Bailey is a real dog. In early 2002, not long after my youngest daughter was born, a couple of co-workers of my husband’s were looking for a family for their Jack Russell Terrier - they just couldn’t take care of him anymore. I was staying home with the kids, and we had a house, so [...]

If you ever want to set yourself up an impossible hero to write, try a Mesopotamian god-king who has two weeks (a month?  I can’t remember) to assimilate, fall in love, and commit in Southern Ohio in the twenty-first century.  Yes, I know that’s not believable.  The dogs talk.  Deal with it.
The biggest challenge in [...]

You know, I’ve never written a musician before. I’ve never been into musicians, or even into music all that much. I mean, I love music, I make soundtracks, I use music to inspire me and to get me moving when I need to exercise, but I’m not into music and musicians the way that some [...]

Even though I usually write dark and dangerous heroes, I have a sneaking fondness for blonds.  And men in wire-rimmed glasses.  And Guy Pearce when he isn’t being a cannibal.
So needless to say Guy, in his LA Confidential persona, was the perfect avatar for Christpher, my uptight mathematician hero.  I pictured him as a cross [...]

And then there’s Shar.  Talk about family issues.  She’s trapped by the demands of her past, having promised to finish her grandmother’s monolithic study on Mesopotamian goddesses (sort of a Grandma Causabon) and given the rest her life to teaching ancient history at the college her grandfather founded.   Her future is going to be [...]

When we first started discussing the possibility of this book - at that point it was all fun, no commitments - the first thing I knew about Daisy was that she was organized, analytical and blind to how it was ruining her life. Pairing her with frenetic Bailey (more on him later) and her self-centered [...]

As you may know by now, I was brought into this project at the last minute.  Lani and Jenny had already brainstormed the idea with the divine and gifted Alesia Holliday/Alyssa Day, when suddenly her career took off and she had to bow out, which she did, most graciously, passing on all her hard work.  [...]

So both Jenny and Lani will tell you they’re seat of the pants writers.  And so they are.  But they’ve got nothing on me.  I tend to just sit down at a keyboard and see where it takes me.  Sometimes to delicious places, half the time to dead ends and frustrations and hissy fits until [...]

Like Lani and Krissie, I use a soundtrack to write, but I also use collage.  The collages are really important to me when I’m writing solos, but they’re crucial when I’m doing collaborations because they help me see what the others are seeing.  So I drag them through a process of “What does your character [...]

Hello, everyone! First, I’d like to thank Jenny’s brilliant daughter, Mollie, for building us a gorgeous site and just generally being a genius. Isn’t it great? Also, I’d like to thank Jenny for doing the vast, vast majority of the updates here. I am not at all surprised that woman has a genius for a [...]