by Charlene Teglia | Nov 27, 2005 | Uncategorized
I’m ready to get to work on my next story. It’ll keep my mind off TGB, for one thing. I find myself worrying about it on and off, whether I succeeded in toning the hero down enough to make him not such an uber-alpha readers will want to smack him, if I did a good enough job of keeping the fun in dysfunctional. And of course I realized after I sent it off that I missed another perfect opportunity for a Star Trek reference, which I have peppered throughout the story. I made a note to add it in during edits, bwahaha.
Anyway, no use thinking about it until the editorial feedback arrives. So the best thing to do is get busy on Djinn. Hope everybody out there is having a good Sunday and working their happy way through the leftovers.
by Charlene Teglia | Nov 26, 2005 | Uncategorized
Very fun discussion on RTB about erotic romance, a reader’s roundtable. Today’s part 2 of 2, and the fun factor in erotic romance came up. These books are fun! Yes, they are, which is why I love them. Yes, they do seem to harken back to the bodice ripper days when men were men and women had adventures instead of watching their stock portfolios and worrying about Very Serious Issues.
I’m not knocking those Serious Books, because they have their own audience and their own appeal, but I read and write romance for fun. And I loved the old bodice rippers and I frankly don’t understand why so many romance writers of today seem to feel the need to defend the genre against them, as if it were a dark embarassment to put behind them while they convince people that “romance isn’t like that!”
Romance is a huge genre, so no, not all romance is like that. There’s plenty of serious to go around for people who love that in their books. As for me, I love cheese. Which is why, in a bookstore, I will pick up and buy a book titled “Bimbos of the Death Sun” (which, by the way, is a fabulous read and so is the sequel “Zombies of the Gene Pool”) instead of a book about a family drama.
Anyway, check out the discussion! Because I don’t have anything serious to talk about over here. I’m still giggling about “heroes who chew the shrubbery in their angst”.
by Charlene Teglia | Nov 25, 2005 | Uncategorized
Another job. I finished up TGB, I fixed it as thoroughly as I could fix it (although editing will surely turn up more things I missed), and here I am, between edits, nothing due, and it’s time to think about the next job.
I have some sample chapters to send out now that I’ve cleared the decks, I’m brainstorming another project with some partners in crime, but aside from that, I need to settle on my next project. The order of things is open now because with two February releases already I’m not doing a Valentine’s story.
I am still working on finding a good excerpt that stands alone and isn’t too long for The Gripping Beast to put up on the book’s page. There’s one I really like, but it’s longish.
Happy Black Friday to all the brave shoppers out there. Drive carefully.
by Charlene Teglia | Nov 24, 2005 | Uncategorized
Lots to be thankful for. A roof over our heads, a turkey in the oven, everybody happy and healthy. Three books releasing in the next three months. Today’s a good day to count blessings and be thankful.
Also, several visitors to the site in the last few days were looking for Yule Be Mine. It’ll be moved to the home page so it’s easier to find during the holidays with links to buy, and again, it’s going out of print so don’t wait!
You can get it in ebook here, or in paperback here.
by Charlene Teglia | Nov 23, 2005 | Uncategorized
I wrote the last chapter of The Gripping Beast last night. Today I put on the finishing touches, go over it one last time to smooth out any rough spots where I cut, added and rewrote, and send it away. And that will be the end of The Thing In The File Cabinet, my personal Bluebeard’s Closet.
This Beast has been hanging around for about 10 years. I started it and my true voice erupted onto the pages. I was writing a storyline that was clearly erotic – capture/bondage sex was an important part of the plot – but it was a romance. And it had time-travel. And Norse mythology coming to life and marching around. I sent out queries and the silence was deafening. I got to 55,000 words and lost my nerve. I didn’t know what to do with this Weird Book That Nobody Wanted. I didn’t know how to finish it. I filed it away and it haunted me.
Leaving that story unfinished was like putting on eyeliner and mascara on one eye and going out in public. It was embarassing. What kind of writer invests that much time and effort in a manuscript and then just shoves it in a drawer? What kind of brain comes up with stuff like that in the first place? I felt like a failure. I felt like a person who wrote weird books and it would be my epitaph: “She wrote weird books nobody wanted. And she kept going on about this Viking time-travel Norse mythology erotic story that she never finished.”
And then along came Samhain, a publisher interested in weird books nobody else wanted, and I knew Crissy would at least let me down gently without implying that I needed medication for even proposing a book like The Gripping Beast, so I pitched it to her. Wonderful. Send it in. Um, it’s not finished. In fact, it’s really rough. This is rough draft, okay? Here’s four chapters. Editor responds, I really love it. I’m sending a contract.
A dream. A nightmare. Because now I had to haul it out and fix it and finish it. And it was a hard, hard job. But I did it, and now Bluebeard’s closet has been scoured out and swept clean and my guilty secret, my private failure, is a finished book.
It might not be great literature. It might not be the book readers love best, or even the one I love best. But by God, it is a triumph on a scale nothing else compares to so far. And now my epitaph can read, “She always finished her books.”
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