My Favorite Books--and Why

     I am not speaking of books that influenced me like Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre in high school, Lord of the Rings in college, and Gone with the Wind one long, hot summer. Nope, talking about those I have written.  Though like all authors, I love each baby I have brought into the world, some do have a special place in my heart.  Doesn't mean that publishers or readers necessarily adored them, too.
     My first love was Queen of the Mardi Gras Ball, a 1920's historical that required nine months to write because of all the research.  It grew out of one sentence in A Taste of Bayou Water when a person recalls the heroine's great-grandmother dancing on a table at the local speakeasy. Yes, Queen was turned down time and again, those good rejections that said it was a good story and well-written, but readers currently had no interest in that decade.  By the time it came out, my mother to whom the book was dedicated, had lost her vision to macular degeneration and never got to read it. While it doesn't sell well online, most of its reviews are five stars, and I find it easy to hand sell.

Rosamond was a flapper who had no wish to be queen of the ball, but rather an independent "new woman" who made her own way in the world.  She makes some mistakes along the way but triumphs in the end by having the job she wants and marrying the man she chooses. Within the book are some of my mother's childhood memories of that time.
     Queen fell into second place when Trashy Affair came along. Despite the title, this is a tale of recycling both garbage and people and of small town politics.  In it, I think I achieved the perfect balance of hero and heroine, an attraction of opposites.  She is feisty and refuses to believe a man like Merlin Tauzin, a little trashy himself, can help her restore recycling to the town. Oh, yes, he can do that and more.  This one has always sold well in both e-book and softcover and was optioned by Amazon for its Encore program, the only source for the e-book now where it still garners plenty of great reviews. That's why the failure of Ashy Affair, a companion book killed by defective e-book copies, really hurt. I felt Ashy was almost as good but never had a chance to prove itself.  It's my poor child who can't live up to its brother.
     My third favorite (last one, I promise) is Wish for the Sinner, the second in my popular Sinners sport romances.  More than just sex with athletes, these books are also a family saga that follows a quarterback, Joe Dean Billodeaux, from his days on the bench as a backup to his retirement as a franchise player and icon.  He starts out as a terrible womanizer, and some readers have a problem with that.  By mid-story, he has fathered an illegitimate child and found the woman he wants more than anyone else to help raise the boy. Joe and Nell's story in Wish goes on beyond their wedding to having their own children and adopting another. It was turned down as the sequel to Goals for a Sinner as not a romance since those are supposed to end with the marriage, evidently the place where romance goes to die, but another press did pick it up and published many more Sinners books as the family dynasty grew.  The Sinner's Legacy series follows the lives of Joe's children. The Sinners books now number seven with the eighth due out in March or April, my nineteenth to be published--and yet my closet is still full of manuscripts and my brain full of ideas for new books.
      Since I just received the cover of Sister of a Sinner today, I might as well share it now and hope you will give this one a chance.  Though there is a hunky football player between the covers, this is the story of Joe's adopted Mexican daughter, Xochi. Taking place during the off-season, it is an adventure tale as well as a romance with less football than usual. Xochi's backstory can be read in Kicks for a Sinner if you want to catch up with the Billodeauxs. Happy reading--and oh, Happy Valentine's Day.
   

Too Many Characters

     Too many characters--I find this written on almost every critique I get from my editor and beta readers.  For some reason, a romance novel can have only two major character or Points of View, and perhaps a third if you have a really good villain allowed to plot against them. It's a tried and true formula that has worked for Harlequin next to forever and which I find terribly confining. After all, how many people really fall in love and marry in a vacuum of space? Most of us get input from family at the very least. All of us have a workplace full of people and customers to deal with as the courtship goes on. Children come along and have their own opinions.
      I recently judged two well-written Harlequins for the Rita contest. In order for one couple to stay in their own little world, a beloved brother had to be called out of town as soon as they met, not to reappear until the wedding, and the friend who introduced them similarly took off, her role ending there. In the other, the troubled teen who brings the couple together as they try to save her suddenly reforms and leaves them on their own. She does get to be in the wedding.  Never in real life. I guess that is why they are called romances.
      In writing my Sinners series, my quarterback hero has accumulated twelve children and helped his friends with their love problems over the span of five books from Goals for a Sinner to Love Letter for a Sinner. He's accumulated a lot of POV's along the way, and my readers seem to want to be part of his large family and keep up with the other members of the team. I admit, it is best to start reading them with the first or second book as the cast does grow as they go along.  I recently got back a critique that said I'd given everyone a name. Heaven forbid!  The named people aren't props, but family retainers well-known from other books. I do wonder if Downton Abbey has this trouble?  She also felt the other football players should not have names or opinions. Pretty tough to play a game that way. The only solution is to stage all the stories during the off-season with no football at all which is what many sports romances do to keep down the character count. Unfortunately, my guys have Super Bowls to win.
      Diana Gabaldon now has a book for people simply to keep track of her hundreds of characters. Of course, she does say she writes historical novels, not romance.  Would it help if I called my books family sagas, do you think?  It seems every other genre can have as many characters as they want and not get dinged for it. Go figure. I've taken to listing the main characters in the front of my books now, starting with Son of a Sinner. If the sequel to the family saga, Always Yellow Roses, entitled The Courville Rose is ever published it will have a similar list, though I have every faith that my regular readers can handle a story with more than two characters--and long sentences and big words, too, because they are that intelligent.
     Just griping here about one of my favorite pet peeves of romance writing along with being admonished not to use big words. I don't advise new romance writers to defy conventions and go for more POVs.  You won't get published--unless call your stories something else like multigenerational sagas, and good luck with that!

