RITA ® Award-Winning Author of Fantasy Romance
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Today is the very last day to catch the AMID THE WINTER SNOW anthology. After today it goes off sale and the stories will only be available as stand-alones.
Our topic at the SFF Seven this week is Our Favorite Motivational/Inspirational Quote. Come on over to find out what mine is – and why!
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Today sees the release of SHOOTING STAR! This is a dark and intense romance, one unconnected to any other of my books or series.
See, what happened is this. I wrote this book starting in July of 2015. Arguably, however, I’ve been working on this idea for almost fourteen years, since autumn of 2004. I know this because that’s when I saw this magazine cover.
I was on travel for my day job as an environmental consultant – as I often was in those days – and hustling through an airport, when I saw a newsstand plastered with this magazine. For those of you lacking historical context, this was the same year that Mean Girls released. But that was a bit of a sleeper and hadn’t made much of a splash. Far more present in our minds was the Freaky Friday remake, where Lohan starred with Jamie Lee Curtis and did an amazing acting job of body switches. Five years earlier, Lohan played both twins in the Parent Trap remake – and did so brilliantly – but her role as a teen with her Type A mother inside her body blew us all away. She was a charming, smart, vivacious and tremendously talented teenage actress.
But in the autumn of 2004, Lohan turned eighteen – and was immediately splashed in sexy poses in a men’s magazine. I stood there flipping through it, stunned and flabbergasted. They had her posing on a bed in her underwear. In those days, I wrote mainly essays, and published many of them in magazines. So I knew the lead times, which usually were four to six months. That meant they’d done this very sexy photo shoot with a seventeen-year-old girl, one filming a movie where she plays a high school student.
I stood there, wondering how the hell this happened.
Of course, we know more now – about her mother and various other factors. And we can guess the rest, all of which contributed to a spiral she still hasn’t broken out of. I wrote an essay about it back then, about protecting our young women. I could never sell that one. Nobody was interested.
But her sad story sat in the back of my mind. Fast forward to July of 2015, when I attended the RWA National Convention in Times Square in New York City. My room looked out on the flashing stories-tall digital screens, advertising all manner of things, usually with beautiful women involved. I decided to fictionalize the story, to tell the tale of a child star of tween movies and shows, but who grew up to continue as a pop star. More of a Miley Cyrus career arc.
Ava was born. And when I looked around for the man to save her from herself, Joe Ivanchan walked in and insisted. I really hadn’t planned to write about an Army vet who’d suffered terribly and had a service dog to keep him on the steady – but sometimes I don’t get to decide these things.
I wrote the book. My agent took it on submission. And we couldn’t sell it.
I revised it, and we took it on submission again. No luck.
I revised it yet again, my new agent took it on submission. And still no luck. One house told me they loved the book, but hadn’t had any luck selling “issue-driven fiction.”
So, I finally decided to publish it myself. In many ways, more than any other book I’ve self-published, this one is a labor of love. I’ve been mulling this story for so many years and it’s finally out there.
That’s enough for me.
Not all desires are shiny and sweet—and the dark ones might change you forever…
It’s not the kind of obsession a tough Army guy can admit to—a jones for Ava, the pretty-princess pop star. Not just her body, the perfect product that sells all those magazines. Her music.
The critics call her human lip gloss, all style and no substance. To Joe Ivanchan, Ava is the exact blend of reality and fantasy that he can tolerate, the closest he’s willing to get to giving his heart after the injury and breakdown that got him out of the service.
But Ava is real. She’s a flesh and blood woman with a publicity machine and an album deadline, along with a whole team of handlers paid to shellac a pristine sheen over a damaged, desperate soul. A woman with fears, with secrets, with desires.
When Joe finds himself in an interview to join her security team as her driver, his instinct is to get away. But the woman behind Ava’s carefully focus-grouped image is even harder to walk away from. The angry needs tormenting her speak to something within Joe. Something empathetic, protective—and primal…
Besides, even a falling star can light up the darkest night.
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Today at the SFF Seven we have a guest post from Kelly Robson – please welcome her!
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This week’s topic is writing in different mediums, and it’s a bit of a stumper. I don’t think of myself as writing in different mediums. I write science fiction, fantasy, and horror short stories — those are my jam, man.
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I’m so pleased with how this cover turned out that I just had to. SHOOTING STAR is a contemporary romance, darker and edgier than my Missed Connections series. I’m really excited to see this one finally come out as I’ve been working on it for years. Releasing March 6!
Our topic this week at the SFF Seven is “How do you keep your story from being too complex?”
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This week at the SFF Seven is a topic of our choice – whatever is on our minds. So, I’ve decided to tell a story I haven’t publicly told before. There’s been a lot of conversation in publishing this last month about sexual harassment in the industry, largely springing from this article in the School Library Journal and the followup survey by Anne Ursu. This is my #MeToo story.
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A new power is at work in the Twelve Kingdoms, unbalancing the fragile peace. For the High Queen and her sisters, it might mean a new alliance—or the end of the love of a lifetime…
As a howling blizzard batters the mountain keep of Windroven, Ami, Queen of Avonlidgh, and her unofficial consort Ash face their own storm. Their passion saved them from despair, but Ash knows a scarred, jumpy ex-convict isn’t the companion his queen needs. He’s been bracing himself for the end since their liaison began. When it finally comes, the shattering of his heart is almost a relief.
