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Five Myths About the Glamorous Life of an Author: 5.    That it’s glamorous  at all . There are waaaay too many pairs of sweatpants involved for my life to be considered glamorous. 4.    That I lounge around, waiting for the muse to strike. Yeah…if I did that, I wouldn’t have completed even a full chapter. As with most jobs, the bulk of writing is drudgery. It’s a drudgery that I love and wouldn’t give up for any other job, but still…drudgery. 3.    That after I write the first draft of a book, my editor moves a few commas around, and then it’s ready for publication. Nope. My books change a LOT during edits. I’d say a third gets completely rewritten. If rough drafts were houses, mine wouldn’t be move-in ready. They’d be fixer-uppers (the super-scary, get-out-before-something-falls-on-us kind of fixer-uppers). 2.    That I control covers, blurbs, titles, pricing, sales, and other promo stuff. My marvelo...

Cold water is scary. Really cold water with ice on top is extra scary. Once you’ve fallen through the ice, and the water has you in its grip, it quickly robs you of your ability to fight. In a few short minutes, it makes you clumsy and slow and sleepy and disorientated, until you can’t even try to save yourself. It’s a predator that makes you calmly accept your death. For as long as I could remember, one of my top fears—a break-out-in-a-cold-sweat-even-thinking-about-it fears—was getting trapped under the ice. The idea of pounding on an unbreakable frozen layer while not being able to breathe… That’s the stuff of nightmares. So why, exactly, was I standing on a frozen reservoir, just feet from a hole cut in the ice, preparing to jump into thirty-two-and-a-half-degree water? Sadly, I have a tendency to believe people when they say, “C’mon! This’ll be fun!” I’ve gotten suckered into countless chores (“Let’s all spring-clean the boarding stable. It’ll be fun! It won’t ...

Top Five Ways I Drive My Editor to Drink: 5. Describe the crime-scene stuff in my books with waaay too much detail, because I am a huge forensics nerd. What I find “fascinating,” normal people find “really gross.” 4. Write an entire chapter merely to set up a joke (it was a funny joke, though. Maybe “forward momentum” and “plot” should to take a back seat and let humor drive for a while). 3. Completely and utterly fail in my attempt to write short(er). Even after cutting two complete chapters from In Safe Hands (Book 4 of my Search and Rescue series), I added so much elsewhere that the manuscript was even longer than it’d been before edits. I just can’t stop adding words. It’s a sickness. 2. Lament my inability to correctly use the subjunctive mood for an entire (long) email, because, in addition to being a huge forensics nerd, I am also a huge grammar nerd. 1. Dump my insecurities on her head. “Do you like my book? Did the copyeditor like my book? Did your mom lik...

Run to Ground , the first book in my brand new Rocky Mountain K9 Unit series, will be out on June 6, 2017. To help tide you over until then, here's a sneak peek: He lost his mentor. He lost his K9 partner. He almost lost his will to live. But when a ruthless killer targets a woman on the run, Theo and his new K9 companion will do whatever it takes to survive—and save the woman neither can live without. Grieving the death of his partner, Theo Bosco has no room in his life for distractions. Though his instincts scream that he should avoid Juliet ‘Jules’ Jackson, he can’t seem to stay away. It doesn’t help that Theo’s new K9 companion has fallen head over paws with Jules’s rambunctious family. Or that when he’s with her, Theo finally knows peace. When Jules rescued her siblings, whisking them away to the safety of the beautifully rugged Colorado Rockies, she never expected to catch the eye—or the heart—of a cop . Yet as Jules struggles to fight her growing a...

The Island of Misfit Dogs While researching my Rocky Mountain K9 Unit series, I was impressed with the talented, real-life K9s working alongside law enforcement officers. It’s amazing what these brave dogs can do. Photo courtesy of the Rochester Minnesota Police K9 Unit Here on the Island of Misfit Dogs (i.e. my house), things are…well, a bit different. Roadie and Wiley are Australian Shepherds. Thinking that they should be allowed to do what their breed was meant to do, I signed up for herding lessons. I quickly discovered that they were not interested in herding sheep. Or goats. Or anything, really. These lessons ended when Roadie, the poster child for canine ADHD, turned away from the sheep to follow a butterfly. Not even a squirrel. A butterfly . Sigh. Cam, on the other hand, is a Great Pyrenees/Anatolian Shepherd cross. Her ancestors were livestock guardians, bred to hang out with the flock or herd and protect the livestock from predat...

