Vixenwriter

I’ll be chatting with the Dynamic Trio - Me, Shelley Munro and TJ Michaels at 6 pm pacific/ 9 eastern at the Romance Studio!

I hope you can join us!

I just heard back from Angie the Magnificent - Chased (Marc’s story) and Making Chase (Matt’s story) have been contracted with Samhain! I’m totally thrilled, I love this series and this family and I can’t wait for all of you to meet the women who capture Marc and Matt’s hearts.

I’m having dinner tonight with several of my friends who are local writers. I can’t wait to hang out and talk writing with them.

So I’ve been in a very bad mood for most of this week. It’s been one thing after another. Kids sick, having to find an opening for my middle kiddo in a local Montessori, general annoyances with writing, reviews, people, toddlers working my already way gone last nerve. I will not be sad to see the end of this week, I tell you. Yesterday’s Dictionary.com word of the day was appropriate - Tetchy: Peevish; testy; irritable. Yep, that’s me. But I’m seriously hoping this weekend will break the cycle. I have a lot of work to do so I just need to do it and hopefully the mood will turn in a new direction.

Because of said craptastic mood, I read last night instead of working. I finished up Christina Dodd’s Trouble in High Heels and Linda Howard’s Cover of Night.

A brief review of each and also one of Lori Foster’s Jude’s Law to follow.

Cover of Night - As I said earlier, I’m an LH fangirl. I love her books and I love her writing. She makes it look so damned effortless (her and Nora both). That said, I loved the book. I know there have been reviews where people felt there wasn’t enough romance in the book.

The strength of Cover of Night is that you get a strong sense of who Cait is before the romance begins in earnest. I like that she’s a real heroine. She doesn’t wait for the guy to swoop in to save her but she’s a thinking woman. I did get annoyed by the use of the soft R sound with the twins. But I appreciated Cait being written as a real mother with real responsibilities.

The action scenes are all very well done (my only complaint is that several things were repeated too much for instance how bullets would be stopped by a refrigerator). I liked Cal a lot as a hero, I believed his character. I did like how Howard transformed him for the reader at the same time she transformed him for Cait although I did find it a bit abrupt, I still found it believable.

As for the ratio of romance to suspense - it’s not 50/50. It’s probably 70/30 but I thought it was extremely well done and unlike some of my other favorite authors who went the way of just suspense and no romance, I thought Howard did a good job with the balance. I don’t think so much in terms of percentage but how it fits overall and when I shut the book I thought it was a romance.

Trouble In High Heels - Christina Dodd

I’m always suspicious when historical authors move to contemporaries but I love Dodd’s contemps as much as I do her historicals.

Anyway, I was quite entertained by High Heels. As a lawyer, I always cringe to see characters as lawyers in books and I have to say, this one stretched my tolerance in several places. I wasn’t muttering the entire time about pigs flying but um, suffice it to say I personally could not find any of the law firm stuff or stuff with the judge or other attorneys to be believable. At all.

That said - it was still a fun read and I did like it. I love how the opening sets up the character’s struggle and I also appreciated her seeing her mother later on as someone who is strong and worthy. She’s strong and smart and I dug that she understood her beauty as a tool.

Roberto’s character was fabulous. Sexy, funny and romantic. And I loved his nonno (that’s his grampa in case you thought I was being naughty).

The chemistry was really hot and the energy between the H/H was full of sparks. I liked them together.

The baddies were very bad and gave the reader a place to hang her ire.

There are books you just sink into to get rid of your crappy week because they’re fun and fluffy and all about entertainment. Despite some annoying things (which you probably woudln’t even know if you weren’t a lawyer although I’m sure nurses and mechanics have their own peeves, too) - I was very glad that Dodd gave me a few hours of some great reading fun.

Jude’s Law - I love Lori Foster. And I love that Lori Foster gives her heroines so many different lives and makes them three dimensional. I’d have to say that several Foster books would be at the top of my favorite romance novels of all time list.

