Please give our guest Goddess a warm Mt. Oly welcome! Louisa Edwards is the chef-obsessed author of the Recipe for Love novels, a series of contemporary culinary romances full of food, passion, food, laughter, and food.

Hello Goddess Blog readers! And thank you to the lovely resident goddesses for letting me hang out here with you all today. Talking to you will be a welcome respite from my currently crazy life!

Why so crazy, you ask? Because at this very moment, I’m in the process of picking up and moving from Ohio to Texas. Austin, to be exact, and we couldn’t be more excited—the food, the live music, the food, the natural beauty . . . and did I mention the food?

But as thrilled as I’ll be to live closer to my parents, who semi-retired back to Austin after 25 years in Virginia, and as giddy as it makes me to imagine shopping at the flagship Whole Foods and dining at restaurants like Uchi and Fonda San Miguel, the past few days of saying goodbye to our life in Ohio have been emotional.

The last time we made a life change this huge was when my husband and I married and moved from New York City to a small town in Ohio almost five years ago. I’d been an assistant editor at Berkley Publishing Group, which was a fantastic job—basically, I got paid to read romance novels all day! I adored it, and had even started acquiring my own list of books and working directly with authors on their manuscripts.

But my husband’s job yanked us out of Manhattan and plunked us down in a small town where we knew no one, and where I finally had no more excuses to put off one of my oldest dreams—to write a romance novel of my own.

I firmly believe that the Recipe for Love series wouldn’t exist if we hadn’t moved to Ohio. That move gave me the time to dedicate myself to my dream, and our life there helped me write the stories I was most passionate about: The Market trilogy, Can’t Stand the Heat, On the Steamy Side, and the upcoming Just One Taste (out August 31).

In Just One Taste, the hero, Wes, had a nomadic childhood with his con artist father, and it left him feeling rootless and disconnected. Having moved every few years since I graduated from college, I can relate. I can’t wait to finally put down roots in Austin!

What was the best or worst moving experience you’ve ever had? How have the places you’ve lived influenced your life? I have a signature Recipe for Love collection for the best comment!

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Please give a warm Mt. Oly welcome to Gayle Callen!

USA Today Bestselling author, Gayle Callen writes historical romances for Avon Books. Her latest novel, In Pursuit of a Scandalous Lady, was published in May 2010.

She resides in a suburb of Central New York, with her husband and three children. Besides writing, she loves to read, sing, travel, crochet, and delve too deeply into historical research.

TV Addict

Hello! Thanks for allowing me to visit all you goddesses today! I’m Gayle Callen and I write historical romances. My newest book, In Pursuit of a Scandalous Lady, is the start of a new trilogy about three women, all of whom insist they’re the model in a scandalous nude painting—and three men who’ll do anything to figure out the truth.

Promo over, let’s get on to the good stuff—TV! I am a TV addict. Reality shows (Dancing with the Stars), dramas (Lost), sitcoms, sports, I like them all. People often say, “But you’re a writer—don’t you read books?”

I always have an audio book going on my mp3 player. I can’t exercise or clean without it. And I’m trying to be more faithful to reading a physical book every week or two. But…I spend my days reading my own work and research books. TV is where I go to veg. At night I put my feet up and read the paper or crochet while watching my favorite shows.

I think I’ve come up with a deeper meaning for my TV habit: I like plots and characters. It’s what I do for my job, and it carries over to my favorite pastime. It’s fascinating to watch other writers at work, and that’s what I’m doing with something like Lost or Medium, how they twist my expectations and totally surprise me, how they show their characters changing and growing, so that I feel like they’re real people. I see the mistakes some writers make, and I try to learn from them.

Now you can easily say—“So how does that explain your fixation with reality TV?” Ah, but this is all about character! I’ve stuck with Survivor all this time because there’s nothing more fascinating than watching what happens psychologically to a group of people starving on an island together for a prize. Some people break down, some people take the show’s game premise as permission to lie/cheat, others can’t be anything less than honorable. It’s mesmerizing!

I do like the dancing shows, and that can’t be explained by an addiction to character study. Those are about competition and hot guys dancing. And then there’s my love of football and basketball—again, competition and hot guys. There’s a minor sub-theme here…

So do you watch TV? What’s your favorite kind of show and why?

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Please welcome Julie Leto to Mt. Oly!

