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The Story Behind The ALPHAbet

Jane posted this on her blog, the true story behind what sparked the Presents ALPHAbet.

My darling son, Aidric, who will be four in April, is so smart he scares me. He knows his alphabet and he can read simple books. So he was sitting in my ‘office’ (Alani’s room) with me the other day while I was working on revisions, and he was looking at an animal book. He sees the word ‘Vulture’ and he says ‘Virgin!’

I have Presentsed the poor child. Now just wait until he asks what virgin means…

The ABC’s Of Romance (or the Presents ALPHAbet)

Well, I had some very good news on book #2 today! My editor really liked it and the revisions were extremely minor. So much so that I aim to have them done and have it sent back to her by tonight! (tomorrow her time!)

So, applying all of my past revisions seems to have really paid off. The key thing was to remember to keep it character driven, rather than plot driven. In my initial draft I had the plot driving my characters all over the place. He had to get her back to his home country, so I contrived a way to have that happen. After the revisions for the partial, which saw me rewriting the whole thing, I really just let Max and Alison steer the plot. I put them in a situation, but from there on it was up to them. And I’m very happy that that came across!

In a celebratory mood, my CPs Jane ‘mulberry’ Jones and Jackie Ashenden and myself, have come up with the Presents ALPHAbet for you! Enjoy! (please remember, we get giddy when we chat!)

A is for Alpha male, as you simply must have

B is for Billionaire you have to have him too

C is for Convenient, wedding or wife

D is for Desire, no shortage of that!

E is for Erection..well…we gots that too!

F is for Flighty, that’d be the hero’s ex-wife!

G is for Growl, as heroes tend to do

H is for Hostility, to conceal D and E!

I is for Italian, he’s letters A and B!

J is for ‘jaculation, it makes secret babies!

K is for Kisses…deepening, demanding, passionate, and occasionally punishing. 😉

L is for Love (naturally)

M is for Millionaire, we’ll take him if B is unavailable!

N is for Naughty, cause you know they will be

O is for…well, you know…cuz what’s a Presents without one?

P is for Passion, that’s guaranteed

Q is for Quickie, and we mean that in the best way

R is for Rich, the hero must be! And also Relationship, the central key!

S is for Sensual Seduction, another absolute must

T is for testosterone, of which there is plenty

U is for Undone, their clothes will be soon

V is for Virgin…but not for long

W is for Wedding, the more convenient the better

X is for Xhausted, as our poor heroine will be soon

Y is for Yawn, which she’ll never do in bed!

Z is for Zenatakos the Greek responsible for V through Y

Yeah…hilarity we haz!! 😀

What Makes A Book A Wall Banger?

I’m reading a book that I am just not fond of right now (no I will not say what it is in public..Not HQN though!) and if this bad boy were not on my Kindle, I may have thrown it at the wall. Oh, so many reasons why. It seems like if the hero had a bunny, the heroine might boil it. The hero is lecherous to the point of being plain icky. Motivations seem to be there just to be there, with no discernible reason why…and the plot devices! Oh, the plot devices…

I’ll share a few of my serious pet peeves. These aren’t necessarily deal breakers, because, as we say in my crit group, it’s all in the execution, but I DO find some of these elements a turn off. And, well, some are deal breakers.

1. ‘Forced Seduction’. This, IMO, is rape. No means no, man. Alternately, I am all right with him taking a kiss even when she says no. 🙂

2. Multiple partners in one book for the H and h. Ew. Gross. Which leads me to…

3. The heroine being pregnant with another man’s baby and sleeping with the hero. Particularly when we’re dealing with brothers. There’s a squick factor there for me that’s tough to get through. Having said that, I have read one that worked for me.

4. They’re married and they slept with someone else. The hero and heroine separate, the hero goes and beds every chick in sight to ‘get over his wife’. Or the marriage is in name only and the hero keeps sleeping with other women. Whatever, if they’re still married, I no likey. Again, I have read a couple Presents where this worked. But generally speaking, I find it distasteful.

5. A hero who was a total jerk for 98% of the book, then says sorry, has a personality transplant, and it’s suddenly a given that he loves her. Man, seriously, if I don’t want the heroine to end up with the hero, we have a problem. A dark hero is great, a hero who does and says horrible things, great, fine, but redeem him before the very end. I have to believe his feelings, and believe the change. It’s all in the execution.

So I’m wondering, what makes a book a ‘wall banger’ for you? What are the deal breakers? The things you really hate to see? What ruins the romance? Share your pet peeves with me!

Submissions and an Unconventional Hero

I have now submitted the rewritten book #2! My sexy prince and his convenient bride are in Richmond awaiting their verdict, which had me thinking about what my next submission might be…

So, yes, this is really a question for my editor since the buck stops with her, but I’m curious: How do you feel about an unconventional hero?

