I’m running out of games! No, not games for me to play, but games for the children in my books to play.

In the last book, the kids played Candyland. In the book before that one, I believe Go Fish was mentioned. For the book that I’m currently writing, the hero and heroine are playing Chutes and Ladders with a six-year-old. In the next book I’m going to have an upper elementary school child…and I’ve run out of games.

Sooooo, I thought I’d be proactive and ask for input on common games (either cards or board games) that would be familiar and age appropriate.

While I’m at it, I’d like to know what games you played as a child and if that game is still available. I remember Monopoly, The Barbie Game, Life, Mousetrap (was that even a game?) and for cards, Go Fish and UNO.

I’d love to hear what you remember…

Oh and I almost forgot…I’ll be drawing one winner from everyone who comments. That lucky person will win a copy of a Special Moments put out by Mills and Boon that includes two books, “The Christmas Proposition” by moi AS WELL as Christyne Butler’s “A Daddy for Jacoby.”

Kristan Higgins’ All I Ever Wanted and The Next Best Thing are finalists for the Australian Romance Readers Awards for Contemporary Romance!

I recently discovered that there was no place in the Regency England marriage ceremony for a man to receive a wedding band from his bride. It just was not done. Men wore rings, often  signets. But not wedding bands. This fact caused an interesting discussion with one of my groups on whether or not married men today should wear wedding bands. Apparently there are lots of women who believe a man is “slime” if he does not wear one. They imply that if a man isn’t wearing a wedding band, he is on the prowl.

My husband of 30 years – who does not wear any jewelry, not even a watch – has been approached a few times by women on the prowl, and he is dumbfounded when it happens. (Yep, he’s told me about each incident).  It never occurred to me (or him, I’m sure) that his lack of a ring made him “fair game.” Maybe I should have bought him a band and insisted he wear it.

His dad didn’t wear a ring, and neither did mine, so I guess we were conditioned not to think much about it. In fact, I almost didn’t bother with a wedding ring, either. Then we recalled that my grandmother had left her plain gold band to me, so we used it and that’s what I wore for the first few years we were married. Since then, my husband has given me several rings - and I wear one of them now, in place of my grandmother’s band. I’m just not the type to decorate my fingers with jewelry, I guess. (I’ve always been a “less is more” kind of person).

What do you think? Does a married man owe it to the female population to wear a ring to “prove” whether he’s married or single? Obviously, Prince William doesn’t need a ring to make his marital status known. You’d have to be living in a cave not to know he’s a married man as of this morning. But other than Will, do you think married men who don’t wear wedding rings are on the prowl? I’m going to send one commenter a copy of my latest book, Seducing the Governess. I’d really like to know what you think!

By the way, did any of you get up early to watch the royal wedding?

When I was young, my mother used to bake the most delicious red velvet cakes. Even the icing was from scratch.  She’d stack them high and sprinkle them with flaky coconut.  It was heaven on a plate. Mostly, she made them for special occasions like birthdays and Valentine’s Day, but every once in a while she’d surprise us and made one just because. Maybe that’s why I always associate red velvet cake with comfort, happiness and love.

I’ve drawn on this memory to inspire my work-in-progress.  In this book (part one of a trilogy centered around a catering company), a red velvet cake changes the course of my heroine’s life and sets her career on the road to culinary success.

The book has made me a little nostalgic. I was wondering do you associate certain foods you with good memories? If so, what are they?

I’m so excited to welcome Mia Marlowe to the blog. Her new book, TOUCH OF A THIEF, looks fabulous and is on top of my TBR pile!

Thanks to Shana Galen and all the Jaunty Quills for having me here today!

When my DH wonders what to get me for my birthday or anniversary, I always tell him “Blessed is the man who knows jewelry always fits.” For millennia, women have loved gem stones and men have loved giving them to their women. But jewels are more than ornaments. They’re easily portable wealth.

Click image to order!

If you’ve ever seen the Crown Jewels, you know some of the fabulous diamonds there are as big as a ten year old’s fist. By contrast, red diamonds are small. The largest ever unearthed was only a little more than 5 carats, but Victorians loved colored stones more than the clear diamonds we favor and red is the rarest color of all.

So despite its relatively small size, the Blood of the Tiger is worth the earth.

