Anya Bast

Cross posted to the Bradford Bunch Blog

Recently I’ve been hearing stories about writers doing rash things when they’ve been unable to sell their work. Quitting forever (is a popular one), but some people even hurt themselves physically over what they perceive as a failure. (I use the word perceive because I have a much different definition of failure than most people.)

On the happy flip side of this, one of my dear friends Lauren Dane has sold two books to Berkley Heat recently! I have watched her from the beginning, before she sold to Ellora’s Cave. Over the years I’ve observed her unwillingness to never give up, even when she thought things looked their darkest.
It took me ten years to sell my first book. During that time, I endured a bad agent relationship, and amassed enough rejection letters to wallpaper two rooms. I even I did quit “forever” once. I meant it, too, and didn’t write again for three years until I realized I was being dumb and I should be doing the one thing I loved, regardless of whether or not I sold. Once I started writing purely because I loved it, that’s when everything fell into place for me.

Of course we want to sell to publishers. Writers don’t want to exist in a vacuum. We want to share our words and worlds with other people.  That’s why we don’t simply just write for the joy of it and simply slip our finished product under the bed. We write for the the joy of it and try to sell that work to the world to read. And it’s a hard sell in most cases. Sure, once in a while you read about someone who never had to struggle, (and secretly we hate them. Heh.), but most of the time it takes years of blood, sweat, and commitment to finally break in.

It’s the result of art meeting commerce. It’s an uneasy match most times, and heartbreaking for those who have produced art that isn’t marketable.

The bottom line is that to pursue this path, you must have perseverance. Perseverance is not a guarantee that you will eventually sell, but without perseverance odds are you won’t. Writing is not an easy career path. Choose it because you love to write. Don’t choose it because you think you’re going to make a lot of money. You probably won’t. Choose this path because you love the “work” and, above all, persevere.

If you can keep an image in your mind of who you want to be and work toward making it real, chances are that, (with some stumblings and a few confusions here and there), you’ll succeed. It might take you ten years or longer, but you’ll eventually make a break.

Can you tell me about one time you really had to get your perseverance on?  How did you manage it?

1. I KNOW there were two socks when I put them in the washer and now there is only one. Where, oh, WHERE did the other one go?
2. How is it some people can get so wrapped up in TV show fandoms that they sound like they think it’s all real. Also, isn’t there more important things to get so worked up over?
3. Homophobia. Gah! Such a frustrating mystery to me.
4. How it is that Cute Overload has reached in and possessed a chunk of my soul.
5. How they could have thought it was a good idea to cancel Dead Like Me or Firefly.
6. Star fruit is always on sale in the produce section, but who actually buys and eats it?
7. Pork rinds. Can we just not?
8. How I can alternate between Zen Buddhist calm and all out anxiety with no middle ground.
9. How in the middle of the night I manage to step on that one block I managed to miss during toy clean up.
10. How some weeks I have tons of things to blog about and other weeks…nada.

What are some of your personal mysteries?

A scintillating day in the life of a romance author. There are thrills! There are chills! There are….yeah, okay, there’s none of that. There is some caked on food I had to scrape off a onesie and barely averted coffee spill onto on my laptop keyboard.

A photo journal of my day.

5am. Insomina. Get up and write, check email, write blogs until Chiclet wakes:

Mmmmm…coffeeee….

Feed dog. (oh….and here’s where it gets really exciting. Hold on guys!)

Chiclet wakes. We both have breakfast (mine is different from hers)

We get ready and hit the road to run errands:

Ipods are just the most awesome thing in the world. Ipods docks for your car stereo are EVEN BETTER. I have a music-loving Chiclet. She especially likes The Decemberists. Luckily, so do I. (Damn…I need to clean my car interior)

Shopping at our friendly neighborhood Target.

They didn’t have what I needed.

Then it was off to toddler open gym for Chiclet, where we played for an hour and a half:

Then home again! A nap for Chiclet and….

Writing for me. Mmmmmm…diet cooooke with liiime…..

My computer is “well loved”. I use it a lot, after all.

After she wakes up, we have lunch and go through our normal afternoon routine of me stacking blocks, playing with toys with her, changing diaper, while getting snatches of writing time in between.

Yes, the glamorous life of a romance author. Y’all are lucky I didn’t have scrub toilets today. 😉

I woke up at 5am and couldn’t go back to sleep, so I got up to write and do some picky administrative things I’ve been putting off. (Writers have to do picky administrative things. Who knew?)

