Backlist Valentine: PETALS & THORNS

This week we're giving a valentine to the books of years' past and sharing a title from our backlists. A little love for those publications that might even predate the creation of this blog!

For mine, I'm sharing my first standalone fiction publication. It was my first sale as a novelist, even though it's technically a novella at 81 pages, and I originally published it with Loose ID. (Now sadly going out of business.) It's an erotic fantasy - a BDSM Beauty and the Beast - and is still one of my best-selling titles ever. Also, I originally published it under the pseudonym "Jennifer Paris," the one time I used that name. When I got the rights back and self-published the book (also my first venture into self-publishing), I did it under my own name. A bit of history there.

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In exchange for her father’s life, Amarantha agrees to marry the dreadful Beast and be his wife for seven days. Though the Beast cannot take Amarantha’s virginity unless she begs him to, he can and does take her in every other way. From the moment they are alone together, the Beast relentlessly strips Amarantha of all her resistance. 

 If Amarantha can resist her cloaked and terrifying husband, she gains his entire fortune and will be allowed to return to her family and a normal life. But the Beast seduces her at every turn, exposing, binding, tormenting, and pleasuring Amarantha until she no longer knows her own deepest desires. Increasingly desperate to break the curse that chains his humanity, the Beast drives Amarantha past every boundary. But her desire for a normal life may jeopardize the love that will save them both.

Amazon

Kindle

Barnes & Noble

iBooks

Kobo

Smashwords

As an interesting aside, here's this article on how Facebook is "flattening" content and reducing the ability of creators to share quality stuff. I'm trying to share it widely in places that AREN'T Facebook.

New Release Day MATEER A #SciFi Romance Novel

I'm going to take a pass on the week's topic of why people aren't writing or don't write and how to move beyond that, because my fellow SFF7 authors have covered it brilliantly all week AND because I have a New Release today!

MATEER: A Badari Warrior SciFi Romance (Sectors New Allies Series Book 2)

The Blurb:

Megan Garrison, a doctor at the Sectors Amarcae 7 colony, goes to sleep one night as usual only to wake up in her nightgown, strapped to a table in an alien lab, destined to be the subject of terrifying experiments. Granted a brief reprieve, Megan and the other kidnapped humans are released in the middle of a forestlike enclosure on this unknown world and told to survive as best they can for now.

Her only hope is Mateer, the genetically engineered alien warrior imprisoned with the humans. He knows more than he’s sharing about this planet, their captors and the fate of other humans, including perhaps her own sisters. Turns out everyone from her colony has been kidnapped by the Khagrish, a ruthless race of alien scientists. Working for enemies of the human-led Sectors, the Khagrish have created the Badari to be super soldiers.

Mateer, a tough Badari enforcer, now a rebel, is captured while infiltrating the lab to help his pack bring it down. He’s also been ordered by his leaders to search for Megan and save her life at all costs. Tortured by the enemy, he’s offered one chance at survival – convince Megan to become his mate and assist the Khagrish with further experiments.

As the situation at the lab grows worse, Megan struggles against her deep attraction to Mateer, while she does her best to shield the other humans from the terrible Khagrish experiments. For his part, Mateer knows she really is his fated mate and despairs of being able to keep her safe, as the rebel attack is delayed and she fights the truth of their bond.

Will they be able to work together to defeat Khagrish plans and preserve human lives until the promised rescue happens? And what of their future together – will Megan accept Mateer as her true mate, or walk away if she’s freed?

This is the second book in a new scifi romance series and each novel has a satisfying Happy for Now ending for the hero and heroine, not a cliffhanger. Some overarching issues do remain unresolved in each book since this is a series but romance always wins the day in my novels!

Buy Links: Amazon     iBooks   Other buy links to come

Why You're Not Writing

Just a little blue heron for you today.

Full disclosure: This week's question was mine. That's because so many people tell me they want to write a book but they have no idea where to start. Or that they actually started the book and then read one on the same subject that was so good and they could never, ever do that well so they quit and gave up writing. I have an email file full of responses bleed pain all over my Outlook folders from people who knew what they wanted but believed themselves inadequate to the task of going and getting what they wanted.

