Inspirations for Writing

As you all are reading this, I'm at a week-long work meeting/conference for the day job.  It's a busy week full of trainings (I'm giving 3) and getting together with workers from all over the state and fun.  The best part of the week is a banquet where we honor exceptional workers and adoptive families.  One of the families being honored this year is a family I have had the privilege of working with for several years.  They have adopted three boys and are in the process of adopting the younger brother of one of their sons.

Anyway, the week serves as a great inspiration for the day job, reminding me of why I do what I do.  Which got me thinking about what inspires me in my writing job.

My first inspirations is my parents, who just celebrated their 49th anniversary on July 4.  They are still very much in love and it shows!  Watching them, I know that happily ever after does indeed exist.  I will never forget when I was in high school and my best friend was spending the weekend.  We had gone upstairs to gossip and be silly, but Prim forgot something and ran back downstairs.  She came running back up the stairs and told me that we needed to turn a hose on my parents.  At the time, I was mortified!  Now I think it's very funny.  Kind of. 

My father is a 25 year AF veteran so I grew up watching the brave men (it was mostly men at that time) who served our country so selfishly.  That was the beginning of inspiration #2.  My love of men in uniform began early!  Now when I venture onto a base the men aren't too old for me, but mostly too young (although some are within range of my inner cougar!).  My son is in the AF and is about to be promoted to 1st LT.  But I still admire and am inspired by what the uniform stands for.

And then there's the wealth of fine looking eye candy available for inspiration #3.  My current favorites include Hugh Jackman and Joe Manganiello.  Alexander Skarsgard and Henry Cavill aren't too bad either!  I frequently search for images, all in the name of research, of course!  A good browsing session really gets my muse going!  She's shallow that way.

Who's your favorite leading man?

P.S. Hopefully, next month I'll have a new cover or three from the Class of '93 Trilogy to share with you.  And an excerpt or 2.  I'm very excited that the Class of '93 Trilogy will be available for Kindle!

Embattled Minds is LIVE!

I've had the Lost and Found series in my mind for several years now, but I've only recently started to write and release the books. I felt I was at a point in my career when I could do the stories justice. My heroes are not traditional, in that, they are all disabled. And they stay so through the end on the story.
In the prequel of the series, The Embattled Road (free at all outlets), you meet the three main heroes, catastrophically injured during the war and struggling to find a place in the world with their new reality. Book 1 of the series is Embattled Hearts. The hero in that book is wheelchair bound and angry at the world, but still struggles to find love.
I just released Embattled Minds, Book 2 of the series. This novella deals heavily with PTSD and Traumatic Brain Injury. Here's the blurb:

Zeke Foster has little to no experience with women over the past couple of years, after being injured in Afghanistan. Brutally scarred, he has no expectation that he’ll ever find a woman capable of accepting him the way he is. But he can’t help but be enamored of Ember, the waitress of a local watering hole.
Ember Norton’s life has turned into one devastating catastrophe after another. When the scarred soldier with the kind eyes brings some security to her life, she’s afraid to trust her luck. She’s been self-sufficient for a long time. But his wounded soul calls to her and she finds herself falling for him. 
In spite of the secrets he continues to keep.



Amazon~ Barnes and Noble~ Smashwords~ ARe



I enjoy writing all of my characters, but this one really tugged at my heart, because I know how our returning veterans suffer with these issues. And because of that, a portion of the proceeds from this book will go to a scholarship for a medical professional to learn to treat PTSD. 
Be kind to a veteran and happy reading!
J.M. 

J.M. at Facebook~ Twitter

Putting in the Research

I judged a contest entry not too long ago. The entry was well written, the hero and heroine engaging, the premise interesting and fresh, and something I’d never seen before. For the first half of the entry this story was great. In fact, it was one of the cooler contest entries I’d ever judged and I’ve judged quite a few. And then the author started filtering in her hero’s back story and my enjoyment came to a screeching halt because she made this guy a retired SEAL.

