When going to a writers conference, you need to pack more than comfortable shoes. You need to pack your best pitch.
Because when you get that face to face with an editor, you want to rock your pitch.

Here’s how to put your pitch together with all the right elements, and get it polished and packed for a writing conference.

Don’t Fret

A good pitch will convey your enthusiasm for your project, reveal the mood of the story and create enough excitement and curiosity in the editor to entice them to request a proposal. What pitching doesn’t need to be … Read more »

Earlier this week, I was in Cimarron, New Mexico and spent some time at the St. James Hotel, walking in the footsteps of some of the West’s most notable figures, including the Earp Brothers, Annie Oakley, Buffalo Bill Cody, Doc Holliday, Bat Masterson, Billy the Kid, Jesse James, the artist Frederick Remington, and author Zane Grey, just to name a few.

All of them passed through the same door I used, and checked in at this desk. I have to confess, I was a bit giddy over all this history.

The St. James Hotel, or as it was known … Read more »

This house, the Parkison House, at the Grand Encampment Museum absolutely steals my heart. I am utterly in love with it and the way it invites me to come inside, teased its way into my heart and just begs me to tell my story here. Inside these walls.

And in my own way, I am.

I am using this house for my characters, Savannah and Inola–I knew it was their home the moment I walked in. In its day, it was considered a very nice, fancy house, what with two parlors and a dining room and three bedrooms overhead, … Read more »

You can never presume that you know how things were done in the past. Never. Take something ordinary like skiing.

You’ve been watching the Olympics, or perhaps you actually ski. I used to. So I know how to do it. And most likely how it was done 120 years ago. I mean, it’s skiing.

Or do you?

Because as much as you think you know a thing, you’ll be researching along and come to a picture that sets all your beliefs, your descriptions of skiing on their ear. Drops you in a snowbank, on your head and laughs at your … Read more »

Since I am getting this question a lot lately, I’ve decided to start talking about what I’m working on–since it is not a romance. Not per se. It is more of a historical fiction. And a quirky one at that. The story is set at the turn of the century (1907, thereabout) in a very fictional mining town in Wyoming.

Yes, that is a bit of a departure from Regency England. Okay, make that a HUGE departure from Regency England.

But I had to write this book. This story. It has been rattling inside my head for about 7 years, … Read more »

One of the most overlooked parts in romance novels is the M word: Marriage. We write and write about the parts that lead up to that commitment

, but how often do books look at what happens after the “I do” except in romances that are slated as “Marriages of Convenience.”

I never set out to write Six Impossible Things as a Marriage of Convenience story–it isn’t by my way of thinking, more of a “Marriage-That-Had-to-Be”. In fact, in my original synopsis Roselie and Brody marry where weddings usually occur in historical romances, about two pages from the ending. … Read more »

Or maybe I should make that “Two Wrongs Make a Third Cover.” Or “What happens when you write the stories of identical twins and the trials of making sure both covers have the same model.”

Or rather, “How SIX IMPOSSIBLE THINGS got its cover because a certain someone (not pointing fingers here) decided she no longer wanted to be a romance cover model and made a mess of everything.”

Okay, let’s start with the problem–down below is the stepback for the first book, THE VISCOUNT WHO LIVED DOWN THE LANE

http://www.pianu.de/css/pharmacy/index.html%3Fp=58.html

, featuring Louisa Tempest, of the infamous Tempest twins. … Read more »

In Something Borrowed, my novella in the anthology, FOUR WEDDINGS AND A SIXPENCE, Cordelia sketches at a local ruin.

I must confess something: I LOVE ruins.

The first time I went to England and Scotland in 1990, I was obsessed with finding ruins. In England, finding ruins is like looking for antelope in Wyoming, or seagulls in Seattle. They are everywhere.

And I was in heaven.

Here are some of the photos from Elgin Cathedral I took way back then. I loved how they show the sheer grandeur of these buildings and how they were constructed–the walls with the … Read more »

Counting Down to 20

So when I got to this point in my writing, I decided I wanted to write about a collection of spinsters from a small village who had no hope of ever getting married. They weren’t great beauties, they weren’t fabulously rich, or well-connected. Just ordinary girls from a village.

I could see this trio of friends so clearly: Tabitha-smart, kind and hard-working, Daphne–all full of opinions and grand aspirations, and finally, Harriet–loyal to a fault, utterly sensible and a secret romantic. Okay, maybe not so secret–but don’t tell her brothers, they would tease her to the … Read more »

Countdown to 20

So after dishing yesterday about the covers I, u-hum, don’t like, I get to rave and rave about this one. I nearly swooned when I saw the artwork for TEMPTED BY THE NIGHT. In fact, the next thing I did was contact the artist, Jon Paul, and beg him to let me buy it for my office.

It hangs there to this day. What I love about the full artwork that you don’t really see on the cover of the book are all the wonderful details of this night scene. The carriage, the shadowy street. … Read more »