Most of these people are women. (I did ask guys, too, I swear! But guys mostly denied every wanting to write books. Of the few who responded with wanting to write, every last one had also given up.)

So. Why aren't these people writing that book?

1. Because they're confused about what writing is.
Those of us who DO write have come to figure out that it's a multiphase process that in its first stage requires you to regress to your earliest and lamest excuse for language in order to get the bones of a story on a page. Don't believe me? Someday we'll auction off sneak peeks at a couple of my first drafts. (The price of my humiliation will be high.) They only barely qualify as language. Most of it has no caps and no punctuation. They're heavy on 'I know what I meant, even if no one else does.' That draft gets edited into something more mature. That draft goes to beta and then gets rewritten again . . . So yeah. The people notably NOT writing thought they could sit down and be, if not brilliant, at least understood from the moment their fingers touched a keyboard. They were deeply disappointed in themselves when that didn't happen. I send these people to Julia Cameron The Artist's Way - something that will ease them into viewing writing as a process.

2. They're comparing their raw drafts to someone else's finished product.
Most of us have been there. Let's pretend I was working on an 'an alien comes to earth and gets hooked up with a group of kids' story. And then ET came out. On the big screen. With a John Williams score and cinematography that plucked every emotional string I had and a few I didn't know I had. Where do you suppose that alien story *I* was working on went? Right. Straight under the bed. Get it back out. Write that alien. Write those kids. Ya know. If the plot is too much like ET, change it up. But your telling of the alien stranded on earth is going to be different because of your voice - that's what readers buy. Oh! You thought it was the story? Or your lovely prose? Nope. Not saying those things don't help - but no one cares if there's a typo on page 612. Your readers care whether your story connected with them emotionally. Did it make them feel anything? If yes, you win. If no, well, you won't likely sell many copies. Readers pay you to make them feel something. Lots of writers who write about writing address this. So I hand over my copies of Anne Lamott, and Stephen King.

3. They're afraid.
We live in a society that demands there be a right answer and a wrong answer. It is the basis of our educational system. It's etched pretty deeply into our psyches when we're young. Most of us have a dreadful relationship with failure. No matter how many inspirational memes we paste on the mirror telling us that failure means we're learning, we've internalized the message that failure means we're bad human beings. Even how we talk about it brands US as failures rather than our endeavors. (We say "I tried and failed" rather than "I tried and the thing I tried failed.") Writing fiction, by definition has no right and no wrong. There's only a story to be told. That's stepping pretty far outside societal conditioning there, pal, you sure you wanna leave the pavement that way?? So that aspect is scary enough. Then you have to deal with the fear of spending all that time and all that effort only to have everyone hate what you did. Or worse yet, roundly ignore it. Those things are pretty fail-y, aren't they? And that kind of perceived rejection is mighty threatening to a social beast like humans. I honestly don't have resources to offer on that one. Nike ads notwithstanding.

If you have any suggestions for assuaging or coping with that fear, I'd love to hear it. A couple of the women have glorious minds and amazing stories to tell. I'm invested in not letting the stories die with them.

Why You Aren't Writing That Novel

OK, time for some hard truths.  You haven't finished writing That Novel.  You've been talking about it for years, and you can visualize all the elements of it so easily.  You know it, back and forth, inside and out.  It's there, waiting.

But you haven't written it.

Why is that?

I could tell you it's about discipline-- and it is, no doubt.  It takes discipline, it takes putting your ass in the chair (or feet at the standing desk), and just plain doing the work.  It takes not going to that party, not binging that series, not spending yet another night refreshing Facebook every twenty minutes.  It takes just digging in and getting it done.

But most of you don't want to do that.
Here's the ugly truth, dear reader, and look deep inside yourself and ask yourself if this is why you haven't written That Novel.

You don't want to write a novel.  You want to have written it.

