A couple of weeks ago, our transit union went on strike. They’d been in a strike position for weeks, and the contract negotiations had been going on for weeks before that.  But one thing the union promised was 48 hours notice before a strike came into effect—giving time for peeps to make other arrangements.

Little bits of news would leak out about the negotiations, but nothing that was gaining the union much sympathy amongst the general public. Eventually it came time to give that notice; one local news channel had hourly updates. The deadline came and went, then an hour later we heard an agreement was struck. *phew*. Dodged that bullet, now to have the union body vote.

Can you guess what happened next? The majority of workers rejected the agreement and…. *without further warning they went on strike.* We’re talking 12am on a Friday night. Folks were stranded where ever they were.  Can you say bone-headed publicity move? They promised us 48 hrs notice before a strike. The deadline came and went, so another 48hrs notice was needed.

Yes. I am going to tie this into writing, right now. An author needs to keep whatever inherent or implied promise made to the reader. Is this a romance? Make sure the HEA or HFN is there. That’s the promise of a romance.  Do not have the hero falling off a cliff, the main characters parting after a sharing a last kiss and an ‘it’s been a slice. Seeya!’  Sorry, an HEA in book 4 with a second hero after the first hero dies at the beginning of book 1 doesn’t work either.  Show a gun in chapter one? Someone better get shot before the end of the book.  You break the promise, you piss people off. 

Now I’m gonna look at this from a different angle.  Remember I said earlier about details leaking out after the 48hrs notice was given, that weren’t bringing anyone over to the strikers cause?  During the wildcat strike, more details came out, like concerns about job security, which did elicit empathy.  If you could get past your rage. 

If you couldn’t get past your rage, all you heard was the voice of Charlie Brown’s teacher.

If those pertinent details had come out before hand, while folks might not have been any happier about the strike, they might have been more patient/understanding.

So point number two: If you’re going to have your character do something that just might tee off your reader, you need to give good and plausible reasons for the character’s actions.  Before the ‘questionable’ action takes place.  And when I say give good reason, I don’t mean some heavy handed declarative statements.  You can ‘show’ or imply the reasons. Just make sure they’re there.

Today I’m talking titles. I’d been cruising by Dear Author/Smart Bitches and voting in their March Madness tourney, when at some point it was brought home to me how important titles are.  I freely admit to not being familiar with about three-quarters of the book choices in the tourney, so how did I go about voting?

By title. Alone. No going over the Amazon to check out the cover art, blurb and/or reviews. I just read the titles and made my decision. Bam!

I didn’t get what I was doing right away, partly because there were a few titles upfront that I was familiar (from reviews) or had sitting in my tbr pile; but as time when on I realized I didn’t have clue what most of the books were about and was too beat-assed tired to go trolling for info, so I went simply by title appeal. 

Was something evocative/poetic (Wicked Lovely ) or to the point (The Billionaire Next Door)?  Did it tell/hint at genre and tone (Magic Bites) or could it have been the title/name of any ole thing (Broken)?  Without cover art, blurb or familiarity with an author’s work, the title  is the only thing that will capture a reader’s fancy.  

With my upcoming July release I originally had the title of DENIAL. Can’t you just hear Robin Leach doing the voice over on the book trailer? (where’s the ‘big hunk of stinky cheese’ smilie? And, drat, how did I forget the exclamation point? A title like that just screams for an exclamation and embossed foil lettering!)    

After some revisions, I changed the title to FELICITY STRIPPED BARE. I think, without knowing another blessed thing about the book, the new title will (hopefully) elicit more interest than the previous tabloid-esque title.  

So what’s your preference? The Mormon Mistress’s Illicit Italian Affair type titles (which tell you in exactly 2.3 seconds what type story you’re getting. Important when you’ve got a full shopping  cart and 3 screaming kinds hanging off your calves–or so the Harlequin marketing whizards tell us), or something more along the lines of Almost Forever?

Big Spankable Asses or Mystic River?  

For some more food for thought (and a hella lot of laughs) with titles,  several of us had fun helping Amie with titles a couple of years ago.  