Now I don’t claim to be the queen of research, but I do try. I’m not a SEAL, nor have I ever been a SEAL. I’m not in the SEAL community. I don’t have SEAL or ex-SEAL friends, or relatives who I can question exhaustively. But I still try to get the details right. (well unless they don’t work for the manuscript and then I sort of twist them!) I do a boatload of research online, I read all the books out there written by men who used to do the job my heroes are doing, I’ve been lurking on a closed SEAL forum full of the real deal for several years. And I found a former Navy EOD diver who has worked with all of the West Coast SEAL teams to answer my questions if I can’t find the answer online.

So yeah, I’ve done as much research as I possibly can without having access to an actual SEAL myself.

But this author, she/he did absolutely no research. And I mean not even the basics. She didn’t even spell SEAL correctly. Her hero’s back story timeline was impossible because she didn’t even know the standard length of enlistment. Everything she pinned on the hero in that entry was wrong. 

Annoyingly wrong, because all it would have taken to fix the inaccuracies was a quick Google on Navy SEALs and the very FIRST URL that would have popped up would have alerted her to her inaccuracies.  To compound what she did with her hero, she introduced a gaggle of secondary heroes who were also decorated ex-Navy SEALs, and her lack of research carried over into them. And then it carried over into her details on Law Enforcement, since all of these characters had joined the same police station and gotten into the same anti-terrorist unit. Now I’m not that well versed in Law Enforcement, but just from reading the posts that come through the crime scene loop, I knew her LE details were as unresearched as her military details. 

By the end of that contest entry I was so damn annoyed I wanted to shake her. Here was an author who had enough pride in her work to master grammar, punctuation, characterization, and story-telling, only to do absolutely no research to ground her story in the technical details of her hero's background and current job? Please! If you aren’t willing to put in the research, then don’t make your heroes Navy SEALs, and for God’s sake, don’t make them active law enforcement.

As an aside here, while I’m on the topic of research.

I just received the developmental edits back for my third Red-Hot SEALs book and my developmental editor asked me to bring in more details about the SEAL team my heroes are on. Things like how many men are on their team, where they usually deploy, what kind of jobs the team is usually given, what kind of expertise each member of the team has. While I know these details, I’m having a huge problem bringing them into the story as my DE requested.

 For one thing, the over-arcing plot of this series takes place outside the teams, and they are so consumed with the current events sucking them down they aren’t thinking about any of the things my DE wants me to bring in. I mean these things are second nature and known to my SEALs, so they aren’t things they are thinking about or discussing. And every single person introduced in this book lives this life, so there isn’t someone new and unfamiliar with team life that I can use to filter the answers to my DE questions in. After exhausting way too many brain cells, I finally came up with a way to incorporate these details, or at least most of them into the story, in a way that won’t feel like author intrusion—but it sure wasn’t an easy thing to do.

The other thing that has been bugging me through the past three books is the jargon SEALs use. I want to use the actual Jargon they use, instead of substituting terms or words they don’t use, but that readers would be familiar with. While it’s true that readers might not know exactly what the term means, most the time they can get a good idea from the context of the sentence. Besides, I can include a glossary in the back.

So what do you think?

If you run across a piece of jargon in the characters thoughts or dialogue and you aren’t sure what it means, does that really stop you from reading? Do you find it annoying? Inquiring minds would like to know.

Guest Author Desiree Holt

Note: If you leave a comment today your name will go into the hat to win a Phoenix Agency t-shirt.

Happy day after the 4^th of July, the day we celebrate this country’s independence. And we should all give thanks to the various military branches whose troops labor every day to keep us free and safe. There is no grater deed to honor.

I try to honor them by using them as heroes in my novels. To me having a military man as the hero in a romance novel seems like a no-brainer.

There's just something about a man in uniform. Whether it's the pest control guy or a Navy officer in his dress blues. (Well, all right, maybe not the pest control guy.) A uniform will getcha' every time.

From mainstream to category, and Air Force to Special forces, the Military romance has come into its own. Written by women who have served in the military, such as Merline Lovelace, or who are just in love with these honorable, adventurous men, like Suzanne Brockmann, the military romance is here to stay.

Sure, the uniform is a big part of the appeal. But we are drawn to the special character of the military hero. Not only is this guy a prime example of the alpha male but also, he is very often a hero of superior intelligence. Besides the obvious appeal of the bold and frequently beautiful men of the military, what makes these heroes truly irresistible is a gentler side that eventually shows through all the brawn and courage. That softer, sensitive side; superior intelligence; and honor gives them that edge to make them true heroes.

