It’s snowing. Again. It’s been snowing all week. Snow. Do you know how wrong it is to have snow here? Pacific Northwest and snow are not supposed to go together. And it’s cold. Really cold. Somebody find that groundhog, I am officially so done with winter.

Happy news: the Harlequin Presents blog is taking requests for authors’ backlist ebooks, so run over and be heard if you have a secret (or not so secret) love for Presents and missed classics by a favorite author.

Maybe if I can download enough Presents, I can imagine I’m under an Aegean sky with a blackmailing tycoon and cold is not an issue…Of course, this would involve my husband developing a bent for blackmail, but he’s Italian so I think he could pull it off.

Jordan reminded me that I have a new book in print with her post about books to buy. I got the announcement that it was in the EC warehouse, but since it hadn’t shown up on Amazon, and because I’ve been up to my eyeballs in work all month, I sort of put it out of mind.

But here it is, officially for sale! Catalyst! This book was my Hurricane Katrina fund-raiser, in case anybody wonders why it was self-published. I did raise some $$ for those in dire need, and I will be glad I did until my dying day. I wish I could have done more.

“This is a fun read. Veronica is a well-written character with insecurities that will be familiar to many. And the entry of Sebastian, the pet from hell, as a protagonist, is a lot of fun.” - Romantic Times BookClub

“Catalyst was a wonderfully well-written, absolutely darling, love story. Catalyst is the first book I have ever read by Ms. Teglia, and it won’t be the last.” – Joyfully Reviewed

4.5 Blue Ribbons “Charlene Teglia’s CATALYST is fast paced, a pleasure to read, and will have you smiling through to the end.” – Romance Junkies

Blurb:

If Veronica Jones’ prince is coming, he’s lost her address. Resigned to the single life, she buys a house and settles down with her man-hating cat. But single doesn’t have to mean celibate, especially with her sexy new neighbor on the scene. Determined to get a life that includes an affair to remember, she had no idea what she was getting into.

Excerpt:

They fit together perfectly. Just as she’d known they would. With a soft sigh, Veronica abandoned herself to the moment and laid her cheek against his chest, luxuriating in the male scent of him.

His hands were cradling her hips now, strong fingers moving in slow, sensual strokes designed to arouse and tease her, fitting her closer against him until she could feel the jut of his masculine arousal.

It made her knees weak to know she affected him so strongly. He wanted her, and the knowledge was a powerful aphrodisiac. She knew he could feel her uneven pulse and the thousand subtle signals her body gave in response. She felt languid, liquid, receptive. Wanting him.

His lips brushed her hairline in a tender caress that heightened rather than diffused the unspoken admission of raw desire between them, and the sweetness mingled with aching sexuality made her shiver.

Scott slid one hand up her back to wrap in her hair, tugging her head back, and she arched to meet his first exploring kiss.

Sensual nibbles teased her lower lip as he coaxed her into opening for the brush of his tongue between lips softened by drugging kisses. He teased, tasted and tempted. And then he claimed and devoured, drawing her into a world of need and want.

Kissing her was everything Scott had dreamed it would be. He heard bells.

Bells. The soufflé.

The latest issue of Romantic Times is out, and Beginnings: A Samhain Anthology, which contains my story Night Music, rated four stars. Pretty nice! Here’s the RT summary (love the part about the moose)

This first anthology from Samhain authors is a mix of contemporary, sci-fi, historical, paranormal and time-travel stories. The heroes are warriors from the future and the past as well as vampires and, believe it or not, a shape-shifter who turns into a moose. The sexual content is firecracker hot. Even the most blase reader should find something that tickles her fancy.

It’s a very fun anthology, I held off reading it until I had my print copies so I didn’t have to read it in PDF, which formats in an ugly way on my Palm. I like being able to read one at a time, little romance breaks. I love anthologies. Especially ones with my name on the cover!

I also love how Samhain packaged this, so you can either download the anthology tales individually, or buy them all in the print book. Because everybody who read The Gripping Beast will want to read Night Music.

Here’s my to do list from myself of things to fix in the book, just in case you’re interested:
Give the heroine A. a goal B. a spine C. her frontal lobe back.

Fix the first half of the book, in which our heroine is Too Perfect. See above.

Go for the low humor, you know you want to. I don’t know how you resisted the first time around.

Get hero and heroine interacting from the beginning. It’s a romance. The hero and heroine need to interact.

And my theory is that by making these changes I will fix the issues in the first and second acts which will then resolve my problems with the third act. It all builds, and if your structure doesn’t have a solid foundation, that’s a big problem. My foundation is weak, which is why I’m tearing it apart and rebuilding. I have the “how”, the specifics on all these points, but I’m not listing ‘em because that’s spoiler territory. But that’s my to do list.

He touched her lower lip with one finger. “Stay with me and you can have that every night.”

“What about days?” Cass nipped at his finger and he smiled at her.

“They last a long time during certain points of the year.” His eyebrows wiggled meaningfully. “And so do the nights. I do have a business to run, but we can always hire a backup bartender to take over if you need a quickie in the middle of work hours.”

Cass laughed and tried to picture that. She sobered as she realized it was all too easy to picture. Coming down to the bar, giving Jason a look that he would instantly understand. He’d make an excuse and follow her, and they would fall on each other. Mouths meeting, tongues tangling. Hands touching, holding, unbuttoning and unzipping and discarding clothing that got in the way. And then Jason, hard and hot inside her.

She blinked and gave her head a shake to clear it. “I have to work too, you know.”

“Planning to do shifts in the bar?” He smiled.

“No, shooting tourists.”

Jason shook his head at her. “I know they call it tourist season, but that’s no reason to try to bag your limit. Tourism is our biggest industry, next to fish. We frown on shooting them. Makes it hard for them to come back next year or recommend Ketchikan to their friends.”

Back to saving Miss Lonely Hearts. The plot might be a snarled mess, but the characters, the setting, and the one-liners are worth the work.

So I’m back to the Shrek soundtrack and Mary Chapin Carpenter, the music for Miss Lonely Hearts. I figured out what needs to change and where and how, and now it’s just a matter of getting it all done. The figuring it out was the hard part; I spent the last year trying to do that and I only wish I was exaggerating. If I hadn’t finally put it aside around June and worked on other things, coming back to it in between, I would have nothing but a giant headache to show for the last year.

I have learned so many things from this process. At the top of the list would be, if you ever want to make a royal (and almost unsalvageable) mess of a book, try very hard to fight your voice and NOT write the way you write. Because that’s what I did for the first 30K of this book, and while the story is in there, it’s buried and nearly obliterated.

The good news is, I don’t fight my voice anymore. Fighting my voice led to me quitting writing altogether for a good long time because I just couldn’t get around the brick wall tht resulted in. I write the way I write, and as long as I keep doing that, I won’t ever create another multi-headed monster of a book like this. (Cut one head off, two more spring up in its place kind of monster)

COMPLETE WOMAN has licensed first serial rights to WILD WILD WEST!

The feature– appearing in the July/August issue– will include the 1,300 word excerpt, original illustrations, a cover shot of the book, and a ten book give-away for lucky readers.

This news just forwarded from my St. Martin’s editor. SQUEEE!