Sourcebooks Casablanca Romance Authors

Here I am at the pharmacy get a refill. Why am I here when I have a blog about romance writing to write? Why didn't I take care of this couple of days ago? I did. At least I tried. My insurance company wouldn't pay for them on that date though. They said I could have no more for five days. I had been given a thirty day supply. Thirty days had passed. What was the problem? The story goes back several months. I have a chronic medical condition which, fortunately, is well-controlled by medication. As soon as generic equivalent came on the market, I switched to it and did well for a couple of years. A few months back, when I refilled it, I noticed the pills were a different color. Not to worry, the insert in the bag said. It's still the same medication. But I checked an old bottle. It was a different manufacturer. Anybody want to guess why the pharmacy would buy from a different manufacturer? But by law it had to be the same, cheaper or not. In the first couple of days, I notic...

by Mary Margret Daughtridge It's been a strange week. Anyone who has watched any news at all knows there's been a huge turnover in popular culture icons. From the sublime Farrah Fawcett to the ridiculous Billy Mays to the bizarre Michael Jackson. Billy Mays' black bearded face smiling molar to molar on the screen was enough to make me reach for the mute button. I often wondered about the gadgets, glue, and gimmicky gee-gaws he hawked. Does anyone buy squares of cloth or pieces of plastic for $19.95? They must have, or he wouldn't have come back as tenaciously as crab grass. Still, he influenced popular culture. A friend and I have a running joke that begins "BUT WAIT!" Farah Fawcett had a hairstyle that defined a generation. Though she did other things, I can't actually recall ever seeing her in anything except Charlie's Angels. I wonder if she will become like Clara Bow of whom I know nothing except that she gave the world "bee stung" lips. ...

by Mary Margret Daughtridge To me, story ideas are like acorns. You cannot guess the mature size or shape of the story, or even see that the seed is a story until you see them sprout. That moment of story germination is what I call what if. The what if of SEALed with a Promise happened as a result of my research for SEALed With A Kiss . The reason I initially chose a SEAL was because I needed a military hero who was away from his family for long periods and one who wouldn’t be doing what he was doing if he didn’t love it. I knew no more about them than any romance reader—and truthfully, didn’t want to know much more. Here’s the deal. I didn’t want to write a “military” romance, and I certainly didn’t want to write romantic adventure/suspense. So when I sat down to do my research I wasn’t looking for the finer points of body armor or the difference between a Glock and an AK 47. I thought I’d get a few background details, absorb some lingo, and since the story wouldn’t be set on a ba...

I woke up this morning snuggled under my yellow, down-alternative comforter, already writing this blog. Which proves, I guess, that one can become accustomed to anything, because I hate writing it and my brain usually shuts down the instant I set to work. I think my sudden desire to write was more than bowing to the inevitable however.Since the pitch contest all you blogolytes have become real to me. I no longer feel like I’m shouting into the blackness of a cave and trying to kid myself that the echoes coming back are a conversation. Now I can hear your voice. I mean your voice . That distillation of personality and attitude transmitted in your intrinsic rhythms. I get your humor, your pain, your hopes. All that in fifty words. Isn’t that amazing? I don’t know you at all, and yet, I know you . More than if we’d had one hundred sixty-some perky conversations of “Hi, I’m Lou-lou, and live in Walla Walla. I write XX. I have XX children and XX pets.” We list the pieces of our lives as if ...

by Mary Margret Daughtridge January 29, our Casablanca editor will be with us to take your fifty-word pitches for your book, so I hope your pencils are sharpened and you're polishing away already. Marie's going to tell you all about it tomorrow, and she'll answer all your questions. When I suggested to the other Casababes we have this little pitch-party, and maybe offer some tips for success, several admitted they had never pitched. Well, neither have I. True. And then, I wondered if I could . Evey author needs a couple of sentences they can respond with when someone asks, "What's your book about?" So I decided to offer a warm-up to the Deb's blog by writing some pitches for SEALed With a Promise , the SEALed book that will be in the stores in April. I played by the rules: fifty words and under. We learn by doing and then getting feedback. Tell me which pitch you think is most successful. I'd also welcome suggestions. Here goes: 1. Caleb, a Navy SEAL ...