I ended up liking the book overall. The tension was interesting with the suspense story. The hero with a tragic past is a storyline I like and one Foster excels at (or the heroine like in Bruce and Cyn). I LOVED that the heroine was a big girl who didn’t hate her body but still had some insecurities about it. That was so refreshing in its normalcy. Her weight was not an “issue” in a large sense. But she’s beautiful, that’s something as a reader that I never doubted. It’s a testament to Foster’s skill that she walked that line so well.

Jude? well at first, I really liked Jude. I loved that he was so frustrated by this woman’s ducking his attentions. It was sweet and amusing but once she game to him for help in his study I began to seriously develop a strong dislike for him. I absolutely hated the way he spoke to May, almost as much as I hated how she took it. I understand that they both had issues which made them overreact the way they did to things but to me, I thought it was way too much.

May - as I said above, I love that Foster gave us a heroine who isn’t a size 10 and considered plus size and I loved that her weight wasn’t an issue outside of the normal way women see themselves. She’s a woman who is the default caregiver for people in her life. That’s a reality for many women and I appreciated that Foster gave her a book. I loved when she stood up to her parents for being abusive. I did not love that she went back to letting them abuse her and that Jude went along with it. I did not love the way Jude talked to her when he had other issues and I did not love how May took it. I don’t want to give spoilers but there were two points in the book, in his study and in his guest room where he acted in a totally unforgivable manner and she was too accepting of it.

I LOVED Denny. What a marvelous character! I hope he gets a book, silver tooth and head tattoos included. The parents were bad, got it. The brother was a weakling idiot who also did something utterly unforgivable that I couldn’t get past at all.

Despite the negatives, I still enjoyed Jude’s Law and I’m going to look for Murphy’s Law to catch up on the secondary characters we met in Jude’s Law because I enjoyed May’s best friend and the chemistry between her and Quentin Murphy.

I love that phrase and I totally stole it from the uber magnificent Anya Bast. Essentially it’s when a romance author writes the hero who does the stuff most men don’t do.

Now, admittedly I love a very masculine man. I love an alpha hero (who isn’t a caveman thank you very much). I want him to do things manly men do. He can show emotion and be soft, but there are things the women in men suits do that drives me nuts.

So I’m reading and I see a man we’re supposed to believe is a super, uber alpha man (who quite frankly, borders on asshole during most of the book) referring to the heroine’s clothes as “camis” and also he likes the “pastel” items he got for her.

Now here’s the deal, I haven’t been single for 20 years and maybe men are different than the one I live with, but if I put a bunch of shirts in front of my husband in pastel colors he would not know they were pastels. He’d be able to say they were soft colors perhaps or light colors but he would so not describe them as pastels. And don’t get me started on the word cami. First of all, no men say cami for camisole. In fact, I’d go as far as to say a man sees a camisole and thinks tank tops perhaps, but most likely he just likes the boobs. This guy didn’t weep, oh the weeping hero (and again, there are some situations where he may weep or show terrible sadness but there are books where the hero cries and cries and I want to shake him and tell him to get a hold of himself).

I like men a lot. I like the way mine smells and how warm and hard he is against me when we snuggle. I like his deep voice and his strength and the way he’s protective of me and our children. He would not know a cami from a pastel. He would not know my sweater was lilac or that my skirt had a handkerchief hem or was cut on the bias.

Maybe it’s just me, but I’d prefer for the hero in a book to be a man and not a woman in a man suit.

I did indeed finish my edits of Stripped on schedule, thank goodness. So it’s off to my agent and the other two authors in the anthology and that’s one less thing on my to do list. Thank goodness my goof up wasn’t that big of a deal. Oy, I honestly can’t believe I do stuff like that. It’s sort of like walking through a restaurant with your dress tucked into your pantyhose. Leave it to me, sheesh! Oh or once I had this pretty skirt and blouse and I went to school wearing the blouse inside out. Here I am, destroying your illusions about me one by one. Snort.

Got my edits for Sword and Crown back so that’s on my plate for this upcoming weekend but I’m going to work on Wolf Unbound for the rest of the week.

I’ll be at Ecataromance on Friday from 10 - 11 am pacific with some other very fine Ellora’s Cave authors. Come on by and spend part of your day!

