Romantic Suspense
Date Published: 3/15/13
When lives are on the line, sometimes the wrong thing is the right thing to do.
Born into a Chicago cop family, Angela DeLuca gets her rush from saving lives while her brothers get theirs from catching the bad guys. A tough beauty with a heart perhaps too big, she champions the underdog because, as the youngest of six siblings, she often felt like one.
ICE Special Agent Troy Deavers became a cop to prove he wasn’t like his father—a southern politician who brought his family down with greed and corruption. He doesn’t suffer victims well. At first intrigued by Angela’s passion, he soon fears that the fire in Angela’s heart will be her undoing.
What happens when Troy falls in love with the lovely but infuriating Angela, the Chicago paramedic who insists on protecting a young witness and her unborn baby—a witness who could break his case wide open?
You met the DeLuca family in heartbeats, now come to know them even better in ICE blue.
I write, basically, because I just can’t help myself. I can’t resist the challenge of taking the intriguing characters and storylines that pop into my head and fleshing them out into compelling manuscripts. Romantic suspense is a natural to me, because it allows me to combine a sexy, passionate love story with a gritty suspense tale—in my opinion, the best of both worlds. It also lets me express my appreciation for the outdoors in the settings which I recreate on the page.
Freefall, my second novel, takes place in Wisconsin’s Kettle Moraine Forest and beautiful Door County. ICE blue returns to the busy streets of Chicago and the shores of Lake Michigan to continue the story of the DeLuca family which began in my award winning first novel, heartbeats. I am currently working on the third book in the DeLuca series, TRUE blue, due out in 2014, where it seems my characters must take a trip to Montana’s majestic Glacier National Park.
When I’m not sketching characters or working out plot problems, you might find me on the golf course working on my handicap. I also enjoy traveling around the country seeking out new settings for my novels with my husband and my empty nest puppies, Ginger and Nikute. To read more about my novels and the writing life, please visit my website/blog atwww.susanrae.com
What Does Your Office Look Like? (Author Guest Post)
Picture an expansive Mahogany desk with a brightly polished surface. No stacks of papers or manuscripts clutter the top, only my open laptop, waiting for my pristine words. Now picture a comfy leather chair and behind it a divided light picture window through which you can see a beautiful wooded landscape filled with evergreens, maples, and birches and where I can turn to to watch the seasons go by as I contemplate my novels. Now pan to the right of my desk, to the credenza against the wall and the hutch where my many volumes of books are awesomely displayed.
Sounds good, doesn’t it? Yes, but that’s not my office. That’s Nora Roberts’ office. I saw it during an interview she did a couple of months ago for, I don’t remember the show, 60 minutes, CBS Sunday Morning, ABC’s 20-20? It doesn’t matter. All I remember is staring enviously at her desk. Where are her stacks of research files? Where are her piles of manuscripts in various stages of completion? Where are her notes and check lists and marketing materials and files of blogs to write and interviews to do? Where are the writing tips and articles she keeps at hand to glance at when she gets a little stuck in the work and needs a jump start?
Oh, that’s right, it’s Nora Roberts’ office. I’m sure she doesn’t need all that stuff now. I long for the day when I clear away all the clutter and it is just me at my desk, alone with the words. Right…
What does my office look like? It depends on what stage of the book I am in. I took a picture when I was finishing up the final draft of ICE blue. How can a person work in that clutter? I asked myself. But, it my defense, it was organized clutter. My desk had not one, but two computer displays on it—my laptop and its connection to my regular keyboard and monitor. You see, my main computer died about a month before I finished ICE blue’s first draft. ICE blue was locked inside it! Luckily though, the computer was acting up the day before it died so I decided I’d better back up the file on flash drive. Thank God I did, or I would have lost a full month’s worth of work. That’s about one hundred pages! I have a new computer now, but whenever I am working on a novel, I back up the work to a flash drive before I leave the desk.
What else was in that picture I took? Stacks of research files, stacks of various critiqued chapters from my critique partners, my check list, pictures of my hero and heroine taped to my hutch, chapter and page number lists of what happens in each chapter so I can quickly go back and edit something when I needed to, stacks of other chapters on the floor which I had already gone through, and, the pile that I loved, crumpled up notes that I had made during the final draft which I was now done with and never had to look at again! But back to the items on my desk: a three tier file stack devoted to the business of writing—royalty statements, time schedules, business receipts for items spend on promotion, etc.; on the accompanying hutch, the notebook for the next novel, waiting to be filled; my dictionary and thesaurus—even with the computer I still love to thumb through those for the perfect word; and, oh yes, the still relatively small collection of my books. My books. Awesome. It may not be as large a collection as Nora Roberts, but heck, I wrote those!
And that’s just my desk area. We’re not even talking about the closet with more shelves filled with more manuscript drafts, envelopes, computer program CDs, paper, print cartridges, marketing materials—book marks and post cards, etc., all very haphazardly arranged. I really need to neaten that up. To the left of the closet sits a book shelf that goes from floor to ceiling. The top shelf holds my literature collection from all my courses I took in college. The second holds paperbacks of my favorite romance authors, mostly read, although there is a stack I just don’t seem to get to with all the writing and promotion that needs to be done. The third shelf holds hardcover copies of what I call classic contemporary literature—the fantasies of Harry Potter and the Lord of the Rings, some of the works of John Grisham, Tom Clancy, Stephen King, Mary Higgins Clark, Jayne Ann Krentz, to name a few. I’m an eclectic reader, when I get the chance to read. And I still have a collection of The Hardy Boys novels which I read when I was in grade school.
And that window? I do have a window in front of my desk. I can even look out at trees, but more important, I can see the delivery trucks that pull up or anyone else who might pull into the drive and decide if I want to answer to the door, or just keep writing. Mostly, the blinds are turned up to shield the sun so it doesn’t interfere with my writing.
So you get the picture. My office is definitely not as neat as it could be, although I vowed when I was done with ICE blue and before I started the next book in the series, TRUE blue, that I would clean it up. Get rid of all the clutter. Make my office look like Nora Roberts’ office so next time it’d be just me and the words. I’m afraid that’s not going to happen. Although I have eliminated some of the clutter, filed away the notes, manuscript drafts, and research specific to ICE blue, I am busy trying to get the word out about ICE blue and am already writing notes and organizing the research for TRUE blue. Honest, there is no time to tidy.
But in the end, that’s okay, because when I really get down to the writing, it is just me, the words, and the world I create on the page. Everything else around me evaporates. And that’s when the magic happens!
Thank you to our host for giving me the opportunity to give you some insight into my writing life and to for you for spending this time with me. For more information on my writing and my books, please visit me at www.susanrae.com
Happy Reading!
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