His name was Georg. That is all I know. I can’t say I even met him, even though I stood next to him in close proximity. Despite my burning gaze upon him, I wasn’t even able to achieve eye contact through the spectacles that covered his somber brown eyes. His hair was dark and unruly…
The idea for The Tree of Life began in 1999 when the public school my daughters attended held a centennial celebration. The classrooms became decade rooms filled with memorabilia, photographs, letters, magazines and period clothing. Many years later I decided to take this centennial celebration as the starting point for a novel. What might happen…
“An Embarrassment of Riches” The Last Wife of Attila the Hun is based on both legend and history. The legends I studied came from a book called the Poetic Edda. While the Poetic Edda was written in Iceland in the thirteenth century, the “eddas” or poems it includes existed orally for centuries before they were…
In many ways, The Cavalier Spy should have been an easy book to write. After all, it is the sequel to the first book in the Yankee Doodle Spies series, The Patriot Spy, so many of the characters, themes and settings were in place when I began the book. But ironically, that made the book…
I wrote the first sketch for Dolet about four years after my husband’s death in 1996 from Parkinson’s disease. I knew a good deal about interesting figures from the sixteenth-century in France, since that was my main research-field. I had published three scholarly books on François Rabelais (1494 [ca]-1553) and a novel in French translation…
History has always fascinated me and ancient history even more so. This is where held melds in with fantasy, where facts get mixed up with mythology. This is the realm of legends, and still it is about the lives of people who once lived and breathed and walked our earth. I grew up in Pakistan…
I had just finished my second book, Journey in Time, which was a romance. I was in the process of researching my next book, a romantic thriller set in Turkey, at an archaeological site near Troy. I’d put my research material away for the night and put in the DVD of Phantom of the Opera,…
Behind my novel is the image of a woman who is strong, fiercely independent, ambitious, intelligent and attractive to both men and women, but who is at the same time a profoundly imperfect and flawed human being. From the beginning, Ximena Godoy has been more an idea than flesh and blood, and I confess that…
I wrote the first draft of my historical novel, A Decent Woman, as a stay at home Mom in my late forties, while living in Brussels, Belgium with my husband and two children. By that time, I’d been an exhibiting artist for twenty years. A year later, my kids left for university, and I moved…
When I sat down to research and plot out The Witch’s Salvation I had every intention of writing a light-hearted vampire novel about two adolescents, who had been born mortal to immortal shape shifters of royal lineage. While researching the Carpathian Mountains, the setting for the novel, and vampire myths, I read about the history…
The Story Behind the Book 