Sharon Ashwood | Making Paranormal Sandwiches

There’s a lot to be said for the submarine sandwich. There can be as much bread, cheese, veggies and cold cuts as the maker desires. If you want two kinds of cheese, go ahead. Mayo and mustard? Why not? The only limit is appetite.

Which is all good until your boss points to a sandwich box made for the usual peanut butter and jelly sized affair. That moment of “hmm, how am I going to get this sucker in there?” sums up my experience of writing the paranormal romance. I have to tell a many-layered story as clearly and efficiently (and as briefly!) as I can.

For any author, there’s a lot on the kitchen counter when they’re building the universe of their book: there’s character, plot, and setting, plus:

• In a romance, there’s the whole fall-in-love experience.
  
• If it’s a historical novel, the author needs to bring the past alive, right down to the horseshoe nails, gun smoke and corsets.
  
• If it’s science fiction, fantasy, or paranormal, there’s the whole supernatural universe, with its vast array of creatures, rules of magic, and other cultures to explain and make compelling.
  
• For a good paranormal or urban fantasy romance, where you have most of the above, your metaphorical book sandwich is a definite clubhouse. Yum, and don’t hold the pickles.

But wait: just because an author has a lot of ground to cover, that doesn’t mean they get more pages to tell their tale. In fact, many editors are careful to put the word count they want right in a writer’s contract. How many words? Not enough! Why do they do this? Long books cost more to print (and the reader pays for that) and also not everyone wants to read a really long book.

Having a word limit does challenge an author’s skill, and that’s not a bad thing. It’s made me write smarter—but inevitably, things get left out. When the dust settled from writing my February 09 release, RAVENOUS, I had a spare demon and an entire unopened box of vampires. Plus, there was a lot to say about my universe and the people in it that I hadn’t even begun to cover. It was like I’d been whittled down to, well, half a sandwich. Thank heavens there’s a book two!

What’s an author to do with all their leftover ideas? One solution to the world-building overflow is to take all that extra content and post it on the web. Games, maps, character interviews and background histories are popping up on web sites more and more often—and that’s not the only outlet for extras. Marvel Comics has picked up some popular authors and are releasing comic books based on writers like Laurell K. Hamilton. If TV shows and movies have tie-ins, why not books? Can action figures be far behind? In trade magazines for the book industry, I’ve seen this many-pronged approach hailed as the future of reading—books aren’t just on paper anymore, but require a multimedia event.

As an author, that’s a lot to explore. So far, I have my own Monsterpedia page at www.sharonashwood.com/ that fills in snippets of information about the RAVENOUS world. I’m sure I’ll do other things as the series goes along. Overall, I’m glad there are so many ways to communicate with readers, and I enjoy blogging, and multimedia content is fun to experience and to create. But what about the story?

This “book plus web” approach is nifty from my side of the fence, but would more book and fewer extras work better for readers? Or is the opposite true? I like to think of novels as one-stop-shopping or, to go back to my original metaphor, the full meal deal. Is that view out of date?
What about you? Thumbs up or thumbs down on putting important book series information on the web? Should it be web-only, or just repeat what’s already on the page?

Sharon Ashwood

Stephanie Bond | Writing a Letter to Yourself

In this day of faxes, e-mails, instant messages, and texting, what a treat it is to receive an old-fashioned hand-written letter! The pleasure of unfolding crisp pages of stationery..ahhh. But what if you received a letter one day, and it was a letter you'd written to yourself ten years ago!

My husband had a high school instructor who asked his students to write a letter to themselves about the things they wanted out of life and where they thought they would be in ten years. Then he sealed the envelopes and ten years later, sent them to the last address of record the school had for each student. My husband's parents forwarded his letter on to him and I remembered how amazed and thrilled he was when he realized what he was reading. It was like a time capsule into his teenage mind, and he must have reread it a dozen times. It was a time of self-evaluation for my husband, comparing where he thought he'd be with where he was. As it turned out, my husband's achievements had surpassed what he'd thought himself capable of
only ten years earlier, and he said that revelation alone reinforced the idea of never underestimating what he could do.

