Maxine Sullivan | THE LONG JOURNEY

If anyone had told me in the early 1980s that it would take me over 20 years to be published, I probably wouldn't have kept on writing. Perhaps. Back then the world was much smaller, and living in Australia it was smaller still and very isolated. There was no internet, no romance writer organisations, it took two weeks for a letter to get to a publisher before waiting months for a reply, and it took me weeks to type up a manuscript on a typewriter from longhand. Patience was something you had to have. And that was a good training ground for the next twenty years as I tried hard to get published.

In the early 1990s the fledgling internet began to trickle information through. Luckily I knew a computer guru who set me up with an internal modem with a speed that is laughable now but was sheer heaven back then, and I started to learn that there was a growing network of writers out there. It was fantastic. The world was coming into my home and suddenly Down Under wasn't so far away.

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Diane Whiteside | Once Upon A Time in A Place Far, Far Away

Historical authors always write about someplace that can’t be seen or felt by their reader. For KISSES LIKE A DEVIL (just published in February 2009 by Brava), I always knew Brian, William and Viola Donovan’s second son, would find his true love in turn-of the-century Europe. But I wanted it to happen in a fictional country, not someplace well-known where I’d have to walk the straight and narrow path of rigid locations and dates set down in an almanac. No, I wanted the fun of making up a country’s map and history all on my own, just like I would for a fantasy. Yes!

I decided to call it Eisengau, or “Iron Mountain” in German. Quite suitable for someplace that made topnotch guns and cannons, then sold them to the rest of the world at big time prices.

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Amanda Scott | Legends

Border Wedding, Border Lass, and Border Moonlight all began with a legend from Scott family history…the legend of Muckle-Mouth Meg. Meg was Meg Murray, who was supposedly one of the homeliest women in the Borders. Legend perpetuated by Sir Walter Scott the poet, among others, was that the son of famous reiver Wat Scott of Harden was trying to steal cattle from one Jagan Murray, a neighbor, when he got caught. Murray supposedly gave Will Scott the choice of hanging or marrying Meg. So, that’s where I started. But the first thing I discovered in my research was that the man involved was not Will Scott of Harden. Negotiations for Will’s marriage to his wife Agnes are well documented as being long and amiable.

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Natale Stenzel | Between a Rock and a Heart Place

First of all, thank you, thank you to Fresh Fiction for hosting me here today. I love visiting this site for scoop on all the latest romance novels by my favorite authors, so I'm thrilled to be blogging here on the release day for BETWEEN A ROCK AND A HEART PLACE, the third book in my series of funny paranormal romances.

As you'd guess almost immediately upon reading the back cover blurb for this story, my heroine Daphne Forbes receives a truly unwelcome gift: renegade puca powers. Oh. Well, that explains everything. Or maybe not? A puca is actually a fantastical character derived from Celtic and British mythologies. In some traditions, the puca is a shape-shifting trickster who preys on travelers; half faery and half human, the creature has a distinctly mischievous, even malicious bent. Does my version of the puca accurately reflect all the mythological accounts? Some of them. Others I cheerfully warped and expanded to suit my own needs. The pucas in my stories have three specific powers: mindspeak (mind-to-mind communication), glamour (creating illusion/molding the thoughts of humans), and shape-shifting.


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Jaime Rush/Tina Wainscott | What's Paranormal, Anyway?

I've always been drawn to the paranormal. Not necessarily monsters, though those occasional reports of the chuppacabra, Big Foot, and the Everglades' Skunk ape are interesting. I like the weird stuff, like people for no apparent reason going up in flames, weird nature, and all things psychic. The appeal for me is that there's some truth in it. It could be real…maybe. Possibly.

I think we're all psychic. Most people have had feelings about things, that gut instinct, hunches, call it what you will. Some people are more in tune to that ability and have real psychic abilities, some have vague abilities, and others are, of course, downright shams. That's true of all things, like those video clips of the guy in the monkey suit trudging through the forest.

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Sandi Shilhanek | Great Technological Advances for This Reader

This week I conquered one of the technological challenges that has had me frustrated for months. I couldn’t be more proud of myself, and thought what better way to celebrate than to share that achievement with those of you who read my blog.

In case you don’t know I’m a bookaholic! It’s an addiction that I really don’t want to find a recovery program for. I always have a book going that is either print or on my Kindle, plus an audio book either on my IPOD or my MP3 player.

Why you might ask do you need both an IPOD and an MP3 player? The answer is somewhat simple. When I got introduced to audio books I thought I could put everything on my IPOD, then I discovered downloading books from my local library, and discovered they weren’t compatible with the IPOD. Therefore I had to find an inexpensive MP3 player.

I did that quite well, and was happy until I ran out of memory. Was discussing that with my husband, and he showed me that my MP3 player had a memory card slot. So I gladly inserted said memory card into said slot, but have been unable to figure out how to put the audios onto the memory card.

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