Oh, he wouldn’t be unconventional for some of Harlequin’s imprints, but for Presents he’s a bit on the ‘different’ side. Presents has done rancher’s, but generally they’ve been of the South American persuasion. My hero, Domenico, has a ranch in Texas. He’s from Mexico and he ran away from a very bad home situation at a young age and made it into the United States, where he worked his way up from ranch hand, to celebrated professional bronc rider, to billionaire cattle rancher and stock supplier for the pro rodeo circuit.

He has to put on that sophisticated, CEO suit every now and then, to deal with the business side of things, but he’s just as much at home doing physical labor on his ranch. He’s unquestionably alpha, and my heroine, Acacia, certainly likes him! And, of course, he’s super hot. 🙂

(my model is the very nice looking Mark Consuelos)

So what do you think? Does he have Presents appeal??

Livin’ The Glam Life (Presents Style!)

Okay, so maybe it’s not exactly Presents Style around here, but it is an extremely happy and chaotic place to be. Of course the kids keep me on the move most of the time, and with dear Haven’s help, I manage to get some writing in now and again!

So, you all know I’ve been working on revisions, which became a complete rewrite because my heroine’s character especially changes a bit during the rewrite of the partial. I just finished up with that last night, after receiving my editor’s approval on the changes I’d made to the partial. (Big time yay on that!)

In the middle of that, I’ve been working on little tiny tweaks for His Virgin Acquisition. They sent me a PDF and told me now was the time to make small changes. For smoother sentence structure, dealing with word repetition, etc. I’m trying to obsess too much and change too many words. 😉

And of course, I’ve been dressing Alani in girly clothes. Lots of girly clothes. Because that’s what you do when your first two children were boys! (And I swear to you, I bought these cute little purple jammies when I found out I was pregnant this time, and if she had been a boy you can BET he would have worn those at least once.)

So yes, life is busy. But honestly, this is the best kind of busy in the world. I hope to be this busy for a very, very long time.

Pink Heart Society Post

Hello all! There’s yet another chance to catch my Call story! It’s up on The Pink Heart Society Blog! Stop by and visit me, my dear friends! 😀

http://www.pinkheartsociety.blogspot.com/

WIP News

I’m over halfway through the grand rewrite of what I *hope* will be book number two for Harlequin Presents. My editor hadn’t seen the full MS, so I wasn’t exactly required to do a rewrite, but once I got stuck into fixing the partial, which I rewrote, it just seemed natural to keep going.

So, since I’m knee deep in my characters and developing their developments, I thought I would ‘share’ them with you! I don’t usually ‘cast’ my characters, and by that I mean I don’t usually have celebrity counterparts for them, but, it just kind of happened for Maximo and Alison, and, of course, Maximo’s castle. (Because the man is a PRINCE!)

For my lovely heroine, Alison, I would cast the very beautiful Amy Adams. Alison is sweet, but she is a fiercely independent woman who plans everything in her life, and her plans do NOT include a husband. Especially not a sexy, autocratic ROYAL husband…So what do you suppose I do to her?? 😀

And then we have Maximo…I have no idea who this guy is. And I don’t really care. He’s my model for Max, with a few alterations, of course, because I am ridiculously picky. Most importantly, Maximo does not have a tattoo. But he does have the muscles. Maximo is the kind of man who values duty and a sense of honor above everything else. He doesn’t want to get married again, he’s been there and done that…so what do you think I do to him?? 😀 Yes, I’m evil.

And just because I love it, here’s the castle:

Okay, enough playing…now I have to get them that HEA!!

Kreativ Blog Award!

I am most honored to have been nominated for the Kreativ Blog Award by Miss Jackie Ashenden. Hey, I even managed to type it all out, despite the fact that my own personal spelling peeve is people getting kute by spelling c words with k’s! 🙂

So I’m supposed to let you all in on seven little known facts about me (whoops, almost typed seven little known facts about men…well that’s another blog post altogether, isn’t it?) and then I’m s’posed to nominate seven of my fine cyberspace friends, although many have already been nominated. So good luck, me.

Okay, ready for my seven facts?? (make sure there are no children present…)

1. I used to do a lot of concerts with my hubby. We used to sing at a coffee shop a few times a month. Acoustic contemporary Christian music. 🙂 (Yes, I have latent American Idol fantasies…although now I have to tell Simon I can’t give up writing, not even for music)

2. I got married at nineteen, had my first child at twenty, my second at twenty-one, and my third at twenty three, only thirty days after M&B bought my MS!

