Sourcebooks Casablanca Romance Authors

By Cheryl Brooks I feel like I cheated this year, buying nearly every Christmas gift online. No hustle and bustle of shopping with the crowd for me, only the click of a button followed by the arrival of the UPS truck. This past Saturday, I wrapped all the presents and put them under the tree. You can do that when your kids are grown up, which is a lot easier than trying to hide everything until after they go to bed on Christmas Eve, although not nearly as exciting. There's a lot to be said for having plenty of time to get everything done. Little or no stress. No last-minute panic. No dragging out the wrapping paper only to discover that you're out of tape. I look back on some of the things I've done in the past and don't know how I ever managed to pull it off. We used to leave early on Christmas Eve morning and spend the entire day visiting family and friends, then make the two-hour drive back home, arriving sometime around midnight. I'd feed the horses and help...

by Cheryl Brooks I'm writing this on Thursday afternoon after dusting, vacuuming, mopping, cooking, and window cleaning, so if I don't come across as terribly brisk, that's why. I recently received the cover for the second book in my Cowboy Heaven series, Must Love Cowboys , which is slated to release next April and is currently available for preorder. It's the same super-hot photo that was used before the book (originally titled Cowboy Bliss ) was rewritten and relaunched as a "sexy contemporary" rather than an erotic romance. Kinda makes you want to ride a cowboy, doesn't it? The first book in the series, Cowboy Heaven , released this past March. Yeah, I know. That's a long damn time between books, which is due to that "rewritten and relaunched" thing. There's a lot to be said for momentum, and I seem to have lost it lately, something my sales have been reflecting rather vividly. That being said, I'm not the only author in...

We always have great expectations about the RWA National Conference. It hasn't even officially started yet, and yet thousands of published and aspiring authors have already descended on the Big Apple. Just getting here was an adventure. Planes were backed up at the gates at LaGuardia, which is probably nothing new, but traffic getting from the airport to the NY Marriott Marquis was horrendous. We were hungry and exhausted by the time we made it to the hotel, but the excitement was already in the air as more RWA members arrived. After dinner at Junior's Restaurant, we wandered around Times Square before heading back to collapse in our hotel rooms.  Tuesday is the day for most of us to play tourist. With the help of a bit of prior online research, we managed to get tickets to see the Statue of Liberty and made it from Times Square to Battery Park via the NY subway system, which is an adventure in itself. That's me with two of my Indiana RWA pals, Nikki Hayes and Aly G...

Stay out of the bunkhouse. By Cheryl Brooks If you know me at all, you probably know me from my Cat Star Chronicles series. When I wrote the first book, Slave , I never envisioned a ten-book series. Then I sold it to Sourcebooks and was asked to write a total of six books. Later, they asked for three more. The tenth book, Rebel , was one I had to write, so I did, and they bought it. I loved writing about the cats. My imagination had a fairly free rein, and I rarely had to resort to research. If I needed a new species or a new planet, or even a new word, I simply invented them. My science was reasonably accurate, and since there isn’t anyone with first-hand knowledge of the future on this or any other planet, no one could really argue the validity of what I’d written. Then last year, my editor asked me to send her something new, so I sent her the manuscript for Cowboy Heaven . She liked it enough to ask me for a two book series with a related novella, which would all b...

by Cheryl Brooks If you read my blog from last month, When it snows, sometimes it drifts... , you'll know that the start of 2015 has been a bit rocky for my family. But at the moment, my husband's head is healing from having two burr holes drilled into it, his hair is now about a third of an inch long, my foot has been injected with cortisone, and both of us are walking a bit better than we were a few weeks ago. And now the first book of my Cowboy Heaven series (also called Cowboy Heaven ) has been released! The Cowboy Delight novella is available for a free download, (click HERE for the links) and the manuscript for the second book in the series is all set to go to my editor next week. After that, well, I don't know what I'll be doing. I'm almost finished with the first book of a romantic suspense trilogy, but I haven't decided whether to have my agent try to sell it or publish it myself. Ideas come from many places. The idea for my romantic suspen...

I'm already feeling slightly jinxed, so I suppose it's appropriate that my blog falls on Friday the 13th this month. Thus far, 2015 has not been kind to my family. We had a very pleasant holiday season. I'd gone all out with the decorating, and we enjoyed several fun get-togethers with family and friends. Then on January 5th, my husband was headed back to work. He stopped at an intersection to wait for oncoming traffic to pass before making a left turn off the highway. He was starting to make the turn when two boys in a pickup truck rear-ended his Honda Fit at what had to have been a fairly high rate of speed. He was trapped in the car for a while and sustained a severe concussion, a chipped molar, and badly strained muscles in his right calf, no doubt from slamming on the brake when he was hit. The side airbag deployed, which is probably the only reason he wasn't more seriously injured. The police report stated that the eighteen-year-old driver of the pickup ...

By Cheryl Brooks Since my last post here on Casablanca, I've done a bit of traveling. And no, I didn't make it to New Orleans for RT this year. However, I will be attending Lori Foster's RAGT in Cincinnati June 5-8. Registration is full, but the signing on Saturday from 3 to 5pm is open to the public, so if you're in the Cincinnati area, be sure to drop by! I'll be signing print copies of my Unlikely Lovers series as well as books 1-9 of the Cat Star Chronicles . I'm also putting together a raffle basket that includes all of those books, plus an ARC of Rebel, so if you're registered, be sure to drop a raffle ticket in the bag! I will also be participating in a panel discussion on erotic romance on Friday at 12:30 in the Blogger Lounge. After that, it's July and RWA nationals in San Antonio! I've never been to Texas, so I'm really looking forward to it. Maybe not as wild as RT in New Orleans, but I'm sure we'll have a fabulous time! ...

By Cheryl Brooks Maintaining interest in a series when there has been roughly a year and a half between releases isn't easy. Most people figure you're simply not writing anymore and forget about you--that is, if they spare any thoughts for you at all. The "What have you done for me lately? " rule is as valid in the publishing industry as it is in Hollywood. Although I did self-publish a four-book erotic contemporary series called Unlikely Lovers last summer, which has sold reasonably well, even those titles have been out for nearly a year. With stats like that, you'd think I haven't been writing, but I have. I'm gearing up for a new erotic contemporary series with Sourcebooks called Cowboy Heaven to be launched next year. I've already written one book and one novella, and I'm a little over 20,000 words into book #2. I love the cowboys, but there was just something about those aliens... So what does one say about the tenth book in ...