Archive for the 'Delicious' Category

September 7, 2007

just in case I was getting big-headed…

Wow, this is the worst review I’ve ever got.

That said, it could be worse. She gives 2.5/5 to books she really likes. And she likes my best friend Kathy okay.

August 23, 2007

a life lesson

Oh and I just wanted to mention once again, for those of you who might have forgotten, that my book which is number six on the WALDENBOOKS BESTSELLER LIST was rejected twice by Harlequin/Mills & Boon before they bought the revised version.

Just goes to show. Something.

(I’m on Kate Rothwell’s blog today.)

August 22, 2007

bestseller!

MacAllister’s Baby is number six on the Waldenbooks/Borders series romance bestsellers list this week.

My fellow Modern-Extra-authors-released-as-Presents are on there too–Kelly Hunter (at NUMBER TWO!!), Kate Hardy, and Trish Wylie.

Hooray!

August 1, 2007

MacAllister’s Baby is out!

Today is the day my first USA book hits the shelves!

HOORAY!!

It’s called MacAllister’s Baby and it’s out as a Harlequin Presents. Here’s a pic of the cover:

If you’d like to read more about this book, there’s an extract on my books page, under its original title, Delicious.

Since I also happen to be in the USA, I’m going to my local Wal-Mart today to see if it’s there.

I haven’t been home to send out newsletters, so if you’re on my list, I’m sorry I haven’t sent you any news about this release. I will when I get back!

If you’d like to be on my newsletter list and receive information about all my releases when they happen, do send me an email using the contact link on the right.

June 22, 2007

more covers

This is the Australian cover for DRIVING HIM WILD (out now).

Love it, love it, love it!!!

And here’s my first US release, MACALLISTER’S BABY (aka DELICIOUS)…out in August.

June 11, 2007

Hey, Delicious is out in Italy this month.

Also in Germany.

Back soon with photos and blog about Kate Walker’s 50th book celebration bash!

April 30, 2007

Grammy eggs

Today I wrote an article for the German romance magazine, Loveletter, about why a chef is a perfect hero. It was to promote Delicious, which is being released in Germany in June.

One of my main points in the article is that food has the power to evoke strong memories, and as an example I mentioned how every Sunday my grandmother Cohen used to cook my brother and me brunch. I never used to like runny eggs so she used to fry eggs for me by breaking the yolks and cooking the whole thing until it was well done and crispy. I called it a “Grammy egg”.

To this day, whenever I eat an egg cooked this way, I think of my Grammy and those Sunday brunches. Lawrence Welk on the TV, comic books in the closet, wrapped strawberry sweets with a liquid centre on the coffee table, doodle pads near the phone covered with crosshatch Grammy scribbles, Grampy sitting by the window watching the people walk by on their way to the Methodist church, and hard-cooked eggs and–if we were lucky–home fries.

Recently, when I was very pregnant, very hungry, and very cranky, my mother made me upside-down toast (which is essentially buttered bread fried in a skillet). Her grandmother used to make that for her when she was a child and she considered it the ultimate comfort food. My mother used to make it for us with soup on cold winter afternoons and made it our comfort food, too. As soon as I smelled upside-down toast, all my crankiness was gone, and all I could do was hug her and say, “Oh, Mommy.”

What food is evocative of memory for you?

June 11, 2006

delicious, third draft (part 4: the heroine)

I didn’t change Elisabeth, my heroine of Delicious, very much. I knew she was a caring person, a dedicated teacher who was afraid of losing control over her life because she had made some mistakes in her past; I knew she was quick-witted, clever, and a little bit sardonic, that she forgave others’ mistakes far more easily than her own, and that down deep, she was desperately in need of fun. And she’s still that in the final draft. What I did do was beef up her backstory to give her more reason to be the way she is, and to develop her emotional reactions.

To give her a reason for her obsession with control and stability, I decided that her childhood had been disrupted by her family moving frequently around Canada (nude Canadian hippies, dontcha know). I also decided her parents had not been strong authority figures, so she values rules and boundaries. In the first draft she’d had a bad relationship with a superficial man in her past, but I decided to really explore the pain that relationship had caused.

