Long Time Favorite

Back in the dark ages -- well, the 1980s -- when I was first getting started reading -- and writing -- romances, I found a few authors whose books were automatic reads.

One of the earliest among them was Candace Camp, who at the time was writing historicals as Lisa Gregory and contemporaries as Kristen James. It didn't matter what she wrote, I read it. And I loved them all.

To my way of thinking her Kristen James book, The Sapphire Sky, is one of the best contemporary single title romances of all time. I read it often, and it never loses its intensity or its charm. And Nick, ne'er-do-well that he is, is one of my favorite heroes.

And her Rainbow Season, written as Lisa Gregory, is probably in my top three all-time favorite historicals.

Dynamite books, emotional blockbusters, both of them. She's well worth watching out for. And she's now written fifty or so more terrific books.

One of them is Promise Me Tomorrow. Writing now under her own name, Candace Camp, she tells the story of beautiful thief, Marianne Cotterwood, and Justin, Lord Lambeth, the man who is trying to figure her out.
Promise Me Tomorrow is a delightful book of engaging characters and secrets galore.

Do you have favorites from years ago that you go back to? Which are they?

The 12 Point Guide to Writing Romance

Kate Walker wrote a book a few years back called The 12 Point Guide to Writing Romance. As she has been published by Harlequin Mills & Boon as long as I have, she's been around the block a few times and she knows what she's talking about.

Lots of people besides me think so. Kate's book was an enormous success. It sold out pretty much everywhere it was on sale. And recently her publisher came to her and wanted to reprint.

Kate had a better idea. She knew that some writing advice is timeless, but some depends on publishers and the market. In order to give fledgling writers the best chance possible, she was determined to make the book as timely as possible. So she rewrote and updated the book.

The new revised second edition of The 12 Point Guide to Writing Romance is launching this month. In fact it's making its official debut at the London Book Fair, which is pretty impressive.

Kate is off to London to hobnob with the bigwigs next week and promote her book. I haven't seen it yet, though I offered some "timely" advice for it. I have no doubt, though, that it's every bit as good as the first edition. Probably it's even better.

Check it out via Kate's blog. And if you are a writer, especially a romance writer, looking for a lot of good advice by someone who knows what she's talking about, pick up your own copy of The 12 Point Guide. It's like being walked through the process of writing by a cheerful, knowledgeable expert who understands what you need to know and tells you before you even think to ask.

There is a blog party launch celebration going on over at Kate's right now. So if you hie yourself over there, you might win a copy of it or of any number of terrific books.

If I had a copy, I'd give it away here.

I don't. So I'll just have to add another of my recent reads to the pile of Give-Aways for this week.

It's Julia Harper's novel Hot. I think it may be her first novel. It was a fun read. Turner Hastings, small town Wisconsin librarian turned criminal-on-the-run, and John MacKinnon, the FBI Special Agent who, the longer he chases Turner, loses sight of exactly what his priorities are officially supposed to be, are fun to spend time with.

A veteran of lots of upper midwest summers -- and the ticks, bugs, sweat, and heat that go with them -- I had no trouble putting myself right in Turner's shoes. That isn't the only thing that makes it hot, by the way.

Parenthetically, I'm blogging today over at Tote Bags 'n' Blogs about writing. Stop by and leave a comment there and you could win Flynn's book. And you can read my 'wisdom' too, of course! It's about writing (and if I didn't say it for Kate's book, I should have. It's good advice).

Prowling the bookshelves

Or, dusting, part II . . .

One of the books I dusted the other day was Donald M Murray's Shoptalk: Learning to Write with Writers.

A Pulitzer Prize winning columnist and writing teacher, Murray died in late 2006. But his books live on and continue his mission to teach.

Shoptalk is a book I've had for probably ten years. And it isn't one that I have listed in my top four or five that I turn to again and again, but it probably should be as it's a collection of significant writerly wisdom. It's definitely a book to keep.

If you're unacquainted with Shoptalk, it's sort of a commonplace book for writers. In it Donald Murray has gathered quotes from many writers -- novelists, poets, non-fiction authors, pretty much a Who's Who of those who make their vocation working with the written word. He introduces each chapter with thoughts of his own on the topic, then he lets the authors speak for themselves.

