Sourcebooks Casablanca Romance Authors

  will Solitaire ever be home?   Science Fiction romance combines two of my favourite things, romance and sci-fi. While some people will argue that the only real sci-fi is all about the technology, what is the point of technology without considering the impact on human lives? And what is life without a little romance? The ES Siren series is at an end. Ours to Save (book 9!) came out last week (July 23rd). Like any good adventure I took it with friends (Mel Teshco and Denise Rossetti also wrote books in the series). We built our ships and filled them with people and then set off heading toward a new life on the planet Solitaire. When we started writing we had no idea how we were going to pull the world together or how the drama on the ship would unfold. 12 months in space....anything could happen. We had riots, and fighting, splinter groups and micrometeoroid showers. Among all the drama we had a couple of ménages form, a prisoner fell for a soldier, a scie...

I often get asked how I build (and keep untangled) the worlds I create. I have my Fendrake world which included the Bitten Backstage books (vampire rock stars) and Brightwater Blood , in a Bottle , the Shadowlands , Decadent Moon, ES Siren , Annwyn ...and there are a couple of other unpublished sci-fi and paranormal worlds and also a couple of contemporary worlds as well as a few standalones. I have no fancy method. Each book has it's own exercise book--which if it turns into a series becomes the series bible. There are no clever segment, just a whole lot of scribbles, sticky notes and tabs so I can find what I need relatively quickly. In my mind though the two sci-fi worlds of Decadent Moon and ES Siren would never interact, one is all alien and high tech and full of the weird and wonderful while the other is human drama on a spaceship. The paranormal worlds are also quite distinct as the magic is different, the rules are different and the creatures are different. My gobli...

Some of my favourite TV shows are sci-fi. I grew up watching Doctor Who and Star Trek, moved on to Farscape, returned to the rebooted Doctor Who, and loved the rebooted Battlestar Galactica (I never saw the original). There is something about sci-fi that I love. Maybe it's tech or the cool aliens (Farscape did aliens so well)...or simply the human drama of being in space and trapped on a ship with limited supplies where danger is never far away. Farscape and BSG also threw in some romance which I loved:)  Who didn't want John Crichton and Aeryn Sun to get together? It was only a matter of time before I started writing sci-fi romance. The ES Siren series has no aliens but plenty of human drama as the ship makes it's way to the new colony. What's extra fun about this series is that Mel Teshco and Denise Rossetti also write books in the world so on release day the publisher puts out 3 books...yep 3 at a time so there's no waiting around to see how the mini cri...

Over the last 12 months I had the opportunity to work on two continuities. One I was invited to join (and which I can’t say more about until the big announcement…but it is contemporary). The other I kind of started because I had an idea for a sci-fi romance series that would be fun to write with other people. Both were totally different experiences as for the first there was a story bible, and for the second— ES Siren series —we had to make it up as we went along.  Both were (or in the case of Siren which is ongoing, are) lots of fun and something different to sitting there at the computer plugging away at a novel in your own world.  The ES Siren series is set in the reasonably near future, yet far enough in the future that humans have established a research base on another habitable planet. This is a good thing as big business ended up winning/bribing their way into power and the Earth is heavily polluted.  Those couple of sentences took many, many emails to wo...

I take my research seriously. And while I can never interview a vampire, a goblin or a fairy I do read up on the mythology. Sometimes research is more practical. I've been doing martial arts since I was ten and have done several different styles to get a feel for different techniques. I've done archery and the Tough Mudder (because you never know when a character will need to get over a 9 foot high wall--it’s not easy, nor is moving quickly over rocky/muddy/steep terrain for 20km). My latest bit of research involved knitting. I know, you’re all thinking I've gone soft all of a sudden, but how else was my hero going to make socks? There are no department stores on the new colony of Solitaire*. My Nana taught me to knit and over the years I've knitted bits and pieces but I have always shied away from socks, I mean there’s a toe and a heel and they look tricky. Reading the pattern makes them seem even trickier! So in the name of research I bought wool and some ...

  Welcome to Casablanca author Kris DeLake, here to celebrate the release of her sci-fi romance, A Spy to Die For ! Escapes By Kris DeLake Honestly—and let’s be honest here—it’s Fourth of July week, and I’m hiding. In my office. Staring at the beautiful sunny day and listening to—sirens. Ambulances, fire trucks, police cars. Mixed with car alarms, explosions, and lots of screaming people. Welcome to the Oregon Coast during the first week of July. I used to love the first week of July. The weather was warm, the sun was out, people were nice. Then I moved here. The Fourth of July turns our town into an armed camp of us against them. The locals converge on the grocery store during the last week of June, stockpiling for the onslaught. Only one road goes the length of our town—Highway 101—and it’s stop-and-start traffic from the day before the Fourth until the Monday after. Weeks like this, where the Fourth is a Thursday, we have stop-and-start traffic fro...