Something strange happened while I developed Elisabeth’s backstory, though–something that shows the odd interaction between imagination and real life.

I didn’t check my first draft of Delicious before I wrote the new draft–not beyond the first few pages, anyway–and so I happily built up the backstory I thought I already had…that Elisabeth had gotten pregnant from an earlier disastrous relationship, and miscarried the baby.

Except when I was checking something different in the first draft, I realised something I honestly had not remembered before.

Elisabeth in the first draft had never been pregnant. And she’d never had a miscarriage.

She hadn’t. But I had. About a month and a half before I wrote the new draft of the book, in April 2005, I lost a baby at ten weeks.

Of course, this gave me a huge well of emotion to explore, because I was still dealing with so much of it myself.

And honestly, writing that book helped me hugely. I expressed emotions that I was keeping in, and through my characters, I dealt with them. And just as importantly, I visualised a happy ending for my heroine.

It’s the ultimate in positive thinking. And it’s also why I cry when I finish reading the book, every time.

June 9, 2006

delicous, third draft (part 3: the hero)

First, let’s talk about why Ewan McGregor makes a perfect hero.

He is charming. He is confident. He is talented. He is outgoing. He is adventurous. He is Scottish. (They, whoever “they” are, say that Mills & Boon won’t take Scottish heroes in contemporaries, and I was determined to prove “them” wrong.) He has a good sense of humour. He has the most dazzling smile, even more so because his teeth are not Hollywood perfect. He is gorgeous and has this really cute dimple in his chin. He does not mind getting naked. He has a huge light sabre. I, personally, would do him at a moment’s notice.

Therefore, my hero for Delicious, Angus MacAllister, resembles him. Not in every particular–Angus is taller, and has darker hair, and a more muscular physique.

When I revised Delicious, I had to deepen Angus’s character. My second rejection, from Mills & Boon, said that he was too arrogant, and also that he seemed to have little internal conflict. So I decided to soften the arrogance to self-confidence (accompanied by genuine charm, which is the talent of being able to put people at ease), and I decided to explore why he became a celebrity chef, and why, at the start of the novel, he is seeking publicity and fame–in a bid for the approval he’s never had from anything else in his life.

As the novel is set in a school, I looked at his school life first, and decided to give him a good reason to hate school. This, I figured, would give him conflict right away. I thought about the implications of being famous and popular, and how it could tempt someone into also being superficial. I decided that Angus wasn’t superficial, deep inside, but he’d neglected his emotional life for so long that he needed reminding of it.

All of this gave him conflict, and a character arc, and ensured that Angus would learn from his relationship with Elisabeth, and be forced to examine his own motivations and lifestyle.

I also decided to echo Angus’s conflict in other characters: Christine, his publicist who is focused purely on work; Danny, the once-bullied teenager who turns to deliquency just to fit in; and, of course, the chickens, which represent a nurturing side of Angus he has tried his best not to acknowledge.

(Angus and a chicken, especially for Michelle.)

An interesting side-note about writing a hero called Angus: Word’s spell check does not recognise the name and suggests it is a misspelling of Anus.

Note: for related posts, click the Delicious link, below.

June 4, 2006

delicious, third draft (part 2: the writing style)

Back to Delicious.

As I said in my last post about revising the book, I decided what plot elements I wanted to keep and lose. Then I looked at the manuscript, which I hadn’t read for two years.

Right away, I knew I would have to rewrite the whole novel from scratch.

My style had changed considerably, both in writing and in storytelling. I could explain more, but I’ll embarrass myself and show you what I mean. Here’s the first page of the first draft of Delicious, with what I thought as I read it:

FIRST DRAFT
The bell shrieked in her ears, making Elisabeth’s hand waver as she poured coffee into her mug.
She looked from the clock, to her coffee, back to the clock, and kept on pouring. Her year nine class would have to put up with her drinking coffee while they read Romeo and Juliet. She needed this caffeine.
By the time she’d finished adding milk, the staffroom was empty. Elisabeth grabbed her handbag and, dangling her heavy bag in one hand and clutching her mug in the other, pushed open the swinging door with a practised move of her hip.
Okay, I need NONE of this. All it does is show that Elisabeth is a teacher. I could do that in one line. And NOTHING IS HAPPENING.
The next thing she knew she was on her backside on the staffroom floor, the contents of her handbag scattered around her, and the contents of her coffee cup splashed liberally over the front of a charcoal-grey suit.
I like the heroine on her backside on page one, but aside from that? It’s a cliche. Heroine bumps into hero and spills coffee on him. Yawn yawn yawn. Besides, what’s with the spilling coffee over a suit and not a person? And look at those passive participles, and the adverb. Ugh.
Elisabeth’s eyes travelled up the suit–my God, was it an Armani?–up long legs, over a flat stomach, up a broad chest, past a burgundy silk tie, over a lighter shirt collar, up to a grey-eyed, high-cheekboned, strong-jawed, dimple-chinned, extremely angry face.
What?!? Since when can an English teacher tell an Armani from sight? I can’t. And since when do you describe a person for the first time in bits? Especially the person the reader is supposed to lust over? Look at that chunk of description. I’ve lost my own interest already.
“What the hell do you think you are doing?” gritted the man through clenched teeth.
Okay, leaving aside the obvious tautology of “gritted…through clenched teeth”, our first glimpse of the hero is that he’s an angry jerk with no sense of humour. And I described this guy as charming in the synopsis? Yikes.

In contrast, here’s the final draft. This one isn’t free of faults, but it’s better. I think.

FINAL DRAFT
Elisabeth paused, listening, her knuckles hovering over the surface of the food technology classroom door.
One sentence. She’s a teacher. Easy.
Inside it was completely silent.
She checked her watch: 10.13, midway through period three. She’d passed by here last week during her free period and it had been far from silent—downright noisy, in fact.
The silence disturbed Elisabeth more than any screams would have done. In theory, a silent classroom was A Good Thing. In real life, a silent classroom meant that the students inside were absorbed in something besides cooking.
Which was A Very Bad Thing.
“Please let there not be any blood or fire,” she muttered. She shoved the stack of reports she’d brought for Tasha Cutter to sign underneath her arm, leaned forward, and listened.
She heard the rustle and cough of children. The sound of a chair being scraped back. And softly, just at the limit of her hearing, a cluck.
Something is happening! It’s not a cliche! I’ve kept the chickens!
A cluck?
Okay, this was weird. Elisabeth slowly opened the door.
The room was still. About thirty twelve-year-old students were sitting in a circle, their eyes fixed on the centre of the room. Some of them had their mouths open. She heard another cluck.
A man stood in the centre of the circle with his back to her. He was tall, dark-haired, wearing trousers tailored to his long legs, a midnight blue shirt that fit his broad shoulders, and Elisabeth didn’t recognise him. He certainly wasn’t Tasha.
A strange man, in a teacherless classroom, clucking?
This, I think, is a more realistic description–it is what you’d notice in an attractive man not facing you. Possibly it’s got a little too much detail, but it’s a romance novel, we want to know these things. And he’s not coming across as a jerk. Bizarre, maybe crazy, but not a jerk.

I think the main thing that’s changed, besides all the picky stuff I commented on that probably wouldn’t bother me much in somebody else’s work, is that the second draft has my voice. I don’t know what my voice is, but I know the first draft hasn’t got it. And the second one has. Not sure why–but I do know that voice is at least as important as plot and characterisation, to me, anyway.

June 1, 2006

delicious, third draft (part 1: removing crap)

When I dug out my original draft of Delicious, I actually decided right away that I didn’t feel like reading it. I remembered the scenes I still liked, the lines I still liked, and the characters I still liked; everything else could most likely go.

So I put it away, and started deciding what I wanted to keep and what I wanted to ditch.

First, I knew I had to get rid of most of the external plot. In a romance, what’s important is the romantic, emotional conflict, and I had a feeling that my external plot was too complicated to allow the reader to fully engage with my characters. Plus, it hinged on a secret that the hero had (that he was serving community service for a crime he didn’t commit), which the heroine (and the reader) found out in the black moment. I thought it would be a lot easier for the reader to identify with the hero if they knew what he was about from the beginning.

