If I had a nickel for every time I’m asked that question … I would have a LOT of nickels, LOL.  I take it as a compliment, actually.  In my line of work, it’s nice to know people wonder how I come up with gruesome tales of mayhem and murder.  It must mean I have an innocent face.

Bwahahahaha.  Little do they know! 

But I do get that question a lot, as most writers do.  So where DO I get my ideas?  And the answer is - all different places, and each tale has a tale of its own.   For example, in DIE FOR ME, the villain is a video game designer with a meticulous attention to detail.   Bad things ensue.  I got the idea for that book after listening to the audio version of a time travel book where the characters go back to medieval France.  (Think Gerry Butler in the movie version.)  I thought, now wouldn’t going back in time be too cool!  For about five minutes maybe - then I’d miss my flushing toilet and MP3.  But what if a villain was obsessed with that time period - especially the violent parts?  Then I remembered visiting a medieval torture museum in Germany with Mr. R (totally his idea), and the evil Simon Vartanian was born. 

SCREAM FOR ME - which was released yesterday - took a slightly different path.  I started with a mystery I’d left dangling at the end of DIE FOR ME - the first time I’d ever written a sequel!  The evil Simon had possessed some photos, you see.  Photos that looked like real victims being hurt.  His older brother Daniel pledges to get the victims justice, no matter how long it takes.  Then add in a startling experience of my own:  my first viewed autopsy.  I experienced the very disturbing sensation of not being able to absorb what my eyes were seeing.  Part of my mind insisted I was looking at a doll.  The other part knew I was looking at a dead body and tersely told the first part to get it together.  I distinctly remember the entire dialogue between the two halves of my brain, like I was a bystander.  Very, very surreal.  That experience became a big part of SCREAM FOR ME as I thought about what would happen if someone saw something so horrific and overwhelming that the denying part of their mind won?  What would make them remember, and what would that experience be like? 

Now you know a bit about where I get my ideas.  I like to think I still have an innocent face!  (Bwahahaha!)

So … where do you get your inspiration?  If you paint or write or sing or play sports or whatever it is you do, what makes your mind percolate?  Do you have to have incentive (aka chocolate) or does inspiration miraculously occur?  Do I have an innocent face (humor me)? Have you seen the video for SCREAM FOR ME?  Will you RUN and get your copy of SCREAM FOR ME today?

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For Refreshment Only Sunday (FROS) is delighted to celebrate all of our hot mommas! As we all know, hot mommas deserve hot dads, so here are a few in honor of this wonderful day.

and . . .

and while I’m not the world’s biggest Brad Pitt fan, even I melted at this picture:

Happy FROS Mother’s Day to all of our Hot Mommas!

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My little ward of state discovered a Winnie the Pooh bear in a closet that belonged to me when I was a kid and latched onto it. He will not part with it now. My maiden name is Winn, which turned into Winnie somewhere in grade school, and naturally, Winnie the Pooh bears followed. And as much as I do love Winnie the Pooh and his honey pot, he was not my favorite toy. When I think of my childhood, I almost always think of Elizabeth first.

Elizabeth was a tricycle. She was green and she had streamers on the handlebars, and I loved her so much I named her Elizabeth. I don’t know how old I was, but I know where we were living at the time and I know I couldn’t have been more than four or five. That green trike was my first brush with freedom and the depths of my imagination. I didn’t get very far, but it seemed like miles and miles to me. And as we lived way out with cows, the landscape was nothing but an empty easel where I began to paint my stories—almost always of danger and almost always involving Indians, and Elizabeth was my trusty steed.

I had Barbies, too, but that was before the Barbie dream house, so my mother made us a house with her shoe boxes. I had older sisters, so that meant they got the shoes and the little combs and I got Midge. We created plays with those Barbies, with three acts, and used the shoe boxes for stages.

I had siblings, too, who sometimes can be as good as toys. We would go to the wheat fields and stomp down a house—I mean literally stomp the wheat down and make rooms amid stalks that stood higher than our heads and be a different family. The next day, we’d be a wagon train, circling the wagons for the night in that wheat, and guess who was lurking in the wheat where we couldn’t see them? Yep, a few Indians. The next day, we probably were discovered and got in trouble.

