The Inspiration behind Novel Ruby Dawn

I’ve invited Raquel Byrnes to share with us what inspired her to write Ruby Dawn (the book I introduced to you on Monday.

Take it away, Raquel…

Of the six children the Lord has blessed me with; four of them are adopted from the foster care system. During that journey to completing our family, I met some incredibly dedicated people and some that weren’t so great during the process of adopting.

What I noticed most of all was that a great many of the children become teens and then adults without ever being adopted. I wondered what God would do with someone who had been tossed about in the winds of this system. I know that many come in contact with loving, godly caretakers and workers and that seeds of hope and faith are planted in the hearts of these kids. How might the Lord bring them through this time and what kind of faith grows from trials at such a young age, I wondered.

The story of Ruby and Tom is close to my heart. Two souls who find each other in a dangerous place only to believe they’ve lost each other after a tragic accident. First loves, feeling that you’re alone in your faith, and seeing the amazing work God can do in the life of someone willing to surrender their heart and soul are subjects that really move me as a writer.

I have often found that when we feel most vulnerable and weak the Lord shows us how strong our hearts can be when fortified with faith.

Sometimes you have to trust in God’s promises, despite what it looks like at the moment.
–Ruby, age 16, Dresden Detention Center

Ruby Dawn explores the power of faith and the choice to trust God in the face of losing all that we love.

Thanks so much, for sharing with us today, Raquel. Wow, you must be one busy woman raising and homeschooling your brood in addition to carving out time to write.

Your Turn: Readers do you have any questions for Raquel?

I’ll start…Raquel, when do you find time to write?

Ruby Dawn and Forgiveness

I’m excited to share with you today a bit about Ruby Dawn, a new release from Raquel Byrnes, a fellow writer with Hartline Literary Agency.  

The book just released so I haven’t had a chance to read it yet, but I’m looking forward to seeing how Raquel handled some elements similar to those in my upcoming release. (i.e. forgiveness, a past in youth detention, and a drug sting).

Here’s the back cover blurb:

A Painful Past.
A former street kid, Ruby now reaches out to runaways through her medical clinic in the worst part of the city, but her escalating battle with a gang leader puts that in jeopardy.
 A Love Returns.
Cavalier, a risk-taker, charming… Ruby’s first love is now on the right side of the law and the center of a dangerous DEA sting involving her clinic.  Tom’s disappearance ten years ago broke her heart and rattled her faith. As their romance relights, memories of what it costs to love him flood her with fear.
A Desperate Plan.
Ruby’s battle with the gang ignites a firestorm of danger, and a pattern of lies from within her own camp emerges. With Tom’s life in the balance and her world cast in shadows, can Ruby trust God as she once did…or has she strayed too far, for too long to ever return?  

So… here’s our discussion question for today…

Ruby once believed that God could make incredible changes in people, but when she encounters a dangerous person from her past, her faith is put to the test.

Your Turn: Has someone hurt you in the past returned and asked for forgiveness? Did you find it difficult to open your heart to them again? Is there a scripture verse that spoke to you?

Fun Friday – Five Top Reasons I Love Writing Romantic Suspense

No matter how wonderful your job is, or how long you’ve dreamed of doing it, sometimes you wonder why you torture yourself day in and day out.

Yes, even writers feel this way. Quite often, actually.

I’ve created this list for just those kind of days.

1) I love writing romantic suspense because my heroine can zing those pithy comebacks at the hero that I never think of quickly enough in real life.

2) If someone bugs me, I can kill them off. Hee, hee, hee.

3) I can make the hero suffer for his idiocy!

4) I can thwart the bad guy’s plan with a flick of my finger.

5) I can knock some sense into the hero and heroine so they’ll find their happily ever after.

Your Turn: Why do you like to read (or write)?

Talking about Real-Life Characters…

As a writer I’m always on the look out for interesting quirks that will make a character come alive on the page. Not so long ago, I met such a quirky character.

It was at a birthday party and she was serving the chocolate cake.

Now you know as well as I do that when there’s a choice between chocolate and white cake, the chocolate always disappears more quickly.

Well, not at this birthday party!

This sweet, cheery, smiling woman didn’t seem to realize that running her finger along the knife to clear off excess icing and then licking her finger and then using that licked finger to do it again and again was…uh, unappetizing. Oh, who am I kidding?

It was really gross. But too funny!

At one point the woman carried a piece of cake to a chair-bound guest and you never saw so many others swoop in to try to dish up their own piece of cake before she returned!

