EXILE – 1st Place Romantic Suspense!

My current WIP, Exile, a romantic suspense with paranormal elements, placed first in the RS category of the Where the Magic Begins contest.

This was the first contest in which I entered it and wasn’t holding out any hope of a final. I have always written futuristic romance. My one erotic romance, Heart For Hire, however, did pretty well in contests in 2008.

I had never even dabbled in RS before, until… I had this dream one night. It was one of those full-length, Technicolor movie-dreams with Surround Sound. I watched all the characters move through this fully-formed rich plot about a mysterious Native American who, with the help of his vigilante group, the Horsemen, travels around the country catching serial killers.

Prior to my dream, and now some research, what I knew about mystery/suspense/crime drama could have been written on the head of a pin. I don’t even watch CSI or Law & Order. I’ve never read James Patterson, for heaven’s sake! But there it was, a complete novel ripe for the picking–and the second I woke up, at 4am, I jumped out of bed and wrote it all down.

It was so completely different from anything else I’d ever written, I was sure it was crap. But after a few positive crits from my RWI chapters sisters, I got up the nerve to enter it in the WTMB. Of course, it didn’t hurt that I’d won a free entry into that contest in a drawing. What did I have to lose?

Exile is about 1/3 complete and I’m already getting ideas for the second novel in the series. I’m hoping to finish it, as well as my sensual contemporary, Bad Influence, this year. I’ll also be working on a regency historical as part of a partnership effort.

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