I get that.  I get wanting the glory of having it in your hands, being able to say, "Oh, I wrote a novel", but not having to do to the unsexy, daily-grind part.  I'm in the process of drafting my tenth novel (thirteenth if you count the ones that are sitting fallow on  hard drive), and I always wish there was a way to fast-forward this phase of it.  At this point, I know what I'm doing in terms of writing a novel, but it's still hard, grinding, go-down-to-the-word-mines work. 

And you're never going to write That Novel until you come to terms with that part of it, and get down to doing it. 

So what are you waiting for?

YUNOWRITE?

Why don't people who claim to want to write a book...write that book? Mostly, I think it's about unreasonable expectations of what "being an author" is and what writing a novel entails. I'm not going to get into the selling of the novel because that's a leg of the journey beyond this week's blogging prompt.

Unless you live with an author, your exposure to what it means to Write A Book has probably been through the fictitious portrayals of an author's life in TV and movies. It's a fun and flexible occupation for a character to have, but like most occupations portrayed on TV, the actual act of doing the job isn't anywhere close to reality. Rick Castle, Jessica Fletcher, Rory Gilmore, they spend five seconds on screen every fifth episode "writing." Sure, there's a reason for that. Watching an author do their job would be some dry, dry, dry TV. Type, type, type, swear, talk to themselves under their breaths, get up, pace, get something from the fridge, write some more, get up, get coffee, erase everything they'd written, let the dog out, scan social media, make a snack...you get the idea.

Folks who "want to write a book but..." rarely stop to think about a novel being the longest term paper they've ever written. If they did, they'd find a local author, hand them a bottle of whiskey, and walk away...after buying two copies of every book ever written by that author, naturally. 🤣

It's not surgery!

"Why haven't you written that novel in you"

That's the subject for this week, to paraphrase.

Well, the easiest answer is normally close to right. I have several, but let's go down the list shall we?

First: "I just don;t have the time."

Sure you do, precious. You make the time. That excuse will never work for me. I have had  a full time job through all but seven months of my time as a full time writer. Those seven months were interspersed through the last twenty-five years, and included three months off to recover from serious knee surgery and various stints when I was looking for a job.

It wasn't that I had the time. it was that I made the time. More than once I declined an opportunity to join friends at one gathering or another, because I had to do my daily quotient of writing. Why? Because that's how you get the writing done, You MAKE the time.

So that excuse does not fly with me.

Second: "I don't know where to start."

With ass in chair. Writing is like any other craft. it takes time and practice. You sit, you write, you work out the details of that process for yourself, like every other writer throughout history though I'll grant you that some have had help along the way and some have not.

I don't care if you work the details out in a notebook (Tried, failed. My handwriting was waaaaay too sloppy), if you plot every scene meticulously and make a stack of index cards regarding each character while you hire someone to do sketches of their facial expressions or if you wing it. The story is only told if you put in the effort.

Let's be honest here: if you are expecting an easy ride of this, you're going to be disappointed. Writing a novel is work. From the outlining to the first draft to the second, third, and fourth edits. It's work. That's why not everyone ids doing it I have known a great number of people who decided that they would write a novel and then called it quits after the first few weeks because surprise, like with any work, there is effort involved.

That said, I have a lot of fun writing. I don't imagine that will ever change. I enjoy my work, even when the work is hard and requires extra effort.

Third: "Oh, I guess everyone has a novel in them."

Yeah. not mentioning names here, but a friend of mine who is a successful comic artist (far more successful than I ever was in my efforts to become a comic artist), and whom I'd worked with as a writer on a few projects that never quite came to fruition, looked at me when I told him I was going to try my luck at novels and said, "I'm pretty sure everyone has a novel idea in them." The way he said it, i knew he was dismissing my attempts. I resisted the urge to tell him where he could shove his words. Instead I just got a bit more serious about getting the first work done. My bibliography speaks for itself.

Fourth: "It's all been done before."

Bite me. You can tell me that there are only ten basic plots (or twelve, or eighteen or thirty-seven, it depends on who you are talking to or reading) and I will continue to sit in my chair and make up stories and I will do my very, very best to be paid for them.

it is not the story, but how it is told that changes. Thee may only be X number of plots, but the way that the tales are created and offered is as different as the shape of a snowflake from the next.

