The Masquerade Crew

By tweeting this post, you can earn promotional tweets from me as part of the Amazon Tweet Exchange. Details here . Anti-Heroes and Villains Why do we love them or love to hate them? As a writer, any kind of emotion we can rip out of our readers is AWESOME! Do we feel a little bad that we made you cry? Sure, underneath all the GLEE! Because when we make you shout, scream, wail, or laugh out loud, we are doing something right. And although we love it when you fall for our hero or heroine, when you hate our villains (or better yet, lust after our anti-heroes), it’s like we’re dancing around on marshmallows and chocolate to the song, “I’m Walking on Sunshine!” The same goes for the writers of TV shows. Take Empire for instance. Empire is centered around a music label started by Lucious and Cookie Lyon. Right off the bat, you should hate both these characters. Lucious is a murderer who cheats and lies as easily as he breathes. He treats his family like chess pieces...

By tweeting this post, you can earn promotional tweets from me as part of the Amazon Tweet Exchange. Details here . Going Dark Side:  Oh the feels! I am not a super dark person. Have I had bad stuff happen to me? Absolutely. Can I go dark side? Sometimes. But one of the reasons I prefer romance above all other genres is because even if it’s dark, you still have that ray of hope, that happily ever after… And that keeps me reading. My first three books, Things Good Girls Don’t Do, Good Girls Don’t Date Rock Stars, and Bad Girls Don’t Marry Marines had sad moments, even things that ripped my heart out at times, but they never went truly dark. But before I even finished Marines, I had Everett and Callie running around in my head and I knew that their story wasn’t going to start off with a bang of passion or that light hearted banter was going to carry them through. These two had been through the ringer and I didn’t want it to be sweet as honey when these two fel...

By tweeting this post, you can earn promotional tweets from me as part of the Amazon Tweet Exchange. Details here . Hollywood, Wake Up! I’ve been saying for years that Hollywood needs to stop pulling their head out of their asses and stop remaking a) classic shows and movies (REMAKES SUCK!) and b) stop copying foreign films who do it BETTER! What happened to creativity? Have you all just gotten lazy? Is it more important to crank out project after project instead of working on new screen plays or hell, even adapting awesome books to movies? Of course, even then you seem to fall short. Let’s talk about a couple of examples where Hollywood mutilated a foreign adaptation, and one of my all-time favorite romances! Currently on television is the NBC mini-series, The Slap. The Slap was adapted from an Australian mini-series of the same name. While The Slap does have an amazing cast, the pilot episode, which I watched on Hulu, left me feeling disgusted at a) the complete la...

By tweeting this post, you can earn promotional tweets from me as part of the Amazon Tweet Exchange. Details here . My Obsession with  Serial Killers  (and why my husband calls me paranoid) As terrifying as it is to admit it, I have always been obsessed with bad guys. While reading my R.L. Stine’s Fear Street series in middle school, I remember my favorite being Broken Hearts, and I read it several times, always feeling sorry for the killer, Erica. Even the heroine, Melissa, didn’t stir an ounce of pity, and yet, the deranged younger sister made a connection with me. Weird, right? And so my fascination continued with Tami Hoag, Linda Howard, and even the occasional Ann Rule. Scream became my favorite movie and I would write short horror and suspense stories, wanting to see what made these twisted souls tick. Glee would bubble up inside me if I was able to guess the killer’s identity before he was revealed, and my first year of college, I imagined becoming a ...

By tweeting this post, you can earn promotional tweets from me as part of the Amazon Tweet Exchange. Details here .

By tweeting this post, you can earn promotional tweets from me as part of the Amazon Tweet Exchange. Details here .

By tweeting this post, you can earn promotional tweets from me as part of the Amazon Tweet Exchange. Details here . Cover links to Amazon.com

By tweeting this post, you can earn promotional tweets from me as part of the Amazon Tweet Exchange. Details here .

By tweeting this post, you can earn promotional tweets from me as part of the Amazon Tweet Exchange. Details here .