3. My husband is the only man I’ve ever kissed. And I didn’t get that first kiss until I was eighteen!

4. I play (very casually) The trumpet, the flute, the violin and the piano (also the tin whistle if pressed.)

5. I am a Lord of the Rings geek. I waited in line for the midnight showing of Return of the King for six hours, and for that one and Two Towers I dressed as an elf. I was on the news. (hey, I was in high school)

6. I married my boss. Yep. I started working at the coffee shop Haven assistant managed when I was seventeen. And he was twenty five. Yeah, we’re so Presents.

7. I started going to college when I was sixteen, and though I have never, ever worked in this field, I am a certified dental assistant. I’ve only had two jobs, one as a barista at a coffee shop, and the other as a bridal consultant. Now I have STORIES from that job…no joke, my first customer bought a pink wedding dress. She came with her stepmother, who was fifteen years her junior. She was marrying a man she met at her work (she worked at the DOG POUND). He was doing community service while serving time in prison. I’ve got a million of them…

And now for my noms…

Jane ‘mulberry’ Jones

Maya Blake

Kelly Boyce

Joanne Pibworth

Sally Clements

Jane Holland

Anne MacFarlane

Revised and Re-sent

Had to intro with a new baby pic. She’s doing well! I’m hoping I’ll get some sleep tonight…hahahaha!

Well, my revised (rewritten!) partial is…well it’s not even on it’s way to England. It’s there. Ah, cyberspace!

As I mentioned, these revisions kind of made me feel like my face was melting, not because I didn’t agree with my editor, but because, as it is when you first read revisions, I felt like I had no idea how to fix all of the problems! Because how could I keep the plot as it was and make all these changes? Well, I couldn’t. And the simple fact was that my plot was in the way!!

That’s where I applied my editor’s golden advice: You’re telling the hero and heroine’s story.

So as I started these revisions, I forced myself to stop trying to shove my characters into this little box that was my plot. Oh, the plot has the same premise, but now it’s shaped around the characters. Rather than saying to myself, okay, I have to get them from point A to point B and in order to do that we need to introduce Plot Device 1…I simply asked myself what Max and Alison would do if they found themselves with this certain problem, and let them take it from there.

Now, this is an MS that was finished, and I’m not sure how much of it will have to be rewritten with the partial since I haven’t really sat down to see what I’m working with yet, but all that to say, I know the characters really well. But one of the main problems I had was that I wasn’t letting my reader know my characters, and I wasn’t allowing them to act organically. For example, I needed my heroine to get to the hero’s country, so she got on a plane with him even though she doesn’t trust him. Why did she do that?? My editor wisely asked me. And I thought, well, she did it because I needed her to. Oops. Because Alison would never have gotten on the plane with him in the circumstances.

We’ll see if I executed this is well as I hope, but I think it was a mini breakthrough for me as a writer. This process was really about getting back to basics. Maximo and Alison, their issues, and how they then resolve those issues and fall in love with each other. That’s really what I want as a reader, an emotionally satisfying read, and in order to have that, I need a connection with the characters and a sense for their love. As a writer, that’s what I hope to deliver!

We’re Home!

Alani came home from the hospital today! Thank you all so much for your prayers and just for letting us know we had so many people who cared. It really meant a lot!

Her big brother is quite enamored with her!!

And in other news, I got my contracts signed and sent yesterday! We felt it rated a photo op. 🙂

Baby News

On Dec 29th I decided to clean my house and vacuum, which was a necessity, let me tell you. Of course, the big pregnant woman was uncomfortable after so I went to see my doctor even though I’d been the day before and after a little check up they sent me to the hospital. I was more than a little surprised!

After a very long night, Alani Grace Yates was born at 2:49am, Dec. 30th., two and a half weeks earlier than scheduled. In true princess fashion she followed no forumla and would not be dictated to, of my children she was my longest labor, quickest delivery. But that super fast, three minute delivery did cause some problems for her.

Her body didn’t have the chance to have all that fluid worked out of her as she made her transition into the world and a couple hours after she was born she started having to work extra hard to breathe. They put her on a C-PAP machine in the NICU and she’s been doing well on that. Last night she was able to go off of the machine for a couple of hours and this morning they’re trying it again.

I’m home and my baby is at the hospital, and that’s a very strange feeling for a new mommy. It makes it even harder to believe she’s not just in my tummy and I keep forgetting I’m not pregnant anymore.

Even though we live forty minutes from the hospital we make it in to see her a couple times a day and we get to hold her for most of the visit.

God has blessed us with a beautiful little girl, and even though it hasn’t gone quite the way we planned it, we still feel incredibly, wonderfully blessed to have her.

Keep us, and Alani in your prayers.