Four Letter Words

     Warning!  This post will contain many offensive words. If you can't handle the topic, please do not read and especially do not whine about it if you do.
     I was recently dinged by a head editor (not my own who knows me well) for using the word dick and the one-time use of the word cunt. Now, I don't like the last word either, but I did feel it might be used by a vile man angry at a woman who would not put out for him. I was trying for realistic dialog, but it must be removed and replaced by something milder like bitch or honey, I suppose. So be it. Son of a Sinner will come out without the C word. Not that big a deal.
     However, I was under the impression that dick was a mild euphemism for penis. Now, I write about football players, and I suspect they do use this term about their own and others.Those of you who have read my books know they are not awash in foul language. My athletes might utter an occasional WTF or use the F word from time to time, but not very often, less I believe than in reality. I know I could just do a global change and make all the dicks into penises, but that seems so clinical. Somehow, I doubt athletes would use pee-pee, wiener, or ding-dong. Other suggestions I received were his prick, his jewels, or his junk, though that last implies the whole package (another idea).
     The best ideas came from my water aerobics group made up of very mature women. One wrote romances in the 1980's and said she had to use "his throbbing shaft" or "his velvet rod". I doubt a football player would be so eloquent, but it would be funny, and I do like to put humor in my books.  Other suggestions: tallywacker, one-eyed pocket mouse, and my favorite, a hurrah rod, a term the lady claimed her daddy used. Some of the suggestions were so gross, even I won't tell you. Women are not the delicate flowers many believe.
     Anyhow, Son of a Sinner will come out with a disclaimer for bad language and violence since part of the plot deals with the mistreatment of a woman by a professional athlete. My heroine fends off rape and breaks the guy's foot in the process.  She is not an abused woman to make that clear. I was attempting to deal with current events. For a while it looked like the book would not be printed, but a compromise was reached and so it shall. Please let me know that you think when reading it sometime next spring. Whew! It's good to get this off my chest, my rack, my boobs....

Inspiration?

I am among those authors who believe if you sit waiting for inspiration to come or a muse to tap you on the shoulder, you will get hemorrhoids before that happens. I don't believe in inspiration so much as ideas, and ideas are everywhere. The Sinners football series grew out of watching the Panthers lose the Super Bowl way back in 2004. The newest in that series, Kicks for a Sinner, due out in January, developed from watching games where the final score depends on a field goal.

Recently, I had problems with my garbage pickup. Just trying to get a new trashcan became a two month struggle with the powers that be. This evolved into my latest WIP, A Trashy Affair, a light-hearted romance despite the tongue-in-cheek title. One of these days, I will write about about a funny mix-up where I was served a manly sub while a handsome guy at the next table got my club sandwich complete with frilly toothpicks. What a way to meet! If only I had been younger and sexier at the time, but my heroine will be.

Have I ever had writer's block? Nope (and may it never happen to me). Why? Because, I repeat, ideas are everywhere-from an overheard conversation in a cafeteria to imaging what happened to your high school crush (Goals for a Sinner). My biggest problem is not having enough time to get all the stories in my head written down. My New Year's wish for every writer reading this post is that you have the same good problem of abundant ideas in the coming year!