I loved the idea of writing a letter to yourself, and used it as the premise for my Harlequin Blaze Sex for Beginners trilogy: The women at an all-girls college who took Dr. Michelle Alexander's Sexual Psyche class (fondly dubbed "Sex for Beginners" by students) were given the optional assignment of writing a letter of their sexual fantasies and sealing them, with the promise that the letters would be mailed to them in 10 years. Now 10 years later, the women are at pivotal points in their lives. When they each receive their fantasies letter, it takes them on a sensual path they never imagined!

The idea is that the women were 22 when they recorded their fantasies. When they receive their letter, they are in their early 30's and at a sexual peak-it's the perfect time to relive the things about sex they were curious about, what things turned them on, and what they were hoping for in a partner. Their letters help them reevaluate where they are in their lives in general-have they settled? And if so, can they redirect their destiny?

Do you remember what you were doing and thinking ten years ago? How much do you think you'll change in the next ten years? Writing a letter to yourself is an enlightening exercise for taking stock of your relationships, achievements, and hopes, and would be a great project for family or best friends, book club members, school mates, etc. (And hey, if you want to
record your sexual fantasies, no one's stopping you!) Have fun with it-happy writing.and reading!

About the author: Stephanie Bond is the author of over 40 humorous romance and mystery novels, including the BODY MOVERS sexy mystery series and the Harlequin Blaze Sex for Beginners trilogy: WATCH AND LEARN (Oct 2008), IN A BIND (Nov 2008), and NO PEEKING. (December 2008). Learn more about Stephanie and her books at www.stephaniebond.com/.

Stephanie Bond

Laura Griffin | A Romantic Thriller and a Chance to Win

People often ask me where I get story ideas. With my latest romantic suspense novel, THREAD OF FEAR, the idea took shape as I watched a news broadcast about a kidnapped girl. It wasn’t the kidnapping itself that caught my attention, but the forensic artist who helped solve the case.

How does a person interview a traumatized victim, and come away with a life-like picture of a criminal? This is the job of a forensic artist. They listen to people’s heart-wrenching stories and transform them into concrete leads for the police.

Fiona Glass’s talent at forensic art has made her the best in the business—which is why she’s quitting. She’s haunted by the stories of victims and the faces of sadistic criminals. She’s working on her last case when rugged Texas police chief Jack Bowman bulldozes over her resistance and convinces her to help him hunt down a serial killer who is terrorizing his small town.

Jack never intended for Fiona to become so involved in his case. Or in his life. But he knows she’s his best hope for finding a psychopath who’s lurking in plain sight. He desperately needs Fiona’s help, but he never counted on her ending up in the killer’s crosshairs.

If you like a spine-tingling mystery, as well as a love story, I hope you’ll enjoy THREAD OF FEAR.

While you’re here, please check out my fall contest, through Fresh Fiction, for a chance to win a gift basket that includes: a $15 Starbucks gift card, a $15 Barnes & Noble gift card, a box of Godiva chocolates, as well as my romantic suspense novels, THREAD OF FEAR, ONE WRONG STEP, and ONE LAST BREATH. For details, just click here . To read an excerpt from THREAD OF FEAR, or to drop me a line, please visit my website at www.lauragriffin.com/. I’d love to hear from you!

Happy reading!

Laura Griffin

www.lauragriffin.com/
laura@lauragriffin.com

Jessica Inclan | Changes

Hello! I’m so glad to be blogging here, and as I was thinking about what to write about today, I thought about change. Writers need to change, even if we think we shouldn’t have to or don’t want to. I went from writing women’s fiction to writing romance to writing nonfiction. As my latest romance INTIMATE BEINGS comes out, I find that I’m writing personal essays. We must adjust to new editors or changes in publishers. We have to consider marketing trends and reader desires. But most people I know hate change. We want things to be the same, for goodness sake! You’d think that buying a new car wouldn’t be that must of a struggle, but it certainly did present some interesting challenges for me, most about my difficulty with change, with what is “new.”

