Wild Card Weekend - July 4th

Please welcome Susan Page Davis with this year's Independence Day post!

This Saturday will be a family 4th of July celebration for me, my husband and children. We’ll travel about 200 miles to connect with others in the family and enjoy the day together.


That means a day off from working on my upcoming book, but I’ll probably be thinking about it in the car on the way. I love writing historical romance, and several of my past books fall into this category.

My Maine Brides series featured different generations of the Hunter family. In each book, the hero was somewhat of an outcast. But by the end, the family had reason to celebrate. Family, forgiveness, and reconciliation are themes in many of my books, and those things dovetail nicely with holiday celebrations.

In contemporary books, I love to work in holiday celebrations—Christmas, Memorial Day, 4th of July. It takes a little more work in historicals, because you have find out if that holiday was celebrated in that place, at that time, and if so, what the customs were.

My characters in Frasier Island, first book of my American Heroes Series, were isolated on a remote island in the North Pacific. One of the few naval officers on the island brought sparklers along for the July Fourth celebration. When you’re far from home, keeping traditions can be especially meaningful.

I like to read about holidays in books. If major holidays are “skipped over,” I wonder why. So I use a calendar when I’m planning and writing, to make sure I don’t do that. If the book is releasing near a holiday, that makes it even more fun.



Whatever your idea of a perfect Independence Day celebration, I hope you enjoy it with your family and give thanks for the freedoms it represents.




Susan's latest Love Inspired Suspense is On a Killer's Trail, Feb. 2009.

Must Watch Friday - Amelie

This week Silhouette Desire author, Bronwyn Jameson, is delighted to present the quirky French romantic comedy (well, sort of) Amelie. Or, in its original full title, Le fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain.

Yep, I am absolutely delighted to talk about Amelie ...although I must admit it wasn't my first choice. I was going to do a piece on Cinderella movies, with a smooth segue to the Cinderella touch in my July book Magnate's Make-Believe Mistress. (I love everything about segues, you see, including the feel of the word on my tongue.)

But a quick search of the PHS archives revealed that both my favourite Cinderella-themed movies, Pretty Woman and Ever After, have been done already. Sooo, I thought I could do Gossip Girl but that's only "must watch" television if you want to study the Upper East Side and soap opera excesses of bad behaviour. My third thought was The Proposal, which I saw this week, but it's not out in the UK until later this month so that wouldn't be fair, would it?

And then, serendipity. One of my all-time favourites on pay-TV! Smiling, I settled in to enjoy...and didn't stop smiling until long after The End. That's one of the reasons why Amelie. sits at the top of my favourites list -- no matter how many viewings, I'm left feeling completely satisfied and joyous. And smiling. And wanting to make others feel good as well. The perfect choice for a Must Watch Friday.

So, Amelie. . It's told in a different narrative style--the narrator and subtitles are part of the story, part of the appeal!--quirky, very French, and irresistible. Because Amelie, played brilliantly by Audrey Tautou, is irresistible. She's a naive young Frenchwoman embarking on a new life as a waitress in a Montmartre coffee shop, and through the opening series of vignettes of her childhood you learn why she is such an extreme introvert. That backstory is comic and poignant and, for the writers amongst us, a master class in showing-not-telling backstory.

The story proper commences when Amelie moves to Paris, although she is still an observer of life and of people -- in the coffee shop where she works and in the apartment building where she lives. The first turning point is when she discovers, in a secret hidie-hole, a box of treasures from a previous tenant's boyhood. She sets out to find him, to return the treasures, but because of her shyness she does so from a distance...although she watches and when she sees the man's joy, she has found her life's mission. She will stop observing, listening, she will start doing something about the inequities she sees around her.

I should mention at this point the movie's logline. Amelie -- she will change your life.

Amelie's missions are many and, given her imagination and her extreme shyness, they're not approached in a usual or straight-forward fashion. At the coffee shop, she dabbles in a spot of match-making which provides some of the movie's funnier moments. She convinces her housebound father to follow his dream of world travel with true inventiveness and the help of a garden gnome (I did mention this movie was quirky, yes?) She turns around a neighbour's sadness over her cheating husband, and her vengeance against a pig of a shopkeeper is a thing of charm and beauty. I defy anyone not to fall in love with Amelie based on this alone!