Do you remember when you first started making up stories, and do you remember what toy or activity sparked your desire to do it?

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My daughter is always sending me fun youtube links to crazy stuff. She knows I love to laugh and be amazed, and she’s sent me some good stuff.

The other day, she sent me this link. Check out what these youthful, obviously well-insured guys did to stave off boredom: (It’s a youtube link, so give it a moment to load.)

I must say, it made me remember certain events I witnessed/participated in during my younger days. Before, of course, I knew about oh, death, paralysis, and such.

Did you and your friends ever goof off in silly ways when you were younger and less worried about losing an eye or mangling a limb? Did you push boundaries back then you’d never think of pushing now? And did you think the guy who back-flipped into his pants was going to plant his feet right into best friends’ faces?

As for what I did in college and high school to kill valuable time before I became aware of my own mortality . . . you tell me yours and I’ll tell you mine.

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Okay, I admit it.  I love gadgets.  Mr. R just shakes his head at me sometimes when a new gadget comes on TV and I say, “Ooooh, I want it!” 

I have new gadgets and some oldies that are still goodies.  My newest acquisition is a GPS that came pre-loaded with maps of the UK.  I used it last month when I made my trek from London to Wales.  It would instruct me in the proper road to take, the lane to be in and on the one occasion I missed my turn, it politely said, “Please turn around at the first possible opportunity.”

I like a polite gadget.

My life is ruled by my palm pilot, which pops up with a warning on upcoming appointments.  It failed me today.  I forgot I was supposed to blog.  I could blame my trusty palm pilot, but the truth is, I forgot to input it, so the fault is totally mine.  I absolve my gadget of all responsibility.

So do you love your gadgets?  What’s your favorite?  Do you leave the house without your cell, EVER?  How did we survive before GPS?  (I just got lost a lot.)

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When I popped onto the Goddess blogs this morning, I saw that there wasn’t a new blog and I thought: “Hmm, wonder what slacker forgot she was blogging today.” Then I went to our special blog calender and saw it was me. I am that slacker. For some reason I thought it was Claudia’s day.

So since I don’t have anything intelligent and informative planned, I thought I’d ask you all a question that has been rolling around in my brain.

Why can’t Hollywood make a decent romantic comedy? They really haven’t for years. Why don’t they just take a good romance novel and adapted it? I just don’t get it. The book already has a built in audience.

And what romance novel would you like to see made into a movie?

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I don’t really, but wouldn’t that be sort of cool? Okay, here is the deal: one day, I was out wogging, and there was a man ahead of me on the path. I was trying to quicken my waddle by maintaining the distance between us, but there is a point where the path joins a street on a neighborhood, and when I reached it, the man was nowhere to be seen.

Now, my first thought was that the dude had run home. But my stepdaughter had a different theory altogether: He was a ghost. A man who had died on the path (which was probably constructed in the last five years), who died running, who runs every day because he’s caught between heaven and hell.

I thought that was pretty clever imagining, and was telling some friends later—laughing, naturally—but my friends, grown woman like me, did not laugh. They began to talk about ghosts in their houses, or their grandparents houses, or weird things that had happened to them, as if those things happened to everyone. I’ve never had an experience like that. I asked them if they seriously believed the man ahead of me on the path was a ghost. Two said no, one of them shrugged and said, “Maybe. Who knows?”

Well I know—the guys was real. But whose to say there wasn’t some other ghost wogging with me that day? I was fascinated by the tales my pals were telling me about weird occurrences in their houses (things moving, doors closing, cold or hot spots), or around their person. It made me wonder about the supernatural world. Are some people more in tune with it than others? Are there really souls wandering around between us that can’t get to their eternal resting place? Have you ever had a supernatural or otherwise ghostly experience?

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At the best of times, naming a book is difficult for me. What usually happens is that I give Avon 50 or so titles and they reject all of them and come up with one on their own. The only title I’ve ever kept for any of my books is Tangled Up In You.

