Sourcebooks Casablanca Romance Authors

My mom is a huge horror fan and created me in her image. As a kid, the first movie I remember watching with her was "The Wolfman" staring Lon Chaney Jr. I have a very vivid memory of sitting on the couch next to my mom and watching a man turn into a hairy creature who died a tragic death. From then on, I was hooked. We watched Dr. Shock together on Saturday afternoons. We went to see Jaws, The Thing, Friday the 13th, Halloween, Alien, and every slasher/monster/alien movie you could imagine. My mom braved the midnight movies to take me to see Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, Eraserhead and Rocky Horror Picture Show. We swooned over Frank Langella as Dracula and, later, at Gary Oldman. We laughingly cringed at out-there films like Re-animator and The Toxic Avenger. We've kept the tradition alive with movies like Paranormal Activity. My mom bought me my first Fangoria and Heavy Metal magazines. She gave me her copies of Stephen King's Carrie and Salem...

 My imagination...  Mark and I live out in the country, where the chances of anyone approaching our house - for any reason whatsoever, regardless of the time of day - are pretty much zero. Our driveway is hundreds of yards long. Even our closest neighbors call before coming over, and we do the same.  All that solitude...it's introvert heaven. Usually. Because when Mark's gone for the weekend and I'm home alone...you know where my imagination goes. My hearing, always very acute, ratchets into overdrive. I hear every scratch or thump, inside and outside - especially when that thump occurs in the middle of the night. There are a lot of animals, both wild and domesticated, on the loose in the area, and they don't particularly care that humans are trying to sleep. Coyotes howl at the moon in eerie harmony. Racoons ruckus and rumble as they cross the road. The deer play Chicken with cars on th...

Personally, I love Halloween. It's not so much the ghosts and goblins, but I just love Fall. I love pumpkins and cooler temperatures, full moons and ghostly trees. In my warrior series, these guys fight real evil monsters, but instead of posting one of those excerpts, I decided to post the first scene of the book, which does include a bump in the night. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ She wasn’t in Scotland. That was the first thing Shay registered when she smashed her foot against the wall. She sat up, disoriented. This bedroom hadn’t been hers for nine years. Rubbing her toe, she tilted her head, trying to pinpoint the sound that had woken her. Was it the strange dream? This one was always the same, a place that glowed, a man she couldn’t see, speaking a language she couldn’t understand. It was better than the one where she was buried alive in a casket, listening as dirt fell on the lid. The only twist in her dreams these past weeks was that Cody haunted them. Shay hoped this impromptu trip...

by Elisabeth Naughton One morning in June I was driving my daughter to theater camp when I felt something strange on my neck. Figuring I'd been bitten by a mosquito the night before, I rubbed the spot and didn't think much more of it. Until a few hours later when the spot began to hurt...a burning, stinging pain I'd never felt before. By the evening (a Friday, no less), my neck was swollen and red, and the burn was spreading. I suffered through the weekend with flu-like symptoms, and by Sunday night every lymph node in my head was enlarged, especially those on the left side of my head and neck--the side with the "bite". Until that moment, I didn't even know humans had lymph nodes on the top of their scalps! But guess what...we do. Though I really wish I'd learned that in a book and not from experience. The area around the bite turned black as the skin all died. When the pain became so intense I couldn't stand it anymore, I finally gave in and went to t...

I have to admit, Halloween is my least favorite holiday, and I never really looked forward to it. And then I started watching Ghosthunters on the SyFy channel. Two plumbers rambling around reputedly haunted houses and old castles saying “Ghosts, are you here?” I absolutely fell in love with the characters, and I’m always cheering them on to find evidence of paranormal activity (although they have yet to find indisputable proof, darn it). I especially enjoy the history of the old houses and locations they visit. They do a live show on Halloween and I always look forward to watching it. I adore how they try to be all scientific with their equipment (EVP, means Electronic Voice Phenomena, which is background noise too quiet for the human ear to catch, but can be caught on a tape recorder.) I love how one of the plumbers uses formal language, like ‘upon’, and how the other one is just cute enough to squeeze. The show has popularized phrases like, ‘debunking’, ‘residual haunt’, ‘intell...

It seems like such a long time since I wrote this book to being here—and yet at the same it doesn’t seem quite real. I dreamed of being published and holding my book when I started writing (as an adult) but as I educated myself on the business I knew the odds were long. However I’m stubborn (and I was having fun writing the stories I wanted to read) so I kept going, switching between writing fantasy romance and paranormal romance, between novella and novel length. Then something clicked and I started selling. I wish I could pinpoint what I started doing differently, or what online class I’d taken that caused the change so that when people ask I could tell them. But in truth is I don’t know. Luck? Timing? Writing hundreds of thousands of words and then re-writing them? Not being afraid of rejection? All of the above? What I do know is I never let go of the dream. I stumbled, I thought about giving up, but in the end I wouldn’t let myself. If you give up on dreams, all that’s left is...

This month's theme is a tough one for me. Whenever I hear things going bump in the night, I never think of ghosts or witches or werewolves. I'm more nervous about things like thunderstorms, tornadoes, and earthquakes--things that can cause actual damage and injury. Real, live human beings are often pretty scary, too, and they don't have to be axe murders or serial killers to make me shiver. I recently had an experience that unnerved me quite a bit. It involved some items that came up missing  from my home when nothing else seemed to have been disturbed. What bothered me wasn't so much the loss of those items as that someone had quite obviously searched the house for them. And I knew who that someone was. It was a violation not only of privacy, but of trust. For me, the disruption of my peace of mind is far more scary than any ghostly visits, zombie attacks, or bloody vampires. The idea that even in your own home, nothing is truly safe or private creates a feeling o...

When I think of our topic this month, things that go bump in the nigh t, I don’t think of ghosts or goblins or vampires. I don’t think of any horror-type things at all. I have plenty of real things that go bump in the night, and most of them are due to my own little goblin, Baby Galen. I will preface this by saying that until 6 months ago, Baby Galen was not a good sleeper. She was usually up once a night at least 3-4 times a week. I don’t know about you, but if I anticipate my sleep is going to be interrupted, I sleep very lightly. In fact, I would often wake in the middle of the night and not be able to go back to sleep even if she was sound asleep. It was like my body was ready to be jolted awake, even when there was no need. Finally, Baby Galen has started sleeping consistently, and my body has gotten back on a regular sleep schedule. But there are still occasional “bumps in the night.” Like the other night when she’d been in bed for about forty-five minutes, and all of a sudden I ...

A big Casa welcome to fellow Sourcebooks Casablanca author, Kristine Grayson, whose book Utterly Charming is in stores this month and very fun twist on Fairy Tales: Cocktail Party Conversation by Kristine Grayson People say I have a strange imagination. I simply think that I like to ask “What If?” What if Sleeping Beauty slept a looooong time. What if she wasn’t just sleeping, she was in danger? What if Prince Charming, in trying to save her, lived 1000 years longer than she did—real time. What if Sleeping Beauty woke up now and has no memory of the last 1000 years? Those questions are the stuff of cocktail party conversation, only the cocktail party usually happens in my head. That’s because I’m the kind of person you don’t want at that cocktail party. I’d insist that Sleeping Beauty would be a bit angry (understatement!) and that Prince Charming wouldn’t be interested in that kid any more. Okay. I wouldn’t just insist. I’d insist loudly . That’s why you do...