RedHotRomance

Figured I'd pop in with a quick flyby post as little man naps (he learned to shit through his diapers over Christmas. I'm so very proud!). Hoping everyone survived the holidays. As 2006 rapidly approaches, I want to hear from you. First, what happened in 2005 that you're particularly psyched about? What do you want to improve on for 2006 (I hate the whole resolution thing, so I prefer to think of them as areas that I hope to improve upon)?
Here's what I'm psyched about for 2005:
1. After 5 years of trying to get pregnant, I finally had a baby boy in May
2. After 3 years of writing, I sold 3 books this year
3. The success of my writing buddies - Bella's first book from Pocket not only debuted, it made Bookscan! And Monica... (last name of pseudonym still TBD) got a 3 book deal from Ballantine.
4. I got a fantastic agent
5. After having my little man, I took off all the pregnancy weight plus 5 pounds (and yes, I know I'm incredibly shallow, but whatever)

Things I'd like to improve on for 2006:
1. My abs (did I not mention the shallowness?)
2. My attitude towards potentially stressful situations (I call it pre-stressing)
3. My organization and time management skills
4. Using my babysitting/baby nap time to be productive (as in, BICHOK)

Okay, now you go!

I was dreading last week. The deadline for Wolf Tales III was looming, I was totally unprepared for Christmas and my 90 year old mother in law was coming for five days. The men with the "hug me" coats were waiting in the wings...
Now it's the day after Christmas, my husband is on the road, making the seven hour round trip to return his mother to her home, the rush has settled into a crawl and I can look back and actually smile at the fun week we had. First of all, I hope I live to see 90, and if I do, I hope I can still go to the Indian casino, sit down at a poker table and finish in the top five in a tournament. :-) I don't think I could finish top five now! My husband promised to keep his mother busy so I could write, and he did a marvelous job. I won't say how much it cost us in poker losses, but it was worth every penny for those uninterrupted hours of writing time.
It's been stressful and fun and I've had the added bonus of watching Wolf Tales climb steadily in the rankings at both Barnes and Noble and Amazon.com. (Somebody please let me know if there is a twelve-step program for ranking addicts...) We've spent time with family ranging in age from 20 months to 90 years and watching them all interract was a lot of fun. I can't help but sit here on the day after Christmas and count my blessings--a healthy, fun-loving family, a daughter and son-in-law willing to take over the big Christmas Eve dinner where both families blend seamlessly, a new granddaughter due to join us in six weeks, and a career that is suddenly taking off to an entirely new level.
It really doesn't get much better than this.
I hope all of you are having a wonderful holiday. I wish you health and happiness in 2006, and always, a few free minutes every day to curl up with a good book.
Happy New Year!
kate

At this time of year we Americans continue our annual debate of whether to say Merry Christmas, Seasons Greetings or Happy Holidays.
I always thought Seasons Greetings worked best on a painted window and Happy Holidays rolled off the tongue well. Imagine seeing a friend across the street, waving and yelling Seasons Greetings. If I know the person celebrates Christmas, I’ll most likely yell Merry Christmas. I’ve always loved the sound of it.
Saying Merry Christmas makes me think of houses trimmed in colorful lights, trees adorned with ornaments, my dog with a bell on his collar and my husband wearing a Santa hat holding two glasses of champagne.
No matter which greeting you choose, say it from the heart and should you be the recipient of the greeting, accept it in the spirit of the season.
So, to my fellow authors and to all of you who visit our site and read our blog Merry Christmas.
Stay safe, be well and keep love in your heart.

BJ McCall

Okay, I know better than to rely on what "feels right," bit it really felt like Christmas was two weeks away, not next Sunday...and since we celebrate on Christmas Eve it's really only a week away and I'm not anywhere close to ready. Thank goodness our daughter and son in law have the dinner at their house, but I have to cook it, or at least the roast and the salmon. Plus, my mother in law will be with us for a week--she's ninety this next month and still sharp as a tack. I hope that if I live that long, I can stay that sharp...er, guess I can forget that one. I'm not that sharp now...
Today was wet and windy and the rain never let up. I was up in my third floor office working away on Wolf Tales III when the power went out. Okay...I call PG&E and wait for light. Nothing. My deadline is growing closer by the minute and I've got no power. I start cleaning. Dusting, picking up stuff, anything to keep busy. No power. Finally the lights come on and I try to go back to work. The scenes that I'd kept in my head were suspiciously absent. The dialogue was gone. The rain was still falling. I ended up sewing all afternoon, making baby blankets for the new granddaughter due in February.
Christmas will arrive on schedule whether I'm ready or not. The book will get done when it's done, and no sooner. There's something inevitable about the march of time...I think it marches right over me. One thing I'm going to be ready for--my book signing for Wolf Tales on Tuesday, December 27 at the Northgate Mall Waldenbooks in San Rafael. If any of you are in the area, stop by Tuesday from noon to two. I'll be the one with the time-stamped foot prints across my butt.

