Jenna Petersen | A Family Affair

Hi everyone! Thanks to everybody at Fresh Fiction for having me back once again to blog! I always love coming here because I feel like I’m surrounded by fellow romance lovers. It always makes me think about family when I talk to people who love the genre as much as I do.


Actually, I’ve been thinking about the entire concept of "family" a lot lately. As I’m writing this blog, I am sitting the Raleigh-Durham airport after a weekend in North Carolina presenting an industry retreat to the Heart of Carolina Romance Writers. Last weekend I was in St. Louis, presenting a workshop called "Write Like You Mean It". So basically, I’ve been surrounded by the family of writers for the past two weeks.


To read more of A FAMILY AFFAIR please click here.

Cindy Keen Reynders | Appreciating Family

As a kid, I couldn’t wait to grow up and get away from home. I thought my brothers and sisters were annoying. I thought my parents were straight from the Stone Age. After high school, I went to college, got married, then I was off and running. I lived in Texas, Japan, South Dakota, Colorado, moved back to Japan, then back to Colorado. Finally, twenty-two years later, I moved home to Cheyenne, Wyo. which is full of my relatives.

After all those years and all those places, you’d think I’d sit down and write a book about my travels. Somehow I became fascinated by the dynamics of the home folks; the ups, the downs—everything. So I wrote a book about an off-the-wall family in the small, fictional town of Moose Creek Wyoming. I focused particularly on sisters Lexie Lightfoot and Lucy Parnell.

In my book, The Saucy Lucy Murders and its sequel, Paws-itively Guilty, Lexie has moved back home after a divorce. She finds that with age, she and Lucy have mellowed. Nevertheless, the sisters still manage to backslide into the roles of bossy, older sibling and younger, rebellious sibling.

After several mysterious murders occur in town, Lexie decides the local law officers aren’t doing their jobs, and she feels the need to intervene. It’s only natural that she would call upon her sister for help. Lucy, misguided as she is, lends her church-going spirit and humorously rigid outlook on life to all the cases the sisters decide to sleuth.

So if you like mysteries, if you like sisters and perhaps have one, and if you like laugh-out-loud adventure, try reading my stories. I promise, by the time you’re finished, you’ll have gained a new appreciation for family.

Cindy Keen Reynders
www.cindykeenreynders.com

Karen White | Southern Women's Fiction: It's More Than Just An Accent!

When people ask me what I write, I tell them that I write 'Southern women's fiction'. To clarify, I usually follow that with the (hopefully) more clear 'grit lit.' Although that frequently elicits a grin or two, it rarely seems to explain what it is that I try and create on the pages of my novels.

I stick with the adage to 'write what I know' and I know the South. My father's family has lived in the South since before the American Revolution and both of my parents were born and raised in Mississippi--my father on the Gulf coast and my mother in the Delta. I have relatives still living there that most people from other parts of the country would need a translator to understand. But when I hear them speak, I simply feel as if I have found home.

Yeah, sure, I've created more than my share of hunky Southern men who drawl and even use the word 'darlin'. But writing Southern women's fiction is so much more than the accent. It's primarily a sense of place, and stocked with those inherently wacky yet familiarly beloved Southern characters (remember Aunt Pittypat?)--most of whom I've met or find myself related to in real life. It's the heat and the humidity, too, and the strong sense of family, good homestyle cooking (think Paula Deen), and warm hospitality. That's the Southern part, anyway. To make it women's fiction, I make the protagonist a strong but flawed woman at a crossroads in her life. I toss her and the setting together and, voila! Southern women's fiction results.

When I sit down to write, I close my eyes and picture myself at my grandmother's Indianola, Mississippi home--always alive with the sounds and sights of the South--and try to recreate those senses for my readers. My dream is for my readers to close my books with a sigh and a laugh, and for a craving for some really good fried chicken.

Karen White
THE MEMORY OF WATER - NAL/Accent--March 2008
THE HOUSE ON TRADD STREET - NAL Trade-November 2008
LEARNING TO BREATHE - NAL/Accent-March 2007
http://www.karen-white.com/