Fifth: "I don't want to write fiction. I want to write literature."

Stephen King has a great quote that he heard from a man on the street once I';s been a whole but as I recall the story he was watching TV and they asked several people at a museum opening what they thought of the art and whether or not the works at the particular establishment qualified as art. One of the locals. a man who was very likely a farmer and was dressed for the part looked at the interviewer and said (and I am paraphrasing here) "I don't know if it's art, but I know what I like."

That's exactly how I feel about literature.

Want to create art instead of a house of toothpicks? Find the right tools in your mind and get to it. I know a few folks who created literature from the very start. I know others who will never manage to create literature in that sense and are fine with it. Me? I write stories and consider literature to be a happy coincidence. I'm having a lot of fun. I have no intention of carving away at the words that I write until I have removed any phrase that fails to pass the literature litmus test, assuming such a test exists. I write stories that I enjoy writing. If I occasionally bleed on the page, that's just a side effec of the process for me.

The point is, there are any number of excuses that can be found and used. There are infinite reasons not to write, The number one reasons are, as near as I can tell, fear of rejection and a serious desire to not have to put the work into it. If you want it, if you NEED to write like you need to breathe, then you'll get it done. And if you are finding a dozen or so excuses why you can't, then you obviously don't want it badly enough.

Does that sound harsh? Sorry, but sometimes you need to be a little harsh.

If you want it, sometimes you have

to work for it.

Why You Haven't Written the Novel That's in You

Another photo of the lunar eclipse as the full moon set over Santa Fe.

Our topic this week at the SFF Seven is "Why do you think people DON'T write?"

It's a different take on a familiar topic. Because all writers hear - and, I confess, dread - the standard line from people: "I've always thought I had a novel in me, if I had the time to write."

Or some variation on this. Almost every person who says they want to write a novel and hasn't blames not having the time to do it. Which makes the person who HAS written novels want to throttle the person speaking. Maybe very gently - just a light squeeze to the larynx to stop those hated words.

Because here's the deal: WE ALL HAVE THE SAME AMOUNT OF TIME.

Right? 24 hours in a day, 365 days in a year.

No, no - don't start explaining or making excuses or mentally going over your incredibly tight schedule. I'm sure your days are packed. I don't doubt that you don't have an empty three or four hours - or whatever it is you think you need - to write in. None of us have that. Nobody I've ever known has had HOURS to kill every day, with absolutely nothing to fill them, so they might as well write a book.

Except maybe people in prison? I dunno - seems like they're kept pretty busy, too.

People don't like being idle. We're not built for it. If we don't have work to do, we like to be entertained. If we do a lot of work, as many people do, then we need to be able to relax in between. We need to sleep, to eat, to take care of children and the elderly and the infirm. We have homes to maintain, pets to nurture, volunteer obligations that are important to us.

I'm going to let you in on a secret that isn't much of a secret: occupations are like gas - they expand to fit the available time.

This means that, your allotted 24 hours a day will always be filled. If you have empty hours for some miraculous reason? They'll get filled. Nature abhors a vacuum, yes? Empty time sucks other things into it.

So, the reason these people haven't written their novels - or short stories, or poems, or essay, or what have you - is NEVER because they don't have the time. It's because they chose to do something else with that time.

Now, I'm not going to pretend making time to write is easy. It's not. In fact, I suspect making time to write is harder than making time to do most anything else. That's because it's solitary, it's producing and contributing nothing to the world apparently (maybe for a long time), and it looks to other people like you're not doing anything at all. Except maybe taking away from the stuff they approve of you doing - like stuff that benefits them.

Decide to start an exercise regime? Look at all the people at the gym doing the same thing! You come home sweaty? You lose weight and get stronger. All awesome observable stuff.

Take up gourmet cooking? People are so happy with you! Yummy food for all!

Get a second job? Wow, you're not around as much, but yay for more money! And the people at the job are happy you're doing stuff they need you to do badly enough that they'll PAY you to do it.

