Cynitha Eden | Getting Lost In A Book

I love to get lost in a good book. Love to let the hours slip away as I become drawn into a great read. I love to laugh and cry and have my husband look at me like I’m crazy. Oh, yeah, sometimes getting lost in a book can be a wonderful thing.

When I’m reading—I want to get so drawn into a story that I consider myself lost. But, when I’m writing a book, well, getting lost can have a whole new meaning for me…

I’m finishing up work on my latest novel, part of my "Midnight" paranormal series for Kensington Brava. And I have to say—I think I’ve gotten lost in this book—but not necessarily lost in the good way. You see, all of my free time is consumed by this book. I’m so deeply into my demon story that all my energy is consumed by the tale. So that means the rest of my life is getting a bit lost, too.

I walked into my dining room earlier and wondered when all of the lights in the chandelier (there are twelve of them) had stopped working. Surely not all at once. This had to be a gradual thing—and I missed it.

I looked in the closet and realized there were no clean clothes to be found—but the pile of dirty laundry is large enough to eat me now.

I’ve got phone messages from friends that are over a week old—and calling them with an apology that I was lost might not cut it.

Sigh. Getting lost in a book—sometimes, it’s so easy to do.

So tell me, have you gotten lost in a good book lately? Or, if you’re a writer, too—has your own story pulled you in so deeply that your family has written you off as being lost?

Cynthia Eden
http://www.cynthiaeden.com/
HOTTER AFTER MIDNIGHT—Available now from Kensington Brava
"Wicked Ways" in WHEN HE WAS BAD—Available now from Kensington Brava
Believe in monsters. They believe in you.

Jessica Andersen | Of Mayan Myths and Hot Men

As I talk to people about NIGHTKEEPERS, one question that comes up repeatedly is one of inspiration, and how I came to take pieces of ancient Mayan mythology and bring them into a modern day paranormal romantic thriller. Given that I’m a scientist by training and have spent the last bunch of years writing medical romantic suspense, it might seem a little off-topic for me to be writing about Mayan mythology. But really it isn’t. . . it goes back to being a little kid and visiting a big pyramid.

This was back when Cancun was just starting to become Americanized. My parents and I stayed at small local hotels and took rattling bus tours to Mayan ruins across the Yucatan. I soaked up enough Spanish to ask where the bathroom was, and to order a burger and Coke. More, I learned how the Mayans were masters of astronomy, and how they played a winner-loses-head ball game in huge, open-ended ball courts. I discovered flan (and subsequently Montezuma’s revenge), haggled at open-air markets, and learned a bit about how the coming of the Conquistadors in the early 1500s had changed the landscape forever.

Ever since, I’ve been fascinated with the Maya. I can still close my eyes and feel the damp chill of the narrow stone stairway inside the great pyramid at Chichen Itza, or remember the squirrelly quiver at the pit of my stomach as I stood at the edge of the Cenote Sacrada- a water-filled sinkhole hundreds of feet across and down, that the ancient Mayans used for ceremonies and sacrifice. It’s those images, those memories of history and grandeur and a deep sense of otherness, that came back to me, grabbed me by the throat and dragged me along for the ride when I stumbled over a reference to the endpoint of the ancient Mayan calendar, and how it aligns with scientific concerns about a stellar conjunction set to occur on that very day. . . December 21, 2012.

I mean, how cool is that?

So I started working on the concept for NIGHTKEEPERS and the subsequent books in the series. But the stories that I love to read and write aren’t about a place, or a situation. . . they’re about the people in those places and situations: How does a guy with a business degree and part ownership of a garden center deal with learning that he’s not only the last leader of a dying race of magi, but it’s up to him to save the world? How does a no-nonsense detective hunting her brother’s killer cope with learning that his death- and her own potential sacrifice- are tied up in ancient prophecies and the so-called 2012 doomsday? How do they both deal with an attraction that is part magic, part basic chemistry, and one hundred percent complicated?

