Sourcebooks Casablanca Romance Authors

by M.L. Buchman I'm still busy recovering from the release of Light Up the Night . Trisha O'Malley had been kicking her heels in frustration at not getting her own story and she's damn glad that she finally did. (No! No! Shhhh! Don't get her started or we're all in trouble.) She wandered aboard in Book #1 The Night is Mine  and kept showing up in subsequent books. She fought beside Emily Beale, was interviewed by Connie Davis, and did her best to seduce Tim Maloney. And she did all of this despite my best efforts, she's a little pushy that way. Just like the helicopter she flies. The MH-6M Little Bird attack version, small, feisty, and dangerous. MH-6M Little Bird and 75th Rangers visit NASCAR It's only when she is faced with SEAL Lieutenant Bill Bruce, who she immediately tags as "Billy the SEAL," that she meets her match. And she does her absolute best to resist him...right until a moment aboard "Old Ironsides." I fin...

In keeping with the theme of Abundance this month, I thought for a while about what my favorite things are to have in abundance. The never ending basket of chocolate at my day job? Wonderful friends? Fan mail? Honestly, I love each and every one of those items and I can never have enough of any of them. But I am an author and so my mind eventually circled back to the art of story-telling. And do you know what I love in abundance? Secondary characters. How random is that? But these are the characters who make movies, television shows and books really sparkle. They add depth and dimension that wouldn’t be there without them. They make you want to know their story and they tell you so much about the protagonist with very little effort. One of my favorite movies of all time is Casablanca . I am a huge Humphrey Bogart fan, but for me, it was the secondary characters who made that movie the classic it is – from the self-serving Captain Renault to the loyal, piano-playing Sam to the idealist...

Since we’re blogging about mothers this month, I’ve been thinking a lot about how I portray mothers in my novels. I tend to make certain they’re absent or more of a villain than a helper to my hero or heroine. I love my mom and consider her a good friend. So why do I kill off my characters’ mothers or make them horrible adversaries? And my conclusion? It makes my characters more vulnerable. And stronger. If they’re alone in the world, they’ve had to make their own way, build their own life, go it alone. So it’s not that I’m against mothers, but characters lacking a mother or a supportive mother are more interesting to me. That said, in my next novel, The Making of a Duchess, I’ve written a wonderful mother character. Rowena, the duchess de Valére, escaped the French Revolution with my hero Julien. Unfortunately, she had to leave her other two sons behind. Very early in the book, Rowena has to make a decision: save one son or lose all three. She decides to save Julien. Rowena isn’t a ce...

I thought it might happen. Even planned it, really. And earlier this week, it happened! What happened, you ask? I had a reader/reviewer, who got an advance copy of HEALING LUKE, email me to ask if Luke's brother, Aaron, and their father, Bart, would get stories of their own. As an author, there's not a better compliment than to have a reader ask to see more from your secondary characters. (Well, there is "I stayed up all night to finish the book!" and "I'm going to the store now to buy your whole backlist!" ...but wanting stories for the secondary characters is right up there!) Knowing that a reader not only fell in love with your characters in THIS book, but that they enjoyed your writing enough to want more is heady stuff. I'm flattered beyond belief. It also reinforces my belief that memorable secondary characters are almost as important to a story as having a hero and heroine the reader can love. In fact, I have a workshop that I give to writers...

Every aspect of creating and presenting a well-rounded story is fun, as far as I am concerned. I love setting the atmosphere, describing the clothing or emotions, and of course weaving the plot is a favorite/necessary part. But you can have all of that stuff down, pen the greatest masterpiece of all time even, but if the characters who walk through that world are not riveting in every way, then the entire novel will fall flat. I suppose it is open for debate, but I would almost go so far as to say that great characters are more important than the plot. Or at least characters that a reader loves will go a long way toward salvaging a story that may not be all the wonderful. So we all approach our characters with careful consideration. Or we should! In my particular case – in writing The Darcy Saga – I have the advantage or disadvantage (depends on how one wishes to look at it!) of not only needing to create my own players, as all authors do, but also giving new life to characters origin...

I’ve always been fascinated by the role of secondary characters in novels. What would Jane Austen’s Persuasion be without Sir Walter Elliot and his overweening vanity? Or Jane Eyre without poor, dear Helen Burns, or lively Adèle? Those characters live to serve, in a way. In the best sense, secondary characters provide more than a placemarker, or merely someone for the hero or heroine to talk to. They should mean something to the plot, and they should reflect bits of the primary characters, exposing their strengths and weaknesses along the way. And so I thought I’d reveal a little about the secondary characters that people Lady Anne and the Howl and the Dark , and the next two installments Lady Anne and the Ghost’s Revenge & Lady Anne and the Gypsy Curse . Many secondary characters in ‘Howl’ are, I realize, missing someone who has died or disappeared. ( Hmm, funny how things can occur to the writer only after they are done writing the books! I never thought about that before I wro...