Sourcebooks Casablanca Romance Authors

Bottoms Up! Otter Explores Bucket in Georgia Aquarium I’ve always had a fondness for aquariums, especially in the summer. Zoos can be hot, overly bright, noisy, and, unsurprisingly, redolent of their various inhabitants. By contrast, aquariums tend to be temperature-controlled, softly lit, reasonably quiet—give or take the occasional dolphin-click, whale song, waterfowl squawk, or seal bark—and less odoriferous, provided you don’t mind the smells of brine and sea wrack.   And there’s something soothing, even hypnotic, about watching multicolored fish or sea mammals glide silently through the waters of their tanks, while kelp forests sway in the current. I’ve been to several fine aquariums over the years: Monterey Bay, with its charming sea otter exhibit; Stanley Park, Vancouver, where I first saw beluga whales; and Georgia, which boasts an amazing collection of aquatic life that includes whales, dolphins, otters, penguins, and an albino alligator (the latter looked like ...

Mother's Day is tomorrow and flowers are a popular gift. So this seems like the appropriate time to talk about the traditional language of roses...and catfish! Did you know that since Victorian times, the different color of roses had different meanings? For Mother's Day, at least in the South, it is traditional to a wear red rose corsage on Mother's Day to signify a living mother, and white roses to honor a mother who is no longer alive. My mother passed three years ago in February and there are several lovely white buds on my rose bush out in the yard this year. I think they will be full blown by tomorrow. When she passed my sister went through the ancient suitcase that held all her pictures and divided them up three ways. One for each of Mama's three kids...bless her heart, that couldn't have been an easy task. I know because I haven't touched that white plastic box she brought over here until today. I went looking for a good picture of Mama ...

Since this is my first post as a Casa Author, I thought I should tell you a little about me. Oh, you can get the basics on my website , where I say that I grew up on Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie . That two of my favorite books are Bewitching by Jill Barnett and A Knight in Shining Armor by Jude Devereaux . What I don’t go into and will here is how these shows made me the writer I am today. I studied Spanish in college. Actually, I studied it from 7th grade on and lived in Spain for a semester. I have a “thing” for languages. I love words. I love manipulating words and, like my heroine Erica in In Over Her Head , am a sucker for puns. I love double entendre and playing with meanings and alliteration and taking clichés and twisting them to a whole new meaning. Combine a love of language with a love of the paranormal, throw in Disney--with an attitude (because I love those princesses), add in some Indiana Jones action (and the hot heroes naturally follow), stir in some of my favor...