Sara Reyes | Texas Book Festival Musings

George Duran
Originally uploaded by freshfiction

I went to the Texas Book Festival last weekend and as always it was fun to be in the company of books...yes, with the accompanying authors and readers! If you ever get a chance to go to a book festival, no matter how big or small, you owe it to your self as a reader to go at least once! That is the reason I used last year to drag along my husband. He only reads current events and a very occasional an adventure fiction novel, but I said that qualified as a reader and he needed to go. This year, I didn't need to prod or twist his arm, he made room in his calendar and in fact, he even scrutinized the schedule and marked the ones he planned on attending. I was amazed!

Gwen and I divided up the non-adventure reminders: Gwen picked the Young Adult tracks and of course George Duran, I got the rest! And so we were off to listen to authors talk about their books.

I'm not sure if there was a theme this year for picking books and authors, but I got the impression it was war. From the Civil War to Custer to World War I through WWII to the Iraq wars, there were books and authors covering it! And these sessions were usually standing-room only. I just missed getting to hear Jennet Conant talk about her book, THE IRREGULARS: Roald Dahl And The British Spy Ring In Wartime Washington. But we did squeeze into Jeremy Scahill's talk about BLACKWATER. A very thought provoking book about the out sourcing of our security including domestic security like natural diasters including Hurricane Katrina to mercanaries who are not accountable to any law or government entity.

But also learned how to be "posh" in a very practical manner! Robyn Moreno is an editor for Woman's Day and a native Texan. her new book, PRACTICALLY POSH offers many great tips, suggestions and ideas about living a posh life style with a not-so-posh checking account.

All-in-all, it was a great weekend in sunny, beautiful Austin and we came home with bags of books and a much lighter checking account. Ah, well, that's the way it goes with readers!

Check out our photos from the Texas Book Festival on Flickr.

We twittered all weekend while attending the festival.

Sara Reyes

Jennie Bentley | Home, Sweet Homicide!

I spent the first half of my life in the same house. My grandfather built it with his own two hands back in 1929, and when he died, my mother inherited it, and lived there until she died. It was my home through childhood and most of my teen years, until I headed out, to seek my fortune in the world.

Since then I’ve lived in...oh...roughly twelve more houses and a few apartments in a couple of different countries, cities, and states. I renovated my first home eight years ago; since then, I’ve owned and renovated seven more. Eight houses in eight years isn’t too bad of a track-record. Especially since most of them were renovated around our ears as we tried to go about our business as usual in the midst of paint and drywall mud and dust and men with their shirts off flexing their muscles as they drove nails and soldered pipes.

And it’s just really hard to keep going about business as usual when there are shirtless men driving nails and soldering pipes in the next room, isn’t there?

Anyway, it’s that background that caused Berkley Prime Crime to offer me a chance to create a series of Do-It-Yourself Home Renovation mysteries last year sometime. Something to capitalize on the current interest in ‘flipping’, and to snag the interest of all the women who tune in to watch Ty Pennington and Carter Oosterhouse flex their muscles every week.

Mmm...

Sorry about that. Slight digression there. As I was saying, something to snag the interest of the people who tune in to ‘Extreme Makeover, Home Edition’ and HGTV every week. Something with home improvement tips and Do-It-Yourself projects, some suspense, a little history, a few dead bodies, and a hot guy with his shirt off.

Yes, there really is a hot guy with his shirt off. His name is Derek, and he’s six feet tall, with hair that’s just a touch closer to blond than brown, melting, blue eyes, and all the right muscles in all the right places—on display—and he’s really, really good with his hands. Not to mention that he has power tools, and knows how to use them. Derek’s the one who teaches Avery—she’s the main character—the ABCs. About home improvement, I mean.

Avery meets Derek when she inherits her Aunt Inga’s Victorian cottage in tiny Waterfield, Maine, and decides that she’s going to spend the summer renovating the place, before putting it back on the market in the fall, hopefully to make a quick buck. Or a quick hundred thousand. A girl can hope, right? Flipping is ‘easy’ and ‘everyone’s doing it’, right?

Well, maybe not. As I know, and as Avery finds out, there’s a lot more to renovating a house than what you see on TV. It always costs more and takes longer than you think it will, and then there are those complications... And that’s where Derek comes in. He’s a local handyman, remodeler, and restorer, and he hires on to help Avery navigate the choppy waters of DIY. And the rest, as they say, is history. There are cats (Maine Coons, of course), scheming relatives (his and hers), historical intrigue dating all the way back to the French Revolution, stolen heirlooms, a missing professor, secret tunnels, a rotting corpse, a sexy Frenchman in a beret... and, as I mentioned, a hot guy with his shirt off. What more could any hot-blooded woman want?

“Fatal Fixer-Upper” first in the Do-It-Yourself Home Renovation mysteries, hit stores everywhere on November 4th. If you decide to check it out, I’d love to hear what you thought, as I’ll hopefully be writing this series for a while!

