My story ideas usually start with a visualization of a scene in my head, often a dramatic moment. So, my novel Chase was initially just a picture in my mind: a bad-guy drug-dealer meets with one of his runners. The incident then turned into a scene which expanded into a full-length novel. Interestingly, I ended up cutting […]
Behind the Scenes: Author Pamela S. Meyers dreamed of traveling back in time
Having grown up in the small resort town of Lake Geneva, WI, I’d heard for as long as I could remember how the wealthy of Chicago had come north to Geneva Lake after the Great Chicago Fire to build large (sometimes gargantuan) homes on the lakeshore to house their families while the city was rebuilt. […]
Behind the Scenes: Author Sara L. Foust and her dream career
The heroine in my debut novel, Callum’s Compass, is Kat Williams. She is a wildlife biologist tasked with documenting spring salamanders in select water sources of Anderson and Morgan counties here in East Tennessee, where I live. I chose this career path for her for a number of reasons. Having her out in the forests […]
Behind the Scenes: Author Lisa J. Flickinger tells of a childhood trip
The original seed for my latest release Fool’s Notion was planted long before I put pen to paper (fingers to keyboard). When I was nine years old, my family packed foodstuffs, clothing, and my grandmother in our brown panel van and drove eighteen hundred miles to Los Angeles for a vacation. We toured the amazing Disneyland, […]
Behind the Scenes: Author Shannon Taylor Vannatter & the city girl living in an abandoned farmhouse
A few years back, a young single woman from our church had to move out of her apartment on very short notice. The only new place she could find where she could move in quickly was in the country. The house belonged to another church member, but it was old and had been uninhabited for […]
Behind the Scenes: Author Donna Schlachter’s desert oasis tale
A Prickly Affair came about as the result of a long-standing friendship, a step-mother who I dearly loved, and a desert oasis I longed to write about. Mary Davis, a good friend, contacted me because I’d worked with her on a previous romance collection, wanting to know if I was interested in another, and I […]
Behind the Scenes: Author Laurie Lucking constructs fantasy-world religion
Christian fantasy is one of my favorite genres to read, but until I started writing my own novel, I never realized how tricky it can be to handle religion in a fantasy context. Would the people of a fantasy world approach religion the same way we do? If not, how far can their religious practices […]
Behind the Scenes: Author Carole Brown listened to her mother’s stories of World War II
Do you have a favorite military picture of a loved one? My journey into learning about the spies of World War II begin with my mother’s tales of living through the war and the pictures I saw. The romance, bravery, fashions, vocabulary, the shows and music, so much nostalgia—all of it fostered a love of this […]
Behind the Scenes: Author Becky Melby tastes the cherries of Door County
If you look at a map of Wisconsin, Door County is the tip of the thumb of the mitten-shaped state—the part that gets frostbit on nippy winter days. This location, with its cooler spring months, makes Door County the perfect place for growing yummy, tart Montmorency cherries. At their peak in the 1950s, 700 cherry […]
Behind the Scenes: Author June Foster confronts flawed characters
Prescription for Romance is the sequel to Letting Go, both set in small town Alabama. Scott Townsend made a brief appearance in the first book and dated the heroine. He was a nice guy then. Unselfish, thoughtful, sweet. Or so I thought. He didn’t tell me much in that first book. It wasn’t until Prescription […]