Canadian Connections, available from Ellora’s Cave, features my book as well as Hot Fusion by Cristal Ryder. Both Hot Fusion and Letting Jack Watch are contemporary erotic romances originally released as part of EC’s Oh, Canada! line.

Some lovely friends are helping me promote my new release on their own blogs; please drop in to their websites and take a look around! Here’s the schedule thus far:

•  Right now I’m up on Berengaria Brown’s blog;
•  On release day – November 9 – I will be hosted by Tracy Cooper-Posey;
• And Naomi Bellina is letting me take over her Tuesday Treat on November 13.

I’m really excited about my trade paperback release – I can’t believe this is happening so soon. Thank you to all my readers for your support.

And now, I must get some work done to try to clear some time for writing…

I’m also buying a condo, which has turned out to be a much longer and more complicated process than I realized. Well, I did assume it would be somewhat complicated… but I didn’t realize it was the kind of thing that you had to put time into every other day for several weeks. For a while there it was almost like having another part-time job (on top of the three I already had). Thankfully, however, the process is pretty much over, and I now have almost two months to languidly go through my possessions and start sorting, tossing, and packing.

I’m at the university right now, and in less than two hours I’ll be having coffee with a colleague who studies queer young adult literature. Last week I had the opportunity to hear this fellow give a brief presentation about his research, which sounds fascinating. He talked about how, in the anti-gay culture of the very recent past, gay characters in fiction were generally not permitted to have happy endings, and instead experienced a lot of  tragedy, loss and even death, including frequent suicide. If I understand his research correctly (and I hope to hear a lot more details over coffee), he is studying the effects this literature had on the queer youths reading it, how that literature (and its corresponding influence) has changed in recent years, and what changes might (should?) yet be ahead.

Though my first book is a straight romance (and for adults, since it’s an erotic romance), I am planning to write gay (m/m) romance as well. I also hope someday to write books that will appeal to young adults (though honestly, I find the ‘line’ between adult and young adult fiction to be very blurry and arbitrary). And as an older-than-I’d-like-to-admit straight (mostly straight? I like boobs, but doesn’t everybody…?) female author, I’m very curious to hear what a young gay or bi* man thinks people should be writing.

*I’m not making assumptions simply based on this young man’s research topic; I’ve met his boyfriend.

I hope in turn my experiences as a(n erotic) romance author, and knowing other erotic romance authors, will be of some use to this young man. I guess we’ll find out.

Either way, it was a delightful surprise to find my academic and author lives coming together like this. I did not expect this to happen – and certainly not less than two months in.

May You Live In Interesting Times

You may not like vampires in your fiction because of the blood sucking and the biting…and well, you may just simply be sick of them.  They’re everywhere in romance these days, and they’re endlessly sexy and often omnipotent.  But I continue to write about them because of their longevity.  It’s not quite immortality because they can be destroyed in a small handful of unpleasant ways, and immortality by definition implies life unending.  But vampires, like a tiny number of other mythical and fantasy species, get to live very, very long lives, which means they pass through history and observe it changing.

Lucky bastards.

That’s the fascinating part.  A vampire that is one thousand years old was around to see the Normans tearing up England and tossing the Anglo-Saxons around.  How cool is that?  Or depending on where they were sitting at the time, they could have watched the fall of Constantinople a few hundred years later.  Wow.

If you’re interested in history at all, think of all the significant events you’ve read about that have stirred your interest.  You don’t have to go all that far back, either.  The landing on the moon in 1969:  Would you like to have been an adult, or even around for that?

Personally, I would have loved to have visited Hollywood during the golden age of movies in the 1930s and 1940s, just before the war broke out.  And that’s just one of a long list of events and eras and locations on my list of time travel stops.

There’s just a wee catch.

No one gets to just visit anything.  Even if vampires have been around for thousands of years, passing as humans through the centuries, none of them would have got to just watch history pass them by.  They would have had to participate in each event as it happened, right alongside the humans they were living among.  Every war that came along would be their war.  Every famine, every tsunami, drought, disease, disaster, recession, revolution, evolution, changing currency, change of weather, change of outlook, change of language, change of seasons, tides, continental shift…it would all affect them just as much as their neighbours.

