Please join us in welcoming author Jeri Smith-Ready. Her latest novel, Wicked Game is out this month from Pocket Books. After you read her post, leave a comment and you’ll automatically be entered in Jeri’s book giveaway. One lucky poster will win a signed copy of Wicked Game.

And now here’s Jeri!
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Brainspace

Have you ever noticed, when actors go on talk shows to plug their new movies, they’ll often spend time discussing the movie they’re working on now, a movie that won’t be out for another year or two? You can sense that’s what they’re most excited about. It’s filling their ‘brainspace’—the place where their creative and problem-solving energy is flowing like crazy.

I wish I were the kind of writer who could sit down and work for just ten or fifteen minutes, swatting away distractions like meddlesome flies. But I need time to sink into the story’s brainspace. It can take half an hour or more of sitting still, drinking coffee (or tea, in the evening), and staring at the screen before any worthwhile words appear.

There are many enemies of brainspace, including:

* Television
* Family crises
* Illness
* E-mail/Web surfing
* Upcoming release of a new book (hmm, no idea why that one comes to mind right now)

Some of these we can avoid or at least minimize; some we can’t. Most of us aren’t hermits. We can’t seal ourselves into a vault to do our work. So we need to find shortcuts.

How I create brainspace:

* Music: After working on a book for a week or two, I choose music that resonates with its mood and characters and story. Then I play the same music every day when I sit down to write. Eventually I get like Pavlov’s dog: when I hear those opening chords, my brain clicks into writing mode.

* Spider Solitaire: Just one game, I swear, at the beginning of a writing session, while I listen to the music. I see this as easing my brain into the space. That’s my story and I’m stickin’ to it.

* Coffee: Usually it’s the second cup of the day, whether it’s 10 am or 4 pm. (It took years, but I have finally stopped feeling guilty for not writing first thing in the morning.) Of course, coffee enhances concentration most (and tastes best) when accompanied by something sweet.

How to tell what’s dominating your brainspace:

* What do you think about when you’re on ‘autopilot,’ i.e., driving, taking a shower, folding laundry?
* What’s the last thing you think about before going to sleep, or the first thing when you wake up?
* What do you dream about?

I’d love to know: how do you create brainspace for your writing? Do you have a ritual? Is it different for each book? Do you yell at people and pets for invading it? Tell me in the comments to enter a drawing for a signed copy of my new vampire book, Wicked Game.

Thanks so much for having me at Southern Fried Chicas, and thanks especially to Tanya for inviting me!

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Jeri falls into the brainspace of her new vampire series every time she turns on the radio. Wicked Game (and its sequel, Bad to the Bone, coming May 2009) concerns a cadre of vampire disc jockeys and the con artist trying to save their ‘lives.’ Simply Romance Reviews called it “an urban fantasy thrill ride” and “sexy as hell.”

For more about Wicked Game, go here. To visit the DJs and listen to a sample of their shows, click this link. Jeri and her heroine Ciara can also be found on MySpace, though mysteriously never at the same time here and here.

I first discovered Jeri after a friend recommended her urban fantasy, Requiem For The Devil last year. The premise was so unique that I immediately ordered a copy from Amazon and waited with baited breath for it to arrive. I’m not exaggerating when I say once I got the book, I couldn’t put it down. I mean, Lucifer was the romantic hero, for God’s sakes!

And the story was in his POV.

Talk about a compelling read.

I was so taken by Requiem that I turned into a total fangirl and contacted Jeri. Not only that, but I also did a write up on my blog last year telling everybody who’d listen to pick up a copy.

Annnnyway, Jeri’s got another novel coming out from Pocket Books, and I can’t wait to read that one! She’s going to be here on Wednesday, May 14th, so be sure to stop by and say hi.



Here’s her bio:

Jeri Smith-Ready has been writing fiction since the night she had her first double espresso. She holds a master’s degree in environmental policy and lives in Maryland with her husband, cat, and the world’s goofiest greyhound.

Her hobbies include cooking and animals—though not at the same time, unless you count the cat’s culinary supervision, which looks remarkably like sitting on the floor waiting for food to drop.

Jeri fosters shelter dogs with Tails of Hope Sanctuary. As of this writing, she has hosted twenty dogs at her home, all of whom have found loving adopters.

Recently, I found an article on the internet about Peter Mark Roget. I’m embarrassed to say I knew nothing of the man. It seems his entire family was plagued with mental illnesses, from simple depression to possible schizophrenia and paranoia. An uncle slit his own throat while Roget struggled to take the razor away.

To hold onto his own sanity, Roget wrote long lists of synonyms. He found solace in words. I can understand this. When I’m restless, can’t write, or even settle down with a good book, I pick up the dictionary to find interesting, previously unknown words. Words fascinate me.

I’d be lost without my copy of Roget’s Thesaurus. Not only does it offer many choices, but sometimes one of the synonyms sparks my imagination, enabling me to write a better sentence.

Words make the world go round. They allow us to communicate, albeit not so well at times. It’s not just a good story that sells a book, but how it’s written. Think about how your words will flow into a reader’s mind.

