Why I Miss Harry Potter...

Wood Nymph and Witch
Originally uploaded by freshfiction

Last year we were all agog at the idea of Harry Potter 7, coming soon, count downs to release day. Which store to go to for the party. House party plans being made. Authentic Potter menus researched and practiced. Conferences juggled around the release date. Reading schedules worked out. How many copies to buy, would it be just the hard cover or did we need the audio as well? Who doesn't love Jim Dale, the "voice" of Harry Potter? But this year, as they say, "not so much" to look forward... book wise.

The closest book is Stephanie Meyer's Breaking Dawn. The book stores are planning midnight parties but unfortunately for the majority of readers -- non-female ones particularly -- the overwhelming look on the face when asked if they're going to the store is confusion. That confusion is also felt by most of our book club members as well when asked if we should plan an expedition. And the excuses for not going, well, I guess vampires and werewolves just don't hold the same universal appeal as does magic and round glasses.

Or is it because HP had a series of movies made almost simultaneously with the rising popularity of the books? So even if the sight of 600 page books daunted, people knew the HP characters and "place." The first "Twilight" movie isn't scheduled to be released until late fall way after the final book in the series is published. I remember talking myself blue in the face about the HP books when number four was being released but that was also the summer when the first HP movie was released and the trailer made little eyes pop open and they were eager to try out Goblet of Fire. In fact that is the first midnight party we attended. And it was an eye-opener!

Daniel on the Night Express
Ready to party all night!
Originally uploaded by freshfiction

All those kids and parents staying up on a Friday night, crowding a store and a BOOK store at that to get their hands on a big fat book. Wow! In the years since then, I've managed to drag even the non-HP readers to the "midnight events" every other year and it was the highlight of the summer! We'd plan a late Friday night dinner at a restaurant near the store of choice, then troop over to partake in the craziness of an HP Countdown party! Then our very next book club would be a HP night complete with butter beer and pumpkin pasties. Delicious! We'd sit around the table until late at night discussing characters, motivations, plot, favorite bits and whether or not the ending was necessary! It was fun, it was unusual and wow, do I miss it!

So, what are you waiting for this summer? What delicious treat is in store for your literary entertainment? Is "Hancock" or "Mamma Mia" really going to fix your yen? Or, are you like me desperately missing Harry Potter?

Check out our photos from Harry Potter 7 party


Our Harry Potter 6 party

Karin Tabke | Hot Cops and Hot Knights

I want to start off by thanking everyone here at Fresh Fiction for inviting me as a guest blogger today! I’m really happy to be here.

So, let me ask you this: What is it we find so sexy about those sexy cops and to die for knights??

Hmm, could it be the washboard abs and the muscular arms? Or those brilliant piercing eyes that seem to look right into our souls? Maybe it’s that thick dark hair we want to run our fingers through. Or the uniform or the chain mail?

Or maybe it’s more, much, much more. Could it be the many layers that comprise an alpha’s true character? You know? that command presence they have when they walk into a situation and immediately know what to do: The bad guy is apprehended, the damsel in distress is no longer in one kind of distress but now a completely different kind of distress.

I think for me, what makes a guy sexy, whether he is a knight of William the Conqueror or a beat cop, is his brain. It’s all connected to how he works. How he thinks. His compassion, his take control attitude, his willingness to stand for something and fight for it, but mostly, his passion for everything he does. Whether it’s work, play or love.

A man who is unwaveringly committed is sexy. A man who when he walks into a room does not have to roar to let everyone know he is the king of the jungle, he just is, is damn sexy. That understated rawness and power that every woman wants to tame is beyond hot.

He could be wearing a five thousand dollar Italian suit or holey Wranglers and a faded tee-shirt. A sexy man looks good in anything. He wears it all, well. He has that charisma that smile that way to make each woman he makes eye contact with feel as if she were the one. Be still my beating heart. A sexy man can make a woman forget her name, where she lives and what she had for breakfast. He can take a confident over-achiever and reduce her to a pile of stuttering mush. He can make a wallflower bloom. He can make grandmothers blush and wish they were forty years younger and make a school girl wish she would hurry and grow up.

Sigh, it is because of men just as I have described that I write romance. I fall in love each time I write a book. How about you? What makes a guy sexy, and tell us who your all time favorite romance hero is.

Karin
http://www.karintabke.com/

Eve Kenin | Kick Butt

We all do it every day of our lives. We handle the cooking, the cleaning, the job, the boss, the mustard spilled down the front of the white blouse just as we’re ready to leave the house, the sick parent, sick child, sick hubby or self. A shattered glass. A shattered dream. A mountain of laundry that seems to be growing exponentially. Carpool, car accident, kid throwing up in the car. We handle things that are bigger, or smaller. Things that get under our skin and stay to irritate, like sand in your bathing suit. Things that are so huge they would dwarf a whale. We handle them because we must. Is it always easy? No. But we do it nonetheless, sometimes with gritted teeth or a heavy heart, and sometimes with hard won grace.

