WordPlay

It’s my own fault.  I waited a couple weeks, and then I put that new book release schedule on the blog this past Monday morning.  Right out there for the world to see.

And lo, Monday afternoon, I exchanged a few words with my editor, in which we counted on our fingers, looked at what remained to be done, and decided that July for Tiger Bound was just a leeetle too optimistic.

So that book is now an August baby, and my editor and I get to keep our sanity.

Except for the part where I run around my web site, blog, FaceBook, newsgroup, and Twitter, cleaning up after that July thing!

The Sentinels

Night of the Tiger (Bite): Dec ’11
TIGER BOUND: Aug ’12
KODIAK CHAINED: Dec ’12

Demon Blade
Demon Touch (Bite): Sept ’11
DEMON BLADE: ’13
DARK BLADE: ’13:

No, really.  I MEAN IT!

Once upon a time…

I wrote some Nocturne books and I delivered them.  And then I went on to the next books, waiting for the usual to happen–editing requests, production, scheduling.

They kinda didn’t.

And then there was a bit of chaos driven by editorial promotions and transition, and lo…some years later, just as the first book is at the point of being reverted back to me due to non-publication, I’m on the schedule!

For starters–and ironically, thanks to the shuffling, this title was scheduled about a year sooner than expected ( real surprise to me when it wasn’t even slated to be written until next spring)–and look, it’s almost time–!

Night of the Tiger

December ’11
Nocturne Bite e-novella
An installment in the Sentinels series

Nook
Kindle

Marlee Cerrosa turned unwitting traitor to the shapeshifting Sentinels, and Scott O’Brien paid the price. Now, with another traitor amongst them, Marlee hunts redemption, and Scott hunts what he lost…and it looks like they can only find the answers in one another.

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But wait!  There’s MORE!

The Sentinels: Powerful and Passionate Protectors of the Land

Night of the Tiger (Bite): Dec ’11
TIGER BOUND: Aug ’12
KODIAK CHAINED: Dec ’12

Demon Blade
Demon Touch (Bite): Sept ’11
DEMON BLADE: ’13
DARK BLADE: ’13:

So finally, I get to the very best part about writing:  the sharing!

Just makes me want to write more…

So sad.  Today’s blog is preempted by a batch of delicious, muse-pleasing, MUST WRITE ME NOW DAMMIT pages in my current manuscript.

That would be Night of the Tiger, which will be out in December as a Nocturne Bite, and if you happen to read it you can be all smug and say, “Yes, this is the piece that preempted that August 8 blog.”

(What do you mean, that “so sad” was hardly convincing?  Huh?  Me, wallowing in first draft?  Surely not!)

…Monday

What fun to start the week with babbling good news. I think next week I’ll MAKE UP some good new so I can do it again!

This week, though, I don’t have to. I’m delighted to announce that I’ll be writing three more Nocturnes, and two of the online Nocturne Bites along the way.

The Nocturnes are the ones I’ve gotten the most requests for so far…remember Maks, the straightforward bodyguard who’s played a role in all three of the Sentinels books so far? Maks takes the tiger as his other form; he’s a quiet guy with an unusual background. Not quite tame, for all his reliability–and with reason. The first Sentinels book is Tiger Bound, and that’s where I get to play with Maks’ story. Oh, gleeful, evil, rubbing of hands together!

Ruger is the character who first started getting the requests–right from the start. Was I ever going to write a book for him? Well, in fact…yes! Ruger is the healer who also spends time as a Kodiak bear, and who (in Lion Heart), took the brunt of an Atrum Core ambush. In the wake of that, he’s still looking for himself. Could be he just needs a little help, hmm?

But before I dive into those two books, I’ll be writing a second Demon Blade book. You haven’t seen that first one yet–it’s been waiting for scheduling, and to some extent waiting for this cycle of decisions to come around, to see if we’d be working it as a series or as a one-off. Well, guess what! I get to do a series!

And then there’s a Demon Blade Bite and a Sentinels Bite.

And there’s ME.

VERY HAPPY!

Getting to write books I love, knowing my schedule is planned for these next months, hummm hummm humm! The muse wins!

BLOG PARTEEEE!

…Monday

Yes! It’s true! I have a genre auto-adjust function in my brain!

And it comes in REALLY handy. Because everything I write, I also read. (I mean…duh, right?) And without the auto-adjust, there might be some ugly genre gap issues.

Ug-LEE, I tell you.

Okay, not for mysteries–two of them so far for me. Easy to tell apart from the rest, and obvious what to expect.

