by Kathleen Scheibling, Senior Editor, Harlequin American Romance

I love family drama. No, I don’t mean when my crazy uncle announces he’s in love with a house plant at the Christmas dinner table. I’m talking about watching and reading about other’s people’s families, and finding out what makes them tick. For years I was obsessed with The Sopranos, in all their bizarre domesticity. And I love shows like Modern Family, which shows familial dysfunction at its finest. It’s way more fun to look through the window at other people’s problems than deal with my own!

There’s one show I grew up watching that still sticks with me. On Dallas, the Ewings taught me about family rivalry, forbidden love, how money drives people, and about the imposing figure of the patriarch. I loved that show. Now they were fun to watch! And I still can’t get that theme song out of my head…

For a long time I thought about doing a big family drama in American Romance. Our books are all about family, after all. And since we love our western stories, I knew the family should live in a place as untamed, majestic and dramatic as I imagined their story would be. And so, American Romance brings you The Codys: The First Family of Rodeo.

This series is full of drama, wild western settings, and most important, heartwarming romance. John Walker and Anne Cody have raised five children on The Cottonwood Ranch in Big Horn County, Wyoming. Their offspring have all been brought up with a love of the rodeo. And even though they may have other professions, each of them regularly competes in rodeos all over the American west. And amid the horses and the dust and the glory of their events, they find the loves of their lives. And believe me; it’s going to be fun to watch.

Six incredible authors have created the Codys – a family with as many ups and downs and crazy times as any you’ll ever see. In Walker: The Rodeo Legend, you’ll meet a war veteran who finds redemption through rodeo, and through the love of a good woman. In Dexter: Honorable Cowboy (July 2010) and Dusty: Wild Cowboy (August 2010), you will read about twin rivalry at its best, while the brothers fight over women and spar with the rest of the family. Mark: Secret Cowboy (September 2010) brings the whole Cody story to a head – and we’ll find out what secret almost tears the family apart. Elly: Cowgirl Bride (October 2010) shows how the Cody women can hold their own at the rodeo, and lasso the man that’s right for her. And in Jesse: Merry Christmas, Cowboy (November 2010), we wrap up this part of the Cody story with a dramatic one-two punch.

I love this miniseries, and I hope American Romance readers do too. Thanks to our wonderful authors – Rebecca Winters, Marin Thomas, Cathy McDavid, Pamela Britton, Trish Milburn and Lynnette Kent – and thanks to you, for letting the Codys in to your lives. Enjoy the drama…and enjoy the romance!

Note: visit the Cottonwood Ranch today and meet some of the Codys in Her Unexpected Cowboy, a FREE online read by Trish Milburn! Here’s a sneak peek:

After the tragic deaths of their parents, Madison Gray had to become a mother to her fourteen-year-old brother, Jason. But the boy’s grief has led him down the wrong path, and Madison will do anything to steer him right. So she takes her friend, Elly Cody, up on her offer to visit her family in Wyoming, hoping a dose of ranch life will do them both good. The last thing she needs is the kind of complication that comes in the sexy form of Elly’s cousin, Callum!

by Jayne Hoogenberk, eHarlequin Community Manager

I’m back with a great line up of romances to help warm up your Spring and keep you turning the pages til we hit the beach with our summer time must-reads.  Our editors recommend you check out the following favorite authors and new miniseries and continuities, and I can’t wait to talk about them with you in our blogs and forums!

First off the block is Maureen Child’s Man of the Month story for Silhouette Desire, The Last Lone Wolf. Maureen is known for her provocative stories, family sagas and strong sexy heroes, and she’s been giving us some backstory on her hero Jericho and how Daisy Saxon plans to rock his world in the Silhouette Desire Author blog on eHarlequin.  Maureen says “I loved this book and it wraps up a quartet about the latest batch of King (of California) brothers! Oh, there will be more, but Jericho King is one of my favorites, so I’m excited to see him out on the shelves….”  you can read more of her blog here.

Of her new series in Silhouette Special Edition, fan-favorite author Marie Ferrarella says, ”Here we are with the second installment of Matchmaking Mamas. This time it’s soft-spoken Theresa Manetti who is trying to find a mate for her workaholic daughter. Kate has only ventured out into the dating field a handful of times. The last time was not the charm, inasmuch as she became engaged to a high-profile criminal lawyer who enjoyed more than his share of “undercover” work, the undercover in this case being sheets. After that disaster, Kate dedicated herself to building up her career and completely ignoring her personal life.”  Ha! We just know THAT won’t last, but you’ll have to read Fixed Up with Mr. Right? to say I told ya so!

