What’s hip, what’s now, what’s tomorrow in the romance world.
May 17th, 2008 by Editor
From Little Brown and Company and Stephenie Meyer (author of The Twilight Saga: TWILIGHT, NEW MOON, ECLIPSE, and BREAKING DAWN) comes a new novel, THE HOST . . .
Our world has been invaded by an unseen enemy. Humans become hosts for these invaders, their minds taken over while their bodies remain intact and continue their lives apparently unchanged. Most of humanity has succumbed.
When Melanie, one of the few remaining “wild” humans, is captured, she is certain it is her end. Wanderer, the invading “soul” who has been given Melanie’s body, was warned about the challenges of living inside a human: the overwhelming emotions, the glut of senses, the too-vivid memories. But there was one difficulty Wanderer didn’t expect: the former tenant of her body refusing to relinquish possession of her mind.
When outside forces make Wanderer and Melanie unwilling allies, they set off on a dangerous and uncertain search for the man they both love.
One of the most compelling writers of our time, Stephenie Meyer brings us a riveting and unforgettable novel about the persistence of love and the very essence of what it means to be human.
From Publisher’s Weekly:
In this tantalizing SF thriller, planet-hopping parasites are inserting their silvery centipede selves into human brains, curing cancer, eliminating war and turning Earth into paradise. But some people want Earth back, warts and all, especially Melanie Stryder, who refuses to surrender, even after being captured in Chicago and becoming a host for a “soul” called Wanderer. The straightforward narrative… shines with romantic intrigue.
RomancingTheBlog has two copies to give away via a random drawing.
* To enter, leave a comment below stating you’d like to own the book.
* The comment must be left before Saturday, May 24, 2008 at 6:00 a.m. eastern time.
* You may enter only once.
What comes to mind when you think of a reading room? Do you picture leather wingback chairs and walls of floor to ceiling bookcases, full of leather bound books? Too stuffy? Maybe an alcove in a spacious public library? Too public? Perhaps your style is a white wicker settee in a country garden, with birds twittering and floral fragrances wafting in the air. How sweet. Too sweet?
Do you have a favorite place to read? I pretty much consider wherever I am when I take the notion to read to be my reading room. I can read just about anywhere, with two exceptions. The first is in the car - I learned at an early age that if I read in a moving car, I’m guaranteed a serious case of motion sickness. The second is in the grass. I’m not of the barefoot in the grass variety. I can’t stand to be barefoot in grass, and sitting in grass just makes my skin dance – subject myself to being crawled upon or seen as a bug buffet? I don’t think so. I like to think of myself as being a sensible woman, calm and cool under almost any circumstance, but put a bug on me or a spider within reach and I can squeal and jump around with the best of the girly girls.
One of my favorite places to read is at home in the sunroom, lounging on the futon with the sun streaming in and a cold Diet Coke on the end table. I fully understand the appreciation our dog and cats have for the sun. They typically tolerate each other fairly well, but when the sun streams in any door or window, they’ll squeeze cheek to cheek to get a little sunbeam action.
I also love to read in a lounge chair by the pool when we’re vacationing (you can’t be picky about water spots when you do this because there are bound to be some). My co-worker and I are both content to read while sitting at our desks during our lunch hour – after putting our phones on DND, of course. I’ve been found perched on the very edge of the bed while stowing books away in under bed storage bins, sometimes after a couple of hours or more, because a book (or two or three) in the bin called to me to pick it up and take yet another look, skimming the pages for my favorite scenes. Big sigh.
Before you ask – yes, I do have a life outside the pages of my books. Reading is not my life, but it is a significant part of it. My family comes first, so I don’t read all the time or even as much as I sometimes would like. I figure there will be time for reading marathons once we’re empty nesting. Perhaps that’s why I can read just about anywhere – I like to make the time that I do have to read seriously count.
What about you? Can you lose yourself in a book, regardless of where you are? Where’s the strangest place you’ve ever read? Does your family support your reading habits? Do they ever feel neglected or ignored because of them? Do your reading preferences ever hinder where you’ll pull them out to read? I’ll admit that there are some covers and/or titles that I simply don’t feel comfortable reading at my desk at work. Where is your favorite place to park yourself and read?
Our first Author Spotlight giveaway concludes Saturday morning, with another posting the same day. Be sure and check out both prize packs.
Also, our 2008 schedule is almost filled, with only a few December slots remaining. Anyone interested in advertising, please visit our info page to see the ad specifications.
