“I have a one-year-old in one hand and type with [the other] hand, and then I have a three-year-old next to me on the couch,” Jessica said. “They can be kind of tricky but it works for me. … I try to [write for] two, two-and-a-half hours but sometimes the baby tries to delete with his feet what I’m writing because he wiggles in his sleep.”

“I hardly will ever order hot tea when I’m out because I know it won’t be good enough. … I worked in a tea room and that kind of spoiled me for properly brewed tea,” she said. As for writing romantic suspense, “ultimately it’s because that’s what I most love to read. So I already loved the genre, and when I had an idea for my first book, that’s what I naturally gravitated to.”

“I’m a huge reader,” Shelley said. “I’m always drawn to mysteries, romantic suspense, thrillers—I find those books fun to read. Even though I do write a lot of straight romances, I love to have a romance suspense book in my back pocket. … It was fun as a writer to keep the pace going.”