Thanks so much for the invitation to hang out here today! I’ll begin by telling you a bit about myself. I’m a dark person. When I was born the nurse said, “This baby has a dark soul.” Well, I’m sure she at least thought it. ;)

I find foreboding in everything. Old buildings. New buildings. Bridges. An open field. A weedy pasture. A grove of trees. A quiet street. Anything and everything seems sinister to me. Small towns can be particularly secretive while at the same time seductive. On the surface they can look quaint and welcoming, but underneath they resent newcomers and change. Nature is the same way. Beautiful and inviting, but dangerous and secretive. I decided to tap into those personal anxieties while writing Pale Immortal and Garden of Darkness – books I think of as basically one long story that I call the Tuonela books.
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The fabulous Anne Frasier will be with us this Wednesday! I’m going to cheat a bit a swipe the intro off her web-site, because it says it all, except that she’s a favourite author of mine with several books on my keeper shelf.  Make sure you drop by on Wednesday, she’s got a kick arse post loaded with lots of goodies for ya!

 Anne Frasier’s novels have spanned the genres of mystery, thriller, paranormal, science fiction, and horror.  Garden of Darkness continues a dark tale started in Pale Immortal of a spooky Wisconsin town.  In Before I Wake, a secret government medical experiment goes wrong.  Play Dead plays out amid the voodoo scene in Savannah, Georgia. Sleep Tight, a traditional police procedural, is set in Minneapolis.    Publishers Weekly says Frasier “has perfected the art of making a reader’s skin crawl.” The Minneapolis Star Tribune calls her a “master.” This award-winning, USA Today bestselling author has been published since 1988, and her books have been printed in over a dozen languages in hardcover, trade, and paperback.
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Bear with me for a sec. My girlfriend sent me the following ‘inspirational’ message—Eight Lies of My Mother– in an email last week (this isn’t the exact email that she sent to my office, but I found a very, very, very, sappy, long version of it online which I cut it cut down and revised for this post) :

Whenever the time came for eating, mother often gave me her portion of rice. While she was removing her rice into my bowl, she would say “Eat this rice, son. I’m not hungry”.
That was Mother’s First Lie

And While I ate the meat of the fish, she would eat what was left on the bone. When I tried used my chopstick to give her some of my fish, she refused it and said “Eat this fish, son. I don’t really like fish.”
That was Mother’s Second Lie.

To make extra money, mother packed used match- boxes. I woke up from my sleep and looked at my mother who was still awake, working by candlelight, I said, “Mother, go to sleep, it’s late, tomorrow morning you still have to go for work.” Mother smiled and said “Go to sleep, dear. I’m not tired.”
That was Mother’s Third Lie.

While I took my exams mother waited for me under the heat of the sun for several hours. When the test was over, mother welcomed me and poured me a glass of tea. Seeing my mother covering with perspiration, I gave her my glass and asked her to drink too. Mother said “Drink, son. I’m not thirsty!”.
That was Mother’s Fourth Lie.

After I had finished my study and got a job, it was the time for my old mother to retire. I, who worked in America and make an excellent salary, sent her some money to help her in fulfilling her needs, but sent the money back to me. She said “I have enough money.”
That was Mother’s Sixth Lie.

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The story behind the book: Hair, Sugar Packets and Homones

I got the idea for His for the Taking when I was at a Keith Urban concert in London. I don’t actually like Keith Urban’s music all that much. I went, I will admit it, purely to look at his hair.

Hair can only hold your attention for so long, though, especially through very long guitar solos; my mind started to wander. I got a mental image, suddenly, of a man in outdoor clothing pitching a tent. The unusual bit was that he was pitching a tent in the middle of an expensive upper west side Manhattan apartment.

I even knew who he was: Nick Giroux, the brother of the heroine of my first Halrlequin/Mills & Boon book, Featured Attraction. He was a park ranger and he liked rescuing animals and helping hopeless cases. I knew he was there because he was looking for his father, because I’d written in Featured Attraction that Nick’s father had abandoned his family when Nick was ten. I had no idea where his father was, of course. I suspected he wasn’t in the apartment. I also had no idea whose apartment it was, though I suspected it was Nick’s heroine’s.

I tried out all sorts of heroines for Nick. Mostly, because of the apartment, I thought they would be rich, probably beautiful, sophisticated city-girls. I played with one after another, and none of them seemed to work. But I had to keep the apartment. It was so real in my imagination.

