Samhain Publishing

My husband and I share a desk—he owns an HVAC & electrical company and I write. It’s not so bad for me, since I can take my laptop to an uncluttered space while still having a place to toss my paper scraps and sticky notes. But sometimes—usually after a three-hour hunt for some essential document—my husband tells me it’s time to clean the desk.

Desk cleaning day can be fun because it offers a triple dose of procrastination. 1) While I can pretend to plot in my head, I can’t actually write while filing, can I? 2) Since I’m stuck at the desk—and desktop—anyway, I may as well sign into IM, right? And 3) I can actually procrastinate during my procrastination by sifting through unearthed artifacts.

What kind of things lurk in the bowels of a writer’s desk piles?

• A roughly 1”x2” torn corner of notebook paper that says: Vandals would be cool—downplay lack of hygiene. I have no memory of writing it, but I must have because were my husband to have written it, I would have had to call in Chicken Little to translate.
• The registration for a car we sold five years ago.
• While filing extended warranty papers, a clause caught my eye that decrees my warranty will be void if I use my four-wheeler to deliver pizzas. Dammit, there goes Plan B.
• Sixteen pages of meticulous research on Leerjets so my Devlin Group books could feature an accurately rendered private plane. If you’ve read them, you might be thinking, “But don’t they fly a Bombardier?” Yes, they do.
• A flattened M&M wrapper containing one red M&M. Jackpot!
• Two paragraphs of In the Spirit scrawled on the back of a Wal-Mart receipt. I was able to further waste time by checking the final book to see if they made it in. They did, though not word for word. Proof of the theory that once something is written it’s easily lost, but not forgotten.
• A phone number on a sticky note I spent about two hours looking for three months ago.
• A McDonald’s french fry. Eh. Even I have standards.
• A piece of notebook paper with Chapter One written at the top and…nothing else. Yeah, got far with that one.

So you might wonder what I tossed. Well, I might write a book about Vandals someday, and I don’t want to forget the hygiene-deficiency. I might need to prove I owned that car, and I certainly need a reminder not to go delivering pizzas on my ATV. I’ll keep the Leerjet research in case the Bombardier crashes. The phone number I stuck on the monitor so it can fall off and start a new pile. The rest I threw away (after I ate the M&M).

So how does your desk/workspace/kitchen counter fare? Spotless and orderly? It’s okay. You can tell me, and I’ll still like you. If you’re a little more like me, when do you clean? The first time you can’t find something? When the piles start tilting and merging? Or when you can’t find a place to set your coffee?

I’m thrilled the second book in my Devlin Group series is now available! It was wonderful to revisit characters from 72 Hours and meet new ones as well! If you like your romance spiced with a liberal dash of adrenaline, I hope you’ll check out On the Edge.

When an explosion rocks the Devlin Group, two agents must risk everything to save them all. Book 2 of the Devlin Group series.

Tony Casavetti emerges from an undercover assignment only to be summoned to NYC by Charlotte, the Devlin Group’s executive administrator. When he arrives, he finds out she may be ruthlessly efficient, but his assumption about her being matronly was dead wrong.

Charlotte Rhames has it all—looks, wealth and the respect she craved. But an attack on the Devlin Group throws her back into the pit of sex, money, and murder she’d crawled out of.

With Tony’s life at stake, how far is she willing to fall?

You can read an excerpt here!

Not since Ignorance and Want peered out from the shadows of the Ghost of Christmas Present’s robe have so many people recoiled from children as they do from secret babies. (Well, okay, there was Damien. And Rosemary’s Baby, and that girl from The Exorcist. Oh, and…never mind.)

Mocked, scorned, shunned, and starring on numerous pet peeve lists, secret babies would seem to be unwanted. And yet, their numerous appearances in the most popular lines from Harlequin and Silhouette paint a different picture entirely. As I heard Leslie Wainger say on a conference tape, “Hooks are hooks because they sell, people.” From personal experience, Forever Again and 72 Hours are probably neck and neck as the favorites among my readers. Both have secret babies.

So what’s the deal with them?

As an aside, today my own (brilliant & lovely) editor listed her 13 Pet Peeves in Reading on her blog and look: 10. Secret babies (and yet, I’ve edited two books that have “secret babies” in them). Those were me. Back to back, even. Can I hear a big WOOT! for editors who throw themselves into and give their best to a book containing a plot element with a high personal peeve factor?