With a man haunted by nightmares and silent as stone, Ami knows only that Ash’s wounds are his own to hide or reveal. She can’t command trust. But just as they are moving apart, a vicious attack confines them together, snowbound and isolated with an ancient force awakening within Windroven itself. If they truly mean to break their bond, Ami and Ash must first burn through a midwinter that will test every instinct—and bring temptation all too near…
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This week we’re giving a valentine to the books of years’ past and sharing a title from our backlists. A little love for those publications that might even predate the creation of this blog!
For mine, I’m sharing my first standalone fiction publication. It was my first sale as a novelist, even though it’s technically a novella at 81 pages, and I originally published it with Loose ID. (Now sadly going out of business.) It’s an erotic fantasy – a BDSM Beauty and the Beast – and is still one of my best-selling titles ever. Also, I originally published it under the pseudonym “Jennifer Paris,” the one time I used that name. When I got the rights back and self-published the book (also my first venture into self-publishing), I did it under my own name. A bit of history there.
In exchange for her father’s life, Amarantha agrees to marry the dreadful Beast and be his wife for seven days. Though the Beast cannot take Amarantha’s virginity unless she begs him to, he can and does take her in every other way. From the moment they are alone together, the Beast relentlessly strips Amarantha of all her resistance.
If Amarantha can resist her cloaked and terrifying husband, she gains his entire fortune and will be allowed to return to her family and a normal life. But the Beast seduces her at every turn, exposing, binding, tormenting, and pleasuring Amarantha until she no longer knows her own deepest desires. Increasingly desperate to break the curse that chains his humanity, the Beast drives Amarantha past every boundary. But her desire for a normal life may jeopardize the love that will save them both.
As an interesting aside, here’s this article on how Facebook is “flattening” content and reducing the ability of creators to share quality stuff. I’m trying to share it widely in places that AREN’T Facebook.
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Another photo of the lunar eclipse as the full moon set over Santa Fe.
Our topic this week at the SFF Seven is “Why do you think people DON’T write?” Come on over for my take. Warning: brutal truth, but there is hope!
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I woke up this morning and got some photos of the full moon setting during a lunar eclipse, the second full moon this month, and during the supermoon cycle. That makes it a super blue blood moon, which is a mouthful. Because our bedroom window looks west, we were able to lie there when we woke up around 5:40am, and watch the shadow cross the moon until totality. I live in a magical place.
Yesterday I started on a draft of THE ARROWS OF THE HEART, the next book in The Twelve Kingdoms/Uncharted Realms saga. For those familiar with the series, this will be Zyr and Karyn’s book. And, for those who get my newsletter – if you don’t, and want to, sign up is here – you know I did a survey on whose point-of-view (POV) to tell it from. Because, clearly, I’ve been wrestling with this issue for a long time.
These results were fascinating and unexpected – especially that so many readers were good with alternating first person. But they also didn’t give me a definitive answer. All you people who trust me to just tell a good story! I love you, I really do. BUT YOU ARE NOT HELPING.
See, normally, POV is not a question for me. The traditional advice – and I think it’s good advice – is to take the POV of the character with the most at stake in a scene. This works much better with alternating POVs, however, when there’s freedom to choose a POV based on stakes. And which gives weight to alternating first person POVs.
In this series, however, I’ve always done a single First Person POV. I think there’s something to be said for sticking to a single form. Like, Shakespeare wouldn’t start writing plays in rhyming verse instead of blank verse. Not that I’m Shakespeare! But I do believe in creating coherency in a series, for a common feel. In addition, each novel in this series has been from the heroine’s POV. I’ve always felt that’s important, as it seems so much fantasy dwells on the male gaze. (Some of the novellas have been in the hero’s POV, or even in third person alternating, but I see those as subsidiary to the main arc.)
Still, this hasn’t been a no-brainer on this book. It should obviously be from Karyn’s POV – but I keep thinking about Zyr’s POV and hearing his voice in my head. Many of you – and writer friends I whined to who likely aren’t reading this – said to just go with it! Write it the way you want to!
So, I *did*! I started yesterday and wrote a page or two in his POV and…
………………it’s all wrong.
It’s something, and I’ll keep it, at least for a while, but I think this is a case of pushing through the wall. (I talked about that at a panel recently, nicely summarized by Shannon Moreau here.)
You know what decided me? I started thinking about the cover and working on that with the fantastically talented Ravven, and I only see the heroine on the cover. That says a great deal.
So: opinions from those of you who haven’t weighed in yet?
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Another photo from Meow Wolf. Nnedi Okorafor and I fell in love with this crazy kitchen and had to photograph each other in it. One of the most fun aspects of this “immersive experience” is not only being able to touch and enter the exhibit, but in a way to become part of it as well. I felt like part of this kitchen and wanted to seem like it, too.
Art of all mediums is interesting in the way it interfaces with reality. It’s impossible to recreate reality in art – and maybe not even desirable to do so – but art necessarily reflects and at best deepens our understanding of the real world. Our topic at the SFF Seven this week is the unreliable narrator – whether we love them, hate them, write them or avoid them. Come on over to weigh in!