Yes! It’s called Blessed Winter. It’s a no-room-at-the-inn romance starring Brock,the brother of the groom in Cruel Summer, and Pandora, a pregnant waitress alone on Christmas Eve.
The catch is, Blessed Winter is written by Glory, my heroine from On The Edge. So you can only read Blessed Winter by reading On The Edge.
It’s more of an Easter egg than a Christmas book, now I come to think of it. Let’s call it a stocking stuffer, maybe?
I set it up like a real book, though, and made a cover for it, since it has a plot and everything. Read more about it here, but if you follow the buy links, they’ll take you to On The Edge.
Absolutely! No Longer Forbidden? initially released exclusively in the UK, which is why the cover looks different.
It later came out in the US as a two-in-one, bound with More Than A Convenient Marriage, so you get the first two books in my Makricosta Dynasty with one purchase.
It’s an exciting serial that is different from all of my other work.
These are not complete novels, but rather episodes like a soap opera with many cliff-hanger endings and exciting plot twists. You’ll want to read the episodes in numerical order to avoid spoilers. Mine is episode ten.
Even though this series is more family drama than romance, I was drawn to the Presents-like setting in Santa Barbara and the luxury lifestyle of the Marshall family. If you are a fan of The Affair, Brothers & Sisters, Dirty Sexy Money, Billions, The Sopranos, Dynasty, and Revenge, you’ll love this series. Here’s a little more about it from Harlequin:
The prestigious Marshall family is America’s best-kept secret. Their business is fixing the screw-ups of the super rich – from infidelity to embezzlement to…well, anything! Only when family patriarch, Harrison, is in accident that leaves him in a coma – his wife Mariella discovers some startling truths about her husband—and about the secrets he has been keeping from her.
Why has he so much cash? Why doesn’t she have power of attorney? And who is this mysterious figure referred to as The Fixer who has been calling the shots behind her back? So begins a power battle for control of the business—and the family. And ultimately to being torn between her sense of right and wrong…and protecting her husband, her family…at any price!
You would think, after three or four different pairs of eyes had seen a manuscript, that all of the typos would have been caught. I read through my own stories dozens of times as I’m revising. I still pick up printed copies of my book and found typos. It happens and there’s nothing that can be done after the book is published.
I’m glad you asked!
Off the top of my head, I’ve received: French, Italian, Spanish, Japanese, Korean, Hebrew, Indonesian, Dutch, Swedish, Finnish, Norwegian, and German. I’ve also had a Japanese manga (graphic novel) arrive for Proof Of Their Sin which was super cool.
You can find the same title in French here:
L’héritier des Donatelli
In fact, there are dedicated pages to several languages and foreign editions.
Shop the International sections here.
Harlequin releases my books around the world. In North America, the book is called a Harlequin Presents, but in the UK, it’s Mills and Boon Modern, and in Australia, it’s Mills and Boon Sexy.
Those are all English versions and usually release on the same date.
They might later be picked up for translation by foreign language offices, but each office makes that decision on their own.
With the Montana Born covers, a lot were released as part of multi-author series, so they wanted a consistent look between all the authors, but after about a year, they rebranded on all of my covers to make them stand out as a series by me.
Sit down and type until it’s done. That’s the short answer.
If the book is part of a series, I definitely do a lot more outlining and preplanning. Picking names is the first challenge. For virtually all of my books, I do a brainstorming exercise where I list all the reasons the hero and heroine resist each other, and all of the reasons they are attracted to each other. This starts to form the emotional arc of the romance. I often write a few paragraphs of back story about each character. About 70% of the time, I write a synopsis, then change things as I go along, so what’s the point in that? Not all of my publishers ask to see early chapters. Lately, I’ve been submitting full manuscripts. My editors offer feedback and I’ve been lucky in that I’ve never had a truly awful experience with revisions.
Funny you should ask.
Before I published, when I had young children and time was at a premium, I was genuinely frustrated that I couldn’t physically work on more than one book at a time. So the most honest answer is, No. Of course I can’t type one story and dictate another.
But I often have different books in various stages of completion. I might be writing the first draft of one and have to stop for a few days because I have revisions or copy edits on another. That’s very common.
With On The Edge, the heroine, Glory, writes a book. I pretty much wrote her book, Blessed Winter, in real time as I came to points in Glory’s story where she could steal away to the cafe or whatever. I wrote it as if it was a subplot of the main book. (It kind of was.)
It was very challenging and that’s why I didn’t do it again with the next one in the series.
And just to be clear, Blessed Winter is not available separately from On The Edge.
I had twins on the brain when I came up with the Wrong Heirs baby swap duet.
Like many people, I’m fascinated by twins. One of my favourite series as a child was the Bobbsey Twins.
I started thinking about two sets of identical twins, but I needed something that would arc through all four books. I came up with Trella’s kidnapping as a child, which turned them all inward with great defences, giving me some built-in conflicts to play with.
After some back and forth with my editor, I somehow got all four books got written and the Sauveterre Siblings came to life.
View all four books in the Sauveterre Siblings here.
I was due to write a proposal for a new contract and had recently watched Twinsters, about a pair of girls separated at birth.
I was trying to think of a way to make that trope fresh and different. It’s been done by a lot of authors.
As I was thinking about ways that twins might be sent home with different parents, the baby swap idea hit me. I quickly realized that the characters in each book had to have different and significant conflicts aside from the fact their babies had been swapped, especially since the swap is resolved fairly early in the stories.
That’s how Cesar gets amnesia. I thought, “What if he doesn’t even know he had sex with Sorcha?” He finds out when the hospital calls him for a blood test.
He’s pretty darned surprised.
