“But I’m warning you, Hunter . . . screw me over and I will make you bleed.”

Two seconds later, he felt a prick. And he realized she was better than he thought. She’d distracted him, all right, using that lovely body and that gorgeous hair. She’d palmed a knife again, and this time he hadn’t noticed. Shit, she was dangerous.

And not just because she currently had that thin sliver of a blade pressed against his cock, either. Crooking a grin at her, he drawled, “Oh, come on, sweetheart. You really want to make me bleed there?”

“Right now, I want you to bleed in so many ways and in so many places, I can’t even begin to list them.” She stepped back and then he watched as she took the blade and sheathed it. Meet Sylvia and Toronto… the hero and heroine from my latest, and last, Hunter book.

He's a werewolf who doesn't play well with others. She's a mercenary who has issues with authority.

Toronto never did do very well with the team thing and that’s one of his biggest problems…he has to figure out who he is and that’s his journey in this book.

But I want to talk about Sylvia…I’ve written Hunters, but I haven’t written too many hired killers. They are sort of frowned upon, right?

Sometimes, though, there are people who just need to die, the way she sees it. So she just helps them along the way.

She’s not the strongest creature in the world. She’s a vampire, but her power level is a bit below mediocre. She’s not going to get any stronger. She’s spent most of her life capitalizing on the strengths she does have and learning to use them to her advantage. She might not be as strong as some, but she honed every ability she has and can use each of them in ways a lot of vampires never imagined.

Putting these loners together and getting them work together…getting them to fall in love was a lot of fun.

If you’d like to read a little more about them, you can check out my site… www.shilohwalker.com

There is no shortage of 'strong' women in romantic suspense…none at all.

We've got cops, private investigators, sharpshooters, bail bondswomen…the woman who seems to be the type to leap tall buildings in a single bound, while wearing four-inch heels, and she'll land on the other side without breaking her stride. Her hair will be perfect, her make-up be pristine and she'll give the hero a smoldering look on her way to her next butt-kicking.

Yes?

A little over the top?

Eh, yeah, probably. But you have to admit, there's no shortage of the strong heroine in romantic suspense. And I like a strong heroine.

Sometimes, we have her opposite…the push-over.

I don't like the pushover, but here I was writing…writing about her.

Although, to be honest, she was more of a victim than a pushover.

A few years ago, she divorced her husband, after years of abuse. Physical abuse. Mental abuse. But even the divorce wasn't enough to make her feel safe and she started to run. Hitting the road, never settling down, Hope stayed on the road. She never stopped fearing he'd come after her. And she just might have kept on running. But then she was attacked and it had the weirdest effect on her. It pushed her to the wall, and she found her stopping point.

After all the hell she'd been through, Hope finally found her strength.

I knew it was there…it would have to be for the story to work out, but it was still kind of fun to watch her emerge. She won't ever be the heroine to leap buildings in her four-inch stilettos, but she stopped hiding. She stopped cringing her life away.

She looked inside and saw what the hero saw all along…

Without all that hair, she didn’t look so fragile, he realized. Not that she really was, he was coming to realize. A fragile woman would have broken after what had been done to her. No matter what people thought, Hope hadn’t broken. She had been forced to bend, to take unimaginable shit and heartbreak.

But she hadn’t broken.

She had to be one of the strongest women he’d ever met.

Does the quiet strength work for you? Who are some of the heroines (even the heroes) that come to mind when you think of quiet strength? Shiloh Walker will be giving away a $15 gift certificate to Amazon, Books A Million, or Barnes and Noble (winner's choice) to one person who leaves a comment.

Shiloh Walker

http://shilohwalker.com

Your first..

Do you remember your first.. the first book you ever fell in love with?

I remember mine. Third grade. In my parent's basement, on an old, navy blue couch, lost for hours while I read my first Laura Ingalls Wilder book... Little House in the Big Woods.

I remember that so vividly. I read and read and read, losing myself in this other world, about this little girl who had a daddy who made them a balloon from a pig bladder and they ate candy made from snow and maple syrup..

Books--the truest form of magic, if you ask me.

Yep, I remember my first book love. It was Laura.

But I wasn't true to her. I gave my heart over and over to so many different writers, to so many different books. After Laura and her world, I found the world of Bunnicula, the world of the Boxcar Children, the world of the Sweet Valley Twins and then Sweet Valley High.

