Tessa Dare

I’ve been busy the past week trying to work on page proofs of SURRENDER OF A SIREN and make significant progress on my draft of THE DESIRE OF A DUKE (Stud Club, book one).

I’m not sure about the title for this book, btw. If anyone has ideas, shout them out. I pretty much started with the fact that there’s a duke and then the essential Tessa Dare title element – the word “of” – and went from there.

Anyhow, I went away (sorta) to a nearby hotel and worked all weekend there, and got about 10,000 words written on the new book. That was good, because it’s due in a month. Now I’m still behind on page proofs, though – need to mail those by….uh, was it Thursday? Tomorrow? Crud.

Okay, you’re getting the idea why I’m late getting this blog up, and it’s a rambling mess.

The happy thing is, sometime in the last week (and I cross fingers, toes, and everything here, not to jinx it), I passed a milestone with the DUKE book. With every book I write, I start out loving each individual character. I mean, I have to love them. I created them, right? That doesn’t mean they’re especially lovable at all times. But somewhere in the writing of the book comes the moment when I really fall in love with the couple–the way they interact, and what they can mean to one another. I get that warm, mushy feeling inside, and I really start to believe that these two crazy kids can make it work. I start daydreaming about them far in their future, canoodling by the fire and playing with their cute little children.

So this week, I had my SPENCER+AMELIA 4EVER!! moment. It feels really good.

Now the hard part – making the reader feel it, too. Yeah, I’m gonna get back to work on that. Right after finishing the SURRENDER proofs….

It’s been ages since I added an entry to this “How I Write a Book” series. I really have been writing a book in the meantime. I just started to get a little superstitious about blogging about it before the book was actually sold. But now that it is (yay again!), I’m gonna back up a few steps and pick up where I left off.

Which was with outlining. I write a long, rambling narrative outline that will not fit into squares.

The next step would be (drumroll, please)….to start writing the book.

By the time I sit down to write chapter one, I’ve been thinking about it for months. I have this elaborate vision of the setting and set-up, and whole chunks of dialogue planned. I sit down to my keyboard, knowing that this opening scene is just going to flow onto the page, and it will be perfect.

Two pages in, I know I’m screwed. It’s not coming out the way I’d thought it would. Characters are saying things on the page they never said before, in all our many pre-writing conversations. Or they may refuse to behave in ways we’ve worked out well in advance. When I express my irritation with them, and tell them that they are being uncooperative and ruining my Perfect Opening Scene, they give me a diffident shrug and say, “Not my problem.”

Thanks, guys. I thought we were friends.

And then there’s the backstory. It’s like a mammoth logic pretzel, figuring out how to craft a scene, or a series of scenes, that will allow me to introduce all the main characters, communicate the protagonists’ motivations, set up the conflict, fold in details from their pasts that inform the current action… it makes my brain hurt.

So once it’s clear that Plan A just isn’t going to work, I start tweaking it. And the more I tweak it, the more I realize the problem is not just in my envisioning of my Perfect Opening Scene, it is in my whole concept of the book. This is where I quietly freak out. Or not so quietly. And then I take several deep, cleansing breaths, eat something bad for me, and come back to basically reevaluate everything I’ve planned for the book.

With the book I’m currently writing, tentatively called The Desire of a Duke (Stud Club book one, dontcha know), I had I don’t know how many false starts. Writing the beginning of this book was excruciating, because it is not just the beginning of one story, it is the beginning of three. There are six characters introduced in the first three chapters–no, wait. Seven. All three heroes for the series, two of the heroines, and two important secondary characters. If you count a very important horse, we’re up to eight. Some of them are strangers before that night, some are related by blood. Some have a history of love, some have a history of hate. Some are grieving, some are desperate, some are by nature uncommunicative, and one is dead. AND, to make matters trickier, I’m one of those writers who prefers to limit the POVs (points of view) to two. So whatever I need to tell you about six of the eight people, I have to get the point across through one of the remaining two.

Okay, long story short – I find this hard. I typically have to take several cracks at it. (That’s before my editor has her say, which usually necessitates yet more cracking.) Even though I’m pretty happy with the opening chapters of DOAD right now, I know I may still need to change them once the whole book is complete.

For me, the beginning’s never right until the ending’s in the bank. But then, in writing – at least we get as many do-overs as we want. Or as many as we can squeeze in before our deadlines.

What do you think? Are unlimited do-overs a bright side? Or a curse?

I’ve been sitting on the news for a little bit…but whoops, it hatched! I’ve already had a few friends email me to say my new book deal with Ballantine made Publisher’s Marketplace today. Here are the deets. (Okay, they’re super-vague deets, which may make them something other than deets, but here goes.)

Tessa Dare’s next three historical romances (tentatively titled the Stud Club trilogy), in which a duke, a warrior, and a scoundrel are united by chance, divided by suspicion, and brought to their knees by love, to Kate Collins at Ballantine, for publication in 2010, by Helen Breitwieser at Cornerstone Literary (world).