I researched history and mythology, and I thought about the lives and loves of the modern-day magi sworn to protect mankind from the 2012 doomsday, and eventually I sat down and started to write, always with the question in mind: what would surprise me if it happened next? What would make me say, “Dude… didn’t see that coming!” For me, that kick of excitement is another kind of inspiration.

Thus, for me and the writing of NIGHTKEEPERS, inspiration began with a long-ago vacation and a lifelong interest, and then became a love story, and an adventure. I hope you’ll join me on that adventure, and that you’ll love Strike and Leah as much as I do.

Jessica Andersen
http://www.jessicaandersen.com/

Kate Walker | Swamped by Spaniards

As I write for Harlequin Presents, I often have to decide on the nationality of my hero. And part of the fantasy of Mills & Boon Modern/Harlequin Presents is the fact that the heroes are more often than not Mediterranean men – Italians, Spaniards, and those so very-very popular Greek Tycoons. The Greek Tycoon books just fly off the shelf but I can’t always be writing a Greek hero – that would bore me, and my readers – and besides sometimes it seems that everyone else in the world is writing Greek hero story.

There are characteristics that fit some nationalities, and some that are more suited to others, and so I need to take these into consideration when I’m choosing my hero. And that’s what I’m doing at the moment – starting work on a brand new story. My latest titles (my 54th) has just been accepted and my editor is ringing me this week to discuss future plans so I have to have some ideas to talk over with her. So right now I have just the seed of an idea.

My hero won’t be a Greek though. I wrote a Greek hero the books before last and he was such a strong character that I’ll need to wait for a while before I can think of writing another of his fellow countrymen. And the new man won’t be Spanish either. I love writing Spanish heroes, they have a power and an passion that creates a wonderful hero, one who strikes sparks of his heroine and turns the book into an emotional tango – all fire and burn. But at the moment I have rather too many Spaniards to deal with – as the title of this blog says, I’m swamped by them.

My newest book is out in June. Spanish Billionaire, Innocent Wife is the title – so that gives away the hero’s nationality. And the book I just had accepted (Cordero’s Forced Bride) also has a sexy sensual Spaniard as its hero. Then, as if that wasn’t enough, I have Spaniard from the past coming back to join me all over again. Back in 2004, I wrote The Alcolar Family Trilogy – and this year those three books are being reprinted in a 3 in 1 By Request edition in July in the UK and an ebooks ‘Bundle’ on eHarlequin next month. Even the special short story I have in the Mills & Boon Centenary Celebration Collection has a Spanish hero!

One of the reasons why the Mediterranean hero is so popular is that he comes from a warm country - in the past they would have seemed much more 'exotic' before easy and frequent travel abroad brought Spain, Italy, Greece etc into our holiday plans so frequently. Warm countries, so the belief is , create hot-blooded men, men who are passionate, sensual, more 'alpha', less inhibited, less 'stiff upper lip' than the average British male. They are also it is believed more likely to woo the heroine, to indulge in romantic gestures. I don't necessarily think this is true - I think it maligns the poor British male (I married one after all!) - but it is in a way a sort of shorthand for the exotic passionate stranger who sweeps the heroine off her feet.

So a romance novelist isn't trying to create an absolutely perfectly realistic Spaniard or Greek or whatever. But neither do you want to create someone who is so much a stereotype that he appears almost a caricatures.

The thing I always remember above and beyond anything else is that my hero, whatever nationality he is, is a man. This sounds so obvious but it's important that he's a man first and then his nationality affects him second. There are certain characteristics that fit more strongly with certain nationalities than others - think of Italy and you think of style, sophistication, families. But Sicily has more of an edge, a sense of danger - you think of vendettas etc. Greece always bring with it the idea, for me, of that Greek word 'hubris' - that overweening excessive pride or self-confidence; arrogance. And the many Greek islands all have a character of their own, some busy, sophisticated, some rural, even wild in atmosphere. And that can give the hero a raw edge, a primitive streak that underlies his sophisticated veneer.