Every time my RTB column comes due, I flail around trying to come up with a subject. Right now, I’m flailing harder than ever, because everywhere I look, the news is so dark. The economy, politics, war, the state of oil and rising costs of everything. Burma. Tragedies and crises.
How can I say something light and frothy at a time like this? I can’t. I’m worried about a lot of things. I’m worried about the world my kids are inheriting. Worried about my kids. Worried about the kids in Burma who are not being reached by aid.
Yet, when things look dark, that’s when we need light. When times are tough, curling up with a book that reinforces hope is invaluable. Characters in romance novels face worries and dark moments, and come through them. Throughout world history, the human race has faced countless challenges, and individuals have found ways to triumph.
If we all give up, things won’t get better. If I sit around wringing my hands, I won’t do anything to add light to the world. If the world is going to be a better place, it starts with an individual hanging on to hope and retreating from time to time to a place where hope is nurtured, so it isn’t extinguished by the next day’s round of dark and heavy news.
I think that romance can be a place to go to recover from the crises and tragedies that surround us, to find hope again, and to come back ready to face it all and find solutions. Romance is always important, but maybe it’s even more important in dark times. Romance is very human literature, focused on people and emotions and individuals overcoming difficulties and finding happiness. There are life lessons to be found in the ways heroes and heroines triumph, and maybe the most important one is to believe every problem has a solution - however dark things may appear.
My grandmother has terminal cancer and I’ve booked a transatlantic flight at the last minute to say goodbye to her.
The days before my flight have been pretty hectic. I had to cancel plans, arrange child care, finish the first draft of a novel due the day after I left, and then ring my agent and editor to explain to them why the final draft is going to be late. I packed at around midnight, later discovering I’ve only brought two tops for five days. I’ve little brain left, haven’t slept, have backache.
One moment sticks in my mind: About an hour before I leave for the airport, I’m going downstairs to the bathroom. My little boy stands at the stairgate and doesn’t want me to leave him upstairs for five minutes. He clings to my jeans and says, properly for the first time, “Mama.”
I cry for the entire flight over because I miss my son so much. Even through all of Sweeney Todd, which is surprising because normally, musical films about serial killers who lead others into cannibalism make me quite cheerful.
So: not an easy journey over to the US. And not an easy visit, either. But one moment, I will never forget. It’s a sunny, hot day and my grandmother is sitting in her wheelchair in the shade of a tree. We are all drinking iced tea. She has her hand in mine; her other hand is held by my cousin, her second granddaughter, whom I’ve not seen in years.
“I’m so happy to be here with you girls,” she says.
Getting on the flight home, I’m blinking from lack of sleep, surfeit of emotion, and way too much knowledge about how a bedpan is used. It’s an overnight flight, landing in London at 7.00 am, and I won’t sleep because I never do. I’m sorry to leave my family behind, and I want to hold my son so much that my arms ache.
Then someone slides into the seat beside me. He’s wearing jeans, a sports coat and round glasses, and he looks so, so much like how I imagined the hero of my last Harlequin Presents book, the one who moonlights as a male model but is really a computer geek.
“Are you going to London for business or pleasure?” I ask him, because if you’re going to sit next to your own hero come to life for seven hours, you’ve got to talk with him, haven’t you?
“Business,” he says. “I’m researching investors for the software package I’ve designed.”
A computer geek.
Even during heartache, there are moments of wonder, of joy, of serendipity and sudden suppressed giggles.
No, that title has nothing to do with the fact that it’s bathing suit season and I still have Winter Weight. No, it’s a different thing altogether. Hm… where to begin?
An elephant’s gestation period lasts about 22 months (630-660 days), the longest gestation period of any mammal. (Source: Toledo Zoo Website)
So what does this have to do with anything? Well, because basically, the lengthy gestation of the elephant is basically mirroring the evolution of my latest project. Lemme ‘splain. No, there is too much, lemme sum up. (Sorry, couldn’t help myself.)
April 25, 2007: I’m at Romantic Times in Houston (and actually kind of wondering what I was doing there) when I stagger up to my room to check my email. One pops up with the subject line, “A Proposal.” I figured I’d just won the Nigerian lottery again or that some long-lost relative had passed away in Hong Kong and left me a small fortune if only I’d be so kind as to share my bank account information. Because I’m perpetually curious, I checked anyway.
No Nigerian lottery. It was an email from an editor introducing herself, saying that she’d read Adiós to My Old Life and most importantly, that she’d loved it. She went on to say that ever since her twin sister had taken a university course on the character of Carmen and all her various iterations, they’d both been in love with the story and she (lovely editor) thought it would make a nifty young adult novel. Having read Adiós she thought I’d be a great person to give it a go, was I interested?
