#37 – Using Random.org, I’ve picked a winner for $10 Gift Card, autographed copy of SINS OF THE FLESH, STRONGER THAN SIN Tote bag and an autographed copy of AZTEC GOLD.: Rachel Comment # 7 Please e-mail me your postal addresses so I can send out your prize.

I’m so excited to have my wonderful editor, Selina McLemore, here to share some fresh buzz from Forever Romance! Leave a comment on today’s blog for a chance to win a $10 Gift Card, autographed copy of SINS OF THE FLESH, STRONGER THAN SIN Tote bag and an autographed copy of AZTEC GOLD.

Selina began her publishing career as an intern for a magazine—Sesame Street Magazine. But soon instead of editing pages full of puppets, she was editing stories about heartache, heartbreak and the kind of love that can make you forget you ever felt any of those things in the first place. Now Selina is a Senior Editor at Grand Central Publishing, where she acquires literary and commercial women’s fiction and narrative non-fiction, multicultural fiction, and all types of romance. Some of the authors she’s had the privilege of working with are New York Times bestselling author Kimberla Lawson Roby; national bestselling romance author Jennifer Haymore; New York Times bestselling paranormal romance author Caridad Piñeiro; and New York Times bestselling author Stella Cameron.

Prior to Grand Central Publishing, Selina worked at HarperCollins Publishers and Harlequin Books. She is a graduate of Northwestern University, where she earned degrees in English and Spanish Literature.

Without further ado, here’s Selina!

So when I was asked to do this, I was told I could write about anything I wanted. ANYTHING. I thought about the customary topics, you know, the stuff editors typically write about: the kind of submissions we want, upcoming books, company news, etc. But I don’t want to do that. Or at least, I don’t want to do just that. Because sure, I do want readers to know that I’m looking for new books–lush, sensual historicals; dark, edgy paranormals; sweet, funny community-based contemporary romance. And sure, there are a lot of books coming out in the next few months that I’m excited about and think you’d love to read. But before all that, there’s something else I want to talk about: The Royal Wedding.

Don’t worry, it’s not what you think.

This isn’t a post where I go on and on about how much I loved the dress or the hats or Prince Harry (Well, maybe a little about Harry. Come on, how can you not love him? He’s the goodtime prince!) See, I was totally mocked for being so excited about the Royal Wedding. Not in a mean way—the teasing was all in good fun. But over and over again I found myself trying to describe why I was so enamored of it.

I loved the Royal Wedding because it marked a new beginning. Not just for William and Kate personally; it’s like a royal reset button for the British monarchy. Instead of royals entering unhappy marriages, having illicit affairs and trying to sell access to one another, we get a young couple who seems genuinely, happily in love. The even seem normal, in their own way. And so whatever is to come down the road, right now, at the beginning, we get to believe everything is good.

I like beginnings. I think anyone who likes romance does, too. Stories of people who take risks for a chance at a new life with a new love—or sometimes a new life with a former love, that counts too. I find myself drawn to novels that make me believe the characters are truly about to begin something wonderful, and in the next few months I’m lucky enough to have several authors beginning brand new series that do just that:

In July I have a new author who makes her Forever debut, Kendra Leigh Castle. Her novel DARK AWAKENING is the start of her new Dark Dynasties series. It’s the story of a woman who discovers she’s the heiress to a powerful legacy, and the sexy, shape-shifting vampire who vows to protect her.

Before I was lucky enough to be Caridad Piñeiro’s editor, I was one of her many fans. She’s kicking off a new series this summer too, when she releases THE LOST in August. THE LOST begins the Sin Hunters series, featuring dark, ancient magic and heroes with unimaginable powers.

As if that weren’t making summer hot enough, I have another new series starting in August, this one from historical author Jennifer Haymore. CONFESSIONS OF AN IMPROPER BRIDE is the story of a woman reinventing her life, and is the debut of a series featuring the Donnovan sisters. Trust me, wherever these girls go, scandal is sure to follow.

With that, I think I’ll bring my blog post about beginnings to an end. Thanks for inviting me to be a Dangerous Woman for a day!

If you’d like to know more about Forever, you can find us on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/home.php#!/ForeverRomance and follow us on Twitter @ForeverRomance. And don’t forget to download our free Forever Yours App, and put your picture on the cover of a romance novel!