You also won’t want to miss New York Times and USA Today bestselling author, Brenda Jackson’s romance double-header this month with Spontaneous (Harlequin Blaze)and Hidden Pleasures (Kimani Romance).  Of Spontaneous she says, “I’ve been anxiously waiting to be able to write Duan Jeffries’s story—and I’m thrilled to introduce him in my very first Blaze novel. My readers first met the Jeffries clan when Reggie Westmoreland fell in love with Olivia Jeffries in my Silhouette Desire book titled Tall, Dark…Westmoreland! Since then, I couldn’t get Olivia’s two older brothers, Duan and Terrence, out of my mind. Terrence made his debut in my Kimani novel Temperatures Rising, and now, finally, it’s Duan’s turn.”  Read the first chapter here. (bring ice!)

And Harlequin American Romance is launching a 6-book continuity miniseries from June (available in May on eHarlequin) to November, called The Codys: First Family of Rodeo. The Codys’ are a wealthy ranching family with strong ties to the rodeo. Six siblings compete in rodeo events and find love in various western settings.  This miniseries is full of drama, emotion, family secrets, pregnancies and babies, weddings, and hunky cowboys! I know, I had you at rodeo, right?

The first three books are:
Walker: The Rodeo Legend by Rebecca Winters (June)
Dexter: Honorable Cowboy by Marin Thomas (July)
Dusty: Wild Cowboy by Cathy McDavid (August)

If Suspense & Adventure is more up your alley, then you’ll be wanting to check out the all-new trilogy from Harlequin Intrigue, Texas Maternity: Hostages kicking off with Delores Fossen’s The Baby’s Guardian and don’t miss Kerry Connor’s emotional and gripping Shivers miniseries title,  Stranger in a Small Town of which she says, “All of my characters mean a great deal to me, but I especially felt for these two people, two lost souls who find a connection when neither expects it.”  Read more here.  Kerry and Delores often blog at eHarlequin and you can catch up with on the Intrigue Author blog.

On a girls weekend in Las Vegas, best friends Alex, Molly, Serena and Jayne (sadly NOT me) are supposed to just have fun and forget men, but they end up meeting their perfect matches in Harlequin Romance’s new Girls’ Weekend in Vegas miniseries.  Check out Book One, Saving Cinderella! by Myrna Mackenzie, followed by Vegas Pregnancy Surprise by Shirley Jump (July), Inconveniently Wed! by Jackie Braun (August) and Wedding Date with the Best Man by Melissa McClone (September).

I promise to be back with more NEXT week, until then, tell me more of what you like to read and which stories you’re looking forward to most!

Happy Reading,

Jayne

Community Manager
eHarlequin.com

Hi, everybody:

I’m Liz Lounsbury…

I’m Barbara Daly…

…and as a team, we’re Daly Thompson. Dream Daddy, the last of our three-book series for Harlequin American Romance, will be on the shelf next month.

Why would anyone want to collaborate? We wish we had a dollar for each time we’ve fielded that question. So how did this collaboration come about?

Serendipity, we think. We’ve been email friends for eight years. We both wrote Harlequin Temptations, and when the line closed, we tried writing in other genre. Then…

Liz: When I asked Barbara to critique a manuscript, we began talking about our strengths and weaknesses. I was hearing, “love your plot, but am not intrigued by your voice.” Barbara said that in rejection letters before she published, she heard over and over, “the plot won’t hold water, but we love your voice.”

Barbara: I had to summon up all my courage to ask Liz if she’d like to try combining our talents. I was so relieved when she didn’t say, “Are you kidding?  Why would I want to do that?”  I’d been working on a series idea set in Vermont, and in an email I wrote to Liz, giving her my ideas for the books, I said, “He finds out he’s being audited by the IRS, and I haven’t the faintest idea what happens next.” Did I need help from Liz? Desperately.

Liz: Daly Thompson was born, and she found a home at Harlequin American. The books I plotted and Barbara wrote, although we bailed each other out many times, have received Romantic Times Magazine’s coveted 4 ½ Top Pick ratings for the first and third books, and a 4 for the middle book.

Barbara: Each of these small victories has made us more confident that we write better as a team than either of us did separately. I tell Liz that writing with a prefab plot in front of me is like a dream come true.

Liz: The way we began this series was that I put the plots together while Barbara began writing the first three chapters of the first book to submit with our proposal. When it was accepted, Barbara continued the writing, sending me pages as she wrote them.

Barbara: Liz nearly resorted to a lasso to keep me on track. We didn’t fight, thank goodness, but we did occasionally disagree. Fortunately, we both have southern backgrounds, and those emails were long ones, since we expressed ourselves like this: “I feel that if you wrote Daniel a little gentler in the black moment scene…” instead of, “He’s brutal! What were you thinking?”

Liz: And Barbara had this way of saying, “I’m afraid I didn’t write this exactly as you plotted it, but I was thinking that if this happened before that happened…” And each of always ended with, “What do you think?”

