No matter what kind of work you do, it seems like funny little sidetracks can take you places you never knew you would be going…

About a year ago, I was busy writing a really fun story, my October release from Avon, the cover of which debuts here, today! The story is about Brianna Munro, a runaway bride, who escapes a dreaded marriage and flees to the east coast of Scotland. She hides in what should have been a deserted castle, but -oh no!- its laird, Hugh Christie, is in residence, and he’s in the midst of trying to figure out why his smuggling operation has gone awry.  Obviously, he’s got to get Brianna out of there, because if they’re found together, there will be hell to pay! And Brianna wants out because the east coast of Scotland will be the first place her bridegroom goes looking for her. Unfortunately for them – and luckily for us! – they get caught in a blizzard and can’t go anywhere. I’ll tell you more about the story in a future blog, as well as some of the details that played into writing this book, including why the heroine is wearing a plaid blanket on the cover you see above!

I turned in this story, then started on my next book, The Rogue Prince  (Avon Books, May 2010). I had to do a lot of reading to prepare for this one, because the hero is a young man who was wrongly convicted of a crime in London, and transported to Australia. The story does not revolve around his prison term in the penal colony, but I had to know what kind experiences he would have had, because they would have shaped his personality and played into the story I was about to write.

I actually got a little behind schedule with all my reading and research, but I was finally getting into the writing when an editor from Running Press in England contacted me and asked me to contribute a short story to an extremely popular series of anthologies. They are The Mammoth Books of [blank], and I decided it was an opportunity I couldn’t pass up, even though it would tighten my schedule even more than it was.

My contribution would go into The Mammoth Book of Time Travel Romance and will be released in December. Not that I’m a major time travel writer – but I’ve been known to dabble. And it was quite an intriguing proposition, since the editor gave me very few guidelines for this story… only that it had to be a romance, somewhere around 35-40 pages long, and incorporate a time travel element.

Wow. I could do anything I wanted! I used this as an opportunity to flex my creativity, and wrote a sexy little tale with a hero from the year 2743 AD, where sex is nearly non-existent, who returns to modern day Chicago to work out some problems that will influence his time. Of course he encounters our lovely heroine … an exotic dancer! 

I am just putting the finishing touches into The Rogue Prince for Avon, and The Mammoth editor has contacted me again. She’d like me to contribute a story for The Mammoth Book of Irish Romance. This anthology will have tales of Irish gods and Celtic heroes, of faeries and little people, dream lovers, and who knows what else? It’ll be out in January 2010.

As I said… A funny thing happened on the way to getting my regular work done! I yet haven’t figured out what my Irish story will be… but I need to get cracking. My deadline is early next month!

I would love to know what unplanned little sidetracks you’ve taken - at work or personally. I’ll draw one person’s name and send them something really cool: the tote bag I received when I attended the RWA national conference in Washington DC, and an autographed copy of Wild, my January book.