A few years after that, I found the world of fantasy, courtesy of Mercedes Lackey and it was around that time that I found the world of romance, thanks to Rosemary Rogers. Then I discovered Nora Roberts, and Linda Howard and oh, my, my my.

But it all started with Laura Ingalls Wilder, a book my dad gave me. A book that I read on that old navy blue couch down in the basement the year I was in third grade.

So... do you remember your first?

Check out my latest... IF YOU HEAR HER... at my website.

-Shiloh Walker

Last year, I was at a reader and writer get-together and I was at a table during dinner, talking with some friends.  Jude Deveraux’s KNIGHT IN SHINING ARMOR came up. And I was shocked to realize that book had made people angry.

WARNING…LOL… SPOILER ALERT…

Why? I asked.

Because they weren’t really together.  It was a descendant and her, my friend pointed out.  "Not exactly what the reader was expecting".

But that wasn’t what he’d promised…my soul will find yours…(And I’ve got to say, that’s still one of the most romantic lines ever for me).  No, it wasn’t what the reader was expecting, but sometimes the unexpected is what makes a book even better.

Then we started talking other books.  Sandra Brown’s books…and ANOTHER DAWN.  Yep.  Another book that had left some people unhappy. Another book that broke one of those rules. Another one I loved.

There is a science fiction author, SL Viehl, who has a way of breaking convention and I adore everything she’s ever written. Some of her most memorable books ENDURANCE, CRYSTAL HEALER and DREAM.

CALLED TIME—yeah, those books probably broke some serious rules.

I guess I’ve got a thing for authors who break the rules…as long as the book is worth it.  Maybe that’s why I like books where the characters go through hell and back—very often those are the books where rules get broken, and the happy ever after just seems that much more…complete.

But I want the rule-breaking to make sense…I don’t just want it to be simply for the sake of breaking the rules.  I don’t want it thrown in just for the shock-factor value.  Or just for the fun of it.

Just this weekend our kids were on fall break.  We decided to take them to Great Wolf Lodge & Cedar Point in Sandusky, Ohio… Great Wolf has an indoor waterpark and Cedar Point is supposed to be one of the top roller coaster parks in the country—or maybe the world…???  I don’t know (my son would, though.)

Anyway, while I was watching my kids play, here in a place designed for fun, inspiration strikes.

My current work in progress is a paranormal romantic suspense, a follow-up to my summer release, The Missing.  And the inspiration takes the form of murder—a kind of horrific one.  Set in a place designed for fun.  Kids around me are shrieking in laughter, and I’m having murderous thoughts. So what do I do?

I start telling my husband.

After about two minutes, I stop to take a breath.  He looks at me and goes, “You’re so weird.”  I then asked what he thought they’d do for safety procedures—and what would happen if they did this, or that.  Then I start speculating on whether or not they’d let me talk to a manager.  I ended up cornering a worker—without giving my name—I mean hello, what if somebody dies there, I don’t  want them pointing me out.  Just kidding…I’m not sure if she really believed me when I told her I write romantic suspense—if she’d asked my name, I would have told her.

My husband saw me a few minutes later and without even asking, he knew what I’d been doing.  He sighs, rolls his eyes.  I think they need a support group for the spouses of fiction writers.  Their opening thing could be… Hi.  I’m married to a…..  and we can’t go on vacation without my wife/husband having murderous thoughts…

Now this isn’t a new thing—me having insane ideas in the most unlikely places, and often brought on by the most innocuous things.  Like my book due out tomorrow?  The First Book of Grimm—I bastardized fairy tales.  The inspiration for that one?  Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  The Hansel and Gretel episode—for the Buffy fans, remember when Giles was on the screen doing his Giles thing, about how fairy tales and folks lore had their basis in reality, and Buffy is giving him that look and goes, “Huh?”  Then Oz says, “Fairy tales are real.”

So that got me going… Hmmmmm…what if…what if fairy tales were real, but the stories were made so crazy because they hide to hide something even scarier…what if…

What if—That’s a crucial question for me as a writer. 

And that’s what set my crazy idea off on vacation.  The question what if…it’s the question that started things going for the romantic suspense trilogy I’m putting together to talk to my agent and editor about. 