Start writing a novel? None of these things. You take time away from other stuff, nothing happens for a long time, and - because writing is difficult, mentally and emotionally draining - you probably won't even seem happy about it.

When most of us start writing, the time we make - that is, steal from another part of our life - is usually from something that was fun and relaxing. It's hard to cut out the things we need to do to live, like cooking food and making money. So we steal from reading time, or movie-watching time, or gaming time. Then not only are you trying to learn a New Thing, which is tedious and draining, you've also lost the things that made you happy.

It's really hard to get through this phase. Especially if the people who love you are saying, "Not only do I see you less, but you also seem miserable. Are you sure you want to do this?"

Yes. Yes, you really do.

Writing might be the most delayed-gratification project I've ever engaged in. But the rewards are worth it. IF you stick through all the garbage and difficulty. And that means well past the publication of your first book, or even the first ten.

I can vouch that making a living as a writer is even BETTER than I imagined it would be.

So: MAKE THE TIME TO WRITE.

Beg, borrow, and steal the time! Don't wait for the day that never comes, when time to write magically falls from the sky.

TAKE THE TIME AND SQUEEZE EVERY DROP FROM IT.

I believe in you.

Not Into Unreliable Narrators

DepositPhoto

I have only one thing to say about this week's topic - I don't have any time or patience for unreliable narrators, not in books, movies or real life. Nothing will send me running faster... Okayyy then, that's kind of a short post.

What can I add to this?

 Here's the only sort of unreliable narrator I've ever written to my knowledge and it's because she was about 100 years old, in ancient Egypt and her grasp on everything is pretty tenuous at this advanced age. The man asking her questions is a 200 year old ghost (or "akh"), sent back to life by the goddess of second chances to solve his own murder. I guess he was a bit of an unreliable narrator for most of the novel, come to think of it, but not to the reader, only to his fellow Egyptians. But he tried very hard not to outright lie! Edited a bit from the published version, which is one of my older ancient world paranormal romances.

To not be promo-y, I won't even add the buy links!

The excerpt:  He’d asked the cook, oh so casually, who was the oldest servant remaining on the estate, working his question in among other topics. She’d directed him to a woman named Benerib. “You’ll get little sense from her. Dreams in the sun, she does, and waits for her ka to be ready for the Afterlife. She must be more than one hundred years old.” Wiping her hands on her apron, Khensa went to a shelf at the rear of the kitchen, beckoning him to follow. She selected a clay jar, removing the stopper, and taking a deep sniff of the contents. Then she took a small bowl and ladled a generous serving of honeyed figs from the jar. “Here, my special recipe. Benerib loves these, greedy as a child she is. I don’t know what you want of her, but with these as your greeting, you’re more likely to get her to talk. Don’t expect much sense.”

Taking the treat with a murmured word of thanks, he left the house in search of the old woman. Asking people he met in the yard, he was directed to where the elder sat in the shade of a willow tree, a cat purring on her lap. Clearing his throat to get her attention, he bowed. “Old mother, I’m told you’ve been in service in this house for a hundred years.”

She laughed, peering at him from rheumy eyes. “Not quite that long, but yes, I’ve been a body servant to all the women of the family, including young Neity. I started running errands at the age of five, holding combs and wigs and pins and ironing linen, and I don’t know what all else over the years. Until I got too old and bent. My hands don’t work well anymore.” She showed him her gnarled fingers. “Do I know you? Are you a noble of the house, home after the war?”

Wondering which war she was thinking of, in her age-addled mind, he seated himself next to her. “No, I’m Periseneb, a guest, only here to help Lady Neithamun until the tax collection day. I’ve brought you something.”

Shooing the cat off her lap, she accepted his offering and popped one of the figs into her mouth. Eyes closed in contentment, she said, “Many years since I had a suitor bring me treats.” She giggled like a girl. "Oh yes, I had many men chasing my skirts, let me tell you.” Benerib swayed in her chair and began enumerating the swains of her youth.