Pick a random sentence from one of your manuscripts and spend time improving it. The more often I do this, the faster I get. Now I take all my weak sentences when I complete a chapter and make them stronger. And, of course, Roget is my bedside companion.

For anyone interested in reading the entire article on Roget, it can be found HERE.

I’m also looking forward to reading The Man Who Made Lists by Joshua Kendall. Discovering more about Roget’s unhappy life might be great research for anyone wanting to know more about the darker side of mental illness.

My mother always told me, “Choose your words wisely.” Of course, she wasn’t referring to my writing, but the idiom holds true whatever way you look at it.

Happy word hunting!

This Wednesday we’ll have 2008 Eppie winning author Pam Champagne. Not only is she talented and prolific, she also cps with me every now and then. Gotta love anybody willing to read through my scribblings!

Here’s her bio:

“Pam lives in on 50 rural acres in rural Maine with her husband, two Siamese cats and a black Lab. By day she works in Bangor, Maine as a legal secretary.

Other than writing, Pam enjoys hunting, fishing or just being outdoors. Each year she promises to maintain her perennials and a huge vegetable garden, but somehow they always manage to get away from her. God blessed her with two beautiful children and two wonderful granddaughters. Pam writes, hot romantic suspense novels and is currently branching into short stories and novellas.”

So check back in on April 30th for Pam’s post. In the interim, you can take a look at her absolutely bitchin’ book covers.

Fellow Loose Id author Mechele Armstrong has long been one of my favorite people in the business.  A fine writer of hot, very romantic books, she’s both prolific and talented—and one of the nicest ladies you’ll ever want to meet.

So, without further ado…

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Mechele  Armstrong

The story behind my latest release is that you can’t always get what you want. 
 
From characters that is.

Mine tend to take me on wild rides.  You’d think I’d be used to it by now, but they still throw me curve balls.

Earlier in the week, Settler’s Mine 3: The Woman, released from Loose Id. I’m excited about this story. It was challenging to write about two guys who really had no desire to find their third, much less find out their other mate is a woman.  The story took me places I didn’t expect to go, especially because it wasn’t the story I originally sat down to write.

When I decided to start another Settler’s Mine novel and planted my butt in the chair to start working, I thought I was going to write about a character introduced in Settler’s Mine 2.  A woman who I already know her story and where she’s heading.  Only my fingers wouldn’t start typing about her.  My brain wouldn’t focus on her tale.  Instead, a character named Tam kept popping into my vision.  He had long, dark hair. The color red was a constant whenever I thought about him.  Along with a woman on the run, Kiann. She had a big secret that I wasn’t sure at first what it was.  And then there was Jax, who was Tam’s mate, and a stick in the mud. He wasn’t happy about a lot of things.

Try as I might, I couldn’t get the story I’d sat down to write going.  Not with these three talking in my head.

Usually, unless I have to write something else for a deadline, I’ve learned to run with the story that wants to be written.  I didn’t have an official deadline on a particular story, so I started toying with these characters, instead of writing the story I’d expected to come next in the Settler’s Mine series. And Tam, Jax, and Kiann wouldn’t get out of my head to let me tell anything else but their book.  They took over and their story, for the most part, flowed.  Even though some parts of it were hard to nail, and I had to go back and revise a few times when I lost their voices and track, we hashed it out until I got their story to the end.  It was well worth it. They challenged me to tell a tale I hadn’t expected to write.  They aren’t easy characters and their ending wasn’t quick to reach, but we made the journey together.

Obviously my editor decided I’d made the right decision, because she accepted The Woman and now it’s out!

I’m sure the next story in the Settler’s Mine series will be the one about the character I thought this one would be about.  But I’m so glad that Tam, Jax, and Kiann started appearing in my mind.  I love stories that stretch me, and these reluctant mates definitely did that.

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Mechele Armstrong aka Lany of Melany Logen
Where Sensuality and Wonder collide
http://www.mechelearmstrong.com/
http://www.collector-series.com/
The future’s never been so sexy
http://www.melanylogen.com/

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: 

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

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!

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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

This week’s BTB is with my good friend MJ Fredrick (also known as Mary Fetcher hehe).

I first met Mary online at e-Harleqin. She was so smart and determined and driven (and a fellow   Texan!)–she’s quite an inspiration and a multiple Golden Heart Finalist!

Her second release, HOT  SHOT is now available from Samhain publishing, and I guarantee you won’t want to miss her Behind the Book!

Roxanne St. Claire is a national bestselling author of more than twenty books. She currently writes a romantic suspense series for Pocket Books, called “The Bullet Catchers” featuring a cadre of high-end bodyguards and security specialists. Her books have earned numerous awards and recognitions, including the RITA Award, the Maggie, the Daphne du Maurier, the Holt Medallion, the Booksellers Best, the Book Buyers Best, Borders Top Pick for 2007, the Aspen Gold and several other prestigious writing contests. She is a full-time author, mother of two, active RWA member and certified lover of all pink shoes.
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