Then my friend lent me the first series of Battlestar Galactica, which I was immediately hooked on, especially because of Starbuck, played by Katee Sackhoff. I couldn’t stop watching her. She was tough, she was competent, she made self-destructive decisions, she was vulnerable, she was even more boyish than one of the boys, and yet wholly feminine. What if I took someone like her, a woman in a man’s world, someone who had so much to give, wanted so much to love, and yet couldn’t let herself because she had to keep up the tough facade?

So I had Zoe. A New York city cab driver. And, I decided because I wanted her to be fit and strong, an aerobics instructor. Obviously she couldn’t own this apartment, either…so who did? Why was she there? And where was Nick’s father, anyway?

One question led to another and so of course I trapped my friend in a car with me on a long journey and made her listen to all my questions and ideas, and then rejected all of her suggestions and came up with my own. I do this a lot. I really do feel sorry for my friends sometimes.

Even after I had those mysteries solved, I still had some problems. Writing for Harlequin/Mills & Boon, I’d always concentrated on emotional conflict rather than plot. I’d never handled a mystery before, or a quest story. I didn’t know how to structure it. My big question was, did I wrap up the mystery before or after I wrapped up the romance? If I did it before, wouldn’t it get annoyingly in the way? If I did it afterwards, wouldn’t it seem like an anticlimax? I remember getting another friend drunk and making her listen to all of this, while I drew diagrams with sugar packets and candle holders on the table.

And what the hell was I going to do with the pigeon who turned up on page 69?

Then, of course, I got pregnant. I reached the first sex scene, set in an orange hotel room in a place called The Lobster Trap, when I was about eleven weeks pregnant, and I discovered that it is nearly impossible to write sex when all you want to do is throw up. I wrestled with that damn scene for days until I decided to give up and leave it for later; I just wrote down the emotions and the barest plan of the scene and went on to the next scene.

A couple of weeks later, I got to my second trimester, you know, the sexy trimester, and I went back to the scene and wrote and wrote and wrote, aided by the best hormone high I have ever had.

Anyway, despite all my angst and puking, Keith Urban’s hair must have done something right, because His for the Taking (under its original title, Driving Him Wild) was shortlisted for the Romantic Novelists’ Association’s 2008 Romance Prize, for the year’s best category romances. It’s out now in print and ebook in North America, as a Harlequin Presents in the Nights of Passion collection.

Links:

My website
http://www.julie-cohen.com

Excerpt of DHW/HFTT:
http://www.julie-cohen.com/books/driving-him-wild/

Buy book on: Amazon.com

Buy book/ebook: on eHarlequin

We have another fabulously talented author joining us this Wednesday. You might have read the great reviews she’s been garnering for her most recent release HIS FOR THE TAKING at Smart Bitches Love Trashy Books, and also over at Dear Author, now you’ll get the slightly warped story behind the story straight from the author. (And I use ‘warped’ in the most complimentary manner possible.)

That’s right folks the funny, charming, slightly warped–and I’ll come clean, past critique partner of mine–Julie Cohen will be joining us!

Stay tuned…

There’s nothing like great dialogue. It’s memorable and sticks with you long after many other details of the book, movie, or tv episode have faded to blurry recall. 

Here’s some of my favourite exchanges.

From the movie Goldfinger:

Jame Bond: Do you expect me to talk?
Goldfinger: Why no, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die.

From Firefly:

Mal: Don’t hurt him. Just scare him.
Jane: Pain is scary.

From Die Hard:

Hans Gruber: Do you really think you have a chance against us, Mr. Cowboy?
John McClane: Yippee-ki-yay, m*therf*cker.

Some of the best stuff is from the older movies.

From The Thin Man:

Reporter: Say listen, is he working on a case?
Nora Charles: Yes, he is.
Reporter: What case?
Nora Charles: A case of scotch. Pitch in and help him.

From Gentlemen Prefer Blondes:

Esmond Sr.: Have you got the nerve to tell me you don’t want to marry my son for his money?
Lorelei Lee: It’s true.
Esmond Sr.: Then what do you want to marry him for?
Lorelei Lee: I want to marry him for YOUR money.

And this is from a current a wip of mine. In this scene, Winston has just met Raine at a bar:

Winston: “Uh-oh. She’s thinking. She’s thinking, ‘but he’s a stranger’.” His voice was low and softly mocking. “But just think, I won’t be a stranger tomorrow morning.”
Raine: “No. You’ll just be a memory.”
Winston:“Oooo.” He grimaced. “I’ll need a drink to recover from that one. What are you having?” He signaled to the bartender.
Raine: “Am I recovering from something too?”
Winston: “My devastating charm?”
Raine:“I’ll have a ginger ale.”