(*insert momentary break for much squeeing*) Um, that would be a yes.
May 2007: I come up with proposal for a young adult story that’s set in the world of drum and bugle corps. With a dancer. And an intense music prodigy. And a soccer player. (No, seriously, this works.)
June 2007: Lovely editor thinks it’s great, we’re a go for Carmen. (*and there was much cheering and celebrating throughout the land*)
September 1, 2007: Turn in first draft of Carmen. Wait anxiously for editor’s reaction.
Late October 2007: She loves it, but of course, there are revisions that have to be made. It needs to be beefed up in places, some character motivations need to be clarified, in other words, good stuff.
January 2008: Turn in revised manuscript. Wait anxiously for editor’s reaction.
Late February 2008: She loves it, but now that some things have been clarified, there are other places that need work and as a whole, what we need to focus on is streamlining overall. Economy is key. This time, she’s sending the actual manuscript along with the revision letter. (*insert break for Barb to freak mildly because this letter is longer than the first one*) Many darlings have to be killed for the good of the story, but overall, revision is accomplished without too much bloodshed otherwise.
April 15, 2008: (no, I’m not kidding on that date) Turn in revised manuscript again. Wait anxiously for editor’s reaction.
April 29, 2008: Just past a year to the day that Lovely Editor first emailed me about this project, she emails me back and raves over the revision. She loves it. I really pretty much nailed everything she was looking for this time around. (*pause for giddy celebration*)
However.
We’re going to need one more pass, we’re so close, but there are some pacing issues towards the end. While this did induce a mild *headdesk* moment, it wasn’t entirely unexpected. I knew when I turned in the second revision that I’d made some changes to the beginning of the manuscript that were in all likelihood going to necessitate further changes towards the end, but I didn’t feel comfortable making those changes until after I knew how Lovely Editor felt about the changes at the beginning of the MS. They’re easy fixes, all in all and combined with her other suggestions, will only make the MS even stronger. More darlings will have to be sacrificed, but that’s okay. That’s what the deleted scenes section of the website is for, right?
May 8, 2008: We had our Big Talk and discussed which of her proposed changes were totally right on and which ones I thought we needed to compromise on and end the conversation completely on the same page, if you’ll pardon the pun.
June 2, 2008: Proposed date for third revision to be submitted. Hopefully, this is the last overhaul before line edits and copy edits and galleys and all that good stuff. Oh, and we still have to come up with a title.
Proposed birth, erm, release date?
July 2009
(*counts on fingers*)
That’s… twenty-seven months. Hey, look at that—I’ve got the elephant beat!
But, like actually giving birth, I know this is going to be so worth it. It’s been such a labor of love for both my editor and myself. We’re both so emotionally invested in this, which is why, even though it feels like it’s taking forever, ultimately, it’s okay. I know it’s so that every part of the book can be as fully developed as possible. Actually, elephant gestation analogies aside, this process can also be likened to something like making homemade bread—it’s something that requires time and patience and multiple stages in order to pull the perfect loaf from the oven.
Elephant gestation to bread making. No, my brain isn’t completely fried as of late.
Anyhow, have you had one of those in your life? Any kind of project that meant so much to you, that even though you were anxious to get it “out there” you were also willing to be infinitely patient and wait to get the perfect result? Tell me about it. Entertain me so I have happy stories with which to retreat into Revision #3.
The title of this article isn’t exactly true. Firefighters have only been my heroes for about twelve years, when I decided to propose some fire department books for Harlequin Enterprises. This suggestion led to five novels for SuperRomance and now four for The Berkley Publishing Group. My latest, TAKING THE HEAT, out in May, tackles the issues involving female firefighters in New York City. They don’t have it easy, I’ll tell you that.
I initially decided to write about firefighters because I respected them and appreciated the job they do. I had no idea how this would transform into utter awe and intense admiration until I began spending time with them. Through my teaching connections (I taught high-school English for a long time), I was able to meet and interview a line firefighter with my local 500-plus fire department. From there, I was invited to a fire station for lunch, extended an invitation to observe at the fire academy, allowed to ride the trucks on actual calls and encouraged to hang out at the firehouses for coffee or meals. Through it all, I interviewed the individual men and women of the Rochester Fire Department, read countless books they recommended to me and did a wealth of first hand research on the line. Even our very busy fire chief spent a whole afternoon with me, helping to iron out the plot for the hero in my fire chief book.
