Sara Reyes | Adventures in World Building, or Let This World Go!

Books I read this week, all good for me:


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This week it seems everyone's been talking about "series" or "trilogies" or "quartets" or something implying a bunch of books all taking place in a world created by an author. Not necessarily one in outer space, but it can be. Or it could be a historical world, as in Mary Balogh's Regency period, or it could be contemporary-historical-futuristic hybrid, as in Jayne Ann Krentz's "Arcane Society". Or it could be international as in Karen Kendall's "Take Me" world. It could be contemporary with paranormal flavors such as Christine Feehan's "Drake Sisters. Or thrilling contemporary as in Alison Brennan's "Prison Break." Each author manages to create a "universe," populates it, makes a set of rules and then invites us in to enjoy.

Recently some favorite authors seem to be forced into making a series instead of sticking to what they do best -- write a self contained world for a single book. One of our topics of book club conversation is that some authors are very good at "world building" and others not-so-much. We are talking about really good and favorite authors who can suck you into a book, make you forget all about other responsibilities and worries and then let you out at the end with a sigh of relief and thankfulness for being taken away for a few hours into a magical place that a good book can swept one to! So it's not books with plot problems or character issues or boring middles, we're just addressing the world building.

Sometimes I get lost in the story but brought up short by trying to remember -- is this a circle or level I've read before? Didn't this character have their own story in another book? Where is this located, I thought it was the east coast and now suddenly we're in California? Did they just change a hair color? Okay, so the hair color is easy to explain. After all I am a woman and changing a hair color isn't that difficult. But some of the other things make me sigh. And that isn't always good.

On the other hand, there are series I hope never end...Virgin River by Robyn Carr is one of those. Those mountain valleys and communities can live for a long long time!

So be brave and step up, tell me what series you really like and some that are ready to be ended. After all, all opinions are welcome, none of us are entirely right or entirely wrong. It's those shades that make life interesting.

Until next time...
Get out there and READ a book...

Sara Reyes
DFW Tea Readers Group
Join us at Readers 'n 'ritas November 13-15, 2009!

Sandi Shilhanek | Retail Therapy

On Tuesday I let my emotions get the best of me and stormed out of my job in the direct vision of my boss, and quite possibly other employees. Did I care? No, not really. Was I thinking sanely? More than likely I wasn’t. What did I do next? What any self respecting woman/bookaholic might do I took myself out for some retail therapy.

Where else would a self proclaimed bookaholic go for retail therapy, but to the bookstore? My reason for going to the bookstore was really twofold….one in my haste to leave school I had left my book, and two who knew what new treasures might be awaiting me?

I went to Half Price Books, a chain store that sells used books, music, DVD’s etc. If you’re just going to wander and don’t have a specific title in mind you might be able to spend hours and hours in the store. If however you want a specific title and don’t find it your disappointment might be so overpowering that you leave the store almost immediately.

The book I was hoping to find a replacement for was Behind The Shadows by Patricia Potter. Unfortunately for me they didn’t have it. I was fortunate instead to find Taming The Fire by Sydney Croft and Vision in White by Nora Roberts. Finding these two books while exciting does produce a whole new set of problems. Do I feel elation about the additions to the TBR pile or do I feel sorrow for the books that are destined to be sucked into a deep dark hole quite possibly to never be seen again?

Do you have an opinion? Do you use retail therapy to ease your emotions be they good, bad, or indifferent? If you can answer yes to either of these questions then please comment and share either that opinion about how I should be feeling with great books in the TBR or what your last retail therapy purchase was.

Until next week I wish you happy page turning.

Christy Reece | How a Wish Became a Series

People often ask writers where they get their ideas. Many can answer about how a particular incident or thought popped into their head and they were able to create an entire book from that. With the first three books I wrote, before I sold, the idea always started with a comment in my head. A character, usually my future heroine, would say something and I'd wonder why she said it. The conversation would expand and I would create the story from there. That's one of the wonderful things about imagination. Being able to take something so small and seemingly insignificant and create characters, a story and sometimes an entire world.

When I started writing RESCUE ME, my debut book, it wasn't because of some conversation I heard in my head. It was an event. I'm a self-confessed news junkie. Even when I'm writing, I often have the news playing in the background because I never know what might spur an idea. Something that always intrigues me are missing persons cases. Tragically most of these cases don't have happy endings. Many are found dead, some return on their own. But the few that never return, the ones who disappear without a trace--what could have happened to these people?

One high profile case touched me more than any other because it was a young girl who lived in my city. I watched the news, read articles, followed the case closely. The longer it took to find her, the likelihood of a good outcome seemed less and less. I began to wish that an organization existed that would do whatever it took, no matter the risks or cost, to find and rescue her. And that's how Last Chance Rescue was born.

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Jina Bacarr | When you can't get a character out of your mind…

When I received my author copies for my latest Spice release, Cleopatra's Perfume, I re-read it all over again from beginning to end, reliving the heroine's sexual obsessions and romantic interludes with the men in her life, the angst and horror of World War II when she becomes a spy for the British Foreign Service and the fascinating story behind the mysterious perfume in the title (and yes, I enjoyed the sex, too!).

