Vixenwriter

Goddess With A Blade

16,000 / 100,000 (16.0%)

Got some more progress done before I had to put it aside and get back to Wolf, which I’m about 20 pages shy of finishing revisions on (thank god, LOL). I’m actually researching police procedure and some forensic stuff right now so I can write about it more effectively. I’ve written a different universe and so Rowan has access that a civilian wouldn’t normally have but I still need to write the medical and physical details correctly.

I also need to get Wolf done so I can turn back to GWAB with total attention. (well what passes for total attention when I’ve got three kids hanging off me chattering about Mario, Super Mario and Pokemon)

I’m rambling. My daughter decided she’d wake up for three hours from 1 - 4 and I’m rather incoherent today. Off in search of caffeine.

Goddess With A Blade

13,000 / 100,000 (13.0%)

So I’m doing something new. This is not a romance. This is a mystery with heavy erotic elements. I love this book. I want to write it all the time and I get annoyed when I have to break away to work on other things. Although I shouldn’t admit that because I’m supposed to be revising something for my agent and my editor at EC is expecting something from me June 1. But I can’t look at the revisions another moment so I put them aside for the weekend and I promise Ann that I’ll finish Sword and Crown by June 1.

I need to call the Seattle Police Department and see if someone will talk to me about police procedure.

I’ve heard the opinion often enough that what we write is porn or nothing more than sex scenes strung togehter one after the other for no logical reason.

Writing sex is hard, er, difficult. It’s not a matter of sitting down and typing the same intercourse scene over and over. Although I have read those books and they bore me to tears. Writing a good sex scene, one that the reader has to stop at the end of because she’s tingly and a bit out of breath, is much more difficult than most other things about writing. Because sex in a book should have a purpose.

Now, sometimes that purpose is to get your heroine off. And that’s okay. But the best thing about a sex scene is that sex is rife with opportunity for depth of emotion. You can have major breakthroughs for your character, big emotions communicated without a single word spoken, deep insight into the main character - a good sex scene will leave you more than tingly, it’ll communicate something to you.

There’s a scene in Emma Holly’s, Personal Assets that is probably one of my top five favorite sex scenes ever written. Bea, the heroine of sorts, is under David’s desk and someone is in his office so she has to be quiet. Okay, so you know what happens next, that’s obvious of course. But Holly takes the office sex cliche (and I’m going to write about cliches later in the week) and puts a twist on it.

With David’s cock in her mouth, we see how much Bea yearns for this man who appears unobtainable to her. Her yearning for him is so huge that it takes your breath away as you read. And we’re in David’s head and we can see how tempted he is but also how conflicted as well.

All in all, I think the depth of yearning by both characters against the backdrop of this scene where neither can speak of it for a whole host of reasons is a great example of writing good sex.

What about you all? What are some of your favorite scenes and why?

I was talking on the phone with my mom yesterday and filling her in on the storyline for my WIP, Goddess With a Blade. At one point she said, “how do you come up with all this stuff?” And I explained to her how this particular story came about and she laughed and said she thought I was left on their doorstep by elves.

For me, inspiration can strike anywhere. For GWAB, the basic story came to me on a recent trip to Las Vegas. We went to two different strip shows, The Thunder From Down Under (which, come on ladies, I can’t lie, was the best damned time I’ve had in a while!) and Bite.

Now Bite is pretty high on the cheeze scale. Really, the entire point was breasts but there was juggling and flamethrowing and other crazy stunts to try and disguise the fact it was about breasts but whatever. Anyway, the concept is that they’re all vampires, the women are the harem of the “Vampire Lord” (and we’d so hoped he’d be hawt. He did have green glowing contacts though). The Vampire Lord lost his beloved and so every night at 10:30 in the Stratosphere hotel, he trolls the audience to find her.

Anyway, I started thinking about vampires and how in a lot of modern fiction, they’re often portrayed as good. I wanted to do something different.

The story started to brew then and I kept adding bits and pieces until I worked out an outline. I’m fairly superstitious about my WIP so I’ll just say that really, the book doesn’t resemble that cheezy strip show, but it gave me the basic seed and I ran with it.

For Triad, I was in New Orleans with a friend to see Pearl Jam and I fell in love with the city. The music, the magic in the air, and I started to think about the city as a character in a book, and then Lee came to me and her family later on.

Sometimes it can be a song lyric, a scent, an ad in a magazine (that Matthew McConaghey Stetson ad has inspired me a lot!). I get a lot of inspiration when we go on trips. The different surroundings always jolt my creativity and I’m always studying people and places for story ideas.

This is a sort of ramble. Other people work differently. I am by no means claiming to be an expert on this or that my way is the only way to write (I have a thing about authors who are so rigid that when they talk about writing, it’s always in a tone that says if you don’t do it their way you’re wrong or bad)

I forgot to mention that I’ve just contracted Cascadia Wolves: Tri Mates with Ellora’s Cave! This is the second book in the series and takes on Tracy’s story, the youngest Warden sister! It’s also a menage.

It’ll release later this year sometime, I’ll know more as the process moves forward!

“If it weren’t for Brook’s story, this would have been an F book, but even that one left me a little unsatisfied. It made me feel like a teenage boy receiving a handjob from my girlfriend in the front seat of my Camry, about to bust a nut, only to have her dad come out to the porch with a shotgun, looking for her slutty ass. Make of that what you will.”

