"Novelist time is reptile time; novelists tend to be ruminant and brooding, nursers of ancient grievances, second-guessers, Tuesday afternoon quarterbacks, retrospectators, endlessly, like slumping hitters, studying the film of their old whiffs." ~ Michael Chabon
"Start writing, no matter what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on." ~Louis L'Amour
"As for my next book, I am going to hold myself from writing it till I have it impending in me: grown heavy in my mind like a ripe pear; pendant, gravid, asking to be cut or it will fall." ~Virginia Woolf
"Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it." ~C.S. Lewis
"The storyteller is deep inside everyone of us. The story-maker is always with us. Let us suppose our world is attacked by war, by the horrors that we all of us easily imagine. Let us suppose floods wash through our cities, the seas rise . . . but the storyteller will be there, for it is our imaginations which shape us, keep us, create us - for good and for ill. It is our stories that will recreate us, when we are torn, hurt, even destroyed. It is the storyteller, the dream-maker, the myth-maker, that is our phoenix, that represents us at our best, and at our most creative." ~Doris Lessing
"Can I be blunt on this subject? If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that. Reading is the creative center of a writer's life."
~Stephen King
"You know, I'm a storyteller. We are storytellers. And ours is an ancient tradition, contemporized by the cinema and the capturing of light. And we should all be very proud of our place in society. On any given night, millions of people across the world buy a ticket for adventures that only we as storytellers can provide. We release burdens, we galvanize emotions, we make people laugh, we make people talk over breakfast. This is a great job and I want to encourage every one of you in this room to give everything you can to the story. God bless narrative. God bless originality."
~Russell
Crowe
2002 SAG Award Winner
"When I write, I feel like an armless legless man with a crayon in his mouth."
~Kurt Vonnegut
"Don't be afraid of your material or your past. Be afraid of wasting any more time obsessing about how you look and how people see you. Be afraid of not getting your writing done." ~Anne Lamott
"America is now wholly given over to a d****d mob of scribbling women, and I should have no chance of success while the public taste is occupied with their trash--and should be ashamed of myself if I did succeed. What is the mystery of these innumberable editions of The Lamplighter (by Maria Susanna Cummins), and other books neither better nor worse? Worse they could not be, and better they need not be, when they sell by the hundred thousand." ~Hawthorne's 1855 letter to his publisher William D. Ticknor, quoted in Pattee, Fred L. The Feminine Fifties. NY: Appleton-Century Co., 1940. p. 110.
I think that’s all of them, yes? Tomorrow I’ll post and contact the winner of the month one Summer Bonanza and launch the second month’s giveaway. Sorry I’m so late in getting to this today, but I had another self-imposed writing deadline. Met that, cleaned up dog vomit, heh, called the vet for new med instructions, and finally here I am.
Now, here’s the deal. I’m nursing a sick dog who has to be let out every two hours to pee and take Pepcid before he can take his Cipro. I have no car. I have no mailers. I have no stamps. Get what I’m saying? All of you send me your addresses, but it may be next weekend or so before I can get anything sent out! That’s just the way of the world here!
It started with Sam last Saturday, and his Monday night ER stay. Of course, we’re still watching Casey as he recovers; he’s gone back to work and tends to overdo, so when he does, we worry. He sent me a text message around 5:00 on Friday evening that said:
Please call as soon as you can. I think our dog is dying.
He’d come home after work with Sam to find Takumi barely breathing and lying in his crate in bloody stool. He’d tried to call, but I was in another part of the house, and by the time I got to my phone, there were several missed calls and messages as the family coordinated dog saving efforts. That would be all of the family but ME, helpless at home.
The husband was commuting between job locations in Houston, and made a Friday evening rush hour U-turn. #2 (the former future vet tech) and her boyfriend headed to Casey’s house. Taylor’s mother headed to Casey’s house. Casey and the boyfriend picked up Takumi, blanket and all, and set out for the animal hospital fearing the dog had been poisoned. #2 stayed with Sam until Taylor’s mother arrived, then followed. The husband was next to get there with his checkbook. Taylor was the last to arrive from work.
Takumi had not ingested poison. He had HGE, hemorrhagic gastroenteritis. Everyone left the hospital feeling his prognosis was good, but Saturday things weren’t so certain. Physically, he was doing much better, but neurologically, not so much. He was scared and confused, violent with the staff, and in pain – not to mention he’d almost bled to death. The husband did get him to respond, as did Taylor, though it was still touch and go.
