A New Book!

Let me introduce you to Catherine, Reginald, and Yolann … and to Francesca Rose.

Francesca Rose is the name I’m using for my Victorian Secret Romances. They’re set in the Victorian era and are a little sexier than the Frankie Robertson titles. If you’ve read WITH HEART TO HEAR, you’ll enjoy this new release, YETI IN THE MIST.

YETI IN THE MIST: A Victorian Secret Romance

Catherine Denton loves her ailing husband and is taken aback when he  encourages her to take a lover. Reginald, formerly a colonel in the East India Company Army, wants his young wife to have what he cannot give her: children–and his titled brother, Cedric, has offered to oblige. However, her brother-in-law is not the man Catherine desires. The male who makes her pulse race is Reginald’s good friend Yolann, the Yeti who served with him in India, and who sleeps just down the hall.

 

 

In the Gloaming

“Desert Twilight” by Bo Mackison, Seeded Earth Studio

I’m torn. I love the fall here in the desert, when it finally gets cool enough to take a walk during the day. The bright sunshine always lifts my spirits.

But the twilight calls to me. Like many before me, I hear the whisper of other worlds across the veil when the light fails. Twilight isn’t frightening the way night can be. It offers magical possibilities without the threat. Taking a walk at twilight stimulates the imagination, especially when you walk somewhere away from traffic.

On a practical level, here in the desert, I do have to be aware of the possibility of encountering wildlife if I stray too far away from civilization. So I choose places to walk that are safe enough that I can let my mind wander to other, more magical lands, and let he people I meet there tell me their stories.

And then I tell those stories to you.

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Secondary Characters as Heroes

Part of the fun of writing a series is having the chance to turn the spotlight on secondary characters. That’s also part of the challenge.

I have a tendency to write stoic heroes who are bound by duty and honor. I also tend to give those heroes friends and brothers who are a little flip and irreverent. These sidekicks do a good job of pricking the ego of the hero, humanizing him. But when it’s the buddy’s turn to take center stage, it becomes my job to torture him. That’s where the problem lies.

You have to make your characters suffer or they won’t change and grow. The trick is to make a secondary character who was a joker mature without losing his personality. He can have a dark, or self-deprecating sense of humor, but when he’s really suffering the reader needs to feel it. You have to make the hero’s pain real and profound for his eventual triumph to be meaningful. Humor can still work in these situations. The character may try to deflect his pain with humor, or he can turn sarcastic and biting.  But however he reacts, he can’t be quipping as usual.

I faced this problem when I wrote Ragni in as the hero of FORBIDDEN TALENTS. He had to become more serious given what I was putting him through, without losing the essence of what had made him appealing in DANGEROUS TALENTS. One technique I employed was keeping the hero from the earlier book, Dahleven, around. By comparison with his older and more serious brother, Ragni is still irreverent. By the end of FORBIDDEN TALENTS he’s gained a bit more gravitas, even if he’s still more than ready to give Dahleven a hard time.

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FORBIDDEN TALENTS is FREE from Kindle through Tuesday, 10/16/12.

An Accidental Series

I’m guest blogging over at Secrets of 7 Scribes today thanks to an invitation from Casey Wyatt, the author of MYSTIC INK and THE UNDEAD SPACE INITIATIVE. I’m talking about why I’m writing not one, not two, but three different series. Come over and say hello!

FORBIDDEN TALENTS Is Available on Amazon!

The Kindle version of FORBIDDEN TALENTS,  book two of the Vinlanders’ Saga, is now available on Amazon!

This is Ragni and Saeun’s story, but the hero and heroine from the first book, Dahleven and Celia, are significant characters.

Here’s the “back cover copy”:
As the second son of the Kon of Nuvinland, and a priest of Baldur, Lord Ragni understands the demands of politics. He’s not surprised when his father arranges a marriage for him to the daughter of another Jarl. Unfortunately, Ragni has just fallen hard for Saeun.

Saeun never expected to fall in love with Lord Ragni, but what began as a casual dalliance with a ladies’ man blossomed into a deep passion. But her hopes for the future are dashed when her tools of forbidden magic are discovered. To save herself, and Ragni’s reputation, Saeun escapes into a deadly blizzard—leaving behind everything, and everyone, she loves.

