Linda Howard is an award-winning author whose
New York Times bestsellers include
Open Season, All the Queen¹s Men, Mr. Perfect, Kill and Tell, and
Son of the Morning. She lives in Alabama with her husband and two golden retrievers.
Geralyn Dawson is the critically acclaimed author of more than a dozen novels, including
My Big Old Texas Heartache and
My Long Tall Texas Heartthrob (both available from Pocket Star Books). A three-time RITA finalist, Geralyn has won numerous awards, including the National Readers' Choice Award and a Career Achievement Award from
Romantic Times. She is an active volunteer for the Making Memories Foundation and lives in Forth Worth, Texas, with her family. Visit her website at www.GeralynDawson.com and watch for the first novel in her Bad Luck Brides series,
Her Bodyguard.Jillian Hunter has received several awards in the Romance Community, including Romantic Times Career Achievement Award. She lives in Southern California with her husband and three daughters.
Like most writers, I was a reader first, but I've also enjoyed writing and story-telling since I was a child. After working many years in public relations (which was a great background for fiction), I decided to stop talking about that book I was always going to write and actually do it. In 1990, when I was on maternity leave, I wrote my first book,
Steal the Stars (now out of print.)
This was not as felicitous as it sounds. I was as fried as every other new mother, but at least while I was staying up all night, I was also writing. I didn't know how my book was going to end, I wandered around through the viewpoints of every single character, and my opening was so full of setting and backstory that I'm surprised any editor could stay awake to read it. Fortunately, one did, and with her help and understanding, I trimmed my manuscript by a third, tightened the plot, and pruned the extra characters, and duh-duh, on Valentine's Day, 1992 my first book was published and my writing career born.
Born, yes, but not totally prospering. I dutifully went back to my day job, writing at night, for another four years before I was earning enough to be able to write full time. I sold my first Fairbourne Family book, The Captain's Bride, to Pocket Books in 1996, and I've been happily writing for them ever since. My twentieth book, Star Bright, will be published by Sonnet Books in November, 2000, and I still can't believe I've come so far in eight years!
One of the things that has set my books apart from most of the other historical romances today has been the setting: colonial America. I'm not sure why this isn't a more popular setting among writers -- it's certainly one brimming with romantic possibilities! -- but it's a time and place I already knew something about, and an era that I especially enjoy. I went to college in Rhode Island, a place where the colonial past is still very much a part of modern life, and I'm sure that influenced me, too. I was especially fascinated by how fluid society was in New England at the time, with fabulous family fortunes made (and lost) in record time. It's a time of bold, daring, larger-than-life men and women, and that makes it a wonderful source for a writer.
With Starlight and Star Bright, I'm venturing back across the ocean to Georgian England, seeing the old country" through my colonial characters' eyes. This has been a new challenge for me, and a great deal of fun as well. This is, after all, the time and place that virtually invented the rake and the rogue! Visiting the London of Hogarth and Tom Jones, dancing at the pleasure gardens on the Thames and being presented at King George's court, wearing powder and paint and silk gowns and finding love with the most dashing of swashbuckling heroes -- what better vicarious fun could an author -- and, I hope, readers! -- possibly wish for?
And I do love research, and finding the exact little-known fact to bring a scene or event to life is one of the real joys of writing for me. As much as possible, I depend on original sources -- books written at the time, diaries, log-books, journals -- rather than later historical interpretations.
One of the advantages of writing books all set more or less in the same time and place means that, by now, I have a pretty good sense of the details of everyday colonial life. For example, I don't have to stop writing to look up what kind of underwear the heroine should have under her gown; I already know she's got a shift, stays, maybe a quilted petticoat or two, but nary a pair of knickers or bloomers no matter how cold the winter!
I also volunteer at a local living history museum, an eighteenth-century working farm and farmhouse. Dressed in period clothing, hauling water from a well and cooking over an open hearth has helped with the sorts of things books don't convey. Yes, the water in the wash-bowl does freeze in your bedchamber in January, and there's nothing like hefting an oak bucket full of water to build up those colonial biceps.
As you can doubtless tell, I love to write, and each morning I wake grateful for having such a wonderful way to spend my day (and night), and such wonderful readers to share my story-telling adventures with me and my characters. History and happy endings -- it doesn't get any better than this!
