I didn’t know what to expect when I sent my literary baby off to be published.

Like the writerly mother I’d become in the process of penning ‘Beyond Those Hills: an Officer and a Lady’, I was afraid something terrible might happen to it, now that it no longer was hidden in the protective shell of my computer, safe from critics, mean reviewers and readers who would wonder why on God’s green earth I chose to write about something from which I’m so far removed. In the year following the release of my first novel, I’ve encountered reactions ranging from sheer skepticism, dismissal, and suspicion over the content of the book to wonder. “How can you know all this, since you’ve never served?” many have asked.
How?

Isn’t the first duty of a writer to research what she intends on writing about? Wouldn’t you extensively read on a topic about which you feel unabashedly passionate? I did, passionate as I was, and still am about the military. I’ve read my share of military fictions, non-fictions, and romance, some great, others not so much. But as satisfying as delving into the good ones was, as enthralled as I was by tales of modern-day warriors falling for women like you and I, I ended up feeling like something was missing… I had come to realize that there never was a female central character in any of the books I’ve read, at least one who could fire a gun, lead men and kick butts as well as the men do. One who would be one the guys, not one merely involved with one of them, yet remain the lady her mother raised her to be.

So I created my own alpha female, Lt. Laura P. Armitage, USN, a bright, no nonsense, half Caucasian, half Hispanic, young woman who embarks on a self-discovery journey when she volunteers for Special Operations (SEAL) support. With her confidence in her skills and her allegiance to the flag put to the test when she is thrown in a den of full-time warriors, she approaches every challenge with combat intensity and a desire to win. She’s also aware that her tenacity may never be enough to earn her the respect of her teammates and her contemptuous commanding officer, Lt. T.J. Wilkins (follow him here). Between the apparently unreciprocated love she feels for her tormented mentor, the secretive Jim Marshall, Wilkins’ unsuccessfully concealed and unreciprocated lust for her, and the tragic loss from which she’s hoping to recover, there are much private battles for Lt. Armitage to ponder.

I relish tales of damsels in distress whom handsome, tattoo-ed soldiers/sailors will rescue then love, as much as the next girl. But this is 2010 and there ought to be a designated spot in the pantheon of imaginary naval warriors for a naval warrior who happens to be a female. Don’t you worry, die-hard fans of stories involving rescued damsels! Even a tough cookie of Lt. Armitage’s caliber still needs to be rescued, and rescued she will be since two men compete for the honors. After all, hasn’t someone once said that no matter how secure, accomplished or successful we are, something in us longs to feel safe?

I concocted a dish full of the ingredients I love: romance, suspense, controversy, action and history… ‘Beyond Those Hills’, my Cold War era tribute to all females in uniform, past, present and future, was truly a labor of patience and passion.

I hope you will have as much pleasure reading it as I had writing it.

As someone who has reaped the benefits of the military education system, I can honestly say the GI Bill is one of the best out there. Now that the rules have changed, however, it’s critical that all veterans look into just what that means for them. The below information came from Diana Bakowski, who asked me to help spread the word to our Romance Roll Call Readers.

d. The Post-9/11 GI Bill offers terrific benefits, but they are not automatic. The actions taken today will simplify the process and help the VA expedite benefit payments. I’m contacting you today on behalf of The United States Department of Veterans Affairs to stress the importance of completing all of the necessary steps to ensure the benefits deserved will be paid in a timely fashion! Here’s what needs to be done:

* Check your eligibility online at www.gibill.va.gov
* Submit your application VA Form 22-1990 or 22-1990E.
* After you have enrolled in school, check with your School Certifying Official (SCO) to confirm that your VA enrollment certification has been sent to the VA on your behalf. This form certifies your actual enrollment period and triggers your payment. *Here’s a little hint: the school’s designated SCO will be found in the Financial Aid Department, Admissions and Records Department, or Registrar’s Office.)
* And last but not least, enjoy the education benefits you earned!

If you or a loved one is planning to use the Post-9/11 GI Bill to attend school anytime this year, action must be taken today. Please let me know if you would be interested in working together to ensure your readers are securing the benefits they are eligible for. For more information please visit: http://www.gibill.va.gov or text GIBill to 99702.

And thank you for your service to our country.

I’m kind of surprised to find myself here today. I didn’t set out to write military romances, and to tell you the truth, I’m not sure I do write them. In my books, there’s darn little action of the military kind, though I try to offer plenty of the more intimate kind.

I write romance, pure and simple.

“If you didn’t want to write military romance,” you might ask, “what’s the point of writing a series starring the ultimate warriors, Navy SEALs?”

The point, dear friends, is that SEALs make great alpha heroes in a character-driven romance.
SEALs are real; my heroes are products of my imagination. It’s a distinction I never lose sight of, but anytime I need someone larger than life and yet engagingly, touchingly human, I troll through the many SEAL memoires I’ve accumulated. Though the stories they tell might be old, human nature doesn’t change. I’m reading for character—and by golly, I find it.