Which means there’s a little kick butt heroine inside us all.

So what exactly is the kick butt heroine? She’s a woman who copes with anything that is thrown at her. It isn’t always easy for her, but she faces down the challenge before her and finds a way to surmount it. Physical strength is one weapon in her arsenal, but she’s also smart and wily and she finds her backbone even when she’s shaking so hard she can barely breathe. She has failings and weaknesses, and she’s smart enough to both recognize them and turn them to her advantage.

My July release, HIDDEN, has such a heroine. She’s a genetically enhanced super-soldier who’s been kept prisoner and used as a lab rat all her life. At one point in the story, Tatiana is described as a combination of “waif and warrior”, and that description is apt. She’s survived horrors in her life and she’s on a mission to complete her three-step plan to kill the monster that held her prisoner and save the Northern Waste from the plague he developed. She’s both incredibly brave, and incredibly afraid. She can withstand the subzero temperatures of the Waste, hack through bone with her bare hands, and take out a small army without breaking a sweat. But more than that, she faces down her frailties and weaknesses and fears and meets each day, each challenge, with all the strength she can muster. And that puts her solidly in the kick butt category.

Just don’t make her cook a meal.

Please visit www.evekenin.com/ or www.evesilver.net/ for more information on HIDDEN and other Eve Kenin / Eve Silver books.

Happy reading!

Eve Kenin / Eve Silver

Shari Anton | Whatever made you think you could write a novel?

How often have you read a bio where the author states she's been making up stories since she was in elementary school? I'm not one of those authors.

Sure, I got good grades in English class. I didn't grumble when the teacher assigned a five-page essay because that wasn't torture for me. Reading literature was a joy and the book reports were a breeze. However, if someone had told me then that I would someday write a 400 page manuscript and have it published I would have laughed hysterically.

I needed a practical education. Like many females of my age group, I took the courses needed to get into college along with a bunch of secretarial courses as back up if the college thing didn't work out. Including Gregg shorthand. Does anyone remember shorthand? I didn't think so.

Well, college didn't work out. And I got married and had kids. So over the course of the years I've had several jobs – sometimes part time, and occasionally full time, alternating with the times I needed to be a full time Mom (which I was so glad I was able to do and wouldn't give up those years for anything!).

During one of the Mom times I got hooked on Romance, especially historical romance. I can remember trolling the book aisle at K-Mart for any cover that featured a cowboy, knight, or pirate. Hmmm … I still tend to do that, but now I'm usually in the bookstore, and I have my favorite authors, and there all those lovely Victorian and Regency books … but I digress.

One of my full time jobs was for a brand new company. We needed everything from purchase orders and invoices to marketing brochures and technical manuals. As you can imagine, some of the writing I was doing was rather dry and boring. Looking for help, I decided to take a creative writing class, thinking I could pick up some tips on how to jazz things up.

Discovering how much fun writing fiction could be was like the proverbial slap upside the head. The poetry section was interesting and the essays weren't challenging. Then we began writing short stories. Ideas flowed. Writing was exciting. My stories were always too long and convoluted for the form. I needed to write a novel. To my amazement, I sold EMILY'S CAPTAIN (March 1997), and suddenly had the writing career I'd dreamed of. MAGIC IN HIS KISS (July 2008), is my twelfth novel.



I sometimes look back at my temerity and wonder where the passion, determination, and confidence came from. But then, no one has ever accused me of being shy or timid, either. A friend of mine says he tries to do something every day that he's just a little afraid to do. What have you done lately that gave you a moment's pause – but you forged ahead and completed the task, or survived despite the danger, or changed your life – and you're so glad you persevered?

Shari Anton
www.sharianton.com/

Tara Taylor Quinn | Black and White; Right or Wrong; You Tell Me

My favorite colors are…non-colors. And that’s so me. So TTQ. I’ve never been a joiner. Hard to believe from someone who was president of a large writer’s organization, huh? You’d think a person had to be part of the ‘in’ crowd to get to such an elevated position. Except that the position wasn’t elevated, and when I entered the board room for my first term of service, I didn’t know anyone well. And only two people by name. I hadn’t run for office, and had no idea how the current president had ever heard of me or why she thought I was the one she wanted to appoint to a vacated position. After eight years of service, I came away knowing a lot more names, but only a handful of people personally.

It’s not that I like being alone. Or that I don’t want friends. I’ve just always been alone. I grew up with my nose in a book. Literally. By the time I was fourteen, I was reading a Harlequin romance a day. Throughout high school I attended class, did my homework, worked in the nursery at a bowling alley and then at Wendy’s, and I lived for those moments every day that I got to escape into my books – even when those moments had to come in the wee hours of the morning. I graduated from high school never having attended a single party or having gone on a single date.

