March 2007

I knew the first time I heard the very funny and brilliant Rosemary Clement-Moore read the first chapter of her book at our critique group that she would be published by the end of year. I had no idea at the time she would also become one of my dearest friends.

I'm so excited to tell you about her new March release PROM DATES FROM HELL. Maggie Quinn is six weeks from graduation and her high school has the stench of evil about it. The intuitive, young detective must work hard to save her school and the town from some big time nastiness. "Prom Dates" is clever, wicked fun and though it's for the Young Adult market, grownups will love it just as much.

Because I live to torment Rosemary (Smile) I sent her some questions and made her interview herself for this month's column. Here's what she has to say:

Q: How did you come up with this idea?

Rosemary: I was working on a completely different project when I woke up in the middle of the night with the start of this one in my head. I wanted to get it down fast so I grabbed the first notebook I could find and scribbled out the first four pages. Unfortunately, I didn't have my glasses on, so when I got up in the morning, I couldn't read what I had written after the first paragraph.

I remembered enough of it to reconstruct it. I was cleaning out a drawer this weekend and found those scrawled pages -- that first paragraph of the published book is almost identical to what I scribbled in the middle of the night.

Q: Did you set out to write a YA book?

Rosemary: Maggie Quinn was actually a character I'd envisioned as kind of a female Night Stalker who investigated supernatural stories. But when I came up with the premise for "Prom Dates," I realized she was the perfect character to solve this and went back in her history and put her six weeks from HS graduation.

Q: What kind of writer are you?

Rosemary: I joke that with my theatre background I'm a "method writer" but that's actually true. The first clue to the supernatural in "Prom Dates" are olfactory -- basically, the creature has a really foul odor. While I was writing this, my mother's dog would sit under my desk and pass gas. So whenever I would get stuck, the dog would fart and the demon would show up. No writer's block here.

(I told you she's one funny chick!)

Now let's check out the mailbag and see who has fun stuff coming up in March:

Karen Harter has a new one, AUTUMN BLUE out March 1. It's about a single mom who struggles to save her troubled young son and finds help from an unexpected source. Harter says she came up with the idea for the character Millard Bradbury "while trying to take a Sunday afternoon nap. He was such a loveable old curmudgeon, doing the daily crossword puzzle and thinking that the only life he had, had already been lived. I just couldn't leave him like that. There went my Sunday nap!"

Kathleen Dante has the hot ENTICED out March 6. Black ops agent Dillon Gavin wants a vacation fling, but clairvoyant artist Jordan Kane wants nothing do with such a dangerous man. Dante blames her critique partner for this one. "She urged me to write the story of Dillon, who first appeared in ‘Entangled,' says Dante. "I too wanted to find out how the smiling rogue gets his lady love, and I had to write the story to find out."

Also on March 6, is the beautiful Alyssa Day's new release ATLANTIS RISING the first in her Warriors of Poseidon series. "The idea came from my fascination with the mythology of Atlantis," says Holliday.

And that's the same day of Nalini Singh's new sexy release VISIONS OF HEAT about a woman who can see the future...a woman from a race without emotion. Any one who read SLAVE TO SENSATION knows this chick writes HOT books.

Linnea Sinclair's GAMES OF COMMAND is in bookstores now. It's a Sci-Fi romance, "and the cool thing is my cat is featured on the front and back cover," laughs Sinclair. "The furzels creatures are modeled after my Maine Coon cat, Daq."

For a fun twist check out Cindy Procter-King's new one DECEIVING DEREK from Chippewapublishing.com. The heroine is a lingerie designer with a meddlesome twin sister, a dog with an underwear fetish and they all team up to give police detective Derek one big headache.

Candy Havens

Candy is a nationally syndicated entertainment columnist, who has interviewed just about every celebrity there is in Hollywood and written thousands of articles. She is the author of the Charmed & Dangerous series including Charmed & Ready and the upcoming Charmed & Deadly (June 2007).

Her non-fiction prose includes Joss Whedon: The Genius Behind Buffy, and essays in Alias Assumed: Sex, Lies and SD-6, and Five Seasons of Angel. She's also the entertainment critic providing the latest on TV, film and celebs for the radio station 96.3 KSCS. And she's the managing editor for FYI Television.

You can visit Candy daily at her blog or her website