They would have fought, lived, and pretended to die.  And they would have mourned the passing of the humans they lived with…and loved.

We as humans live these days for eighty to one hundred years (it’s extending with each succeeding generation).  We consider ourselves most fortunate to live a good, long life free of wars, strife and disease, to be surrounded by family and loved ones, and die peacefully in our own beds, with our families around us.  That recipe holds none of the “interesting” events I’ve just listed.

No one wants to live through “interesting” events.  I have personally lived through a civil war.  Twenty three years later, I still sometimes dream about wild rides in jeeps, while machine guns fire from the jungle.  Even if it sounds romantic, the reality is very different.  No one likes interesting times, which is why “May you live in interesting times” is considered a curse, not a blessing.

Vampires, because they live for so long, are beating the odds.  Sooner or later they’re going to hit interesting times.  The longer they live, and the more they move around (which is often, in order to avoid detection as a vampire), the more frequently they’re going to get caught up in “interesting” historical events and have to call on all their hard-won survival skills to live through them.

After a few centuries of surviving interesting times, a vampire has to get mighty tired of it all.  Live for long enough – a millennium or two – and a vampire would be in danger of developing severe psychoses.  Except, vampires don’t change – it’s a factor of their longevity.  If they can’t change and therefore their brains don’t change, it should be impossible for vampires to develop mental illnesses at all.  They can, however, choose to change their behaviour.

After a millennium or two of constantly adapting to changes in human society and surviving “interesting” events, it’s reasonable to assume that some vampires would chose to opt out.  Suicide is next to impossible for vampires without concerted effort and help from others (although in some fictional universes it is as simple as stepping out into the sun, but the resistance to ending a long life is high).

Another way of opting out of human society is to completely withdraw.  For well-monied vampires (compound interest does, well, “interesting” things over several decades), buying up an island or mountain retreat far from the madding crowd, and cutting off nearly all contact from the real world is completely possible.  A vampire could recreate his own original environment that he remembers from his youth, or an ideal moment in time, and live as he or she prefers, almost without interference.

Live long enough alone in these rarefied fishbowls, and it’s possible that the vampires within would develop quite unique and bizarre behaviours and ways of thinking.  They would be disconnected from society and could have real problems interacting with the world when they really need to.  They would need help – an interpreter – when from time to time they needed to reach out.

This is the theory and structure I built to explain The Unspoken Ones, the ancient, hidden and aberrantly petulant vampires that bring Nial’s plans to a grinding halt in Blood Stone simply because they have objections to their private lives being ruffled.

____________

Blood Stone is my 44th title and my ninth indie book.

Nial orders Calum Garrett to get close to Hollywood producer Kate Lindenstream.  Garrett reluctantly complies for he has held himself apart from humans for centuries.  Kate doesn’t fall into Garrett’s arms, either.  She already has someone for that.  Roman Xerus — whom Kate knows as Adrian — and Garrett go way back to the sixteenth century Scottish highlands, but they parted bitterly two hundred years ago.

With Roman’s support, Kate battles Garrett in wills and business as he methodically forces himself into her life. However, on the closed-in movie set in the Californian desert, Garrett’s calm, orderly world crumbles for Garrett is drawn to Kate.  He has begins to experience real, human feelings.

Kate doesn’t cooperate in the chess game Nial orchestrates, despite being unaware of the strategies swirling around her film set.  Demanding and expecting only the best for her movie, Kate’s agenda forces Roman and Garrett to work together to protect her and keep the humans around her ignorant of the Pro Libertatus, the anonymous and all-powerful vampire group who nearly killed Nial, Sebastian and Winter, and shield Kate from the excesses of the League for Humanity.  But could Roman really be with the Pro Libertatus?

