So, How’d You Two Meet?

October 2, 2015October 1, 2015 / roughwighting / 100 Comments

ROMANCE IS DEAD, the headlines read.

Just like God, and book reading, and carb-eating.

But we all know they never went away.

So I laugh when people squirm after they learn I write romantic suspense.

“Daring!”

“Scary!”

“Inconsequential!” are the comments I hear (or the sneers I detect).

I am unfazed.

Photo Credit: Francois Duhamel

But still, I’m encouraged when I read articles like a recent Time Q&A piece on Nancy Myers, the writer/director of the new movie The Intern (starring Robert DeNiro and Ann Hathaway), in which Myers addresses the state of romance.* Continue reading →

You Say YES

September 25, 2015September 24, 2015 / roughwighting / 64 Comments

The weather is frightful outside. You have just arrived home from a hard day at work, your feet are freezing, and your brain is fried. You collapse on the big cozy chair in front of the fireplace with a cup of hot tea and pick up a good book. Your dog sits on your feet, puts his head on your knee, and asks with warm, pleading brown eyes, “Please, please, please take me out for a walk.”

You say YES.

You are divorced and have vowed that you will raise your two young children on your own, with no help from a man, thank you very much. In fact, you have no intention of dating for quite a while. Your best friend introduces you to a tall, attractive, persistent man (he involves you in hours-long, long-distance phone conversations and acts as if you are extremely fascinating and intelligent). Ten months later, he asks you to marry him… Continue reading →

You Fill Up My Senses

September 18, 2015September 17, 2015 / roughwighting / 86 Comments

I drove seven hours last weekend with John Denver.

Well, kind of.

At 4 a.m. on Saturday, my daughter, 7-year-old granddaughter, and I hit the turnpike to drive from Boston to Delaware to visit my ailing mom.

Before we left the driveway, the 7-year-old was back asleep and stayed that way for almost three hours.

As I drove in the blackness of too-early morn, my daughter and I conversed quietly in the front seat. The dark shapes of homes and trees – then the lit-up highway signs and speeding cars and trucks – passed by like shadowy strangers.

We reminisced about her Nanny – my mom – whose strong feisty personality is dimming. We laughed softly as we shared a story or two of Nanny’s powerful presence in our lives, and then my daughter slowly, slowly, drifted off to her own dreams.

I was alone, then, in the quiet swiftly moving car, and I reached out for some music, something to fill the space of memories and sadness. Continue reading →

The Strange Undeniable Truth

September 11, 2015September 10, 2015 / roughwighting / 43 Comments

Most often, stories that seem too amazing, too strange, too, well just too too, are the most real stories in our lives.

I know that’s the case for me.

I write fictional novels, because many would find events in my life just too unbelievable. Yet, when we all look deep into some of our experiences, aren’t they too wild for fiction?

Mark Twain hit the mark (!) when he declared: “Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t.”

SO HERE’S THE TRUTH. (From last week’s post True…? or False?) Continue reading →

True…? or False…?

September 4, 2015August 19, 2015 / roughwighting / 65 Comments

Here’s a “game” I dare you to play with me. Read the three small stories, below. Two of them are true. One is false. In the comment section, guess which one is the False story (and the reason you think it never happened). The one with the right answer and the most clever reason of why the story must be false, wins a copy of my romantic thriller, The Right Wrong Man, in paperback. (Thank you, Vanessa-Jane Chapman, for the idea!) Continue reading →