Can you believe it's only a week until Christmas! Where does the time go. Hubby and I have been driving around looking at the lights and even went to a Victorian Christmas at the historical Ringwood Manor. Elegance of times gone by. If you're interested in some photos, I've posted them after today's spotlight.
​I'm so happy to bring you one of the  Wild Rose Press's most supportive authors. Barbara always has words of encouragement and advice. So without further ado, after all this is her release day, Around the Fire Brings you The Right Knight.

The Right Knight
by
Barbara Bettis
 Dec. 18, 2023
Medieval Historical Romance 
 Two-Hour Romance Short Reads 

About
After her father dies, Annis of Roxley fears King John will award her home to one of his pet mercenaries. Still, she’s unprepared for the knight who arrives carrying John’s order: Wed the new lord or become the king’s ward. If the new lord is anything like his disheveled representative, she’s better off –elsewhere.
Rushing to claim the castle John’s finally granted him, Sir Hugh reaches Roxley looking so unkempt, Annis takes him for a servant. Before he can reveal his identity, she disappears with her cousin. Hugh knows John rejected the cousin’s claim to Roxley.
Will the knight defy royal decree and force Annis to marry? Not if Hugh can help it.
Exerpt
God’s toenails. Hugh huffed as his gaze followed the lady. She all but ran across the bailey.
“Martin,” he called to his captain. “Secure the walls and join me.” Then he took off after Lady Obstinate. Obstinate but beautiful with her snapping eyes and stubborn chin. He watched the sway of her hips appreciatively. Admired the way a sunbeam glinted off the chestnut curls swinging from beneath a short veil.
He quickened his pace, finally passing her. Some childish part of him had been determined to beat her to the doors.
Even that act of command was doomed. The damned latches didn’t work. He jaggled and waggled the handles. Nothing. 
Then she caught up, performed some sleight of hand, and a door swung open. Muttering a curse about repairs, he followed.  Behind him, Martin coughed, an exaggerated hack that let Hugh know his friend found the situation amusing.
He paused to wait for him.
Of all the holdings at John’s disposal, why did he saddle me with this particular castle and a blasted, contrary female?
Hugh had left London in triumph three days earlier, bound for the rich holding and the wife the king had promised him for service in the battles against France. He’d been so eager to reach his new home and bride, he’d not bothered to prepare himself before galloping up to the gates and demanding entrance in the name of King John. 
Not even in the name of the new lord. Himself. Aargh!
And then to face this lady he’d been directed to marry.
She was the daughter of an old and trusted ally, John said.
A sweet young maiden, raised to know her duty, John said.
Pah!

Get your copy today!
https://www.amazon.com/Right-Knight-Barbara-Bettis-ebook/dp/B0CKWBRKNQ
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-right-knight-barbara-bettis/1144163225
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/199811842-the-right-knight
The Right Knight by Barbara Bettis - BookBub

Welcome to Around the Fire! Life is just tick-tocking by and here it is mid-December. Holiday festivities are in full swing at my house. Pete and I have a map of local light displays and are driving around the county checking them out. Hali, our doggo, enjoys the evening romps. We went to Walpack, a small historic town and saw Christmas in the 1800s for regular folk. It was quite humble. This past weekend we had an openhouse for everyone to visit and see all my DH's Christmas projects. This Friday we hope to tour Ringwood Manor. Check it out here www.ringwoodmanor.org/victorian-christmas.html  
Now, please help me welcome today's guest, Romantic Suspense author, Roxann Dunn

Roxanne, thank you for joining us today. What refreshment can I get you?
Coffee—strong and hot like the men in my novels as soon as I’m out of bed. Later, when it’s time to sit with a book, champagne, please. It doesn’t have to be expensive—just dry, cold, and bubbly.
My kind of guest. Since it's early, I put on a pot. While I do, will you introduce yourself by telling our other guest who are you other than your bio? 
I’m a true introvert, happy to spend time alone. I play the piano badly, dabble in watercolors, study French in hopes of being able to speak fluently when I’m in Paris next time, and am learning to tap dance because I’ve always wanted to do that. As an entry-level foodie with 83 cookbooks on my shelf, I love to cook for friends. Ten years ago, I retired from a long career as a physical therapist then manager of a team of home health and hospice nurses, therapists, and social workers. That’s when I began to focus on writing.

