Sourcebooks Casablanca Romance Authors

I love music. It can bring me out of the deepest funk, make me smile through tears or take me back to a breathtaking moment in time. Music has the innate ability to call up a plethora of emotions and memories but it can also spark my muse to life. I drive quite a bit for my gig with The College of Westchester and while I'm doing my road warrior thing, music is constantly flowing through the speakers of my bad-ass mini-van. (I know...a mini-van isn't bad ass but I have to think of it that way in order to tolerate driving it.) I use this drive time to do much of the plotting for my books and the songs inevitably help me along.  As I plot, certain songs are more helpful than others and these songs end up compiling a soundtrack for each book. Within each soundtrack, there is a theme song that I end up using as the music for the book trailers. Amy Petty, whom I've blogged about before, is my primary musical muse for the Amoveo Legend series. She and her record label Red Pi...

Is 6’2”, slightly shaggy hair the color of fresh roasted coffee suntipped with gold, puppy dog brown eyes, surfer tan, and a body Jillian Michaels would approve. He makes sure my coffee cup is filled, that I have anything I need, that my favorite DVDs are within reach, and my iPod is always fully charged. He’s within reach if I need a little … inspiration, and always ready to run to See’s if I require my favorite chocolates. And sadly, he only exists in my imagination. Sigh! My muse has been talking away a lot while I’ve been buried deep with new work. And if I hit a snag he would even direct me to my witchy Barbies, my dragon and Fae figurines, and the best, Ganesha, the Hindu god of good fortune and Patron of the Arts, especially writing. All little things that would give me that much needed spark. Writing a book is a lot of ‘what ifs’ and a muse is terrific at whispering that all important what in my ear or suggestions. Why can’t that new cat hanging around the house be a fun famili...

By Greek definition, music is any art presided over by one of the nine Muses. It’s fitting that my muse is amused by music. Specifically, hard, fast, loud, electric-guitar-enriched, drum-thumping, bass-groovin’, singer-screaming music. Rock music throws my muse all in a tizzy and she gets a little wild and crazy on the page. (You can thank me later.) If you take her to a concert, she has weeks of inspiration to fuel her insatiable need to create. I guess that’s not too surprising. I do write rock star erotic romances, after all. A lot of authors need total silence when they write. Sometimes I do, too. Especially when I need to concentrate on something that just isn’t clicking right. But if I want to channel the story, the chaotic sound of rock music in the background puts me in my zone and the words come pouring out. I’m not exactly listening to the music. I couldn't tell you what song was filtering through my head at any given moment. It’s mostly there to block out other things th...

"They are all of one mind, their hearts are set upon song, and their spirit is free from care. He (she) is happy whom the Muses love. For though man (woman) has sorrow and 
grief in his soul, when the Muses sing, at once he forgets his dark thoughts 
and remembers not his troubles. Such is the holy gift of the Muses." Hesiod Once upon a time it was a universal belief that creativity in the areas of art, poetry, philosophy, music, dancing, writing, science, and history was inspired by the goddesses known as the Muses. Greek mythology originally referred to three goddesses born to Zeus and Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory, but very early on the number was increased to nine. Legends vary, as legends always do, but the existence of the Muses was part of oral history for centuries before the Greeks indelibly immortalized them in poetry and written myths. According to the prevailing legends, the muses were brought to life to make the world disremember the evil, relieve t...

In Greek mythology, the muses were nine sisters, daughters of Zeus, who presided over the arts, whispering in artists’ ears, inspiring them to create great works of art. I don’t like to spend a lot of time thinking about muses. Oh, I believe I have a muse. I’m certain of it, in fact. Well, probably not a daughter of Zeus, but you know what I mean. I have this idea, however, that if I spend time thinking about my muse or trying to figure out where it comes from, that I’ll lose it. Go ahead and laugh. I know it sounds silly, and yet I believe it whole-heartedly. How do I know my muse exists? I know this because I am a “pantser”. Half the people reading this just went, “Ah. Yep, you have a muse.”For the rest of you, and for those who don’t know what I mean by “pantser”, the short version is I don’t know what will happen in my story until it happens. Often I’m just as surprised as any reader would be. Probably the most tangible way to explain this to someone else would be explaining the d...