So why the disparity? Besides personally believing there are many, many closet secret baby fans, here are two points about secret baby romances I feel are key:

• It is very, very hard to create and maintain sympathetic characters in a secret baby book. Asking readers to emotionally bond with a woman who hid a child from its father (and thereby hiding a father from her child) is asking a lot. The reason for secrecy has to be compelling and believable. A broken heart, infidelity, and “because my Daddy said so” are weak unto themselves, and if a reader can’t empathize with the heroine, the book is toast. If a reader comes across enough of those, the entire premise is toast. And, although the idea is that the hero didn’t know about the child and therefore is blameless, he can also lose a reader’s sympathy very easily. My editor and I worked hard on Travis (Forever Again), as she kept trying to pull him back from unsympathetic territory. To me, a nearing-middle aged man looking forward to a wedding and a new life and suddenly finding himself the father of a teenaged girl is going to have to work through some issues. It was a tightrope with Travis, and even the most favorable reviews mention the reviewer wanting to slap him upside the head occasionally.

• On the flip side, a secret baby ratchets the emotional conflict up to a near primal level. Internal conflicts come from the beliefs and values of the characters, and nothing impacts those more strongly than children (although, the child can’t be the only conflict). I also think the writer can have a much stronger conflict pulling the hero and heroine apart, because the child keeps pushing them back together. No matter what lies between the characters, they have no choice but to work through it.

So how about you? Do you love secret babies? Hate them? (It’s okay if you do. I promise I won’t cry.) Do you secretly love them but don’t admit it because of the ridicule they’re subjected to? What’s the appeal? What repels?

Shannon
www.shannonstacey.com

IN THE SPIRIT by Shannon Stacey

A holiday paranormal romance

Available now from Samhain Publishing

When a holiday-loving ghost tries to rock around the Christmas tree with a Grinchy guest, will they both wind up on the “naughty” list?

Even though Zach Roberts died in an incident involving a string of lights and an inflatable Santa, he’s determined to deck the halls in a big way. But being trapped in a rental cabin with the Ghost of Christmas Overkill isn’t on Jessica Newton’s bah-humbug agenda.

Together they discover it’s nice to be naughty, but can he help her find her holiday spirit?

Excerpt:

“I’m the ghost,” the man said cheerfully. “I live here.”

The ghost? The real estate agent had given her every emergency number in the county and directions on where to stand on the roof of her car to make a call, but she’d forgotten to mention the ghost?

“Jacob Marley, I presume?” Jessica snapped, but then she laughed. “My agent sent you, right?”

It had to have been Harry who set up this ridiculous practical joke. He was the only person who knew where she was, and only because he’d have called out the National Guard if his money tree went missing for two weeks.

The man disappeared. Jessica blinked and — poof! — he was gone. Before she could even react, he reappeared next to her. Instinct kicked in and she struck out, but he was kind of blurry and the heel of her hand passed right through his nose. Then he poofed again and reappeared a few feet away.

“That wasn’t nice.”

Neither were any of the words flying around in her mind, so she kept her mouth shut.

“If I was Jacob Marley I’d be dragging chains around,” he pointed out, and Jessica was surprised she could even hear him over the hysterical screaming in her head. “I’m Zachary Roberts, but everybody calls me Zach. Or they did when I was alive, anyway.”

“There’s too much fresh air up here,” she said, shaking her head. Sleepwalking and dreaming at the same time. She had to be. Despite being the queen of things that went bump in the night, Jessica didn’t believe in ghosts. Sleeping in a strange bed without the crappy air quality and ambient sounds of the city was clearly taking its toll on her.

“Aren’t you going to ask me how I died?” Zach the ghost asked, jerking her away from her musings on her own mental state. “Everybody does.”

“No. I’m going back to bed.” Jessica spun and went into the bedroom, slamming the door behind her.

Zach watched his guest slam the bedroom door in his face and sighed. Being a ghost was hell on a man’s ego.

He let his physical body dissipate and hovered in the room like a horny little ball of energy. At least in this form he didn’t have to deal with the hard-on from hell.

It sucked being dead. Once he’d mastered the art of becoming solid, he’d found himself fully-functional in the libido department. He could even have an orgasm, though there were no bodily fluids involved. Hell, the whole situation gave new meaning to safe sex, if only potential sex partners could just get past his being a ghost.

Sure, there had been a few open-minded ladies in the decade since the unfortunate incident with the roof, a string of lights and the inflatable Santa. But they invariably left him for guys who weren’t dead. He didn’t blame them, of course, but it made for a lonely eternal existence.

Zach found this woman more attractive than all of the cabin’s former tenants combined. She wasn’t skinny and she didn’t have crap painted all over her face to make her look and taste artificial. He shuddered, remembering the hideous waxy flavor of lipstick. This woman was nicely plump and curvy, with pretty blue eyes and tousled, shoulder-length blonde hair.

He knew her name was Jessica. The real estate agent had been yapping to the cleaning service lady when they were getting the cabin ready. But that was all he knew.

Well, that and the fact she wore no wedding ring and had no loved ones who cared if she was alone for the holidays. It was up to Zach to make her days merry and bright. And, if he was very lucky, he might get to make her nights jolly, as well.

www.shannonstacey.com