It's not a book you read from cover to cover. It may not even be a book in which you read an entire chapter.

It's a book to dip into, to read here and there, to listen to soundbytes of wisdom,
and find one that speaks to you right where you are.

It's sort of an I Ching of writing aphorisms.

You can take your current problem -- a scene, a character, an inability to sit down at the computer (or anywhere else) and actually write -- and find someone else whose words resonate with your dilemma. It gives you a different perspective from which to study it, someone else's view to filter it through.

It's a comfort -- and it's a challenge. And I'm glad I plucked Shoptalk off the shelf to dust -- and re-read bits and pieces of.

The quote that resonates with me at the moment is in the chapter called "Planning for the surprise."

It's about that curious dichotomy that exists between planning a story and being surprised by it as you go along. While certainly some of us are more plotters and some are more pantsers (those who fly by the seat of theirs), each book, I think, has an element of both.

I'd be hard pressed to imagine a book plotted so tightly that the author was never surprised by anything the characters did or said. And equally, I would find it hard to imagine a book coming to a satisfactory conclusion if the author had absolutely no idea at all where it was going or whether he or she was writing horror or romance or a western.

So . . .

as I am in the "oh-gosh-there-is-a-Saturday-in-Seb's-week" and something has to happen then (surprise!), and I have lots of plans for Sunday, should we ever be lucky enough to get there in the book (debatable at this point), I particularly appreciate William Maxwell's comment.

He wrote: "Undoubtedly if I knew exactly what I was doing, things would go faster, but if I saw the whole unwritten novel stretching out before me, chapter by chapter, like a landscape, I know I would put it aside in favor of something more uncertain -- material that had a natural form that it was up to me to discover."

Ah, yes. I, too, am a fan of the surprise. And I don't think I would like everything plotted and sorted and neatly boxed.

So I'm out here in Saturday of Seb's week and looking for the surprise. It's not exactly comfortable, but it's challenging.

I can't think of anywhere else I'd rather be.

The trouble with dusting

Dusting is no bad thing. Let me say that up front.

Dusting blinds is, if not entertaining, at least mindless and usually (but not always) there is a view to behold behind the dust cloth.

Dusting pictures is trickier because you pick them up and look at them -- and then you remember where you were when that happened, and how young your youngest looked then (Was he only twelve? And sitting at a bar on a Caribbean out island! Good heavens). And you do that, say, times twenty odd pictures and you've frittered away a whole afternoon.

You have some very good reminiscences, but it is

• a. not getting the book written
• b. not getting the room ready for George the school teacher turned painter
• c. making you want to go to the Caribbean again. Also to Barcelona and Vienna and Scunthorpe and St Erth and Fermoy and all the other places in those photographs.

Worse, there is dusting bookshelves.

It wouldn't be bad if you could just dust the shelves, but you have to take out the books and open them. Not to dust them, of course, but to see if that scene you remember in Jill Mansell's Perfect Timing is as good as you remember it being.

And it is, and so you stand there reading it. And then you go sit down and read it because it's swept you right up in the story again and you can't not read it.

Until finally you need to go put the dogs out. And call George and tell him maybe next week the room will be ready to paint.

And then you have to go back to dusting because there are several more shelves on that particular bookcase and unfortunately they are all "keepers" or you wouldn't have kept them, would you?

But maybe you could get rid of a few of them. Of course you have to read them first to be sure you were ready to part with them.

Which is why I hate dusting.

What about you?

Alpha heroes

There's a lot of talk about alpha heroes in romance novels.

They are often accused of being cruel, arrogant, haughty, and downright nasty -- until, of course, they understand how wrong they were about the heroine and then have a metanoia sort of conversion somewhere around page 186.

Far be it from me to deny they can exist. Though I wouldn't necessarily call all the men who behave like that "heroes."

But I suppose really, it depends on what your fantasy is. If you like those guys described above, that's what works for you.

It doesn't work for me.

My alpha hero doesn't do 'cruel.' And he doesn't do 'mean' or even 'downright nasty.' Arrogant, yes. Haughty, sometimes. Silently judgmental? He can.

Oh, yes, he can. (Ask Seb). He can even be judgmental out loud.

He can also be wrong. (No surprise there).

But when he is, he has to be honorably wrong.