And this is pertinent today only because I’ve come face to face with myself – with a few major differences. This mirrored image is a loner, too, no close friends, doesn't know how to socialize, spent high school reading on the computer instead of books, but still reading. The differences? The person I’m facing is only twenty-three years old. And male. His name’s Ryan Mercedes. He’s Sara’s Son. Ryan isn’t like any other twenty-three year old guy I’ve ever heard of. When he presented himself almost two years ago, the twenty-one year old son of a woman who’d been raped at sixteen, I told him to go away. He came back. He told me that his mother had to meet her rapist. I told him he was nuts. And sent him away. He didn’t go. He just stood there. Silently for a long time. I wondered how he could wait so long without getting tired. Eventually, of course, he won. Because that’s Ryan. He doesn’t believe in losing. He doesn’t believe in giving up. He’s hard headed and stubborn and when he’s sure he’s right, he’s sure he’s right. Period.

And now we’re back to my favorite colors. They’re black and white. I’m wearing them today. I wear them many times a week. I have many many renditions of black with white shoes, white with black shoes, white shoes, black shoes, blank and white shoes – and purses – and jewelry to match. I have at least seven white button up blouses, and more black and white other shirts than I can count. I have at least five black cardigan sweaters. Three-quarter length sleeves, long sleeves, long body, short body, heavy, light. I have a black sweater for every occasion. (I get cold a lot!) And Ryan, darn him, showed me that I AM the clothes I wear. Or he is.

A long time ago someone told me once that ‘Life is not lived in black and white. It’s lived in shades of grey.’ This was not someone I knew well. It was not someone I particularly liked. And I liked the message even less. I want things to be clearly delineated. I want there to be right and wrong. One right and wrong meant for every occasion. I want to know that there is a right, best choice that fits every situation (just like my shoes and shirts are made for my black and white days) and I want to do my best to make that best/right choice every single time. Ryan again. That’s him. Exactly.

Only difference is, Ryan’s more than twenty years younger than I am. He has the ignorance of youth to bolster him. I, on the other hand, have enough years of experience to know that that person I didn’t like all those years ago, that message about life being shades of grey, was pretty accurate. Life isn’t black and white. For every situation there are multiple sides, multiple layers, multiple people with multiple needs that will be effected, and multiple choices that serve different goods. There isn’t one right answer waiting to be found. Or one best choice, either. Rather, life is a learning experience, and a choice that might seem ‘wrong’, if it teaches us a lot, could then be deemed the best choice we could have made. If we grow and progress and get a tiny bit closer to ultimate joy and happiness with that learning, to being able to bring it to others, then how can we pronounce the choice wrong?

I posed the question to Ryan. He argued with me. Adamantly. He stood again. For a long time. Staring at me from the back of my mind. But I’d learned. I knew him. I stood, too. For longer. It was an eternal stalemate. Except, somehow, while Ryan and I stood stubbornly, refusing to budge, we ended up creating Trusting Ryan. (He came up with the title, not me.) See, Ryan orchestrated a meeting between his rapist father and his biological mother in my July ’07 Superromance Sara’s Son. They went behind his back and fell in love. He couldn’t accept that. At all. And he was blaming me.

Readers, on the other hand, thought I did a good job with Sara and Mark, but they were not happy that I’d left Ryan hanging around. They couldn’t leave him behind. They wrote clamoring for more. Ryan, with an unsmiling nod, took this in stride. While he challenged me to give him his own book – his own forum to have his say. Let’s just say, the end result wasn’t quite what he’d been expecting. At all. And now, in just a few short days, you’ll all have a chance to see what happened when he and I met head to head. Trusting Ryan, the sequel to Sara’s Son, a 2008 RITA finalist, is a July ’08 Superromance.

Some say I made wrong choices when I gave my high school years to books. I missed a lot. I never learned to socialize. Or make friends. (My best friend was a girl I met when I was five who lived two states away!) I didn’t go to a single dance. I never went to prom. Or even to a movie with a guy. Bad, bad, bad, wrong choices. Yet…all of those years of reading romances instilled in me a need to spend my life with Harlequin books. I was driven to give to the world that which had been given to me. To that end, while others scoffed, or humored me, regarding my ambition to write for Harlequin, I put pen to paper. And then fingers to keyboards. For years. Over and over. I wrote many stories. Opened many rejections. And, like Ryan, I was sure about what I was sure about, I didn’t quit believing. I have no idea why. Ryan could probably tell you. I just knew that I was a writer and I was going to write for Harlequin and I had to write. And now here I am, fifty published novels later, giving you my story. Oh, wait, I mean Ryan’s story. (He made me say that.) Did I mention, Ryan’s a cop?

Anyway, we hope you’ll pick up a copy of our joint effort. And that, if you do, you’ll write and let us know what you think at staff@tarataylorquinn.com. And right here, right now, tell us…black and white? Or shades of gray? What do you think?



Tara Taylor Quinn