Q&A with Cat Schield, The Black Sheep’s Secret Child

How did you come up with the relationship between Savannah and Trent?  

I always start with the conflict. And nothing says trouble like two brothers involved with the same girl. 

What is your favorite part about writing for Billionaires and Babies?

Is there anything more adorable than alpha men with babies? The first meeting between Trent and his son is adorable. I absolutely love Dylan. He’s a charmer.

Many of your books feature children, is family important to you?

Family is everything. But for me it’s not always about those you’re related to. I think it’s about those people who stick with you through thick and thin.

What was the first book that made you cry?

Black Gold by Marguerite Henry

How long do you spend researching before beginning a book?  

I usually jump right in without much research. For me the fun of writing the story is immersing myself in the details of the world. And I do a lot of research. Much of it never shows up in the book because I tend to run wild finding out about things. For The Black Sheep’s Secret Child I spent a fair amount of time learning about record labels and how many of them have struggled in the digital age.

How do you select the names of your characters?

I whip out my favorite baby book and flip through the pages until something seems right. In the case of the Club T’s books, I needed 3 men with “T” names. So I have Trent Caldwell, Nate Tucker and Kyle Tailor. 

If you didn’t write, what would you do for work?

I think I’d take up creating marketing materials for authors. Book covers. Book trailers. I have a blast working on my own stuff.

Do you believe in writer’s block?

No. Some books are painfully hard to write. I think a lot of writers have avoidance tendencies. I’m always choosing between sitting down to the computer and pushing through a challenging scene or watching yet another HGTV show. Often HGTV wins.

What is your favorite thing about fall?  

Fall in Minnesota is such a beautiful time of year. The trees burst into glorious colors. The days are warm. The nights are cool. It smells like campfires and dry leaves.

Are you excited for Halloween?

If so, do you have a favorite scary story? I love Halloween. The pumpkin carving. Handing out candy. My daughter is 17 and too old for me to take trick or treating and I miss it. There’s something magical about helping her pick out a costume and walking the neighborhood and seeing all the fantastic decorations. No favorite scary story, but I do love going through a haunted house. Creepy!

How Ghost Hampton Was Born by Ken McGorry

My wife and I were driving down a shady residential lane in Westhampton Beach, Long Island, one summer day a few years ago when she gestured at a nicely restored old colonial house. As we passed, she said, “I know the man who bought that house. He says it’s haunted.” Oh, really? “Yes. And they told him it was once a brothel.”

This was a few years ago. I was shopping my first novel, Smashed, and also looking for a new project. By the time we got out of the car, I had my title: Ghost Hampton.

A college professor of mine once told us English majors that you only title your work after you’ve written it -- so you know what it’s about. But now it was too late. I was in love with my title and would have to work backwards! Soon enough, I had a climax in mind: a troubled man trapped in an old house with some vicious, deadly supernatural being.

How trapped? Well his wheelchair battery had given out.

What’s he doing in a wheelchair? …Have to get back to you on that.

Where are his friends? He has none.

Family? Just an estranged daughter who wants nothing to do with him.

How did he get in this house? Uhmm…

Why does he have no friends? Err…

I had plenty of work ahead of me. For one thing, I had to move my setting away from the village where my wife and I have a little summer place. Bridgehampton looked good – situated in the middle of the posh Hamptons, but a place with lots of history and a surprisingly small off-season population of 3,000 locals. I’d need to fictionalize the place while creating a memorable cast of year-round characters. And I needed an “inciting incident.”

For my protagonist Lyle Hall and me, that incident coalesced around perhaps Bridgehampton’s most noteworthy landmark: its century-old memorial to those who lost their lives in America’s wars. The big old block of granite, which is real, stands in the middle of the village’s main intersection. That’s what Lyle Hall plows into, driving his Hummer too fast and trying to avoid a sweet old lady who’s blundered into his path. She does not survive. Lyle does, just barely, and when he emerges from coma we see he’s become a pariah in the eyes of an unsympathetic local population. And there’s something more: He can now hear and see disturbing things no one else can. Like the strange whispers that emanate from an abandoned old mansion known to all as “Old Vic.” The whisperers want Lyle Hall.

Knowing You’re Dying Can Be Murder: A Peek at My New Novel, ‘Sick to Death’

I spent the better part of 2015 writing a novel titled Sick to Death. I spent much of 2016 editing it, having some pros edit it even more, and praying to the literary gods the damn thing sells. 

Sick to Death is your average, everyday tale about a group of terminally ill individuals who become serial killers to make their city a safer place to live. And die. 

Call it a beach read. 

Craig Clevenger, author of The Contortionist’s Handbook and Dermaphoria, says, “Sick to Death is a tour de force dark comedy.”  

For those of you sick enough to want to take a peek, here is the opening from Chapter 1:

Everyone in the subway car gasped when the man with the shaved head slid off his seat and crumpled to the floor.

Everyone except Gage. He just leaned back with his head resting against the window, tapping the ivory handle of his walnut walking cane. As the train rattled around a curve beneath the heart of Philly, Gage ignored the panic and commotion, keeping his eyes on the supine skinhead and on the woman who was now frantically administering CPR to bring him back into the world.  

