Mechele Armstrong, prolific author of hot romances (and half of the Melany Logen writing team) will be our blogging guest on Wednesday, April 23rd for Behind the Book.

 Mechele writes fabulous books for Loose Id and Ellora’s Cave Publishing.  She is also one of the nicest people in the business, and it’s an honor to call her a friend.

 Please join us!  :grin: 

I must confess…

Occasionally, when I visit author’s blogs (yes, including my own), I imagine myself as a reader, rather than a sympathetic party suffering from the same affliction.
And if I were just a reader visiting these blogs, and reading about all the angst, occasional anger, frustration, waiting, blocks, barricades, struggling, etc…
I’d simply have to wonder, “Why do these people DO this?  Is it really worth it?”

So now, I pose the question to you.

Is it worth it?  Why, or why not?

You’ve shopped it around since time began. It’s been here, it’s been there … hell, it’s been everywhere–and I mean EVERYWHERE. Still, no takers. Even though you consider it the greatest thing you’ve ever written, and you’ve poured your heart, your soul and maybe even a few drops of blood into it, your baby has officially become A DEAD BOOK.

As writers, we’ve all been to this horrible place. Something you’ve loved and nurtured will never see the light of day. How do you pick yourself up? Where do you draw your comfort from? How do you re-energize your muse and start believing again? What steps do you take to begin anew?

Please join us in welcoming Drollerie Press author Joely Sue Burkhart. After you read her post, leave a comment and you’ll automatically be eligible to win a copy of her latest book, The Rose of Shanhasson.

And now here’s Joely!
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When I grow up as a writer, I want to be known as “Robert Jordan meets Laurell K. Hamilton.”

At least that’s what I thought when I was a one-year-old writer just starting out. Four years ago, I didn’t know what point of view was, let alone genre and shelving. My two favorite authors were Robert Jordan, fantasy author of The Wheel of Time series, and Laurell K. Hamilton, (horror, dark fantasy, erotica?) author of the Anita Blake and Merry Gentry series. So it was natural, I suppose, that I wanted to take the best of both worlds and create my own story with epic fantasy, blood, and steamy sex. What was wrong with that?

Evidently quite a lot, as I came to discover.

As a reader, I love big meaty fantasy series, but I’m often dissatisfied. I want MORE. I want more relationships, more romance, and yeah, more sex. But I also find many “fantasy romances” and “romantic fantasy” rather lacking. I love detailed cultures, rich worldbuilding, big plots, and quests; however, if the romance is done well, then quite often the worldbuilding suffers, or vice versa.

So I decided to write what I could not find as a reader.

One well-meaning person laughed when I told them of this dream: You aren’t Laurell K. Hamilton and you’re not Robert Jordan. You can’t get away with combining genres. You can’t sit on the fence. Fantasy readers won’t be happy because of the gushy romance and sex; the romance readers won’t be happy because of the epic quest of the story, the strange cultures, and the violence.

She was right, sort of, but I had to learn the truth in a roundabout way.

The Rose of Shanhasson was my first completed novel, delivering me as a newborn writer five years ago this September and setting my feet on a steep rocky path. I suffered through constructive RWA contest critiques until I learned exactly what POV was after all. I learned everything I could, rewrote the story, and then learned some more. However, in 2004 I actually quit the story, which is painful to admit. I’d come to believe the dream would never live, and so I tried to create another dream, abandoning all I knew to force my growth in a different direction.

I tried to jump down off that cross-genre fence and broke both my legs in the fall.

As I healed, though, I learned that roots have a way of defining who you are, no matter what branches may be grafted to the trunk. My roots were clear, founded in Shannari’s epic story of love and betrayal, Shadows and Blood, darkness and light.

After writing other stories, I came back to Rose late in 2006 and wrote it from scratch again–not a “revision” but a complete rewrite from page 1. I didn’t finish that draft until the beginning of 2007. Then I tried my hand at writing a shorter novella set in a companion country of the same world, and to my great excitement, found Drollerie Press.

You might characterize some of our stories as speculative fiction, mythic fiction, slipstream, new weird, urban fantasy, dark fantasy, paranormal, magical realism, mystery, science fiction, romance or horror. Any of those would be true, but there are story elements that never die: the quest, the coming of age tale, the epiphany; and there are elements that will always fascinate us: tales of creation and dissolution, who we are and where we come from; stories about magic, love, mystery, and life. We find those ideas especially intriguing when presented within the framework of myth, legend, and fairy tale.

