First, I extend the usual apologies for scattershot blogging.  My deadline for the first Stud Club book is May 1st, and I need every (childfree) minute between now and then to finish and polish it up.

But I had to share this – my editor emailed me this morning to let me know that Goddess of the Hunt, Surrender of a Siren, and A Lady of Persuasion have all sold to the book clubs!  They will be featured alternate selections in July/Aug/Sept respectively, in the Rhapsody, Doubleday, and Book of the Month Clubs!  I am beyond excited.  So far beyond excited, I can’t think of a word for it.

But wait, there’s more!  You may remember that Courtney Milan and Ann Aguirre and Dear Author and I engaged in some werestag-themed April Foolery a few weeks back, regarding were-ruminant trademarks and the infringement thereof.  Well, Ann was good enough to actually read my novella, The Legend of the Werestag (coming May 12th from Samhain!), and give this stunning quote:

“Tessa Dare writes with incandescent emotional ferocity, balancing story and character with knife-edged elegance. This is the best novella I have read all year.”
~Ann Aguirre, national bestselling author of Blue Diablo

I think there is more gorgeous writing in that quote than there is in my whole novella. I’m not sure that’s fair. 🙂 But I’m beside myself with glee about it anyhow.

If you haven’t already bought Blue Diablo, what are you waiting for? I just … Read More »

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 … Read More »

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 … Read More »

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 … Read More »

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!… Read More »

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!… Read More »

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 … Read More »

Okay, I promised this post a few weeks ago now.  I’d been holding off, hoping I could get the blurb of my soon-to-be-epubbed novella together, but it’s still in the works.  Darn if that isn’t proving to be the hardest book ever to blurb.

Anyhow, I posted a few weeks ago about my belief that e-publishing is good for the romance genre.  And today I’m posting about why I think it’s a good move for me.   I have a NY print contract and three books coming out this year.  In terms of royalties and readership, realistically speaking, my e-pub novella is not going to come anywhere close to my print figures.  So what’s in it for me?… Read More »

Newsflash: Lori Brighton (Lori from FanLit) has a new blog!  And she’s giving away three fab books!

It’s been a busy week!  I just finished the galleys of GODDESS OF THE HUNT last night, and I’ll give them one more quick look before mailing them, likely tomorrow.  I’m wrestling with the blurb for my Samhain novella, though the manuscript itself is all revised and copy edited and in the vault.  (This *%!$ blurb would be part of the reason I’m not blogging more about e-publishing today.  I’d like to be able to tell you what my e-pubbed book is about when I do!)  And I have a few light revisions to tackle on A LADY OF PERSUASION–a task I’m eager to cross off the list.  It’s never a chore to spend more quality time with Toby… 😉

My other goal for the week is to add a new feature to my website, tentatively called “What to Expect in a Tessa Dare Book”.  The cool thing about having 3 novels and 1 novella releasing so close together, is that I can actually offer the reader some quantifiable data about them.  If you pick up a Tessa Dare book at random, for instance, you have a 50% chance of fish, horses, or hounds, but only a 25% chance of goats, stags, or babies.

Um, yeah…I’m going to try to draw some more useful conclusions from the data…but the main idea is to give people who might be thinking about investing their … Read More »

There’s a lot of conversation going on right now, on various loops and blogs, about the RWA’s new rules for the RITA contest, which require entries to be “mass-produced” and effectively exclude most e-books or books published using POD (print-on-demand) technology.

I don’t really want to get into contest rules nitty-gritty–I know those kind of things are by definition arbitrary, and it’s impossible to make everyone happy.  I don’t envy the (hard-working, volunteer!) rule-makers one bit.  I’ve heard the RWA leadership has already committed to looking into the issue further, and that’s good.  What I do want to blog about is something more general.

As the RWA’s current policies are arranged, an author who publishes a work of fiction (over 20K words) with an e-press (even if that press is on the RWA’s list of Non-Subsidy, Non-Vanity Publishers) is no longer considered unpublished for the purposes of entering the Golden Heart.  However, neither is she considered “published” and PAN-eligible unless she can prove earnings of greater than $1000 for that book.  And unless her book meets the (vague, undisclosed) definition of “mass-produced in print”, she cannot enter it in the RITA.  Basically, an author who chooses to e-publish must do so with the knowledge that she’s forfeiting certain valuable RWA benefits without gaining any new ones.  To me, that adds up to an RWA organizational bias against e-publishing.  I’m not saying this was the intention, but it’s the de facto effect.  And this general bias bothers me, more than any … Read More »