So what hero will I choose this time round? Most times it’s the plot that helps me choose in ways I’ve described already. But this time it was a chance ‘serendipity’ moment when I came on an article in a magazine. It showed a wonderful, beautiful house set on a tiny private island on the Italian lakes . It was actually a small hotel but it would work perfectly for my hero’s private house. And I haven’t written an Italian hero in a while.

Now all I need is a name – and a heroine for him – and a plot . . .

Kate Walker

Thanks so much for inviting me over to blog on Fresh Fiction! I'll keep coming back to see what's new here. If you want to know more about me and my books, please visit my web site at http://www.kate-walker.com/ or my blog - http://kate-walker.blogspot.com/

Toni McGee Causey | The Tipping Point...

Eleventy quibillion years ago, when I was in fourth grade, I wanted to be a writer. I wrote terrible poems, which I think only got worse as I got older and the teenage years descended like locusts, leaving only WOE and ANGST. By college, I had brief bouts of sanity, whereupon I attempted architecture (ohmyGod, they do not tell you about the math), business (my first accounting teacher gave me the final exam in advance, with the answers, if I would swear to her I would never, ever, take another accounting class again), and then journalism (where I learned they had the picky little annoying habit of wanting reporters to not make crap up)(this was before Fox News).

And in spite of a fine history of liking to eat and wanting a roof over my head, I still wanted to be a writer. If you asked a question, you would get a story instead of an answer. If I could sidetrack into a couple of tangents? You might as well park a while, because the stories? They would not stop.

All the while, I wrote. Much of it was bad.

I ran into a former high-school teacher, who'd also been a librarian, who asked me the tough question: why wasn't I submitting for publication? Have you ever run into one of your former teachers? THEY ARE SCARY. It's like they can retroactively fail you or their eyes shoot truth serum rays or something, and I did not want to stand there in front of my two-year-old and explain I hadn't submitted anything because I was a big honking chicken. So I took her advice and started writing and submitting to the local paper. (They were insane enough to buy the very first one. That's like feeding a stray puppy. They did not realize this, I think, until I was around so much, they added me to the regular staff AND the food staff, and this was a fairly prominent paper. One of my relatives realized that I was being assigned to write about how people COOK things. He asked, "Isn't that... fraud? You use the fire alarm as an oven timer." I look back on this as the beginning of my fiction career.)

Over the years, and we are not discussing how many, maybe more than two but less than a hundred, I wrote more articles than I can remember or count for newspapers and magazines. I started querying and submitting (and getting sales) at national magazines, but my real love was fiction. I tried my hand at a novel, but it was a spiraling mess, and my husband could see how frustrated I was. (And EVERY husband out there just substituted the words "complete raving loon" for "frustrated.") So, being a very wise man who liked to wake up breathing in the mornings, he encouraged me to go back to school for some writing classes.

For a while, I was lured to the dark side (screenwriting), and landed an agent, and did a lot of stuff that was almost-but-not-quite what I wanted to do, which was to sell something I made up. Hollywood, by the way, will kill you with encouragement, because when you meet the executives, you will be told you are the most brilliant writer they have read in forever and where the hell have you been all this time and they want to be in the "Toni Causey" business. Swear to God, they will say it and you will believe it because they are that good at sincere. Until you're sitting in the Warner Brothers commissary waiting for the next meeting, furtively looking around to see the FRIENDS stars on their lunch break (yes, I am dating myself, hush), and the same executive walks by with his arm around someone else who is not you, telling them how utterly brilliant they were, the most brilliant person they'd ever read. That's when you look down at the script in your hand that is an action thriller that everyone absolutely loves but could you make the man a woman and the woman a duck and wouldn't it be great if the horse saved the day? and you think, "I'm crazy, but I'm not this crazy." Some writers (our very own Alex and Rob) have the tenacity for that. Me? I kinda wanted to just kick people. (I never claimed to be mature.)

