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Archive for August, 2011

Adventures In Vehicle Ownership

Tuesday, August 9th, 2011

The other morning, I stepped into the garage to leave for work and discovered my left, rear tire was flat. Completely flat. This is the one tire on my car that manages to find any nail in a five-block radius. It doesn’t matter where it is on the car, this is the one that picks up the debris. It’s been plugged many times and had developed a leak around the bead seal. I thought that had been fixed, but as I looked, I thought: Guess not.

I took a vacation day, realized it was far too early for any car service center to be open, and resigned myself to a frustrating day once they did open. I called my dad later in the morning and told him the problem. He suggested I buy a new car. Um, yeah, dad, sure.

Now, to be fair to him, my car is a 1998, but there’s been nothing mechanically wrong with the car. Everything I’ve dealt with has been routine maintenance and things like replacing the battery. I wasn’t ready to get rid of her and take on a car payment again.

So after calling around and making a decision on where to bring the car, I called AAA and someone came out to inflate the tire. Only problem? This wasn’t a slow leak around the bead seal as I’d assumed. I could hear that tire hissing air out fast and furious. Adrenaline kicked in. I leapt behind the wheel, started the car, and drove like a maniac, praying all the way that I’d make it to the car place before the tire got too low for me to drive on it.

I think I hit every light. No lie. Panic rose with each delay.

Finally, finally!, I made it. The service guy found a hole in the tire, on the corner where it can’t be plugged. But that tire already had so many plugs in it, that the last time it was patched, I was told it probably couldn’t be done again. I also knew that I needed new tires this fall anyway.

Bottom line was four new tires and getting all the corrosion polished off my rims. Sometimes owning a car isn’t the awesome experience I imagined it would be when I was in high school.

Tags: cars
Posted in Adventures, Life | Comments Off

The Morning Side of Dawn

Sunday, August 7th, 2011

One of my all-time favorite books is The Morning Side of Dawn by Justine Davis. This was a Silhouette Intimate Moments from 1995.

The heroine, Cassandra, is a super model who’s taking time away to reassess her life. She’s also being stalked, so it’s a good time to get away. The hero, Dar, designs and builds wheelchairs for racing. He’s a double amputee who competes in these races. He also has a huge attitude problem. But when the stalker follows Cassandra out west and she needs help, it’s Dar that steps in to provide it Reluctantly.

This is a book that I’ve read and reread over and over. One of the themes I liked about the book is how people judge others based on appearance and often don’t bother to look deeper. This book shows two different sides of the same coin. Cassandra is only seen for her beauty, but no one seems to see beneath the facade to the person she is below the surface. On the other hand, people look at Dar and see a man in a wheelchair. They don’t see him as a person or notice how gorgeous he is. They’re too caught up on his physical challenge. It’s the fact that they are the flip side of the same coin that allows Dar to finally see that he’s judging Cassandra the same way others have judged him.

Justine Davis is one of my favorite authors. I loved a lot of her books for Silhouette (especially the Intimate Moments line) and her futuristic romance, The Skypirate, is still my favorite in this subgenre. She has a way of really making me care about her characters and she excels at torturing them. You know how I feel about that.

The Morning Side of Dawn is no exception on the torture front. The h/h are immediately attracted to each other, but Dar doesn’t want to get close. His attitude problem, BTW, came before the accident that took his legs. Most people don’t look beyond that either and make assumptions, but Cassandra doesn’t and that’s part of what gets under Dar’s skin, that the heroine really does care enough to get to know who he is at his heart.

I’m not doing justice to this book at all, but trust me, it’s awesome and I highly recommend it.

Tags: reviews
Posted in Books | 8 Comments »

Blend

Thursday, August 4th, 2011

(This topic is via request on Twitter. If you have something you’d like me to blog about, feel free to ask.)

I never set out to blend genres. The stories I’m attracted to as a reader are romantic suspense, science fiction romance, and paranormal romance. The books that are straight romance with no action tend to sit in my TBR pile for a very long time. It’s the same with movies. Sleepless in Seattle bored the hell out of me and my favorite romance movie of all time is Speed with Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock.

I’ve never gotten many story ideas that didn’t involve action, adventure, and suspense along with the romance. The few that I did have are gathering dust in a drawer somewhere. I try to write most of my ideas down because I never know when a piece of it (if not the whole thing) might be something I can use later. I actually had the idea for Deke’s curse more than ten years before I wrote In the Midnight Hour. (And I even had his name and the name of his TV series, I just didn’t have a heroine for him until Ryne showed up.)