In betwixt all her anonymous do-gooding, Amelie becomes embroiled in a minor mystery involving pictures of a man taken and discarded in rail-station photo booths. The photos have been found and collected by a mysterious stranger, Nino (Mathieu Kassovitz), to whom Amelie is drawn. She melts, literally. Although her shyness proves a huge barrier when it comes to meeting the man. And so we get to the real heart of the story: Amelie has been busily changing other lives, but what about her own? Can she stop observing life and grab it for herself? Can she change her own life?

Amelie has developed a friendship with a housebound neighbour, who spends his life painting Renoir's Luncheon of the Boating Party over and over. There's a girl in the centre background (observing the central characters!) that he can't get quite right and their dialogue about this girl, about the parallels with Amelie, bring her inner conflict to the fore. The movie's climax is her quest to meet Nino although, being Amelie, this is neither straightforward nor simple. It is, however, whimsical and charming and original. Which pretty much sums up Amelie, the character, and Amelie. , the movie.

Why do I love this movie so much? For its joie de vivre, its touches of dark humour, its unexpectedness, its bright colour and detail (I swear, I see something new with every viewing.) For Amelie's unique character; she is what Regency novels refer to as a "true original". For Audrey Tautou, who lives and breathes the character. For Paris, as seen through Amelie's childlike eyes. For how all the subplots play together to enhance the theme. For its core message, that little touches can bring the most happiness.

And for our irrepressible heroine's own happy ending. Hooray!

Warm and fuzzy rating: 10 out of 10.


What is top of your Must Watch list? Which one movie is your perfect 10 out of 10 feel-good experience?


Bronwyn's current release Magnate's Make-Believe Mistress--the one with a touch of Cinderella--is a July, 2009 release from Silhouette Desire. It's a story about a woman who needs to find her own happiness instead of always looking out for those around her. Read the behind-the-book stuff at her website.

Thursday Talktime: Location, Location, Location

Ann Roth talks about the key to any story -- its setting

We writers love to talk about our craft. Today is travel/settings day, so I thought I'd talk about setting, aka atmosphere, background. The overall setting is the town or city where the story happens-including those little details that bring the place to life. On a smaller scale, setting is where each scene takes place. Setting plays a role in any story, sometimes a huge role. Take a story where characters must battle the elements in order to survive. Those elements, whatever they are, become so key that they are every bit as important as the main characters.

Sometimes setting serves as metaphor. A raging storm and a hero's anger that he can't control a situation. Fireworks in a star-studded sky while a couple enjoy great sex. A childhood home burning to the ground just as a character forgives the past.

Setting can have a huge impact on who the characters are and how they view life. Take a character, say the novel's hero, born and raised in Big Sky country, where the population is limited and the terrain is vast and open.

Now imagine the heroine born and raised in Manhattan, with its concrete and tall buildings, and the non-stop hordes of people.

How might these two view the world?

Chances are, not at all the same way. Your Big Sky fella might be used to a slower tempo, thinking huge and speaking his mind. If he needs to get away, he might hike or take a long drive. Whereas Ms. Manhattan might be on espresso time, fast, fast, fast. Her world might be limited to the people in her apartment building or her work. Maybe she hides her thoughts in order to get ahead. When she needs a break, she shops or dashes into a coffee bar. The hero might quickly feel overwhelmed in the Big Apple, and the heroine would quite possibly freak out at the quiet and space in Montana.

In Harlequin American Romances the sense of community is all-important. Setting can augment that community feel. My American novels take place in small towns to underline the community element, but a writer can do the same in any big city. It's all in how we present the atmosphere and background and the characters involved.

For my Halo Island series, I chose a small island with a big summer tourist business. I like the sense of separateness and intimacy created by the island. Some of my other story settings have been in fictitious towns on the Oregon Coast, in towns on the outskirts of Seattle, and in a fictitious Midwest town. Each is a unique atmosphere that in some way highlights or adds to the story.

I could go on and on about the settings but due to space constraints, I won't.But I would love to hear from you.

What kinds of settings do you enjoy? What settings would you like to see in future novels?Looking forward to your comments, and thanks for letting me visit today.

Ann Roth's latest A Father for Jesse is out now. You can learn more by visiting her website

Writer's Wednesday - Good Narrative or Cutting for Pace?

This Writer's Wednesday, Donna Alward heaves a sigh and discusses trying to find the balance between cutting for pace and narrative opportunities....

I don't think there's a romance writer alive who hasn't at some point heard the words "cut for pace" either in regards to their work or in regard to someone else's. It's a necessary thing; readers need to keep turning the pages and every now and then certain things need to be sacrificed or tightened to keep that PTQ - Page Turning Quality. I don't cut for pace that often, usually it involves tightening a scene and making it work harder and on more levels. Every scene has to work - and work hard. Sometimes it's not enough for a scene to have one single purpose.