Jennie Bentley

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Jennie Bentley is the author of the Do-It-Yourself Home Renovation mystery series from Berkley Prime Crime. When she’s not writing about real estate, she’s buying it, selling it, or renovating it somewhere in Nashville, Tennessee. You can find out more about her at www.jenniebentley.com/ or www.theabcsofdiy.blogspot.com/

Cynthia Baxter | The Importance of Creating a Compelling Main Character

What goes into writing a good mystery? While it’s critical to have a compelling plot filled with twists and turns, I’ve always believed that the book’s heroine – and the development of her “real life” – was at least as important.

When I started writing the Reigning Cats & Dogs mystery series, I wanted the focus to be my protagonist, Jessica Popper. Jessie is a veterinarian with a mobile services unit, essentially a clinic on wheels. I chose to make her practice mobile instead of based in a regular office because she needed an excuse to go out into the community every day, talking to suspects and ferreting out clues. But since I love to incorporate humor in all my books, I wanted her to be sassy, independent, and strong-headed, as well as someone who was battling a few demons. The main one is her conflict over commitment, which provides the ups and downs she experiences with her boyfriend Nick. (I tried to model their relationship after the sparkling repartee in those wonderful old Katherine Hepburn-Spencer Tracy flicks – or one of my favorite movies of all times, It Happened One Night.)

The Reigning Cats & Dogs series was already moving along nicely when I came up with an idea for a second series, one that featured a travel writer. I’ve done some travel writing, and it occurred to me that it would be fun to set each book in a different location as my heroine researched a new spot for a magazine article. But as I started to write the Murder Packs a Suitcase mystery series, I wanted to create a heroine who was completely different from Jessie Popper. So I made Mallory Marlowe a little older, as well as less secure in her career and herself. Perhaps even more importantly, I made her central conflict the exact opposite of Jessie’s. While Jessie struggles with her fears of getting into a committed relationship, Mallory is dealing with the loss of hers, the result of her husband’s sudden death. And while the members of Jessie’s family all have four feet (one has wings), Mallory has two almost-adult children. That gives her a support system that Jessie doesn’t have – and isn’t sure she wants.

It’s been a challenge, alternating between the two series and having to go back and forth, getting into the head of each of my two heroines. Writing about two such different women requires a totally different mindset. I “hear” them in my head and I “see” them in various situations – and the experience is strangely different. Thank goodness that in the end, both Jessie and Mallory have the same goal: discovering “whodunnit!”

Cynthia Baxter
www.cynthiabaxter.com/

Karen White | Blending Women’s Fiction with the Paranormal—Is there such a thing?

I’m known for writing ‘grit lit’—Southern women’s fiction. My books are recognized not only by their Southern setting and characters, but also by their emotional intensity. So when I proposed the idea for THE HOUSE ON TRADD STREET to my agent, she was a little leery at first—especially after I told her that I planned to make this into a long-running series.

In this book I’ve blended my favorite elements of ‘grit-lit’ but threw in my passion for old houses, the City of Charleston, an historical mystery, and ghosts. The main characters are multi-layered with a lot of emotional baggage (ala Karen White books), but their dialogue is lighter, and snarkier, than my readers are probably used to. And, yes, my protagonist, Melanie Middleton, sees dead people.

So, how did I sell this idea as a marketable proposal to not only myself but to my agent and editor? After all, isn’t the publishing industry married to the ‘tried and true’ despite their insistence that they want something ‘fresh and new’? I made a deal with the devil (figuratively, of course). I promised my editor that I could still do a ‘grit lit’ novel every year—if I could just be allowed to sneak in these cool women’s fiction/paranormal mystery books in between. Seeing as how my books are usually around 120,000+ words, it was no mean feat promising two in a single calendar year. But I believed in this project and I signed the deal.

I am blessed with a really wonderful editor who likes what I write and trusts me a great deal. I think all of us (me, my agent and my editor) were holding our collective breaths as I worked on the book, hoping it would live up to its promise of being a book that my current readers would enjoy as well as one that would attract new readers. After all, I’ve always had a dash of the paranormal as well as a mystery in all of my books—this one just had a little more.

I’ll admit that I had a lot of fun writing THE HOUSE ON TRADD STREET. It’s a little lighter in tone than my previous books, and the dialogue between the two protagonists, Melanie and Jack, was the most fun I’ve had between the pages of a book in a long time. With ‘bated breath, I turned in the book and waited.

Luckily for me, my agent and editor loved the book as much as I did and they reinforced the decision to keep my name for this series because it was definitely a ‘Karen White’ book—recognizable by not only the southern setting but by likeable but flawed characters who have to work through internal and external conflicts—including a ghostly presence who’s not all that nice.

So, did I pull it off? Did I manage to merge women’s fiction with a paranormal romance? I think so, and early reviews are good. Nobody really knows what to call it—and that’s okay because I don’t know either. Maybe this series will be the beginning of a whole new genre! But I’d like to believe that I achieved that goal that I set for myself every time I sit down to write: to create characters readers will care about, and put them in a story that will make my readers feel every emotion, want to turn the pages, and give them a sigh of satisfaction when they get to the end. And that’s really what it’s all about in the end, isn’t it?