Kate Douglas snuck up behind me and shot me through the dorsal fin. Since she posted her top ten writing secrets on our Aphrodisia Author blog, now I'm supposed to post mine here. I'm also not sure what kinds of secrets I'm supposed to include. Writing tips? Secret plot brainstorming rituals? Reminisces about all the books I've loved before? Anyway, here's a smattering of both:

1. I treat writing like a job. It's the only way I get anything done. When I first started writing, I would "wait for the mood to strike." It took me a year to write a draft of a 250 page manuscript. Then I started treating it like a job, with set hours and time sensitive deadlines. I finished the draft of the second book in 3 months.

2. I have the best critique partners in the world. Bella Andre was my roommate in college, and after a "break up" of several years, we reconnected and discovered we were both working on romance novels! I met Monica McCarty at my first RWA meeting in February 2002. They were the first two people who ever read my work, and I know I never would have sold a book without them.

3. The first manuscript I ever finished is a cowboy/secret baby book.

4. Despite being an English major and a romance lover, I have never read a Jane Austen novel.

5. My parents were convinced I'd be a successful author when they read an email I wrote about a trip my husband and I took to Tuscany. It contained my commentary about the "Museum of Torture" and how members of the Spanish inquisition liked to shove various objects up the asses of heretics.

6. My husband is convinced I'm going to make enough as an author for him to retire. I told him, "Sure, if you want to retire to West Virginia."

7. I made friends in sixth grade by passing around a copy of Judy Blume's "Forever" with all the good parts marked.

8. One of my proudest moments was when my husband complained that he didn't get anything done one weekend because he didn't want to stop reading my book.

9. I have a sharpie pen ready to "edit" my book for my husband's family. I figure the abridged version will be about 4 pages long once I'm through with it.

10. For all of you people who keep asking, no, I don't consider my romance novels "practice" as I prepare to write "something more literary."

and now I tag..... Rae Monet, Vivi Anna, and Sasha White.

Bella Andrea's debut novel, Take Me, was on the Bookscan top 100 romance bestseller list for 2 weeks!!!

Kate Douglas' A Changling for All Seasons spent a week on Amazon's Top 100 romance list.
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Rae Monet's, A Faerie Tale and J.B. Skully's, Vengence to the Max, final in the EPPIE's for 2006 in the Anthology and Mystery Categories.
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Réunions Dangereuses, a vampire ménage quickie by Mardi Ballou, will be released Jan. 18.
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Kensington's Aphrodisia authors just started a blog -
http://theaphrodisiaauthors.blogspot.com. Go check it out.
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Rae Monet contracts with Venus Press for her latest HOT NASCAR romance, Winners Circle, sequel to Racing Hearts. See the details here
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Kate Douglas will be at Waldenbooks, December 27, 2005 at noon to 2:00PM in San Rafael, Northgate Mall, signing Wolf Tales.

Then I could buy him clothes for Christmas....

I swear, I just went to an outlet mall that has every store and every brand and not one single thing didn't scream, "I'm twenty and flaming". Sigh. My husband looks good in thick, rugged sweaters. You know, manly clothes. But evidently those don't exist anymore.

In other news, on the drive home from the fruitless shopping trip, I heard Alanis Morrisette's "You Oughtta Know" and it reminded me of the fact that back in 1995 when I heard it for the first time I nearly drove my car into a ditch. Damn, it's a good song. Especially the line, "And every time you speak her name does she know how you told me you'd hold me until you died, But you're still alive."

Damn, I love that. The songwriter in me just gets all giddy with lines like that.

