Sandi Shilhanek | Friday Nights are For Book Friends!

Sara of Fresh Fiction fame thinks I can write a column while I on the other hand am not as certain, but decided that if she was going to be encouraging then I should give it my best shot by helping with the Fresh Fiction blog.

Christine Son
Originally uploaded by freshfiction

Friday, August 15, 2008 I met a couple of friends for a lovely and lively dinner, and then on to a book signing for a debut author [Christine Son] who also happens to be local to our area. Is there really anything better than meeting friends for a dinner and books without the husband, significant other, and or children?

I for one think not. Yes, the main purpose is to discuss books, but if the group of friends is close doesn’t the discussion naturally go from the romance found in books to the romance found in your real life?

Does that not then have you wondering are you married to a hero worthy of a romance novel? I know that physically I may not be married to a typical hero, but he’s there for me emotionally and financially. He’s a great dad, but more importantly he doesn’t mind my obsession with novels of any sort, but romance books in particular.

So I’ve shared a bit about my hero and now I want to know what makes the hero in your life worthy of the title of hero. Did you know the moment you met that he was a hero worthy of your love, or did he have to prove himself worthy?

If you have trouble sharing just pretend that we are sitting around the table enjoying a nice meal, and sharing thoughts.

Sandi Shilhanek
DFW Tea Readers Group and FreshFiction.com Reviewer

Carol Culver | 10 Things I Love About Writing The YA Novel

Two weeks ago I was at the RWA conference in San Francisco where I gave a talk about writing for the YA market.

For those of you who weren't there, here's the list -

1. YA books stay on the shelves longer (by longer I mean longer than category romance which is my other outlet) Category books are gone in a month, but the last time I checked at my local Borders, all three of my books in the BFF series, MANDERLEY PREP, RICH GIRL and THE GUY NEXT DOOR were still on the shelves.
   
   
2. Teens are loyal readers, if they like your book, they spread the word by texting, calling or whatever.
   
   
3. Series are popular. Hook a teen reader and they'll stick with you.
   
   
4. YA books are short, around 50,000 words. You can write more books in a year than single titles.
   
   
5. Writing for and hanging out with teens can keep you young.
   
   
6. You can dig into your own past for material or use your kids or your neighbors.
   
   
7. Deal a blow forever to the memory of those geeks, freaks, nerds, cheerleaders, jocks and goths who wouldn't eat lunch with you, date you, or even speak to you in the hall.
   
   
8. Teen novels can play to your strenghts. They can be romantic, paranormal, dark, light, funny, edgy or angsty.
   
   
9. Teens are voracious readers and they've got more leisure time than many adults do.
   
   
10. Teens are smart. They expect a lot. You can't let them down.
    

In the interest of fairness, I should say a few words about why I also love writing for Harlequin Mills & Boon, my British publisher.

• The books are translated into many languages (Spanish, Danish, French, Japanese, to name a few) and sold around the world which keeps the royalties rolling in long after the initial publishing date.
  
  
• The London editors are a fabulous group of supportive, kind, generous women.
  
  
• Working with the London editors encourages foreign travel to see the office and meet them. Definitely a fringe benefit.

Carol Culver

www.carolculver.com/

Marcus Sakey | Good People

Hey all! It’s an honor to be guest blogging here—thanks so much to Fresh Fiction for lending me the microphone. Suckers.

My new novel, GOOD PEOPLE is about, well, good people, specifically a married couple that’s been trying to have a baby. They haven’t had any luck, and are being crushed by debt from fertility treatments, and that’s straining their marriage and their hope.

Then one night, everything changes. Offered a chance at a future they’d almost lost hope in, they seize it. One simple choice. A fairy-tale ending.

But as they soon learn, fairy tale endings don’t come cheap….

Of course, that’s the finished book. When I began thinking about it, I didn’t know all that stuff.

See, for me, starting a book is a difficult time. I usually have some idea of what I want to explore, but I can’t get started until something clicks. Sometimes it’s a character, sometimes a scene. I never know until it hits. So I spend a lot of time freewriting, staring at the wall, cleaning the toilet, reading other books, cooking, browsing the web….

And it was that last that made this come together. I was just surfing, the way people don’t often do anymore. A click here led to an article there that led to a personal page. And somewhere along the way I came on a community site designed for people who were trying to have children.

