As a child, I lived in the far reaches of the city, then in the suburbs of Chicago. I didn’t know much about the downtown area, nearly twenty miles away by electric train, except that I always looked forward to my infrequent trips there. My mom treated me every holiday, taking me downtown to see the Christmas windows of the department stores.My favorites were always the windows of the iconic Marshall Field’s (now Macys) on State Street.

That’s why I used Marshall Field’s as the model for Westbrook, the main setting for HOLIDAY IN CRIMSON and NIGHTMARE IN CRIMSON, the related holiday romantic suspense novels from Entangled Publishing for their Dead Sexy line.

About HOLIDAY IN CRIMSON:
Westbrook Department Store’s Christmas party wasn’t that wild–until, that is, Santa ended up dead. Now window designer Shelby Corbin is the prime suspect in his murder, and the holidays are anything but festive. If Shelby doesn’t figure out who killed Santa, she’ll be ringing in the new year behind bars.

Westbrook’s impossibly sexy co-owner and CEO Rand McNabb’s romantic attentions both thrill and frighten Shelby. But is he really helping her search for the truth about that fatal night? Or does Rand have a deadlier motive for courting the only possible witness to the crime…? Read more…

It can be hard to find balance when your biggest fan(s) are also your biggest critics.  Take my mother. . . (yeah, you know what usually goes in there, don’t you?)  But seriously.  She loves me, she wants me to succeed, and she knows that being a novelist is a crazy, complicated kind of job.

Well, okay, she’s not quite convinced that it *is* a job.  At the very least, she hasn’t figured out what the job really looks like.

Which probably precipitated her latest remark.

I had just collected her from a meeting, and we returned to our shared home where we spent a few minutes preparing a meal together, then I turned on my computer and said something about getting back to work.  She looked at me and said, “It seems like you want to spend all of your time writing these days.”

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Look up process on Wikipedia and you’ll see over forty definitions. The one I think most clearly relates to us as authors defines process as “activities or tasks that produce a specific service or product for customers.” In our case, that product is the story, the manuscript.

Like the word process, there are different methods for taking that first kernel of an idea and turning it into a full-fledged manuscript, one we can hand to our editors or agents with a fair amount of confidence. Defining our process is crucial to success. Unfortunately, just as we think we’ve figured out our process, something comes along to change it.

Don’t be afraid of that change. Embrace it.

When I first realized there was a book inside me that wanted to get out, I had kids in high-school, a full-time job, a schedule that didn’t allow for much free time. So, I set my alarm for four am, rolled out of bed two hours before the rest of the household, and spent the time until the sun came up hunched over a yellow legal pad, pencil in hand.

With that manuscript, I learned a lot. Mostly that I didn’t know enough to complete a novel. But I also started to see what worked—and just as important, what didn’t work—for me as a writer. I learned that I worked best when I was surrounded by peace and quiet. I learned I needed a sense of where the story was headed before I could write it.

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When it comes to people, you can miss a lot if you judge by that first superficial impression. The same is true with books, and yet we all do it, don’t we? That’s the purpose of a book cover.

It’s release day for Body Heat from Kensington Brava (written under my pen name Susan Fox). I happen to love this cover and think it suits the book perfectly.

Hero Jesse Blue is assigned to do community service at a seniors residential facility. Heroine Maura Mahoney, not wanting to trust him with her precious seniors, puts him to work in the garden – right outside her office window. So I look at this cover as the view from her window. (Sigh…)

In general, I’m not all that big on the semi-naked guy covers, but this one works for me. He does have a lovely body, not one that looks as if he’s on steroids. He’s decently clad and he doesn’t have a hand drifting suggestively below his belt as if he just can’t wait to touch himself. LOL. The skin tones are lovely and the cover is bright and appealing.

The “candy” colors of the lettering add a fun touch, in keeping with the tone of the book. So in this case, I think you can judge the book by its cover.

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