Tessa Dare

We interrupt this blog for an announcement of squee-erific proportions:

Author Sara Lindsey Mangel – former Fanlit winner, steadfast Bonbon girl, and general sweetheart – has signed a three-book deal with NAL/Signet for her debut historical romance, PROMISE ME ALWAYS, and two sequels! All three will be published in 2010.

PMA is a lovely romance with wit and charm, and Sara is a lovely person with wit and charm – great things are in her future, and I can’t wait to watch it all happen.

CONGRATULATIONS, SARA!!!

Edit: Yeah, so now I’ve fixed my typo. I really can’t wait to see it happen – although, I am resigned to the fact that I must. I was just excited, what can I say?

In the way of updates:

The other day I turned in my revisions of SURRENDER OF A SIREN – so that’s one thing crossed off the list! And now I can turn my complete attention toward wrapping up A LADY OF PERSUASION.

To answer a few questions from the comment thread last week – Yes, we are really taking the darelings on a 14-hour plane trip the day after I return from Nationals. Yikes. And the picture I posted last week was taken on the island of Tortola, in the British Virgin Islands. Gorgeous, isn’t it?

Here’s something on my mind this week: In some conversation on a romance bulletin board (can’t remember exactly where and when), I read someone complaining that she had trouble buying into a book’s Happily Ever After when all the action of a book takes place over an extremely short time – in this case, I think she cited a timeframe of about a week. This reader preferred books where the romance develops over months, because that helped her believe in the HEA.

This got me thinking about my own books and my own reading preferences. It’s funny–on first thought, I would have categorized my books in the “short, intense” column, as opposed to the “get-to-know-you-slowly” group. But when I started thinking about it, I realized they’re not that short. In both GODDESS and SIREN, the action takes place over about five or six weeks, and the hero and heroine of GODDESS have known one another for years before the book even starts. In LADY, there are about 2-1/2 months between page one and page three-hundred-somethin’.

But in all three cases, there’s a window of one or two weeks where all the good stuff happens, *grin*. And I don’t have any problem reading books with short timeframes and believing in the HEA, if the characterization supports it.

This is probably because my own romance with Mr. Dare was such a whirlwind. I think I once calculated that we’d spent fewer than ten days in one another’s physical presence before we got engaged – although those days were spread out over a few months. (However, I’d decided I was going to marry him after day 3 or 4.) And here we are six years into our own HEA – so I really don’t have any difficulty believing in instant attraction and short roads to commitment.

How about you? Do you prefer to read and write romances that are short-fuse explosions of lurve? Or do you prefer the slow burn over months, or even years?

I went here this week! Uh, in my imagination.

Well, that is the cool part of being a writer. Seriously, this my picture was my inspiration for a little scene I wrote this week while revising SURRENDER OF A SIREN. If only I’d planned this better, I could have taken a sweet trip and written it off as research.

I apologize for being a colossally negligent blogger. Really, these days I’m hardly making comments anywhere (but I do visit blogs, even when I don’t comment! Truly!), and barely managing to drag myself over here once a week…you are all too sweet to keep dropping by to read whatever it is I have to say. It’s only going to get worse soon, because conference will be upon us, and the day after conference ends, the entire Dare family will be leaving for a transglobal vacation of epic proportions that may just offer vistas not unlike the one pictured above, although in the opposite hemisphere. The darelings, on a 14-hour plane trip…
**makes note to stock up on Benadryl and Xanax**

And this of course means I *must* make my August 1st deadline for book three, because it is not getting finished on my trip!

So where are you going on summer vacation?

In other news, please join me in wishing Happy Birthday to my dear friend and most excellent critique parter, Amy! Amy (sometimes known as India), you are a wonderful person, an incredibly talented writer, and a true friend, and I love you! Here’s wishing you a day of pleasant surprises and a year of much-deserved success.

And congratulations to Lenore, who took first place in the Spring into Romance contest this week!

