Tessa Dare

So here I go – all this week I’ve been researching and outlining book three. (Yes, I am actually a plotter, despite my aversion to storyboards and worksheets and notecards. I just write it all out in narrative form in one big file.) I’m so excited about this book. It brings all the characters from my previous books back into the mix: Lucy, Jeremy, Sophia, and Gray all have minor parts to play. There’s going to be a secondary romance, which is a new challenge for me. Therefore, this one requires a bit more plotting and (erp) organization before I even begin.

What it’s missing is a working title.
To recap, the titles of books one and two are:
Goddess of the Hunt
Surrender of a Siren

So from this pattern, the third should ideally include:
a) The word “of”
b) Some sort of mythological or divine reference.

Here’s the blurb:

All Isabel Grayson wants is to save the world. Is that too much to ask? Ashamed of inheriting her family’s ill-gotten wealth and her mother’s exotic, sensual beauty, Bel has decided to redeem both by trading them for influence. She’s come to London to marry a nobleman—ideally one who shares her passion for social justice, but any gentleman with a seat in the House of Lords will do. She’s looking for Lord Honorable; she’ll settle for Lord Malleable. But she falls in love with Sir Toby.

Sir Toby Aldridge just wants his life back. Before his fiancé jilted him and made him a laughingstock, he was the ton’s most ruthless flirt. When he spies Isabel on a secluded verandah, he sees the perfect balm for his bruised pride. Not only is she an angel inhabiting a body designed for sin, she’s fresh off the boat from the West Indies. Determined to impress Bel before any humiliating rumors reach her ears, Toby turns on the charm. When she professes an interest in politics, he impulsively tells her he’s destined for a seat in Parliament.

When Toby’s joking proposal of marriage meets with Bel’s eager acceptance, he’s stunned. When she announces their engagement in a crowded ballroom, he’s horrified. And when he learns Bel’s sister-in-law is the woman who jilted him, he’s doomed. His pride can’t take another broken engagement; Bel won’t marry him unless he makes good on his promise to run for MP. And against all reason, she seems to believe in him. Can Toby, a hopelessly shallow flirt, unearth a passion for justice and a hidden talent for politics? Doubtful. But then, Toby only promised to run. He never promised he’d try to win.

Any ideas?

Of course, all of these are subject to change, but I feel sort of adrift without some sort of title.

Actually, the file on my computer already is called something Sara Lindsey dreamed up, which is so perfect:
Toby or Not Toby MP
I think that’s already this book’s sentimental title, like Goats on a Boat was for book two. (The first book, in case you’re wondering, was Regency House Party Massacre.)

So way back before I got really ill the other week, I blogged about my difficulty talking about my books and how this Toastmasters guy was coming to my chapter meeting. And I did go to that meeting, even though I was running a fever and hoarse from coughing. After his talk, I asked him – if I’m a nervous speaker, what should I tell myself to get over that? I was expecting one of those “picture the audience in their underwear” type things. But what he said was, “Remind yourself that you have something important to share, something that will have meaning to the people you’re addressing.”

Well. That was sort of a light-bulb moment for me. Because I realized that a lot of my shyness in talking about my books probably stems from insecurity – my fear that what I have to say isn’timportant to the listener, especially if s/he doesn’t read romance novels. And yeah, that’s something I need to get over.

Because this genre is important, to a lot of people. If you attended RWA National Conference in Dallas last year, you heard Lisa Kleypas give that great speech about how she and her mother went to buy “essentials” at Wal-Mart after her home was devastated by a flood…and how, for each of them, a romance novel counted as an essential. My friend Deb Mullins told me that she’d had a fan letter from a reader whose husband was deployed with the armed forces. The woman thanked her, saying it was the first novel she’d been able to really get lost in since her husband had left, and it gave her a much-needed break from constant worrying.

When I went to the hospital to have Dareling #2 induced (I must have the coziest womb ever, because neither of my children showed the slightest inclination to leave it willingly), I took along a romance novel to help pass the time and distract me from those lovely pitocin-amped contractions.

So when someone asks me about my books, I’m going to try to follow Toastmaster-guy’s advice and remind myself that I have something important to share. Someday my book is going to give a woman a smile and a happy sigh just when she needs them, and that’s a worthy mission indeed.

But the more examples I have, the more confident I’ll feel. So how about you? When has a romance novel been important to you, or even essential?

Just a note to say, Goats on a Boat Surrender of a Siren is now revised and complete and sent in to my editor.

I’m going to Disneyland!
(Really.)

More on book three this coming week…it’s in desperate need of a title.

I think it was Keira Soleore who asked in the comment trail the other day what movie Mr. Dare and I went to see for our annual outing – we went to see Juno. Which is wonderful, if you haven’t seen it, and the end made me cry and cry. I’m not even sure why…It was a happy sort of ending, for the most part. But in a way, I guess I felt that the movie captured something essential of my 16-year-old self and my 32-year-old self and then smashed them together with a bunch of pregnancy hormones, and it was just about impossible not to cry. But I didn’t notice anyone else getting weepy. I guess sometimes a book or movie just hits me in exactly the right way (or wrong way) at the right time (or wrong time) and turns on the faucet. And of course, it would usually happen when I’m in public.