About one month ago, I drove out of the MINI dealership lot in my new pepper white, black top, black interior MINI Cooper S. I was lurching a little, still unused to the manual transmission. The last manual I had driven was my former spouse's 1972 VW camper van—a car I only drove under duress--and that beast is a story in and of it. Let's just say I would get in the far right lane on the freeway and stay there for as long as I could, ignoring the honks from other cars and praying hard and fast for no inclines to rev up over. When I saw the film Little Miss Sunshine, I went into VW Van flashbacks, wincing every time the Hoover family’s van’s horn blared because the sound was exactly right, a horrid, tinny whine of VW pain.

Back to the MINI. I drove it home, parked it in the garage, and there it was, the first car I had ever bought on my own. Every car before had been a car I bought with my husband or a car my mother had given me. There had been the 1968 Buick Sportswagon and VW Squareback (my mother’s gifts) and then the Volkswagen Bug, 1985 VW Van, Toyota Camry, Dodge Caravan, and Volvo X70 (cars with my husband). This car was mine, bought with savings and book royalties and very good credit. It was brand new, shiny, cute, and zippy.

I wasn't sure I liked it.

I closed the garage door, shaking my head. What was wrong with me? I had spent hours researching and considering cars. The only two options for me were the Toyota Prius and the MINI, both somehow better for the environment, but the Prius just not what I had in mind. The Prius felt too much like the good girl car, the right thing to do, and for about three years, I hadn’t known really what the right thing was. All I had been thinking about was what was the right thing to do.

So, I thought, the Prius can be my next car, maybe. From the get-go, the MINI was going to be it.

Michael told me that when he bought his BMW--his first new car since his marriage ended--he had the feeling of true freedom. He felt as though he'd let go of his past, his marriage, a lot of baggage. Almost a ton of baggage, literally.

Before I went into the house that first day of my new car, I walked around my MINI slowly. What did this thing mean to me? I wasn't sure, but as I stared at it, I started to immediately think of things I missed about my Volvo. The power seats. The expensive leather. The feeling I was driving a comfortable couch down the freeway. The Volvo had a lot of power, a great stereo, and room to drag home fully set up gas barbeques and other equally large household objects. I had used it in several moves in recent years, packing it full of my belongings and carting myself off to the newest abode.

And the Volvo said something about me that had been true. I was a person with people to move around. I was not alone. I had places to be and people to care for and the room and seatbelts to do it.

The MINI has a different story. It is small, close to the ground, fast and darting. Potholes and I have a new relationship. Every part of the road is always apparent, nothing covered up. When I drive around in this tiny thing, I feel small, slightly insignificant, a head in a piece of tin. I am an adult Fisher Price toy.

In my old car, I was planted on the road, solid, firm. I was "there."

In this car, I was like a wriggling child trying to get off Grandpa's lap.

I kept driving, and then a few days ago, Michael asked, "Don't you love your car?"

I wasn’t sure how to answer him because I felt the answer was full of so many other questions than simply the one about my MINI. I waited a minute, sighing, and then I said, "No, not really. I like it a lot. But I don't love it."

He was quiet for a moment, and then he said, “That makes me sad. I wanted you to love it. “ Then he went on to talk about all the good things the MINI had to offer such as traction and turning radius, gas mileage and wonderful air conditioning.

Everything he said was true, but what I’d said was true, too. Admitting that my feelings for the MINI were mixed, I released the notion that I was having a perfect love relationship with my new car. And then, saying it, I was able to talk about my old car and how I had loved it. Though the Volvo had been worn and breaking something important every other service or so, costing me hundreds if not thousands of dollars, it had been comfortable and sturdy and known. I missed the ease and familiarity. I was used to its heavy girth, its wide stance on the highway.