The woman’s rescue efforts were futile. Gage knew this. He knew there was no coming back from the two hundred milligrams of sodium cyanide currently coursing through the skinhead’s body. How the cyanide made its way into the body, well, Gage knew that, too. And if all went well, he’d remain the only one who knew. And all usually went well. Gage was quite good at cyanide.

And ricin.

And arsenic.

Unfortunately, Gage was also quite adept at Gemcitabine.

And Oxaliplatin.

And Irinotecan.

Unless you’re an oncologist or the patient of one, you’ve probably never heard of those last three.  
Over the previous six months, there was only one thing Gage had become more efficient at than killing… and that was dying.

But for now let’s keep things positive and focus on the former. 

The skinhead was the second person Gage had murdered in three weeks. 

It had been a slow month. 

Sick to Death is available as a paperback and as a Kindle ebook on Amazon.   

About the Author

Greg’s first novel… meh, nobody but Greg really cares about his first novel.

His second novel, The Exit Man, was optioned by HBO for development into a TV series and won a 2015 Independent Publishers Award (a.k.a., an “IPPY”), earning a silver medal for Best Adult Fiction Ebook.

Greg’s third novel, Sick to Death, is out now and is being hailed by critics everywhere as one of the top three books he has ever written. Author Craig Clevenger (The Contortionist’s Handbook) calls Sick to Death “a tour de force dark comedy.”

Greg resides with his wife, daughter and two cats in Austin, Texas, where he reportedly is wanted by local authorities for refusing to say “y’all” or do the two-step. He is currently working on his fourth novel.

Visit him at http://www.greglevin.com

Q&A with Jenna Harte

What is the hardest part of your writing process? 

My biggest challenge is that my first drafts are pretty weak and I worry I won’t be able to fix them. Especially in romances, the snap and crackle required between characters is usually nonexistent in my first draft. I’m also weak on descriptions (setting and facial). So during revision, I spend a lot of time going through my thesauruses to find the right words to express what I see in my head.
How do you develop your characters? Are any of them like you or people you know? 

Like my weak scenes and descriptions in early drafts, my characters are often flat when I first start writing. They deepen during the writing process. That means, they’re not really based on anyone in particular. However, Tess Valentine in the Valentine mysteries likes old R&B music and chocolate, as do I. And she’s not very tall. Neither are two of the characters in the Southern Heat series. I’m not very tall either. Technically, I’m short.

You are both traditionally and self-published. How did you decide what route to take for your books? 

For the most part, the decision to self-publish the Valentine Mysteries came from an inability to get an agent to take a chance on the concept. Several liked the first book, but pushed me to sell it as a stand-alone romance. I always knew I wanted to do a mystery series featuring a romantic couple. I knew I couldn’t be alone in that, but agents and publishers are sensitive to book stores, and no one felt it fit well into the mystery-lane, and romances don’t usually continue with the same couple. I’ve started to see some change in this, but at this point, with five books and a novella, and a sixth book in the conception stage, it will remain self-published. 

For Southern Heat, a series of interesting events happened. The first was that I had this old romance sitting on my hard drive (it was so old it mentions dial-up Internet). I thought would be a fit for a Harlequin line, but at the time they only took snail-mailed manuscripts, so it sat. But then a few years ago, I noticed an online pitch contest with Harlequin Blaze and thought, what the heck, and entered. I won one of the five spots, which lead to a request for the first three chapters. The problem was, the book was far from done, so I spent the next few weeks getting it finished and revised. Harlequin then asked for the full manuscript, and then it sat for nearly two years. I finally got an agent, who was able to get a response (no), but she helped me beef up the story and sold it a few months later, as a series. 

Both traditional and self-publishing have their positives and negatives. What many new authors don’t get is that it doesn’t matter what route you use, marketing is the key success in writing.

The Southern Heat series is a departure from your mysteries. What made you decide to write them? 

The first book, Drawn to Her, I wrote so long ago, I’m not sure where the idea came from. When the Harlequin pitch contest came about, I decided to try and sell it. To be honest, I’m not much a contemporary romance reader. I usually prefer romantic mystery or suspense. So this series is quite an anomaly for me. When it became a three book deal, I already had ideas for the other two stories, one of which has a bit of suspense. Moving forward, my ideas are for the Valentines, a traditional cozy, and possibly a paranormal.

What authors or books do you enjoy reading? 

I’m a huge J.D. Robb fan (married couple solving mysteries). I also like Sandra Brown and Linda Howard...mostly their older stuff, but I haven’t had a lot of time for pleasure reading, which is why I’m not caught up on new books. I like to listen to audio books when I run, and Linda Howard is good for that. Bella Andre’s Billionaire stories have been good in audiobook too.

What is next for your writing? 

I just sent final copy edits back on Meant to Be, book two in the Southern Heat series and I hope to have book three, Wed to You, finished in the next couple of weeks (it’s due July 1). I’ve promised Valentine fans a new book this fall, so I’ll be working on the sixth full-length Valentine mystery. After that, I have a traditional cozy mystery I’ve already started that I plan to complete, and hope my agent will like enough to sell.