I’m nearly done with Lori Foster’s Jude’s Law which I am enjoying immensely. I love her books and I love the heroine in this one. I also have the new Dodd, Adair and half of Linda Howard’s Cover of Night to finish too. Because I have sooo much free time. Snort.

There are days and then there are DAYS. Yesterday was a DAY. The wee monster is going through a stage right now where she’s whiny and not sleeping well. She’s also clingy which makes it hard to get any work done. She didn’t even take her 90 minute nap yesterday so I didn’t get much done. I think it’s a growth spurt and a new tooth coming in, combined with her brothers going to school and a big change in her schedule. But I took them all to the library yesterday afternoon and the 5 year old is running in the parking lot and the 9 year old is whiny and can’t choose a book and wee monster is like a great dane on a leash and I’m trying to juggle them all, keep them alive and get my books that were on hold. The car is a nightmare of whining and yelling and crying.

All I want to do is have them all asleep so I can get some work done! I’d figured out yesterday the perfect spot to add a bit of backstory to explain my character’s behavior and I wanted to add it. I also had a shitload of work to do to get it turned in by Wednesday to my agent as promised.

So I settle in and start to work my ass off editing - at this stage, I work from paper to the computer and I’m going back and forth, I correct and add for about thirty pages or until I hit a spot I need to add a scene to. I look at the paper and my screen and the sentence I want to add to a certain paragraph is not on my screen. I look again, and once more and it’s not there.

Well I have a touchpad mouse and sometimes the heel of my hand touches it and selects a paragraph and even cuts it so I’m like, “hm, did I do that?” and add the paragraph into the text and then I get a sinking feeling.

Moving to the end of the manuscript I see the old ending. Shit. I have been editing the older version of the fecking manuscript for two days. I panic for a moment, run downstairs and look and thank god I’ve got the documents where I sent half and half to beta.

After really being upset and mad at myself for such a stupid, rookie mistake, I did realize that most of my real changes between the manuscript I’d been editing and the final were at the very end anyway and I hadn’t gotten there yet. And all my edits since I got crit back were on the older document (I expanded the opening and changed some scenes for POV). But it doesn’t look as dire, or even as difficult to deal with as it did at first glance, thank god. So I’ll have to cut and paste the end onto the doc I’m working on and just do a quick run through and compare of the old one to be sure I didn’t miss anything. But still, GAH!

I was so upset I just put it down and read for a few hours before going to sleep. I do feel better about it today though and hope to get some work done during the wee monster’s naptime (should she actually decide to take one, sigh)

I’m finished with the first five chapters of edits on Stripped and am now moving into the second half of the novella. Thank you so much Megan for your most excellent crit (and my beta readers who always give me great feedback) I’ve added a bit of backstory to my heroine to explain why she’s the way she is and woven other chunks of backstory into the novella as a whole. I’ll have it to my agent by Wednesday as promised, yay!

It set off this whole introspective thing in me last night as I was thinking on the nature of crit and how I deal with it as an author.

It takes a lot for me to send out work to crit at this stage of my writing because I normally don’t send to beta and crit until the third draft but I didn’t have the time and so it’s rougher than it would be normally. Showing my stuff, warts and all, at early stages makes me neurotic and freaks me out. But it has to be done and it makes the final product better.

And so for me anyway, I take crit in the spirit it’s offered. It helps to know what other people I trust think. I don’t want fluffy crit. I don’t want harsh for the sake of harsh either but I want straightforward crit so I can just get to the point without having to salve my ego. I can’t fix it if I don’t know what’s wrong. And I’m not perfect and neither is my writing, I’m a work in progress.

I was just thinking about how far I’ve come after doing this a few years. Some of the comments I received, if I’d gotten them a year ago, I wouldn’t have known how to fix it or it would have been this long, arduous process. Now I know how to add even a paragraph here or there to make a huge difference overall. So each time I do this I learn and as I want to do this for the rest of my life, I have to keep making things better. You can’t do that if you don’t try and put yourself out there.

Half the importance of crit is finding people who you click with and who you can trust. The other half is taking what you need and ignoring what you don’t but still benefitting from everything that’s said.

