Sweet n Sexy Divas

I love setting my romances in out-of-the-way places. The three books in my Blake’s Folly Romance series take place in a Nevada semi-ghost town where roads are unpaved ruts, and the doors of abandoned shacks slap in the endless wind. Felicity’s Power is set in an isolated cove on the California coast; and in my romantic suspense, The Turkish Affair, I present an archaeological site in central Turkey where theft is rife and the police are untrustworthy.

Yet, somehow, I’ve avoided writing about the country where I now live: France. Is it because the France portrayed in so many romances is nothing like the real country? Because people want fantasy more than reality? They want cafés where people engage in deep philosophical conversations and beret-wearing men with baguettes under their arm pass by on creaking bicycles. In that mythical France, food is always wonderful, and Art is important to all.

In reality, people in cafés talk about football, television or social media. Those beret men are long gone, and food is often — like elsewhere — created industrially, then frozen and shipped to restaurants where it’s heated up in a microwave oven. As for Art…

Which is why I finally made the decision to write a romance set the real France, and to knock down a few of those unrealistic ideas about the country.

Thus, The Unpredictable Colors of Love, set in an artist’s retreat in the real France, in a château that, like so many in this country, was doomed to disappear.