Your Turn: Any quirky characters in your life?

Chapter One Shades of Truth

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Taking this undercover assignment in Miller’s Bay, Ontario, was a bad idea. Too many reminders of his own screwed-up youth.

Ethan Reed trailed Darryl Corbett, the son of the detention facility’s founder, into the yard full of teenage boys. The mixed teams of staff and residents on the baseball field underscored the center’s buddylike approach to rehabilitation, but the barbed-wire perimeter glinting in the summer sun hammered home the reality.
While Darryl itemized the characteristics that set Hope Manor apart from government-run facilities, Ethan’s thoughts drifted to the reason for his secret recruitment from outside the Canadian border town’s tight-knit police force. Whoever was luring residents into becoming drug pushers had inside connections. Inside the manor. And inside the police force.
At first glance the youths looked like average kids in their saggy pants and oversize T-shirts, minus iPods dangling from their ears and ball caps askew on their heads. But Ethan didn’t miss the hand signals gang members flashed when they thought no one was watching, or the scars on their faces from fighting, or the burns on their skin from initiations.
The facility forbade wearing gang colors, but restrained rivalry was evident in their defiant swaggers and icy stare downs. They tried to look tough, but most of them were cowards who saw nothing wrong with three guys swarming a lone stray, like a pack of wolves circling their dinner.
A foul ball bounced in front of Darryl, who tossed it to the kid on the pitcher’s mound. “Basically, you’re expected to engage the residents in whatever activities interest them. If you’re any good at coaxing them to open up to you and talk out their problems, all the better.”
Ethan grunted. He’d better be good at getting the boys to talk, because whoever was recruiting these kids had neglected to mention short life expectancy in the job description.
An engine’s roar ricocheted off the brick building. Then a scream—urgent, terrified and female—pierced the air.
Ethan’s attention snapped to the perimeter, but a wall of pine trees blocked his view.
“That sounded like Kim,” Darryl said. “My sister.”
Ethan sprinted for the gate and yanked on the lock. “You got a key?”
“No!” Darryl raced for the building.
Ethan pictured the maze of locked corridors between them and the front exit and dug his fingers into the chain link. “I’ll meet you out front.” He bolted up the fifteen-foot fence, crushed the slanted barbed wire in his fist and vaulted over the top. Pine needles scratched his arms and face on the way down. He crashed through the trees, cresting the hill in three seconds flat. Not quickly enough to ID the vehicle squealing away. But soon enough to glimpse the blip of its single brake light rounding the corner. A few strides further, he spotted a woman wearing shorts and a sky-blue jogging tank crumpled in the ditch. Her muddied running shoe lay inches from a tire track carved in the dirt.
He skidded down the grassy embankment still slick from last night’s storm. A hit-and-run outside his newest undercover gig. Coincidence?
Not if Chief Hanson was right and there was a dirty cop taking bribes to sabotage the investigation. A cop that had somehow found out about Ethan’s mission.
Hitting level ground, Ethan broke into a sprint and grabbed for his phone.
Argh! He didn’t have it. A security risk, Darryl had said. A resident might swipe it. Ethan’s gaze shot to the driveway. Where was Darryl? They needed to call an ambulance.
Long chestnut hair hid the woman’s face, and the image of another jogger slammed into his thoughts. Fifteen years later and he could still picture her broken body. Blocking out the memory, he dropped to his knees at the victim’s side.
She appeared to be in her mid-twenties, in remarkable shape, but breathing way too fast and shallow.
“Miss, can you hear me?”
She didn’t respond. Didn’t move.
And the sight of her motionless body—too much like Joy’s—had a stranglehold on his gut. “Miss,” he repeated, more urgently this time. “Can you hear me?”