The tie-in books…well, those are pretty much self-defined.

And the Bombshells. No question about that marketing. Kick-Ass Chick books. Jane Bond. Alias. Sums it up right there.

The confusing part?

The fantasies. The different flavors thereof.

SF/Fantasy vs Silhouette Nocturne category vs single title paranormal. All fantasy–but all entirely different.

With my first fantasy books–of the SF/F variety–I had a lot of freedom. Of course there were relationships in these books–our lives are made of relationships. But the books were structured around plot, and built primarily on worlds, magic, and character. I could and did hit from between 90K to 150K words.

The Silhouette Nocturnes are contemporary, relationship-driven category romance fantasies. World building and plot are vital–the pieces always have to be there!–but the book grows around the relationship. And the length is 70K words or less. That means the developing relationship takes priority over extensive world building and layered plot lines (and it means there are pages of Sentinel notes, history, and factoids that haven’t ever made it to print).

Single title paranormals–like those in the Reckoners series–are a blend of both worlds. They’ve got the world building, the relationship, the characters, the layering, and a whole cast of supporting characters. At 120k words, they’re crammed in tight!

But here’s where it gets tricky. Because the expectations formed by reading any one of these sibling genres won’t match the reading experience in the others. Picking up a fantasy won’t fulfill the yen for a relationship-driven story. Picking up a Nocturne won’t provide deep world building and multi-layered plots–and it’s not meant to. Picking up a paranormal single-title provides a great balance of both–but the specific focus of neither.

So picking up one of these genres and blaming it for not being like one of the others? Well, it feels odd to say this about fantasies, but…that’s not exactly realistic. Or, thank you (and here comes the opinionated part), fair.

In fact, the key to a happy read while genre-surfng turns out to be pretty basic. Know what you’re reading. Set expectations accordingly. Voila!

In which case it’s really handy to have an auto-adjust function.

posted on Wednesday

Not all that far into Sentinels: Wolf Hunt….

Jet has been trained by the Sentinels’ dark counterparts for one mission: To take down Nick Carter.  Everything she’s been told in preparation has come through that Atrum Core filter.  But Jet can think for herself, and she has the strength to do just that.

(Have I mentioned how much I enjoyed writing Jet?)

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Quite suddenly she bent over, laying her face against his–nuzzling him ever so slightly. Just as suddenly, she straightened again. “I think he lies,” she said. “He will do to my pack what suits him, no matter what I bring him.” A gentle lift of his head and a flick of her hand, and she removed the amulet thong. “No more do I heed him. You, I help. And my pack…I save on my own.”Instantly, breathing seemed natural again. And if his body shuddered with waves of flame and ice, he nonetheless had his growl back.

posted on Wednesday

Lion Heart…if you’ve seen the dedication, then you know I wrote an important chunk of this in the hospital, on my wee smuggled EeePC.  Fairly surreal, that.  That work was in the middle somewhere, though…not this prologue bit.

No, here we have Lyn, and her first glimpse of Joe Ryan.  Poor Lyn.  So sure she’s got all the facts, so ready to act on them…so completely unprepared for what lies before her…

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Lyn Maines stared at the image of Joe Ryan, big as life–much bigger than life–as it splashed across the high definition plasma screen of the sleek Sentinel conference room in Tucson, Arizona. Both Joe Ryans, actually–the man and his beast. On the left, tawny mountain lion, heavy masculine head with black tracings and jaw dropped in a panting snarl as the animal stalked the camera, clearly aware of and annoyed by the photographer’s presence. On the right, Joe Ryan the man, caught unaware, leaning over a railing before an enormous high desert panoramic vista of pines and sere ochre plains, head turned three-quarters to the camera, wind lifting his tawny hair with its dark tracings at the nape of his neck and temple, features clean and straight and strong.

Not always did the human form reflect the Sentinel form. Her own didn’t, aside from a certain something around the eyes. But there in Joe Ryan, the mountain lion lurked out loud–the sinuous authority, the simmering power. All of it.

Too bad that striking exterior covered a corrupt interior.

Joe Ryan was as dirty as they came–a dark sentinel. He’d killed his partner for cold hard cash, and he’d done it cleverly enough so the Sentinel’s brevis region consul and his echelon hadn’t been able to pin him down. Cleverly enough so Ryan had now gone on to a new assignment, a new home at the base of Arizona’s San Francisco Peaks, to start a brand new scheme–acquiring power on top of his money. Still on the Sentinel rolls, still roaming free in his powerful form. Still playing with power itself.

