Samhain Publishing

I’ve been leading up to this for at least the last fifty pages. I’ve established mutual attraction, sexual tension, increased heart rates, heat, legs that turn to jelly. You get the idea. So the reader expects it, my characters demand it and I now have to write THE LOVE SCENE. You would think this would be the fun part.

BUT IT ISN’T. At least not always. It’s a struggle, should it be fumbling and endearing, total fantasy, very graphic, and from who’s point of view? Should the point of view change as the scene unfolds? And what about the setting? A bed, basic but maybe a little boring. Outside but where and did anybody remember to bring a blanket? In a car like horny teenagers? Or maybe up against a wall, awkward, but demonstrates that the couple is really hot for each other.

The length of the scene is important too. I know that this is somewhat of a stereotype, but love scenes written by male authors tend to be short and to the point. (No pun intended) Women authors, especially those in the romance genre, go on for pages and pages, sometimes dividing the love scene into chapters. (Talk about fantasy). They also spend more time on the afterglow, cuddling part. Male authors usually have the hero jumping up to go into battle, argue a case in front of the Supreme Court, or some other world saving task.

Then there is the question of how graphic to get. There is a fine line between describing lovemaking and porn. Should body parts be called by their proper names? I don’t have a problem using the words breast or butt. But should I call a penis a penis? Or maybe it’s better to use a slang word like dick? (Men love that word have no idea why) Or maybe its better to use a more indirect word that is descriptive, like erection or arousal. Then there is the question of what to call female parts. I won’t use the “c” word. Vagina and vulva sounds like you’re visiting the gynecologist instead of making love. That leaves words like mound, nether region, feminine core, velvet sheath, secret heart, and my favorite “feminine triangle”. Good grief!!!

There is also a danger of getting repetitive, how many ways can it be described really? This is especially dangerous when there are multiple love scenes planned. Also remembering where everybody’s hands and other parts are can be very challenging, especially when you’re switching points of view. .

How to finish the scene, does everybody climax? At the same time? Is the woman having multiples? (Remember its fiction) Is there an encore? Do you even call it a climax? Or orgasm? Or a more poetic word or phrase? Like shattering, becoming one, riding the wave, reaching the stars, tumbling into a white-hot abyss? Yowsa!

So after all this I still haven’t written the love scene. I still don’t know where it’s going to be or how graphic I’m going to get. But at the end I want it to be the kind of scene that the reader will go back and read again, maybe to their partner for inspiration. I want it earthy and fun, a natural expression of the character’s feelings for each other.

Tall order, but somebody’s got to do it.

Did you ever want to live a different life? Or actually have a life?

The last thing Ellie Newman expected to see was her husband wrapped in the arms of a blonde. Talk about a wake-up call.
With her son almost grown, her job a bore and a husband whose hobbies don’t include her, she is ready for a change.

Out of the blue, Ellie gets a chance to live another life when she goes to New York City for the summer to escape her problems. She gets a job of sorts, pet-sitting for her friend’s cousin.

She loves New York. The parks, the food, the museums, the clubs all beckon. The only annoyance is Seth, the beast who unexpectedly shares the apartment.

Seth wants her to leave. Women are trouble and he needs to focus on his music. But she is hard to ignore, especially after they discover a mutual love of jazz. Ellie is up for a fling. After all, who can resist such a bad boy?

Ellie’s Dream is about finding your heart, finding your passion and letting go.

I wish I could say that the defining moment that made me a writer came when I was a child. That I kept notebooks with stories written in pencil, or that I wrote in my diary every night or led the poetry club at school. But it didn’t happen that way. It took a television show to inspire me.

I didn’t even watch the show during its network run. My daughter was little then and I spent most evenings with her. If we watched television it was Nickelodeon, Disney or the Cartoon Network. Late one night I happened to catch the show in its syndication run. I liked the characters, and thought the writing was okay. And there was one particular actor on the show who well, “rang my bell.” Tall, blond, gorgeous, misunderstood, he was the true anti-hero. I was hooked.

During one boring lunch hour at work, I typed the name of the show into Google. I found a bunch of websites devoted to the show. I browsed most of them, some were good, some not, but most had sections devoted to something called “Fan Fiction” or “Fanfic”. I didn’t know what that was so I skipped that section.

Then one afternoon, I was on one very good site and accidentally clicked on the “Fan Fiction” section. It was organized by author and most authors had several titles underneath their name. I clicked on one of the titles and started to read and was amazed. This was something I never would have thought of in a million years. The authors (fans) of the show write stories using the main characters and creating different situations for them to play out. I read and read and read. Some of it was truly awful, some of it was good, and a lot of it was really erotic. There were stories that were much better than the ones written by the writers of the show! It took the characters beyond the bounds of a twenty-two minute sitcom. I just loved it.