It was an incredibly intimate experience.

Hopefully, none of you have had to deal with this. I haven’t. But for a lot of people, having children isn’t the simple prospect it’s “supposed” to be. For a lot of people, millions, it’s a lot more challenging than that. It involves doctor visits and calendars and daily temperature readings and shots and procedures. It can cost an enormous amount of money and be a brutal experience.

The site that I found, and others like it, were a revelation. Normal people posted regularly, supporting one another through this difficult process. They wrote about their frustration and pain, about their dreams, about what the process was doing to their marriage. They wrote about it with a simple honest that was heartbreaking. It certainly broke mine.

And as I read more—and I scoured these things for days—I realized that this was something I needed to write about. It was hard, and terrible, and real. And inside, I felt that click, the little moment that told me I had found what I was looking for.

I wanted to write about two perfectly normal people and what this would do to them. I wanted it to be as true and raw as I could. And I wanted to put them in a situation where all the answers to their prayers seemed to be laid out in front of them. Of course, nothing is as simple as it seems….

As I said, this is something I haven’t had to go through myself. I hope that I did it justice, that I did it right. And of course, at the same time, I hope it’s a book that will keep people up past bedtime, or make them miss their train stops.

Only time will tell. But if you happen to buy a copy, please, drop me a line marcus@marcussakey.com and tell me what you think. I’d really like to know.

Marcus Sakey
www.marcussakey.com/

Leanne Banks | Great Days

Thank you Fresh Fiction for allowing me to visit today. I’m having a great day because my book, BILLIONAIRE’S MARRIAGE BARGAIN, which features a hot, powerful, charming and RICH man is on the stands! Alex Megalos has the ability to charm women into his bed with no difficulty at all. When my shero, Mallory James tells him she’s not interested in him, he decides to prove her wrong. There is a lot of heat and a couple of scandals to keep things interesting. If you get a chance to read BILLIONAIRE’S MARRIAGE BARGAIN, please write me. I’d love to hear from you.

I’m having a great day, but that got me to thinking about bad days... or odd days.

...cuz you had an odd day...

I changed the lyrics to that hit song American Idol played over and over again because I believe there are degrees to bad. Bad is a piano falling on you, incurable diseases, a plane flying into your condo, bombs going off in your town ...

You get the picture. I feel like a real whiner if I say I’ve had a bad day when I think about how tough a lot of other people have it. So, again I have different ways of expressing an “odd day” using words like sucks or crappy or my favorite “I’m not having a sparkling day.” Could be the weather, could be the dog gets out of the yard, could be a fender bender, could be I’m the recipient of a snark attack from a pretend friend... A day that doesn’t sparkle usually has at least three sucky things associated with it.

How to put some sparkle back in your day:

1. Wear your favorite bright color. Remember you’re trying to ward off the blackness.
   
2. Play beach music especially in your car. Crank up the volume, roll down your windows (if it’s cold, turn up the heat).
   
3. Call a friend and ask them to give you a phone hug.
   
4. Splurge... at the Dollar Store. It’s so fun! And no guilt! You can buy 15 items and only spend $15.00.
   
5. Do something small for someone else. Bake brownies, take flowers, send a card of encouragement or thanks. Sometimes it helps to think about someone else because thinking about yourself too much can be depressing. And it makes you feel like less of a POS person.
   
6. Watch a funny sitcom or movie. I have an aversion to crying. For the most part, I don’t find it cathartic. I much prefer to laugh.
   
7. Make a list of things for which you are thankful. Yeah, I know it sounds hokey, but it helps.
   
8. Get a cosmetic counter makeover. But tell them you don’t want the natural look. Tell them you want the movie star look. If you like what they do, you can use some of their tips. If you don’t, you can use it for Halloween.:)
   
9. Love this one from Cherry Adair. I had an upsetting day a couple months ago and she said “Did you buy yourself a gift?” That was wonderful, so I must pass it on. Buy yourself a gift.
   
10. Eat chocolate!

I’m celebrating the release of BILLIONAIRE’S MARRIAGE BARGAIN with lots of cool stuff:

A chat party Wednesday, August 27 at 9pm ET at where I will hold a drawing every 15 minutes!

TWO new polls on my message board and I will hold a drawing from those polls.