What is After Paris About? by Renny deGroot

In the summer of 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary was assassinated which triggered a chain of events that resulted in World War 1. The Great War. The war to end all wars.

Alliances were formed, which pitted the Allies of France, Great Britain and Russia against Germany and Austria-Hungary. By the end of the war, over 9 million soldiers had been killed, including 61 thousand Canadians and another 21 million wounded (including 172,000 Canadians).

The Netherlands was neutral during the war, but they did contribute. Many benevolent societies stepped up to provide medical support in the form of doctors and nurses, ambulances, supplies and medicine. It was through this support that the Netherlands Ambulance Service in France came to form a hospital in the location of a beautiful restaurant called Le Pre Catelan in the middle of the park of the Bois de Boulogne in Paris. The building was transformed into a hospital for the duration of the war, staffed by Dutch medical teams and supplied by Dutch resources.

And so it was that my protagonist, Liesbeth Zwart and her sister Alida volunteered their services as nurses and travelled to Paris.

This is where my new Historical Fiction, After Paris, begins. Paris, 1916. The story follows Liesbeth Zwart who forges her identity in France during WW1. We see her working in horrific circumstances in France but her greatest test comes after the war.  She returns to Netherlands and gives up her career to become a wife and a mother. The world had changed forever after the Great War. It inspired the Russian Revolution. Empires shifted with the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire into modern day Middle East. And the role of women changed as well. In England, France and Germany, women were refusing to go back into the box of their quiet homes and family life. Would it be possible for a woman who had seen what Liesbeth saw, to go back and fulfill her family and country’s domestic expectations?

Purchase on Amazon

When Liesbeth makes a shocking discovery, she flees to Nova Scotia, Canada but can she outrun her past?

This captivating story of a woman lost in the turmoil between the old world and new, will resonate with anyone who has witnessed a person that has constructed their entire identity on a career. Whether an injured athlete, a retiring thirty-year ‘company man’ or an ‘empty nester’ Mom, creating a new identity is sometimes an insurmountable challenge.

You can pick up my book here or contact me http://rennydegroot.com

Have you gone through a redundancy or down-sizing? Do you know some-one who has had to start again to define who they are? Share your story. I’d love to hear about it.

About The Author

Renny deGroot is a first generation Canadian of Dutch parents. Her debut novel, Family Business, was shortlisted for the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize, 2015.  She studied English Literature at Trent University. Her strong Dutch roots continue to influence her while the love of her Canadian homeland with its beauty and freedom, flavours all that she does. 
Renny lives in rural Ontario with her Great Pyrenees and Chocolate Lab.

Q&A with Debra Webb, author of Dark Whispers

Where did you gather inspiration for Birmingham?

My father’s family is from Birmingham so I grew up visiting the Magic City. Many of my fondest childhood memories took place in Birmingham. But the most important and inspiring part of Birmingham for me is the incredible medical services there. You see, my older daughter was born with extreme health issues. The amazing folks in Birmingham saved her life. So you see, for my family Birmingham truly is the Magic City.

How do you think the setting affects the story?

Birmingham is a southern town at its very roots, but it’s also very progressive city—almost like the Manhattan of the South. There’s the intensity of big city living, yet the heart and warmth of small town life. For Natalie, my heroine, it’s home, family and all that entails. On the other hand for Clint, Birmingham has been a bit of a bitter sweet experience—at least until he becomes part of Jess Harris Burnett’s team.

Is anything in your new release based on real life experiences or purely all imagination?

Natalie, in some ways, is me. I suffered a life altering injury and lost a great deal of the use of my right arm and hand. It has taken six years for me to learn to use my arm and hand again. It won’t ever be the same, but I’m learning to live with what I have. It’s amazing what the human mind and body are capable of.

How long on average does it take you to write a book?

Oh my, that’s a tough question. Before my injury I would fly through the pages. You see, the stories have always come to me in wonderful streams of scenes. Now with my hand injury, the stories still come but they don’t get on the page so fast. 

What is the biggest misconception about your genre?

Oh my, I really believe any misconceptions about romantic suspense are in the past. Readers know what they want and have a much better understanding in today’s world filled with knowledge what they’re getting when they pick up a Harlequin Intrigue. 

Did you hide any secrets in your books?

There are always delicious secrets in a mystery/suspense. Sometimes it’s about the killer, but often times it’s about the hero or heroine and who they really are deep down inside. Clint has some deep and delicious secrets!

Any tips to get through the dreaded writer’s block?

Never stop writing. Your writing muscle is like any other it needs regular exercise. Even if you’re not sure where you’re going in a story just write something! I’m always amazed at what’s hidden in my head behind any uncertainty!

What is your favorite book and why?

Hmm. I don’t think I can pick a favorite book. There are simply too many wonderful ones I’ve read!

What is your current end-of-summer read? 

I am waiting for the release of Karin Slaughter’s The Kept Woman!