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Rachel Caine is our guest blogger during the week of June 1st. If you have any questions for Rachel Caine, add a comment to any of her posts.

Here is more information on Carpe Corpse (The Morganville Vampires, Book 6):

In the small college town of Morganville, vampires and humans lived in (relative) peace-until all the rules got rewritten when the evil vampire Bishop arrived, looking for the lost book of vampire secrets. He's kept a death grip on the town ever since. Now an underground resistance is brewing, and in order to contain it, Bishop must go to even greater lengths. He vows to obliterate the town and all its inhabitants-the living and the undead. Claire Danvers and her friends are the only ones who stand in his way. But even if they defeat Bishop, will the vampires ever be content to go back to the old rules, after having such a taste of power?

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Deidre Knight is our guest blogger during the week of June 1st. If you have any questions for Deidre Knight, add a comment to any of her posts.

Here is more information on Red Kiss:

The Spartans wage fierce wars-but nothing matches the battle within their hearts...

Spartan slave River Kassandros can transform into any weapon. After a bloody battle he's forever a dagger-until a mortal can release him. Drawn to this blade, Emma Lowery draws blood with it and frees River. But even as they fight off intense passions, a sinister power arises to destroy them. To protect humankind, they may have to make the ultimate sacrifice-and lose their chance at love...

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One question I always get at school visits is: what's it like being a writer?

First off, I do have a difficult time calling myself a writer. I like the term storyteller better because I started as a visual storyteller: painter, filmmaker, animator, illustrator. The writing came by accident. As a filmmaker and animator, I needed scripts and ended up doing them because nobody else would. The idea that I would someday be a novelist? Fugehdaboudit! Me writing a 320 page book was not in the cards.

But strange things happen and unexpected doors of opportunity open when you least expect them to.

Believe me when I say that I am an accidental novelist. I was tricked into it, bamboozled, flim-flammed. There I was writing a short story-and my writer's group liked it. Only they had questions. And they wanted more answers.

Fine, fine. I could dig deeper. Sure thing, some back story here, an extra scene there... Great stuff they said. Keep going! Keep going? Why? Its good they said. We want more. Alright, so I kept writing. The short story became a longer piece and still they wanted more! What about this? And what happens when-

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I think I may have figured out why Americans do not make better food choices. I think people are completely confused. Heck, I get confused and I work in food, study food and research the effects of food on health. I am considered an expert (whatever that means...) and if I get confused, I can only imagine what the rest of the country...who just wants to live their lives and eat dinner...feels.

And I know why we are confused. The latest addition of Men's Health magazine arrived the other day, the ‘Life in Balance' issue and it kicked off with a great...and I mean great editorial by David Zinzenko, author of ‘Eat This, Not That' and editor in chief. In the essay, he talks about Michael Pollan and eating real food, skipping drive-through and junk food; he speaks of whole unprocessed food versus the ‘edible foodlike substances' we have come to rely on in our diets. He waxed poetic about ‘pulling off the packaging and examining what's really on the end of our fork.' He goes on that our modern food culture has pulled us away from the reality of food with slick graphics, cartoons and healthy-sounding words like ‘lite.'

Well, you can imagine my excitement as I prepared to steal my husband's magazine and pore over every word of this balance issue. I could not wait to read the exposes, the scathing indictments of processed foods. Sure enough, I turn the page and there is an ad for ‘Silk' soymilk. Cool. But wait...what's this? Can it be? An item in the Table of Contents called ‘Soy's Dark Secret'? (I'd bet ‘Silk' knew nothing about this article before they bought into the ad space.)

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Ever watched the intimate interactions between a baby and their parent?  All the cooing and copying of the babies facial expressions and sounds? In doing this, we let our babies know that we understand them and we reflect that understanding back by copying and imitating them. This is instinctive for most of us; we don't need to be taught how to speak to a baby. Babies love this, all this mirroring calms and soothes them and helps them to feel safe with what is happening around them. These interactions are critical to development and have a profound impact on the how the brain functions. In fact most of the human brain's circuitry is developed after birth. As parents interact with their children, providing not only food and safety but predictable emotional nurturing the resulting attachment helps the brain to organise and begin to regulate and make sense of the complex world around it.

The human brain continues to grow, develop, and adapt to the environment throughout our lives -- not just when we are babies. Most of us mirror quite naturally with our babies but drop these efforts as our children develop language.  We begin to tell our older kids what we think they are feeling and drop all this wonderful mirroring from our repertoire. They tell us we're hungry, we tell them they can't be hungry because they just ate. They tell us they don't need a sweater, we tell them they do, it's cold outside. We no longer send messages back through our verbal or body language that mirrors or matches what we think the child is experiencing.

 
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G. Neri, Surf Mules, Putnam Juvenile, Penguin Books