My mental picture Davy Graziano, the hero of SEALed with a Ring, began when I noticed how unselfconsciously aware SEALs were of other men’s attractiveness and how frankly they expressed their appreciation. I think its their competitive nature that makes them size up every man they meet, but it’s disconcerting the first time you read a description, by a clearly heterosexual man, of his admiration of another man’s butt size.

Being me, I instantly wondered, how would it feel to be a slam dunk winner in the looks contest on top of enjoying a SEAL’s über self-confidence?

Suddenly I could see Davy. Understanding full well that he has a Neapolitan masculine beauty that would have made Michelangelo reach for his chisel, Davy’s reaction is to laugh. See, Davy likes sex. Not seduction. Not the thrill of the chase. Sex. Being handsome confers no advantage at all in becoming a SEAL, but being a SEAL sends a handsome man’s ability to attract women off the charts. He gets the best of the best. Works for him.

My challenge as a writer was to show his unconscious sense of entitlement without making him look like a jerk. Because he isn’t….Well, okay, he is…a little…in the beginning. But he’s also an absolute sweetie.

That’s the other thing about SEALs. Although alpha to core, they are not stereotypical, emotionally walled-off, “make my day” Rambos. They easily admit that they have tender feelings.

And they have an extraordinary joie de vivre, an enthusiasm for all of life that fuels their never-say-die attitude.

Davy turned out to be perfect for a marriage of convenience plot I had in mind. Excerpt here.

A few days ago in these pages, Jessica Scott spoke of the difficulty of overcoming the perception that romantic suspense and military romance were synonymous. I understand. Even though I, of all people, know better, I wondered about my fitness to contribute to this blog since my books don’t fit the stereotype either. Fortunately as the TV series Army Wives has shown, there is a market for military stories that aren’t action-packed.

Now I’m thinking, this blog might be an excellent forum to discuss the subcategory: tender, of the subgenre: military romance. In your mind is military romance the same as romantic suspense except the hero is military?

Would a military romance without suspense appeal to you?

What catch phrases can Jessica and I use to let people know right up front what kind of reading experience we are offering?

Today is release day for A Taste of Liberty, the second book in my Task Force 125 series so pardon me for being a bit excited.  Squeee! 

A Taste of Liberty follows The Path to Freedom and continues the story of Sarah Stevens and her team as they aim to take out a major arms dealer.

Following is the first chapter:

Sarah blinked back the sweat that rolled from her forehead and into her eyes. Her hair fell from her ponytail in long locks sticky with perspiration and clung to her cheeks. Her breath was hard and fast as she dodged hits and blocked kicks just to keep up with the man she was fighting.
My God! He’s a machine.
He had about thirty pounds on her but he was wiry and fast. He was throwing everything he had into the mix. He started with Muay Thai boxing, but, when he did a Capoeira flip and spun his body in mid air from a standing position, a chill raced up her spine. She’d never seen anyone as fast as this guy. She threw punches at his face, shoulders and stomach and never made contact. He’d dodge, twist, spin and jump just barely avoiding her hits and kicks. His years of training and experience in hand-to-hand combat were obvious.
Focus, Sarah. Focus.
The midday sun in the Nevada desert beat down with a steady blast of 102 degrees. Each breath was like taking a drag off a bonfire. The heat, dehydration and near exhaustion wore her down, and Sarah slid into a reactive, defensive mode where her movements were automatic. She knew she couldn’t win this way but the bright sun lulled her into not caring.
Her opponent flashed a wicked smile. His eyes sparkled like the trillions of grains of sand glinting around them. The relentless sun and heat slowed her down and he made the most of it. “Come on, sugarlips. Is that all you got?” He spun to his left.
The pain of a powerful blow to her right shoulder woke her from her daze, and her adrenaline surged.
Son of a bitch!
His teeth glistened as he grinned. “Papa’s gonna take you to school.”
Her jaw tensed. “Not today, Papa.” Sarah saw her opening for a kick and took it. She put all of her weight behind a roundhouse kick aimed for his neck and a clothesline takedown but the soft sand beneath her feet shifted and she slipped, kicking him in the head instead.
They both fell.
Sarah scrambled to stand quickly. As she did, she turned to see the man still lying on the ground, unconscious. She dropped to her knees beside him. A chill raced up her spine despite the heat. “Jason? Jason!” She placed two fingers on his neck.
Good heartbeat. Damn. I’m gonna need some help with this sandbag.
This wasn’t the first time one of them had been knocked out when they were sparring. It was becoming all too common as Sarah’s fighting skills advanced. She walked over to her Jeep and pulled her phone out of the door pocket. She pressed the number One and then the Send button.
I hope he answers.