#37 – Using Random.org, I’ve picked a winner for copies of THE CALLING Vampire novels, namely, DANGER CALLS, TEMPTATION CALLS and FURY CALLS: Sewicked Please e-mail me your postal addresses so I can send out your prize.

Today we’ve got a very special guest, Stacy Boyd, Senior Editor for Harlequin Desire and also my (Caridad’s) wonderful editor! Stacy is here to give us some hints on how to create a winning novel for Desire. We’d love to hear what you like about Desire or feel free to post any questions you may have about the Desire line or writing for Harlequin. Finally, we’ll pick one lucky commenter to win copies of some of the books that Caridad and Stacy have worked on together from THE CALLING Vampire novels, namely, DANGER CALLS, TEMPTATION CALLS and FURY CALLS!


Without further ado, here’s Stacy!

Seven Tips for Creating the Perfect Harlequin Desire Submission

1. Hook your reader right away!

Write a really great first line, first paragraph, first chapter. Readers, and editors, want to be invested in the characters, their conflicts and/or the premise right away.


2. Create a story with high stakes and lots of conflict.

In Desire, we love lots of sensual tension and romantic conflict, and there should be strong and believable reasons that the hero and heroine are at odds, as well as believable sensual attraction that makes them want to resolve their differences.


3. Develop an alpha hero with a heart of gold.

Desire heroes are sexy, powerful alphas with a core of emotional vulnerability. The hero may seem tough and stoic, but underneath that hard exterior, the reader can sympathize with the hero’s motives and flaws.


4. Surprise us!

Know your genre. Play with it. Make your reader feel like she’s never read anything like your book before. A surprise in the plotline, in the story’s execution, in the character development or in the author’s style and voice can really make a writer stand out from the crowd.


5. Be professional.

Successful Desire authors tend to write quickly, consistently and well. Including your publishing history and other relevant experience in your query letter, along with a short summary of your book, is the best way to introduce yourself. We look for writers we can build long-term, so let the editors know if you have more story ideas in the works.


6. Be a reader.

Read as much as you can, write what you love, keep honing your craft and maintain an attitude of persistence and professionalism.


7. Do your research.

If you’re interested in writing for Desire, you can find our guidelines on Harlequin.com, and you can speak with our authors, readers and editors by following us on Twitter (@DesireEditors) or “liking” us on Facebook (facebook.com/harlequindesire).


Thank you so much for taking the time to be with us today, Stacy! We really appreciate it.

#37 – Using Random.org, I’ve picked two winners from this Getting to Know You Blog: Cindy L. and Jane T. both win STRONGER THAN SIN T-shirts, copies of STRONGER THAN SIN, bath gels and other goodies!! Please e-mail me your postal addresses so I can send out your prizes.

One of the best things about being published is that it’s let me get to know so many different people. All kinds of people. Fellow writers like my wonderful Dangerous Women Writer friends who rock and are so supportive! The editors who make it all possible by taking a chance to publish my books. You’ll get to meet two of my fabulous editors next week as the wonderful Stacy Boyd from Harlequin and awesome Selina McLemore from Forever Romance pop in to chat with you.


Best of all, being published has let me meet readers like you who take the time to visit the blogs, Facebook, signings and conferences. I so love meeting all you guys and wish we had more time to get to know each other better.


Since we may not be able to do it face-to-face, I thought it might be fun to get to know each other here! So here’s some things you may not know about me.


I used to play the bassoon. That’s the big long thing that kind of looks like a bazooka and sounds like a fog horn.
Bassoon Photo Credit: Gregory F. Maxwell


I grew up in Levittown which was the world’s first planned community. Cool place to grow up. It was also where I wrote my first book in the fifth grade.


I’m a Jersey Girl now and love the Jersey Shore. It’s one of the reasons I set my new paranormal SIN HUNTER series in the towns along the Jersey Shore. It’s a series about a race of people who have the ability to gather energy. That gives them all kinds of cool powers, like the ability to shapeshift or to heal or kill with just a touch.


I also love to travel, although I hate to fly. Makes it really difficult. Just ask my friends whose fingers I’ve crunched when the ride was less than smooth. UGH. But despite that fear of flying, I’ve gone to lots of different places and I’ve often included the more interesting ones in some of the stories I’ve written. AZTEC GOLD (Jan 2011) and THE FIFTH KINGDOM (Jul 2011) are both based on some of the sites I had seen on a trip to Mexico and a scary climb up a Mexican pyramid.


