And our Sue's Clues Mystery Author is:

Photo susansquires.com

Our Mystery Author this round is Susan Squires. When she is not working in the corporate world as an executive at a Fortune 500 company, she is working hard to create great romance for all of us to enjoy. Read on to hear what she has to say about her career, her writing and a little about everything else.

When you are done, visit Susan at her website: http://www.susansquires.com/

Thanks, Susan!

1. Tell us about being an executive at a Fortune 500 company. What do you do? It seems a far cry from being a novelist.

Believe it or not, no one has EVER asked me this in the ten years I've been published! And it's a strange story indeed. In spite of the fact that I have a Masters in English Literature from UCLA, somehow I ended up heading up business systems in care management for a huge insurance company with 35,000 employees. I like what I do though. I toil in medical management where nurses work with members to help them manage their chronic conditions, like diabetes or coronary artery disease, before they need to go to the hospital and help people with complicated health problems manage the health care system when they've had some kind of catastrophic incident and maybe have landed in the hospital. My team of a hundred people or so helps the designers of medical management programs describe what they want (and sometimes I tell them what they SHOULD want or what they can have) to the IT people, and I manage the projects that help them get it. We've delivered applications that identify members with gaps in care (like not getting Beta Blockers after a heart attack, which everyone knows saves lives) and pass them to the desktop we designed for nurses to work with members, and on-line programs for members to learn about what healthy habits can affect their conditions. Part of my team does reporting too. I think the reason I got into this odd corner of expertise, is that it's really like translating language between clinical people and technical people. In some respects, I'm just a translator.

2. And you've got two Belgian sheepdogs and a warmblood mare. Beautiful dogs, but definately not little! And a warmblood mare—do you ride? Do the dogs come along when you do? Not being very knowledgeable where horses are concerned, is there a difference between a warmblood mare and a regular mare?

I have ridden since I was 21 and my mother could no longer tell me having a horse was impractical. In my younger days I did eventing (like in the Olympics with cross country, dressage and stadium jumping). Was I insane? As I got older I still jumped, but didn't tear across country anymore. When I got a horse that liked dressage but not jumping, she was such a wonderful horse I went with her, and gave up jumping too. Her name was Finlandia (like the vodka!) out of Martini, out of Cocktail. Warmblood horses are crosses between "hot bloods" (read thoroughbred horses, like the ones who race at the track) and cold bloods. Those are draft horses like Percherons or those lovely Clydesdales from the commercials. Finny was a Trakahner—lots of hot blood and a little cold. So she was a big, beautiful girl with a lot of fire in her, but with an inherently steady temperment. She was a dressage champion and when I got her, when she was 15, she had settled into a beautiful ride who knew more than I did. So she was a wonderul teacher as well. Every once in a while, I would push a button and get something unexpected—like a pirouette. I was so lucky to have her. She passed three weeks ago unexpectedly, and (after a rough three weeks) I'm trying to decide whether I'm up for trying to find another horse. It's unlikely I'll ever find her equal. And as I look back over the concussions, two batches of broken ribs and a knee reconstruction, I'm....thinking. I'm also involved with training our dogs. And there are a lot fewer injuries!

3. I see that your husband is also a novelist. How does that work having two writers in the house? Do you bounce ideas around together or help each other out? Have you ever thought about co-writing a book with him?

It is absolutely GREAT living with a novelist. Harry writes supernatural mysteries as HR Knight. He understands what it's like to be on deadline, or totally frustrated with your story or your characters. It's like having your very own critique group liviing with you. We bounce story ideas, he reads my second drafts (no one should read my first drafts!). And if you're stuck, there's someone there to drag you out of the swamp. Before we were published, we used to be in critique groups together. That made us much tougher, and able to take criticism from each other. The only rule now is that you have to say something nice first. If a marriage can stand being in critique groups together, it's pretty solid. We have thought of writing together. But we write in such different styles, (and at different paces) we're not sure it would work. Why push your luck?

4. Tell us about your vampire books. Your take on vampirism doesn't follow the norm, from what I understand?

The very first book I wrote was a vampire book. (That version was... awful.) This was back when people were blaming those who had AIDS for "bringing it on themselves." I got to thinking that maybe we were blaming other kinds of people for diseases they couldn't help—even vampires !?!. So, my vampires have a parasite in their blood. They call it The Companion. It gives them power humans don't have, and it rebuilds their cells endlessly rather than find another host. Thus the eternal life. There are explanations for their ability to control minds and to "translocate." But other beliefs are myths that grew up around them: mirrors (mostly—you'll have to read the books for the exceptions), garlic, silver, turning into bats, etc. The parasite exacts a terrible price. They need human blood to live. But they don't have to kill. They bear the unbearable loneliness and boredom which sometimes drives them mad. A human has to acquire the parasite from their blood to turn vampire and unless the human gets three days of vampire blood to build resistance to the parasite, they will die. So there are no accidental vampires. To turn a human into a vampire is forbidden, because vampires are secretive, and upsetting the balance between vampires and the humans they need for their sustenance would result in the destruction of both.