Suffice it to say, I’m floating on air and feeling very warmly toward my agent, my editor, my CPs, my friends, my family, everyone at Ballantine, strangers passing in the street… I’m in love with love right now, but most especially with Spencer, Amelia, Rhys, Meredith, Julian and Lily…all of whom you will meet in mid-2010!

Holy smokes, I have to get writing.

The first rule of Stud Club is: You do not talk about Stud Club.

Talk about it all you want!
ETA: The heroes are all studs of course, but before anyone starts freaking out about anachronistic slang in historicals, the stud in “Stud Club” refers to a horse.

(Side note: Do you know, I get many, many hits a day on this post, from people googling “Brad Pitt Fight Club”? If you want to increase your internet traffic, I highly recommend working those words into your blog.)

Okay, so I broke down and started a Twitter account. So far I’m not finding much to say. Heck, I can barely manage to blog once or twice a week! But I’d started to feel like I was in danger of being the last person aboard the HMS Twitanic, so… *shrug* Come follow me if you like! Who knows, I might come up with something fascinating to tweet about. More likely, I’ll enjoy reading your tweets, so if you’ve got an account, sing out!

But fair warning: Now that I’ve joined up, it’s officially not cool anymore.

What trend have you been resisting? Will you hold out, or are you just delaying the inevitable surrender?

Oh, and Happy St. Patrick’s Day!

Just in – the cover art for my e-novella! World, I give you The Legend of the Werestag. And it has its very own bookshelf page, here!

Cover artist Natalie Winters did an amazing job. This certainly wasn’t an easy assignment, I’m sure. I mean, I doubt she’s had to make covers for too many funny/sexy historical romances with pseudoparanormal hooks lately. But when I filled out my cover art worksheet, I said, “When people see the cover, I want them to think – ‘OMG, that is too funny. But also hawt.’” And didn’t she just nail it?

As the release date approaches, I’ll be blogging more about this zany little story and how it came to be. Until then, enjoy your weekend, everyone!

Psst…I’m giving away a DVD of this film, along with goodies and coverflats! To enter, see my contest page.

If anyone ever asks me why I became a romance writer? This movie is to blame.

Travel back in time with me, to November 11, 2005. (cue wavy effects and plinky music) I was a work-at-home mom with a toddler (dareling two was yet to be). My birthday had just come and gone a few days ago, with little fanfare. It was Friday morning, and as I drove to pick up my daily workload from the office, I listened to the weekly movie reviews on NPR. They reviewed the brand new adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, and in a rare occurrence, all of the critics loved it.

Now, I was already a P&P fangirl. Since high school, it had been one of my favorite books, and I’d been a huge fan of the 1995 BBC miniseries adaptation (which, for the record, is still my favorite adaptation. Colin Firth will forever be my Darcy.). Anyhow, I immediately called my husband at work and told him, this was what I wanted for my birthday – he needed to call his mother and have her come over to babysit, and then take me to see P&P that very night. So he did.

And oh, it was lovely. Funny, touching, romantic, filled with beautiful landscapes and a beautiful score and beautiful people. I pretty much floated around for days, which Mr. Dare obliquely enjoyed but did not exactly “get.” I eventually sought a different outlet for my effusions of delight…online. That serendipitous click of the mouse was my introduction to the vast Austen online fandom, and the inspiring, creative playground that is JA fanfiction. And that community was my reintroduction to the historical romance genre. I was reading romance again, after many years hiatus, and I began writing it, too. First in short works of fan fiction, and then longer fics, and eventually (after a little contest called FanLit) my own original historical romance novels.

So without this movie, whatever writing career I might have would look verrry different. Darcy, what I do not owe you!

Any movies that you’ve watched at turning points in your own life?

At my Samhain e-novella?

I haven’t got a page for it up on my bookshelf page quite yet — I’m waiting for the cover art. But the blurb and excerpt for my May 12th release went up on the Samhain website. If you read the title and laugh, that’s good! It’s a comedy. And the story is very loosely linked to Goddess of the Hunt.

Also – I finally have a contest going on this here website! So when you click that Contest link, it gives you something other than a vague promise of “coming soon.”

I had plans to blog more today, but I am terribly sick. I did just want to comment briefly on the latest online debate. There’s been a lot of discussion in the past week about the Kindle2 and it’s TTS (text-to-speech) feature – whether it constitutes a copyright violation, whether Author’s Guild was right to protest the feature, and whether Amazon was right to back down. (See here and here, for example.) I really can’t pretend to understand all the legal arguments involved, but I tend to agree that clutching our intellectual property tighter to our chests is not the best way to protect our income. And what I can’t understand is why an organization devoted to protecting authors’ interests would not view protecting readers’ interests as paramount to that mission. What are authors without readers? Sure, authors create the words on the page, but any cultural significance of a book is a joint product of the author and the readers. To put it Zen-ly: if a book sits alone, unread, in the middle of a forest, does it make a point?

Maybe it’s because I was a public librarian long before I became an author, but I’m all about access. I’d let them read my books aloud over the PA at sports arenas and shopping malls, if anyone cared to do such a thing. I’m pretty sure my royalties would only go up!

What say you?