There’s hidden intentions everywhere, and centuries of repressed feelings, along with at least two different groups that mean them harm.  Then there’s the rumours that Kate has found the mythical Blood Stone, the key to unlocking vampire history and lifting their curse.   Who is Kate, really?  Because once Garrett begins to notice, things about Kate don’t quite add up, either…

___

An Excerpt From: BLOOD STONE
Copyright © TRACY COOPER-POSEY, 2012
All Rights Reserved.

“I like a girl that is on time,” Adrian murmured.

Kate slid onto the seat and moved further around the semi-circle so they were sitting a little closer together than a politically correct ten and two, but not quite snuggled together. It wasn’t that sort of relationship.

Yet.

“I’m three minutes late,” Kate observed. “How was New York?”

“Cold and wet. But you’re not ten minutes late or fifteen or twenty-five. Three is barely noticeable, in this town.” He rubbed at the stubble on his chin, his blue eyes twinkling.

Garrett had blue eyes, but not like Adrian`s. Garrett`s blue was softer, milder, offsetting the dramatic colouring of his hair. Adrian`s was almost an electric blue, which was odd for a man of clear Greek descent, but it made him stand out in any crowd.

He looked damned good for someone who had just caught the early flight from New York. The stubble was an almost permanent part of him that she only ever saw disappear for high formal occasions. He was wearing his usual designer jeans and dark sleeveless tee-shirt and a leather jacket lay over the back of the buffet, which must have been in concession to the cold rainy weather in New York. He did things to jeans and sleeveless tee-shirts that would turn an entire apparel industry on its skinny behind if they saw him coming, especially with the black leather belts and plain, square silver buckles he preferred, that sat down low on his hips…and drew the eye.

Kate quite often found her current train of thought utterly derailed whenever Adrian was walking toward her.

He gave her a small smile. “I appreciate the honour of you turning up on time for me, though. I know what it means around here.”

She couldn’t help smiling back. “It means, I’m hungry,” she teased, reaching for the menu.

The restaurant was already getting busy, but it was a Tuesday, so it was unlikely to be too jammed, today. No one was sitting right behind them, where they could listen to every word they said — another reason Kate didn’t like The Standard.

“I’ve been thinking about you.” Adrian’s deep rumble was enhanced by the back seat cushion they shared. It ran through her body and brought it awake and alert in a way that Greg Evershot, bless his adorable A-List ass, just hadn’t managed last night. Kate stared at the first page of the menu without really seeing it.

This was new, for Adrian. This was romantic, almost. To this point, he’d been great company, undemanding, even distant, except that she knew from the look in his eyes and his body language that he wanted her.

And she wanted him. No question. Her body quivered at the idea of Adrian Xerus. But she had always figured she would get to set the pace because so far, she had.

Now this.

“You’ve been thinking about me?” Kate repeated inanely, still unable to focus on the menu. And the stupid thing was, she was girlishly pleased he had spared her a single thought at all, while she apparently couldn’t string a single coherent, adult sentence together in response. Damn it.

“I think you need the next page,” Adrian said, and flipped the page of her menu for her. “That’s just the intro crap.”

She looked at him and rolled her eyes. He was grinning as he leaned back, enjoying her discomposure.

“Asshole,” she muttered. “You did that deliberately.”

He reached out and tucked a curl of her hair behind her ear. “Yep,” he agreed. “Doesn’t mean it wasn’t true. Pick your lunch, Kate.”

.

BLOOD STONE is the second book in the Blood Stone series

BLOOD STONE is the sequel to BLOOD KNOT.

It is a Plus-sized Novel.

WARNING:  This book contains two hot, sexy alpha heroes, frequent, explicit and frank sex scenes and sexual language.
It includes heart-stopping sexual scenes between the aforementioned sexy heroes, menage  scenes, anal sex and the use of sex toys.  Don’t proceed beyond this point if hot love scenes offend you.
No vampires were harmed in the making of this novel.

___

Blood Stone is the second book in my best selling erotic MMF paranormal urban fantasy romance series.  It will be on sale on September 14, if not a bit before then.