Wolf Unbound

14,000 / 62,000 (22.6%)

So before I start back on my second draft of Stripped, I’ve spent the last two days on Wolf Unbound and gotten a lot done. Last night I laid out part of the “issue” that Ben and Tegan will have to get past and it’s something that happened in Enforcer and also came up in Tri Mates. Oh and the werewolf mafia is back. I freaking love the werewolf mafia.

Of course my two year old, who has gone from high spirited child to utter evil monster in the last week and a half, decided that sleep was for suckers and refused to go down until after midnight last night. My husband and I traded shifts. Honestly, she’s working my last nerve and I went through this with the older kids and I absolutely hated 2 and 3 for this reason. Anyway, the 5 year old woke up the whole house at 6:45 by declaring that his cough was worse at the top of his lungs. Yep, he’s sick, but not that sick. It’s that crap they all get when they start school for the first time. Which means I’m going to get sick and my monster toddler will get it. Sigh. There are days I wish that children were like birds and I could just toss a blanket over their heads and they’d go to sleep. That would be awesome!

I did get about 150 pages into the new Linda Howard last night after I gave up on writing. I’ll talk about it when I’m done. I’m a little put off by the recitation of the twins inability to say their “r” sounds, I think it’s been established and we should move on. But at the same time, it’s LH and I adore her and I am less bugged by it than I would if just about anyone else on the planet did it. And I like that she writes children into her books and makes them real characters. So few authors do that well, the kid is introduced to make the reader feel the heroine is maternal but you never hear about them again and she has all sorts of time to date and have sex and go to lunch with her girlfriends. Who are these people? So thank you LH for writing real mothers.

Let’s see - I feel very accomplished this week. I finished my novella and got it out to crit and beta, then I sent a submission in to my editor at EC and got back to Wolf Unbound. I thought about Celtic Triangle but as I’m going to be interrupted again to finish up Stripped after I get comments back and then after my agent sees it she’ll have suggestions too, I thought I’d just see how far I could get into WU instead.

The first week of school went well. They just built a new school near our house so everything is new. Teachers, building, schedules, etc. We had one mess up on the first day but otherwise things are well and the boys seem to love it, which is good. And I actually get about 90 minutes of time in the afternoon to write while M is down for her nap. I know it doesn’t seem like a long time but it’s the longest alone time I’ve had in years and it feels really good.

I’ll hold off on my rant about people who feel the need to bring giant dogs to pick up children and then don’t control them and expect everyone else to stay back and be quiet around excitable and grumpy dogs. Grr. Oops, I guess I didn’t, LOL.

I was perplexed by the absense of letters in this month’s RWR in the wake of last month’s Jan Butler debacle but apparently the deadline passed before last month’s issue even came out. Okay then. I won’t refrain from saying that Butler’s crybaby response is pathetic. If you say something, especially something hateful and contraversial, you’re going to be confronted. If you believe yourself to be so special that anyone expressing an opinion counter to yours is an attack, you should just shut the fuck up. Because free speech means free speech for people who have opinions other than yours too. So stop whining about being attacked, because you weren’t. Your opinion was and there’s a huge difference. Oh, and it seems incredibly stupid to attack Nora Roberts like it was something personal because she didn’t agree with you. But hey, it’s your prerogative to do silly stuff.

I have a review for Kitty Goes to Washington to write but I haven’t had the time. I did quite enjoy it though and I can’t wait to read the next one.

And the new Rachel Caine is out! Yay!!

Woot! Finished Stripped and it came in at just over 32K, right where I wanted it to be. So now it’s with beta and crit and I’ll put it aside until Sunday when I start revisions.

The weather is lovely and I’m hoping it stays sunny and cool until the end of the weekend but you know how that goes. I love fall! Autumn in the Northwest is my favorite time of year. The air is crisp and clean and I can start making soup again too. Crock pots are the best thing ever. Ok, not as cool as magic erasers, now that’s an invention! But right up there with the wonder bra and 100 calorie granola bars.

I’ll now go back to Celtic Triangle and finish up that partial before getting back to Wolf Unbound for EC. Hee!