When I created The Phoenix Agency I made each of the original four partners former military—air force, Special Forces, SEALs, Force Recon Marines. In the first book, JungleInferno, the hero is the leader of a Delta Force team they rescue from terrorists in the jungles of Peru. He then became the fifth partner.

In each of the subsequent books I continued to honor them by showing their bravery, strength and commitment to doing the right thing, even when it put their own lives in danger. In Feel the Heat, released today and available at all virtual bookstores, former SEAL Troy Arsenault must defend the hero against not one but two villains. Hope you enjoy his story.

Lauren Cahill lives as quietly as she can, protecting her ability as a psychic healer. But danger brings Troy Arsenault into her life—along with scorching sex and intense emotions. Resisting him isn’t even a question, in or out of the bedroom. He protects her from the evil stalking her even as he teaches her what erotic sex is all about. When she’s kidnapped, his world is turned upside down and he employs all the resources of The Phoenix Agency to rescue her. He won’t rest until she’s back safely in his life—and in his bed for the rest of their lives.

Excerpt:

When the doorbell rang, she was gripped by a sudden attack of nerves, her palms sweating for no reason. She wiped them on her jeans and looked through the peephole. What she saw was an identification folder with a photo ID and Troy Arsenault, Phoenix Agency, in black capital letters, along with the Phoenix logo.

“It’s me,” he called through the door. “Maybe you’d better let me in before your friends out here decide to join me.”

Friends? What friends?

She cracked the door a little, and her heart sank when she realized some of the reporters and photographers had wandered back closer to the house, apparently hoping to catch a glimpse of her. Or to get a quick shot at her before the cops chased them away. At least they were staying off of her lawn. A cruiser would be driving by again before too long and they’d get chased away. She swallowed hard against the sudden rise of panic.

I won’t give in to it. Everything’s going to be fine. They’ll go away, and I can have my life back.

Summer slid off the safety chain and opened the door just enough for Troy to slip through. When she closed it, she hooked the chain again and turned the deadbolt. Then she turned to the man in her foyer.

She was prepared to be polite, let him do his thing and send him on his way. But when she looked at the man standing there, her tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth and all her breath was trapped in her lungs. Faith had told her Troy Arsenault was a former SEAL and as far as Summer was concerned, he could have been the poster boy for recruiting. He was as tall as Mark, with a lean runner’s body and deeply tanned skin. His light brown hair was just a tad long, curling at the neck of his shirt, the kind of hair a woman wanted to run her fingers through.

But it was his face that was the most arresting. Ruggedly handsome, like Mark, high cheekbones were slashes on either side of his nose and eyes the color of melted chocolate studied her from beneath unexpectedly dark eyebrows and lashes.

Holy crap!

Her reaction to him was hot and totally unexpected and she made a deliberate effort to tamp it down. For one thing, he was only here to make sure she was safe. For another, her history with men was so unpleasant that she’d decided to swear off them completely. The last thing she needed was to have her ruthlessly controlled hormones decide to take a walk on the wild side. How terribly inconvenient that those hormones chose this particular moment to start galloping through her system again. Maybe she should have insisted harder to Faith that she didn’t need anyone.

“Looks like you’re pretty popular with the folks out there.” His mouth curved in a smile but his tone was dead serious. When she didn’t comment he asked, “You okay?”

Summer gave herself a mental shake. What was going on with her? She had a problem here and this man had kindly agreed to come check it out as a favor to her friends. This was business, not pleasure. She’d hoped for someone at least appealing to look at but Troy Arsenault had danger written all over him.

“Sorry.” She didn’t know if her hands trembled because of the mob outside or the nearness of this man. She shoved them into the pockets of her jeans.  “Thank you for coming over here, although I don’t think it was really necessary.”

“From what I saw outside, this may be a little more serious than you think.” He held out his hand. “Troy Arsenault. But you already know that, right? Nice to meet you, Summer.”

“Same goes. And the idiots outside will probably go away the next time a police car comes by.”

He lifted an eyebrow. “Yeah? Doesn’t look like it to me.”