The best example I can remember of this was reading Summer of My German Soldier in eighth grade life science class. I often read through science class. I often read through a lot of my classes, but it was particularly easy to read through science. My science textbook was big enough to swallow a paperback whole, I sat in the very last row, and I had a particularly oblivious teacher–this big, round jolly guy named Mr. Ploof. Really.

So on this particular day, I was nearing the end of SOMGS and could not be bothered to put it aside for any discussion of mitosis or meiosis or whathaveyou. And if you haven’t read the book, I won’t spoil it for you, but suffice it to say that the ending is tragic. Tragic in a way my thirteen-year-old self was just not prepared for, when I was only just graduating from children’s literature, AKA the world of the typically optimistic ending. I was so sure that book was going to end happily–that’s why I was racing through the pages behind my ginormous science textbook. Squeeee! I thought, age-inappropriate, completely implausible, against-all-odds HEA ahead, surely with some kissing!

Nope. Didn’t work out that way. And I started to cry. And by cry, I mean sob. Like, noisily. With no tissue anywhere nearby. Tears just streaming down my face. I don’t know if any of my classmates noticed, but it probably wouldn’t have fazed them if they had, because everyone knew I was just weird anyhow. Mr. Ploof remained jolly and round and oblivious. But when I finished that book and put it aside and tried to start looking and acting normal again (always a challenge, under the best of circumstances), I just remember looking up at whatever science lesson we were having and thinking, This is all bullsh*t. Why are these people sitting us in these chairs and feeding us all this stuff about cell division and algebra and prepositional phrases and neglecting to tell us that an awkward, unloved Jewish girl and her fugitive Nazi can’t get a freakin’ happy ending in this world? I think that’s the greatest frustration of adolesence–the fact that you’re feeling and clawing your way through all these complex life issues and the manner in which you’re forced to spend most of your waking hours seems so hopelessly irrelevant.

But I digress.

What book or movie has made you cry uncontrollably? Did anyone notice?

Check one:

___Yes
___No
___Maybe

Okay, I finally got a MySpace page. If you’re on MySpace, please come friend me! And tell me what you think of my gorgeous-looking page. Manda (of Romance Vagabonds) got me started. I love the look and colors, and this has been a great experiment as I start working with my web designer to redo my tessadare.com site. Till now, I’ve been a fan of the red/parchment/sepia look, as there’s no doubt it looks “historical”…but now I’m thinking a bold, energetic, colorful look might suit my books better. Any thoughts? Which do you prefer?

In other news, today is my wedding anniversary. On an unseasonably warm February day (mumble) years ago, Mr. Dare and I tied the knot. Several years, two kids, three pets, one house, and countless viewings of P&P later, that knot is tighter than ever. (Gee, that sounds kinda kinky. I didn’t mean it that way, swear.) We will celebrate by going to our first movie alone together since before dareling #2 was born…a year and a half ago. Seriously.

Mr. Dare, you’re my real-life romantic hero. I love you!
XOXOXOXOXOXO

As many of you know, I am allergic to storyboards, character worksheets, index cards, multi-tabbed notebooks and all examples of an organized writing process. I’ve tried to do them all, I really have. They make me break out in hives. I think they’re wonderful–for other people. But for me, they feel like forcing a square peg into a round hole…where the square peg is my brain, and the round hole is one of those gnawing little mouths on a cheese grater. Just. Can’t.

But a few weeks ago, I was reading a wonderful new historical, The Wicked Ways of a Duke by Laura Lee Guhrke, and something kind of cool happened. I had to put it down. No, that’s not the cool part…hang on. When I came back to it, of course I had not marked my place with a bookmark (that would smack of organization! *sigh* how I became a librarian is beyond me). So I thumbed through the scene I’d been reading to find my place. It was a looooong scene. A loooong conversation, in fact, between the hero and heroine, and it went on for pages and pages and pages. But I realized that…when I was reading, it hadn’t felt long at all. LLG had me so caught up in the scene, it could have gone on for fifty pages, and I would have been delighted.

Which made me think about Goats on a Boat Surrender of a Siren. You see, in Goddess of the Hunt, the characters are almost always in motion. Riding, shooting, nearly drowning…there was always a physical activity that helped propel the scene forward. The pacing in SOAS is very different, because it’s sort of a cabin romance–a large part of the tension comes from the fact that, for a large part of the book, the hero and heroine have very little to do. There are scenes where they just talk to one another, for pages and pages and pages, and I’ve been worried that those scenes do not flow so smoothly as the brilliant LLG’s.