The good news?  The first book in the series, Blood Knot, is my #1 best seller, was the Winner of the Coffee Time Reviewer’s Recommended Award, was listed as one of Goodread’s “Most Drool-worthy Covers“, nominated for Erotic Vampire Book of the Year by The Romance Reviews, and received a CAPA Nomination for Best Paranormal Book of the Year by The Romance Studio, December, 2011, among many glowing and rave reviews.  If you’re curious about Blood Knot, you can read more here:  http://bit.ly/g9pSw5.

The really good news?  On the 14^th, when Blood Stone is released, Blood Knot drops down to $0.00 for three days of free downloading at Amazon.

Bookmark Blood Knot on Amazon now:  http://amzn.to/hcrCCf

And bookmark Blood Stone on my website, so you can jump to the Amazon link the day it goes live:  http://bit.ly/TrCuWv

If you want a reminder on the 14^th to go get your free book, sign up to my blog’s RSS feed, or to the email feed, or to my newsletter.

____

Tracy Cooper-Posey writes romantic suspense, hot erotic paranormal and urban fantasy romances. She has published over 40 novels since 1999, been nominated for 5 CAPAs including Favourite Author, and won the Emma Darcy Award.

She turned to indie publishing in 2011. Her indie titles have been nominated three times for Book Of The Year.   She has been a national magazine editor and for a decade she taught romance writing at Grant MacEwan University.

She is addicted to Irish Breakfast tea and chocolate, sometimes taken together.  In her spare time she enjoys sewing, history, Sherlock Holmes, science fiction and ignoring her treadmill. An Australian, she lives in Edmonton, Canada with her husband, a professional wrestler, where she moved in 1996 after meeting him on-line.

You can find her site at http://www.TracyCooperPosey.com.

My new ergonomic saddle chair.

I’ve had the saddle chair for a couple weeks now, and I think it’s working out okay. From the first time I sat on it, I could tell immediately that it did indeed straighten my back, take the pressure off my neck and shoulders, and lift me into a much better position for typing (and for viewing my ginormous computer monitor). Because it’s backless, it was a bit of a core workout at first, but my torso muscles got used to it after only a couple of days.

My butt and other nether regions are having a tougher time of it, though. Sitting on my saddle chair is kind of like sitting on a bicycle seat, in terms of pressing uncomfortably on one’s private areas. At the moment I can only do it for about two or three hours at a time, before things start to get really unhappy. That’s not so bad, though – you should probably move around after three hours on any chair, right?

Now I just need to get some writing done. I had planned to write Novel #2, and possibly also Novel #3, over the summer, but I hardly got any writing done at all. Some of it was other work and personal things sucking up more time than anticipated; some of it was taking a much-needed rest after teaching while working several other jobs in the spring, and some of it was sheer laziness and procrastination.

I don’t know why I think I’ll have more time to write in the fall, since I’m starting yet another full-time job (a research postdoc at my local university) on top of everything else I was already doing, but I remain optimistic. Foolishly optimistic, perhaps, but optimistic nonetheless. We’ll see how it goes.

What do you do, in terms of physical space, mental preparation, and/or time management, to make sure you get everything done that you need to?

Lately I’ve realized that as a writer and freelance editor, I spend a huge chunk of every day working on the computer. And, as we all know, this sort of work can lead to a host of physical problems, including eyestrain, repetitive strain injuries, and headaches. I have prescription eyeglasses, and I’ve had carpal tunnel surgery… now I just need to get a handle on the headaches.

I think a major cause of my work-related headaches is poor posture, and I’ve decided one of the biggest causes of my poor posture is chairs that do not fit me. I don’t know who designs most chairs or who they think they’re designing them for, but I can tell you they are NOT being designed for the comfort of short, heavyset women with particularly short legs. I have a very hard time finding chairs that are not too tall, too deep, and too tilted back (both in terms of the seat itself and the seat back).

After much searching (and after trying some of the “best” ergonomic office chairs on the market, which haven’t worked for me at all), I think I’m going to invest in a saddle chair and/or a kneeling chair. Both designs encourage (indeed, force) you to sit with your back perfectly straight, both allow your legs to rest more vertically than traditional chairs, and both allow you to sit higher than normal chairs (which I think will help me compensate for the fact that most tables and desks are too high for me also). So I think these will be a good fit for me.