Julie Leto was born and raised in Florida to a family of Italian and Cuban descent. After picking up her first romance novel when she was only sixteen, Leto knew that she wanted to write one of her own. In 1989, Julie sold her fourth completed novel, Seducing Sullivan, to Harlequin Temptation.  In addition to her long publishing history with Harlequin, she has also written romantic adventure novels for Simon & Schuster and paranormal romance for Penguin.

Isn’t it Romantic?

First, I want to thank the goddesses for inviting me here today. I love all things goddess. My last name, Leto, comes from the demi-goddess who gave birth to Apollo and Artemis. So I’m glad to be a demi-goddess among the full-fledged goddesses today!

After writing nearly forty books, there often comes a time when a writer needs to stop and re-evaluate her work and see if there’s any place to make improvements. Okay, maybe not all writers do this. I suppose some know what works and keep doing that one thing in order to satisfy their readers. I don’t mean one plotline or one type of book. I mean, one “promise” that a writer gives a reader so that they know they will get X if they read a book by Y. For me, no matter if I’m writing contemporary, paranormal, suspense or any other of the subgenres I’ve written in, I want my readers to know they will get a super-sexy book.

I like sexy books.

I like writing them. I love reading them.

My books don’t always have the same degree of heat—a writer should be flexible to the needs of the story and the publisher—but they’re always hot. At least, I try.

But after taking something of a break from writing Harlequin Blazes, when I had the opportunity to go back, I wanted to do something to re-establish myself within the line. And hot really isn’t enough when the whole LINE promises heat, right?

To find out what I should focus on, I talked to my editor. I asked her which of my books (she’s edited over thirty of my forty books) was her favorite and why.

This was a fun question because she knows my work nearly as well as I know do. Her favorites are “Surrender” in the Essence of Midnight collection (which was nominated for a RITA in 2005) and “Into the Woods” my most recent Blaze, MORE BLAZING BEDTIME STORIES. What she liked about both stories is that they were both super-hot, but they were also ROMANTIC.

Romantic.

Write that down. That’s my new buzz word.

Romantic, romantic, romantic.

But what makes one story more romantic than another? I think the answer is emotion.

I’m not, by instinct, an emotional writer. I tend to go for the big plot twist rather than the emotional gut twist. But now that I’m looking to make my stories a bit more “sweep you off your feet” for both the characters and the readers, I’m paying hard attention to that element of conflict and fantasy that takes an ordinary couple and makes their story extraordinary. I tried it out on my recent FREE online short story, SURPRISE WEDDING  and definitely pulled out all the stops for my new release, 3 SEDUCTIONS AND A WEDDING, which will be on bookshelves soon!

I think I made it work. Time will tell.

So tell me…what are the most romantic moments you remember in a book…or in a movie? Comment and you’ll be entered to win a copy of both MORE BLAZING BEDTIME STORIES and my brand new book, 3 SEDUCTIONS AND A WEDDING.

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Help us give a warm Goddess welcome to Jean Brashear!

A letter to Rod Stewart resulting in a Cinderella birthday for her daughter sowed the seeds of Jean Brashear’s writing career. The three-time RITA Award finalist and Romantic Times BOOKReviews Career Achievement Award winner has appeared on the Waldenbooks bestseller list and received numerous other awards for her work.

How Do You Find Your Inner Goddess?

A question for the ages, eh? (Though obviously this faboo roster of authors already has figured it out—SO exciting to be here with you all!)

Well, it’s an individual quest, don’t you think? I’m still looking for mine, but I feel like I’ve made some progress as I followed the protagonist of my women’s fiction release, The Goddess of Fried Okra, Eudora “Pea” O’Brien, on her somewhat unusual path to locating hers.

Pea, see, is on a journey to find the sister who raised her, but she faces a daunting challenge because, well….Sister died several months back.;) No, this is not a paranormal; Pea has no superpowers. She’s a little quirky (so she hears voices—what of it?) but mostly she’s just plain folks like you and me.

Okay, so she’s jumped into her car with what little she owns and is searching for Sister’s reincarnated soul and is counting on Fate to alert her when she’s getting warm. Not exactly normal, I get that. And yes, she’s a soft touch and picks up an odd band of companions along the way: a starving kitten, a surly pregnant teen, a con man trying to go straight. Pea does indeed have her hands full and figures she needs some help.

Help arrives in an odd package—a crusty gun dealer named Glory (the shop’s name is Guns ‘N’ Glory) who introduces Pea to all manner of goddesses and female warriors. Glory’s a big fan of the sword-wielding, bloodthirsty heroines of Robert E. Howard (creator of Conan the Barbarian) and one in particular named Dark Agnes, Pea takes a real shine to.