And that my friends, is why I love It’s Not Chick Porn book reviews.

I sent off an informal author type photo to my agent today to go with pitch packets. I’m doing professional ones but not in enough time for these pitches. Anyway, my husband, sweet man that he is, was my photographer last night and the one I finally chose was the last one he took as my children made me laugh.

I think for an informal picture it turned out well despite the white above my head there behind me. I would be wearing glasses but the flash kept glaring off them. I prefer the black and white version of this shot but I keep hearing from folks that they like the color one better. Shrug. I sent my agent some copies of both. She knows what works better and I’ll leave it up to her.

It’s odd that anyone would actually care what I look like. I mean, it has no bearing on my book or how I write at all. But still, it’s a factor and so okay, like everything else, I’ll deal and put my all into it.

Thank you to everyone who has commented here, at my loop, at the EC loop and via email to congratulate me on winning Ecataromance’s romance book of the year with Triad. I am really touched by the outpouring of affection from all of you.

Lastly a well deserved plug for Tawny Taylor, whose book, Stolen Goddess releases today from Ellora’s Cave.

Check out this blurb! When Kylie Mannings answers the door on Halloween evening, expecting a couple of toddlers in pumpkin costumes, she quickly learns that candy bars don’t make the most effective weapon against kidnappers. In quick order, two thugs have her overpowered and unconscious. To her chagrin, she wakes up nude, tied to a bed, and the prisoner of a strange man. A powerful, very sexy man who insists she’s his wife and some kind of goddess. Uh…hello? She’s pretty sure she’d remember a little thing like being married. And a goddess…puhleez. If only she could convince her whip-wielding captor of his minor confusion.

Unfortunately, with a killer on the loose, there’s bound to be a few more surprises for them both.

AND THE WINNER IS…

Winners of the Prestigious Ecataromance.com Ebook of the Year awards have been announced

Hiram, Ga - April 10, 2006 Ecataromance.com is thrilled to announce the winners of their prestigious Ebook of the Year contest for 2005. The competition this year was tough. Votes were plenty. And the selection of ebooks was fabulous. But only one book could win the title of best Romance Ebook of 2005. And the winner is:

Triad by Lauren Dane (published by Ellora’s Cave)

About the Book: Lee Charvez is a witch in a family where all of the women are born with inherent gifts of power. She is a witch dreamer, she has the ability to walk in dreams and the subconscious and to work magic there. There is only one Charvez witch dreamer each generation and she’s the strongest in generations.

She meets the man of her dreams, literally, when she bumps into Aidan Bell outside their apartment building in New Orleans. He’s a three-hundred-year-old vampire with the face of a wicked angel, and he has no problem with claiming her as his own. As if that isn’t miraculous enough there’s another man, a powerful wizard, Alex Carter, who makes their partnership into a triad. Problem is, there’s no time to sit back and enjoy her newfound loves because there’s a demon out to destroy the source of her powers, and her entire family in the bargain.

Visit Lauren online at: http://www.laurendane.com/

Visit Ellora’s Cave and buy Triad today: http://cataurl.com/JdiVq

Visit Ecataromance.com today for a complete list of winners by subgenre. Http://www.Ecataromance.com

Ecataromance.com is the premier Internet community for lovers of romance ebooks. Established in early 2004, Ecataromance.com has just celebrated it’s second birthday and we’re excited to be able to give readers a place to congregate and meet their favorite authors. We offer a large database of reviews, interviews, excerpts, author profiles, contests and other features of interest to ebook readers.

For more information visit: http://www.Ecataromance.com

I’ll be hanging out at Love Romances all day tomorrow, April 11. Please come on by and sit a spell. Chat. Read some excerpts. Maybe win something.

I need to get an author photo taken. Wow. I have some casual stuff but as I’m trying to sell myself as a professional author (and not some chick with one too many shots of tequila in Vegas or a mom covered in cracker spooge), I guess I should get professional shots. With make up on and everything. Oh but no feather boas, I promise. Man oh man do I want to fly out to Pennsylvania and have Scott Church do my photograph. Not the nekkid stuff! But he just has this way of photographing women that I adore. Megan Hart did a shoot with him last week and he did a great job (and she’s already lovely so he had the raw materials). We have an agreement that when I sell my first big book deal and Anya does, we’ll fly out and meet Megan do and a Maverick photo shoot. Hee!

But for now, I need to find someone good and reasonably priced in the Seattle area to take some lovely, dignified and yet not overly so (cause hello, me?) all Lauren Dane type author shots. I tell you, two years ago, all this stuff was just a dream and now I’m living it. I’m so lucky.

Wolf

100,000 / 95,000 (105.3%)

Originally, I had 88,000. After the second major revision, I had 92K but thought it would end up at about 95 thousand. I just finished the last one and I broke 100K. Still the same book, the same major storyline and theme. Just more intensity between the characters, oh and some more secks, LOL

Holy moley, I wrote a hundred thousand words. *falls over* I need to be done with this book for a while. I still love it and the characters but I have now crossed most officially into, “please don’t make me open that file again.”

I need to write something now. Well, not right this moment, my brain is mush at this particular moment, but tonight when I sit down to write, I’ll open up Threat of Darkness and work toward finishing it. And then Sword and Crown and then back to Taking Chase. In between all of that, I’m hoping to get edits for Giving Chase and Vengeance Due as well.