Sourcebooks Casablanca Romance Authors

Like many millions of other people, I spent at least some of the day in front of the television on Super Bowl Sunday. Yeah, I'll be the first to admit that I'm not a huge football fan. I'm more about The Puppy Bowl (Eli pooped on the field, bringing a new definition to the word "Foul!"), the halftime show (Destiny's Child reunion! Didn't Kelly Rowland look fierce ?) and yes, the commercials. Critical opinion for several of the commercials was pretty unanimous. On the positive side, a baby Clydesdale ? **squee** ovaries explode **  AWESOME. Overwhelmingly panned was the commercial in which supermodel Bar Rafaeli very audibly kissed GoDaddy's website guru, Walter. Some commercials received mixed reviews, and have catalyzed some unexpected and interesting online discussions. Consider the following commercial, for Audi:   Is this commercial cute and sexy, or is it sexist? Did she consent to the kiss, or not? Is the kiss romantic, or is it sexual ...

Rockaway Beach, OR Mark and I just returned from a week-long vacation to the Pacific Northwest which involved many modes of transportation: an Amtrak sleeper car, a couple of taxicabs, a Hertz rental car,  and a drive-aboard BC Ferry ride. This "Planes, Trains and Automobiles" trip made me think about transportation - or rather, how writers use transportation to convey important information about our characters' lives, attitudes, abilities and worldviews. Here are a couple of examples from my Underbelly Chronicles series:   TASTE ME's hero, incubus security guru Lukas Sebastiani, is linebacker-sized, and has a need for speed: "Come on, we need to get inside." He scoped out the parking lot and the shoreline of the Mississippi River, and then stood in front of her to cut off as many angles as he could with his body. She eyed the space between them. "Can you give me a little room, please?"  "No." She sighed. "What's u...

Disneyland! Like hundreds (thousands?) of other romance writers, I recently returned from Anaheim, where I attended the 2012 Romance Writers of America  National Conference. Anaheim, of course, means Disneyland, so Mark and I flew out a couple of days early. MONDAY : We had a great time at Disneyland. Funny how Minnesotans had to travel to SoCal to experience some cooler temperatures! I didn't hit the wall until about 6:00 p.m., when my Achilles tendon was finally clipped by one SUV-sized stroller too many.  TUESDAY : Taking my advice, Mark vamoosed before the estrogen horde descended. I spent the day at the LAPD with the Kiss of Death Special Interest Chapter,where a number of the LAPD"s finest (and I do mean FINEST) showed us what they do. We spent the day at two training facilities, where we saw drug dogs, police horses, and LA's men and women in blue up close and personal. The biggest surprise was being taken out onto the test track, bundled into six-point...

So, is it hot enough for ya? It was pushing 100' in southern Minnesota when Mark and I left to spend last weekend in the northern part of the state, just outside the Boundary Waters Canoe Area. My college girlfriend's artisan-made log cabin is a mix of luxe and rough, with electricity but no running water, a heated floor but no bathroom (outhouse!) and an outdoor shower whose only source of hot water is what gets heated by the sun. No sun? Too bad, baby. Did I mention there's no internet? As someone who finds it necessary to take occasional cold-turkey technology holidays, I was more than ready.  Here's the beautiful view from the deck to the dock. After breakfast, I took a bag containing my current work in progress, Julia Quinn's latest mass market paperback, my Kindle, my sunglasses, Coppertone SPF 50, and a bottle of diet green iced tea down to the dock. As you can see, I'm already wearing my reading hat. ;-)  Hard at work on TEMPT ME, Un...

Some readers who’ve gotten an early look at CHASE ME have asked me a rather unexpected question: Didn’t I think it was just a teensy bit…well, risky? to do such a flat-out gender-flip of the traditional paranormal stereotypes? To have the heroine be the rough and tumble, sexually aggressive   alpha badass, and the hero be more cautious and deliberate, the one who’s in touch with his feelings and looking for love?   Nope, not at all. It was a BLAST. It made complete sense to me that my heroine, Valkyrie archaeologist Lorin Schlessinger, wears the steel-toed boots in this relationship. After all, given Valkyries’ hyperactive adrenal systems, “food, fight, f*ck” is a biological imperative. She fights for fun, eats what she wants, and sleeps with whomever she pleases—and her partners are damn pleased in return. Her professional nemesis, by-the-book werewolf geologist Gabe Lupinsky, on the other hand? Gabe’s a city boy through and through, who appreciates fine dining and ...

by Tamara Hogan Aaaah, spring! -) ...flowers? Nuh-uh. If you grew up where I did, on the south side of the Minnesota/Canada border, there's still snow on the ground in April, and anything planted before Memorial Day weekend will be a certain victim of serial killing frost. Nope, if you grew up where I did, learning how to skate as soon as you learned how to walk, and with a "Miracle on Ice" Olympian living across the street, April is all about hockey playoffs, and May the Stanley Cup. In Minnesota, April showers bring May mullets.;-) They say "write what you know" so it's probably no surprise that both of the Underbelly Chronicles books I've written so far - 2011's TASTE ME and my June 2012 release, CHASE ME - are partially set in northern Minnesota, where I grew up. One of my favorite scenes in CHASE ME occurs when my sophisticated vampire villain, Beddoe, walks into a northern Minnesota dive bar while the locals watch the Stanley...

At the time I write this, the romance writing community is eagerly awaiting the announcement of the finalists in the Romance Writers of America's RITA and Golden Heart contests, which acknowledge excellence in published and unpublished romance fiction. Over at my other group blog, The Ruby Slippered Sisterhood , regulars who've entered the Golden Heart are starting to get twitchy, but those of us who've entered books in the RITA are...pretty chill. Having your book be named a finalist in any writing contest depends on an epic alignment of taste, subjectivity, and luck: which preliminary round judges were randomly selected to read your book? Do they like your voice? Did you use a trope that they love/hate? Does your hero remind them of a rat-bastard ex? Are your love scenes too hot, too cold, or just right? Does your runaway enthusiasm for em-dashes annoy them to high heaven? It's a matter of taste, the...

A number of months ago, I was the guest speaker at my college roommate's book club. While we talked about the book, one of the members - the cutest little thing, with punky platinum hair that took me back in time [mumble mumble] years - revealed that while reading TASTE ME, she and husband had... a lot of sex. An unusual amount of sex, most of which she'd initiated. "I'd read a chapter or two, turn over and tap him on the shoulder, and...whoa, Lordy, it was ON."  After the group finished laughing, she continued her story. One night, when she and her husband were getting ready for bed, he gestured to the book, lying on her bedside table. "Aren't you going to - you know - um, read?" he asked. Instead of doing so, she paged to the book's first love scene, and passed the book to him. "Why don't you?" So, he read. When he finished the scene, he closed the book, turned off his light, and settled down to sleep. "And...no...

Can you keep a secret? Vegas rules, right? I hate writing first drafts. There. I said it. I know, I know. I've heard all the writerly bromides: "First drafts are  supposed to be bad." "You can fix anything but a blank page." But the perfectionist who lives in my head isn't listening. She's singing, "Let it suck, let it suck, let it suck!" - to the tune of "Let It Snow" - at the top of her lungs. Being I'm five chapters into my third manuscript, with a good fifteen chapters yet to go, let's just say she's gonna be singing for awhile. Yeah, I know. La Nora's right. Once the first draft has been written, the words can be fixed - but I've learned that I'm one of those writers who loves revising, and sometimes vapor-locks looking at a blank screen. Some tricks I've learned to goose myself out of the blocks a little faster: Step away from the computer. I pick up a notebook and pen, set ...