Please visit my website, www.mirandajarrett.com, or write me:
email: MJarrett21@aol.com
snail: PO Box 1102, Paoli, PA 19301-0792
Mariah Stewart is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of numerous novels and several novellas. A RITA finalist for romantic suspense, she is the recipient of the Award of Excellence for contemporary romance, several RIO (Reviewers International Organization) Awards honoring excellence in women's fiction, and a Reviewers' Choice Award from Romantic Times magazine. A three-time recipient of the Golden Leaf Award and a Lifetime Achievement Award winner from the New Jersey Romance Writers, she has been inducted into their Hall of Fame. A native of Hightstown, New Jersey, she lives with her husband, two daughters, and two rambunctious golden retrievers amid the rolling hills of Chester County, Pennsylvania. She is a member of the Washington Romance Writers, the International Thriller Writers, the New Jersey Romance Writers, and the Romance Writers of America. Visit her website at www.mariahstewart.com.
From: "Blue Moon" Chapter One
One full moon a month was bad enough, Sheriff Jackson Brody thought sourly; two should be outlawed. Nature's rule of survival of the fittest had been all but negated by humans, with advances in modem medicine and the generally held view that all life was worth saving, with the result that there were a lot of very weird, and/or stupid people out there, and they all seemed to surface during a full moon.
He was not in a good mood after working a car accident on a county road. As sheriff, his duties were not supposed to include working wrecks, but damned if every full moon he didn't find himself doing exactly that. The county was small and poor, mostly rural, and couldn't afford the number of deputies he needed, so he was always juggling schedules anyway. Add the madness of a full moon to an understaffed department, and the problems multiplied.
The accident he had just worked made him so furious he had been stretching the limits of his willpower not to cuss at the participants. He couldn't call them victims, unless it was of their own stupidity. The only victim was the poor little boy who had been in the passenger seat of the car.
It all started when the driver of the first vehicle, a pickup truck, woke up and realized he had missed his turn by about a quarter of a mile. Instead of going on and finding a place to turn around, the idiot began backing up, going the wrong way down a narrow two-lane blacktop, around a blind curve. He was an accident waiting to happen, and he hadn't had to wait long. A woman came speeding around the curve, doing over sixty miles an hour on a road with a posted speed limit of thirty-five, and plowed into the rear of the pickup. She wasn't wearing a seatbelt. Neither was the four-year-old sitting in the front seat. For that matter, neither was the driver of the pickup. It was nothing less than a miracle that all three had survived, though the little boy was severely injured and Jackson had seen enough accident victims to know his chances were no better than fifty-fifty, at best. The car had had airbags, at least, which had kept the two in the car from going through the windshield.
He had given the woman citations for reckless driving, not wearing a seatbelt, and not properly securing her child, and she began screaming at him. Had he ever tried to make a four-year-old sit down and wear a seatbelt? The blankety-blank things chafed her blankety-blank neck, and the state had no business telling people what they could do on their private property, which her car was, and the car had airbags anyway so there was no need for seatbelts, blah blah blah. There she was, with bulging eyes and unkempt hair, a living testament to the destructive power of recessive genes, throwing a hissy fit about getting traffic tickets while her screaming child was being carried away in an ambulance. Privately, Jackson thought people like her had no business having children in their care, but he made a heroic effort and kept the observation to himself.
Then the driver of the pickup, he of the bulging beer belly and breath that would fell a moose at fifty paces, added his opinion that he thought her driver's license should be taken away because this was all her fault for rear-ending him. When Jackson then gave him citations for reckless driving and driving in the wrong lane, he was enraged. This accident wasn't his fault, he bellowed, and damned if he was going to get stuck with higher insurance premiums because a stupid hick sheriff didn't know an accident was always the fault of the one doing the rear-ending. Any fool could look at where his truck was hit and tell who was at fault here.
Jackson didn't bother explaining the difference between the truck's hood being pointed in the right direction while the truck itself was going in reverse. He just wrote the tickets and in the accident report stated that both drivers were at fault, and seriously pondered whether or not he should lock these two up for the safety of the universe. Terminal stupidity wasn't on the books as a chargeable offense, but it should be, in his opinion.
But he restrained himself, and oversaw the transportation of both furious drivers to the local hospital to be checked out, and the removal of the damaged vehicles. When he finally crawled back into his jeep Cherokee it was pushing four o'clock, long past lunch time. He was tired, hungry, and both angry and discouraged.