Whoa, hard to characterize stories heavy in fantasy, myth, legend and love: right up my alley! Shannari has found a wonderful home at Drollerie. More importantly, through her journey, I found myself as a writer. Lo and behold, I’m not Robert Jordan. I’m not Laurell K. Hamilton. I’m Joely, haunted by a Shadowed Blood with an ivory rahke, who refused to let the dream die even when I tried to let it go.

The Shadowed Blood is a story I’m giving away via Friday Snippets each week on my blog. More free reads can be found HERE.

–Joely Sue Burkhart

Joely’s Blog
Drollerie Press

Okay, so one of the times when, as a writer, the dh can help (one of the VERY few times, because I swear he is never as obtuse as when I ask him for writing help) . . . the sex scenes. If I am ever unsure as to how good/bad a sex scene is, I let him read it and er, uh . . . with the title of this post you can tell how I, um, gage it.

I was reading a Aphrodesia book today–no not one of Ames, but hers has been known to melt popcycles –and the scenes were VERY . . . well written. To the point I was cursing the fact the dh is in Vegas all week. But I digress…. (A LOT!) It got me wondering how authors “gage” their sex scenes.

Have you ever noticed I ask a LOT of questions–I have had some strange looks and reactions by the questions I ask. . . so let me say this, “No I don’t like girls that way, No I am not allergic to eggs, and No officers I am not trying to mouth off!”

So anyway . . . I have varying degrees of sex scenes in my books. I have yet to reach the popcycle melting works yet, but I up my writing comfort level every little bit. But there are times where I worry the current level is staid or contrite. Or, god forbid, down right boring. As writers, how do you judge your scenes? And as readers how do you know when it’s . . . husband-outta-town-BOB-worthy?

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-ETA: Its Raine’s birthday!

It’s the little things that make life grand. A great fitting pair of jeans, comfy shoes, your favorite flat iron–you get the picture. But occasionally I wish for more.  Not much more…just a tiny bit more.  It’s simple really. I want a contact lens warmer.

Don’t laugh! Have you ever gotten up on a cold winter morning and had to put in ICE COLD contacts? It sucks….so someone please….do me a favor and invent one.

So, dear reader, what creature comfort would you have someone invent to make your life a little easier?

For a few years now I’ve been a fan of the infamous Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, sponsored by the English Department of San José State University in California.
Yes, that would be Bulwer-Lytton, original author of “It was a dark and stormy night…”
The competition challenges writers to compose the opening sentence (preferably a very LONG sentence) to the worst of all possible novels.

A few favorite gems from the contest here—just because they make me smile.
(And of course, I couldn’t resist joining in—with apologies to Emily Dickinson). I discovered that it’s very easy to write a bad sentence, but not so easy to write a very GOOD bad sentence).
Enjoy…or add on! Open forum.

She’d been strangled with a rosary-not a run-of-the-mill rosary like you might get at a Catholic bookstore where Hail Marys are two for a quarter and indulgences are included on the back flap of the May issue of “Nuns and Roses” magazine, but a fancy heirloom rosary with pearls, rubies, and a solid gold cross, a rosary with attitude, the kind of rosary that said, “Get your Jehovah’s Witness butt off my front porch.”~~Mark Schweizer

“Send an ambulance; I’m glistening profusely . . . bosom heaving . . . luscious, ripe orbs threatening to burst the seams of my black lace bodice . . . . pulse galloping apace like a knight’s sleek steed . . . exquisite pain radiating down my graceful, alabaster arm, shooting upward to the finely chiseled jaw . . . I shall swoon—oh, my address?” the romance writer gasped into the phone before collapsing.~~Linda A. Fields

I was in a back alley in Fiji, fighting desperately and silently for my life, fighting desperately for oxygen, clawing at the calm and almost gentle pressure of the fabric held over my face by implacable, ebony thighs when I realized — he was killing me softly with his sarong.~~Karl Scott