She fixed him with a startled gaze—luminous, rich green and so undeniably alive it kick-started his heart and sent it hurtling into overdrive.
Kim Corbett squeezed her eyes shut and reopened them, but the dark-haired stranger with the shaky voice didn’t evaporate. His muscular build blotted out the sun, washing him in a halo of light. Kim blinked again, this time noting the rapid rise and fall of the man’s chest, the bunched neck muscles that signaled a readiness to explode into action and, most surprising of all, the look of terror in his dark eyes.
She averted her gaze, swallowed the coppery taste coating her mouth. Ditch water seeped through her shirt and her ankle screamed, but she didn’t feel too bad. Although, given this guy’s worried scrutiny, she must look a mess. She swiped at her mud-streaked hair. “Who are you?”
“Ethan Reed, Hope Manor’s new youth-care worker,” he said, and the unexpected hitch in his rumbly voice sent a tingle racing up her spine.
Darryl staggered into her peripheral vision. “You okay?” he asked between gulps of air.
Embarrassed by the fuss she’d caused, she struggled to push onto her elbows.
“Don’t move.” The man—Ethan—clamped his hands at the base of her skull, rendering her immobile.
“What are you doing?” she shrieked.
“You could have a spinal injury.”
“My shift starts in ten minutes. I need to punch in.”
“You need to stay still until the paramedics get here.”
“Paramedics?” Kim tried to squirm free of Ethan’s hold. If he called for paramedics, the police wouldn’t be far behind. They’d ask her if she’d recognized the car, the driver. And if they figured out that an ex-resident almost ran her down, it would be the final nail in Hope Manor’s coffin.
She couldn’t let that happen. Not after Dad had poured his life into this place. “I don’t need a paramedic,” she protested, but the more she wriggled, the firmer Ethan held her, his hands astonishingly gentle for being so strong.
“Trust me,” he said with a gravity that made her stop struggling. “You can never be too careful. What were you doing out here, anyway?”
“I always jog to work when the weather’s nice.”
The color drained from Darryl’s face. “Your neck’s bleeding.”
“It is?” She reached up to find the source, and Ethan caught her pinky between his first two fingers.
“No,” he said, halting her probing with a quick squeeze of his fingers. “It’s my hand.”
Ignoring the jolt of his touch, she tugged back her hand. “You’re bleeding?” she squeaked, and tried again to sit up.
“It’s nothing,” he said, continuing to brace her neck with that infernally stubborn grip.
“Nothing?” Darryl gaped at Ethan with something akin to awe. “It’s a wonder the barbed wire didn’t tear your arms to shreds. You’re crazy, man. I don’t know how you climbed that fence. Everyone’s gonna try it now.”
Kim gaped. “You climbed the fence?”
Ethan actually blushed, but his eyes never left her face. “Darryl, did you tell someone to call 9-1-1?”
“No, I—”
“The car didn’t touch me,” Kim said, quickly. “I dove clear when I saw it coming. I’m okay, really.”
She’d be even better if they’d just forget the whole thing.
“Humor me until the paramedics get here, okay?”
She took a deep breath, hoping the scent of fresh-mown hay would calm her rattled nerves, but only succeeded in drawing in the musky scent of the man cradling her neck.
His thumb traced the scar along her jaw. And a tiny frown tugged at his lips.
It didn’t help that his chocolate-brown eyes radiated protective concern. It was enough to make a girl forget the ache in her ankle, to forget the fear that had flung her into a ditch, even to forget that she was much too busy saving Hope Manor to let her heart flutter over some ruggedly good-looking guy with a surplus of knight-like qualities.
Except, she couldn’t forget. The upsurge in drug-related incidents around Miller’s Bay had only fueled the lobbying efforts of the people determined to shut down the center.
Instead of running in to call an ambulance, Darryl hunkered down beside her. “Did you see who did this to you?”
“It all happened so fast.” She shrank from the memory of the white sports car barreling across the asphalt. No matter how the incident had looked, Blake wouldn’t have targeted her deliberately. Never. Why would he want to hurt her?
No reason. None at all.  