So how about you guys? Post some of your favourite dialogue exchange–tv, books, movies– in the comments.

I’ve been thinking about this post for a few weeks now, wondering how on earth to condense the story behind the story to my current release, “Test Me!”. It’s been a five year voyage to get this book to publication and I finally realized where to begin. You see, it all started with a towel.

For whatever reason, I remember thinking as I wrapped my head in a towel, that it sure would be embarrassing if I were wearing just a towel on my head and someone walked in. Not that I’m big on nude strolling, but you know, if I were to do it for 0.5 seconds…I’ve got the kind of luck that it would happen to me. And it wouldn’t be my Mom or someone who wouldn’t care. No. With my luck, it’d be some really hawt guy that I never wanted to find out the precise location of my cellulite. The idea was too delicious. It simply HAD to be written. Only, instead of me, it’d be some hot blonde or something. So, I got started on the scene and then I realized, these two have to have a good reason why he’s seeing her walk around nekkid. (You know, after I got pass the thought that she had to have a good reason for walking around nekkid.) That was when I discovered I didn’t really have very good plot skills.

(What? I told you this was a long story!)

Suffice it to say, it took quite a while to write the first complete draft of this book. I learned a lot of lessons on my way to the second draft and by the time I was sure I was done, I felt as if I’d ripped out my guts, inverted them, stretched them out and stuffed them back in. In other words, I’d learned quite a lot from several very forgiving authors and CPs and I began the long road of submissions. Believe it or not, “Test Me!” is actually now known as something of a pregnancy book. Every editor who read it had to transfer me to another editor as she went on maternity leave. I started to wonder what was in the ink. Either that or my love scenes were unbelievably potent. Let me tell you, nothing slows down a story read like three or four pregnancies.

One thing that did come out from all those editorial changes was that as likable as the homegrown hero was, there was something missing about him. His heroine was smart, sassy and intimidating and he wasn’t holding his own against her. I have to admit, I fought that. I wanted to control my hero. I wanted to make him a “Hero” with a capital H. A too good to be true and ‘why-can’t-I-have-one-of-those?’ Hero. The problem, it took way too long to admit, was that those kinds of guys are annoying as hell. They make no mistakes. They do everything because it’s the right thing and they never imagine that doing the right thing is anything but soulfully rewarding. If I had to live with that guy, I’d have killed him. I’m just not that kind of girl and neither was my heroine, Vetta. She knew that sometimes, doing the right thing really sucks. Most of the time, actually.Travis Carmichael, scientist and casual womanizer, was not one of those guys. He was that raw element of unapologetic maleness. He’s a guy. He’s a guy’s guy. If you don’t like it, go somewhere else. He needed that quality to make him worthy of my heroine. To make him worthy of me.

I don’t say that to be vain (she says, throwing her flowing hair over her well-moisturized shoulder). But write enough stories and you start to think about what kind of characters you want to be remembered for. You want to be known for believable characters. Real people with real chemistry and real conflict. At least, that’s important to me. Real characters. Real Romance. And on my good days, I want to be Really Funny. I didn’t want Travis to be a hero you forgot about. A guy with no balls who’s pretty much there for my heroine to control with little twitches of her hips. So, you might not always like him. You might want to wash his mouth out with SOAP–perhaps his brain too–but once you meet him, you’ll remember him.

Finally, the elements of the characters was right. So I sent it off to my editor over at Samhain Publishing and wouldn’t you know it, five years, five editors, two category lines retired and at least a hundred dollars in postage…Test Me! found a home. And a cover with boobs, but that’s a different story behind the story…

*~*~*~

Vanessa Jaye, here– You can get your hot little hands on TEST ME! at Samhain.

This week’s guest blogger is Dee Tenorio. Dee has several best selling titles out with Samhain Publishing, but decided to do something a little different with her current release and turned up the heat in her usually very sexy story lines to something that approached scorching! But you’ll still find her trademark humor and depth of emotion. So don’t forget to come on by and take a glimpse into the inner workings of the Dee’s thought processes. ::be afraid. be very afraid:: lol.