The flip side of that - and isn't there always a flip side? - is that you should never miss an opportunity for good narrative. So while in some places you can jump cut without needing that five or six paragraphs of transition, getting to the meat of the matter, there are definitely other times you DO jump cut and reveal what happened and miss a great opportunity.

How do you know which is which?

You know what? I don't know. Bear with me here. I recently finished a first draft of a book and because of scheduled holidays and National conference coming up, I scrambled to write the last 25% in the last week. The problem with writing something so quickly, at least for me, is that at times I skim, rather than savour the scenes. A few chapters it worked...I was in the zone. The last few chapters? Not so much. And the thing is, a lot of times you don't know what you need to cut, or the opportunity you missed, until you get that draft out and SEE it. It's right back to that famous Nora quote, you can't fix a blank page. You can't see an opportunity you missed until you actually MISS it. You can't tell if you need to cut something to keep the pacing going until you've written it and know it's slowing things down. In other words, unless you're very fortunate and the book comes out of you easily (which is a beautiful and rare thing), you need to screw up before you can fix it.

It's probably easier to explain if I give a bit of an example. My critique partner, by the way, is brilliant in spotting this kind of thing. At the beginning of my chapter eleven, she pointed out that the first page was mostly unnecessary and I could start the scene midway down page 2. I haven't done it yet, I'm thinking about how to take the things I wanted to point out and filter them in through the scene in another way. Instead of that page + of information dumped at the reader, I can feed those points through in individual beats later, without sacrificing pace. It doesn't always have to be a whole scene; sometimes it's just a page or two that needs to go, so you can get to the purpose of the scene faster. What does the scene need to accomplish, and what way can you do that to get the most impact?

Alternatively, she has sent back my last 2 chapters and while I am going to edit out the story details, her comments go something like this: "You missed an opportunity for great narrative action at the start of the chapter and thus the entire chapter feels flat and without tension... You need a short scene between Ella and her editor... Rather than the scene of introspection that you have now. It makes her be proactive and adds to the question... You can then cut to...

It is about getting that tension sky high with showing and narrative rather than the exposition that you used. It is simply tweaks but it will add considerably to the layers. You can do this and it will increase the PTQ no end."

So while I overdid it in one spot, I underdid it in another - and didn't show what I should have. And I know she's right. This is the second-last chapter. This is the part where we need the stakes sky-high, and be at the pinnacle of the growth arc. We need to see Ella's actions to feel her triumph and to also share in the sacrifice she's made - and feel good about it. It engages the reader far more.

Will I make this mistake again? Of course. It is why you give yourself permission to write crap. It is what first drafts are for - so you can look at them, put what you've done in perspective, decide what needs to be fixed. There is no magic formula. It's a great deal of trial and error, and what works for one set of characters and story may not work at all for another. So go ahead, get your hands dirty, and then cultivate your story until it blossoms.

Donna's current release is HIRED: THE ITALIAN'S BRIDE, finishing up its North American run and enjoying a July release in Australia and New Zealand.

Today is Canada Day and she's officially on holidays - sharing the day with friends, food and fireworks. And gardening. Lots and lots of gardening....

Temptation Tuesday - Summer Libations

Join the editors today as they talk about their favourite summertime drinks!

Summertime. Hot days, gorgeous evenings, by the beach or on the deck or in the garden. What would it be without a glass in hand?

Donna: I love lemonade. We don't usually squeeze our own, but we do buy lemon juice at Costco as in addition to lemonade I use it often for marinades (barbequeing - a whole other post!). The husband is master of lemonade. He knows just the right proportions for a balance of sweet and tart. Lemonade is SO refreshing. And we have been known to sneak a little vodka or gin in if the neighbours happen to stop by for a drinkie... rim the glass with sugar and it's lovely.

My other summer favourite is one we don't have often, but it's summer in a glass. And that is pina coladas. Last year gadget man (aka the husband) bought a margarita maker. Really, it's a fancy blender. Anyway we did pina coladas one afternoon when our friends were over for a swim. Gorgeous, smooth, coconutty flavour. It reminds me of the sun tan lotion we used to use before we worried about SPF.

