When Rick and I were offered the opportunity to take a dream trip through the Panama Canal, we jumped at it. Now, on board the Island Princess ship sailing south from Los Angeles, we’ve settled into our room, unpacked our bags and stowed them under the bed, and are enjoying the warm, salt sea air. …
I love movies. Rick and I have quite a collection. While it may shock some, we enjoy old horror movies like “The Blob” (Steve McQueen version), “War of the Worlds” (Gene Barry version), “The Creature from the Black Lagoon”, “The Day the Earth Stood Still” (Michael Renny). I added “Eight-Legged Freaks” a few years ago, …
Would I change the ending? A number of readers want to know why I stripped Angel at the end of the story. There is a simple answer to this and a more complex one. The simple answer is I wanted Angel to be like Eve before she offered the fruit to Adam, naked and right …
My husband became a Michael Hosea. In a sense, so did I. Neither of us were Christians when we married, and we struggled. We had very high highs and very low lows. Think of a roller coaster ride and you get some idea. We were on the edge of divorce when I found a church …
When I first started writing Redeeming Love, I thought about beginning the book when Angel was already a prostitute living in a brothel in Pair-a-Dice. I realized quickly that readers would not empathize with Angel unless they knew her back story and how she came to be so blind and stubbornly resistant to the love …
When I’m asked what responses I’ve received from readers, I am always cautious in answering. For one thing, many of the letters I’ve received are extremely personal and come from wells of pain and suffering. I’ve had letters from men and women who have experienced all manner of abuse. Some events happened during childhood, others …
I set Redeeming Love in the California Gold Rush period because all of my previous historical romances had been set in California between the years of 1840 to 1880. As a native Californian, I could visit the areas in which I set my novels. I had easy access to historical documents. I also wanted to …
One question that comes up frequently is how I feel about exposing so much of my personal life and my past sins, through my writing. Although I wasn’t a prostitute, I gave myself away and experienced the heartache and emptiness of misplaced love. I also experienced the horrendous consequences, along with the shame and guilt …
The original (general market) manuscript of Redeeming Love was offered to the editor with whom I had been working for a number of years. She turned it down because it was a recognizable allegory about Jesus. So the manuscript made the rounds and ended up in the hands of a Christian who was an editor …
Some of you may know that I started writing in the general market in the early days of the historical romance boom (mid 70-80s). My first book was a combination of the genres I enjoyed reading: western-gothic-historical romance. I became hooked on writing. It seemed to be the one area of my life where I …