During the course of researching my historical novel The Depth of Beauty, I came across scads of fascinating facts that I've been sharing over time. Here are a few more relating to Chinatown: M is for Mornay Sauce To illustrate the shallow world in which Will Firestone lives, I begin the novel with his wealthy mother’s complaints about her chef’s rendition of a mornay sauce, which is really just a basic cheese sauce. It’s variation of a bechamel, or white sauce, one of the standard ... VIEW POST
The Many Challenges of Writing The Lair
My latest contemporary romantic suspense novel, The Lair, now available for pre-order, stands on its own, which means you don’t have to have read my other books to immerse yourself in the story. However, the main characters and part of the plot are connected to the other volumes in my far-reaching “Sinner’s Grove” series. Writing a multi-faceted, even genre-crossing story whose books are independent yet interwoven, poses a whole host of challenges, but for The Lair, that was only the ... VIEW POST
For Chrissakes Don’t Say That!
One of the tricky aspects of writing about a certain historical period is the use of language in dialogue. You want your characters to sound natural to the modern ear, but not out of place within the context of the era they’re living in. The word choices you make are important, because the wrong ones can really jar the reader. In my new historical romance, The Art of Love, for example, most of the action takes place between 1896 and 1903. Men who lived in that era might have used the expression ... VIEW POST