The first run I went on was at seven a.m. on a Sunday morning–a stabbing which required police backup. I rode along to working fires, flooded basements and EMS calls. The guys gave me one of their turnout coats to wear, let me start a generator and hold the Jaws of Life (it’s smaller than you’d think). One lieutenant led me (by the hand) in a training exercise through white mist that simulated smoke. I was totally blind, which is routine for them, and was truly frightening for me. Also, one snowy Friday night, they booted up the Hazmat truck just for me so I could have hands on experience of the ways they deal with terrorism. And sadly, I attended a traditional firefighter funeral, which was as impressive and grave as people say it is.
But the highlight of my research was getting to know these brave men and women as people. At first they were wary of me. No one swore when I was in the house. They were careful to seat me first and wait until I had my food to begin eating. I couldn’t do dishes or help out with clean up. Basically, they were on their best behavior. Eventually, though, they loosened up and began to cheer when I came to visit, let me set the table and started to tease me relentlessly. They also became affectionate with me as they are with each other. (Firefighters are big huggers when their guards are down. It was tough, but hey, somebody had to do it.)
It was then that I got to really know firefighters. Some are arrogant and cocky on the outside, but most are sensitive and introspective on the inside. I heard stories that made me cry: losing a child in a fire, which most agree is the worst thing that can happen to them; what it felt like to get so burned they ended up in the hospital; the sheer joy of finding trapped victims; the difficulty of balancing home and work, and how hard it is to talk to their families about what they do. And not one of them considered himself or herself a hero and denied the tag when I told them they were.
I’ll leave you with one last picture. I got to be good friends with a paramedic named Joe who taught at the academy. He was the one who helped me the most in my research so when the release date of the first Berkley book approached, we decided to take a promo picture for the back of the books. When I did book signings, he came to the events with me. People loved him and asked him to sign their copies, too. And I’ll never forget how all the firefighters from the various station houses showed up at these signings, bringing their kids and husbands and wives and moms and grandpas. It was a like a reunion.
I have these people to thank for the quality of the books I wrote about them, the reality of the world of firefighting and the details I was able to infuse in my characters’ personal and professional lives. Is it any wonder they truly did become my heroes?
Courtesy of A&E, today we launch our Author Spotlight feature with a special giveaway celebrating the romantic works of Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, Sir Walter Scott, Henry Fielding, Baroness Emmuska Orczy, Richard Doddridge Blackmore and Richard Alexander Hough - and celebrating them in A&E’s spectacular DVD format. From the A&E Romance Collection Special Edition DVD Set description:
These acclaimed adaptations of literature’s classics transport us to amazing worlds: the chivalrous pomp of Ivanhoe, the bodice-ripping adventure of Tom Jones, the intimate side of monarchy in Victoria and Albert, and so many more.
And now it’s even easier to lose yourself in the captivating drama of these beloved, masterful small-screen adaptations. Offered in a brilliant, slimmer case that still contains every moment of these classic programs, this must-have collector’s set stores all 14 DVDs of acclaimed drama and still leaves room on your shelf (for more wonderful A&E® DVDs!).
Long celebrated for their lavish production values, brilliant scripting and unforgettable performances — with star turns by everyone from Colin Firth to Sirs Nigel Hawthorne and Peter Ustinov — these films represent the very best of the genre, and any discerning fan of quality programming and intelligent entertainment will be delighted to own them.
We are pleased and privileged to offer this new space-saving SPECIAL EDITION presentation of A&E®’s best-selling ROMANCE COLLECTION.
The sleek ROMANCE COLLECTION SPECIAL EDITION includes:
* Pride and Prejudice * Emma * Jane Eyre * Ivanhoe * Tom Jones * The Scarlet Pimpernel * Lorna Doone * Victoria and Albert
* To enter, leave a comment below stating you’d like to own the set.
* The comment must be left before Saturday, May 17, 2008 at 6:00 a.m. eastern time.
* You may enter only once.
* Open to North American shipping addresses only (Region 1 DVDs)
UPDATE: And the winner is . . . Darla!
There were 93 entries before the cut-off, the random integer selected was 43, and Darla was the 43 commenter.
We’ve all heard that everything and everyone in the world is connected, and this is just as true in fiction as it is in real life. When creating a world, whether it’s fantasy or science fiction or paranormal, all the bits and pieces have to hold together and work together. All the spaces need to be filled in with the proper parts, and it all needs to mesh seamlessly or the made-up world will have a thoughtless, cardboard feel to it.