Michelle: It stands to reason that Donna would get there first with fresh lemonade. I love lemonade. It is why we have a lemon tree in the sun room. Lemonade with fresh mint (chop 3 lemons. Put in a bowl with a handful of mint leaves. Pour 1 pt (500 ml) of boiling water over. Leave to infuse for a couple of hours. Strain into a jug, add sugar to taste and pour over ice)

I also enjoy Blackcurrant cordial ( 1lb/450g black currants stalked, 2pt/1.25 litres water, 1lb/450g sugar -- place fruit and water in pan,bring to boil, boil for about 5 min, add sugar, stir until dissolved, again boil for about 5 min, strain into sterilised bottle) mixed with sparkling lemonade/7 up. Else you can use ribena. It is also good served hot. My children used to love orange squash. I prefer the homemade variety -- take 3 oranges and1 lemon. Wash and dry the fruit. Squeeze the juice and reserve. Chop the fruit skins fine, Then put the chopped fruit skins and pulp(having first discarded the pips) into a pan, add 2pints/1.25 litres of water and boil for 5 minutes. Strain the liquid into a jug and stir in 1lb/450 g sugar. Once it is cool add the reserved juice and 1 0z citric acid (you can obtain citric acid from a chemist). Bottle. Serve either diluted with water or sparkling lemonade.

For an alcoholic drink, what would the English summer be without Pimms? Pimms was first invented in London by James Pimm in 1823 and originally it was sold to aid digestion. Pimms No 1 cup is a gin based drink. There were other cups with different bases but Pimms No 1 is the most common.

One part Pimms No 1 to three parts sparkling lemonade in a large jug. Add various fruits such as oranges and lemons, strawberries or even diced cucumber. Stir. Serve over ice and float a borage flower on top to give a really summer look.

It is the perfect accompaniment for playing croquet or watching cricket. It is also traditionally served at polo matches.

Jenna :: It's fun to see the differences an ocean can make...I've never had orange squash (as a drink, I thought it was a veggie), black currant anything, or Pimms.

We're beer people in the summer. The hubster is even talking about putting a keg-or-ator in the garage at the new house. There is something refreshing and relaxing about a light summer lager while stretching out on a chaise on the deck while the kids work out the slip-and-slide on the lawn...

When we want to step it up, we go for margaritas of all flavors. I like really lime-y versions, while my cousin makes a killer blackberry margarita. And when strawberries are in season we'll freeze them, toss them in a blender with some tequila and whirl until you can't wait for a taste. I wonder if the healthy fruit makes up for the alcohol...

With the kids, water is key. They'd Kool-Aid all day long, so I try and keep water interesting by having pitchers in the fridge that have cucumber, mint, or orange slices floating. It gives a hint of flavor and seems to keep the kids from balking too much.

***WHATCHA DRINKIN' THIS SUMMER?***

Male on Monday - Michael Weatherly

Fiona Harper investigates the hit TV show NCIS and lingers a little on one of the stars for this week’s Male on Monday.



I’m an addict. There. I’ve said it. I just can’t live without watching NCIS. The award-winning TV show about the American naval crime investigation service was originally a spin-off from naval legal show JAG and, although I missed the first few seasons when it aired in the UK, it has quickly become one of my favourite shows.

I love NCIS for the characters: strong and silent Gibbs (who could merit a Male on Monday post of his own), gothic Abby, quirky Mossad assassin Ziva and computer geek McGee, but the eye-candy on this show is definitely Michael Weatherly, who plays agent Tony DiNozzo.

Now, I’m not normally one to see the attraction of bad boys, but Special Agent DiNozzo is just delicious. He’s naughty but loyal to this team, immature but charming, and the series where he went undercover and fell in love (for the first time) with the daughter of the arms dealer he was trying to get close to was full of wonderful heart-breaking moments that really added depth and vulnerability to the character.

If you believe reports on the web, the actor Michael Weatherly’s bio reads a bit like a novel. His father is a billionaire who made his money importing Swiss Army knives, but Michael's family weren’t pleased with his decision to drop his university studies and pursue music and acting and word has it that his inheritance was cut off.

His big career break was playing as Logan in the popular TV show Dark Angel. He actually dated and became engaged to his co-star Jessica Alba, but their relationship ended in 2003. Thankfully, the show’s producer cast Michael as Special Agent Anthony DiNozzo and the rest, as they say, is history – or at least, very good television. So, if you like your heroes with a few flaws and a cheeky charmer personality, check out the show. You won’t be disappointed.

I'll just leave you with a little bit of true Tony DiNozzo magic:

Watch out for Fiona's September release, Invitation To The Boss's Ball from Harlequin Romance.

In this modern-day Cinderella story, plain Alice's world is turned upside down when she's askes to organise tycoon Cameron Hunter's charity ball...