Happy January 11th, everyone! I'm Katie Ruggle, author of the Rocky Mountain Search & Rescue series and the upcoming Rocky Mountain K-9 Unit series. When I'm not writing, I'm usually baking up a storm at my day job (well, more like my night job). During my time at the bakery, I've come to find that creating food for people is surprisingly similar to writing a book. To make caramel rolls, for example, I first weigh out the ingredients and mix them together in a bowl that is big enough for me to bathe in (although I never would, because that would be gross). This is like writing a rough draft. My frequent advice to aspiring authors is to finish that first draft. Once it's done, then you have the raw dough to shape how you wish. Without it, you just have honey, flour, butter, eggs, milk, yeast, salt, and an idea. After it's mixed, I oil up the table, roll out the dough, cover it with butter and cinnamon sugar, and turn it into a boa-constric...

I’m kidding. Honestly, I’m not going to steal your brains—or your personality. Sometimes, when I share with new acquaintances that I’m an author, they flinch away, saying, “Don’t put me in one of your books!” Others ask, “Where do you get your ideas from?” while giving me suspicious looks, as if I’m in the process of mentally robbing them of their identities. For me, it doesn’t really work that way. There are tiny bits of a whole army of real-life people in each character, but I don’t decide, “Okay, Daisy from In Safe Hands is one-third my Aunt Betty, one-quarter the guy who works at the gas station, and five-twelfths my third-grade teacher.” My heroes and heroines jump into my head fully formed. Their quirks and foibles are not really conscious decisions on my part; the characters just are how they are.  Daisy is Daisy, and Chris is Chris. Because of that, they constantly surprise (and frustrate) me. When I write, the characters are driving the bus. Sometimes...

GoneToo Deep Out August 2 nd , 2016 In the remote Rocky Mountains, lives depend on the Search & Rescue brotherhood. But in a place this far off the map, trust is hard to come by and secrets can be murder… George Holloway has spent his life alone, exploring the treacherous beauty of the Colorado Rockies. He’s the best survival expert Search and Rescue has, which makes him the obvious choice to lead Ellie Price through deadly terrain to find her missing father. There’s just one problem—Ellie’s everything George isn’t . She’s a city girl, charming, gregarious, delicate, small . And when she looks up at him with those big, dark eyes, he swears he would tear the world apart to keep her safe. With a killer on the loose, he may have no choice. Ellie’s determined to find her father no matter the cost. But as she and her gorgeous mountain of a guide fight their way through an unforgiving wilderness, they find themselves in the crosshairs of a dangerous man in search...

I love doing outdoor things. Horseback riding, hiking, ATVing, target shooting, SCUBA diving, cross-country skiing… I’m up for pretty much any outdoor activity. When I’m done, however, when I’m sweaty and wind-burned and hungry and tired and a tiny bit cranky, I don’t want to have to pee in the woods.  Plus, I really hate ticks. Like,  loathe  them. What I do want is a soft bed and indoor plumbing, and I don’t care if that makes me a princess. Plop that tiara down on my head, because I will claim that crown. Just don’t make me camp. This caused a conundrum for me when I was writing Gone Too Deep , the third book in the Search and Rescue series (out on August 2nd). Not only do the characters have to camp in the mountains for several days, but they have to do it in the snow. For most of this series, I threw myself into the research wholeheartedly (and sometimes quite literally, such as when I jumped into a frozen reservoir during cold-water rescue training, similar ...

I’m not quite sure how it happened. I blame it on all the storage space in my off-grid, mountain home. And Amazon Prime. Amazon Prime definitely played a part in all this. However it started, I have to accept that I’m descending into prepper-dom. Although I’m not fully there yet, I’ve taken a giant step into the land of preparedness. I think it began when I accidentally ordered a case of soup mix, rather than just one package. Sure, when I put it in my online shopping cart, I thought it was kind of expensive, but I just assumed that it was really, really good soup. It did get four-and-a-quarter stars, after all. When the case of soup mix arrived at my gate (the UPS man having long ago abandoned the idea of trekking all the way up my driveway to my front door. My dogs could’ve deterred him. Or it could’ve been the snow drifts. Either way, he’d started dumping the boxes by the gate and taking off as fast as his little box truck could go), I was in a quandary. Did I send th...

Search and Rescue Series spoiler: One of the bit characters in Book 3, Gone Too Deep , is a moose. A scary, scary moose. “Scary?” you may scoff. “Moose aren’t scary. They’re cute, peaceful herbivores, like a bunny. Are you afraid of bunnies, too?” [First of all, to address the bunny comment, I have just two words (from Monty Python and the Holy Grail ): “Run away!”] Let me tell you why moose are the animals of my nightmares. Last spring, I was running along a Forest Service road in Montana, not long after writing the moose scene. The sun was just rising, not quite penetrating the thickly treed areas on both sides of the road (and I use the word “road” loosely; it was more of a rutted, two-track of a trail, one that someone could drive on only if highly motivated and in a vehicle that he/she did not care for much). As I rounded a curve, I stopped. There was a large, dark shape standing in the road about seventy-five feet in front of me. At first, squinting through the...