Have any of you ever used a kneeling chair or saddle chair? Would you recommend it? Why or why not? What tools and strategies do you use to help you write in a more comfortable and healthy way?

As a novelist and freelance editor, I don’t have an office to go to (yet; more about this in a minute), so I mostly work from home. This works pretty well for me; it’s nice not to have to waste time driving to and from my place of employment, and I enjoy the freedom of being able to sit at my desk, or the dining room table, or on my couch aka bed (it’s a sofa bed) to get work done. And the best part, of course, is working in my PJs – I love that. I’m a huge fan of wearing the comfiest clothing possible, whenever possible.

But after a few days of this, even I – hater of crowds, sun, heat, and most things outdoors – start to go a bit stir-crazy, and start looking for somewhere else to work. So what’s available? I’ve tried libraries, coffee shops, fast-food restaurants, and mall food courts – is there any other indoor public space available that I haven’t thought of?

I love libraries; I always have. But I can’t work in them: they’re too quiet. The quiet itself doesn’t bother me – I can work in silence – but after a while I start feeling like I must be bothering the other patrons. I sniff, I cough, I shift in my seat, I giggle over something I’ve written or read… and after 30 minutes or so I’m in a state of full-on paranoia, assuming everyone within a 50-foot radius wants to claw my eyes out for making too much noise. I’m probably not really that noisy – I certainly don’t whistle, hum, tap, or talk on the phone in libraries like some people do – but I still feel horribly loud for whatever reason. So I can’t last more than about half an hour in a library.

I do a bit better in coffee shops, restaurants, and especially food courts, though I don’t usually manage to stay very long since I get worried that it’s rude to linger after I’ve finished consuming whatever drink and/or food I’ve just purchased. Hmm, maybe the bigger problem here is paranoia…

And speaking of paranoia, I have a hard time writing in public at all. Stephen King has said (or at least, one of his characters – I think it was Gordie LaChance in “The Body” – has said) that “The act of writing itself is done in secret, like masturbation”, and suggested that it may take someone who is “nearly crazy with courage” to do it where anybody can see them.  That definitely describes how I feel. I can edit in public (well, I can do my academic editing in public – my erotic romance editing is another story), but I find it very difficult to write in public. This applies no matter what I’m writing, but it’s even harder when I’m writing romance or erotic romance. In public, I always feel like there’s someone reading over my shoulder.

And what’s wrong with that, you ask? The thing is, I’m not totally sure. I don’t think it’s precisely that I’m afraid of being judged for what I write. If, instead of reading over my shoulder, the same hypothetical person asked what I do, I’d be happy to tell them I write erotic romance, and – if they were interested – give them my name and the title of my book so they could read it for themselves. And if they hated the book or thought I should be ashamed of writing “smut”, I’d shrug and carry on doing my thing.

But there’s something about the thought of being observed in the act of writing that really bothers me. I don’t want anyone watching while I choose my words, while I pour my muse out onto the page. That really does – to me at least, as to Stephen King – seem like having a stranger watch while you masturbate. Can’t do it, nope.

Also, I’m starting a new job at my local university in the fall, for which I will have a shared office. I plan to go in four days a week, and I’m looking forward to finding out how it will be to write (and edit, and do academic work) there. I will definitely try to arrange the furniture so that my office mate and/or people passing by in the hall won’t be able to see my computer screen as I work. But, to be honest, sometimes even sitting in a corner with my back to the wall isn’t enough to let me write comfortably in a public place.

Not yet, at least. I’m going to keep pushing my limits on this, because I really do go stir-crazy working at home all the time, and I really do want to someday feel like the stereotypical hipster sitting in a coffee shop, sipping a latte, tapping coolly away at a screenplay on a Macbook. (Even though I’m not a hipster, I hate coffee, and I’ll be writing romance novels, not screenplays. But I do have a Macbook Air. )

Am I weird? How do you feel about writing in public? Where do you like to write?