When the husband went by on Sunday, he decided it was time to bring him home. There was nothing the hospital could do at this point that we couldn’t since he no longer needed the IV fluids and injected meds. We knew healing at home and resting in a happy comfortable environment would be so much better for his spirits. Since I’m the only one not punching a clock weekdays and able to let him in and out for the breaks he needs, and to give him his food and antiobiotics and Pepto-Bismol, heh, we brought him here.
He was all smiles when he got out of the car, and walked inside like a drunken sailor. After quenching his thirst, he was not happy to be put in Snickers’ crate (and she wasn’t happy to be watching all of this through the patio door), but he settled down, napped, then went out to do business and ate a bite before we locked him up again. So far so good, though this looks to be another high maintenance week coming up! Wish me luck!
(And I’ll post all of last week’s winners later today!)
I could probably write 1000 words on character names, but that’s not what this post is about, and anyhow, I don’t have time. You see, I had to change my LONG HARD RIDE hero’s name. And I did. But neither my editor or I realized what we agreed we both liked for my hero’s first name is the last name of one of the other author’s heroes in this Blaze 0-60 miniseries. (And, yes, I asked for her input since, to me, my hero will always be the name I originally gave him. I can’t see him as anyone else!)
If you scroll through these pictures, this is very similar to where you’d find my hero on any given weekend. He’s crew chief for a top fuel drag racing team. His last name is Davis. His nickname is “Whip.” He’s tall, sexy, gorgeous, as befits any Blaze hero. I have two names in the wings I like, but would love to hear from you guys. Give me some heroic names!
Museum director Mandy Cooper has always been obsessed with nineteenth-century artist Catherine Burke—and the artist’s erotically charged relationship with Atacar, her enthralling American Indian lover. But Mandy’s link to the legendary couple runs deeper than she knows. She’s having a heated affair herself—with Jared Cabrillo, Atacar’s perilously handsome great-great nephew. And the consuming passion Atacar once used to seduce Catherine is now being engaged by Jared. He knows precisely what it takes to move a woman…
He’s in possession of Catherine’s wildly explicit journal. He knows every intimate detail of what she wanted and needed. But he also knows how desperately Catherine had loved Atacar and how dangerously he’d loved her. The journal is timeless and tragic, and the secrets contained within its pages can bring Mandy and Jared together, or just as surely destroy them both—desire by shocking desire.
Post a comment here if you’d like to be entered to win a copy of THE ART OF DESIRE from Cherie Feather. Winner will be drawn, Sunday night, June 29, 2008, at 8:00 p.m.ish CDT. (Authors interested in having their books advertised, click here.)
. . . I am researchingdragstrips and dragracing, and finding Google Images to be indispensable for my visual needs while working on Long Hard Ride. Since I didn’t manage a giveaway yesterday (I pretty much crashed and burned after getting in my edits, spending the rest of the afternoon working on a new LHR prologue to which I am now giving visual life), I’ll do a box o’ books giveaway today. This one will have some ARCs in it that I tripped over and found. I’ll draw a winner on Sunday night, June 29, 2008, at 8:00 p.m.ish CDT. Contest Rules.
Sorry for the late posting and lack of prize. I had to finish reading through the final printout of KISS & TELL and get the changes back to my editor. My personal goal was to send them off by noon, and I hit the send button at 11:55, so yay me. This is the rewritten book, so the edits that came were to the changed version, but the printout then incorporated the revisions I made to the edits. Make sense? Or are you as confused as I am? When I get my final printout, I don’t do a line by line comparison to the edits, but I do have the edits at my elbow to double-check when I hit something in the read-through that doesn’t sit right. (And, no, the editing marks aren’t in red because Harlequin sends a copy, not the original.) Lots of times it’s just me. Lots more of times it’s mistakes made when the changes to the changes to the changes are input. So, yeah. Even with a lot of eagle eyes, mistakes show up in books. I found a couple of sections I wanted to revise yet again, but at this point it’s too late for that. What’s there is clear, I just wanted to pare it down. It seemed I was rather repetitive in making those points. Thankfully, when all is said and done, I like the book. With all I had to do to get it done, I wasn’t sure I would, but I do. So yay for that! Now I’m off to shower and get my head out of KISS & TELL and back into LONG HARD RIDE. I left off at a crucial spot and need to find the zone.
This is Takumi. His name comes from (I’m pretty sure this is the story) the anime / manga series Initial D that features the “drift” style of Japanese street racing. Like in the movie Tokyo Drift. He was a Hurricane Katrina rescue puppy, and Taylor’s friend who named him was a big street racing fan. He’s now Sam’s dog. Or Casey, Taylor, and Sam’s dog.
