Although I write romantic suspense, I'm not happy with the moniker the industry gave to the genre. According to the publishing industry, romantic suspense includes all romance-themed mystery sub-genres, from cozy to thriller. There's the added hero/heroine story arc, with its requisite Happily Ever After. However, by tacking that 'suspense' term onto the genre, readers might be expecting an actual suspense, not a mystery, and be disappointed. Mystery isn't the same as suspense. I happen to think I write romantic mysteries, or, as I prefer to call them, "Mysteries with Relationships." According to the dictionary, suspense is a state of uncertainty, enjoyable tension, or anxiety. A mystery is something you cannot explain, or don't know anything about. It's easy to see how the two overlap. Often the major difference in writing a mystery as opposed to a suspense will boil down to Point of View. If there's a villain's POV, then the reade...

Every now and then, there's a scene that absolutely refuses to get from opening to closing in a straightforward fashion. When I was working on a scene for Danger in Deer Ridge , I had my starting plot points, there were only two characters in the scene (and one was asleep for most of it), and I had a reasonable idea of where it should end. As I worked on it, however, it was more like a connect-the-dots picture, but without any numbers telling you where the next dot should be. This scene happened to be one of my few ventures into the villain's POV. It's only the second time he's been on the page, so I wanted to show what kind of a man he was in a little more depth, as well as reveal some points that would heighten the tension. And, as I was writing, it turned out he was a lot nastier than I'd first thought. My plot points for this single-scene chapter: Bad guy is having an affair. He's thinking about breaking it off. He's looking for something he th...