Just in case your New Year's resolutions had something to do with reading, too, here's a title for anyone who loves a good, suspenseful yarn involving creepy old houses, mistaken identities, and ghosts from high school past. In NEVER TELL A LIE, Ivy and David Rose seem to have the perfect life--a Victorian fixer-upper, a happy marriage, a first baby on the way--until a woman who claims to know them shows up at their yard sale. She introduces herself as Melinda White, but she looks and acts...

• DeVa Gantt The Pillars of the Earth
• Susan Elizabeth Phillips The Sugar Queen
• Lyn Cote Black Ice

Be True to Yourself

Don’t let anyone tell you how to write a book. Every single writer has a different process they use. This is the only steadfast rule I ever give to any writer. Whatever gets you from point (a) to (b) to (c) to the end is the best process for you. Don’t worry how others do it. If you’re in a rut, then try another method, but don’t throw yourself into a panic because Betsy Bestseller writes a certain way and you don’t. Be true to yourself and the book and you’ll never go wrong.

Case in point, I’m normally a linear writer, but when I wrote A Dark Champion, I had to stop after Chapter 3 and then decide how I wanted the mystery aspect to go. Instead of working from beginning to end, I worked end to beginning so that I could build the red herrings and surprise the reader.

Kinley MacGregor, author of The Warrior

• 10/2/2008 The Post and the Courier covers Romance

  Charleston newspaper's article Georgian...

• 10/2/2008 Carol Alt on GMA

  Author of Next Year's Model on GMA

• 9/15/2008 Lois Greiman at RWA

  Romance author Lois Greiman answers...

• 9/9/2008 Carol Alt on The Today Show

  Author of This Year's Novel on The...