Going through my email, I found five pieces of email from readers stashed in various places. OY. I have a one touch policy with reader email. I open it and reply to it immediately. When it’s stashed in strange folders, it makes it hard for me to do that. Four bits were about Witch Fire (I’m totally amazed I ever get any at all).  Made me happy. Did not make me happy they were stuck in an unread folder. I replied immediately.

There was also an email about Ordinary Charm. Out of all my Ellora’s Cave books, that one gets the biggest response from readers. Maybe because it’s a witch book? Apparently I’m not bad at writing witches. Hmmm….maybe I should examine that one more closely. Heh. Maybe because the witch is overweight? Not many romance novels, erotic or otherwise with plus size characters.

In other news, I finally hit my stride on Witch Heart. I had to rewrite the beginning twenty gazillion times because getting the book off to the wrong start…? Not good. Finally Adam blew something up and everything fell into place. I set the book in Crocus Hill, St. Paul, Mn (That would be the Summit Avenue area, for those who know). Well, a big chunk of it will be there, anyway. I plan to do some damage. 🙂 Demons run amok and such. Funnily enough, I know more about this area of St. Paul now than when I lived there. Via research and the Intarweb!

Today I am photo-documenting my day as a blogging experiment. If it doesn’t turn out too incredibly boring, I’ll post it soon.

The wonderful Rhian of Creative Goddesses has created a movie and cast me, Megan Hart, Lauren Dane, and others of her tribe in it. It’s way too funny. You have to check it out. It’s a bit violent (in a totally unrealistic way), but amusing as hell. Rhian owes me a new laptop because I spit coffee all over mine. 😉

I always knew there was something odd about Megan Hart.

My husband woke me up because I was crying in my sleep. Normally I wake myself up because I cry really, really hard in my sleep. It’s amazing how everything is more intense in dreamlandia than it is in waking reality. Emotion is sharper, sex can be more explosive. My theory? Uhm…not sure exactly, but it has something to do with the centers of the brain.

The dream, btw, was nothing personally traumatic or anything. It was just a dream with a heavy emotional component.

So we get up (quiet, not to wake the daughter), make coffee and we’re standing there in front of our living room window looking out over the frost-laced front yard and…a buffalo walks through our line of vision. A WHITE buffalo, an adolescent. He ambles down our little country street alongside the cow pasture in front of our house and off down the road.

Me: *head tilt* Uhm?
DH: “Did you just see that?”
Me: “I think so.”
DH: “I’ll go call the police.”

Turns out he’s an escapee from a nearby buffalo farm. Wasn’t sure there for a sec if I wasn’t still dreaming. *g*

Lauren Dane sold two books to Berkley Heat, you all!!!! Go on over to her blog and offer her some congratulations! She’s been working long and hard for this one and I know she would appreciate it.

The book she sold is called Battlefront (at least, for now) and it’s way hot. It’s a futuristic menage with a righteous dose of BDSM. I’ve read it and it rocks.

And….how about this for a cherry on the cake?

Our agent, (mine and Lauren’s), just ranked FOUR in Publisher Weekly’s Top Five Dealmakers of 2007!! This is especially impressive because Laura is a newer agent on the scene and just look who she ranks with. Pretty damn cool….

Roberta Brown
Natasha Kern
Dierdre Knight
Laura Bradford
Pam Ahearn

Of course, myself and some others knew she was awesome before anyone else knew she was awesome. 😉 This comes as no surprise to us.

Cross-posted to The Bradford Bunch blog

Opposite attract is an old saying and one that definitely bears out in my opinion. My husband and I are just about as opposite as you can get. He’s outgoing, extroverted, lives for the social scene. He’s methodically organized with everything. I’m, well, the opposite of all that. *g* I’m introverted, not scared of a social scene, just not energized by it. And I’m definitely not organized with anything but my novel files. (I can never, ever find my keys! Or my cell phone!) I’m the creative, kinda dreamy one, the right-brainer philosopher type. He’s the feet-on-the-ground, take charge of reality type.

Oddly, though, despite our huge differences in personality, we work really well together and have for many years now. We have qualities the other lack and so, together, we make a whole. Kinda like ying and yang. Probably this situation doesn’t always work, but sometimes it does.

Since it works for my husband and I, I tend to pair my heroes and heroines the same way. It’s what I know. (Write what you know.) To me, the right kind of opposite equates character chemistry. Chemistry makes the romance. ***

In Witch Fire, Jack McAllister is unpredictable and impetuous (a little like the element he commands). He needed a woman to balance him out, so I gave him Mira, a woman who is coming out a bad relationship and is (trying) to proceed cautiously and make solid decisions.