Karen White

The Memory of Water--- NAL/Accent--March 2008
The House on Tradd Street--- NAL Trade--November 2008L
Earning to Breathe --- NAL/Accent--March 2007"Critic's Choice" Atlanta Magazine, July 2007
www.karen-white.com/

Candace Havens | Secrets and Siblings

I grew up an only child, and I really liked it. (Smile) Except for the fact that I love to play board games and cards, and I didn’t always have a playmate.

But I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of siblings.

That’s why there are four Caruthers sisters and one brother in my new book "The Demon King and I." I wanted to write about that interaction between siblings. I have first hand experience after watching my own children, but I also did some research by hanging around and learning to understand how my friends interact with their brothers and sisters.

Take my friend Shannon’s comment about how one of her brother’s dresses. We were Christmas shopping a few years ago and she talked about how she bought him some decent clothes so he would wear something besides a t-shirt and jeans. It was her subtle way of telling him to grow up. I didn’t realize it, until just this moment but that sort of ended up in The Demon King and I. (Please, don’t tell her.)

I watched as another friend interacted with her two sisters. That dynamic was very interesting because the middle sister, my friend, has become the peacekeeper in the family. There is this constant battle for her to keep everyone happy, though it seldom works out that way.

My two best friends, Shannon and Rosemary, have become like sisters to me. We even have our own little family dynamic, though I’m pretty sure we are much kinder to one another than most siblings. But we can talk about anything, which is something I love.

So I want to know about you and your siblings. Are you like my kids, who grump at each other constantly but when the chips are down they are there for one another? They both have this thing that they can give each other a hard time, but no one from the outside better say anything derogatory. So tell me. And do you share secrets with your siblings?

Candace Havens
www.candacehavens.com/

Angela Steed | The Road to…Time Travel?

Her footsteps go where no other woman has walked before. Through a doorway our heroine treads into a fracture in the universe, and empty space becomes a walkway to her destination. Stonehenge is the beginning of her journey; a renowned world is the end. And everything else between is…nothing?

Science is an ingredient I really wanted to add to The Sea’s Embrace, but only as much as I could get away with in a romance novel. I managed to throw in enough to make it work, excluding a short prologue divulging the secret behind the mysterious floating orbs lighting the way. (You’ll have to read the story to find out about them.)

The true science comes with time travel. I’ve always been fascinated with the Bermuda Triangle. Ever wonder why things go missing there? Did you know there’s a similar phenomenon off the coast of Japan? Some scientists believe these two locations are connected beneath the earth by a black and white hole. Though it hasn’t been proven, and has caused a bit of controversy within the scientific community, most gurus would love to believe in this fantastic theory.

Think time travel. Not in a sense you can travel back in time and play lottery numbers already played. Wouldn’t that be nice? Think traveling from one place to another in the blink of an eye, think wormhole. Though in the case of my book, a short walk between the sea and sky takes our travelers to a legendary world as well as a different time.

So back to the book: I sent my characters into more chaos than one can endure, leaving science somewhat in the backdrop. After all, it’s a romance novel, so everything is centered around love. The story is adventurous, mind-boggling and dark, and in one reviewer’s words, “mentally exhausting.” No, it’s not the simplest romance novel to read, and there are several traumatic life or death scenes. But I believe anyone who wants something different and loves unusual sci-fi, fantasy love stories might actually enjoy it.

You can find more information, as well as an excerpt, at www.angelasteed.com/. I’m also on Myspace at www.myspace.com/angelasteed.

The Sea’s Embrace will be out at www.blacklyonpublishing.com/ sometime this month as an e-book. It’ll be available everywhere else on the official release date of November 1st.

Angela Steed

Sandi Shilhanek | E-Reader?

I think that sometime in the last week or so Oprah Winfrey was peeking at my list of topics I had written for this blog. One of my ideas was about e-readers. Now she’s made Amazon’s Kindle one of her favorite new things. Am I surprised? A little but only because it means she has now limited herself to purchasing books from Amazon, so I would have thought she’d like the Sony e-reader instead.

I have a Kindle and have had it for about seven months now. Yes, the downside is if I want an electronic book I have to order it from Amazon, but that doesn’t bother me. It also doesn’t have the backlight feature that many people like, but I’m typically in bed and asleep well before my husband, so the lack of a backlight doesn’t bother me.

I had seriously considered the Sony e-reader and well as another e-reader that many of my friends prefer, the E-Bookwise. However, the Sony wasn’t compatible with my MAC, so that eliminated that. Then I decided to get smart and compare the book prices between the E-Bookwise and the Kindle.

That comparison helped to cinch my decision. I would be able to save more with the Kindle and be able to buy books from anywhere without the need of a computer. For a book fanatic what could be better?

How about you? Are you thinking of getting an E-Reader? Have you done a lot of research? Have you discovered some up and coming reader that I’m unaware of, and anxiously awaiting its release? Do you think that e-readers will replace paper books? If you have a reader or intend to ask for one for the upcoming holidays will you convert your paper books to ebooks?

As for me, I won’t be entirely an ebook reader as I do have many “real” books still remaining unread on my shelves. However, as I add to that collection I’m going “green” whenever possible and getting a Kindle book instead of the paper version.