Ragni faces an agonizing choice: enforce the law he’s sworn to uphold, or save the woman he loves.

And while the lovers’ hearts are breaking, a dark and ancient threat to all of Nuvinland is gaining strength.

FORBIDDEN TALENTS will stand alone, but you’ll enjoy it even more if you’ve read DANGEROUS TALENTS.

Which Classic Trek Character Are You?

I’m old enough to have grown up when reruns of the original Star Trek were one of the few sources of science-fiction on TV. (Lost In Space doesn’t count. It just doesn’t.) SF wasn’t mainstream back then. Trekkies were geeks and nerds long before there was such a thing as geek chic. Did that make us cutting edge? Well, uh, no. At the time it just made us different.

Or maybe it was because we were already different that we loved the show. Instead of playing cowboys and Indians, I imagined Away Team adventures. I never put myself exactly into the shoes of any of the original characters, though. I was a Russian/Vulcan hybrid. Emotional and analytical. “It is logical that humans are emotional, Spock. It is their nature,” I’d tell him. Like he didn’t already know.

I knew at nine what I was. I wasn’t impulsive and egotistical. I wasn’t decorative and supportive. Grumpy, stubborn, sneaky, or technical. (Hmm. The seven dwarfs as an away team . . .)

And yet, I’m all those things. The crew of the Enterprise (in the original show) represented the individual traits of a whole personality. The show wouldn’t have worked as well without any one of them. They even addressed that in the awful episode where Kirk’s personality was split in half. Still, some traits dominate.

But at nine, none of that was on my sensor array. At nine, I was just a Vulcan, with enough Russian in me to justify my illogical emotional outbursts.

Which character were you?

DANGEROUS TALENTS Is Now Available on Amazon

DANGEROUS TALENTS, a romantic fantasy novel, is now available on Amazon.

I really enjoyed writing this story, and I hope you enjoy reading it. It combines my love of fantasy (with magic, swords, and elves) with my love of a good romance. Like tales told by C.S. Lewis, Diana Gabaldon, and Joy Chant, the heroine is a contemporary woman who has to cope with an unexpected change in circumstances:

Celia Montrose has been trained to deal with any emergency—except being thrust into another world. Crisis management training hasn’t prepared her for meeting the descendants of the lost Vinland colony, or coping with kidnapping, murder, and magic.

Lord Dahleven is trying to avert a war when he rescues a strange and beautiful woman in the drylands. Though he fears Celia may be Fey-marked, Dahleven can’t resist the powerful attraction he feels for her. But is Celia in league with the enemy, or will she provide the key to saving his people?

Alone and off-balance, Celia finds herself falling for Lord Dahleven. But dangerous forces are at work, and one of them is offering Celia a way home—for a price.

My Self-Publishing Journey: I am the Decider!

I just got the 2nd pass edits on LIGHTBRINGER back from Edits that Rock. One of the questions Rochelle raised after the first round was whether I wanted  to discuss religion quite as much as I did. In much of today’s paranormal romance, the big questions of religion are carefully skirted so as to not offend and lose readers. This isn’t as true in science-fiction and fantasy. A significant number of authors in those genres have tackled religion head-on, but not so much in romance.

I had what I think is a fairly average Christian upbringing, colored by an early love of science-fiction and fantasy.  In SF and fantasy it’s often acknowledged that in building a new world, religion is an integral part of  what motivates people. So for me, if characters have a conversation about life after death (VEILED MIRROR)  or angels (LIGHTBRINGER) it doesn’t make sense to pretend religion doesn’t exist.

And yet . . . I am paying Rochelle for her expertise, and I do want to actually sell my books, not just decorate Amazon’s website with my listings. So I thought pretty hard about her advice. I was free to take it or leave it. As I mentioned in a previous post, unlike an editor at a traditional publisher, Rochell has no leverage — the decision was all up to me.

I’m pretty good at catastrophizing. I can worry that a minor misstep can doom me to utter darkness and failure with the best of them. Interestingly, as I’ve progressed on my self-publishing journey, I’ve felt less of that. Where I used to worry that if I didn’t write the perfect synopsis I would be exiled to the outer reaches of writer purgatory, now a decision about editing is just that, a business decision.

