Sourcebooks Casablanca Romance Authors

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...

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 ...

by Tamara Hogan  Weasel lends a helping (?) hand  Christmas. It's a time to get together with friends and family, to catch up, to chat, to exchange presents...and of course eat too much. Home for the holidays. It resonates, doesn't it? Mr. K waits for his turn  In my family, we tend to gather at the home of my youngest sister, the only one of us to have produced a grandchild - a dear girl named Taylor that we all adore and shamefully overindulge during the holidays. In addition to my sister's home being centrally located, the house has a huge family room equipped with a fireplace, with enough room for everyone to sit comfortably for hours. Because we will be sitting there for hours. We open our gifts in rotation, from youngest to oldest, one gift at a time, cycling through everyone until all the gifts are open. Though my niece finds this approach excruciating, there are several be...

Thanksgiving is, of course, the time of year where the concept of thankfulness is visibly front and center. Here is where I must admit that, by personality and profession, I'm a problem-solver, more immediately attuned to recognizing and then correcting exceptions, deviations and negatives. Sometimes I need a reminder to break out of problem-solving mode, and consciously acknowledge the things I'm thankful for. Thanksgiving gives me that reminder. In no particular order: Good health:   For those of us living with chronic illness, the concept of good health is a relative, sometimes day to day, thing, but all things considered, 2011 was a pretty great year health-wise. My metric? I barely met my insurance deductible! Modern medicine:   Every time I grumble about how many sticks it takes for me to have blood taken, I try to remember that had I been born even a decade earlier than I was, I likely would have...

I had a definite "I'm becoming my mother" moment over Labor Day Weekend. It went something like this: SCENE: Lake cabin, northern MN, sunny afternoon with temperatures in the mid 60's.  While two couples eat lunch from paper plates, Katy Perry's "Last Friday Night (T.G.I.F.)" starts playing on the radio. I wrinkle my nose at its pop and fizz, at its flagrant and unapologetic use of AutoTune. "This sucks. Hard. Who's going to tell the children of today that their favorite singers can't actually sing?" Mike grins at me. "That sounds like something our mothers would say." "Well, I like it," Kristi replies defensively. Ruh-roh. (sigh) Yeah, Mike totally called me on my crap, as longtime friends are in prime position to do. He was right. I might just as well have added, grumpily, "...and you dang kids get off of my lawn!" But if there's anything I hav...

by Tamara Hogan I'm a complete hoor for reality shows showcasing the creative process:  Project Runway and Top Chef in all their incarnations. No Reservations . And summertime is THE time for the hottest competitive reality show of them all:  So You Think You Can Dance, which aired its season finale last night. After 60 performances (!) contemporary dancer Melanie Moore was named the winner. For those of you who don't watch, the country's top aspiring dancers audition for the show, with 10 guys and 10 girls being selected to compete for the title of "America's Favorite Dancer." I admit that most seasons I don't particularly care who wins. I don't even vote once they open the judging up to viewers. I tune in twice a week, through the humid dog days of summer, to watch talented (hardbodied, flexible) dancers challenge  themselves with new and unfamilar genres, and work wit...

I’ve loved taking hot baths for as long as I remember, and they’ve long served multiple purposes in my life. As a lifelong Minnesotan, I have a well-honed appreciation for warmth. As a former competitive gymnast, my muscles slackened and relaxed as they slurped up the moist heat. And the bathtub’s always been my favorite place to read. As a young teenager, one of my favorite Sunday afternoon rituals was to take a bath with a book—usually a Harlequin Presents category romance. I’d lock the door, fill the bathtub with too-hot water, and carefully select my bubble bath from the row of colorful plastic bottles lining the toilet tank. I’d read until my skin was shriveled like a prune—or until one of my younger sisters picked the lock with a bobby pin.   When I was a slightly older teenager, I got sick. Suddenly it hurt to eat, and my joints ached all the time, even though gymnastics season was over. I lost weight—a lot of weight. Family and friends kept me stocked with books durin...

by Tamara Hogan I’m celebrating both my <mumble mumble>th birthday and the publication of my first novel this week, so, without further ado:  Happy launch day to me Happy launch day to me Happy launch day, dear Tammy… Happy launch day to me! Forgive me; the tune’s on my brain. Please, help yourself to some cake. ;-) My birthday - or the passage of time, at any rate - is something I’m thinking about quite a lot this week. A couple of decades ago, I came out of college with a freshly-minted B.A. in English/Creative Writing, and a paralyzing case of performance anxiety. Many birthdays later, at the mid-point in my life, I finally found the guts to put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard) and write my first manuscript. I never in a million years imagined that that manuscript would final in RWA’s Golden Heart contest, win a paranormal Daphne, and sell to Sourcebooks as part of a three-book deal. This whole experience has been an epic rollercoaster rade, chock-full of ...

I have to be honest and reveal that my first kiss kind of sucked. (In the bad way.) Not that the kisser wasn't a perfectly delightful boy... but that boy was a friend, not a boy friend, and as readers of our blog certainly realize, this is a critical distinction. So when he laid the kiss on me - wholly unexpected, all tongue, and no technique - I thought kissing was eww, gross. You'll be happy to know that I have since changed my mind.  Ahem. While Taste Me's hero, incubus security guru Lukas Sebastiani, may not have given siren rock star Scarlett Fontaine her first kiss, he was definitely her first lover--and as the tagline on the cover of the book says, "When your first lover's a sex demon, it's all downhill from there." After spending a single, rock-my-world night together, Lukas, guilt-stricken, walked away without saying a word, leaving Scarlett wondering what she'd done wrong.  Years later, she's never had a lover to match him, and she...

 "Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned.  I have committed Prologue, repeatedly, gleefully and joyfully..."   Yeah, okay. I realize that I'm risking a lighning bolt on this one. But here in the confessional, I can freely admit that I LOVE PROLOGUES - well-written prologues, that is. Prologues: love 'em or hate 'em? This is a subject where authors, agents, editors and readers all seem to have strong opinions. Writers on the contest circuit are told that agents and editors hate prologues - or do they love them this year? I forget. ;-) Right now, a lot of us here at Sourcebooks Casablanca are judging manuscripts and/or books for two of Romancelandia's most prestigious writing contests: The Romance Writers of America's Golden Heart and RITA awards. As a rabid reader, I judge a lot of contests, primarily in the paranormal/urban fantasy/futuristic/time-travel...