She wasn’t really my type, a hard-looking but untalented reporter from the local cat box liner, but the first second that the third-rate representative of the fourth estate cracked open a new fifth of old Scotch, my sixth sense said seventh heaven was as close as an eighth note from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, so, nervous as a tenth grader drowning in eleventh-hour cramming for a physics exam, I swept her into my longing arms, and, humming “The Twelfth of Never,” I got lucky on Friday the thirteenth.~~Wm. Ocheltree

Paul Revere had just discovered that someone in Boston was a spy for the British, and when he saw the young woman believed to be the spy’s girlfriend in an Italian restaurant he said to the waiter, “Hold the spumoni–I’m going to follow the chick an’ catch a Tory.”~~John L. Ashman

Detective Bart Lasiter was in his office studying the light from his one small window falling on his super burrito when the door swung open to reveal a woman whose body said you’ve had your last burrito for a while, whose face said angels did exist, and whose eyes said she could make you dig your own grave and lick the shovel clean.~~Jim Guigli

Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul, annoints despair with offerings, seeking to cajole—but I gotta tell ya, every time I’ve let it out of its cage it heads straight for my rear and nips my buttock with its jagged little beak, because once it tried to whisper in my ear and I swatted at it, thinking it was one of those big, retarded moths that thumps against the screen door, and crushed its fragile little wing (which it never forgot), so now, every chance it gets, it shits on my head and bites me right in the ass.~~R. Weaver

A couple years ago, I had an eye-opening conversation with another writer. She told me her dream was to be a New York Times Bestseller. She wanted to out-produce Nora and JK Rowlings combined. She wanted her stories to be the first thing on people’s minds when they entered a bookstore. She wanted her face plastered on every magazine. She wanted talk shows, and round the clock book signings. She wanted to be a household name. (First name only, thankyouverymuch. Like “Nora.”)

Trust me, Tracy Flick had nothing on this gal.

I’m not as ambitious as my colleague. Yes, I want to see the books (plural) of my heart in print. But all that other stuff? Nope. You can have it. Look, I’m not an underachiever. I’m ambitious, but I value my privacy and my freedom. With that kind of fame, comes A LOT of stuff I’d rather not deal with.

You know what I want? I want to write a damn good book. I want people to enjoy my damn good book. I want people to want to read another of my damn good books and I want to be able to write my damn good book in peace. Is that the goal of an underachiever? I don’t think so. If a publisher were to take me on, they wouldn’t find a more dedicated writer. But I know who I am. I know what I want. And I have, what I’d like to call, ‘reasonable’ goals. Call me a hermit, if you will. Call me one of those “strange” writers who keeps to herself BUT churns out a book faithfully. Yes, call me that. But please don’t call me an underachiever.

So how about you? What’s your goal? Do you want mega fame, or do you just want to see a few of your damn good books get published? Or do you want something in between?

Oh, BTW, in case you haven’t seen Election (with Reese Witherspoon as the irrepressible Tracy Flick) you’re missing out on a great movie classic! Here’s the trailer.

The Story behind the Book – Hot Shot

When Amie invited me to blog about the story behind my newest release, Hot Shot, I realized THAT could be a book in itself, a story eight years in the making, a story with turning points and black moments (several!) and a happy ending.

Once upon a time there were wildfires in Colorado, and Harlequin author Cindi Myers was living there and she would email her home chapter of SARA and tell us how heroic the firefighters were. Hmm. Heroic, eh?

That was our first summer in our new house and we had lots of company come stay with us. Even so, I started doing research on wildland firefighters, printing out info to read in the car on the way to this tourist attraction or that one.

One night we went to see Perfect Storm (my dad and I had both read the book) and scruffy Clooney – wow. My hero.

I don’t know how long that first version took me to write, but it was kind of a rip-off of Hanover Street, where the hero was SO brave until he met the woman he could love and then makes bad decisions. I pitched it at my first RWA conference in New Orleans. Rejected. Not heroic enough. Okay. I’d been rejected before. But I’d done a lot of work on this book, so I revised it and entered a few contests. It finalled and won Where The Magic Begins in 2002. That gave me confidence to enter the Golden Heart, and it finalled in 2003.

