Sourcebooks Casablanca Romance Authors

Greetings, friends! My contribution to the Sourcebooks Casablanca line is My Boss is a Serial Killer: A Tale of Murder, Romance and Filing , a romantic comedy which will be released in September, 2008. Because our blog’s recent theme has been breaking the rules, I submit the following list, developed with some helpful ideas from my terrific mother. Mom is a romance fan herself and passed the passion on to me. And please, don’t take offense. I only spoof the things for which I have the greatest affection. So, with Mom’s blessing, I present: “Twenty Things that Probably Won’t Happen in a Romance Novel” 1. Upon meeting, she mistakes him for her cousin’s fiancé. He mistakes her for the scullery maid. This misunderstanding is quickly rectified when they introduce themselves properly and have a pleasant laugh over their error. 2. His grandfather’s Will declares our hero must marry before his thirtieth birthday or he loses land and title. A reasonable discussion convinces the old man that thi...

by Aunty Cindy As soon as I learned how to read (around the age of five) I became one of THOSE kind of kids -- the one with her nose stuck in a book. But being the bossy, first-born that I am, I took it one step further. If I didn't like the ending of the story, I made up my own! In retrospect, I suppose I was writing/imagining one of the earliest forms of fan fic. Who knew? Way back when I was growing up, an author was someone up there on a pedestal. An exhaulted being that a mere mortal like me could never aspire to be, no matter how many creative writing classes I took. Then I took a writing class through a community service program for adults. (My son was an infant and I was desperate to get out of the house and away from his adorable self for an hour or two per week!) My instructor was a tiny gray-haired grandmother who announced, "Other people get paid for their writing and you can too!" This was a revelation! I'm sure I sat with my eyes the size of saucers...

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...

Wow , how exciting to be part of something new. The blog is new. And the Casablanca imprint is new, the first books were out last October (2007), and I was very proud that No Regrets was one of them. And I am over the moon that the book has been nominated by Foreward Magazine for best book of the year. Who am I? Well, I am an Englishwoman who immigrated to Canada. I was an administrator at a university. I’m a mum, and a wife, and a sister, and holy smoke! now I am a writer. I think that is the biggest surprise of my life. I admire people who always knew they wanted to write novels. For me, it was sort of sitting in my subconscious waiting for a chance to make itself known. Oh, I wrote lots... business reports, letters home from Canada, speeches, skits for Christmas parties, but never in my wildest dreams did I think of writing a book. Until I got trapped in a boring round of union negotiations where the parties were not meeting and I had nothing to do for days on end. Bored with the...

I’ve either spent the day in the snowy wasteland of the Canadian Arctic, researching about wolves and how everyone lives up in the cold northern reaches for Allure of the Wolf , or I worked on puttying nail holes and painting my daughter’s room in the now hot Central Texas weather. Such is the life of this writer! And just after I shut down my computer to call it quits for the night, a little Marie voice whispered to me—“Remember to post your blogs the night before.” So I crossed the floor in the now dark house, tripped over my black standard poodle, who didn’t stir, and turned on the computer to write— What? I’m not a night person. Not only had my computer shut down for the night…! But I’ll give it a shot—and if this doesn’t make any sense, Marie, it is not my fault! For me, writing the new werewolf series was based on my love of vampires. ??? I told you I was not a night person! Because vampires were becoming so rampant, uh, make that vampire stories, I needed to think of something j...

We authors of Sourcebooks new romance line called Casablanca are here to talk about books, writing and just about anything that tickles our, and hopefully your, fancy. And I’m lucky enough to be the first poster here! By way of introduction. My name is Linda Wisdom and I’ve been published in the romance genre for 28 years writing as Linda Wisdom and Linda Randall Wisdom with 77 books for six different publishers. All that time I was honing my skills to write what I’ve always loved; paranormal. And in a way, that’s a story in itself. And there’s nothing a writer likes more than telling a story. Once upon a time there was an author who loved to write romance. She wanted all those happily ever after endings and when she sold her first two books she knew she was going to write more. When her first book had the hero’s point of view she was told “you can’t do that” and she couldn’t understand why since she felt it was just as important to know the hero’s thoughts. But it wasn’t done then. Ju...