Out in the Stands
By Shae Connor I’ll admit up front: I’m not particularly a softball fan. I mean, I have nothing against softball, and I’ve watched games here and there, but my attention’s mostly focused in a slightly different direction. I’m a huge baseball fan. And I got it from my mother. My mom grew up in south… Read More
A Playlist for Of Trust & Heart
As with every other story that I come up with, making a soundtrack for it is a fundamental part of the process. But for OF TRUST AND HEART this was even more important because, since the book takes place in the 1920s, where music was such a huge focus on the time, it needed to… Read More
An Unexpected London
by Hayden Stone It started with throwing imaginary chickens out of the house. The reason? Bad chicken behaviour, I told my mom, as a veteran two-year-old, wise in the way of imaginary chickens. Soon after that, I wouldn’t stop telling stories about horses. At my core, I remain a storyteller. To be honest, I have… Read More
The Music Behind THE BREATH BETWEEN WAVES
For me, creating a playlist for a story is a fundamental part of the writing process. And I usually have to make two. The first is for writing with which contains a lot of instrumental pieces from movies/tv shows/games with similar vibes. And the second is a short one with a few songs that serve… Read More
Loving the Anti-Hero and a $10 Amazon gift card giveaway!
Everyone who reads romance will freely admit that there is something they love about the alpha, the jerk, the man who does everything he can to claim the heroine, even if some of it can be sketchy. But what about the anti-hero? You know the one. He or she may be a main character but… Read More
Confessions of a Book Lover
I grew up attending Catholic school, complete with plaid jumpers, nuns, and occasionally, class trips to the confessional in the adjacent church. When I look back on my storied past as book fiend, I find several book adjacent sins I should have confessed to kindly Fr. Roger. As that time has passed, instead I shall… Read More
Nadia Comaneci, Bart Conner, and Me by Shae Connor
One of the reasons I wrote Rough and Tumble was because I’m a gymnastics fan. When I started thinking about doing a college sports romance series, gymnastics was the sport on the top of my list. I had to do some research about collegiate gymnastics, but for the sport itself, I just had to go… Read More
Finding Creativity by Magan Vernon, author of Heired Lines
Hey y’all, I felt like given the state of…well…everything, this might be a timely post. I guess I should start out saying that I had written over forty stories and when my editor asked for a new one about a couple in England I was stumped. I had no mojo or idea what to write… Read More
Inspiration
I begin most of my books by imagining a situation I think would be cool to write about, or characters whose lives I want to lead. Then there are the ones that start from my own experience, but get sexy when I ask myself, What if things had gone another way? The first book I… Read More
Have you had your Carpe Diem moment yet?
I remember the first time I encountered the phrase Carpe Diem, or for those non-Latin speaking folks, Seize the Day, was way back in and around 1989 when the movie Dead Poets Society hit the big screen. I was, well, a lot younger back then, still playing with my Barbies and Polly Pocket, still dreaming… Read More
Building Families
In my new release Most Ardently, an LGBT+ retelling of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, our story centers on the Benitez family – a working-class, close-knit bunch that often drive each other completely insane. One of my main struggles while writing was keeping them recognizable as a modern-day version of the Bennet family, while still… Read More
Tropetastic
As a passionate romance reader, I have a few favorite tropes I absolutely love. A story trope is a common plot line. Although the plots may have common themes, no two stories are the same just as no two people…or in this case, writers are the same. If you choose to write about one of… Read More