That's quite a diverse life both past and present. I think as authors, we count on others to have our backs. Who is your support system that contributes to your writing career?
My scribe tribe, ten women I meet at a week-long seminar in Paris every November, challenges and inspires me to write more and better. My invaluable first readers, a critique group of four, help create, revise, and polish my first drafts. My beta readers, six friends who read extensively and critically in the mystery genre, read the finished manuscript. They point out errors and tell me what they liked and didn’t like. This gives me a chance to fix holes in the plot, discrepancies in story lines, and other problems before I send it to my wonderful editor at The Wild Rose Press for her suggestions and final approval.
I also learn from and am encouraged by members of Sisters in Crime, Mystery Writers of America, and Pacific Northwest Writers Association. 

You do have a tribe? Who or what books or authors inspire you?
I am a big fan of Elly Griffiths, especially her Ruth Galloway series. Ellis Peters ranks right up there with Elly. I love her Cadfael stories and the way she brings the background history to life right along with the characters. There are many others whose books I have read and reread: Alan Bradley, Jess Walter, Kent Haruf, Alice Muro, and Alice Hoffman, to name a few.

I can make animal noises. Particularly I can imitate a dog and cat fight. Do you have a fun or outrageous talent?
I can’t call this a talent, but I have my pilot’s license and flew our own small plane until we sold it a couple of years ago. My first solo flight—when I took off all by myself and landed again without breaking the plane—scared me to death and I loved it.

What an amazing feeling to be up in the clouds.  I live in a lake community. What is your neighborhood like? Are there places you frequent? What makes them special?
I live on San Juan Island, a tiny chunk of ancient bedrock surrounded by cold water in the northwest corner of Washington State, very near Vancouver Island. 
The island is famous as the site of the Pig War, an international dispute that took place more than 150 years ago. The quarrel is commemorated by American Camp, a national park occupying a windswept prairie next door to my house. 
Here’s what happened. The Hudson’s Bay Company had set up a trading post and claimed the land for England. The American government also wanted the island and encouraged American citizens to go and settle there. In general, everyone got along just fine, until one day in 1859, when a pig belonging to a Hudson’s Bay Company employee wandered into an American settler’s garden and ate all his potatoes. Enraged, the settler shot the pig. He apologized, but Hudson’s Bay did not accept his apology and he began to fear retribution. So, he called for help, and the American army showed up to protect him. In response, the British called up their army and sides both called up their navies. Fortunately, only one shot was ever fired, and the pig took it. The dispute eventually led to an agreement on the border between Washington State from British Columbia.
I’m happy to report that today, all is calm, and I hike miles of trails in the park, enjoying the seasonal changes in wild flowers, animals, and birds.

Well the pig shouldn't have made such a hog out of himself. Sorry, I couldn't help it. The story is hystericl through the lens of history. What kind of research to do you do?
I love doing research. I guess you could say I spent ten or fifteen years researching Murder Unrehearsed, my first. I set it in a remote cabin on a high mountain lake because I had spent many vacations in a place like the fictional one I created. 
Murder Undetected, my second, takes place in Paris and a fictional hilltop town in the south of France. Each scene is pulled together from places I’ve gone with my camera and notepad. When I started writing it, I’d been to Paris several times and visited Provence once, but I wanted to be sure I captured the difference between the big city and the ambiance of a small town. And I wanted to know what it felt like to walk up and down steep cobblestoned streets and sit at an outdoor care in the square on market day, so I made two trips to Gordes, Roussillon, and several other small towns so I could see, taste, smell, and feel the individual atmospheres. 
For Murder Richly Deserved, which will be released next year, I visited the medieval town of Foix in the Pyrenees. The trip turned out to be a wonderful travel adventure, and although I had done a lot of research on line, I was surprised to learn how different it was from the hill towns in Provence. I could not have accurately described the scenes that take place in an ancient castle built by the Cathars without going there and experiencing it.

Getting it right is important. Sea Hunter my first historical, took a great deal of research. I like it too. Do you have a piece of jewelry that means something special to you?
Leilani pearls.I bought a string of pearls at the antique market in Nice several years ago because it reminded me of Leilani Barnett, a member of my Paris scribe tribe, who writes beautifully and seemingly without effort. Words always pour from her pen in lovely script. She never seems to have to correct or change anything. So, on days when I can’t seem to get the words to flow, I put the pearls on and think about her, and magic happens. 

This makes me smile. I can picture you sitting with pearls around your neck. What's the most difficult scene for you to write?
Characters from the opposite sex. I love writing male characters. I grew up with three brothers on an isolated farm—no girls anywhere near—and I was a tomboy at heart. So, I think of my brothers, and I’m off. 