That first book, many times revised, became SACRAMENT, published by Dorchester as my second published book. I set it in Regency England. The ordered society in conflict with the chaos of the supernatural promised a lot of fun. And when I went to St. Martin's Press, I revived the world, put in a VERY bad female vampire named Asharti, amped up the sex... and went to town. I love the tortured heros who have seen everything in their long lives being rejuvenated by the unexpected power of love. And I love the fact that in any relationship between vampire and human, the human must face his or her darkest fears in order to achieve happiness.

5. I see that you get to travel to do your research. What has been your favorite trip so far? Any adventures you could share with us?

Such a difficult question! When I was writing Vikings and Saxons (before the vampires in DANEGELD and DANELAW) we went to East Anglia in Britain more than once. We searched out reconstructed Saxon villages, and visited York (Jorvik when it was ruled by Danes). It was all an entry into a magic time. DANEGELD was the second book I wrote and the first published. A wounded Viking Warrior, a Saxon girl with extraordinary powers running from the Saxon warlord who scarred them both. I was stuck on the story and the characters though. All my thoughts and frustrations were swirling in my head one day when Harry and I went to Blytheborough in East Angli and wandered among the headstones on a windy hill outside a church above the River Blythe. Harry had gone poking among the epitaphs and I was left on the hill with the wind blowing my hair around. And I heard my heroine talk to me. Sounds corny. And I'm so practical I'm not the type to believe in this stuff, but she said, "Witch or Saint? Which? Even now I do not know. The gods know, or the one God. Everyone around me is sure, though no one quite agrees. But to me, the one true witness to the miracles, that sureness is denied." It was pretty close to that, honest to God. And those are the first words, still, to that book. The only prologue I ever wrote. I added the Saxon words "Wicce or Sancte" later, after research. And I defended that prologue to the death rather than cut it. So I guess that's my favorite trip.

But the trips have all been wonderful: Scotland and Loch Ness for ONE WITH THE NIGHT, Florence and Rome for ONE WITH THE SHADOWS and ONE WITH THE DARKNESS, San Francisco for the Time Travel Series I'm writing now... I'm getting wanderlust even as we speak. And so far, China and up country Thailand and Portugal and Quebec haven't shown up in my books, but they might....

6.Tell us about your new release, A TWIST IN TIME?

I'm returning to VIKINGS!!!!! This is the first release without a vampire in 7 books. In ONE WITH THE SHADOWS a lovely character, the hero's vampire mother in fact, ambushed me. She was so wise. She saw the hero and heroine loved each other before they did. But her own life had been ruined by regret that she didn't make her one true love vampire back in Roman times. She watched him age and die rather than inflict vampirism on him. So in ONE WITH THE DARKNESS I gave her a chance to go back and correct her mistake. Vampires live long lives. She had a friend named DaVinci. He built her a time machine. Who better? And when she discovers it, she goes back to Caligula's Rome and her the barbarian slave, Jergan, who she came to love.

So my time travel series was born. The knowledge of Leonardo's wonderful machine is passed from heroine to heroine, so they can use it to fulfill their destiny. In A TWIST IN TIME, shy bookseller Lucy Rossano, longs for a time when magic is still possible. She never expected to find a time machine. And she never expected to use it to bring a wounded tenth-century Viking named Galen back to modern San Francisco. All he wanted was to be the powerful magician his mother predicted, but though he is a leader, an inventor, a warrior, that magic has always eluded him. Stuck in a world that does not value his skills, how does he find his way? Now a top secret government agency wants Lucy's time machine and her Viking and she and Galen must flee for their lives. Galen becomes her protector but only their shared passion can awaken their mutual powers, and time is running out. Drawn to a destiny neither alone can embrace, for Lucy and Galen, it’s now… or forever.

7. How fun was it bringing a Viking into the 21st century?

Way fun. We always think we want a strong, virile man—but really, they're quite difficult. Galen is certainly difficult for Lucy. And there's the fact that there are more than a thousand years between the versions of English they speak. They have to find slowly that they can communicate. What would he think of modern San Francisco? What does the fact that he's dependent upon her do to his self-image? How will they escape? And if she wanted magic, does she get it? Or does she get even more than she bargained for? I had a blast writing this one. And I got to learn how to sail. My neighbor, Fred, is a sailing instructor in Redondo Beach. I started askin him questions (beyond what Sailing For Dummies could answer) and he heroicallly took me out on his 25 foot sailboat (once in 4 foot swells) and let me learn to sail. How generous was that? I loved being able to go back to the world of DANEGELD and DANELAW. For those that read DANELAW, you will recognize the ancestry of my Viking.

8. What is next? Are you working on anything now?

I just turned in THE MISTS OF TIME. This time a romance writer longs for the time of courtly love that was Camelot.... but it turns out nothing like what she expected. This one has a couple of plot turns even my editor didn't see... so I don't want to give away too much. It will come out in September. And I'm working on a proposal for a new six book series, in between preparing taxes and jury duty. I'm excited about this series. For once my heroes and heroines are going to have a family! Stay tuned!