Length

I am known primarily for my sexy football romances, so discussing length could mean many things. Get your mind out of the gutter! I am referring to the length of a book. Current wisdom says no novel over 120,000 words will be published today due to the atrophied attention spans of readers contracted from television viewing, computer use and tweeting. An agent at a recent conference declared she wouldn't look at anything over 100,000 words. One of my e-publishers is constantly urging their authors to produce 50,000-60,000 word Harlequin-style romances, not easy to do as I have tried it and failed. Supposedly, people using e-readers won't order anything longer. Forget classics like Gone With The Wind. Margaret Mitchell would be advised to cut that length in half or issue her story as three back-to-back novels. Sad. Okay, I will admit I've only gotten a quarter way through Northwest Passage, but it was the unrelenting dialect that made me put it down, not the length.

Length has cost me some contracts as my two best books both ran over 100,000 words. They have found a home at L & L Dreamspell. My first historical, Queen of the Mardi Gras Ball at 113,560 words, will be coming out in early 2012. Wish for a Sinner, already published, was originally 108,700 words. I cut it back to 103,000 in a vain attempt to get it under that magic 100,000 word barrier, but could not go the rest of the way. Its length was one reason it kept getting turned down. Thank heaven, the lovely ladies at Dreamspell feel length doesn't matter. It's what you do with it that counts. No, no, don't bombard them with your 700,000 word tomes. They are a small press and aren't accepting manuscripts right now. But know that here and there, people who like a good, long story do exist even if we are headed toward extinction. As for me, I did manage to bring the manuscript of Kicks for a Sinner in at 90,000 words. That was a close one!

Why Attend?

I've just returned from attending the NOLA Stars Conference in Shreveport. I go nearly every year to this small, friendly gathering with great craft lectures and best of all, a nice array of agents and editors who will take pitches. With two books out and another contracted, I believe I know my craft, but you can always learn more. This year's best hint - when hyping your romance novel to a mostly all male group mention one thing that interests them in your book like tractors or airplanes, and you will get some sales. I guess I should challenge them to check my football research in Goals for a Sinner and Wish for a Sinner. And I will next time. Since several men have read the first book, including my wonderful son-in-law, I know I got facts right and also have been complimented on that.

But mostly, I go to pitch my latest work, ever hopeful of finding an agent. Although I possess the gift of gab as my mother always says, I have as much trouble as anyone pitching to an agent. I do get the clammy hands, the sick stomach, and worst of all, if I lose my thread, I babble. This year, my first pitch to a fresh and friendly young agent went beautifully. I presented a humorous Regency series I have been working on, The Longleigh Chronicles. Feeling very confident of my pitching skills afterward, I made the big mistake of pitching a complicated reincarnation story in the afternoon. Lost in my own words and babbling, the agent finally cut me off very kindly. She said just to send her the book as an e-mail attachment. I apologized for my rambling, and she pointed out that often great pitches did not yield great books, but even poor pitches sometimes resulted in good submissions. Bless her! I truly don't know if either one of these fine agents will take me on as a client. Most likely not. The odds are not high in this business. But, every year, I go pitching again because you have to keep trying.

Besides, I won a big raffle basket of books and got an unexpected trophy for my two books with e-publishers. I also had a nice lunch and met lots of interesting people, well worth the four hour drive and the modest registration fee. So check out the smaller writers' conferences near you and give them a try.

Limited Palates

I am not much of a joiner but I find myself a member of groups, two art, one writing and one historical. After one of these meetings, we generally go out to lunch. Like most groups, we usually ended up at the same spot, not my favorite, but okay. Recently the place closed sending the members into lengthy discussions after each meeting as to where to eat. I suggested a barbecue place. We went there. One member complained that they only had barbecue (well, duh), another that she never ate in places like this. I pity her. Dives always have the best 'cue. Next week, they look at me again for a suggestion. I recommend a local cafeteria known for its $6.95 plate lunches - a meat, three sides and a bread, lots of variety. One member wouldn't go because she couldn't order off a menu, another because she never went into places like that (again). Third week, I suggested a vast Chinese buffet which also has American selections aplenty. One member says she never eats Chinese, another says she has never been in "that place". I gave up and went home to eat my leftover barbecue - and it was good.

So what does all this have to do with romance writing? Some people will never try anything different. They are stuck in the same eating and reading ruts. They only read mysteries or literary novels. Read a romance novel, and they just might die of word poisoning. As a librarian, I made myself read in genres I did not care for in order to be able to recommend some of these authors to my patrons. Don't care much for inspirationals as most seem unrealistic, but I did find some writers I liked. I try to tell folks romance has a huge range from sweet to erotic. It won't hurt to try one for a change. Who knows, they might even come back for second helpings.