If you’ve ever wondered what inspires a writer’s ideas…it’s possible it started with that one little question…what if…It’s a question very full of possibilities.

By the way, to celebrate the release of my latest print title, The First Book of Grimm, I’m having a contest for a Nook, and I’m also doing a free giveaway.  Details for the Nook contest can be found here, and the information for the giveaway is here.

Thanks for dropping by!

Shiloh Walker

Shiloh will give away a signed copy from her available backlist to someone who comments.

http://shilohwalker.com

When people find out you’re a writer, you can get a mixed bag of reactions. 

Sometimes it’s:

“Oh, have you sold anything yet?”

Well, it’s kind of hard to write for a living without actually having sold a book. 

Other times, I get:

“So do you write kids books?

Um, no.  This usually comes from people who know me in RL/real life—I did pediatric nursing for years and yes, I adore kids.  That doesn’t mean I’d know how to write for a younger audience.  I’d probably be terrible at it.

Another one?

“Do you have a book in bookstores?”

Yep.  I do.  Actually several.

There are various rude ones that I’m not going to go into. 

And then… the whopper.  The one that I’m hardly ever able to answer without sounding like a moron.

“Where do you get your ideas from?”

I tell you… I hear this question and I want to wince, flinch, whimper and hide my face.  Why?  Now, if you’re not a writer, it might not seem like a hard question.   But for a writer, at least some of us?  Well, it’s not like we’re just going to a store and picking out clothes, or even going into a bookstore and selecting a book.

Sometimes the ideas are everywhere, nowhere, and right in between.  Sometimes you wake up with one riding your brain and it won’t shut up until you get it down on paper or screen.  Other times, it will sit in the back of the head, germinating for months or years, taking shape without you fully thinking about.

But where do they come from?  Well… life.

Even if we’re not fighting vampires, having a rendezvous with a billionaire doctor, crossing through some unseen gateway into another world, or traveling through space with a sexy linguist, something we see in our everyday life inspires our ideas.  It sparked something that led to an idea, and ideas leads to books.

The other day, I read a quote from Neil Gaiman who summed it up
quite well:

And life is a good thing for a writer. It's where we get our raw material, for a start. We quite like to stop and watch it.

That nails it…right there.  Life is raw material, and it’s where we get all those little somethings that turn into sparks that turn into ideas that turn into books.

My ideas come from something in my life.  The barest spark—it can be a TV show, a documentary about a pride of lions, it can be a dream, it can be a discussion with my husband about a bruise—yep, a bruise. 

The first book in my Veil series all started with a bruise—the
heroine was always waking with bruises, I bruise easy… the spark of that idea all came from my husband—he’s the one person I’ll take ideas from, but the story itself, the characters grew from him, something he said to me, and from there, the idea took on a life of its own.  And it’s because of something that happened in my life—a bruise I’d gotten from God only knows where.

But when you try to tell people that just life is an idea?  Sometimes they look at you weird.  Or maybe they look at me weird because I am weird…

But seriously, for me, there’s nothing terribly glamorous or insightful about where a writer gets ideas from.  It can be kind of cool, though—like when your guy says something that makes you go… hmmmmm, or when you’re sitting at a stoplight and bam, lightning strike.  Might not be glamorous, but it works and I like it when things work.

And because I wouldn’t be doing my good little authorly duty if I
didn’t mention my latest-my latest is the second book in my Veil series, Veil of Shadows, a mix of fantasy, paranormal, action and romance.  It was a lot of fun to write, even if I did feel like smacking the characters sometimes….

With demons running amok throughout the forests and mountains, a rebel army has been established to win back the land—and a new soldier has appeared out of nowhere to join them.

His name is Xan, and his past is a mystery to everyone, including Laisyn Caar—a beautiful captain in the rebel army—who is shocked by the powerful, all-consuming desire she feels in his presence.

But now isn’t the time for distraction. The future of her land—and of her people—is in her hands. On top of that, she’s been stripped of her magic—and without it she feels like part of her soul has been stolen away.

But when she discovers the dark secrets of Xan’s agenda, it will be up to her to determine whether the man she’s starting to love is a friend of her people—or a dreaded enemy…

 

And I will close my authorly duty by saying that if you’re interested, you can read an excerpt at my site… http://www.shilohwalker.com/

Thanks for hanging around and reading through my rambles…

Shiloh Walker