I have two academic jobs, one of which pays and one of which doesn’t anymore (it used to but it ended, and now I’m just finishing up the work I didn’t finish while I was getting paid). I have two or three copy editing jobs, depending how you count: one for a romance publisher, and one (or two) for a publisher of various academic journals. Last but not least, I also help out my best friend by working two days a week in the store that she owns and operates (which, I have to say, is a lot of fun. This is my only job that doesn’t involve me being alone on my butt in front of my computer, and it’s wonderfully recharging to a) interact with other people – especially my bestie! – and b) do something physical for a change).

All this stuff doesn’t keep me as busy as it sounds (and I have way more time on my hands now than I did when I was also teaching on top of all the other jobs… o_O), but I still periodically find myself wistfully hoping for a utopian future when I will have all the time in the world (and enough money) to just write.

The thing is, though… I’m not sure I would write much more than I do now even if I did have more time to do so.

See, I have a love/hate relationship with writing. I love it, but it’s also really difficult and painful sometimes, and mentally and emotionally draining even when it’s going well. So I’m not sure I would ever want (or be able) to regularly* spend more than three or four hours a day writing, no matter what else was or wasn’t going on in my life.

*Of course, when I’m in the final stages of a project, whether it’s a novel or something academic, I get to a point where I can’t get the damn thing out of my head and I’m spending every waking moment on it. I’m sure this will keep happening to me no matter what I’m doing. But even absent any other considerations and responsibilities, I can’t see myself ever writing close to this much on a regular basis.

I also seem to have a love/hate relationship with work. Or maybe it’s more that work is like money: no matter how much money I have, I always seem to spend all of it… and no matter how little work I have to do, it always seems to expand to fill all of my available time.

How about you? Do you have other jobs besides writing, and do you enjoy them or wish you could quit them and just write? Do/does your other job(s) complement or compete with the mental, emotional, and/or physical energy you need for writing? (And does anyone else out there have the same problems with work and/or money as me, or am I just the world’s worst time-, budget- and self-manager? LOL) I’d love to hear how you balance writing, work, and everything else in your busy life!

That might seem really idiotic, and certainly I don’t think anybody could pick up a Harlequin with a half-naked Fabio lookalike and an equally scantily-clad woman on the cover, with a title like The Amnesiac Millionaire Tycoon’s Maid’s Secret Baby, and not realize they were holding a romance novel. But that’s just the stereotype. There are lots of other romances out there too, and books of other genres with strong romantic elements. And if you’re reading these—and okay, fine, if you’re a bit ditzy like me—you might not figure out right away that you like reading romance.

I know I didn’t. Not until I made a careful and conscious decision to start reading romance several years ago, because I had gotten tired of my usual authors and genres and wanted to try something new. Like any genre, there are some not very good romance books out there… but there are also some absolutely amazing ones too. And I discovered that there are all sorts of sub-genres and topics that I could find lots of great stories about – like m/m, and cops. (And m/m cops. Yum.)

I love the humor. I love the love. I love all the different ways authors come up with for two (or more) soulmates to meet. And I really really dig the happy endings. I read fiction for the same reason I watch movies: to be entertained, to read about a world I want to live in, and to meet characters I want to be or want to know. Romance and erotic romance give me all of that in spades.

And after I finally realized how much I enjoy romance, I also realized that some of my favorite books are romances, or at least have strong romantic elements, and that’s probably one reason I’ve always liked them so much. Like Deerskin, by Robin McKinley. The first half of this book is kind of slow. And terrible. (Not terribly written; I mean terrible things happen to the heroine.) But I keep reading it – over and over. Because she ends up with the hero at the end. (And he’s even my kind of hero: sweet, somewhat shy, not conventionally handsome, and strong but pudgy.) I love the book because of their relationship.

And, as an even better example, I first read Lucy Maud Montgomery’s The Blue Castle about 15 years ago. I loved it. I’ve re-read it dozens of times since then – my first copy fell apart and I had to order a new one. And… I now realize it’s a romance. It’s kind of silly that never occurred to me till I deliberately sat down to think about it, but there it is.

