As an author, I don’t believe in Muses or any divine inspiration related to my writing. I may joke about my muse, but all-in-all, it’s just me and my brain.

But what an amazing brain —

I recently began plotting my latest manuscript, targeting it for a category romance line. Charlene Sands shared with the LARA RWA that babies and children in category romances were hot, hot, hot. I’ll admit that I’ve never been a huge fan of secret babies. Oh, I like babies and secrets, but I could not quite wrap my head around how they could be combined in a story in a believable manner. Meanwhile, I’m working on my plot (longhand)…a dead body here, a villain there, but despite all of my attempts, no secret baby.

Oh well….

I began writing.

The first scene went just the way I’d planned….horseback ride into the desert, a splash of red, pool of blood, dead body. Yay.

Moving on to the second scene, the entrance of the hero, I struggled a bit. Okay, so he drives into town, okay, so he sees the heroine looking all hot and sexy. Then what? I asked him (okay, I asked myself, but work with me), and he answered that he was from this same hometown, knew the heroine all through high school and they had a “thing” one night about four or five years ago when he blew through town on his way to a funeral and she was leaving town in a few days to go into the Air Force.

A thing?

Yeah. He looked at me like I was a bit of a dim-wit. “You know, thing. A one-night-stand.”

BAM! She arrived wearing denim overalls, a pink shirt, her straight dark hair done up in pigtails and flashing a pair of familiar dark eyes at my hero through a car window. You guessed it. My very own personal secret baby.