and when I procrastinate I find out what that reason is.

Then there's the ultimate tool of procrastination. The Internet. Email, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram... and one that's particularly addicting, Pinterest. Everyone knows that pinning pictures on Pinterest is a necessary part of a writer's creative process. Honest, it's not just procrastination. I really need to look at all those pictures of hot guys . . . After all, I write romance.

Eating the Elephant

It's that time of year when we clear the decks, resolve to do better and get on the self-improvement kick. Or not.

I stopped making New Year resolutions a long time ago. About the time when I realised that they didn't last beyond Twelfth Night.

This year, though -  just after New Year, when I'd scarfed down the last of the chocs, I knew there was one thing I had to do.  Lose some weight. Really. My knees were begging me.

There should be a warning written on every publishing contract. Sign this and, unless you are an exercise bunny with a will of iron when it comes to biscuits, this contract will add 20lb to your weight before you know what happened.

In the new house I have to walk up two flights of stairs to the office and about half way up the second flight last week, my knees said "enough". Loudly. Actually, just lately they've been complaining when I put my feet to the floor in the morning and pain is the one thing that will make me pass on cake.

Since I have absolutely no faith that the scales will have survived the move with any degree of accuracy, I decided not to worry about poundage. I'd let my chatty knees do the counting. They'll keep me in line. The jacket that won't quite button around the middle and the black velvet trousers I've never worn will tell me when I'm making progress.

I'm not doing anything fancy. I've cut out bread, upped the level of protein to carbs (I'm eating a lot of fish) and while I couldn't say I leapt out of bed this morning after just three days the knees took the move without complaint. The stairs are already easier and I've switched from Radio 4 (talk radio) to Radio 2 (pop music radio) and I'm jogging around the kitchen while I work to those oldies that were the soundtrack of my youth.

I've lost maybe two pounds (the first few days it always falls off) but the difference is already noticeable to me if no one else.

Exercise is the next step. I keep threatening to dig out the swimsuit and get to the pool. It's attached to the high school so they get first dibs on times and I have to figure out when I can fit it in.

I've made a start. That's the main thing. It feels a bit daunting at the moment, but losing weight is like writing a book. You know how it goes. How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.

Happy New Year!

What Was I Thinking? - Jennifer Ashley

I asked myself this question recently when I sat down to start a book I had contracted a year ago and hadn’t had the chance to mull over for a while. I’d written I think three other books in the meantime (I write under several different names for different publishers), so it had been a while since I visited that particular world.

It usually takes me a little bit of time to come off one book and get fully into another, but unfortunately I didn’t have time this time for a comfortable transition.

So there I was, facing Chapter 1, Page 1, and everything was gone.

Gone.

My story and characters had done a bunk, and the deadline was looming. Oh, I had the original synopsis I’d sold the book on, but. . . what was I thinking??

I banged my head against the keyboard, wailed to my friends, drove my husband crazy, ate chocolate and played computer games as the deadline drew closer. And then finally, finally, it clicked. (I have no idea how or why.) I suddenly found myself re-immersed in the world and chatting with the characters. The excitement bubbled up again, and I was off and running.

This isn’t the first time this has happened in my career, and it made me stop and wonder why, oh why, I wanted to be an author.

Authors work all the time (days, nights, weekends), we give up holidays for deadlines, and sometimes don’t have much of a life to speak of. We struggle to put into words the stories in our hearts which takes weeks, months, years. Then we send our beloved books out into the world to be publicly bashed by people who just weren’t grabbed by them.

Why, why, why do we do it?

For the money?

Not really. Though some writers make a nice living, and household name authors can make gobs, money in the writing world is by no means steady and reliable. A publishing house can close. The books can go out of print. A segment of the market can suddenly tank, and there you are adrift without a life raft. It’s much safer to go out and look for a traditional job in a solid company (with health benefits!).

For the fame?

Not really. I suppose many authors are at first bitten by the bug to see their name in print, but fame is relative. I’ve been to booksignings where everyone has read my books, loves them, and wants to buy everything I’ve ever written. I’ve also been to booksignings when even the bookseller has never heard of me, despite the fact that my books are on her shelves. The spotlight shifts as readers glom one author or subgenre and then move onto something new. Fame comes and fame goes. It’s even more nebulous than the income.

So what does that leave?

Love!

At the end of the day, I truly write for the love of it. Despite the frustrations and the moving spotlight and the financial uncertainty, I write because I love to tell stories. I also write because I love the readers who love stories.

I’ve had readers tell me my books have helped them get through a particularly difficult situation. I’ve had them tell me they love my characters and think of them as real people (as I do). An amazing number have told me they were so caught up in the books that they forgot to buy groceries, do laundry, or pick up their husbands!

I know when readers share these anecdotes with me that I’ve connected with them and their lives. I’ve done the job I set out to do as a writer—reach out to others.

When characters and stories come to me, dance around in my head, and then pour out my fingers, it is the greatest feeling in the world. It doesn’t matter if this particular book doesn’t bring in tons of cash, or make me famous, or win dozens of awards.

As long as what was within me goes out and connects with at least one other reader, I know I’ve done my job.

I guess that’s what I was thinking!

Jennifer

http://www.jennifersromances.com/