News

Coming Soon

My Regency short story: Outrageous Behavior is coming out March 25 from The Wild Rose Press! Yippee! If you're looking for something short, sweet and inexpensive, take a look.

Regency Tea & Book Signing

The Cary Library (Raleigh/Durham, NC) is hosting a Regency Tea with romance authors Liz Carlyle, Amy Corwin, Claudia Dain, Sabrina Jeffries and Deb Marlowe on March 31 at the Paige Walker Center. There will be a tea expert there, giving a period correct tea and a book signing afterward.

The Cary library is asking attendants to sign up ahead of time at their location, as seating is limited. The event is free, but you have to sign up and get a ticket ahead of time. We just heard that they are nearing capacity.

Hope to see some of you there!

What I'm Reading Now

You Have the Right to Remain Puzzled by Parnell Hall.
Cozy Mystery

What a riot! I love this book. It's got me laughing with the snarky dialogue and impossibly twisted situations the "Puzzle Lady" gets herself into. I really recommend this (and can't wait to finish it and get some more in this series).

What I just Finished Reading

Whiskey Sour by J.A. Konrath
Mystery

I really enjoyed this book and am giving it 95 out of 100. It's definitely on my "keepers" shelf, and I'll be picking up the rest of his books. I'll start out with my only quibbles: a) The main character's name is Lt. Jacqueline "Jack" Daniels, with the Chicago police department. Well, as everyone knows, the nickname for Jacqueline is "Jac" not "Jack" (which is incidentally the nickname for John). Obviously, he wanted to play on the Jack Daniels Whiskey theme so he had to stretch it. Sigh. It would have been better to leave it as Jac Daniels—he could still play on the Whiskey theme and it would have been smoother; and b) Jack's voice was decidedly masculine. I got used to it, but never really "felt" the narrator's "female-ness". It was like a man pretending to be a woman. J

Small quibbles, nothing bad, probably just moi.

Gotta say, though, this book moved! He carried you right along with the story of a serial killer calling himself The Gingerbread Man who decided to cut a wide-swath through the female population of Chicago. Pretty gruesome, really.

The writing is tight and exciting, and the story moves right along at a fast pace. It's hard to put it down, really. And I love Jack's wry sense of humor.

Total: 95 out of 100

What I'm Pondering

How to write true-to-life Regency dialog without completely boring my audience and making them think all the characters are hopelessly dorky. You have to update it, but the question is the degree to which you can do this without straying too far into way-NOT-historical. I'm working on a Regency mystery—a serious Regency mystery—and it requires accuracy.

What made me think I could do this?

Promo-ho-ness

Contest

You need something to cheer you up, right? You know you do. With spring almost here—but not quite—and that general blah feeling that results from the end of the holidays and arrival of more bills, you're in desperate need of a nice surprise. Maybe even something you can curl up with and read.  Something that will let you read not one, but thousands of good books…

A Sony e-Book Reader! Yeah, that's the ticket!

The Wild Rose Press is running a contest to give away a free Sony e-book reader! The contest runs until March17, so be sure to visit and find out how to enter.  I'm one of the sponsors so you can use the purchase of my Regency romantic mystery, I Bid One American, to enter!  And I was pleased to discover that Book Utopia considered I Bid One American one of the best books for 2008! Thanks!