Author’s Blog

Valentine’s Day

Do you love it or hate it? You can make a case either way. Valentine’s Day can feel like one of those contrived opportunities to sell us candy, flowers, cards, or whatever some marketing genius wishes to promote.  It can be depressing to some people, a trap that reinforces the notion that if you aren’t […]

Ewww Leeches!

Highlighting Petie McCarty’s research into Regency medicine and the use of (shudder) leeches. Coming from a scientific background and career, I’m no stranger to research so I eagerly dove into research for weeks for each of my novels before the first draft ever started, checking everything from habitat and indigenous species to climatic conditions of […]

Writing to Order

I received this picture and a lovely thank you this week from the reader who won one of my contests last year. The prize was a short story for which she chose specifications. In this case she wanted a scandal caused by a cat. That took some thought! She also wanted a gruff alpha hero, […]

Beauty’s Poisons

This week we are Highlighting Historical author Cari Davis, and her research into poisons. One of the things I love about writing historical romances is discovering interesting tidbits during my research, like the use of arsenic as a beauty aid during the 1800s. For my novel, Fool’s Gold, I knew the villain would use arsenic […]

Fiction and Family Trees

Family, as I’ve written before, is one of my passions. One of the ways that manifests itself is my ongoing absorption in that 21st century form of ancestry worship, genealogy. History and family are tightly linked in my mind and in my writing. I never met a clue about an ancestor I didn’t want to […]