I'm pretty rubbish at this blogging thing, aren't I? No updates for three months, yikes! 

Since I'm not doing a great job at setting aside time to write brilliant content of my own, today marks the first of what I intend to be an every-weekend feature where I pass along the links to particularly insightful writing-, editing-, and publishing-related articles and blog posts I've discovered throughout the previous week. Some will be geared toward authors, some at editors, many for both. 

As an editor, education and awareness are ongoing endeavors for me. Grammar rules, spelling, and style preferences get updated; plot trends are constantly in flux; industry operations are changing rapidly these days; publishers, agents, editors, and organizations are interacting with "the public" like never before, offering up-to-the-minute insight; and I try to stay abreast of it all as best I can.

Here are some of my favorite clicks from last week:

I'm back! Life has finally settled down from my London-to-Hawaii move this summer, and I'm excited to re-launch this blog with a book review on not one but two titles from one of my auto-buy authors, Pamela Clare. For a chance to win a copy of First Strike or Striking Distance, leave a comment about which book cover has you the most excited to turn the page. The winner may choose which of the two books to receive as their giveaway prize.

Author Pamela Clare has been so clever with her marketing that I found it impossible to review one of these books without the other. First Strike is the erotic romance prequel novella (17k words) that she self-published on October 18th as an ebook companion to Striking Distance, book 6 in her best-selling romantic suspense I-Team series, published by Berkley (Penguin Group) on November 5th in MMP and ebook formats. How clever is that?

I’ll leave the finer points of the story descriptions to the blurbs at the end of this review, but here’s the gist of how these books fit together:

Blurb: "I can't sleep with a man who keeps secrets."

Despite the warnings that he would break her heart, Jayne Hughes fell for the bad boy. And Conrad Hughes, casino magnate, did just that with his absences and lies. Now she’s ready to move on, but her husband has other plans….

Conrad’s undercover work for Interpol destroyed his marriage. When Jayne comes to Monte Carlo seeking a divorce, he launches an all-out assault. Seducing his wife back into his bed is child’s play; earning her trust is another matter. Yet Conrad knows the odds favor the house. And he has no intentions of losing.

Why I read this book: Last year I read my first Catherine Mann book, a romantic suspense titled Cover Me, loved it, and immediately read the rest of the Elite Force series. When I saw this new title from Mann available earlier this year as an ARC (Advanced Review Copy) from NetGalley, I was excited. Even if I hadn’t already been a fan of the author, the blurb would have sold me with the idea of Monte Carlo and romance within a marriage!

I was also curious to read a category romance, which this is, because it’s not the romance format I usually go for.

The Reluctant Bride is so much more than a Regency romance; it's romance woven through a plot full of spies, traitors and adventure. Add one of the most swoon-worthy heroes – who's not even titled gentry! – and you get a truly fantastic historical. It was a joy to work with Beverley Eikli on this book and I'm happy that her long-awaited publication day has arrived. Beverley's here today with some interesting insight about her approach to editing and the many changes this book has been through.

                                ***

Beverley: Hi Rachel, Thanks so much for having me here.

Rachel: Thank you for stopping by! I remember during our first set of exchanged emails when we were introducing ourselves you told me up front that you quite enjoy the editing process and looked forward to it. Music to an editor's ears! Since a lot of authors fear edits, what's your secret? 

Liz Harris is not a cookie-cutter romance author; her unusual locales and atypical relationship dynamics bring something fresh to the genre, and her detailed descriptions of those locales truly whisk the reader away to another time and place, taking on as much importance as the characters themselves. Her latest novel, A Bargain Struck, is a romance in reverse: a marriage on page two that leads to love by the final page. The Daily Mail calls it a "sure hit", and I quite agree! Today Liz is here to share with us how she goes about plotting and revising her early drafts of a book.

                                ***

Many thanks for inviting me to join you today, Rachel.

I was handed the idea for my first published novel, The Road Back, on a plate – or, rather, in an album: the novel was inspired by the album compiled by my uncle after he’d visited Ladakh, north of the Himalayas, in the 1940s.

My inspiration for A Bargain Struck came from a very different source – it came from the radio. While driving along one day, thinking about what to write that would fall into the same genre as The Road Back, I heard someone talking about mail-order brides from Russia. I sat up. The concept of mail-order brides was a really romantic concept, I thought. But not in Russia. Before I’d reached my destination, I’d relocated my developing storyline to the wide open plains of Wyoming, where mail-order brides were a common occurrence, and set the story in 1887, a very interesting year in the history of Wyoming.