by Mary Margret Daughtridge Boom! The sound, followed by a long screeching, scraping scream of metal, punched at her eardrums and shuddered through the dance floor beneath her feet. Eric widened his stance with the seaman’s instinct to keep them balanced on the rocking deck, while his arms tightened around her. On all sides, dancers were knocked off their feet. As people reacted according to their temperament a babble of moans, curses, and sobs replaced the lilt of the orchestra “We’ve hit an iceberg!” a woman’s voice carried above the confusion of sound. Iceberg! The word traveled through the room, unstoppable as a bad smell. Repeated in different accents, it escalated into panicky screams. An elderly woman in a voluminous blue robe, carrying a wand tipped with a star, tapped with the wand on Trish’s arm. “What did she say?” the woman demanded, cupping her ear. Despite the querulous tone, a life time of good humor had molded the woman’s face into a permanent smile, and her faded blue...

Part Three By Mary Margret Daughtridge “Sex trade? You mean he sells them into prostitution?” “Or to...private collectors.” Trish shuddered. “That shows how deceptive looks can be." She fought the urge to turn around for another look at the man. "He doesn’t look evil.” While some of the guests at the ship’s masquerade ball wore masks, he did not. Trish had guessed he disdained pretense, confident that he had no need of disguise. If she could be that wrong, it proved how out of place she was amongst this moneyed crowd. All the discomfort with the glittering scene and the stiff brocade of the reproduction eighteenth century ball gown she’d felt a few minutes ago returned, doubled. “Smile,” Armand hissed. He wiped his palm surreptitiously on his tuxedo pants, then with a very good imitation of welcome extended it to the man moving toward them through the crowd. “Pieter, Pieter! How good to see you. Trish allow me to introduce to you Pieter Van der Sloop.” Pieter had silver blond...

By Mary Margret Daughtridge I recently finished the copy edits for SEALed With A Promise (coming Spring 2009.) I had to take my own advice more than once. :-) Criticism—it’s right up there with death and taxes for a writer. Inevitable, and you ignore it at your peril, because the closer you come to being published, the more people there are who tell you exactly what is wrong with your book and expect you to fix it—if you want to be published, that is. Unfortunately, most of the advice about how to take critique, like don’t take it personally is only useful if you already know how to do that. If you could not take it personally, you wouldn’t have a problem, right? As a Master Practitioner of NLR, for many years I’ve helped people make positive, permanent changes in how they think and react to criticism. I’m not going to ask you to view a critique of your work unemotionally. That is so not going to happen. However, you can learn to shield yourself from being overwhelmed by hurt and an...

By Mary Margret Daughtridge I knew a fellow one time. A writer, he was. He was from South Carolina and his name was—I swear—Beauregard. Seriously. Beau, whether or not he ever actually wrote, talked a lot about writing. Back in those days, writing was my guilty secret, so I did write, but never talked about it. People who could talk about it impressed me greatly. If you asked Beau where he was from, he would say Columbia or Greenville or Beaufort—I don’t remember. “But,” he would add in a South Carolina accent thickened considerably by the beers he had consumed, " Ah considda Muunks’ Cawnah mah spurchal home. " (I consider Monk's Corner my spiritual home.) There, he said, flowed a never-ending fountain of inspiration, of ideas and words, paragraphs and plots, and when he was finally ready to write his novel, there he would go. I didn’t have a spiritual home, that I knew of, and I wasn’t perfectly clear on how a spiritual home differed from any other kind. I was raised in ...

by Mary Margret Daughtridge A new-made friend (call her Darla) told me recently that reading romance novels changed her life. Needless to say, I invited her to tell me more. Darla, a professional with advanced degrees, explained that she began reading romances several years ago because it was a way to unwind before bed and let go of the events of a stressful day. After a while, she began to notice that the heroine said things Darla wouldn’t say. It made the heroine mad when men disrespected her. But unlike Darla, she didn’t slink away and nurse her wounds. If the hero tried to ignore the heroine or treat her as if her opinions didn’t matter, she took him on. The heroine had a purpose and a goal and she was clear about them. She was smart and she used intelligence to achieve her goals. The heroine had a strong value system and would make sacrifices to preserve it. At the beginning of the book the heroine might not know how to be an effective person who could make a difference, but by t...

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...