When I wrote Mind Games , the first book in my Diana Racine Psychic Suspense series, I had no idea it would become a series. The idea of a villain with the same psychic abilities as my heroine intrigued me, but in my mind, it was a standalone novel. The villain, a man who plays psychic “mind games” with Diana, is eager to prove that he is the superior psychic. He almost wins. People die, and Diana plays a deadly game to be the bait to catch him. The book takes place in New Orleans, which is the setting for all four books. Diana joins forces with Ernie Lucier, a mixed-race police lieutenant, who at first thinks she’s a charlatan (she is, in a way), and who finally sees her psychic ability is real. He becomes her partner, friend, and lover in subsequent books. To make matters more complicated, Diana’s father is a good-old-boy southern racist. Interestingly, one reviewer said that plot point was ridiculous because racism was all but dead. Hmm. Wonder what she’d think if she read it today....

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In the early 2000s when I wrote Mind Games , the first book in the Diana Racine Psychic Suspense series, I had no idea it would become a series. I was never interested in writing a series. Getting locked into the same characters for years didn’t appeal to me. There were too many stories to tell, and I wanted the freedom to write them. Ultimately, I did both. Many writers claim they’ve written stories since they were kids. Not me. I drew pictures. I knew I wanted to go to art school at a young age, and that’s what I did. Writing books never entered my mind. Fast forward to the year 2000. I’d been an illustrator for years, ran an import business, and owned a store. Maybe I was bored, ready for my fourth career, so when I read a mediocre book, I thought I could do better. (Hubris, anyone?) Little did I know. I wrote what I thought was a good story, but I knew it needed technical work. I found an editor online who had ghostwritten forty-two books, many about famous people. I sent ...

This month’s theme is flora in novels. I know many writers who build their stories around gardens and flowers, but I’m not one of them. One of the most famous was Nero Wolfe, created by Rex Stout. Wolfe rarely left his New York west side townhouse for anything that would keep him from tending to his orchids. Flowers have also been popular in titles: The Black Dahlia, White Oleander, and The Name of the Rose to name a few. I wracked my brain to recall if I had used any type of flora in my books, and I found a couple: poisons, of course. In my latest novel, The Scent of Murder (spoiler alert if anyone intends to read the fourth book in the Diana Racine Psychic Suspense series—blatant self-promotion here, pardon), I use both the scent of flowers in perfume, a deadly flower’s poison, and a highly spiced fruit from a pepper plant, capsaicin. My heroine, Diana Racine, tracks down the scent of a perfume at a New Orleans perfumery, where the scent had been concocted specifically ...