She suddenly found herself tongue-tied. What happened next? “Um, would you like some coffee? I made a fresh pot.”

“Thanks. That would be nice.”

She led the way into her kitchen and motioned for him to have a seat at the table. Figuring the first rush of phone calls would have subsided by now, she picked up the receiver from the counter and replaced it in the cradle. Her hand hovered over it a moment as she waited to see if it rang. When it didn’t, she breathed a sigh of relief and turned to occupy herself taking down mugs and filling them. As she poured the coffee, she tried to focus on the situation and not the man. Troy Arsenault had an electric magnetism about him that made the air sizzle and scrambled her brain. And that was the last thing she needed right now.

 Desiree Holt

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Celebrating the 4th of July

Yep, tomorrow is the big day, the nation’s birthday and it’s marked by being hotter than hell here in the States (or everywhere it seems but my part of Texas where the weather is drunk and it’s actually nice outside), parades, barbecues, and of course, the ever-popular fireworks.

I still remember being ten years old and visiting my family in England on the 4^th and wondering why they didn’t do all these really nifty things. My uncle blandly informed me that celebrating America’s independence wasn’t necessarily British. I grinned and winked and then called him a sore loser. Much with the laughter that day.

But celebrating the 4^th took on new meaning for me as I grew older and more aware of the world beyond my corner of the swimming pool or the apartments where I grew up. It became about celebrating our history—a very long and bloody history demarcated by numerous wars and tremendous loss in the 237 years since we declared that independence.

It’s marked by a harsh political chasm in our country that actually fought a civil war the last time we were so divided.

It’s marked by changes sometimes so slow as to be glacial and other times so swift, our heads spin.

It’s marked by an enduring spirit that at the end of the day, we are all Americans and despite our differences, we need to be that. We need to be the melting pot the country was envisioned to be.

From the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell to allowing women in combat (not that they haven’t been there, but gender will no longer be a reason why women don’t qualify for those positions) to finally scaling back from two long-term conflicts we’ve been engaged in overseas for over a decade.

Celebrating the 4^th of July isn’t about fireworks or hot dogs and hamburgers and summer blockbuster movies—it’s about us as a people. It’s our country’s birthday. We are all of these things and yet, we need to be more.  It’s about celebrating who we are, who we can be, and where we’ve been, as well as where we are going.

It’s about patriotism.

It’s about service.

It’s about responsibility.

Being a citizen means work. Our soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines work damn hard to defend our way of life and to protect our freedoms. For me, the 4^th is about remembering and respecting that contribution, but also about working a little harder myself to give back and pay it forward. I know where I’ve been, I know where we’ve been as a nation and I know where I want to go.

I’m willing to work on it. Are you?

Don’t forget Melissa Schroeder is donating to Wounded Warriors for comments on her blog yesterday! Keep those comments coming.

The Santinis...and a contest

Yay, The Santinis Collection is now in print. Hurrah! I have been so overwhelmed by response to the brothers. I am going to be giving away 3 signed copies to 3 different winners. Plus, every comment here on the blog will get .10  ONE DOLLAR donated from me to the Wounded Warrior Project. (up to 500.00)
The contest ends at noon, central time, July 3.
And be sure to check out my VIRTUAL SIGNING, where I have not only The Santinis but also a lot of great swag.

This is open INTERNATIONALLY.

THE SANTINIS

Four brothers who believe in service before self and the women who will bring them to their knees.

LEONARDO Joint Base San Antonio Army Medic Leo Santini doesn’t know what hit him when he runs into prickly physical therapist Maryanne Johnson.

MARCO Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam Quiet and thoughtful Navy SEAL Marco Santini doesn’t realize love is right under his nose, but once he does, nothing will stop him from capturing Alana Kailikea’s heart.

GIANNI Moody AFB PJ Gianni Santini finds the woman of his dreams the day before a deployment. When he returns, he has one mission on his mind, conquering professor Kianna Jones.

VICENTE Quantico MCB Vicente sees himself at the last Santini standing when he comes up close and personal with the one woman he has always loved, Jules Andrews. Now all he cares about is being that last man standing—as long as he’s her man.

Melissa Schroeder doesn’t disappoint as she continues to unleash her sexy Santini brothers on us. –Ms Romantic Reads

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