If he's going to make judgments, he's got to have a believable reason for it. He's got to have a backstory that predisposes him toward such a belief. He's got to think he has evidence for it. And he's got to be believing it in service to a higher good.

He doesn't jump to conclusions just because he's the hero -- especially wrong ones -- just so he can repent in the end.

And if he's a McAllister hero, even if he believes the worst, he doesn't do anything that would make the heroine rightfully hate him. If he did that would simply prove he has no right to be her hero.

I'm spending a lot of time thinking about this because I am dealing with that issue in Seb's book.

I'm also thinking about it because I just re-read Jane Donnelly's story The Man Outside. Last Thursday on the Pink Heart Society blog, I wrote about Jane's books and, especially, her heroes.

To do so, I got a stack of JD's keepers off my shelf and began to re-read them. Several of them have heroes who believe the worst of the heroine. Not always -- not in my favorite, Behind a Closed Door, in which the heroine believes the worst of the hero.

But in The Man Outside, Piers Hargreaves gradually opens up to Polly's interest and then learns the truth -- but not the whole truth -- that she was dared to try to reach him. The implication is that her interest is a sham, that she is manipulative and doesn't care for him at all.

He could react cruelly. He could do his best to destroy her because he does have all the power and influence an alpha hero should have.

But he also has the honor that allows him to absorb the pain, and the intelligence to look for the root cause of it (that would be the jealous other man who has told him this 'truth'), and to recognize who is really telling the truth.

He doesn't displace his anger. He does something constructive with it -- because that's the kind of man he is. And over the course of the story he has learned from Polly how to reach out to other people, how to risk his emotions, and ultimately how to demonstrate his love.

So when circumstances might allow him to be cruel, he is anything but. He is remote, he is standoffish, he is quiet and self-contained. But he is honorable. And because he loves Polly, he has a long range plan that will turn the tide his way.

As the end approaches and Polly fears all is lost, we readers trust that it's not.

We know that she has loved him well, that she has seen the man inside Piers Hargreaves -- and that her love has helped him find the means of expressing who he really is.

He is strong and steadfast, intelligent and powerful, relentless and singleminded in his pursuit of her. But he will do it in a way that proves to Polly he's every bit the man she believed he was -- an honorable man, a determined man, a commanding man with an inner core of gentleness that will never allow him to hurt the woman he loves.

For me that's a real alpha hero. It's the man I want to find inside Sebastian.

If you haven't read Jane Donnelly, seek her out. Discover that the alpha hero often gets a bad rap. He isn't at all what his detractors make him out to be.

Out on a Limb

No, not me.

Not this time, at least.

Out on a Limb is the title of British author Lynne Barrett-Lee's recent book which I just had the pleasure of staying up far too late in the night reading for the last few nights. I was wishing away my days so I could get back to her book, eager to get back to her world.

And now -- sigh -- I'm finished. And I might just go back and read it again. If you aren't familiar with Lynne Barrett-Lee -- and you like books with a sharp, funny voice and a wry, weary yet still hopeful air -- you might want to take a look at Out on a Limb.

Abbie, physiotherapist single mum of two sons, has just changed jobs to one presumably less stressful in an effort to make her life a bit less stressful (stop running into the married chap she's trying to avoid having figured out that the affair is exactly that and never going to be anything else) and give herself a bit of a 'gap year' while her oldest son Sebastian (no relation to my hero, Sebastian) is off wandering around the continent with his mates.

Good idea. But, like most of us, Abbie discovers that life has a way of complicating her plans.

Her mother, who suddenly becomes a major factor, makes mine look restful by comparision. Her concerns and worries about her sons are ones I remember all too well.

And the TV weatherman who happens to be her mother's dead fourth husband's estranged son, well, let's just say, he makes her life even more interesting.

Can you see why I wanted the day to pass so I could get back to the entertaining shambles that was Abbie's life?

It made me laugh, it made me ache with wry recognition of maternal foibles and daughterly misery.

It was a treat. I'm so glad I read it. I'm so sorry it's over.

I hope Lynne Barrett-Lee writes faster. I loved her earlier Virtual Strangers and Julia Gets a Life. I love her voice. I'm looking forward to more.

Thanks, Lynne.

Now it's back to my own Sebastian who is looking for the right way in to his current predicament.