A bonus contest. Name the car billionaire Alex Megalos drives in BILLIONAIRE’S MARRIAGE BARGAIN and enter the drawing for a prize pack for what every billionaire’s girlfriend should have: a key ring to his car, a sterling silver anklet with a crystal studded star, and sunglasses by designer Betsey Johnson!

In the meantime, since I’ve gone drawing crazy, I’d like to do one here with the good folks at Fresh Fiction. I will send a prize to one of the people who enter my ONE Day Blog Contest. How about that?

Leanne
http://www.leannebanks.com/
BILLIONAIRE’S MARRIAGE BARGAIN Available NOW!

Sandra Brown | Jay Burgess is dead.

Jay, who, you ask?

Jay Burgess, one of the main characters in my new novel, SMOKE SCREEN, which, by the way, goes on sale today.

I’m sure you’re wondering how and why a main character can be dead (and not a ghostly presence), but this is very much the case with Jay, and even though he’s deceased, I still had to make him as dynamic as every other character in the book. You see, everything in SMOKE SCREEN revolves around Jay, his childhood friend, Raley Gannon, our intrepid heroine, Britt Shelley and a fire.

And much like the fire, a single event that fuels the back-story of nearly every character in the book, Jay Burgess is a man who impacted many lives.

Besides Jay, Raley and Britt, there's a host of other characters. Matter of fact, SMOKE SCREEN probably has more characters than any other book I’ve written. This is due in part to the villain not being revealed until so late in the book. Keeping that identity a secret necessitated creating four or five viable suspects and each of them needed motive, opportunity and most importantly, character traits that define them, make them seem not only real but unique enough for the reader to keep them straight.

This can make writing the book a bit for the author at times, but at the same time, more characters means always having "someone" to check in with, and that’s what keeps a story moving forward—Always a good thing for the writer!

I hope you enjoy reading SMOKE SCREEN as much as I enjoyed writing it!

You can read an excerpt Here.

Sandra Brown

http://sandrabrown.net/

Natale Stenzel | The Druid Made Me Do It

And I mean that literally. The other day, I was out signing stock at local bookstores for my current release, The Druid Made Me Do It (Dorchester Love Spell, Aug. 2008), and had the good fortune to run into a reader who was really excited about my books and authors in general. It didn’t take thirty seconds for her to ask the question that writers field pretty frequently: Where did you get your idea for these stories?

Well, I’d like to say I was off on some exotic adventure and based my books on personal experience. But, um, no. I was surfing the Internet. Geeky, huh? While procrastinating, I frequently find myself drawn to news stories and websites describing the weird, the wild and the wonderful. I was reading up on fun stuff like Druids and ancient monuments and mythology (another obsession of mine). That’s when I came across this piece about the Circle of Avebury in Wiltshire, England. The Circle of Avebury is like Stonehenge, except older, bigger and less well maintained. A lot of the stones are missing, many of them taken down by Christian authorities who insisted on replacing pagan sites of ritual with churches of their own. Other stones were destroyed by locals, who fractured the enormous monoliths into smaller fragments and – get this! – used them in construction. Just imagine having a tiny piece of Stonehenge (its equivalent, but you know what I mean) built into the foundation of your home . . .

Did you get goose bumps? I did and, yep, I have them right now. My writer’s imagination was totally seduced by the possibilities and a series was born. It began with my February release, Pandora’s Box, where my heroine inherits her own piece of the Circle of Avebury, only she doesn’t quite know this at first. Nor does she know about a curse and a condemned but gorgeous trickster of a puca named Riordan, and how much her strange inheritance would disrupt her life. My August release, called The Druid Made Me Do It (check out the hunky cover!), picks up where Pandora’s Box leaves off, with some of the same cast and mythologies, but with a new romantic couple and new conflict. To satisfy karma and Druid justice, hunky but penitent bad boy Kane must make amends to everyone he’s harmed in the past – including Dr. Janelle Corrington, his new and reluctant guardian. How does a Druid convince a human doctor to take on guardianship of the guy who devastated her years ago? Why, he offers compensation in the form of a gift she cannot refuse: the power to heal with just a touch. Not that this gift is without its own drawbacks . . . and temptations.

So there you have it. The Druid did indeed make me do it. And I’m so glad he did.

Natale Stenzel
natalestenzel.com/
deadlinehellions.blogspot.com/
myspace.com/NataleStenzel