Yesterday my editor at Avon emailed me. They’re having a cover conference for my May 2009 book and they need a title. As always, I gave them a bunch and they rejected them all. So, I am appealing to all you goddesses out there to help me name my new book. Here’s a short synopsis:

Heroine Faith Duffy was a stripper turned playboy playmate. For the past five years she has been married to a man fifty-one-years older than she is and living as his trophy wife. The book opens with the death of her old rich husband who leaves her his hockey team. Until the death of her husband, she’d been socializing with the Seattle elite and doing charity work. After her husband dies, she becomes persona non grata in that society and gets kicked out of their clubs. Now she must figure out where she belongs, and what she’s going to with the twenty-two hockey players she suddenly owns.

Hero Ty Savage is captain of the hockey team. His main goal in life is to win the Stanley cup championship. He is not happy that the new owner is a trophy wife who knows nothing about hockey. He thinks she’s a gold digger and a bimbo, and the last thing he needs is to feel an overwhelming attraction for the new owner.

Yeah, I know that the synopsis pretty much sucks. Which why I never write a synopsis anymore. But here’s the deal. If Avon uses one of your titles, I’ll announce it here in the Goddess Blogs and send the winner a copy of my very first hockey book, Simply Irresistible.

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During the entire writing and publication process, there’s only one part that requires almost no work from the author and is just plain ole fun . . . sometimes. That part is the development of the title and cover, both of which come from a mysterious mechanism known as The Cover Conference.

It’s fun if you get a great title and an eye catching cover. It’s not so much fun if you find out they want to name your book THE GRANNY WHO LOVED ME and the art department is ‘excited’ about the possibility of using ‘Depends’ on the cover.

I’ve been very fortunate in the covers and titles I’ve gotten. VERY fortunate. More fortunate than, say, these poor authors . . .

This is probably a great anthology. It’s probably witty and humorous and well-written . . . but somehow, somewhere, someone thought the title BIG SPANKABLE ASSES would make the book leap off the shelf.

It certainly caught my attention. Due to my family’s unfortunate allergy to chocolate, desserts, and food which causes various parts of our bodies to swell to ginormous sizes, I’ve seen a lot of big asses in my life (and some spankable ones, too, but that’s another story). So I’m something of a ’spankable ass expert’. As such, I have to say that the one on this cover . . . nuh uh. That ain’t ‘big.’

In fact, I think it’s actually quite petite. Perhaps they should have called this book TINY SPANKABLE ASSES. At least then it would have been anatomically correct.

Just sayin’.

Ok, if you’re through admiring that Big (Tiny) Spankable Ass, go vote in the cover contest and let us know which covers you loved and hated. By the way, you just might see some of your goddesses listed on the pages and, just for the record, we ALL have BIG SPANKABLE ASSES.

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I love villains. I love them mean and smart and sometimes just plain crazy. They scare you and make you wonder if they will indeed win. A good villain makes you look over your shoulder, makes you wonder about the Ned-Flanders-esque guy that lives next door. Could he really be that nice? What about all that banging you hear from his basement? He says he’s hanging shelves - but is he really?

Memorable villains - Jack the Ripper, Mr. Hyde, Dracula … Bad, bad, bad! Most of these guys work alone - but what about the villains who partner up? Bonnie and Clyde, the James gang, Leopold and Loeb. I always wondered if they really thought this through before deciding to take a partner - what if one folded, told the story, turned them in?

Ben Franklin said, “Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.” In my upcoming release, SCREAM FOR ME, I played with that very premise. What would happen if a group committed a crime together and devised some way of keeping everyone quiet? If one told, they all went down. And what if those people were forced to live amongst each other, in a very small town? They’d watch one another as the years passed, and wonder, and seethe and mistrust.

Add to that a very hunky hero, Daniel, and a strong, capable, smart, feisty heroine, Alex, (I liked her!) and the noose tightens until the nightmare makers are forced to do something to make it all stop. SCREAM FOR ME is released on May 13 - that’s just 2 weeks! And it will be excerpted in Cosmo as July’s RED HOT READ! And check out the BOOK TRAILER: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C2I3CJ8rvq8 - but be sure you’re in a place where the screams won’t bother anyone!

So who is your favorite villain - and why? Did they work alone? Did they have a partner? Are you planning to SCREAM FOR ME? 

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