The Path to Freedom and A Taste of Liberty are both available at Sapphire Blue Publishing.

We are the new kids on the block and we have attitude but we back it up with years of inside information collected from both sides of the publishing table. Our sole purpose is to introduce books that make a statement with their unique voice, strong plot lines, and complex, well developed characters. At Accomplice Press our excellence shines through in the tiny details and this produces polished literary works.

After doing extensive research we know what the readers want and we are going to give it to them without worrying about selling millions of copies out of some mammoth warehouse. We are an independent, boutique style publisher and our focus is on the skilled authors and their target audiences, you the readers. The Partners at AP have decided to launch a series of specialty lines to answer the growing demand for something innovative and new. Curvalicious is our first endeavor and it will be a romance line spotlighting plus-size heroines but their size will not be the focus of the plot line. As publishers and women we feel that there are countless romance lovers who don’t see real life females, like themselves, portrayed in the books they read. We plan to change that with this specialty romance series.

Curvalicious women are voluptuous, beautiful, strong, sexy and intelligent. These inspirational main characters will always get the man of their dreams without losing weight or changing who they are on the outside. Romance is all about fantasy; our stories will keep the home fires burning even on the coldest night of the year. We are offering two different heat levels for our reader’s pleasure. Curvalicious Sweet is romance with sweet or sensual love scenes, but no explicit language or sex and Curvalicious Spicy is erotic romance containing explicit language and sex scenes. The stories will be available in e-book format with periodic print anthologies.

Accomplice Press is shaking up the publishing world one book at a time and you can be part of the revolution. We are holding a Curvalicious writing competition which began on Valentine’s Day and ends at midnight on May 14, 2010. We’ll be accepting stories for both Sweet and Spicy heat levels and on May 28, 2010 two winning entries will be contracted to be published in ebook format. The top three submissions of each category will also be included in the first Curvalicious print anthology. The specific guidelines for Sweet and Spicy submissions, word count and formatting requirements are all available at our website accomplicepress.com. All contest entries must be sent to curvecontest@accomplicepress.com. We are also holding an “open call” to all authors, so this is the perfect time to submit that manuscript you have written. Just remember Accomplice Press is NOT a self-publishing company.

It is an exciting time at Accomplice Press and we will be releasing more lines as the year progresses. There will be Silver Sirens, which will be romance about female characters over the age of 40, a Young Adult line called Fierce and a line dedicated to “men in Uniform”. Please check out accomplicepress.com for more information. Also we will be attending Romconinc.com in Denver this July, please look for us there.

Good luck authors!
Karen Jones
Public Relations Manager for Accomplice Press

This week, the New York Times announced the recent death of Major General Jeanne Holm. Major General Holm’s contributions on behalf of women in the U.S. Air Force as well as women in all our U.S. Armed Forces are well documented. Her biography has a permanent place on the Official U.S. Air Force website. She is also a member of the National Women’s Hall of Fame. I won’t attempt to offer you a biography or an obituary of General Holm because they have both been done. What I would like to offer you is how General Holm, though never a personal acquaintance of mine, had a significant impact on my life.

When I joined the U.S. Air Force in 1991, I had every intention of becoming a linguist. I had the ASVAB & DLAB scores and the written job guarantee to prove it. As so often happens, the needs of the Air Force superseded my desire to travel the world as a brilliant linguist and I was given a career that needed bodies. It had only been six years since women had been allowed into the U.S.A.F. Security Police. They had been doing Law Enforcement duties prior to that but the Security Police (now Security Forces) were the infantry of the Air Force. They needed bodies and it didn’t matter what sex they were so I found myself in the Security Police. A “tread” or a “droid” as our Law Enforcement brothers and sisters preferred to call us but they always called us when the job was too big and they needed backup.

General Holm raised the female numbers in the Air Force. She also made it possible for women to be more than nurses. Security Police was one of the few holdouts when it came to women joining because of the combat nature of the job. We were trained in what was politely called “Air Base Ground Defense”. Over the years, the fluff has been removed from the title of our training and it is now simply called “Ground Combat Skills”.

It was because of General Holm’s work that I was able to do the many things I did to distinguish myself in the Air Force. I was a dead-on shot with an M-60 and frighteningly accurate with the Mark-19 and M-203 grenade launchers. I was also handy as a Fire Team Leader and Security Controller. I worked every facet of nuclear security during my eight years in the U.S.A.F.

I hardly think General Holm even considered me when she joined the Army Air Corps but the fact is that my personal history would be far less interesting had she not gone before me to pave the way for women in the U.S. Air Force. She will always have my undying respect and gratitude.

General Holm, I salute you.

I know what it says at the beginning of the book. All the characters and events are purely fiction, blah, blah, blah.

