More writerly today but I’ll sprinkle pretty pictures throughout so as not to bore you all.

We’ll start off with this one, shall we? As I just finished up my partial for No Reservations I thought I’d put up my vision of Charles Dixon. Mmmm, Dr. Troy…

Okay so anyway – I was talking with a friend about books earlier today and we discussed a series people often bring up as “great” erotica and I was saying how much I just never got into them. I can overlook lots of stuff if the author can give me great characters and show me their connection to each other. But this particular author in these books I felt never connected with her characters.

For me – what makes a book one I really love, one that moves me or makes me pick it up over and over are the characters. Show me people who are three dimensional and I will get past my other readerly pet peeves. But if I don’t care about them, the other flaws will leap out at me.

As an author – I want to feel my characters. I want to connect with them and know them in some sense. I hope that translates onto the page. Sometimes I feel the hero more than the heroine, or the villain even. But when I’m struggling, I think it shows and I start worrying about it until that moment when I finally get it, when I finally know them and I can go back and adjust, fill in, give them life. In the books I refer to above, it feels very kitchen sink-ish – like the author had a check list of things she thought others believed to be “hot” and had people doing them to each other but I never wanted inside, never wanted to know them and never felt introduced to them either.

Anyway, it could just be me, but it’s characters like Roarke and Eve that bring me back to the In Death books, especially Naked in Death, time and again.