;-) Bella

http://www.BellaAndre.com

This has been a truly bizarre week, and leaves me with only one thing—well, maybe more than one—to blog about. Sales rankings, or, to put it bluntly and succinctly, the numbers that scream OHMYGAWDTHEY’REBUYINGMYBOOK..or not. When Wolf Tales first listed at Barnes and Noble online for pre-orders, I checked it out. The ranking was at some obscene number like 476,104 which told me that EVERY other book B&N listed was more popular. So I did what I imagine a lot of authors do, decided to ignore B&N because that massive number screaming "not selling" was more depressing than not. Then I heard from a reader that she’d actually received her copy of Wolf Tales from B&N—they were shipping six weeks ahead of the book's release date. I waited almost a month before going back to look at my ranking numbers. They had broken the 10,000 mark! I was hooked. I started checking every day...7,345, then 7,225, 6801 and today at 6,696...someone, somewhere is buying Wolf Tales and might actually be reading it. The funny thing is, I’m also in an anthology that released about the same time Wolf Tales began shipping. I just found out A CHANGELING FOR ALL SEASONS, has been in Amazon’s Top 100 Romances for the past week, hovering between #56 and #80. Not bad for a first print book from a tiny little independent press. When I checked the B&N site online, I discovered it was also outselling Wolf Tales by a large margin. I had to laugh...I’ve been following the wrong book! If I’d just concentrated on Changeling, I might not have spent so much time agonizing over Wolf Tales, which just tells you I’m probably a lot better off not even looking at numbers. So, I go back to the B&N site to double check, and on a whim take a look to see if Sexy Beast, coming out from Kensington in March, is listed yet. Yep, there it is. No picture yet. Ranking is 476,104. Oh my.

This month has been wonderful. And crazy. The wonderful--hearing from so many readers who've fallen in love with Lily and Travis is Take Me. The crazy--getting a cold and then bronchitis and then another cold.

And so I've been forced to remember what I forget every few months--that I cannot live well by work alone. Rest. What a concept. Jasmine, you were talking about this very thing last month right? When you finally went away for a vacation. You're so smart. ;-)

Fortunately, this week I'm teaching a FENG SHUI for WRITERS class with the Passionate Ink RWA chapter. I've got 28 students eager to soak it up. And it's great, because it gives me a break from writing books. And I know that when I get back to it next week, I'll be that much more pysched to see just how hot it's gonna be between Janica and Luke in chapters 1 through 3 of the Take Me sequel.

;-) Bella Andre
http://www.BellaAndre.com

ps-For anyone who wants to see the Take Me sequel in print, please feel free to email me at writetobella@yahoo.com with your request. I'll make sure my editor and publisher gets it. ;-)

I've had a whole stack of ideas rambling through my brain, even though that sad little organ is still on Hawaii time, but then when I sat down to write this morning, my mouse didn't work! Yep, it's the little things that hold us back. Made me realize how often we let "the little things" stop the big stuff..."I didn't work on my book today because the roses needed pruning," or, "I haven't gotten to my blog because I've been farting around with the stupid little ball in this dumb mouse..." For two hours? Yep...I'm a class act when it comes to the little things. Easily distracted, often clueless, totally into allowing myself to be sidetracked. Is it all bad? No, not necessarily. Sometimes those little "side tracks" we wander down have surprises at the end. While mindlessly pruning roses, I came up with a solution to a plot problem in Wolf Tales III that's been holding me back. While playing with the stupid little ball in my mouse I worked through a bit of dialogue that had sounded stilted and unrealistic. It's as if the part of our brain that directs the pruning of roses and the repair of sticky mice (mouses?) is also the same part that gets in the way of our muse. Let the little things get in the way once in awhile, allow yourself to be sidetracked, and if you're lucky, it might just open a fresh gateway for your frustrated muse.

How many times have we heard people in the publishing industry talk about how they love an author’s voice? For the longest time, I didn’t understand what that meant.

Now, ten books later, I’ve learned to honor my voice… but the question is… what actually IS your writing voice?

Webster's Dictionary has 5 different definitions of voice...

Main Entry: voice

1 sound produced by vertebrates by means of lungs, larynx
2 a sound resembling or suggesting vocal utterance
3 an instrument or medium of expression
4 wish, choice, or opinion openly or formally expressed
5 distinction of form or a system of inflections of a verb to indicate the relation of the subject of the verb to the action which the verb expresses

Wow, that’s a lot to swallow. Can I break that down?

Simply put, I believe your voice is you; how you think, how you feel, and how those emotions are weaved into your writing. I think this is probably why most of us are so insecure once we put our work out there for review, because, deep down, that book, is about us, and written with our voice and our emotions. It’s a piece of us.

I remember my first re-write letter from my agent. It was six pages long. I scoured through it, underlined, bolded, tried to wrap my head around how I was going to change the book to please and satisfy her and give the publishing industry what I thought it wanted. After much magical musing, I found, there were just things about my book I didn’t want to change; things I considered… my voice, so I didn’t. I changed what I could and sent a letter explain why I wasn’t changing the remaining. It worked fine.

So what is your voice? You tell me. What makes your writing unique? How do you describe an author’s voice?