Some folk believe crystaline gem stones emit positive energy too slight to be detectable by scientific measurement. What if they could also absorb energy? The possibility was worth exploring for my fictional world. I constructed a backstory for the red diamond, from the moment it was dug from a streambed to the time it was entombed in a statue of Shiva as the god’s eye.

But what sort of vibrations would a ridiculously valuable stone pick up from the humans who scrambled to possess it?

Greed. Covetness. Murderous intent.

The result is that the Blood of the Tiger has developed a nearly sentient presence and it’s entirely malevolent. The red diamond is as important an entity in this story as my heroine’s fence for her stolen jewels or the deposed Indian prince who’s my hero’s best friend.

Have you read another story where an inanimate object is such an important element, it almost becomes a character in its own right?

Leave a comment or question to be entered into the random drawing for a book from Mia’s backlist. Click here for an excerpt of Touch of a Thief you can read right now!

Claim your copy at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Borders or your local bookstore!

A couple of weeks ago, my house was in turmoil.  My husband and I had decided to replace our seventeen-year-old light beige carpet, the original carpet from when we’d moved into the house when it was brand new in the fall of 1994.  The carpeting covered the dining and living room floors, right through to the master bedroom, bathroom, and walk-in closet.  While the carpet still looked pretty good overall, it was torn in a couple of places and the dirt was so ingrained in the front entryway, the carpet never came completely clean no matter how hard I tried to keep it looking nice.

We decided on laminate.  From all we’d heard, it was durable, easy to clean, and would look great years after it was installed.  The search for the right laminate was shockingly easy.  We fell in love with a Mohawk brand one at the first store we visited, and despite looking at samples of plenty of others, that was the one we chose.

We don’t regret our decision one bit!

For two weeks, I painted baseboards, in preparation for the day the new floor was to be installed.  I packed up the vintage dishes and wineglasses in the china cabinet, boxed up my to-be-read shelves of romance novels (a LOT of books!), and, the day before installation, packed away my computer and desk.  I stayed home the day the floor went down, listening to the sawing and snapping together of planks and the workmen shouting to each other.  But at the end of the day, our dingy carpet was gone, and a gleaming floor lay in its place.

It’s amazing how much happier I am coming into the house now.  As crazy as it sounds, replacing that yucky carpet has made me feel lighter, somehow.  Renewed.  I love the way the laminate floor adds its own warmth to our home and unifies all of the downstairs area.  It was definitely a positive change.

At the same time, other things changed in my life, and for the better.  The same day the floor was being installed, I received an email from my literary agent, to say that Entangled Publishing was interested in my contemporary romantic comedy Lucky Girl.  After starting my career with six published medieval romances, I had a chance to make a name for myself in a new genre.  Was I interested?  Yes!

I signed the contract and will soon be tackling edits.  I’m very excited about my pen name, Cate Lord (Lord is my maiden name), which I will use for my contemporary novels.

Look for Lucky Girl to be released in September.

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What positive changes have taken place in your life recently?

One of the requirements of being a romance writer is the ability to fall in love. Often. About twice a year. I have no problem with this. I quite enjoy it, in fact. The other night, I emailed a friend and said, “Just spent an hour Googling pictures of James Franco. See you if you can get me a date, okay?” (My friend works at Yale, where young Mr. Franco is getting yet another advanced degree…see? Beauty and brains. I have standards—much of the time, anyway.)

McIrish has no problem with my boyfriends, as I call them, and the kids too have adjusted well. “Look, Mommy, isn’t that one of your boyfriends?” asked  my daughter as we watched a preview for a movie starring Daniel Craig. I confirmed that yes, it was. My other past loves include Robert Downey Jr., David Cook, Dylan McDermott and Gerard Butler. And Russell Crowe (I know, I know, I’m sorry…there’s just something about his eyes. And his voice. And his arms).

For whatever reason (probably just good old-fashioned lust), I need a face before I can write a new hero. Not for the heroine so much; I guess I can picture the female protagonist more easily because I’m female. But for the hero, I need a face. By the end of the book, however, the original face and my character have become different—Nick, the hero of My One & Only, once started off looking like Robert Downey Jr. But by the end of the first draft, he was definitely just Nick. He may have had some resemblance to RDJ, but he had evolved. I don’t like when my book covers show the full faces of the characters; sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t, but I like to leave something to the imagination. Sometimes I’ll throw in a reference to a famous person—Harper’s boyfriend in My One & Only, for example, looked like “the love child of Jake Gyllenhaal and Gerard Butler.” This photo of Dylan McDermott struck me as the right note for the hero of my upcoming book, Until There Was You.

