Welcome to the My Writing Process Blog Tour – a Monday feature where authors talk about their process and tag three more authors to share next Monday. Fellow Red Hot Authors Café author Lynda Bailey tagged me last week – you’ll want to be sure to check her post at this LINK. Thanks, Lynda! At the end of today’s post, I’ll tag three authors who’ll be joining the tour next Monday.
Q. What am I working on?
Sometimes I think my husband and I have too many irons in the fire. It seems we always have two or three new WIPs in various stages, plus some finished novels to edit and submit or publish, not to mention marketing everything that’s already out there.
Right now? Three unfinished manuscripts: First, an erotic romantic suspense (is there such a genre? We can think of no other descriptor for this book) entitled Next Man In – ménage, intrigue, a murderous villain on a personal vendetta against our hero, and a spunky pair of rodeo barrel riders for heroines. We love these characters – we just need to fill in some more details on the suspense plot.
Second: Book Four in our Passion series at Whiskey Creek, set in our (fictitious) New York based Institute that studies sexuality and creates educational sex videos. We’re having fun exploring what happens to romance with characters who have sex on camera for a living. Readers seem to like it, too.
Third: A time-travel series under contract with Extasy Books. The opener, set in Wales during the Roman occupation of the British Isles, is already finished, but we’re finding ever new complexities with these characters and their descendents as we bring them forward to the present day.
What that means for our process is that at any given time, a couple things have to sit on a back burner while we play with whatever’s hot. This week, it’s our rodeo riders.
Q. How does my work differ from others of its genre? The easy answer: most of our erotic romance features ménage – but very few authors are writing ménage for one man and two women. We also feature main characters across the age spectrum, including some in their fifties and even sixties. We’re out to prove Miley Cyrus wrong – great sex hardly stops at forty!
Q. Why do I write what I do? We started writing erotic romance because we hoped it would sell, but there’s a bigger reason. We’re baby boomers. It didn’t take us long to figure out that a lot of people our age have given up on sex. Clearly that hasn’t happened for us :), but we’re passionate about writing scenes that partners might like to read together to add a little heat or fantasy to their sex lives. So we write what we love to read (well, and fantasize, and watch, when we have time). Both of us especially love the possibilities that open up when we feature two women together. Readers might expect that an f/f/m ménage means two women focused on a man (and we know lots of men fantasize about this). But in our stories, we never put two women in the same bed without featuring their attraction for each other. Our stories are never about pleasure and fulfillment for just one person – we always strive for balance across our characters, no matter how many of them we throw in the bed at the same time.
Q. How does your writing process work? We’re a writing team. When a new story idea strikes us (and that can happen anywhere, anytime) we start noodling with it and taking copious notes, including on a napkin, if that’s all we have. A broad plot arc comes first, but then we spend long hours meeting our characters: who are they, where have they come from, what drives them, what tragedies and pain do they struggle with, what are they afraid of and why – background that might never show up on the page, but the stuff of their “real” lives. Then we start writing on page one. Every few pages we read what’s been written out loud and talk through what’s coming next. Once we write “the end,” it’s on to the seemingly endless edits. We take turns going completely through it until we think it shines.
Q. Who will we meet next week?
I co-founded the author group Midnight Seductions in 2007, and these authors have become my friends and support on the journey. I’m thrilled to showcase three of them in the Writing Process Blog Tour – watch for their posts on March 10:
Awesome post! Loooooove your *process* and how you two work together. But what happens when there’s a disagreement about a character? ARE there disagreements?
I’m almost envious of your creative relationship. When I bounce ideas off my hubby, his stock answer is “Add more sex.”
Shesh…such a man. HA!
Thanks, Lynda – and yes, there are often disagreements about what a character feels, would do, has done etc. That usually means we have some more digging to do – both of us have to concur that we’ve finally “got it” before we can move on. I think that’s not unlike stumbling into a writer’s block as a solo author -except there are two of us to sort it out.
Very cool, Adriana. I like how well you and your husband work together on the stories. Looking forward to reading those next three books.
Thanks so much, Qwillia, looking forward to hearing about your process next week.