As I read I discovered that there were sub- genres of fan fiction, particularly alternate universe and crossovers. Alternate universe fanfics take the main characters and place them in other worlds or times. Like the old west, or the roaring twenties. Crossovers combine the characters or situation from one series or movie with the characters or situations from another. Lots of imagination here. As I continued to read, I realized that these folks were having fun. So I joined the Yahoo group that published the fan fiction.

Every few days a new story would start, usually in chapter format, like a soap opera. What would happen next? Then one day I decided to try my hand at it, and started my first story. I posted it to the group, and got almost immediate feedback, that was the best. Everyone gushed, and a couple of folks gave me some very good advice. I was hooked all over again. Bitten by the writing bug, I wrote story after story. I liked to write stories based on episodes of the show and change the ending to suit myself or expand on the story line. Soon I was collaborating with another author for joint stories. This was the most fun of all. I’d write a chapter, then she would. I’d have an idea where it was going but then it would change, so much fun.

I soon found that the characters in the show, while very dear to me, limited what I could say. I started to hear other characters speak to me. The difference here was that they were my characters with their own stories to tell. That’s when I stopped writing fanfics and started writing books.

I’ve been thinking about my dad lately. He’s been gone for 19 years. To say I miss him doesn’t convey what I really feel. He was a man who took care of his family and never shirked his responsibilities. He loved my mother to distraction and always treated her like a queen. And we knew that they loved each other a lot. As I’ve grown older I realize that he was more of a rarity than I thought.

He didn’t drink beyond the occasional beer in the summer or highball during the holidays. He never hit us except for a much-deserved swat on the rear. He demanded respect from his children and got it. He demanded that we love and respect our mother and we did.

He was an avid reader and a history buff. We got into long debates over politics. He listened to my brash teen-age convictions seriously. He went on camping trips with my brother’s Boy Scout Troop and came to all my recitals from violin, to piano, to voice. He never missed one of my brother’s football games either. He bragged about us to his friends.

He went to church every Sunday, even when my mom lost her faith and stopped going. It helped he said, talking to God about his troubles.

He had no hobbies, except for reading. No time, he was too busy taking care of his family. We didn’t have a lot of money, but we didn’t know that. He and Mom bought us a swimming pool because we couldn’t afford vacations. Dad took care of the pool, but rarely swam in it.

Daddy wasn’t perfect. He was overprotective and sometimes stubborn as a mule. I’m afraid I’ve inherited both of those traits.

He took care of things without being asked, changed the oil in my car when it needed to be done, and slipped me a twenty without me having to ask. He helped me paint my first apartment even though it killed him to see me leave home.

He had a wicked sense of humor and could always make me laugh. He welcomed my husband into our family with open arms. My husband says that my dad was more of a father to him than his own.

When my brother was killed, Daddy’s heart broke. He tried to go on, to keep taking care of everybody, but he just couldn’t. I guess there is only so much grief one person can stand in their life. I didn’t realize how lucky I was to have him for a father until after my daughter was born. He never knew her. Too bad, he would have been a terrific grandpa.

I’ve yet to write a character that resembles my dad. Most of the males in my writing start out as little boys who grow into men. Some of them never grow up and remain charming little boys.

Men like dad don’t need to grow up. Their lives are heroic, because they do the hard stuff, all the time. Everyday.

Spring starts slowly in Western New York. Some people think we move from the dead of winter to the heat of summer in the same week. Of course, everyone has their own way of marking the beginning of spring, a robin, crocuses, removal of the ice boom on Lake Erie. For me, the first sign of spring came in February. No, not the groundhog, but my mother carrying a big stack of seed catalogs into my house.

We would spend hours at my kitchen table looking at the pictures of oversize tomatoes, impossibly red strawberries and fat pink roses. It was hard to imagine flowerbeds, pots of geraniums and showy petunias in February. But Mom had a vision. She ordered her seeds, asking me if there was anything in particular I wanted that year. I never could think of anything more exotic than marigolds or pansies.

Spring came to her basement in March, when she planted her seeds. Rows of seed flats sat on hand built wooden shelves, with fluorescent grow lights attached. She spent hours in the basement watering her tiny seedlings with contraptions made out of old laundry detergent bottles and plastic tubing.

As the months passed and the seedlings grew into healthy young plants, she would prepare her beds. Mom didn’t want perfume for Mother’s Day. Bags of dirt and fertilizer were her favorite presents.

When the weather finally started to warm we hauled the flats of plants outside to “harden” in her homemade cold frames. She had them on wheels so they could be rolled into the garage if the temperatures dropped too low. Memorial Day weekend was always considered safe to plant her flowers. I can still see her kneeling in her garden, floppy hat tied securely on her head, putting her plants gently into the earth.