Generally he loved his work. It was a job where he could make a difference in people's lives, in society. Granted, it was usually scut work; he dealt with the worst of society, while having to maneuver on tippy-toes through a tangle of laws and regulations. But when everything worked and a drug dealer got sent away for a few years, or a murderer was put away forever, or a burglary gang was rounded up and an old lady on Social Security got her 19-inch television back, that made it all worthwhile.
He was a good sheriff, though he hated the political side of it, hated having to campaign for office. He was just thirty-five, young for the office, but the county was so poor it couldn't afford someone who was both good and with a lot of experience, because those people went where the pay was better. The citizens had taken a chance with him two years ago and he'd been doing his best at a job he loved. Not many people had that chance.
During full moons, however, he doubted his own sanity. He had to be a fool or an idiot, or both, to want a job that put him on the front lines during the periods of rampant weirdness. Cops and emergency room personnel could all testify to the craziness that went on during a full moon.
A nurse at the local hospital, after reading a report that the tales about full moons were just myths, that the accident rate didn't really go up, kept a record for a year. Not only did the number of accidents go up, but that was when they got the really strange ones, like the guy who had his buddy nail his hands together so his wife wouldn't ask him to help with the housework on his day off. It was obvious to them: a man couldn't very well work with his hands nailed together, now could he? The scariest thing about it was that both of them had been sober.
So one full moon a month was all Jackson felt any human should be called upon to endure. A blue moon, the second full moon in a single month, fell under the heading of cruel and unusual punishment.
And because it was a blue moon, he wasn't surprised, when he radioed in that he was finished with the accident and heading for a bite to eat, that the dispatcher said, "You might want to hold off on the food, and check in on a secure line."
Jackson stifled a groan. A couple of clues told him he really didn't want to know what this one was. For one thing, though the radio traffic was usually businesslike, for the benefit of the good citizens who listened in on their scanners, the dispatcher had fallen into a more personal tone. And they didn't bother to check in on a secure line unless there was something going on they didn't want the listeners to know about, which meant it was either something sensitive like one of the town fathers acting up, or something personal. He hoped the issue was sensitive, because he sure as hell didn't feel like dealing with anything personal, like his mother running amuck at her regular Wednesday bingo game.
He picked up his digital cell phone and checked whether or not he had service in this part of the county; he did, though it wasn't the strongest signal. He flipped the cover open and dialed the dispatcher. "This is Brody. What's up?"
Jo Vaughn had been the dispatcher for ten years, and he couldn't think of anyone he would rather have on the job. Not only did she know just about every inhabitant of the small south Alabama county, something that had been a tremendous aid to him, but she also had an eerily accurate instinct for what was urgent and what wasn't. Sometimes the citizens involved might not agree, but Jackson always did.
"I've got a bad feeling," she announced. "Shirley Waters saw Thaniel Vargas hauling his flat-bottom down Old Boggy Road. There's nothing out that way except the Jones's place, and you know how Thaniel is."
Jackson took a moment to reflect. This was one of those times when growing up in west Texas instead of south Alabama was a definite handicap. He knew where Old Boggy Road was, but only because he had spent days looking at county maps and memorizing the roads. He had never personally been on Old Boggy, though. And he knew who Thaniel Vargas was; a slightly thick-headed troublemaker, the type found in every community. Thaniel was hot-tempered, a bit of a bully, and he liked his beer a little too much. He'd been in some trouble with the law, but nothing serious enough to rate more than a few fines and warnings.
Other than that, though, Jackson drew a blank. "Refresh me."
"Well, you know how superstitious he is."
His eyebrows lifted. He hadn't expected that. "No, I didn't know," he said drily. "What does that have to do with him taking his boat down Old Boggy Road, and who are the Joneses?"
"Jones," Jo corrected. "There's just one now, since old man Jones died four -- no, let's see, it was right after Beatrice Marbut's husband died in his girlfriend's trailer, so that would make it five years ago -- "
Jackson closed his eyes and refrained from asking what difference it made how lone ago old man Jones died. Hurrying a Southerner through a conversation was like trying to push a rope, though sometimes he couldn't stop himself from trying.
" -- and Delilah's been out there alone ever since."
He took a wild stab at getting to the point of Jo's anxiety. "And Thaniel Vargas dislikes Mrs. Jones?"
"Miss. She's never been married."
The wild stab hadn't worked. "Then old man Jones was -- "
"Her father."
"Okay." He tried again. "Why does Thaniel dislike Miss Jones?"
"Oh, I wouldn't say he dislikes her. It's more like he's scared to death of her."
He took a deep breath. "Because...?"
"Because of the witch thing...
