Authorpreneur Dashboard – Sue Phillips
That Wilder Man
Romance
When floods hit the Midwest once again, the one-hundred-year-old McKenzie boarding house may finally see its demise as widow Elizabeth McKenzie fights to keep water from seeping through the basement walls. If she can't keep the basement dry, the women who are secretly sheltered in the building will be out on the street. Reluctantly, she tracks down the only person available to help her save the shelter—pilot Max "Wildman" Wilder.
Book Bubbles from That Wilder Man
Max faces the truth about the past
His high school sweetheart had married his best friend, Johnny, while Max was overseas. Now she is a widow with two kids, living with Johnny's mom, Bernice, who knows the truth about the past. But is Max ready to hear it?
Max never wanted to see her again.
Liza Jane stands on the front porch of his family's farmhouse, begging him to help save the old McKenzie building in town. He had flown his cargo plane to the Midwest to ferry flood relief supplies. The last thing he wanted to do was rescue a building belonging to the man who had stolen Liza Jane from him.
The Inspiration Behind The Book
In the summer of 1993, Romance Writers of America held the annual conference in St. Louis, Missouri. Unfortunately, the Midwest was in the middle of one The Great Flood of ʼ93. Synchronicity led me to Alton, Illinois where I met Sam Roberts, one of several men trying to save an old brick building that housed a women’s shelter. The next day, USA Today ran a front-page photo of Alton, announcing the flood had crested the previous afternoon, August 1—the same time as our group had been there. I had chills. Not only had I witnessed the Great Flood, I had stood at the river’s edge during a historical moment. After I returned home, I wrote a letter to Sam, asking if the building had been saved. (It had.) However, the electrical facility had flooded, shutting down power to the town for more than a week. He finished with a PS: “Why don’t you write a romance about a local guy manning the pumps during a flood who meets a sexy lady in jeans and cowboy boots? Four years after my trip to Alton, Harlequin Temptation published the manuscript with the new title, THAT WILDER MAN.
This Time Together
Romance
WHAT HAPPENS WHEN a present-day lady lawyer wakes up in an 1890s mountain cabin with a grizzly-faced recluse, then learns she is there to defend him against a murder charge? Entertainment lawyer KATHERINE MARSHALL views the whole idea of time-travel as pure Hollywood escapism, but she figures the only solution to her bizarre predicament is to right a century-old mistake: the hanging of an innocent man. FLYNT AVERY, a student of ancient Indian mysticism, finds himself believing in the claims of this fascinating woman he calls Kate—that she has somehow come from another time. But when he learns that his acquittal means she will return to her life in 1992, Flynt would rather lose his life to a hangman's noose than lose the woman he loves. Re-issue. Previously published by Jove.
Book Bubbles from This Time Together
Inspired By A True Crime
While reading the Dunsmuir Centennial Book, I came across the brief history of Louis Napolean Girard: “In the early 1890s, the family [of Louis Girard] moved to Castella, where he was town constable. While he was constable, a woman and her child were fatally stabbed by her husband. The wife dragged herself to the Girards’ home where she died on the steps. Louis jailed the man. When the news spread to the newly growing Dunsmuir, a lynch mob was formed and they came to Castella on a handcar. They tied Constable Girard, took the prisoner, and hanged him on a tree in front of the schoolhouse.” As with most writers, I began to wonder, “What if . . . ? What if there was an innocent man accused of such a crime? What if a woman saw the newspaper clipping about his mistaken execution? From these questions came the story of Flynt Avery and Kate Marshall in This Time Together.
Mystic Memories
Romance
WHEN A FOURTH-GRADE CLASS of school children spend the night aboard a refurbished nineteenth century merchant brig in Dana Point, California, one of them disappears in the night. After a three-month fruitless investigation, the distraught parents are led to private investigator, CARA EDWARDS, who relies on her sixth sense as much her common sense to solve a case. But when her psychic connection to the lost boy draws her back to 1833 California, she must find a way to bring them both back to the future. CAPTAIN BLAKE MASTERS has sailed the oceans of the world for nearly twenty years, never once looking back on his dark childhood memories. When Cara enters his life and opens the door to his forgotten past, can he trust her psychic insight to lead him on an uncharted course toward a destiny of love and compassion? Re-issue. Previously published by Berkley Jove.
Book Bubbles from Mystic Memories
Aboard a brig named the Pilgrim II...
Mystic Memories had a strange and unusual beginning long before I thought of writing this story… In January 1987, I was the scout leader for a troop of third-grade girls, who participated in an overnight adventure aboard the brig Pilgrim II, a replica of the original ship that Richard Henry Dana Jr. had sailed around the Horn to California in 1834. The following morning, I recalled a vivid dream in which I had gone back in time. Nearly ten years passed before I took the thread of a dream and wove it into the story you see today.
Dark Covenant
Romance
An ancient prophecy. A dark family secret. A promise to a dying sister. On a Pennsylvania mountain road, young Caroline Hartmann encounters the mysterious Baron Merrick Von Hayden who has traveled from Germany to wed her older sister in a marriage contract between the two families. The beautiful Ilse allows herself to be swept off her feet and taken to Europe, only to learn the Hartmanns and Von Haydens possessed dark powers that had faded over time. Convinced she has conceived the spawn of the devil who will cause death and destruction with supernatural powers, Isle slips into madness as she pleads for her sister to take her baby back to America. Unaware of the sinister maze of dark secrets and forbidden passions around her, Caroline devises a clever scheme to pass the baby off as her own and escape. But terrible secrets are revealed and dangerous threats are made against her life.
Book Bubbles from Dark Covenant
How my first book was published by a major New Yor
This book evolved from a college writing class when my instructor, Frank Gaspar, directed us to write three narrative points of view of the same scene. We were limited to one page for each viewpoint. That night, I settled into a chair with a pen and paper. After two hours of frustrated attempts, and a pile of crumpled sheets of paper on the floor around me, I finally had a the first line of what is now the first chapter— "The sky was cloudless. The Atlantic rippled blue-green, speckled with froth. Gulls cried out as the promenade deck..." As I wrote, I felt as if the words were not mine, but that of an elderly woman telling her story of the first time she had crossed the Atlantic when she was young. If I closed my eyes, I could see her sitting with me on a porch swing. I lost track of time. When I stopped, four hours had passed! I stared at the pile of pages I had written, wondering what had happened.