Almost two weeks ago, I had to have my 10-year-old dog, Sambuca put down. When I thought about my muse, I realized my best ideas always occurred when I was out with him for his last pee break of the night. Since Sambuca went to the great doggy park in the sky, I had yet to have a decent idea about my current work in progress. I’ve spent day after day in front of my computer writing complete drivel. Nothing came to me. No divine inspiration, no great idea about how to get past the roadblock I’d successfully built to keep my characters apart. I’ve been stressing, thinking that I had lost my muse. Yesterday I drove from Maryland to Florida with my two critique partners, Laura and Deborah. Fortunately, or unfortunately, depending upon how you look at it, our muses decided to come with us for the 19-hour drive from Maryland to Tampa. The trip usually takes 16 hours, but thanks to Laura’s trouble making muse, Trixie, we hit nothing but traffic and accidents until we reached South Carolina. I...

I’d heard about muses. In my mind, they were little feminine creatures who sat on a writer’s shoulder and whispered ideas and dialogue in her ear. When I started writing ten years ago, I didn’t have a muse. But I figured she would show up eventually. When she didn’t, I thought maybe only published authors had muses. But after I published and my muse still didn’t make an appearance, I finally had to admit that maybe I didn’t have a muse. Maybe writing was always going to be hard work. Maybe it would always be me and the keyboard. Maybe I was just going to have to rely on myself. It’s not that I don’t want a muse. I do. I wish she would come, sit on my shoulder, and inspire me. And it’s not that I don’t have muse-like moments. I write something and look at it later and think, did I write that? I don’t remember writing that. Did my muse show up in that moment or do I just have a short memory? Not having a muse doesn’t play very well, I can tell you that. Do you know what questions an auth...

posted by Loucinda McGary aka Aunty Cindy Way back in May, 2008 when the Casa blog was first started, I introduced myself by saying that I'd been writing for just about as long as I could remember. I wrote in a lot of different venues with varying degrees of success, but one thing was certain, if I wasn't writing I always felt like something was missing. But thanx to my muse Ms. Crankypants (to learn more about her, see my guest post tomorrow on Sia's Thoughts Over Coffee : http://siamckye.blogspot.com/ ) , I usually found something to write about. My muse always threw interesting characters, situations, and settings my way. When I sat down to write, if the words were flowing, it was thanks to Ms. Crankypants. If not... well, she does tend to be a bit temperamental sometimes. Over the years and the different writing projects, I've learned to trust my muse and my process. And mostly that process is to just keep showing up! I know, I know, that sounds terribly boring, a...

Posted by Robin Kaye Yesterday afternoon at 2:00 I emailed the manuscript of my spring 2009 release, Too Hot To Handle to my editor.  At 4:30, she called to tell me the synopsis of my nest book, The Making Of A Domestic God , is due on her desk in one week. I had an entire two and a half hours of blissful self-adulation. If I hadn't been driving my twelve-year-old to her dance class, that time would have involved a toast, maybe a quiet celebratory dinner with my own domestic god. But my life isn't that romantic. Instead, I received a high-five from my daughter and spent the evening at her dance school among other tortured dance parents. And speaking of torture, this morning in my dentist's office, I endured the second half of a root canal. I thought nothing could be worse than the first half. I was wrong. If I were ever to write a romantic suspense, I'd definitely have a deranged dentist as my villain. Mind you, I didn't tell my dentist this until after he put awa...

You know the saying - location, location, location . I used to be the same way about my writing. Same seat, same time of day, muse enters. Voila . I fondly remember the days in my mid-twenties where I could write until way past midnight and still feel the creative juices flowing as I put my computer to sleep. Yet the more kids I had (now up to, and stopping at, three) I've learned I have to be able to write anywhere, any time, or well, it just ain't happenin'. My muse, it seems, is now a morning owl. And she requires coffee. Not just Folgers, either. If she doesn't get Starbucks, she just doesn't put out, the wench.  When my youngest was two, I hammered away in the early morning hours writing Dating da Vinci (Nov. '08) up in the playroom/office on a big Mac. Then my toddler Owen's demands usurped that of my muse's. I was upstairs, he was down, and that doesn't bode well for the whole supervision thing. Big Mac couldn't be lugged around, so I inve...