He spent Monday night having a (fairly sleepless) sleepover with Snickers, however, because Sam spent Monday night in the emergency room with his parents hovering. (And, yes, this is in our terribly messy combo office and general junk room, please ignore.)
The little guy got sick on Saturday with a too high and unexplained fever, and was checked out at the ER. The staff there ran all sorts of tests, hydrated him, and sent him home once his fever was down. It was up and down Sunday and Monday, and his pediatrician decided she wanted him at Texas Children’s in the medical center. He was so dehydrated by then, it took four hours and fifteen tries to get his IV in, poor baby. He slept, had another billion tests, was deemed to have a viral infection and came home around ten Tuesday morning. All I did was dogsit and I was worn out. I can’t imagine his folks’ exhaustion.
Well, I can, since I sat in a pediatric ER for two days with #1 when she was 18 months old. (Sam is almost 15 months old.) It was #1’s first bout with asthma, and was a scary scary experience for the both of us. She had to go several more times over the years for breathing treatments, and ended up there once when she put the nose of our car into a ditch. Car totaled. #1 only scratched. I believe the only time #2 has been in the ER was for stitches in her leg when she stepped through an empty aquarium at age 3 or 4.
I’ve never had to take Casey for anything but stitches either (that I can remember) – in the corner of his mouth when he was about 2, in his hand when he was about 9, and then he took himself when he was 19 or so, and his earlobe ran into another guy’s fist and had to be sewn back on, heh.
And since today’s subject is scariness and ER’s, I’m giving away a copy of THE LAST VAMPIRE by author buddy Patricia Rosemoor and Marc Paoletti, along with a copy of AT RISK. Click on Patricia’s name to read an excerpt. The book released yesterday, and I’ve got my copy and another for one of you guys on the way.
All you have to do is tell me something scary that’s happened to you at some point! I’ll draw a winner on Sunday night, June 29, 2008, at 8:00 p.m.ish CDT. (You can comment without entering to win, too!)
I write them a lot. In my Blazes, anyway. I haven’t written them in my Bravas, though I have had secondary stories going on. Finn McLain had his own story in DEEP BREATH, and I had planned to write Rachel and Vince’s story in BEYOND A SHADOW, but ended up writing from the third point of view of Emmy Rose Maples instead. MAXIMUM EXPOSURE in December will be my first Brava to have a true secondary love story. I haven’t talked about Roman and Jodi, that book’s secondary couple, yet at all, and am not sure that I will. *g*
Only blogging time will tell . . .
I LOVE secondary romances, but it didn’t occur to me until recently that I did not write one in KISS & TELL. I think INDISCREET is the only other Blaze w/o a secondary love story, but that book did have a lot of plot stuff going on. (Oh, the secondary love story in that one (duh, just remembered) was a cementing of Eric and Chloe’s romance from NO STRINGS ATTACHED.) So, yeah. KISS & TELL is the only Blaze I’ve written that didn’t also have another love story going on at the same time as that of the main hero and heroine.
There is a subplot involving another romance, but I never go into the viewpoints of those characters, and their story is part of the framework only, not a relationship I developed and explored. Now that I think further, KISS & TELL is also the only Blaze I’ve written (other than short novellas) with only two points of view used to tell the story. THE SWEETEST TABOO had Callie and Will as extras, KISS & MAKEUP had April and Ethan, GOES DOWN EASY had Della and Book, and INFATUATION had Hector and Angie.
In the first three gIRL-gEAR books, ALL TIED UP, NO STRINGS ATTACHED, and BOUND TO HAPPEN, the secondary romance was that of Lauren and Anton, who readers met online in the series prequel, ROPED INTO ROMANCE. Their love story had its ups and downs over the three books, ending in a wedding to open the series’ fourth book STRIPTEASE. That one and the one that followed, WICKED GAMES, both had their own secondary stories: Aiden and Renata in STRIPTEASE and Izzy and Baron in WICKED GAMES. Wow, I’m throwing out a lot of names, aren’t I? Kinda thinking out loud!
I have to wonder if not having a secondary romance is why I had trouble with KISS & TELL, or if it was something else. Like mental exhaustion, heh. But seriously. If I did something that wasn’t comfortable for me, it could very well hold the answer. And it’s one I’m looking at as I’m writing my 03/09 book, LONG HARD RIDE. This one does have a secondary relationship, but interestingly, it’s not turning out to be the one I originally planned.
Weird how writing works that way!
So tell me. What do you think about secondary love stories?
If you’d like to win a copy of INFATUATION (my personal favorite of my secondary romances) along with one of AT RISK, post here telling me your thoughts on secondary romances, and I’ll draw a winner on Sunday night, June 29, 2008, at 8:00 p.m.ish CDT. (You can comment without entering to win, too!)