How long have you been reading romance? What’s your favorite genre of fiction – or sub-genre of romance – and why?

I’m not too sure why Prometheus made me think of these books – maybe it was the look of the Engineers? With Revis’s book I think it’s the general vibe of the story, and the way their society is organized and stratified, plus her character Eldest kind of reminds me of the Overlord in Hughes’s books.

Anyway, if you haven’t read them, these two books are post-apocalyptic YA tales set in two different domed cities (called Arks or Arcs depending on who you ask). People first moved into the arks in response to nuclear war, and they have stayed inside them for hundreds or thousands of years. The first story is actually a lot like The Matrix (though Hughes wrote her story first); (most) members of Arc One’s society are plugged directly into the city’s computer and use it for everything from looking up schoolwork to taking holographic vacations. Tomi, the Overlord’s son, is accidentally ejected from the city and ends up unplugged from the computer. He meets people living outside the dome who teach him the truth behind the lie he has been living.

I like the first book a lot but the second is my favorite. It’s the story of Ruth, a girl in Ark Three. Her ark doesn’t have the same kind of supercomputer as Arc One, and her people have become talented in various psi arts – mostly telepathy and telekinesis. She starts having dreams about people and places she has never seen, but which readers will recognize as the subjects of the first book. Her dreams become so persistent that eventually an expedition is mounted to leave the ark – for the first time in countless generations – and search for the people of Ruth’s dreams.

I have always loved post-apocalyptic stories. I find them really liberating, both as a reader and (though I haven’t yet written one myself) for the writer. There’s kind of a sense that all rules are suspended, all bets are off, and anything can happen now – stuff that couldn’t happen, or would at least have to be very carefully justified, in a story set in a world that hasn’t fallen apart. They can be terrible and scary – and I don’t want us to have a nuclear war or a devastating plague or whatever – but there’s also an undeniable sense of adventure about these stories too. (And the frivolous girl in me really relishes the idea of being able to break into malls and take anything I want without paying for it. )

Here’s a list of all the post-apocalyptic books I’ve read that I can think of off the top of my head:

• Devil on my Back and The Dream Catcher, by Monica Hughes (as mentioned above)
• The Stand, by Stephen King
• Cell, by Stephen King
• Z for Zachariah, by Robert C. O’Brien (Note: This book is well-written but very depressing – it really gutted me as a kid and I wouldn’t recommend it for young readers)
• The Chrysalids, by John Wyndham
• The Hunger Games trilogy, by Suzanne Collins
• Life As We Knew It, The Dead and the Gone, and This World We Live In, by Susan Beth Pfeffer
• The Forest of Hands and Teeth, by Carrie Ryan
• The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood
• Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley (Does this count? It’s set in a far-off future, with a new society that’s very different from ours, but it’s been decades since I read it and I can’t actually remember if there was an apocalypse or not…)

There is a sequel or sequels to Carrie Ryan’s book, but I didn’t really like the first one, so I quit there. And there are some other post-apocalyptic books that I know of but haven’t read, like The Road by Cormac McCarthy, and On the Beach by Nevil Shute (I must read this one; my dad loves it).

I guess this doesn’t technically count, but another wonderful book with a post-apocalyptic feel is The Magic Meadow by Alexander Key (the same guy who wrote Escape to Witch Mountain). The Magic Meadow is another book I’ve been reading over and over since I was a kid.

Maybe someday I’ll write a post-apocalyptic story. I started one once when I was a kid, and let my mom read what I had (which was no more than five pages). She always said that was her favorite of my stories. And as I said, I just really love the freedom in the idea that anything at all could happen, because it’s not our world anymore.

Do you like reading post-apocalyptic stories? What are some of your favorites? Do you love or hate any of the books on my list (and why), or is there something else you would add to it?