When I came to the end of the story, I realized I had unfinished business with the heroine in my book, Lady Eve Marlowe. Before she married a member of the British peerage, she was a cabaret dancer in Berlin during the wild days of the Weimar Republic during the erotic 1920s. What were those years like in pre-war Berlin? I wondered, intrigued. Eve came to Berlin with an all-girl revue in 1928 looking for love and adventure. Instead she found a city bathed in lust and sex.

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Kimberly Lang | Hero Characteristic

One year at the RWA National Conference, I had coffee with an editor (not my editor) who told me that if you read an author’s books closely, you’ll be able to see that all of her heroes will share some common characteristics. Maybe it’s a core value or just their sense of humor, but it’s often unique to that author’s heroes and it shows up over and over again. And, she says, if you get to meet the author’s husband, you’ll often see that same quality in him.

It makes sense – after all, the author has to fall in love with her hero before the heroine or the reader can. The same qualities the author loves in her real-life hero are going to be what she wants her fictional heroes to have as well.

When I told my husband this, he got a cute little worried look on his face. He quickly ran down a list of common characteristics my heroes have: insanely rich, powerful, successful, tall, muscular, athletic. He figured he could claim “tall.”

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Jane K. Cleland | Plotting in Your Sleep

The great American author, Edna St. Vincent Millay, once wrote that she couldn’t get the woman onto the porch. What she meant, of course, was that she couldn’t figure out an organically sound reason for the character to do as the plot demanded.

I struggle with this situation all the time. Plotting a mystery is, for me, a combination of architecture and sleight of hand. I lay the foundation, plan the structure, and use language to entice my readers to pay attention to something over here while something else is happening over there, unnoticed. In order for this complex process to flow seamlessly, I need to create characters whose actions mesh with the plot’s development.

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Karen Kendall | SECRETS, SEX and SO LONG: The SEQUEL to Take Me If You Can

I love the name Fresh Fiction and think it’s a truly inspired marketing choice. So isn’t it funny that often, the book that’s being released to readers (in my case, TAKE ME TWO TIMES--sequel to TAKE ME IF YOU CAN)--is not the one that’s fresh in an author’s mind because we work so far ahead.

You see, I’m currently struggling with the revisions on the, uh, threequel, which is called TAKE ME FOR A RIDE and will be out in November.

So when people ask me what TAKE ME TWO TIMES is about, sometimes I begin telling them about the wrong set of characters. Forgive me!

The TAKE ME series is about an international agency that recovers stolen art.

And TAKE ME TWO TIMES is the story of Gwen Davies, the one-time debutante who’s a rookie in the art recovery biz.

Gwen may look sweet and proper, but she can kill a man with a spike heel . . . and she’s got some skeletons in her past who are about to pop out and shake, rattle n’ roll. Our Gwennie once spent a secret, steamy summer down south in Brazil. And she got a little too bad with bad boy Quinn Lawson—though in her defense, he really was irresistible. All that tough muscle, dark-blond hair, five o’clock shadow and talented hands. His mouth left a brand on her.

Now, fifteen years later, he’s her client. Surprise! And the cursed, solid gold Venetian mask she recovers for him is not quite what it seems. The Borgias commissioned the original, but who forged this one—and where is the real mask?

Ready for the rest? And an opportunity to win a copy of the NEXT book in the series...then read on...

Sandi Shilhanek | Personal History of Reading...or Why I'm a Reader

Yesterday Sara discussed what bugged readers and made them turn away from an author. I want to know why readers read. What is your favorite thing to read about? Do you remember discovering reading?

I personally don’t recall when, where, how, or why I learned to read. I also don’t remember the first book I read independently. I do know that my parents thought I could read until they caught me with the book upside down, and backwards, and realized I hadn’t learned to read it all, but had instead memorized it.

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I’m sure I became a reader because I remember growing up somewhat lonely and friendless. Board games required at least one other person, but reading is totally independent and can be pretty much done anywhere! I know that some of my favorite books were those read to us at school, and to this day I still own copies of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Charlotte’s Web, and Mr. Popper’s Penguins.

I remember being bribed to do things with a new book, and of course that almost always worked, but how do you decide which book? Choices were and still are limitless! I don’t recall the first grown up author I read, but something tells me it was more than likely Danielle Steel’s The Promise.

So as you see I read to combat loneliness, but continue to read to venture to places that I probably won’t ever be able to afford to go to in person. I read to escape the chores that are required of a wife and mother, and which I really don’t like doing. I read to escape the frustrations that being that wife, mother, and employee often bring to me.

Now it’s your turn…why do you read? Do you remember the how, the when, the why or the what that turned you onto reading? Do you feel like the day just isn’t complete without a certain number of pages or perhaps a certain amount of reading time?

Until next week happy page turning.

Sandi Shilhanek

DFW Tea Readers
Readers 'n 'ritas... celebrating literary obsessions

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