That car had been the literal vehicle for many memories—family vacations, book tour jaunts, rides with the entire family to events, my mother squashed between the boys in the back seat. This was the car my former husband and I drove up to Olympia, Washington to drop off my oldest at college, the last long trip we’d make in that car. So much of my life had happened in that car. I remember a drive down to Bakersfield with my friend Julie, crying the whole way because I knew that my marriage was failing. She and I went to a couple of bookstore readings, and then on the way home bought a flat of strawberries, eating them as the miles went by.

Julie said something to me that drive that I will never forget. She said, “You will do what you are doing until you don’t need to do it any more.” There was no judgment of my plans. She just listened, and we drove along Highway 5 toward home.

My friend Keri and I drove to LA, staying in Westwood at the W hotel, and going to a writer’s faire at UCLA. We met up with a number of my former students, and pretty much laughed the entire weekend. Except on the way home, we listened to a really stupid relationship tape for a while, and then argued with it for the rest of the drive back to the Bay Area.

So many years in that car—driving my sons and their friends. Driving to appointments and classes. Driving to work over and over again. The Volvo was my chariot, my stead, the one piece of machinery I truly counted on.

The MINI was a clean slate, fresh turf, virgin soil. No vacations. No long drives down Highway 5. No book tours, not yet. Nicolas and his girlfriend have been in the car. My friends Julie and Elizabeth and Kris. Michael. And that’s it. A car with no real history.

And I have to work so hard to drive the MINI. I’m shifting, I’m figuring out the gauges, the settings, all the computers in the car. I don’t yet know how to turn on the radio. Forget about the CD player. Everything is effort. I have to learn how to feel about the car, and it is sometimes a struggle. After my first day of teaching this semester, I walked out to the parking lot at the college, and I couldn’t find my car. I kept looking for my golden colored Volvo, but there was only this strange toy like contraption. And yes, it was, in fact, the car I was going to get in and drive home that day.

Each day, after scanning the lot for my Volvo, I see the MINI parked just where I left it, this tiny white and black thing. My new car.

Saying all of that aloud, admitting my disenchantment made me feel better, and of course I started to see the metaphor right away. My old car was like my old life.

Comfortable and known and sturdy and easy. My MINI is like now, shiny and new and scary and irritating and often unknown. It’s much more work than I'm used to.

When I was first with Michael, I often wondered if our relationship would get to a spot of ease and comfort. But then I worried that we would. I didn’t want to lose the feel of this new relationship, the sharp edges, the new discoveries. But I also hated the new discoveries. Once found, I had to deal with them, understand them, try to live with them.

It was like wanting a new old car.

When I first left my husband, I wanted all the new and nothing of the old. But at night, alone in the bed that threatened to swallow me up, I wanted the old because at least I knew what would happen.

It was like wanting the old car and not caring that it didn’t run any more.

In the next few days, I let go of having to be in love with my MINI, and it was a relief. And in the letting go, I started to enjoy my new car more. I loved the feeling a clean, solid shift from third to fourth, the way the turbo charged engine pulled me along the highway. I started to use the dual sun roof, letting the wind flow all around me. I figured out the tachometer and other little tricks on the mod control panel. After work, I would walk around the car and appreciate its short, sleek profile.

I even read the manual to begin to figure out the radio and CD player.

Without calling them forth or wanting them, there were sudden moments of joy when everything seemed to just work. Watch me! I thought. Watch me go.

By saying I didn't love the car I was allowing myself to feel more about it. And I don't know if I ever want it to become known. I want the wildness under me, the new feeling, a different ride than I have ever had before.

Jessica Inclan

http://www.jessicabarksdaleinclan.com/

Cindy Gerard | Writing as a Living

It is GREAT to be here at Fresh Fiction. Frankly it’s just great being! I’m riding a major high because why, you might ask? Well, because I recently found out that SHOW NO MERCY, book 1 of my new Black Ops., Inc. series hit #15 on the New York Times. Yowser! I’m still in shock. And it got me to thinking … how did it come to this? I wasn’t always a writer. I was a lot of other things, all things, that at the time, represented who I was and what I was about. So, it made me wonder… Is the sum total of who we are determined by what we’ve done?

