About Jeanette Baker

Jeanette Baker is the award-winning author of fifteen novels, published by Pocket, Kensington and Mira Books, many of them set in the lush countryside of historical and contemporary Ireland where she lives and writes during the summer months. Her ancestors, the O’Flahertys, hail from Inishmore, the largest of the Aran Islands located off the coast of Galway. She takes great pride in the prayer posted by the English over the ancient citygates, ‘From the wrath of the O’Flahertys, may the good Lord deliver us.’

Jeanette graduated from the University of California at Irvine with a degree in journalism and international relations and holds a Masters Degree in Education. When not in Ireland, she teaches in Southern California, reads constantly, attempts to navigate the confusing world of Facebook and, more recently, e-publishing, concocts creations from interesting cookbooks and enjoys the company of friends and children. She is the RITA award-winning author of NELL.

Please visit and blog with her at www.jeanettebaker.com.

My Workspace

No one would ever call me a perfectionist. I’m more of a big-picture, good-enough kind of person, but my environment, both writing and living, has always been important to me. My personal space has changed over the course of my career, adapting with the changes in my family and my finances. At first, when my children were small, my “space” was a small computer table and steno chair in the family room. My children played games, watched television and invited friends to play while I created and typed away, oblivious to noise, music and, occasionally, minor wounds.

As my family grew and square footage increased through moves and room additions, I graduated to my own office complete with desk and chair, a comfortable couch and, the most wonderful of inventions, a laptop computer which allowed me to move between desk and couch as the mood struck. Over the years, I’ve done away with the desk and straight-backed chair, choosing to, at first, keep files in a cabinet and, eventually, in bookmarked pages on my computer. I’ve come full circle because, now that I’m an empty-nester, my office has returned to the family room. I sit in a very deep, comfortable chair, usually cross-legged but, sometimes, with my legs stretched out in front of me on an equally comfortable ottoman.

I love color and my space reflects it. My chair and ottoman are a deep garnet-red. A chest hand painted in gold, black and more red serves as a coffee table for my tea habit and the shelves of my bookcases are painted a dark, lacquered green. Even more than writing, reading is my passion. I surround myself with books, hundreds and hundreds of books, written by authors who inspire me, as well as photos of my family to remind me of my focus and prints of Ireland and Scotland, the settings for my novels.

CATRIONA, my current release, is a story set in Scotland. CATRIONA began at the ruins of Stirling Castle. After exploring the grounds, I climbed the stairs to the watchtower where Margaret Tudor, daughter to Henry VII of England and James IV of Scotland, waited for her husband to return from the Battle of Flodden Moor. This was a particularly difficult time for her because her husband and father fought on opposing sides. I’d read in the small brochure handed out when I turned over my nominal fee for visiting the castle, that Margaret had carved a poem into the stone wall. The poem is no longer legible and no one really knows what her thoughts were, but standing there with a death grip on the parapet because of the terrifying wind, I imagined what they might be.

Jamie Stewart was a handsome, charismatic king who spoke 8 languages, fathered 38 illegitimate children, founded universities and demanded that the nobility learn to read. History tells us the marriage was not a love match. I decided, for purposes of my novel, that it would be. Why not, I thought, create a woman, with ties to both England and Scotland, a woman with a shameful secret who needed Jamie’s protection for her own purposes? Why not pair her with her equal in intelligence, Jamie’s favorite, a powerful border lord, who’d helped him win the crown? Why not set the two of them amidst the intrigue of the Tudor and Stewart royal courts?

Then it was time to create the contemporary plot of my novel: enter Kate Sutherland, her descendent, an American born 400 years later, an educated woman searching for answers to the odd circumstances of her birth and her frightening ability to see what others could not.

CATRIONA is offered in print as well as electronic format. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I did creating it.

About Catriona

Kate Sutherland has always felt out of step growing up in Southern California, but it isn’t until her adoptive mother’s death that she travels to Scotland to discover the truth about her heritage. There, with the help of a high-priestess of an ancient Scottish sect, she experiences the visions that reveal she is one of the twice-born and that five centuries before she walked the earth as Catriona Wells, daughter of an English earl and a Scots princess, first cousin to James IV of Scotland, English spy and harbinger of a shameful secret.

Catriona, determined to save her young brother from the deadly political clashes of 15th century England and Scotland, embarks upon a fragile balancing act between the court of Jamie Stewart and his arch rival, Henry Tudor, King of England. But Cat’s cunning is no match for Patrick MacKendrick, laird of Hermitage, legend of the borders, right hand to Jamie Stewart who suspects her story for the lie it is. As intrigue in the Scottish court builds and Jamie Stewart’s enemies are unveiled, Cat realizes that the man who deserves her loyalty is the one she has bargained to destroy.

Meanwhile Kate, whose visions rapidly take on a reality of their own, is caught between a present-day attraction to Niall MacKendrick, a Scots historian, the drama of her own adoption—and risking everything in Catriona’s world of passion and bloodshed.