Dark Agnes, see, was thrown out into the world all alone just like Pea—a dicey fate at any time, but in medieval days, seriously scary. Dark Agnes, however, becomes someone quite formidable, and soon she joins the voices guiding Pea. (Here’s a photo of Dark Agnes on the cover of Howard’s book about to take off the head of a burly brute who has designs on her body.)

Where did Dark Agnes come from? Well…that’s a story in itself, one that began on a back road in Texas when I spotted a sign for the Conan the Barbarian Festival in Cross Plains.

Needless to say, we took a detour! Could you have resisted?

What’s the weirdest roadside sign you’ve seen? Did you go check it out? Jean has generously offered an e-galley of The Goddess of Fried Okra to one of our commentors today!

The Goddess of Fried Okra video. You can order a signed copy at Bellbridgebooks. And from Amazon.

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Please give a warm Mt. Oly welcome to Sherri Browning Erwin!

A graduate of Mount Holyoke College, Sherri lives in Western Massachusetts with her nearly-perfect husband, and their charming actor son, amazing violinist daughter, a crafty corgi(Pembroke Welsh), and a very special pug.

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies started the mash-up craze. I have to give credit to Seth Grahame-Smith and his Quirk Books editor. What is a mash-up? With Jane Slayre coming out in a few short weeks (April 13th), it’s a question I’ve been asked quite a bit. Most common of late, the mash-up is taking the form of adding a new supernatural fantasy element to a tried and true classic.

In Seth’s big smash debut mash, he added zombies to Pride and Prejudice, having Darcy and Elizabeth fight their attraction as they fought off zombies in the English countryside. Yes, I didn’t like the idea at first, either. Mess with my favorite book? By adding zombies!? Are you kidding me? But it was an attention-grabbing concept. Zombies don’t really belong in ballrooms. They have appalling manners. They lose parts. They smell. And all they want to do is eat your brains!

Suddenly, frat boys were reading Pride and Prejudice (And Zombies- subtitled The Classic Regency Romance Now with Ultraviolent Zombie Mayhem). And then, everyone started reading it. And fine, I eventually stopped rolling my eyes and picked it up, too. And it was funny! Really funny. I found my sense of humor and realized that adding ultraviolent zombie mayhem took nothing away from my beloved classic. Because I can still read the original. In fact, I did. Right after I finished Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.

And then, I was joking around at The Whine Sisters blog about the Twilight craze and Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and said, “Oh please? What next? Jane Slayre? With a vampire-killing Jane Eyre?” Har har. Fellow Whine Sister Kathleen Givens called me immediately. She told me to delete that blog entry, take it down fast, and just write it. Write the book! But, I was just kidding around, I explained. She told me I would be crazy to leave that out there for someone else to write. And when Julia London joined in, I realized that they were right and I should give it a shot.

And now here we are, with a new version of Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte’s beloved classic, called Jane Slayre (The Literary Classic with a Blood-Sucking Twist), in which Jane, our plucky demon-slaying heroine, starts as a courageous orphan who spurns the detestable vampyre kin who raised her, and sets out on the advice of her ghostly uncle to hone her skills as the fearless slayer she’s meant to be. There are vampires, zombies, yes, even a few werewolves. And Mr. Rochester? “Reader, I buried him.” But you’ll have to read it to find out more on that.

Actually, though, if you ask me, mash-ups have been around a lot longer than Seth Grahame-Smith. When I was a kid, I used to love the cartoon, Rocky and Bullwinkle. And my favorite part of the Rocky and Bullwinkle Show was always Fractured Fairy Tales. The Fractured Fairy Tales were the classic tales retold in a funny, irreverent, sometimes bizarre way. To me, it’s only surprising that it took so long for someone to take the concept to classic literature. And, I expect we won’t be seeing the end of the trend for quite some time. So many classics, so many creative writers with new untried twists.

Tell me, have you ever resisted a book or movie only to give in and love it?  How do you feel about mash ups; fun, sacriledge, weird? Sherri has very generously offered a $25 gift card to BN, Borders or Amazon, the winner’s choice, to one lucky commentor!

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Give a warm Mt. Oly welcome to debut author, Erica Ridley!

Erica writes Regency-set historical romances, often with a touch of paranormal. Since becoming active in the writing community, all of her manuscripts have finaled in or won various RWA chapter contests. Erica is also the webmistress of her local writing chapter. Her first book, TOO WICKED TO KISS, debuted March 2, 2010.