While a lot of us are writers (and readers) most of us were, at one time, something else, right? Like I said – I’m a prime example. I was once a beautiful black wild stallion – but we’ll save that for another day. :o)

Before taking on writing as a living, I worked in the county treasurer’s office computing and collecting taxes, I kept books in a lumber yard, did retail sales and alterations in a men’s clothing/sporting goods store, and sewed custom draperies – all of this before I started a career with the State department of Human Services as a case worker. Oh, and somewhere in that mix, my dh and I have also been restaurateur’s.

Whew. I’ve been a busy girl. It’s no wonder the prospect of parking my behind in a nice cushy desk chair and writing my day dreams on paper appealed to me.

I look back on those days and I realize that each of those positions helped mold me in some way into the person I am today. I learned about handling money, about lumber (and a girl can never know too much about board feet) about measuring inseams (ahem) and about guns. I learned that sewing draperies is a damn hard job. And I learned about humanity and how difficult life can be for a client in today’s welfare system. I learned not to eat everything on the menu and still get into last year’s clothes. Well, that lesson, I didn’t learn so well.

So now, I’m subconsciously bundling all of those afore mentioned skills and applying them to my business of writing. Truly, I have drawn from each facet of my working life – professionalism, discipline, and empathy for one’s fellow human beings being at the top of the list.

So what about you? What did you do before the writing bug bit you? Or what are you doing now as your write your way to bestsellerdom so you can quit that day (or night) job? And what, of all the things you’ve done, has had the most impact on your life and your writing? And if you’re not a writer, what major career or personal changes have impacted you the most?

Cindy Gerard
www.cindygerard.com/

Sandi Shilhanek | Yahoo Groups

In the last few weeks some authors are being discussed quite a bit in a few of my yahoo groups. Naturally, I expect to hear about authors and their latest works through my groups, but what surprises me about the ones I’m hearing a lot about is that people are just discovering them, and because they enjoyed the newest title having to go on a back list hunt.

One of these authors is Robyn Carr. I have to admit to being somewhat new to the Carr party. I once read a book for review (Down By The River) and didn’t enjoy it at all. What I didn’t’ know at the time was that it was part of a series, and the third in the series. Had I known that I might have been a bit more lenient in how I thought of it. Years passed and I had the opportunity to review her new book, Virgin River. Since I knew it was the beginning of a series I thought here is a way for this author to make my auto buy list. I was of course wowed by what I read, and told one and all you must read this series. It’s been over a year and I still am telling everyone run out and get The Virgin River books and read them ASAP!!!! What I didn’t know is how long Ms. Carr has been writing, and am amazed!

The second author I’m seeing a lot about is Susan Wiggs. Ms. Wiggs has just released a hardcover book called Just Breathe, which I enjoyed, and have been recommending whenever the opportunity presents itself. What I most like about Ms. Wiggs is that she writes connected series, and her recent Lakeshore Chronicles is another of those that I take every chance to say you haven’t read them….but you must! Again, I don’t know how long Ms. Wiggs has been writing, but suddenly I see her name a lot!

The last author I’m going to give a shout out to at this point is Debbie Macomber. Those who know me best know that I am a truly devoted fan and can’t wait for each release. I’m amazed by the number of people I’ve recently been chatting with either online or in person who are just discovering this author and her Cedar Cove Series. Like the others I know Ms. Macomber has been writing for a long time, but as with the others seems to be suddenly the author to read!

So I’ve noticed that these three authors have become something of an overnight sensation, even if overnight took them years and years of honing their craft.

Which authors have you been hearing a lot of buzz about? If they have an extensive backlist is there one book getting talked about more than another? If it’s a new to you author are you going to have to do a major backlist hunt?

Thanks for sharing with me because remember inquiring minds need to know!