Hats Off to a Real Life Character

Last Friday, I wanted to add a new feature to my blog–the ability to reply to comments individually. The feature has been available on WordPress for awhile, but I’d only just heard that it was on Blogger, too.

Trouble was…I couldn’t figure out how to make it happen. That’s where this wonderful gal stepped in.

Meet Bonnie Calhoun, the American Christian Fiction Writer’s 2011 Mentor of the year, and blogger guru extraordinaire! Not to mention, a woman with the patience of Job. An exchange of 20 emails later–yes, 20!–I finally had what I wanted.

I had to change 4 settings on two different screens. In the process I re-learned how to add the comment section box for clicking things like “interesting” or “funny”.

Of course, my dunceness had Bonnie rolling on the floor laughing as she tried to help me!

Thankfully, she persevered.

I shouldn’t have been surprised. Bonnie is a dynamo. I don’t know how she finds time to write or to run her dressmaking business. She’s the publisher of Christian Fiction Online Magazine, president of the Christian Authors Network, director of the Christian Fiction Blog Alliance, webmaster for Hartline Literary Agency (which happens to be my agent’s agency) and the list goes on!

In April, “published author” will be added to the list with the release of her debut novel Cooking the Books: A Sloane Templeton Mystery which promises to be as fun and quirky as the author herself.

Given Bonnie’s computer prowess, I wasn’t surprised to discover that the heroine of her book is a computer forensics specialist!

All of that to say: Hats off to Bonnie for giving me personalized comments!

What do you say–will you help me test them?

Your Turn: Ask me a question. Please! I’m just dying to test this out 🙂

Fun Friday – The Truth

The truth is I’m cheating. I’ve been so busy writing Q & As for my upcoming blog tour that I don’t have a pithy thought left in my brain for a fun Friday post. So…

I’m sharing a fun post I wrote for Roxanne Rustand’s blog back in December.

Roxanne had invited me to share a story about one of our animals, and I couldn’t decide on just one—animal or story!

Now any of you who have been with me for awhile have heard many stories about Bella, my hubcap-eating husky who, like a Houdini, can mysteriously escape from her crate without unlocking the door.
She likes people to think she’s a perfect angel, but don’t be fooled by the wings and stardust. We’ve lost count of how many shoes and collars she’s chewed through, not to mention plastic flowerpots.

We have no idea where she keeps finding those!

Yes, she causes us no end of anxiety. One day my daughter saw her standing on the far side of the hayfield at the edge of the woods. She called and called her to come, and naturally, got pretty frustrated when the dog just stood its ground and stared.

But what happened next chilled my daughter to the bone.

Bella loped happily up to her… from behind.  

Did I mention Bella looks like a coyote?

Yup, my dear daughter was trying to coax one of the local coyotes to come home to us. Thank goodness, the animal didn’t oblige!

Is it any wonder we’ve earned a bit of an eccentric reputation around the neighborhood? It’s not every family who gives their chickens wheelbarrow rides.

Or who walk their horse and goat along with the dog.

Or who give the neighborhood cats pony rides.

But perhaps one has to be a tad eccentric to spend hours a day writing novels!

Your Turn: Please share a funny story with us!

BTW If you’d like to read that husky hubcap story, clickhere. It’s my favorite. I’d love to see it become one of the top stories on my sidebar. *grin*

The Truth about Lying ~ Part 2

Before we delve into examples of how my undercover cop hero (or you) might tell if someone is lying, I must warn you that it’s not a good idea to tell others about their signs of deception.

An intelligent liar will merely use the information to throw you off the next time. Hmm, now that might be an interesting plot twist!

On to the examples:

1) Frequently pausing before answering questions (if this is not a normal speech pattern) can be a strong indicator of deception, while stuttering or mumbling are generally not reliable indicators.

2) Nervous laughter might be a sign of evasiveness, or it might simply be a release of stress. But a single deep sigh after a subject has been uncooperative, often signals a readiness to confess.

3) Hand movement to the mouth, nose, eyes, or ears while talking often indicates deception.

4) Contrary to popular opinion, using the eyes to identify deception is unreliable. There are a lot more variables at play in whether someone frequently breaks eye contact, or moves their eyes in a certain direction.

5) Of course…since #4 is a popular belief, a liar may go out of his way to maintain eye contact to convince you of the truth of what he’s saying. An interesting observation I might use in my next cop story. *grin*

6) The movement of a person’s body away from you (often toward the door) is a strong indicator of deception, especially if accompanied by other cues.

7) Bargaining. “I was keeping up with traffic, not speeding.” Or a politician may have “misspoke” or been “quoted out of context.” These are all examples of attempts to disguise reality.

8) Attempt to remake the interrogator’s image of him, for example, by saying, “I’m a veteran.” or “I’m a faithful husband.” or “I’m a good employee.”

9) Attempts to stall. Examples: answering a question with a question; pretending didn’t hear; cough, repeating the question.

10) There are many more examples (and cautions) in the book, but I’ll end with the use of blocking statements. Example: “Why would I lie about something like that?”

Your Turn: Can you think of a memorable line or action you’ve seen in movies or read in books where someone is lying?

Like Lie to Me when they’d point out a “tell” then flash clips of famous politicians who’d been caught doing that very thing, such as Clinton touching his nose during his testimony about Monica Lewinsky.

Giveaway Notice: Kav has posted a fabulous review of my March release and is giving away a copy to one commenter this week, plus a copy of a January LI book of their choice! Here’s the link:  http://bestreads-kav.blogspot.com/2012/01/shades-of-truth.html