I’m also simply fascinated (as, I think, many writers are) with how people write. I don’t know about you, but for me this fascination is probably equal parts sheer love of writing, wanting to find a magic formula or shortcut to brilliance and/or bestsellerdom (or at least a faster, easier writing process), and (of course) procrastination (I can still count this as writing time if I’m reading about writing or writing about writing, right? No? Dammit…)

Hmm… it’s become obvious to me just in writing the above paragraph that one hallmark of my writing style is the fact that I’m dangerously in love with parentheses. Luckily (perhaps?) my publisher (Ellora’s Cave) doesn’t allow parentheses, so I had to cull them all from my first book.

Are there any words, punctuation marks, devices, tropes or styles you love not wisely but too well? I know a police officer who blogs and is working on a book, and he’s far too fond of ellipses. Also of referring to people using ‘that’ instead of ‘who’. Drives me nuts. (Luckily he’s a helluva writer in all other respects, with a helluva sense of humor.) And one of my favourite authors, Dean Koontz, seems to have an unusual favourite word, which is ‘rataplan’. He sure uses it a lot, at least.

Anyway, to get back on topic, I’ve been writing poetry and short stories my whole life (since I was 4 or 5 years old), and I always assumed that all it took to write a novel (other than An Idea, of course) was just taking that short story writing process and doing it for a lot longer, till it added up to a lot more words. But then I set out to write my first novel (the first one I was actually going to finish, dammit,  instead of quitting five or ten or twenty pages in, that is), and I discovered there’s a lot more to it. Like, you (or at least I) need to have some idea what the story is about, and what the plot is. And at some point in the process – maybe not before you write the first draft, but probably during and definitely after the first draft is done – you need to find a way to make that novel hang together as a coherent whole. That’s, you know, going somewhere.

Some writers (like Dean Koontz again, for example) say they have no idea what’s going to happen or who their characters are going to be when they start a new book, and it all just comes out as they write. So I thought this ought to work for me too – brilliant, I’ll just sit at my computer and start typing, and after a while I’ll have a novel!

Well, maybe this works for some people, but I found out it doesn’t work very well for me. I don’t need to know what the whole story is going to be before I start, and I’m far too lazy to make a proper outline, but I learned I need to have some idea who my characters are, and some clue what’s going to happen to them, before I can really get to work. This at least seems to be what made the difference between the idea that eventually became my first novel, Letting Jack Watch, and the two or three other ‘novels’ I started before LJW but that went nowhere. I had an idea who Jack was, who the other two main characters were, and at least some of the things that were supposed to happen to them in the course of the story. (I also ended up giving Jack a backstory/situation that my editor – rightly – felt readers wouldn’t like, and that I had to write out of the novel before it could be accepted for publication, but I’ll save that story for another time). Anyhow, I think this needing-a-rough-idea thing makes me half plotter, half pantser, to use the popular terminology. Also, I was googling around trying to find where I read about Dean Koontz’s writing style in the first place, and I found this instead:

Koontz describes how he writes slowly, polishing a single manuscript page over and over before going on to the next page, then says:

On good days, I might wind up with five or six pages of finished work; on bad days, a third of a page. … The process is slow, but that’s a good thing. Because I don’t do a quick first draft and then revise it, I have plenty of time to let the subconscious work; therefore, I am led to surprise after surprise that enriches story and deepens character. I have a low boredom threshold, and in part I suspect I fell into this method of working in order to keep myself mystified about the direction of the piece–and therefore entertained.

–Dean Koontz

Mystification and entertainment aside, what this quotation tells me is that Koontz actually does have at least some idea where his story is going – maybe not right from the start, but after he’s gotten a few pages in and is busy doing all that polishing, his subconscious mind is figuring out what’s coming up next.

How do you write? Do you plan everything out in advance and stick to your plan, or do you fly totally by the seat of your pants, literally finding out what you’re writing as you write it? Or are you somewhere in the middle, with me (and, I would argue, with Dean Koontz), starting with a hint of a story, and letting your subconscious flesh it out a few scenes or chapters ahead of where your conscious mind is writing? (Or have I created a false dichotomy, and my ‘in the middle’ is actually what pantsers are really doing?) I’d love to hear your thoughts!