I’m cranking out the next story at high speed in the calm before the editing storm. It’s like being in the eye of a hurricane, things are quiet now, but just wait. There will be edits for Wild Wild West. There will be edits for Night Music. I’ve done all the edits for Wolf In Shining Armor (Sept.) and Yule Be Mine (Dec.), so I don’t need to worry about those. But I’m finishing Miss Lonely Hearts and Only Human, and those edits will be incoming, too. I pretty much expect August to be The Month Of Edits. So, I’m hurrying to get more writing out the door (to add to the storm of incoming edits) before they arrive and I have to shift gears.
My goal is to have everything current finished and edited by the end of August, leaving the decks clear for SMP #2, which is due in December, and That Other Book, which I’m prepared to have to finish fairly quickly. (That Other Book=Secret Project A.)
Which is why after turning in Night Music yesterday afternoon, I pulled up the next book to turn in and began to break it down into daily sized chunks, putting me in a good place to get started today.
I’m also reading fun stuff. I finished Bad Boys of Summer, and Amy Garvey’s novella was my favorite of the bunch, so now I need to get Murder in the Hamptons and I Love You To Death. And Highland Fling arrived in yesterday’s mail, so I get to read that next!
I also noted something reading the Brava Bad Boys. I keep thinking I’m not all that erotic a writer (quit laughing, yes, I remember what the award’s for and who I write for), but when I looked at Night Music which I wrote without any restrictions, just letting the story be what it needed to be and compared it to the Bad Boy anthology, it was very obvious to me that my natural voice is a step beyond those stories. I write erotic, I just do. It’s not even a matter of word choices, although I think graphic language can be used to very good effect, it’s the number of erotic scenes and the importance of them and the kind of scenes they are.
Which is not to say Night Music is a sex fest, because it’s not. It’s very erotic, though. The eroticism is a very important element in the story because my take on vampires is the Demon Lover. My vampire hero isn’t a warm fuzzy guy with unique dental needs, he’s a killer and he’s seductive and powerful and even frightening. And the eroticism is part of his power. I think traditionally horror and vampire literature has a strong element of eroticism, of sensuality.
Anyway, Night Music is a good example of my natural voice, written without any restrictions or limits or expectations other than “Must be 12K and have a Samhain theme”, and it’s hotter than a Bad Boy novella. That’s how the story needed to be, that’s how I write. So I guess I am an erotic author and I’ll just have to wrap my head around that concept. But I’d better not spend too much time dwelling on it because the edits will be upon me and I have work to do.
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