Everytime I open my email someone or company is clamboring for my hard earned cash. What's the best money you ever spent as a writer? 
When I finished Murder Undetected, I paid Eric Witchey, a writer and writing teacher to critique the first thirty pages. I was pretty proud of what I’d written and didn’t expect the criticism he gave me. He was very kind, but said I was “driving to the story.” He meant that the first two pages, which I’d carefully, with many revisions, crafted to depict a tense, dangerous atmosphere, needed to be cut; that I needed to start with the characters on stage and build the tension in their interaction. He was absolutely right. 

Ouch! But that's how we learn and better ourselves. How do you come up with names of your characters?
My characters generally tell me their names, but not always right away, so I’ll give them a temporary name or even an initial, until they become real. 

Roxanne, thank you for spending time with us. I bet others are intrigued about your book. Can you tell us a bit about it and where to find it and also where to find you?​

Murder Undetected
by
Roxanne Dunn
Romantic Suspense
​
Two women. One driven by selfish desire, the other by selfless love: The moment psychologist Brittany Ann Thornton thinks she has her life all dialed in, her perfect little family falls apart, and the FBI seizes all her assets. Trouble pursues her from Seattle to Paris to the south of France. Viane Thibaudet, darling of a quaint hilltop town in Provence, has been getting away with murder. But when she attempts to poison her husband, Brittany steps up to stop her. 

What others are saying.
Lies and deceit. Love and loyalty. Crime and passion. Murder Undetected spans the globe with page-turning suspense, action, and thrills. A classic read with an unforgettable heroine.
Bob Fordice, Fourdice Book Trailer Productions.
Grab your copy today!
https://www.amazon.com/s?k=roxanne+dunn&i=stripbooks&ref=nb_sb_noss_1 
www.barnesandnoble.com/w/murder-undetected-roxanne-dunn/1140053815​

More about the Author.
When I’m not writing, I’m trying to understand how to post on Twitter and Instagram. And cook, clean, garden, do yoga, text my grandchildren, update my website, phone my aunts, teach my husband how to make pie crust, and make sure I have clean underwear. My life is rich and full.
​To quote essayist John Burroughs, “I still find each day too short for all the thoughts I want to think, all the walks I want to take, and all the friends I want to see.”
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/roxannepebblesdunn/ 
FaceBook: https://www.facebook.com/roxanne.dunn.127 
Website: https://www.roxannedunn.com/ 

The Last Golden Isle
by
Patricia McAlexander
Psychic Paranormal Romance
Release Date 12/11/23

Ever since a traumatic experience as a college freshman four years earlier, Clare Matthews has had an aversion to men. But when she goes to spend the summer on one of Georgia’s Golden Isles as a companion for her cousin Sally, she finds herself drawn to Jon, a handsome young security guard who works on the family estate. When the feeling seems mutual, she hopes she has at last been healed. Then signs of his possible involvement in a dangerous criminal activity crop up, and Clare must make a decision that will affect the rest of her life.

Grab your copy today.
https://www.amazon.com/Last-Golden-Isle-Patricia-McAlexander/dp/1509251995/ 
www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-last-golden-isle-patricia-mcalexander/1144163217
https://books.apple.com/us/book/the-last-golden-isle/id6468095788

 THE INSPIRATION BEHIND THE LAST GOLDEN ISLE
Where does inspiration come from? The ancients thought of the Muses-–goddesses of artistic creation, nine of them for different arts—as spirits of inspiration; thus Homer and Virgil appeal to a Muse at the beginning of their epics. Centuries later, John Milton tells us that Paradise Lost was dictated to him at night while asleep by the heavenly muse he calls Urania. Robert Louis Stevenson said he received his stories in a state of reverie in which visitors called “brownies” helped him compose. Edgar Allen Poe does not have spirit-like visitors, but he does say his inspiration comes during a state between waking and sleep that he calls “hypnagogia.”
I feel that I too, as a pantser, am in sort of an inspired dream state as I sit at the keyboard for that first draft and words pour out. I wish I knew how to access that inspiration—how to turn it on like a faucet. But for me, it just sometimes magically comes—in the case of The Last Golden Isle, after a visit to one of Georgia’s beautiful coastal islands, reading an old story with a somewhat similar plot that I’d written in high school, and hearing from a friend about her daughter’s experience with a “spiritual guide” in South America. Then these experiences, like the little chips of glass turned in a kaleidoscope, almost on their own formed the new patterns and shapes that became the first draft of this novel.
After the inspiration of a first draft, of course, comes the work of editing and molding it to its final form, then submission and hope for acceptance, then the publicizing and the hope that people will read and like the work. But there is less mystery in that.
​The mystery is in the inspiration for that first draft, however it comes.​