In Witch Blood, Thomas Monahan is a little bit uptight. He’s a micro-manager and a control-freak. He’s got a lot riding on his shoulders and never really allows himself to cut loose at all. He’s sort of Jack’s opposite (and they clash once in a while because of it). Thomas clearly needed a free spirit and that’s what I gave him. That’s all I want to say about that, since the book hasn’t come out yet. 😉

And now I’m writing Witch Heart (that title might change). The hero is introduced in Witch Blood. He’s a real commitment-phobe and has lots of relationships with women, but always makes sure they don’t go farther than the bedroom. He jokes around a lot and everyone thinks he’s a carefree and restless. That’s his rep. There’s more when you scratch this guy’s surface, though. Stuff that’s hinted at in Witch Blood, but will only come fully into the light in Witch Heart.

His heroine is waaay different from any heroine I’ve really ever written before. Her experiences have been such that she’s far, far different from any woman this guy has ever met (she’s a challenge to write too). I think she’s exactly what he needs. Talk about opposites attracting. And, again, that’s all I want to say about this book.

Oh, here’s a tangent. One of my pet peeves about romance novels is the scene in which everyone is fearing for their lives, yet the hero and heroine are busy lusting after each other. You, know, like, the serial killer is rounding the corner, advancing on the hero and heroine, knife in hand, yet the heroine can’t stop thinking about the hero’s massive biceps?

What are some of your romance pet peeves? I want to blog about them next week, so weigh in! Or tell me about your experiences with “opposites attracting”. I want to hear it all.

***Disclaimer here: It’s my intention to create character chemistry. The end result, like everything else, is in the eye of the reader.

Yeah, I loved Transformers. Shoot me. *g*

Devon Matthews (Hi Devon!! *waving*) asked yesterday, “What’s the difference between an urban fantasy romance and a paranormal romance?”

Er. I probably made up the term urban fantasy romance all on my own. Ooops. 🙂 But (to me, anyway) the difference is setting. My Elemental Witch books are taking place in Chicago and Minneapolis, but in an alternate reality in which witches and demons exist. What I write is paranomal romance, definitely. I would also call it (and it has been called) urban fantasy because of the urban setting/alternate reality angle. Hence, urban fantasy romance.

But, gosh, there are so many labels, categories and sub-categories!  The romance genre is changing, growing and mutating all the time. I just love it!

I wrote a response to a question posed about the definition of erotic romance to a discussion loop recently. This is that response, but kind of expanded (new and improved and now with tangents!). This question comes up frequently on loops and blogs, ect.

Mostly, I think the definition of erotic romance is developing and changing as erotic romance becomes more a mainstream feature of the romance genre. I also think that everyone has their own definitions of these terms. Going by the dictionary, after all, is a little limited.  Everyone brings a different perspective to the books they read based on their worldview and life experiences. One person’s erotic romance is another person’s porn.

My books have been called porn. I don’t have a problem with the word porn, really, even though the people wielding the word usually mean it in a negative way. As in, “This book has no plot; it’s just meaningless porn”. (Obviously, I tend to not agree. Heh. However, I understand the POV/worldview element and respect the person’s right to her perception.) Here’s how I define the term: Porn to me is visual, not written. Porn is explicit images in magazines and on video.

Erotica is any written story where the sex is the primary focus. There might be a plot beyond the sexual story, but the focus is on sex. Typically, I don’t think of these stories as romances, though the plot might explore larger issues or show the emotional development of the characters (literary erotica). It also might just be the “penthouse letters” form of erotica and meant simply to titillate.

Erotic romance is a romance, where the development of the relationship between the hero and heroine is focused on, but is also very sexually explicit. Erotic romance interweaves the sexual and emotional journey of the H/H. If you cut away all the sexual bits, the story still stands on its own. However, sex plays a large role in the plot.

A non-erotic romance usually only focuses on the emotional development of the relationship, less so on the sexual (although, of course, that’s always a part of it to some degree).

I don’t really see any problem making an erotic romance a very emotional and heart tugging journey, while also having it be explicit. So, to me, an erotic romance is simply a romance novel with door flung wide open on the lovemaking scenes. 🙂

Now, I write everything from what I would term paranormal romance to erotic romance to flat out erotica. Mostly what I write is paranormal erotic romance or urban fantasy erotic romance. I think trying to slap a label on this particular sub-genre gets a little complex.

My books vary in their degree of heat because of the characters. Sometimes I write characters who are totally all right with super-kink and engage in it freely. Sometimes not. Ultimately, they are the chief drivers of how hot a novel is. So some of my books have a high degree of sexuality, sometimes less so. I would say that as a general rule, readers who don’t enjoy explicit sex scenes should probably stay away from my work.

What are your definitions?