Sourcebooks Casablanca Romance Authors

By: Marie Force One of the things I wanted to do with Love at First Flight was to give the expected romance formula a gentle shake. In the early chapters, you will see my hero and heroine with *gasp* other people. When I say with, I mean with . Are you with me? Good. ;-) When Michael and Juliana meet in the airport on their way to a weekend in Florida, he's engaged to Paige, and Juliana has been living with Jeremy for four of the ten years they've been together. Michael and Juliana are in committed relationships that they expect will go the distance. Neither can imagine on that Friday night how dramatically their lives are about to change. Over the course of the weekend, both relationships hit major speed bumps. So when Michael and Juliana meet up again on the flight back to Baltimore on Sunday evening, both are reeling and trying to process what's happened. As I was writing the book, I thought it was important that the two existing relationships end not because Michael and...

By: Marie Force I'm being asked "what's next?" a lot now that "Line of Scrimmage" has been out for more than a month. It reminds me of when I got married and people started asking when we planned to have kids. Then we had our daughter and they asked if we'd be having another one. Once we had a daughter and a son, a few asked if we were going for number three, but that tapered off once they took a good look at the glazed look in our eyes from a baby who didn't sleep for the first 18 months of his life. Now that my first published "baby" is out in stores, the question becomes what's next? I'm very excited about my second book, "Same Time Sunday," which is based on a conversation I overheard in an airport ten years ago. A young man and woman waiting with me for a delayed flight were talking about the difficulties of their long-distance relationships and both were worried about the weekend ahead. They discovered they were on t...

Eustacia’s Romance Corner is a column for romantic heroines of all genres, wishing to seek romantic, compassionate and practical advice for their problems. This week’s letters share a common thread, involving a couple of lucky behavioral standards for romantic heroines. Dear Eustacia, I'm a contemporary single woman recovering from my latest break-up with Mr. Wrong. My problem is the dead body that just turned up in my begonia patch. Yup, it's Mr. Wrong and he looks to be dead for 12-14 hours and I don't have an alibi since I was watching chick flicks and eating ice cream with my cat for the past 48 hours! Please give me some advice! Dear Anonymous: Naturally you are innocent; romantic heroines do not kill people except in self-defense, and very rarely in that instance. Have you told the investigators that you are a romantic heroine? Well, don’t worry. I am going to send you three phone numbers in a separate email because I don’t want these gentlemen inundated with calls. T...

Posted by Christina Harlin Wow! You can almost hear the crickets chirping lately here at the Casablanca blog, and that’s because so many of our talented writers are at the RWA convention. Personally I’m so much happier here baking in the Midwest and going to work every day . . . wait a minute, no I’m not! Nine-to-five work is tough! My fantasy of being a full-time writer hasn’t yet come true, and so I’m still out there earning a paycheck. Segue. Speaking of earning a paycheck, I spent a some time recently contemplating the jobs available to the modern romantic hero. We readers want our hero to have a job that oozes masculinity and hopefully lots of money (though this is no longer a must), that involves his brains, brawn, bravery (hopefully a combination of all three), and that holds a sexy bit of risk. This puzzle gets more complex if your romantic hero is a vampire, because the job market for the undead is really glutted right now and prejudice is rampant. But for the most part, emplo...

posted by Loucinda McGary aka Aunty Cindy One of the things my Sourcebooks sisters and I quickly learned about each other is that when it comes to our writing, we don't always "play by the rules." Sometimes we've done it unintentionally, sometimes not. But we all agree that a wee bit of rule bending is what sets our Casablanca books apart and makes them memorable reads! When I started writing The Wild Sight , I purposefully decided to bend some "rules" just a little. One of the first decisions I made, even before I had a clue about my plot or characters was the setting. I had set my previous two romantic suspense stories in Italy, but this time I wanted to set the book in Ireland. Hmmm... I've seen and read lots of books set in Ireland, but I couldn't think of a single contemporary story set in Northern Ireland. They're all set in the Republic of Ireland. But the Ireland I am most familiar with is Northern Ireland. So I huffed and puffed and b...

When I was a kid, my parents often accused me of "fabricating." I would be telling them a story, relating something that had happened in school or on the bus, and the story would take on a life of its own. Like the good parents they were, they would hang on my every word and then have the audacity to ask me how much of what I had just said had actually happened and how much had I added to make it a better story. The nerve of those people! I was just telling it as I had seen it. What was their problem? (Apparently, when I was in full fabrication mode, my eyes would grow wider and the hand gestures wilder. Whatever .) With hindsight, I can see that the fabricating girl was sowing the seeds for the novel writing adult. All my life, my parents told me I should channel this storytelling capability into a book. For this reason, "Line of Scrimmage" is dedicated to the two people who always told me I should and to the three people—my husband and kids—who stood by me while I...

Linda, Terry, and Michelle have talked about how they broke the rules and went against convention to write their books. I broke something else. I broke some limitations laid on me by no one but myself. See, I had always wanted to write a romance, but I didn’t think I had the talent. What I liked about the genre was that it seemed (looking from the outside) like there weren’t any rules. Anything went. You need a hero from another century, or one who turns into a wolf, or is an angel, or dead—or even undead? No problem. Ghosts and gods, mediums and madams, soldiers and sorcerers—a romance writer could mix and match to her heart’s content. I’ll tell you what else romance writers could do. They could write stories about hope. About people who choose to be kind. About our capacity to change, and grow. About the importance of caring for, and nurturing tender things. About the difference that love makes. About the everyday courage of ordinary people. And they could do it all with humor and mo...