As I was tweeting with an ex Navy friend the other day, we realized we both had the same problem:

Nobody believes the true stories and we have no choice but to fictionalize them!

Let me let you in on a little secret: I’ve met so many characters in my nineteen years (eight active duty and eleven as a military wife) that I just have to put some of them into books.

How can I not?

There was that corporal in the Royal Air Force, that Buck Sergeant from South Carolina, the good old boy from Virginia, the trust fund baby from Texas, the Fratalian from Maine, the farm boy from Kansas, the cowboy from South Dakota…and that’s just the first four years!

The fact is, we’ve met more characters than we can count – and likely had just as many adventures with those characters.

When we put the characters and adventures on the page with a plot, a few hooks and some tension, they make for great fiction but we can never share the truth.

My story “The Path to Freedom” was reviewed once by a reviewer who found only one aspect of the story completely unbelievable – the idea of a good looking woman getting a free drink from a Las Vegas bartender just to sit at the bar. The premise of the overweight cop being sent to a top secret CIA training camp in the Nevada desert wasn’t questionable at all. It was that free margarita that made the reviewer call “bulls***”.

They also had a bit of a problem with so many good looking guys in the story but I chalk that up to their never being posted on a fire team with three Air Force cops with good haircuts who run with forty plus pounds of gear and guns all day.

This is why I have to write fiction – nobody believes the truth.

Besides, who wouldn’t want to romance the characters I’ve met?

Not everyone has heard yet the story of the three Navy SEALs being court marshaled for allegedly “hitting” a terrorist in Iraq. Here is their story:
“It makes me happy when hearing about a terrorist detainee getting a split lip, courtesy of a Navy SEAL who captured him. Especially when the detainee is the accused brains behind the grisly ambush of four U.S. contractors in Fallujah in 2004, their bodies burned inside their vehicle, dragged through the streets by a chanting mob, then hanged from a Euphrates River bridge. The cruel episode was photographed and posted online as a warning to the Big Bad West: Thus to our enemies. If, as the government claims, Ahmed Hashim Abed is the guy behind the horror, he should thank Allah he has survived long enough to be able to accuse one of his captors of punching him in the stomach. Or the face.” (courtesy of reader Rhonda Ringstad)
Petty Officer 1st class Julio Huertas, 28, pleaded not guilty to charges of dereliction, impeding an investigation and lying to investigators. Petty Officer 2nd Class Jonathan Keefe of Yorktown, 25, is charged with dereliction and lying. These two SEALs will face the man they “hit” in a trial now set in Camp Victory, Iraq on April 5th.
A third SEAL, Petty Officer 2nd Class Matthew McCabe, 24, deferred a plea on charges of hitting a detainee, dereliction of duty and lying to investigators.
The SEALs are attracting much support in the form of 350,000 members on a Facebook pages and protestors at the court house. The mother of one of the slain contractors drove from Ohio to offer the men “everything I can give them.”
I personally feel that this situation is ridiculous. From now on, every captured terrorist will cry that he has been “mistreated.” Do terrorists have that kind of consideration for their victims? Hell, no. Let’s stop wasting government money taking our warriors to court for doing their job and rounding up the scum of the earth. Please show your support for these three Navy SEALs by signing a petition online and/or writing your congressman and senator.
My thanks,
Marliss Melton
Navy SEALs Series Team Twelve

As veterans there is one thing in common we carry with us throughout our lives and that is our time in service. Whether it was just a few years or an entire career, it gives us a common language and a common bond. We were and always shall be brothers and sisters in arms.

Although our service rarely comes up in cocktail conversation I find it really is something I enjoy knowing about people.
I recently watched the much anticipated premiere of Human Target on Fox, starring Mark Valley. Being a major action/adventure fan (as well as an action/adventure writer) I was anxious to find out more about the series after thoroughly enjoying the pilot.

As it happens I saw an interview with Mark Valley and McG, the executive producer, that was quite enlightening. They were old Army buddies from Desert Storm. I liked that. I researched a little further and discovered that Mark Valley is a West Point graduate with a degree in mathematics.

I didn’t intend this to be a commercial for Fox or the show, Human Target. My point is, Mark Valley is one of us. I would like him even if he weren’t – his writers are writing great script, he’s easy on the eyes and he plays a great alpha hero. I hope that someday actors who are veterans will play the action heroes that I write but, until then, I hope we can help a brother out and keep Mark Valley working on a great show.

Check it out: http://fox.com/humantarget

Lisa Pietsch is a freelance writer and novelist. Her interests include terrorists and terrorism, the small arms trade, human trafficking and drug trafficking. All of these topics are represented in the Task Force 125 books which are stories of espionage and paramilitary operations centered around the character of Sarah Stevens who is recruited into the CIA’s Special Activities Division. You can find more information on Lisa’s service and her books at www.LisaPietsch.com.