July Event at The Romance Review includes an Ebook giveaway of Bottoms in Love

July Event at The Romance Review includes an Ebook giveaway of Bottoms in Love

Lots of books by many authors will be available, so please check out this fun event. A question about Bottoms in Love will be posted, and a huge hint about the answer is embedded in this brief excerpt. Thanks for checking it out and thank you to The Romance Review for putting on this event and thank you to my publisher, OC Press, for contributing a free copy.

From part two of Bottoms in Love: Heads

At last, they had another evening alone. They tried to enjoy dinner and each other’s conversation, but they couldn’t help but rush through dessert. They were both hurrying, both focused on the dime on the table between them. Lindsey pushed her plate aside, touched her silk napkin to her lips, and wiped her hands. She picked up the dime, and Carter leaned forward. With a flick of her thumb, she sent it in a tight spin about a foot above their heads. She caught it and swallowed it in her palm. Catching Carter’s gaze, she slapped the dime onto her forearm. Carter jumped and his eyes locked onto her hand, which she slowly raised.

“Yes!” Carter raised a fist in a mixture of excitement and relief. Lindsey gave him a sharp look and his arm fell, his fist opened. He stared down contritely.

“Wave the waitress over, very politely, and say, ‘My wife is ready for the check now, please,’” Lindsey instructed.

“Oh, honey, let’s not do the in-public stuff.”

Lindsey calmly held Carter’s look until he acquiesced. He located the waitress and gave her a respectful wave. When she came over, he repeated the words his wife had commanded. Carter became so immediately docile and nervous under his wife’s command, especially when she demonstrated her power in front of a pretty stranger. He blushed and bowed his head, drawing more attention to his servitude than might have been obvious to the waitress if he had managed any amount of decorum. The young lady was obviously amused, and Carter caught her exchanging a smile with his wife. He turned an even deeper shade of red.

Lindsey retrieved a credit card from her purse and, when the waitress returned, dropped it on the check tray. The waitress thanked her, gave Carter another wry smile, and left.

“I think she is enjoying this. Maybe we should invite her to stop by tonight. Do you suppose she’s ever seen a man beaten with a wooden spoon?”

“She probably hasn’t,” Carter said quietly, still blushing, his head still bowed.

“She probably would, tonight.”

http://www.theromancereviews.com/images/trrbanner.gif'

src='http://www.theromancereviews.com/images/trrbanner.gif' border='0'></img></a>

Real life moment from book

I admit I changed directions when I saw this woman coming. I had two ways to get to the same place in the same amount of time but I had already decided to take the first and she compelled me to take the second, just for the opportunity to cross her path. She had this powerful stride and beautiful smile. Confidence and kindness can mix at the right temperature to make me weak-kneed and get my submissive yearnings boiling.

So, I’m approaching her and I’m already self-conscious because I know I’ve completely re-mapped my path across the store. She couldn’t possibly know that, but rational thought isn’t keeping me from blushing. I’m trying hard to limit my discreet glancing, but at the same time, I don’t want to miss her. When I get next to her, I try to smile and nod, but I’m such a smitten disaster. The look I gave her must have been a terrifying combination of pathetic and creepy, but here’s the awesome part, she was absolutely beaming. She gave me extended eye contact and an awesome smile—a borderline grin—and a nod.

I really like to think she enjoyed that. Am I living in fantasy land? I realize women don’t appreciate having their asses stared at every time they go somewhere to get groceries, but there must be some gray area where women enjoy some polite attention?

I expect I’ll have a pleasant memory of this encounter for a long time. It reminded me of this moment for Alex in Courting Her, just before he meets Kimberly:

His favorite thing was to pass a girl walking up the sidewalk the other way, legs exposed for the first time that season in short jeans shorts or a colorful skirt, a backpack strapped over a tight short-sleeved T-shirt, and flash her a shy glance, letting his gaze linger long enough for her to notice. Then he would stare down at his shoes. A blush would fill his face that he wouldn’t need to fake, and then her light blush would follow. Only her chin would not droop but lift up. She would smile, inspired by the compliment of his attention, and not look back at him. A moment like that, on the right day, felt a lot like love.  

Why I don't drop links (A blog for Ferns)

I’m shy about dropping links because I’m worried people will think I just want them to buy my books. I enjoy participating in discussions on blogs, but I totally do want people to buy my books. More than that I want people to read them and enjoy them. I want people to love them. I want those people to bury me in emails and ask questions and tell me their thoughts and opinions, their feelings. I want them to show up at my house like they know me. I want to invite them in and let them play cards while I cook for them and feed them, and I’ll eavesdrop and hope discussions about my books erupt like flash flood rains. I want to hear which parts made them laugh, which parts made them cry, and which parts made them cum. I want to be in the blood streams of my readers and explore while they read to see where they tingle. I want them to tell me when Kimberly gave them a cute look or said something funny and I want to return to the exact moment I discovered her giving it or saying it to me, and I want to sound completely removed from my writing of her, and simply marvel at her, with them. And I want them to tell me they love her, and I want them to listen while I tell them I love her, too.

But that would be pretty needy, so I usually don’t drop links.

Was Dr. Seuss A Fraud?

I learned recently that Green Eggs and Ham was the result of a bet. His publisher bet Dr. Seuss couldn’t write a story in 50 words or less. Green Eggs and Ham uses exactly 50 words. I had an initial jaded reaction to that news. What the hell? That was one of my favorite Dr. Seuss books. Come to find out he wrote it under restrictions just to win a stupid bet!