Contrary to what one might think, writing in a made-up world is not easier than writing in the real one. Hearing a writer say, “I love writing fantasy because you can just make everything up!” gets me cringing because anyone who can toss out that statement in a blithe, smiley-laden tone of type obviously hasn’t thought things through, and their story will probably end up set in a world which is a superficial collection of ill-fitting elements, most of which are likely to be off-the-shelf cliches, with huge gaps where the implications or ramifications of some earlier decision or creation clearly weren’t considered. No matter how gripping your plot is or how well-drawn the characters (and really, how well can you develop your characters if they sprang from a trainwreck of a setting?) the story as a whole can never be more than mediocre if the world it’s set in looks like it was made up on the fly by a writer who didn’t even know where her areas of weakness were.
Everything has to work, and work with everything else.
If the evil king who rules the land goes around every Sunday slaughtering peasants for sport, who’s doing the work as the working-class population dwindles? Who’s raising the crops and tending the animals and making the pots and chairs and horseshoes? For that matter, what’s preventing the peasants from high-tailing it out of there? If sticking around meant a good chance of being murdered by my own ruler, I personally would take my chances with any border guards, no matter how tough. They can’t surround the whole country — just ask the INS.
If a mediocre apprentice mage is cranking out magical cloaks (auto-heating!) and belts (protection from all animal bites, including mosquitos!) by the dozen as practice, then obviously magical items must be pretty darned easy to make. So why doesn’t everyone have one? Or several? Magic workings are part of the economy and if magic is common or easy then it has to have an impact on its society. And note that saying, “Well, all the mages promise to use their power only in time of Great Need” doesn’t hack it. Gandalf was sparing with his magic, but he was essentially an archangel; if your wizards are human then as a group they’ll include all the standard human weaknesses, including greed, selfishness, and the capacity for self-justification. Human nature is still human nature, even in a fantasy setting; if you’re going to change it, you need a very good reason and some bulletproof justification.
If vampires need to consume one adult person’s worth of blood per week to survive, that’s six quarts. You end up with a vampire who’s either killing someone every week (fifty-two murders per year) or leaving people alive by taking a pint at a time from twelve people per week (one quart = two pints) and spending a lot of time hunting/schmoozing. Even if your vampire is psychic and can make people forget they ever met him or her, they’re zapping the memories of 624 people per year. Either way, murder or mind-zapping, someone’s going to notice. I can see the headlines now, shrieking about some sort of new disease going around the city causing periods of memory loss, or speculating about a new kind of early-onset Altzheimer’s. If the writer wants the characters to have to deal with this sort of thing, then great. (Any vampire writers, feel free to grab the bunny.) And if they’re not zapping memories, than at least one of those 624 people is going to blab, no matter how charismatic or scary the vampire might be. If the writer just ignores all this, though, and the city is perfectly calm, business as usual, with no consequences for the marauding vampire, I’m going to be eyerolling pretty quickly.
And if the vampire turns someone, even if it’s only once per book, extrapolate that back for however many centuries or millenia vampires have existed, figure out about how many vampires there probably are in the world, and escalate the problem accordingly. Even the occasional Van Helsing with a satchel full of stakes isn’t going to be able to hold back that particular tide — how long before the human population dwindles to the point where the vampires are all going to starve to death?
This sort of economy of dwindling resources can be done and done well, and turned into an excellent story arc of its own. Jacqueline Lichtenberg wrote a series of SF books where the human race had mutated into two forms, one of which was a vampire-like predator who had to kill one of the other sort each month to survive. The predators started out as a minority population, but about halfway through the series (which covered centuries of future history) she addressed the problem of twelve deaths per year times a lengthening lifespan for the predators multiplied by an expanding predator population, and came up with what she called Zelerod’s Doom, named after the predator mathematician who ran the numbers and gave his people the extremely unwelcome news that Something Had To Be Done by a certain year or they were going to kill all the prey and then starve to death. It was a major plot point of the series and eventually forced a significant shift in the functioning of her society, with all the politics and wars and death and crises this sort of shift usually entails.
This is great worldbuilding, following the implications to their logical conclusion and then using that conclusion to tell an absorbing story. Note also that this sort of conflict would’ve rocked in a romance series — classic Romeo and Juliet stuff.