About the author.
Even as a child I loved writing stories—in first grade, my personal version of Dick and Jane tales with characters I named Jean and Jerry, in high school and college short stories and novellas I shared with my friends. With this interest in writing, it’s perhaps not surprising that all my degrees were in English—a BA from the University of New York at Albany, an MA from Columbia University, and a PhD from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. I taught grammar, composition, and literature at The University of Georgia and since retiring, have turned back to fiction, publishing three contemporary romantic suspense novellas with the Wild Rose Press--Stranger in the Storm, Shadows of Doubt, and The Student in Classroom 6, with a fourth, The Last Golden Isle, to be released today—December 11. My short story “Falling,” which came in second in the Atlanta, Georgia, Writers Club’s 2021 Terry Kay Prize for Fiction, was published in the Fall 2022 issue of the online journal Knot. I live in Athens, Georgia, with my husband Hubert, also a retired UGA professor.
For more, follow the author here.
Website: https://patriciamcalexander.weebly.com
Instagram: www.instagram.com/patriciamcalexander/
Email: [email protected]
Facebook: facebook.com/patriciamcalexanderwriter/ 
X (Twitter): https://twitter.com/PatMcAlexWriter 
Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/stores/Patricia-McAlexander/author/ 
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/20262992.Patricia_McAlexander 
BookBub: https://www.bookbub.com/profile/patricia-mcalexander

Hello, everyone! There are only a few more Around the Fires until 2024! Can you believe it? In December the festivities begin with Pete's birthday. This year we went to thesizzlebbq.com/ an Argentina BBQ. The food was amazing and the empanadas the best I ever had.  Our house is already into holiday mode. Decorations and the tree is up. A Christmas party will be happening soon. And guess what? I typed The End to a Christmas story I hope will publish next year. So that's me. How about you? Let me know in the comments or at [email protected] 
​Now on to the fire and today's gues. 

JL thanks to spending some time with us Around the Fire. I'm going to grab us some vanilla chai lattes. I know you enjoy them.  While I do let's begin by talking about your inspiration.  
Sometimes actors and actresses from way back when inspire me to create new names from their handsome/beautiful images.My friend, Isabelle Holland, a brilliant author of The Man Without a Face, inspired me as well.

I love the old movies especially from the 40s and early 50s. The characters seemed so elegant. I love scenes from dance clubs and the way they dressed. I grew up reading and loving books. What is one that you hold dear from your youth?
My favorite book from childhood is Charlotte's Web.

Let's chat about writing tough scenes. What are yours?
Hardest scenes to write are about the Holocaust for my historicals. It pains me to read the research of six million tortured and murdered souls.

A dark time in history, certainly. I read Corrie Ten Boom's The Hiding Place several times and struggle with how cruel people can be. Many aspiring authors fall into what we call traps. These can be unreal writing expectations that can set them up for failure. Like, trying to be perfect on the first draft. Firsts can be really messy. This is where its truly about the process. What would you share with new writers? 
TELLING with too much narrative and not enough showing.

Oh, that's a big one. It's when we describe the scene instead of immersing the reader in it by using the protagonist senses. For example, The room was cold. Instead something like Frost on the window in the unheated cabin sent shivers through Maddie. Howling winds carried snow in swirls past the decrepit porch with missing boards as she closed the door. There are many aids for writers. Speaking of which, what's the best money you've ever spent as an author?
My resource library so that I can pull a reference  off the shelf. Also subscribing to verified historical magazines.

My favorite resources are onestopforwriters.com Have you won anything.
I won a prize for a teenage story that was published in Japan many years ago.

Nice, early on recognition. How will you treat yourself after writing a story?
When my novel is under contract, I will feast on salmon and champagne.

JL, thank you for hanging around the fire with me today. Before you leave tell us more about your book.

About Joan 
As a journalist, several of Joan's trips overseas inspired her photography. In fact, she was runner up for a Time Out Magazine cover. Her recent trips to Auschwitz and Madrid will be used as background for historical suspense novel series. When she isn't consulting on how to open your own enterprise, teaching English as a Second Language, and working on the next book in her suspense series, she can be found on a yoga mat or in a ballet class. She adores horses but has little time to ride these days.
She is proud to announce that her entrepreneurial training handbook, The Write Rules, is in the London Consortium of Libraries and Secret Desires was a runner up for best contemporary romance by Readers Choice.
Secret Desires is now in French.​