I thought about what plot elements I really needed:

I needed the cookery contest that forces Angus and Elisabeth to work together. Otherwise, their paths would never cross.

As I needed the contest, I needed the two kids who were participating in the contest. But I decided they needed to be part of the emotional landscape, too. I decided that these two characters, Jennifer and Danny, would mirror Elisabeth and Angus’s emotional conflicts, so that they developed and had setbacks as the romantic relationship developed and had setbacks.

I needed a problem with the media. Originally this was a wholly external plot device, making Elisabeth not trust Angus because she thinks he’s out for fame rather than to help the kids. Again, I decided to make this external device emotional, too–I decided Angus would have a very mixed-up relationship with fame, and that part of his inner conflict is that he seeks fame rather than love, because while he knows he’s good-looking and talented, he doesn’t believe he deserves love.

I needed a birth control failure. Again, I decided to make this a much, much bigger part of Elisabeth’s inner conflict (the blurb on the back of the book gives this part away, though I actually tried to keep that a bit of a secret until later in the book). So it wasn’t just plot, it was emotion.

I didn’t really need the chickens. But I really wanted the chickens. So I worked out a way to make the chickens count–I made them a symbol of Angus’s inner conflict, an emblem for the way he feels about food and love.

I did NOT need: the hero being framed for a crime he didn’t commit, the resulting community service, the illegal immigrant, the dating agency subplot, the wise old guy working in the kitchen, or Angus’s frantic dealings with the press, including the time he gets photographed in his underwear throwing Elisabeth’s bra in the outside bin. All of that was plot, with no real emotional resonance–and besides, it was damn complicated. I was starting to live by the motto of K.I.S.S.–Keep It Simple, Stupid.

This got rid of approximately 30% of the book, and pretty much affected everything else.

At this point I did look at my original draft, to see what I could actually keep, to check if my writing itself was actually okay. The prognosis wasn’t so good.

Note: for related posts, click the ‘Delicious’ category below.

May 31, 2006

writing and revisions and sales

After the second draft of Delicious got rejected, I kept on writing. I wrote the story which eventually became Featured Attraction. I submitted that to the RNA’s New Writers’ Scheme, and got a great crit back, mostly focusing on plot problems. I also sent it to a very dear Harlequin author friend of mine, who gave me some excellent tips to increase emotional depth.

I pitched Featured Attraction at the 2003 RWA conference in New York, and a Harlequin editor requested it. While I was waiting to hear back, I wrote a novella, and a non-category manuscript called Spirit Willing, Flesh Weak. Harlequin asked for some revisions on FA, all focusing on emotional conflict.

Then stuff started happening pretty fast. Featured Attraction finalled in the Golden Heart in March 2004, and then Spirit Willing gathered interest from several agents, one of which I signed with in June 2004, after revising the novel. Then, in July 2004, Brenda Chin from Harlequin called me to say they wanted to buy Featured Attraction.

So–tally so far: Since writing the first draft of Delicious, I’d written three novels and a novella, and revised Delicious and two of those other novels considerably. I’d had one book and the novella rejected, signed with an agent for one book, and sold another.

Then I wrote Being A Bad Girl, my second Modern Extra, in 2005. My editor said she was interested in giving me a two-book contract, and did I have any other ideas?

“Yeah,” I said. “I have this great story about an English teacher and a celebrity chef.” (I didn’t mention the chickens at this point.)

“Excellent,” they said. “We’ll make that the second book in your contract.”

“Brilliant,” I thought. “Sure, that novel was rejected, but I’ve written five manuscripts since, and I’ve learned a lot. I’ve just got to go through and add some emotion here and there. Surely it can’t be as difficult as writing a book from scratch.”

At that point, hollow, malevolent laughter should have echoed through the room, accompanied by lightning strikes and the hideous croaking of vultures. You know, the normal thing that happens when a foolish writer indulges in a bit of hubris.

It didn’t, though. I got out my old manuscript and prepared for a nice, easy revision.

Note: for related posts, click the ‘Delicious’ category below.