Here is what I did. If I’d been an organized sort of writer, with four colored highlighters at the ready, this would have been much easier. But I didn’t have those, so I propped TWWOAD by the computer and typed out five or six pages of that conversation. Then I used Word’s highlighting function to shade each of these elements in a different color: Dialogue, dialogue tags, introspection, stage direction (what the characters do, physically), and setting description.
It looked like this:

Then I took a comparable scene from SOAS and used the same shading scheme. It looked like this:

I don’t know that it’s very clear from those two tiny snips, but when I looked at the whole result, side by side, it was very clear that my scene differed from LLG’s in one big way: Wayyyyy more green. (This is structurally speaking, of course. LLG’s prose is better than mine in about a thousand ways, but you know…) Green was the color I used for stage direction and action tags. All those things like, “She nodded.” “He shrugged.” “Their gazes met.” “He reached for the teapot.” I had tons of that stuff in my scene, and LLG had very little.

Epiphany time! I realized the reader doesn’t need every blink, nod, shrug, and stare spelled out for her. Those things are filled in by the reader’s imagination for the most part (I imagined them while reading LLG, at any rate) and writing them all out slows a conversation down. I’ve been cutting this sort of thing whenever I can as I revise SOAS – cumulatively, I’ve cut three pages of it in the first half of the book! And I did it with color coding, heretofore something I’d believed to be the essence of eeevil.

If there’s a type of scene you’re struggling with, and you know of an author who does that same sort of scene very well – I highly recommend trying this exercise, or something like it. If even I can do it, anyone can.

Oh, and the other huge difference I noted between my scene and LLG’s? LLG’s adverb count: Zero. Mine: Too shameful to admit. I’ve been cutting those, too.

I’m sorry, guys. I am really under the weather – have been ever since Saturday. I’d describe it more detail, but that would really be TMI of the not-amusing sort. It’s a flu-ish thing, I guess. I promise to be back just as soon as I’m feeling better. If anyone has a fun topic to dish about, please go ahead and post in the comments and talk amongst yourselves!

My wonderfully talented and just-plain-wonderful critique partner, Courtney Milan, is a finalist in the NTRWA Great Expectations contest! I’m so proud of her. And last year, India was a finalist in the same contest, so clearly North Texans have excellent taste. :0)

I have my monthly chapter meeting tomorrow, where someone from Toastmasters is going to coach us on speaking in public – something I dearly need to learn. Also, my new friend and fellow romance writer, Debra Mullins, will be signing her new Avon release, The Night Before the Wedding. I just picked up my copy at Borders today. (Did you know it’s buy 4, get one free time in the Romance section?) Can’t wait to read it!

One of the things I admire about Deb is her ability to just talk about her books. No, really. It sounds easy, but I have the most absurdly hard time doing it. This is an experience I relived many times last weekend, at my grandparents’ 60th anniversary party. If someone asks me what my book’s about, first I blush. Then I look wildly around the room for an escape route. What eventually comes out is something like, “Well…there’s this guy…and this girl.. and ooh, look, is that cake?” *dashing away* But if you ask Deb what her book’s about, she tells you. And it makes sense. It sounds like a story. It’s such a mystery to me, how she does it. Hopefully the Toastmasters guy can sort me out.

How about you? When people ask what your book’s about, do you freeze up or ramble or turn red like me? Do you practice at home, in front of your mirror or with your cat?

Hey hey – it’s Super Tuesday, which means here in Cali (and in numerous other states – perhaps even yours) we’re off to the polls. Happy voting, everyone.

And while we’re making weighty decisions…

If you could have any superpower, what would you choose?

I’m torn. I know which ones I wouldn’t want – no psychic ability, no seeing the future. I really don’t want to know. Definitely no pyro-generative qualities. X-Ray vision is definitely out. Flying probably sounds cooler than it is. Maybe the ability to slow time? Or mind control! I can think of a hundred ways I would love to use mind control, nearly all of them involving housework.

And do you remember UnderRoos? I had the Wonder Woman ones when I was seven. How’s that for TMI?

Those gold bracelets she had were pretty groovy, the way they deflected bullets. But that’s not precisely a superpower, now is it? Hmmm… still thinking….

Since I signed my contract with Ballantine, I’ve been blessed to connect with some other debut authors who’ll be going through the same stress joy in the coming year.

Watch for these names!

Christy Reece sold a romantic suspense trilogy to Ballantine that is currently scheduled to release in Spring 2009. We actually have the same editor! She’s part of the Romance Magicians group blog (which I’ve added to my sidebar links). It’s been a real relief to connect with another debut author going through the same process, only Christy is one step ahead. Which means I get to benefit from all her experience and not ask our editor quite so many stupid questions. *g*

Jennifer Haymore/Dawn Halliday is a fellow SoCal resident and historical romance author who recently landed not one, but two (!!!) NY contracts. As Jennifer Haymore, she has a three-book deal with Grand Central, and under her erotic romance pen name, Dawn Halliday, she has a two-book deal with NAL Heat. This woman is on fire!! In fact, this very day she has a new release with Ellora’s Cave – Sins of the Knight. And I’ve had the pleasure of meeting her in person, and she’s just about the sweetest thing going. Dawn blogs with Passion’s Muses – also added to the sidebar.

The Class of 2009 is looking for more members – speak up, if you’re out there. I’d lay good odds that several of you loyal readers will be joining the class soon.

I’m off for the weekend. Happy Superbowl Sunday! Go Giants!
(I’m not really much of a Giant fan, I just loooove to hate the Pats.)