So I’ve never set out consciously to blend genres, I just wrote what I like to read or watch. I’m also a seat of the pants writer which means I don’t spend a lot of time analyzing how I do things, I just do them. I think it helps, though, in genre blending to know what part interests you as the writer most.

For me, the focus is always on the relationship between the characters and the character growth arc. Because this is what intrigues me most, and because this is what the romance genre is all about, my books fit best here. Not that they fit perfectly. I’ve had some romance readers say what I write isn’t romance. It’s an adventure story. And to someone who reads straight romance without the outside action going on, I maybe do. But my hero and heroine usually are together, they work as a team, they deal with falling in love, so yeah, they’re definitely romance.

Sometimes the reaction to genre blending is so mixed, it frustrated me. Some romance readers say I don’t write romance. Some romance writers said I write great romance, but I did "science fiction lite." At the same time, I’m getting emails from SF readers saying, hey, you write great light action/adventure science fiction, but couldn’t you leave out the romance stuff? My head was spinning like the girl in The Exorcist.

My books usually end up being the heroines’ stories, which would make me a more natural Urban Fantasy writer since that genre seems largely heroine centered. The problem is that what interests me about the world is how it affects the characters; I don’t have a great deal of fascination with the world by itself. In Fantasy, the focus is on the world more than the characters.

This isn’t to say I have no interest in the world or world building. I do and I spend a lot of time making notes, but what usually happens is this: I get, The Gineal shun those who turn to dark magic. It’s a weakness. Then my brain goes, ooh! That’s why Ryne is a loner. They think she’s gone over to the dark. If I was a fantasy writer, I’d probably go, ooh! What happened in this world to make the dark side so reviled? That question is one I could answer vaguely, but not with the kind of thought someone more interested in every facet of the world could provide.

What I know is that dark magic and the suspicion of dark magic use has affected my heroine from the time she was twelve and it shaped Ryne into the woman she is today. I know how it impacts her growth arc, how she has to learn to accept that she’s not destined to fall into the dark arts and to trust herself.

I’m not sure I stayed 100% on topic, but I love action, adventure, and suspense with my romance, and if this makes me a genre blender, so be it.

Tags: genres, romance
Posted in Writing | 2 Comments »

Change Happens

Tuesday, August 2nd, 2011

Change is inevitable. I’ve talked about my views on characters and how they deal with this. It’s my position that few people embrace change, and that in fact, many resist it as long as possible. I have my characters do this as well, and generally try to put them in situations where they have no choice about it.

Recently, I had a refresher course on just how real people react to big change, and I can safely say that I’m dead-on in my characters’ reactions. Dead on.

About six weeks ago, we were told our jobs are being relocated to Atlanta. Many of you know that I work for an airline. It used to be Northwest, but Delta bought us out and they’re headquartered in Georgia. The decision was made to close the building I work in and get rid of it. Everyone here–about 400 people–was suddenly faced with enormous change. Either move to Atlanta or find a new job. We were given until July 31st to make our decision.

This wasn’t a fork in the path where one side continued on in sort of the status quo and the other had change. This was a T in the road. There is no path remotely similar to the current one.

One of the interesting side effects of being a writer is being able to observe. Although I was reeling myself from this unexpected announcement (or maybe because of it), I was able to step back and watch others. It’s actually pretty incredible to see how strenuously people have resisted. Now, six weeks after the bombshell, most of my coworkers have adjusted, but there are some who are still resisting.

So yes, in my stories when I have characters who cling to the status quo past the point where they should move on, it’s realistic. In fact, even the most stubborn of my heroes and heroines have adjusted more quickly than many of my coworkers.

And how did I react to this change? I was too numb to go into resistance–my choice was denial. At first. Then I began researching Atlanta–housing, crime rates, traffic patterns. I reached out to friends who live in the south (although not Atlanta) and found people online who could answer questions for me.

I waffled a lot at first, but within a week, I was leaning one direction. A couple of days later, I read something that made me 90% certain which choice I was going to make. I stayed at that 90% level for a really long time. Last week, the week I had to make my decision, I was 99% sure what I was going to do, but I didn’t make my official decision because I wanted to be 100% certain when I did. It’s August, the decision day has come and gone, I did give my notification on my decision, but I’m still not at 100%.

If your curious about what I decided to do–I’m moving to Atlanta. My report date to my new office is January 9th.

Tags: change, characters
Posted in Life, Writing | 6 Comments »