I can’t really remember where in the timeline I submitted to Silhouette Intimate Moments, but in 2004, Hot Shot finalled in the Golden Heart again and I got a phone call from Intimate Moments editor Shannon Godwin on my birthday. Almost a week passed before I actually talked to her and she told me what revisions she wanted. Whoo-hoo! I got those revisions done and sent to her at the beginning of June, and then stalked her at the Dallas RWA conference.

And then she left Harlequin, abandoning me. Fortunately, it wasn’t my first time being orphaned at H/S, so I emailed Susan Litman, with whom I’d worked before, and she rescued Hot Shot from Shannon’s desk.

Again, I don’t remember if she asked for revisions or just rejected, but at that point, Hot Shot went under the bed. I had several other marketable stories by that point (Hot Shot wasn’t the ONLY thing I worked on!)

In 2005 I didn’t final in the Golden Heart, so I submitted like crazy – contests, agents, any publisher that would look at unagented stuff. Hot Shot finalled in the Maggies and Hot Prospects. It won HP and was requested by Superromance and placed second in the Maggies, where Susan Litman requested it again.

Several things happened the same time. Another book won another contest and was requested, and I got an agent who LOVED Hot Shot. She felt we should concentrate on that, so we did.

For almost a year… When we met in Dallas and she wanted MORE revisions (Hot Shot was now Frankenstein’s monster with all the changes, mostly to the heroine), I almost cried. I was sick to death of the book, I no longer liked my heroine, it was a mess. A few months later I rewrote the whole shooting match and let go of my agent.

But I was determined Hot Shot would see the light of day, and the summer of 2007 I submitted EVERYWHERE, ignoring everything I’d been taught about simultaneous submissions.

And one morning, there, in my spam folder, was a request from Anne Scott of Samhain. She read it, loved it, wanted me to revise the ending before it went to contract. I completely rewrote the ending and resubmitted. We went through 5 rounds of edits and now Hot Shot is out and the best it can be. I hope you agree!

–
Mary Fechter w/a MJ Fredrick
www.mjfredrick.com
The Bandwagon - Mary’s Blog
WHERE THERE’S SMOKE from Wild Rose Press March 2008
HOT SHOT from Samhain Publishing April 2008

Is there a pay it forward for writers—I guess really if you’re talking mentoring it’s pay it afterwards because you have already reached a milestone in your own writing … but I digress. 

Someone asked me a writing question recently…out of the blue… someone I have never met, but have e-mailed twice on a totally unrelated issue other than my or her writing. (This is not the first time it’s happened just the most recent which made my brain start a’whirlin’). As writers, published writers, do we owe it to the unpubbed masses of writers to “tell them how it’s done?” Is there an assumed level of commitment from us to help others? 

And me being me, I answered her. But what to tell this budding author? 

She writes out of my genre so I could give some quite vague and universal pointers. But I could also look up some info and point her in the right direction—which I did, I am completely anal, what can I say. But she didn’t know this about me when she wrote to ask and frankly the general vague info and the suggestion to read up in her genre would probably have sufficed.  

But really, are there other “jobs” where folks, outta the blue, contact you and ask your secrets? My BIL is an accountant and I can’t remember him ever saying he got a call from a calculator jockey asking for suggestions as to how to add better… but when you’re in the arts… Is there an implied or maybe karmic mentorship we pubbed authors need to adhere to? 

It reminded me of a few years ago: 

Back when I first got into the writing game, and by that I mean for publication vs. just writing to stop the voices (I kid, but only a little), an author who later became a friend pulled me aside, so to speak, looked over an entire manuscript I had after having read the first couple of chapters in a crit group we were both in (this is a huge group—like 50 members, not really a one-on-one type environment) and gave me some MAJOR pointers. She did a line edit as well as each and every craft point you could think of. I didn’t expect her to or ask her too for that matter. Hell, I was flattered and a little intimidated that she’d taken so much interest in me. And by golly she was right about 95 %—the other 5% is probably stubbornness/cockiness on my part. 

I have to say it helped me IMMENSELY! Were it not for her, I probably shave years off the “process”. I still think I would have gotten published eventually but it might have taken many more years, and much more rejection to get the same info she imparted me with—gee I might wanna think about thanking her sometime in a dedication of something… oopsy! 

So what do y’all think? Yes, I know I over-think things but in our world of writers and would-be authors, it’s such unusual dynamics it leaves me with these type questions floating around…