After Memorial Day, when all her plants were safely in their beds, she planted pots and pots of flowers to adorn her backyard and mine. The last year she was with us, she planted two strawberry pots full of snapdragons and placed them on our front porch. I’m not much good at starting a garden or knowing where to put things, but once the plants are in, I’m an ace at maintenance. The snapdragons flourished that summer but my mother didn’t. She left us in July, suddenly without warning. My family was devastated, me most of all.

Somehow we got through the first few months after her death. Her dog and cat became our dog and cat. I found good homes for her orchids, her cactus garden, and the hundreds of other plants she nurtured so well. My aunts, uncles and cousins picked out some of her paintings to remember her by. One thing you find out when someone dies is how many friends they had. Mom had a lot of friends, people from her painting classes, other gardeners, neighbors, and co-workers. Kind, smart, dedicated, funny, talented were words all of them used to describe her.

When spring came, we felt the loss acutely, even more than the holidays or her birthday. No seed catalogs, no dirt to buy, no flowers ready to put in. My husband and I went to the local nursery and bought annuals. We planted the pots, but it wasn’t the same. They didn’t flourish the same way Mom’s did.

Then at the end of May that first year after her death, I noticed little green sprouts coming up in the flowerbed near the front porch. My husband identified them as snapdragons. “Probably seeded from the ones we had last year.” I watered them, gave them a little fertilizer and in a couple of weeks they were everywhere, beautiful, colorful, just like Mom.

In the seven years since her death, the snapdragons have spread out to the other front flowerbed. I look forward to the little green shoots in the spring. They are now my sign that spring is here, and that my Mom is still growing flowers for me.

I’m thrilled to announce that my very first novel with Samhain is being released today. Ellie’s Dream is about finding your heart, finding your passion and letting go. I hope you’ll check it out.

The last thing Ellie Newman expected to see was her husband wrapped in the arms of a blonde. Talk about a wake-up call.

With her son almost grown, her job a bore and a husband whose hobbies don’t include her, she is ready for a change.

Out of the blue, Ellie gets a chance to live another life when she goes to New York City for the summer to escape her problems. She gets a job of sorts, pet-sitting for her friend’s cousin.

She loves New York. The parks, the food, the museums, the clubs all beckon. The only annoyance is Seth, the beast who unexpectedly shares the apartment.

Seth wants her to leave. Women are trouble and he needs to focus on his music. But she is hard to ignore, especially after they discover a mutual love of jazz. Ellie is up for a fling. After all, who can resist such a bad boy?

Read Excerpt

I’ve been thinking about stuff lately. Emotional stuff, stuff shoved in my closets and drawers until they are bursting. Stuff in the basement that nobody has touched in years. Our two-car garage can only hold one car because the other half is full of stuff. When we moved into our home ten years ago, we doubled our square footage. Less than a year later it was full.

I make somewhat random attempts to clear out excess stuff. I cleaned out my closet and dresser last weekend. Three large bags to the Salvation Army. My daughter and I recently made our house a Barbie–free zone. That was a happy day. She had more clothes than I do along with two convertibles and three houses! Now all the Barbies that have spent the last two years upside down and naked in the toy box are at a women and children’s shelter.

Of course living with two packrats doesn’t help the situation. My husband believes the floor is the largest storage area in your house. The hallway outside my daughter’s room is slowly being cluttered with her excess stuff. I push it back, but like the tide it is relentless.

Having all this stuff requires a lot of energy. You have to remember where it is, store it safely, move it, reorganize it, shove it out of the way and buy storage containers for it. Think how much the storage container section of the average store has grown in the last years. All shapes, all sizes, all colors. I remember when they were a novelty.

Entire television shows are devoted to going into people’s homes and getting them to get reorganize, clean out, throw out and sell their excess stuff just so they can walk through a room without tripping over something. I watch them because those homes look worse than mine. So far at least. People tend to get really emotional about their stuff. I watched a guy cry when he had to get rid of a bunch of Disneyland paraphernalia. A grown man crying over a plastic cup shaped like Mickey was truly a sad sight.

So you’re probably wondering what all this has to do with writing. I think writing is a way to rid yourself of emotional stuff. I’m worked out my relationship with my long dead brother in “Ellie’s Dream”. The idea of him watching over me was sweet. I played out my fantasy of getting back the man that got away in my first novel. I got to write about my daughter as a toddler in my first novel too. I can say things through characters that I struggle with in real life. Not to mention work out my deeply disturbed crush on an actor whose name I won’t mention.

So if getting rid of the clutter in my house is impossible, writing helps me clear out the “stuff” in my mind.