Barbara: When I got stuck or had time constraints, Liz roughed out scenes which I rewrote in my own voice, since we’d promised our editor, Johanna Raisanen, a single voice. I don’t know what I would have done without Liz’s help.

Daly Thompson’s three-book series includes One of a Kind Dad, published in August, 2009,  Surprise Dad, March, 2010, and Dream Daddy will come out in May.

Liz: We’ll tell you a little bit about DREAM DADDY. Ian Foster’s a grumpy sheep farmer who wants to be left alone. Tansy Appletree, the mayor of their tiny town, is gregarious, enthusiastic, refuses to let him hide out and generally drives him crazy. But she drives him crazy in some other ways, too—just wait and see what happens.

Barbara: I’d been thinking about the series idea for such a long time that I already knew Ian inside and out. Liz’s plot gave me Tansy’s voice and personality, so when I began writing, it was easy to keep them in character. How did they manage to fall in love while engaging in a constant tug-of-war, Tansy bugging Ian to get off the farm and into the social life of their tiny Vermont town, and Ian resisting every step of the way? Because Tansy simply wouldn’t take no for an answer! Let’s hear it for strong women!

We look forward to hearing from you strong women out there.

by Jayne Hoogenberk, eHarlequin Community Manager

With the New Year comes new series, and I thought I’d share the scoop on some of the exciting, new, not-to-be-missed continuities and miniseries to be found starting up this month.

Starting off the year in American Romance is Kayla’s Daddy by Laura Bradford. This is Laura’s first book for Harlequin! Not only is this a wonderful story about a long-lost letter that kindles one romance and rekindles another, it’s the first book in American Romance’s 12-book, year-long thematic continuity, BABIES & BACHELORS USA. A whole year worth of adorable babies and hunky heroes!

And if we’re not talking babies in American Romance, we’re talking cowboys!! Hill Country Hero by Ann DeFee has a hunky hero who’s a cowboy and a football player! This author’s fun stories always have a sense of humour—and this one is set in everyone’s favourite part of Texas, the Hill Country.

Bestselling author Lynne Graham is back with a fabulous new trilogy in Harlequin Presents with PREGNANT BRIDES. She popped over to the I Heart Presents blog to discuss Book One, Desert Prince, Bride of Innocence and why she loves to make her character suffer…interesting reading! Also available this month from Presents is the all-new AT HIS SERVICE miniseries featuring Cinderella heroines and billionaire heroes, all beginning with the passionate rags-to-riches story Powerful Italian, Penniless Housekeeper by India Grey. I don’t know about you but I LOVE to escape into Presents…glamorous settings, passionate men and more money than you can imagine…. The perfect recipe for romance!

Also, USA Today bestselling author Marie Ferrarella leads an all-new 6-book continuity about a fertility clinic and the romance conceived there with Prescription for Romance in the new THE BABY CHASE series in Silhouette Special Edition.These contemporary romances from the Silhouette Special Edition line will strike a chord with you as heroines find the balance between their work lives and personal lives on the way to true love!

Meet six gorgeous men in Harlequin Romance this month in the new INTERNATIONAL GROOMS miniseries. Each title is set in a different country or setting and the authors have created different tips, travelogues and information on the settings that you can read about in their blog… This month also features a debut author, and Cara Colter’s “proposal” book, which features the winning proposal from the eHarlequin Competition “Diamond Proposal” contest we hosted last year. We are making the romantic month of February…the month of Harlequin Romance!

From Superromance and Romantic Times Career Achievement award winning author C.J. Carmichael, we have a three-book miniseries, THE FOX & FISHER DETECTIVE AGENCY, running from January to March. The titles are: Perfect Partners, The P.I. Contest and Receptionist Under Cover (available in March). I’m told these books have a light mystery element and are solid, satisfying reads. More than a romantic relationship, it’s mainstream romance with the promise of happy ever after!

If you’re in the mood for a little intrigue then check out the BODYGUARD OF THE MONTH, a new 12 month continuity starting off with The Socialite and the Bodyguard by Dana Martin. These stories feature rugged, tough bodyguards who are more than capable of protecting their innocent women. Tune in every month for edge-of-your-seat reads and a new powerful bodyguard adventure available from Harlequin Intrigue.

You can find more spine-tingling reading with Twin Targets by Marta Perry. This book is the first book in a new six-book Love Inspired Suspense continuity series, PROTECTING THE WITNESSES, which focuses on looming danger and forever love in the witness protection program. With a flood of unsolved murders, those connected to the program are running scared.

And if your tastes run to Historical the editors also recommend The Duke’s Redemption by Carla Capshaw, a terrific story about a British nobleman who comes to South Carolina to find his brother’s murderer and falls in love with a young colonial woman—who might just be a spy!

I’ll be back next week with some more series to check out until then, what series are you most looking forward to this year?