Sorry to be posting late today…we had some minor excitement in the Dare household last night and it threw everything off. And I do mean minor. As in, our washing machine stopped draining, and Mr. Dare and I (okay, mostly Mr. Dare) embarked on fix-it mission that involved much googling, cursing, and mopping of floors, and the eventual recovery of enough spare change to buy a latte. It’s working now.

It was actually a pretty fitting cap to my week. I have revising for days on end, wrestling my book two (SURRENDER OF A SIREN) manuscript into submission. There has been much googling, cursing, and drinking of lattes involved.

A major revision is not unlike appliance repair, really. When something is just plain not working, sometimes you have no choice but to rip the book open and start fiddling with it. There is that terrifying moment when you’ve pulled the whole darn thing apart and all you see is a mess of spare parts, and you wonder if you’ll ever be able to put it back together. Yeah, I had that moment. But I just kept at it, one piece at a time, and now I think I’ve got it working again. And actually, I think it’s working better than ever.

What about you, are you handy? When something breaks in your house, do you try to fix it yourself, or just speed-dial the repairman? Have you ever torn apart a manuscript and wondered just how the heck you would fit it back together?

(BTW, those are my own two kitties, both passed onto kitty heaven now, marveling at said washer when it was first purchased. *sniff* I miss them!)

Over at the Eloisa James/Julia Quinn bulletin board, there’s an auction going on through June 27th. There are lots of signed books, ARCs, and goodies to be won. One of the board members recently lost her husband to liver disease, and the money raised will go to help her kids. I can’t even imagine how rough this Father’s Day is going to be for their family…

Read all about it and see the auction items here.

Also, for anyone who participated in that crazy little game known as FanLit…
A little birdie (who may or may not go by Skirbo) told me that the FanLit website is soon to disappear from the Internet. Ack! So if you want to go save files, take screenshots, etc., now is the time.

I have a teetering stack of new and recent historicals which I have purchased, but not yet read.

They include, but are not limited to:
Elizabeth Hoyt’s To Taste Temptation
Julia Quinn’s The Lost Duke of Wyndham
Meredith Duran’s The Duke of Shadows
Loretta Chase’s Your Scandalous Ways
Emily Bryan’s Distracting the Duchess

and on…and on…

Each of these books has received glowing, marvelous reviews. I’m pretty much salivating to read every one of them. But right now, the TBR pile has taken on a whole new meaning:

To Be Resisted.

I could blame it on my schedule. To meet my goal of completing revisions on book two and finishing the draft of book three by the end of this month, I can’t afford to spend much time swept up in great book. I need to write a lot, and quickly. And ideally well. But some days, I’ll settle for a lot, and quickly.

But really, it’s not that. I can afford to spend an hour or two, now and then, lost in the pages of a wonderful historical romance. I’ve found time to read other books during the last month–contemporaries, mostly. The problem is, I can’t afford to spend two or three days after reading each one, curled up like a pillbug, questioning who I am and just what in the world I think I’m doing writing in the same genre. I’ve started several of these books – but the moment they start getting really, and I mean realllllly good, I’ve flung them away in despair. And it’s a testament to these authors’ talent, that this often occurs within the first page.

Yes, professional envy: I has it. I has it bad.

Really, though, the phrase “professional envy” seems misleading. Too… professional-sounding. A true professional, I suspect, would be able to suck it up and keep reading a great book in her genre without completely misplacing her will to write, for days afterward. I used to dream, someday I want to grow up to write like the orgiastic love-child of all my writing idols. Now I just want to grow up enough to read them.

Ad the pile is only going to grow…before long, it will include
Eloisa James’ Duchess by Night
Joanna Bourne’s My Lord and Spymaster
Sherry Thomas’ Delicious
And on, and on….I know I’m forgetting a dozen or so.

I think I’m going to rename it the TBRIA pile: To Be Read in August!

It is a rather disappointing thing that fulfilling my dream of becoming a writer has completely changed the experience of reading. Reading ‘long ago and far away’ romances used to be my comfort. Not anymore, alas. Now it’s a test of courage.

My, but I’m maudlin today. Don’t sympathize with me, laugh at me. Tell me to just get over myself. And feel free to add titles to my TBRIA pile.