(First of all, for those keeping up, my son has lost 17 pounds since his surgery.)
And the winner of THE RAVEN’S REVENGE is: Anne. Send me your mailing addy, Anne!
For the last four weeks, since Memorial Day Monday, four weeks to the day, I have craved the ability to walk without limping, craved the ability to sit without having to twist my leg this way and that to accommodate my poor knee, craved being able to turn over in my sleep without having to treat my leg like a separate entity needing turning on its own.
I am happy to report that as of today, I am actually free of almost anything resembling a bruise (I still have some fluid beneath the patella and a bit of tightness there), have only minor soreness, and am finally answering the call of the treadmill. But only slowly.
And that leads me to today’s giveaway: Cathy Yardley’s CRAVE: The Seduction of Snow White. From Cathy’s site:
A princess on the run from her murderous stepmother hides out in the woods of Pennsylvania, under the protection of the “seven Founders” of a cult that promotes simplicity, hard work — and no sex. But when she meets her “prince” in the form of a reporter intent on exposing her, she discovers that there are needs even more powerful than survival, as he introduces her to the temptations of life she’s been trying hard to ignore…
I’ve been a Cathy Yardley fan since reading her first story, THE CINDERELLA SOLUTION. She writes smart, and I love smart. Her characters are real, people you could know, people you want to know, not people stuck flat on the page.
And the whole idea of fairy tales taking an erotic turn is too much fun to resist. I’m in the middle of reading this one now, and loving it. I’m sure you will, too. And to tempt you even further, here’s the video which just cracked me up.
If you’d like to win a copy of CRAVE: The Seduction of Snow White along with a copy of my book AT RISK, post here to the comments telling me and Cathy what YOU crave, and I’ll draw a winner on Sunday night, June 29, 2008, at 8:00 p.m.ish CDT.
The following are the five winners of the books from the Today I Am post . . . but first.
I’ve put up a new page with contest rules that will be in affect effect from here forward. I will be sure and add the link to every giveaway I run so that there will be no confusion. I’ve been overwhelmed lately with tracking people down and getting things mailed, and I can’t be doing that when I have so much writing and other work to do.
I don’t mean to be a hardass about things, but I want more people to have a chance to win, and I want winners to actually want what they’re trying for, meaning they’ll go to the trouble to come back and check within the allotted time. And you can only win once every six months. This gives everyone a better chance to share in the bounty.
And the reason I’m posting this today is because I have a week of giveaways coming up and I want everyone to be aware of my contest rules before I get things started!!
You guys send me your mailing addresses and I’ll get those books out to you asap. (Debbie and Tara, I won’t have your extra books until next week, so yours will be delayed just a bit.)
"Every time you write, you go to a construction site in your head. The words are waiting there, like a couple truckloads of loose bricks. They're not going to build themselves into anything, no matter how often you talk to your hands or mouth-breathe or get in touch with your inner Tinkerbell. You pick up the bricks. You mortar them together on a page. You build a story out of them. And that's it. The sweaty, nerve-wracking, non-glittery, unglamorous, orc-free work of writing."
~Paperback Writer
"Writing’s not rocket science. It’s a helluva lot harder. Because once you learn all that rocket science crap, you can (at least in theory) build a rocket. On the other hand, you can read every writing book known to man and attend classes and work with critique partners and get pages of editorial input and still end up with a book that doesn’t quite hit the high notes. Scary, but true." ~Karen Templeton
"My New Year's resolution is to focus on the book and forget all the crap that surrounds the writing business. To lose myself in a story, and not give a damn if it makes any lists, has a good sell-through, gets glowing reviews on Amazon, pleases my editors, hell, even pleases my readers. I want to love what I'm writing so much that none of the rest of it matters, and if I don't, I won't write it. Life's too short to abuse the muse." ~Anne Stuart
What I love: Cookies that log me in @ sites I only visit this time of year. As if I would remember my account info otherwise. Also, cookies. 2011-12-01
I could probably write 1000 words on character names, but that’s not what this post is about, and anyhow, I don’t have time. You see, I had to change my LONG HARD RIDE hero’s name. And I did. But neither my editor or I realized what we agreed we both liked for my hero’s first name is the last name of one of the other author’s heroes in this Blaze 0-60 miniseries. (And, yes, I asked for her input since, to me, my hero will always be the name I originally gave him. I can’t see him as anyone else!)
In the first three 
And that leads me to today’s giveaway: Cathy Yardley’s CRAVE: The Seduction of Snow White. From 