When not reading or writing romances, Erica can be found riding camels in Africa, zip-lining through rainforests in Costa Rica, or getting hopelessly lost in the middle of Budapest.

Real Men Wear Starched Cravats

One of the most fun and most challenging things about being a romance author is writing scenes from the hero’s point of view. On the one hand, I want him to be equal parts strong and sexy and thoughtful and romantic and understanding and compassionate and witty and logical and intelligent and charming and objective. On the other hand, I want him to be realistic. (What? Choice A isn’t always realistic? LOL.)

Luckily for me, I have four brothers and a wealth of male friends from which to draw upon when trying to decide what a man would really say and how a man would really react. I am also dating someone who is a walking icon of the male/female divide and therefore a constant source of entertainment.

Last Christmas, while I was out of town, he and I had the following two phone conversations:

Boyfriend: Hey, I went to a huge party last night.

Erica: Cool! How was it?

Boyfriend: I don’t have time to tell you right now. I’ll explain later.

[4 hours go by]

Boyfriend: OK, now I have time to talk.

Erica: Great! So, how was the party?

Boyfriend: Fine.

That right there pretty much sums up the difference between men and women, does it not?

How about you? Have you experienced dissimilar man/woman expectations of what makes for satisfying conversations? When you’re reading a romance, do you prefer the hero to behave more realistically or more idealistically? Name a favorite hero from your keeper shelves!

Erica will be giving one lucky commentor a signed copy of Two Wicked To Kiss!

Visit Erica on the web at: Her website, her book bonus feature website, Facebook and Twitter.

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Please welcome Linda Howard and Linda Jones to Mt. Oly!

Linda Howard is the award-winning author of many New York Times bestsellers, including Up Close and Dangerous, Drop Dead Gorgeous, Cover of Night, Killing Time, To Die For, Kiss Me While I Sleep, Cry No More and Dying to Please. She lives in Alabama with her husband and two golden retrievers.

Since the publication of her first book in 1994, Linda Winstead Jones has published more than sixty novels and novellas. She’s a five-time finalist for the Romance Writers of America’s RITA Award and a winner of the 2004 RITA for paranormal romance. Her leisure activities include retail therapy (she never met a shoe she didn’t like), easy hiking, and, naturally, reading. An active member of the Romance Writers of America, she lives in North Alabama with her husband of more than thirty-seven years.

Logical Vampires

LJ — Over the years, Linda H and I have taken a number of personality tests. We always end up with a designation of logical, analytical — even super analytical. Maybe that’s why until recently, neither of us considered writing about vampires. Guys who were dead and cold didn’t appeal to either of us. Worse, the lore wasn’t logical. No reflection? Garlic? Attractive dead guys?

LH — LJ’s the analytical one, I’m the logical one. Cold dead vampires didn’t make sense to either one of us. If they’re dead, then why do they need sustenance? And if they drink blood, then they have to have some way for their bodies to process it, right? Their digestive systems at least have to work! And for the sustenance to get to all parts of their bodies, their hearts have to work. That means they’re alive, their hearts beat, and they’re warm.

LJ — So, we started talking (always a dangerous thing) and Blood Born was conceived. Our vampires aren’t dead, they aren’t cold. They breathe, their hearts beat, and thank goodness they’re warm. Their lives and lore make sense to two super analytical writers who can’t stop asking “why?” and “why not?”

LH — But they also have magic, and powers. Isn’t it weird that we can both accept that? Doesn’t have to be logical, we don’t have to analyze it. It’s just falling in love with cold dead guys we couldn’t accept . Making love with something cold . . . can you put him in a microwave first, please? Heat him up a little?

Question: When you read a story, do you need logic?

LH — Depends on the story, depends on how good of a story-teller the writer is. If a story engages me, entertains me, then I can accept a lack of logic as long as I have a rip-roaring good time reading the book. It’s when the book doesn’t quite engage me that much that the logic had better hold up — and, for me, good strong logic will sometime engage me as much as good writing. It isn’t an either/or thing for me, it’s a combination that has to fall within a certain range.

LJ — I’m with Linda. Whether it’s a book or a movie or a television show, I can completely dismiss my need for logic if I’m having a great time. Otherwise, I get caught up in every little detail that doesn’t make sense.

So, what about y’all? Do you need logic?

One comment poster today will win an assortment of signed books from our Goddesses!

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