See, I had this idea. An idea for this funny, take-no-prisoners kind of southern woman, who loves deeply and means well, in spite of the chaos she causes, and I wanted to write that story and be true to that story. So I quit screenwriting. (I had had some offers if I'd move out there. I was not going to move the family.) I had a hard time convincing my former agent that yes, I was serious. I was quitting to write a novel. (I think she still thinks I am going to change my mind.) But I quit, and I started writing Bobbie Faye. I wrote a quick draft in script form, because I was used to that format, then a friend showed a friend, the lovely Rosemary Edghill, who said, "Send me some chapters." And I did. She gave me some notes (smart, smart woman), and taught me how to write the kind of synopsis an agent needs ("I did not think you could make this worse," she said of one draft of that synopsis, "but you did." That's because I am an overachiever. It took a lot of tries before I figured out that writing a marketing synopsis is a lot like writing a non-fiction article, and that I could do.) Next thing I know, I'd signed with an agent and Rosemary had pitched it to an editor, who made an offer, and St. Martin's Press bought that book and the next two based on three sample chapters and a synopsis. Almost twenty years from the point where I saw my old high-school English teacher and she'd said, "Why aren't you submitting for publication?"

(Thank you, Mrs. Ross.)

There is a great big huge world of "no" out there. Sometimes, following the dream does not mean hoppity-skipping down the easy path. In fact, a lot of times, it means zig zagging past mortars and incoming and a lot of almosts-not-quites and despair and frustration what-the-hell-were-you-thinking? and ugh-this-sucks and occasionally wow-show-me-more. And in spite of how long it took, and how much hard work, I have been exceptionally lucky--there have been friends and mentors who've said, "keep going," and who've said, "send that in." They changed my life. They were the tipping point for me.

So how about you? Who encouraged you? Or what's something you tried that someone encouraged you to do and now you're glad you did?

Toni McGee Causey
http://www.tonimcgeecausey.com/

Summer Begins...A New Adventure ???

The start of summer...and so it begins, my renewed search for more books. It's an addiction and it never rests. I sometimes wished I'd get more enjoyment from watching television or movies but to be terribly honest there is nothing like a good book to satisfy the longing inside me of finding a new world, one that exists only in the imagination of a storyteller and writer. A good book takes me far away from my every day life to an exotic world that is exciting and yet "real." A great story telling can uncover nuggets in a world I may inhabit and interact with daily yet never noticed the truths beneath the surface. Yes, I read to escape and to be entertained.

This weekend was the US release of the latest Indiana Jones movie, so of course we had to go and see it opening weekend -- at least we went matinee since prices are outrageous in my opinion. And it was cooler than being out doors in the 90 plus heat, yes, summer has officially arrived in Texas. The anticipation was palpable after all it had been nearly 20 years since the "Last Crusade" and this one with the longest title ever promised "Great Adventure."

Uh, make that fizzled aftermath. Yes, the action began almost immediately and never let up -- thank goodness otherwise I may have fallen asleep. Which can be so embarrassing if I start to, uh, snore in a lady-like manner. And the pace was frenetic, non-stop action, most of it totally unbelievable for mature men to perform. Bless the business of stunt men and doubles! At least the women held up their side of the screen! Was I disappointed? A bit, but then it was the "catch-up" movie and it did that, jumping ahead to 1957 and a different world. It was a bit preachy and disjointed, but worse of all was the story. I missed a story. I wasn't taken back into a world of adventure, I went into a world of "effects." But it was nice to see Harrison Ford and Karen Allen one more time. Even the photographs of "Marcus" and "Henry Jones, Sr." were a welcome treat!

To finish off our Indiana Jones fix, we indulged in a marathon of DVD watching and made it through two of the three movies.
The Adventures of Indiana Jones (Raiders of the Lost Ark/ Temple of Doom/ Last Crusade) I suggested we skip "Temple of Doom" but was out voted so I picked up The Third Circle to finish off. Between being whisked back to late Victorian England and a group of mesmerists and characters with enhanced psychic abilities and watching adventures in a mine it was an enjoyable evening. In fact, I think I prefer the opportunity of reading a book while watching a movie. It fills in the gaps and allows me to indulge ... in my addiction of reading.

So, how did you spend your Memorial Day weekend?