I also need a photo for the animal characters in my books. It can’t just be a picture of the breed—it has to embody the dog’s personality somehow. Here’s a photo of what I thought Coco looked like.

Getting a good sense of setting is also important for me, especially the heroine’s house. Many of the details don’t make it into the book, but I feel like I have to be able to picture her in her domain in order to fully understand her. Because I love writing small-town stories, I also like to have a visual for the bigger picture. Gideon’s Cove in Catch of the Day was based on two towns I’ve never visited—Jonesport and Lubec, Maine, though my friend did take me to several little fishing villages along the Maine coast way back when I was writing that book. Recently,

photo by donald verger

I came across the photos of Donald Verger, and his photos perfectly capture the beauty of the Maine coast. By the way, next spring, we’ll be seeing that area again, but that’s all I’m saying for now. But if you’re interested in seeing Don’s photos, visit www.donaldverger.com.

So how important is that sense of the visual for you when reading a book? Do you like things spelled out, either on a cover shot or in the text? Do you like hints as to whom the characters resemble? Leave a comment, and I’ll send a copy of The Next Best Thing to two people.

I posted on facebook this last week about my love of strolling through cemeteries…especially older ones. The picture above is from Wyuka, the cemetary where I’ve done the most walking.

I was surprised by how many others shared my love for this pastime. Wyuka (means “place of rest”) has winding brick driveways shaded by tall trees. It also has a lot of very interesting headstones.

I’m not sure what I like the most…the quiet peacefullness of the setting, reading the headstone inscriptions and coming up with stories about the people, or looking at unique names and considering them for a character in a book.

In the past cemeteries were places where families gathered and had picnics. I know that Wyuka in recent years restored a park section of their grounds to its 1900s use as a place of public recreation, and initiated open-air performances of Shakespeare’s plays in the courtyard of their nineteenth-century carriage house.

The space formed by the former carriage house and its attaching structures takes audiences and actors back to the Elizabethan inn-yards in which Shakespeare’s plays were often staged in his own lifetime.

Do you have a favorite cemetery story to share? Or have you ever read a scene in a book involving a cemetery?

Today, I have the tremendous honor to introduce you to my very good friend, Tessa Adams, who also writes as Tracy Wolfe. I could tell you all kinds of fun things about Tracy/Tessa, but her blog is as good an introduction as any I could give her. So I’ll just leave you with this fun picture of the two of us together at the RWA national conference last year.

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For most of my life, I’ve heard that love at first sight is ridiculous, absurd, a complete misnomer—after all, it didn’t exactly work out well for Romeo and Juliet.  And yet …  there’s something about it that appeals to me as a writer and a person.

Maybe it’s because my father asked my mother to marry him exactly one week after their first date.  She said yes, and they went to her favorite Chinese restaurant to celebrate, where she got a fortune cookie that said, Happy Marriage, fourteen children.  She looked at my father and said, “Maybe we should reconsider.”  Thankfully, they didn’t, and they were married for twenty-six years … and would be married still if my father hadn’t died unexpectedly a number of years ago.

Fast forward twenty-five years, to a little after my twenty-first birthday.  I was a graduate student in New Orleans, with my whole life road-mapped in front of me—which included three graduate degrees, a teaching career at a prestigious university and a side job writing novels.  I’d been dating a guy for well over a year, and though we’d been separated for half of that—which was causing a lot of problems between us—we were still talking about the school we would go to in the future, where he could get his M.A.  in journalism and I could get my Ph.D in American Literature.  While every once in a while, I thought about where our relationship would end up, marriage and kids hadn’t even entered my mind.  After all, we were young and the future was a long way away.

Anyway, the day I want to talk about was in February (the 21^st to be exact), and a friend invited me to a dinner party at her apartment.  I rushed home from class, threw on some make-up and a dress and hurried to her apartment, thinking I would be the last to arrive.  Turns out I was the first.

A few minutes later there was a knock on the door and my friend asked me to get it as she and her husband were busy in the kitchen.  I opened the door and to this day, I swear I was struck by a bolt of lightning.  Or an arrow from Cupid’s bow, seven days too late.  Whatever it was, it seemed to be affecting the man on the other side of the threshold as much as it was affecting me.  We kind of stood there for a minute, staring at each other, eyes wide and mouths slightly agape.  When I finally regained my senses enough to let him into the apartment, he delivered his hostess gift to my friend (something I hadn’t thought to bring) and then spent the rest of the evening sitting next to me and asking as many questions as possible.