In the end I decided to trim a few sentences from LIGHTBRINGER for the sake of the larger story arc of the Celestial Affairs series. And that’s the point of this post: It’s all about the story you want to tell. Every story has its audience. Don’t worry about that. In my opinion, the priority should be what works best for the story, not protecting the author’s ego and not potential sales.

Review: Drink of Me and Jacob by Jacquelyn Frank

I’m wrapping up a book binge.  Every now and then, usually between projects, I take a break from my usual routine and just read book after book after book.  This binge started with Jacquelyn Frank‘s Drink of Me (2010).

Ms. Frank is a new author for me even though she’s published ten other books.  The cover for Drink of Me caught my eye with faces silhouetted in iridescent blue, and the inside teaser sealed the deal.

One of the things I like about this book is that she has created a complete alternate world that is different from what I’ve seen before.  (I’m thrilled to see more fantasy oriented paranormal romances making it to the shelves.) She also has taken familiar archetypes and made them new.  I’m not a big fan of vampire stories, but her Sange are not the usual sort of blood drinkers.  Nor are they werewolves even though they have a pack hierarchy.  Frank convincingly makes use of the amnesia ploy, too. One of the heroine’s special skills is not particularly unique, but since she didn’t remember she had it, her rediscovery of it just before it was too late was satisfying.

Drink of Me enjoyably held my attention, so I decided to read one of Frank’s earlier works to see what she’d built her career on.  (What can I say?  I’m a writer, these things are important to me.)  I bought Jacob (2006), the first of the Nightwalkers series.

Jacob is what I think of as being a more typical paranormal romance.  The eponymous hero is a demon, one of the Nightwalker races which include vampires and werewolves, but who are misunderstood by humans.  They’re really nice guys at heart.  The heroine is our “average girl” when we meet her, and asks all the questions the reader wants answers to.

One of the things that is typical to this sub-genre is the biological compulsion the protagonists felt.  I wrote about this in an earlier post “Why Isn’t Free Will Sexy?” Frank overcame my reservations on this score in two ways.  One, though her characters were clearly drawn to each other to an unusual degree, neither of them knew why until fairly late in the book.  There was no manipulation of one by the other, and no secrets being kept.  Two, and most important, their interaction, their dialogue, made them real and appealing.  They became more than their archetypes.

One touch I loved was that the demons were happy about the rise of Christianity, because it nearly eliminated the use of magic, and more specifically, the necromancers who summon demons against their will.  Another thing to recommend the book:  Frank writes excellent sexual tension and well-developed love scenes.  As I mentioned in “Reading Like a Writer,” some books are worth learning from.  For me, Jacob is worth studying for that alone.

If you haven’t yet read any of Jacquelyn Frank’s books, you should.  I know I’ll be reading more.

My Next Project

I’m still cleaning up some formatting issues for Veiled Mirror, but soon that will be done.  Then what?  Oh, I’ll have to review the gallies, but that won’t take more than a week.  It’s time to decide on my next project.

I have at least four different books simmering in the back of my head, not to mention a revision of Lightbringer. My choices include a variety of  traditional fantasy elements: faeries, shapeshifters, nomads, and quests; unusual romantic arrangements; trust, betrayal, love, and loss; and a new/old look at werewolves.  (But absolutely no vampires, sparkly or otherwise.)

How to decide?  At least two writer friends have said I should work on something new before I go back to do more revisions, and I’m inclined to agree.  I spent a lot of time revising various manuscripts the last couple of years, so it’s been a while since I’ve written anything new (except for this blog).

I’ve decided to write what calls to my heart, rather than choosing a project that might do the most good for my career.  For one thing, I’m not sure at this early stage that I can know which project will be most successful.  Professional editors don’t always know which book will take off and capture the attention of the reading public, so how can I?  For another, if you’re not writing something you enjoy, the “juice” won’t be there.  I had a hard time with Lightbringer for that very reason.  And third, life is short.  It takes me at least a year to write and revise a full length novel.  If I’m going to spend that much time with the people in my head, I’d better like them.