Raine Balkera - Romance Author

Hi, there! This is Week 16 of the MFRW Author Blogs 52-Week Blog Challenge , and this week's topic is: Family, Friends, and Pets I've Written Into My Books. My immediate response is NONE, but something tells me I included my first dog in my first novel, and it probably sounds even worse that I don't remember, right? I know it is a dog that finally brings my H & h together near the ending, but I don't recall if I used Yukon or just a random doggy to do the job. Elelur.com Anyway, it isn't that I don't like the idea of using people I know and inserting them into my stories. For me, it just isn't Romance-inducing to think about Family, if that makes any sense to you dear readers. Thinking about my mom or dad while writing a Romance novel is counter-productive... the same way thinking about either one of them during sex would be. Right? However, and more and more, I've come to like the idea of slipping myself or someone I...

AUTHOR BLOG CHALLENGE To be honest, some of the Post Topics for this challenge do not apply or interest me (right now) so I'm skipping around with this one. Character Inspiration A lot of different factors go into the creation of any, one character in any of my novels. Most often, however, they are based in-part on someone I actually know who went through some type of adventure-mishap-calamity that intrigued me to the point of devising an entire novel derived from said instance. For example, in Sing to Me , Liv is loosely based on a girl from my high school years who was attacked for being 'too pretty' as the truth became known. She was transferred to Franklin after the insane kidnap and hours of mindless torture the girl suffered at the hands of an immature girl who couldn't quite deal with her own insecurities. Liv's circumstances in my novel are not dramatized but my own idea of something similar in order to avoid a lawsuit. Neal, th...