I’d like to do some more traveling if I can. Here are some of the places I’d like to visit:

The Grand Canyon
Great Wall of China
The Pyramids and City of the Dead in Egypt
Machu Picchu

How about you? Share something about yourself? Do you play an instrument? Are there any fun places you’d like to go?


I’m going to choose two people from those who comment to win STRONGER THAN SIN T-shirts, copies of STRONGER THAN SIN, bath gels and other goodies!

As all the trick or treaters were coming around yesterday, it occurred to me that things were very different than when I was a kid back in the Dark Ages. I remember going trick or treating in costumes we made at home from whatever we had available. That meant the kids streaming along the streets were a motley crew of rather generic “monsters” and other characters. Hobos, Frankensteins, vampires, cowboys, Indians, ballerinas, etc. were all around.

I realized yesterday that most of the kids that came to the door were wearing costumes from Disney and an assortment of television shows and movies.

Which is the long way of getting to today’s Dark Side Demon Monday – Scariest Movie Monsters. For me the scariest one was the Predator from the self-titled movie starring Arnold Schwarzenegger as well as lots of other muscular men (yum!). There was something about that creature, its capabilities and its violence that was totally scary.

The other day we talked about female demons who seduced men – succubi – so it seems only fair that we give the same attention to male demons who seduce women on today’s Dark Side Demon Monday.

I guess this kind of demon is stuck in my head because I just finished reading Larissa Ione’s fabulous PLEASURE UNBOUND which features a rather sexy and honorable incubus. If you haven’t read it, be sure to check it out.

But back to the incubus. In most myths, the incubus seduces a woman to have sex with him and sometimes such intercourse will result in a child – a cambion. A cambion has special powers as a result of the inheritance of the incubus powers. The most well-known of cambions is probably Merlin, who is said to have been conceived as a result of an incubus impregnating a king’s daughter. Much like Merlin was conceived with deceit, so, too, Merlin uses deceit to produce Arthur and use him to achieve his desires.

There are some instances in myth and religious discussion that hint that an incubus might be bisexual, assuming a female form to trick a man into having sex and then using the results of such sex to impregnate women while in the form of an incubus.

Very interesting! It seems to me that the mores of the times could not imagine that sex was something people wanted to do. Blaming demons to justify unwanted sexual desires made it easier to hide or deal with these issues.

Have you read any good books where an incubus was the hero? Or a succubus as a heroine? Please share with us if you did!

Okay, maybe it’s the mad scientist I revealed during my recent visit to Mysteries and Margaritas that explains my initial reaction when I think of the monster from FRANKENSTEIN. To me the monster is the doctor, Victor Frankenstein, who assembled the creature from the assorted bits of humans and other assorted animals since the novel makes reference to taking materials from the slaughterhouses.

As a scientist, Frankenstein had a moral obligation to think about the consequences of what he would create much like Oppenheimer and those who worked on the Manhattan Project to create the atom bomb or the fictional scientists from Wardwell Laboratories who decided to experiment on innocent humans in the SIN HUNTER Series.

When I read paranormals or write them, that challenge of monster versus humans is often most interesting when it turns out, like in FRANKENSTEIN, that it’s the humans who are more monstrous than the demons and creatures in the stories.

What do you think of when you think of Frankenstein?  The creature or the scientist?

Some interesting facts about FRANKENSTEIN:

1.  It was originally published anonymously in 1818 and then again in 1823.  It was substantially revised before being reissued by another publisher in 1831.  The 1831 version is the one most commonly read.

2.  The book was subtitled The Modern Prometheus as some scholars believe the book to be a warning against the adoption of science over civility and the expansion of machinery via the Industrial Revolution.

3.  The author, Mary Godwin (later Shelley) was the lover of Percy Shelley who was a friend to Lord Byron.  Rumor has it the writing of the book came about as the result of a challenge issued that each of them write their own supernatural story.

4.  Mary was 18 at the time she created the novel.

5.  The novel was rejected when submitted to both Shelley’s and Lord Byron’s publishers at the time.

6.  The original work was not well-received and when the identity of the author was revealed,  some attacked the work as being a product of her gender.

Hope you enjoyed today’s Dark Side Demon Monday!

Photo Credit:  Frankenstein entry at Wikipedia; Tate Private Collection.