And Lyn…Lyn would prove it.

Oh, a Wild Thing snippet! I had such a good time with this one–short and fast, and since I had already written the first two Sentinel books before tackling this prequel (prequelette?), it was vast fun to write. I already knew all the gleeful little details!
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Watch her, Nick Carter had told Mark Burton, and sent Mark into the night after Tayla Garrett—into the sporadically lit Phoenix park she patrolled this night. Watch her patrol, watch her stalk the night greenways—a little sideways jog to avoid a loose dog, so casual and then all her attention back on the night, on the people within the park and only Mark’s excellent warding keeping him from her scrutiny.

Watch her. As if Mark had been doing anything but watching Tayla Garrett since his recent reassignment had them crossing paths in Sentinel field activity. Not to mention in the Phoenix brevis regional office, in the hallways…in the damned security lot where she sometimes parked a scooter and sometimes parked a bike. But she’d made it clear enough she still—after all this time—preferred to keep her distance, and he’d reluctantly, achingly, respected her wishes. In spite of the restlessness, the aching, and the tendency to offer her name at intensely inappropriate moments in his personal life.

Not that he’d expected to see that particular date again, anyway.

She’d always done that to him. As an awkward fourteen-year-old, growing into impossibly long legs, learning to hide her natural speed from the world and to finesse her cheetah shift, while Mark, a much more mature and worldly eighteen year old, learned that he was indeed human-bound in shape, regardless of his parentage and obvious peripheral shifter skills—the physical prowess, the tracking skills, the prescience…

She runs the Phoenix city parks at night…

posted on Wednesday

And look! It’s another snippet!

Rounding out the first chapter of Sentinels: Wolf Hunt….

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A nudge of her long muzzle and refined nose brought Nick’s head down; she commenced to cleaning his face–his eyes, his strong cheeks, his ears. The submission of an alpha to a wolf-bitch of his choosing.

Or maybe that had just come from within, after all.

posted on Friday
originally posted on Harlequin’s Paranormal Romance blog ooh quite a while ago.

Okay, I confess. Shapeshifters have always fascinated me (check out Dun Lady’s Jess!). And writing shapeshifters has always delighted me. I mean, what’s not to like? There’s the primal allure, the vibrant nature, the potential conflicts both inside and out…

For these are characters who function on instinct as much as thought, and who must integrate their differences into a society that cannot understand them. These are people who face great responsibilities because of what they can do–or who face the battle of exactly how to use their advantages (and make up for their challenges) without ever giving themselves away to the world at large.

But more than that, these characters must manage themselves and the very different way they experience the world. When your perceptions are so very awry from the norm, what you experience and how it affects you is completely different from the person right beside you. Managing that impact leads to different behavior, different choices, different reactions…it creates of you a secret outsider in the midst of normality, whether you want it or not. It means that all around you, there’s a society living in one way, while you live another…and meanwhile you’re being judged for choices and reactions that seem impenetrable to others.

Things shifted a little to the personal there, I see. There’s a reason for that…and it turns out, it explains my lifelong connection not only with the animals I train and love, but to the continuing exploration of these characters who live in two worlds.

This all rather surprisingly came home to roost a couple years ago, during a hospitalization that sent me off to ongoing recovery. The neurological condition at the root of things not only keeps me from filtering sensory input correctly, but it means my internal volume controls aren’t set to the norm. That man’s quiet voice hits me like a shout; that woman’s expensive perfume might as well be a skunk in the face.  Sensations are more meaningful–and potentially overwhelming–across the board.

It’s also something I’ve had all my life–but is a thing which generally goes critical after time and stress pile-up the effects, and then…well, it doesn’t back down again.

It also means that to some extent, I am one of my shapeshifters. I hear things you don’t; I scent things you will swear don’t exist (repeatedly).  You don’t even want to know how many gas leaks I’ve detected (or how hard I’ve had to argue with the gas company guys to keep looking until the leak is found).  I blossom in the quiet woods; I shrivel in an artificially hyped environment.  The life of shapeshifter characters–those who we writers generally imbue with heightened sensitivities, an alert nature, and a certain reactivity–is something I know from the inside out. And now I know some of the costs, too.

But it’s kind of fascinating to suddenly understand why I identify so readily with such characters, and why I have such a drive to explore their lives–and to reveal to them to readers.

Oh, okay. I admit it. I also like to write shapeshifters of various sorts because they’re just so much doggone fun. I mean, seriously. Anyone else up for a good howl?