The Mother of RE-invention

This is my first visit to Love is An Exploding Cigar and I want to thank Samantha for her techy help!

Picasso said once, “I am always learning what I do not know, so I will know better how to do it.” Nothing speaks closer to the life of an author than these words. Books, research, workshops, networking, conventions, signings, reviewing, editing, promotion…and writing a newspaper column (seven years as an advocate of Fine Arts in our schools.) It’s a continual classroom out there.

Daily, it seems, we are reinventing ourselves, whether as parents, as community leaders, as authors, editors, even publishers. As the Journey song says, “The Wheel in the Sky Keeps on Turning.” It helps if you have a personality that includes being flexible. And honestly, some days I’m better at that than others.

My story isn’t like the majority of authors who penned their first story at a tender age. I was/am an artist and my dream? To draw for Disney. What better job could there be than to create from your imagination characters that would delight, thrill, and entertain others? But life had other plans for me, yet in the connectivity of all things, I came to a crossroads, where I had the opportunity to embrace that “artist” in me, this time not with paint and brush, but with words.

What I learned from my art studies, in seeing past the obvious, using my imagination, I use now in building my characters, creating worlds, and telling stories. In a practical sense, paintings and photos offer visual inspiration for me. My study of music and its effect on the brain serves as inspiration as well, utilizing various types of music (notes, not lyrics) to infuse an image or mood.

With a few published books, a handful of awards, and a number of short stories and novellas later, I stand again at a threshold of another new experience--the debut of my first erotic historical women’s fiction novel with Spice. I am in some seriously gifted company and honored to published alongside such talent, including my new writing partners (Winter’s Desire anthology /Spice 2009) Join us for a look at writing hot historical at Lust in Time

But with every new book I think an author ponders a bit how the book will be received. I’m no different. Especially since the story itself is one that definitely colors outside of the box . For one used to writing one man/one woman romance, I had to step outside my comfort zone of all I’d thus far learned, and see things from a wider scope of viewpoints. It was refreshing actually, and doing so has broadened the parameters of my writing. It’s provided growth, and growth is good.

Still, those questions niggle at my brain…how will readers accept Cozette, orphaned at a young age, her life entangled with the white slave trade during some of the darkest hours of London’s history? How will they receive the sordid accounts of her life, of doing what she must to survive the brutality of living on the streets? How will they see her after a woman of stature befriends her, and though her life changes in some ways, she sees that neither wealth or social status changes the attitude or view toward women in a male dominated society?

Cozette silently studies all the men in her life, learns by their example and keeps an account of her experiences as she becomes the woman she wishes to be. Is there a hero? There are many. Some formed of a young girl’s dream of “Mr. Right,” others for sake of convenience, while another, physically scarred, carries a secret too painful to reveal. Cozette, with flaws of her own, learns from these would-be heroes how to play the cards that life has dealt to her.

Does it have an HEA? I think so, at least one that I feel is well-suited for such a daring, and rebellious woman. But that’s all I’ll say for now, you can read an except on my website. I do hope you’ll watch for it in October and let me know what you think. Set in the Dark Ages, my heroine is the imprisoned apprentice of a tyrannical Saxon Lord’s executioner. And yes there is romance, lust, greed, and all that juicy stuff of what I hope turns out to delight, entertain, and thrill you!