Remembering the cook’s warning about getting anything sensible from such an elderly person, Periseneb felt the akh’s power pushing at him, feeding on his barely suppressed frustration. Benerib was his only chance to learn things about the family history which would never appear in the dusty scribes’ records. “Have another fig?” When she reached for the treat, he clasped his hand around her wrist and let a small amount of the pent up anger leach from him where their skin touched.

Benerib gasped, clutching at her chest, and slumped against the back of the chair. The cat, which had been purring as it twined around her ankles, hissed and spat at Periseneb before scurrying away. Dismayed at the effect he’d wrought, he prayed he hadn’t killed her. One so old didn’t deserve to die at the hands of an akh.

A moment later, opening one rheumy eye, she peered at him flirtatiously. “What is it you want to ask?”

With a huge sigh of relief, he offered her the figs, taking great care not to touch her again in his unsettled emotional state. “I’m curious about the family that owns Heron Marsh. Not this generation or even the generation before. Older times. Have you any tales of a great great aunt? Sitre by name?”

Both of Benerib’s eyes popped open and she slapped her knee as she sat up. “Oh, that one! She was a handful right enough, sir. Not at all like our Neity. Oh no, Sitre was mean, through and through. My mother used to tell me tales about her.”

He was surprised by the harsh characterization of the woman he’d known. Searching for a kinder description, he asked, “Headstrong perhaps?” Certainly many had labelled her thus in his time, with a degree of understatement. No one told Sitre what to do or denied any impulse she took into her head. Spoiled from birth by indulgent parents is what the servants in his time had said.

The elderly woman he was questioning cackled. “As a child, my mother was one of Lady Sitre’s attendants. Mind you, only for the last few years of the harridan’s life. The noblewoman must have been nigh onto the age I am now. Nothing ever pleased her. Threw her mirror at my mother, she did, or was it a cosmetics box? Maybe both! Mother said she didn’t move fast enough to please the high and mighty lady. None of the maids did. Bitter, nasty woman, according to my mother.” Falling silent, Benerib plucked another fig from the bowl and chewed noisily with her few remaining teeth. “Afraid to die, Sitre was. Tried all sorts of nostrums and spells to live forever. Most superstitious woman anyone ever met. Might even have dabbled in black magic in her last years, or so it was whispered. She never spoke of her fears, at least not in my mother’s hearing, but plainly the lady was terrified of what awaited her at the Judging of her heart.”

Discomfited by this description of the apparent harridan Sitre had evolved into before her death, Periseneb waited. This third-hand account was the closest he was going to come to anyone who’d met the woman he’d once hoped to marry. As he handed the old woman the water skin, he prayed silently that Benerib had more to share.

She took a long drink and wiped her lips. “Where was I?”

Hoping she hadn’t retreated into senile dreams again, he gave her a prompt. “You were telling me how your mother was a servant to Lady Sitre—”

“Oh, yes, after she was widowed. She’d married Lord Haqaptah. Well, the one in that day, not the one plaguing us.”

Periseneb’s heart thumped hard in his chest and he rocked on his heels. “She—she married Haqaptah?” Well, what had he expected? He never showed up to claim her, so of course she’d married someone else.

“Aye.” Lips working as she chewed, Benerib calculated and made some tallies on her fingers. “Sitre was the great great grandaunt of the current Haqaptah. She never got over her bitterness at not inheriting this estate either, let me tell you. My mother talked of it often. Cursed, the servants used to whisper, all Sitre’s schemes and efforts going for naught. Any more figs?”

A shiver ran down his spine at her words, surprising him. Curses shouldn’t concern him—he was a ghost himself, after all. Rolling his shoulders to dispel whatever momentary twinge the idea of a curse had given him, he held the bowl closer to her. “As many as you want, old one.”

“You must have flirted with the cook,” Benerib said, tilting her head to see him more closely. “She never gives anyone so many of her special figs.”

“The cook and I have come to an understanding,” he answered. “Why didn’t Sitre or her sons inherit Heron Marsh?”

The elderly woman leaned close, as if to prevent anyone else who might be interested in centuries’ old gossip from overhearing....