I’m embarrassed to say I ranted about that in my head for several minutes, before I realized we do things like this all the time when we write. When I used to write a page a day about any random thing, I recall often limiting my parameters just to see what I might get. One that stands out is I wrote about a guy pulling over at the side of the road and peeing. That was it. I decided not to let anything else happen. I was just going to fill a page with the description of the action. There was no greater meaning to his peeing, there was nothing he contemplated while he peed. No one drove by and caught him. Now the results probably wouldn’t be interesting to read to anyone but me (and they certainly wouldn’t make for a bestselling children’s book!) but it turned into an inspired piece of writing memorable to me. How dare I even consider that Dr. Seuss wrote that dizzying, fun story with any less than his usual zing?

More likely that bet was just a fun gag between them, but Dr. Seuss got to thinking about it. Maybe he started Green Eggs and Ham and his instincts already had him using a small set of words and repeating them. What if I did try to write a book with only fifty words, what would happen? Far from that book being a contrived work designed to win a bet, in the mind of Dr. Seuss, that silly bet led to inspiration and gave us a classic children’s book.

I don’t have many examples as extreme as the peeing one, but the more I think about it, a lot of what I write is the result of eliminating options and tightening my parameters. In Courting Her, I wanted Kimberly to reveal her dominant nature not until their third date, so I had to have their first two dates in the book but I also had to get through them very quickly. So I limited myself, not to an exact word count, but I definitely strived to keep those first two dates extremely brief on the page without letting them feel too short. They ended up three paragraphs. Anyone else have personal examples? Also wondering if there are other famous works anyone knows of that were written under similar types of restrictions?  

Coin Toss!

Little doubt, this year, that the most exciting part of the game will be the coin toss! The odds of winning a coin toss are always 1 in 2, but the odds of winning successive coin tosses rise exponentially. The NFC has won the last fourteen coin tosses in a row, the odds of that are 1 in 8,384. The odds of the NFC winning fifteen in a row are a mind boggling 1 in 16,768, but the chances of that happening during tonight's coing toss? 1 in 2! Enjoy the game, tonight, but pay close attention to the coin toss because a streak like this doesn't come around often.

Actually, I think my novelette, Bottoms in Love, which involves a couple using a coin toss to determine which of them wins having to play the dominant role when they both wish to play the submissive role, probably came from my fascination with this superbowl streak of the NFC winning coin tosses. Watch, though, they barely mention it before the game. Maybe this year it will get more air time, since the streak is growing. Go NFC! Win that coin toss! (I also want them to win the game, but I'm way more interested in the coin toss.)

A Story and Six from Courting Her

The first thing I knew I didn't want to do, when I decided to write about Kimberly and Alex, was to write them meeting. I didn't want to write about a courtship. I didn't want to write about him courting her. I wanted to open with them in a committed, female-led relationship. Books begin all the time about people already entwined in their dramas, why not a femdom book? I opened with them years in, and I had a story to tell, but in the course of getting to know them, the backstory came out that Alex had Kimberly over to his apartment for dinner on their third date. Up to that point, Kimberly had been subtle about her dominant nature. After dinner, they sat on his couch to watch a movie and Alex made the mistake, not of putting his feet up on the coffee table, and not of not taking them down when Kimberly said, but of not taking them down swiftly enough to satisfy her.

I realized that while I didn't particularly want to write "a story about a courtship," I had a burning desire to write "the story of their courtship." I wrote these words in a random notebook that were the beginning of my writing of Courting Her:

"Why didn't you put your feet down when I said?"
"I did put them down."
"Did you do it right when I said?"
"No, but..."
"Why didn't you put your feet down when I said?"
"I don't know."   

The Ending

When does the ending come for you? I had the incredible experience, when I finished Protégé Mistress after a marathon writing session of about 8,000 words (I realize that’s a fairly typical session for some writers but for me that’s a marathon), of writing the ending at the ending. That moment of finishing a book and coming up with its ending will always be a top writing memory, and likely not one I’ll have again. I was so affected by that moment that I actually cursed the ending for my WIP (work in progress), which came to me the other day. No, dammit, I’m not to that part, yet.

Sacrilege! How dare I question the muse? You have to go with it when it comes, and it’s an exciting part to write but it is also something of a relief when you have an ending. I think that’s a typical stress for writers. We get excited enough by characters or a scene to start writing, it starts to develop into a story, and at some point we think, Oh Crap! How is this going to end? I think it’s, for the most part, an irrational worry. The story ends when you’re done telling it. The more rational worry is writing an ending you like and think works well, but to carry this vague stress through a WIP of it just “not ending” doesn’t really have any logic to it. Of course, that doesn’t prevent it. I finished my first short story more than twelve years ago and after an hour long intense writing buzz finally began to fade, I thought, Oh Crap! What if I never think of anything to write again? I still write with that worry, but I’m mostly numb to it.

Like a lot of things in writing, you have to have a good balance. I try to write without worrying about how a story will end, but I do press a little, which keeps my mind working on it, and I think that’s why possible endings start coming to me, sometimes soon after I start a story. Usually I’ll discard them or they’ll turn out to be scenes but not ends. (I think I have a tendency to tighten the framework to keep me focused.) Good possible endings will start to come around two-thirds through, usually. Coincidentally, right about when my irrational Oh Crap! How is this going to end? worry gets ratcheted up.