We talked for hours that night, and through it all, my heart was pounding like a metronome on high.  All I could think about was how handsome he looked in his blue polo shirt and how smart and funny he was and how good he smelled … you get the idea.  It turns out he was spending a lot of the time thinking about unbuttoning the long row of buttons on the front of my burgundy Victoria’s Secret dress, but that’s another story, LOL.  When he left without asking for my number, I was devastated, despite the fact that I already had a boyfriend.  I consoled myself by hoping he would ask his friend (my friend’s husband) for my number.  Alas, he didn’t (the fact that I had a boyfriend scared him off), and two days later I couldn’t help myself.  I called him.   We arranged for him to pick me up at my apartment the next night after work, and within minutes of hanging up the phone, I called my boyfriend and told him we needed to talk … It turned out, he’d been thinking the same thing, thank God, so the talk went very easily.

Anyway, the new guy took me out to dinner and a 12:30 movie and I was so tired from studying for mid-terms that I fell asleep on him right in the middle of the movie.  I figured that was the end of it—I mean, who falls asleep in the middle of a first date?  But he was really nice about it and after I kissed him (did I mention he was a little shy) he asked me out for the next afternoon.

We started our date feeding the ducks at a nearby park, and when all the bread was gone, he took me over to one of the little gazebos near the pond and told me that he loved me and wanted to marry me.  My eyes almost bugged out of my head, needless to say.  I was only twenty-one, he was twenty-eight and while I had heard my parents’ story a million times, they’d been nearly thirty when they’d met.  I told him I barely knew him, blah, blah, blah, and yet didn’t go running screaming into the night.  Instead, I thought about his words for a week and when he asked me to marry him again, eight days later, I said yes.

We were married within two and a half months, and just about nine months later, we had our first child.  We now have three children, the oldest of whom is fourteen, and we are about to celebrate our fifteenth wedding anniversary.  Has it been easy?  No, of course not.  But has it been right—absolutely, and I don’t regret for one second throwing caution to the wind and marrying this man that I was madly in love with.

My friends at school thought it was crazy, my parents (who had no room to talk) cautioned me about making such a swift decision when I was so young, my best friend in the world told me I was freaking nuts.  And I did it anyway—why?  Because from the moment that first lightning bolt struck, I knew we were meant to be together.

Maybe that’s why things always happen fast in the novels I write.  In almost all of them, my characters know pretty soon after meeting that they’ve met someone special, someone who is going to turn their lives upside down.  In my new novel, Hidden Embers, which is the second in my Dragon’s Heat series, Quinn and Jasmine have an instant spark between them.  Though both are tough characters, right away there’s a kind of vulnerability between them, an acknowledgment that they see something in each other that no one else is perceptive enough to see.  Of course, that only makes both of them want to protect themselves more …  And when Quinn figures out very early on that Jasmine, a human, is his mate—well, let’s just say the sparks fly!

So what do you think?  Do you believe in love at first sight or do you think it needs to grow steadily for a couple of years before you leap into a serious commitment like marriage?  Leave a comment for a chance to win a copy of Dark Embers, the first book in the Dragon’s Heat series.

5 days from now When Tempting a Rogue hits the shelves. I’m always excited for release day, but this is the first time that I’ve been sad about it as well. When Tempting a Rogue is my last book as Kathryn Smith. For now, anyway.

While I’m really excited about the new things coming my way and the new books I’m writing under new names (Kady Cross, Kate Cross, Kate Locke), I’ve been Kathryn Smith my entire life. I’ve written as Kathryn Smith since I sold to Avon in 1999.

What it comes down to is that I feel like I’m giving up a bit of myself. I suppose it’s normal, and change always brings anxiety with it — even if it’s really good change. I have that incredible hopeful feeling about each of these new ventures and there’s endless possibilities ahead.

Yup, it’s terrifying.

So, I want to hear about big changes you’ve made. Big decisions that have led to wonderful — or maybe not so wonderful things. More importantly, I want to know if the risk was worth it. Oh, and don’t forget to pick up When Tempting a Rogue on your next trip to the bookstore. It might be a collector’s item one day.