Her Royal Bodyguard is a romantic comedy Intrigue. Rory Kenilworth, a bookish, dreamy-eyed, Southern California surf diva learns on her twenty-third birthday that she's a princess of Estaire. When she was a baby, her father negotiated a marriage treaty with the neighboring country to end a three-hundred-year-old feud. Now that she's twenty-three, she has to assume her duties as a princess and marry Prince Laurent of Ducharme. Suddenly, Rory is taking princess lessons from her fiancé's handsome deputy secretary and dodging bullets!

Just the two.

You mean after I peeled myself off the floor? I bought a new living room set and I designed and built (with my husband) a picket fence for my English garden. I believe in rewarding yourself for hard work! Although, in this case, the reward involved digging post holes and mixing thirty-three bags of cement.

To me, writing is about stories. If a story idea pulled me, I would write it whatever it is.
I don't question my muse. I just do what it tells me. Her Royal Bodyguard surprised me by being funny. Intrigues are by nature darker edgier stories.

I try to keep regular office hours 11:30 a.m. to 4:00 p.m, but my best writing comes when I'm totally immersed in the story and that can happen ten minutes into my writing time or come to me in the middle of the night. It's a feeling I've learned to recognize and obey. Some good stuff can come in fifteen-minute snatches while something's baking in the oven. I usually do my best plotting while gardening or at the ballpark waiting for my son's baseball game to start.

Write because you love to write, not because you want to get published. It's easier to stay sane. *g*

I love research. To me, research writes the book for both characters and plot. How can you write about the problems royals have if you don't find out about their lives? I read several books about European royal families for character research. And I did more research to create plausible histories of the countries I 'd invented. Then I delved into the intricacies of royal protocol for the heroine's princess lessons. I'm very pleased with the protagonists' conflicts in Her Royal Bodyguard. I tried to accurately portray how difficult it is to live in a fishbowl and have your every action guided by duty to others. For the hero, not allowing himself to love was his defense mechanism. A way of protecting himself. And the heroine had to learn how to stand up to enormous pressure to conform to rules, without losing her sense of identity.

Always. I try to draw boundaries, but hey, when your kid is sick or upset, they need mommy. I don't want them to remember me as a mommy who thought that writing books was more important than taking them to the emergency room. When life gets too hectic, I get up in the middle of the night to write. It's the only way to guarantee no interruptions.

No, because although I am no longer licensed, I'm still a private investigator when I sit down at the computer to write my books-except that the cases are only real in my mind. I research my books the same way I investigated. I do background research, I interview people, I look for covert motives in the characters, I talk to the police for input about weapons, possible motives, avenues of further investigation. I take a lot of notes. I like to visit the locales where I set my stories and look for inspiring ways to incorporate elements of the locale into mystery plot - especially when it comes to creating threats against the hero/heroine's lives. For instance, the chandelier and many of the art objects in Rory's home I saw in a gallery in La Jolla. Having grown up in the area, I knew the sandstone cliffs can be unstable.

Have a serendipitous lunch with my best friend Judy McAnerin. She lives in British Columbia and I live near Ottawa, Canada.

My mother taught me that life was an adventure, so I'm not sure that I even have a concept that something I do is crazy. I recently retired from 9 years of being a Girl Guide leader. According to my friends and children, I do a lot of crazy things. I just do stuff I think would be fun or interesting. Two things I would never do again: go whitewater rafting (those rafts tip over!) and venture into an ice cave. I am not afraid of the dark. But I was terrified of that ice cave in Switzerland. They closed the door and this wind-like sound moaned through the cave. It was freezing, slippery and pitch black.
I didn't care that it had been there for thousands of years. I was sure it was going to be my grave. Never again, no way, no how.

Eleanor Roosevelt. What a grand lady. She was so wise. She valued her family and friends and served others. She lived such an interesting life and endured her own personal sorrows, but it didn't stop her from having courage and living each day to the fullest.

I have two proposals in with Intrigue and I'm working on a top secret project that my muse is whispering in my ear.

I hope readers enjoy Her Royal Bodyguard.