A succubus is a female demon who takes the form of a human woman in order to entice men, usually by offering them sex. In older tales, succubi could take energy from men to sustain themselves and were usually shown with a tail and wings. This picture is of Lilith tempting Eve into eating the forbidden fruit and you can see the tail and wings depicted by the artist. Lilith is one of the more well-known succubi.
In Jewish mythology, Lilith was Adam’s first wife who was created from the same materials and at the same time as Adam. Unlike Eve, Lilith would not be subordinate to Adam and in some texts, refused to return to Earth after having an affair with the archangel Samael. Another version of the Lilith legend has her returning to her home by the Red Sea where she became a lover to demons and produced 100 demon babies a day. When Lilith refused to return to Adam, she was punished, eventually becoming a succubus. Adam was then given the more docile Eve. Although much of the folklore around Lilith is of Jewish origin, Lilith has appeared in Sumerian, Greek and a number of other mythologies. Some say Lilith was the first vampire and has appeared Vampire Lilith in a couple of Marvel comics.

I’m busy working on a new short story for THE MAMMOTH BOOK OF GHOST ROMANCE which brings us to today’s topic on Dark Side Demon Monday: Ghosts. There are so many different kinds of ghosts in various cultures, from those who act as spirit guides to poltergeists to revenants, who return from the dead to haunt the living. In some cultures the spirits of the dead are celebrated, such as in Mexico with their Day of the Dead on November 2 (which coincides with the Catholic All Souls Day). Since there are so many variations on ghosts depending on culture, today I’d like to ask you two very simple questions.

The first: Do you believe in ghosts?

The second: Have you ever had a ghostly encounter?

As for me, the answer to the first question is a big yes. It’s also a big yes as to whether or not I’ve ever had a ghostly encounter.

One of those encounters was rather frightening and happened in Mystic, Connecticut. You can click here to read more about that ghostly encounter.

The other was not quite as awful and involved the presence of spirit orbs at a family event and also at DragonCon. You can click here to learn more about spirit orbs and see some of the pictures we took.

Thanks for dropping by! I’d love to hear your answers to those questions as well as any ghostly visits you may wish to share.

Photo credit: Tomascastelazo@en.wikipedia.com

Today’s Dark Side Demon Monday is about an interesting aspect of one of our favorite kinds of demons-Vampires. There are many rituals and myths associated with vampires, but one of the more interesting myths seems to have fallen by the wayside except for Count von Count.

What does Count von Count have to do with the myth? It’s said that if you spread millet, mustard or poppy seeds around the vampire’s grave or your home, the vampire would become occupied with counting the seeds and leave you alone. Chinese vampires share a similar trait, although their OCD traits happen when a sack of rice is placed before them. Much like with the seeds, the vampire would have to count every grain of rice in the sack.

What about Count von Count on Sesame Street? The Count’s job on Sesame Street is to count everything he encounters no matter how annoying he is to the rest of the Muppets! That OCD counting is a nod to the myth about vampires and hot to protect yourselves from them.

Hope you enjoyed today’s not so Dark Demon Side Monday.

Kitsune is the Japanese word for fox and in Japanese culture, foxes are common in Japanese folklore. In these tales, they are seen as faeries and possess many supernatural abilities.

The Kitsune are considered to be intelligent and grow ever more powerful with age and as their wisdom also grows. Their magical powers include the ability to shapeshift to human form and while Japanese folklore has them sometimes tricking people by assuming this guise, there are also many tales of the Kitsune being guardians, friends and lovers. The interesting thing is that the Kitsune can assume either male or female forms.

In Japanese lore, the Kitsune can also have as many as nine tails and the more powerful the Kitsune, the more tails it will possess.

The Kitsune are also considered to be trickster demons, with their escapades ranging from funny to malevolent. THey are also associted with the Japanese god responsible for rice – Iari the Shinto god. Inari’s Kitsune are white which is a good luck color and these variations on the Kitsune are considered to be guardians and can ward off evil spirits. Black foxes are also considered to have these powers.

For the past few years I’ve had foxes in my backyard and they are beautiful animals. Gorgeous red brown fur, sleek bodies and that pointed canine snout really catch your attention. They are also quite protective. A few years back they had a small family with a few kits (fox babies). The babies were adorable, but you can bet that mother and father fox kept a close eye on them.

It’s not hard to imagine creating a shapeshifter mythology around fox-like Kitsune and what’s even more interesting is that their mythological shapeshifter abilities allow them to morph into either male or female and young or old. That definitely would allow them to be the tricksters imagined in Japanese culture.