Not that this is the only way to do it. With some forethought and some time spent chasing down the implications of various aspects of your world, you can create a setting which is relatively stable, if you want to be able to put it in place and then not have to tinker with it over the course of your novel or series. But making sure it actually is stable, that all the parts mesh with each other without any noisy grinding of gears, does take planning and calculation. Considering aspects of society like the government and the economy and religion and the social order and the prevailing worldview of the people, and thinking about how they work together and how they might clash, can help a writer spot potential points of conflict or contradiction. If there’s magic or supernatural beings in the world, their impact needs to be considered. Even geography can be a key feature; the Vikings wouldn’t have gone viking if they’d lived in a rich, fertile land, while Japan wouldn’t have tried to conquer its neighbors if its islands had contained the coal and iron resources they needed to industrialize, and the Italian penninsula sticking out into the middle of the Mediterranean put it in a good position to control sea traffic across the Med for centuries.
Think about all the basic needs of the populace, food and shelter and other necessities, stability and security, trade and information and entertainment, and make sure your society provides these somehow. Any lacks can either be used to round out the story conflicts, or patched up and made to fit more smoothly, either one, but something needs to be done with them.
The fact is that creating a good fantasy or SF setting takes just as much work as researching a real-world historical setting. It’s just a different kind of work. Making up a system that functions, or several systems which function together, means understanding all those systems well enough to riff variations. Trying to make up a world without understanding what all the parts are and how they function is like a beginning music student picking up a trumpet and trying to play improv jazz — it doesn’t work, and the audience isn’t going to be terribly appreciative. You have to know how to follow the roads before you can start hacking your own path through the uncharted underbrush. Studying history and anthropology is a great place to begin, as is boning up on your sciences if you’re writing SF.
Worldbuilding can be a lot of fun, but you have to enjoy that kind of work, and doing the research required to build up a body of knowledge which will let you judge whether your basic concept is even viable. If the idea of all that groundwork is dismaying, then maybe you’d be better off with real-world settings where you can look things up. If popping the hood and learning how and why things work, and working out how different systems function and connect sounds like great fun, though, then chances are you’ll do a good job and enjoy the process. And your readers will appreciate the results.
The Boyfriend recently suggested to me that I like buying books more than I actually like reading them. A rather silly notion, to be sure, but all it took for him to arrive at this conclusion was a quick look at our home office. Let’s just say I have books pretty much stacked to the ceiling, although I think I’ve done a decent job corralling them into the walk-in closet.
I did concede that I do love buying books. There’s nothing quite like walking into a bookstore and looking at all the pretty, shiny possibilities. The pretty covers. The not-so-pretty covers. The unblemished spines. The “smell” of new books. There’s nothing quite like the thrill of the hunt, plus an unread book signifies hope. All of those unread books have potential.
That is what all my book hunting and buying boils down to – the search for The Next Great Read.
I said as much to The Boyfriend. As much as I like buying and hunting for books, I like reading a really great one a whole lot more. My exact words were “There’s nothing better than a really great book,” which is when his eyes started rolling back in his head. That pretty much put an end to the conversation, but not on me ruminating further…
Every reader has a “There’s Nothing Better” list. Themes, styles, autobuy authors, triggers that make really great reads for them. Here are a few of mine:
There’s nothing better than an edge-of-your-seat suspense novel written in first person.
There’s nothing better than discovering an author who excels in writing in the category format.
There’s nothing better than a great friends-to-lovers story.
There’s nothing better than a tearjerker, two-hanky, emotionally-draining western romance.
There’s nothing better than a “sweet” romance that doesn’t resort to preciousness.
There’s nothing better than a fabulous Harlequin Historical.
There’s nothing better than a sexy cowboy hero.
Avid readers become “avid,” because something triggers it for them. I think it all boils down to the “There’s Nothing Betters.” Those key elements, themes, and archetypes that speak directly to that individual reader.
captured, she is certain it is her end. Wanderer, the invading “soul” who has been given Melanie’s body, was warned about the challenges of living inside a human: the overwhelming emotions, the glut of senses, the too-vivid memories. But there was one difficulty Wanderer didn’t expect: the former tenant of her body refusing to relinquish possession of her mind.
I’ll leave you with one last picture. I got to be good friends with a paramedic named Joe who taught at the academy. He was the one who helped me the most in my research so when the release date of the first Berkley book approached, we decided to take a promo picture for the back of the books. When I did book signings, he came to the events with me. People loved him and asked him to sign their copies, too. And I’ll never forget how all the firefighters from the various station houses showed up at these signings, bringing their kids and husbands and wives and moms and grandpas. It was a like a reunion. 
