Lisa Marie Rice joins us today for her Guest Author Day(s). Read on to learn more about her views on sex, writing, and being a man (not!)…
Top of the morning to you all! I am delighted to be here at The Good, the Bed Bad and the Unread, and am extremely grateful to Sybil Cook for making this happen.
Since I live in an enchanted kingdom far far away, chances are slim that we’ll meet at your local Borders any time soon, so I cherish this opportunity for a chat with readers.
Some of you might know that my first novel for Avon Red, DANGEROUS LOVER, has just been published. It is the first of three and I am finishing the second right now, entitled DANGEROUS SECRETS.
Some of you have been kind enough to email me to say you liked DANGEROUS LOVER, and I thank you for that from the bottom of my heart. It’s just wonderful for me to know that I have struck a chord in a reader’s heart. I was a reader long, long before I was a writer.
Like most of you, I have lived for books all my life. They’ve formed the backbone of my life and have provided comfort in sometimes hard and lonely places. I know exactly what a book you love can mean to you. Diving into another person’s world, letting the cares of your life slip off your shoulders for the hours it takes to read the book. Romances, in particular, can be so utterly captivating, pure entertainment. But they can also—and I speak from personal experience—help heal a broken heart, point the way to a new fork in the road when you’re stranded in quicksand, keep you company when you’re lonely, buck you up when you’re scared. There is nothing else quite like it and I consider it a miracle that at this point in my life, it’s been given to me to write books that resonate in some peoples’ hearts.
I’d love to riff on some topics dear to my heart, so bear with me as I go through some ideas and themes I’d like to share with you, such as IT’S NOT JUST ABOUT THE SEX, THANK YOU EROTIC ROMANCE and I AM NOT A MAN.
I am messing around with the grand order of blog posting. I know… shocking! So in the interest of not confusing people (more than normal) I am putting this post on top. Because there are links here and it explains the bottom posts!
You can find the Q&A here. That work? Should I have left it alone? Am I just confusing you all more?
Note: We will be giving away three (unsigned) copies of Dangerous Lover. To enter comment on any Lisa Marie Rice post by midnight (CST) August 23, 2007.
Hi Lisa,
I read Dangerous Lover and really enjoyed it. I just had one small problem…I thought the ending was rushed. I would have liked to have seen an epilogue showing Caroline and Jack living a HEA. Will we see Jack and Caroline in Dangerous Secrets or read about them in any future books?
Hi Danielle —
do you know, a lot of readers have commented on the ending. what I did was to have speculation in Jack’s head about their future life together just before the final scene and thought that was enough. Plus the epilogue — I thought it would be neat to show that Jack and Caroline were so on the same page with their priorities that they would agree to give away $ 20 million dollars.
I’m sorry if readers felt short-changed and will definitely write more complete endings in the future.
best, Lisa Marie
Oh and sorry — no, for the moment I don’t intend to include Jack and Caroline in a future novel, DANGEROUS LOVER is a standalone.
but a writer’s imagination is a scary thing — they might pop up in the future!
Lisa Marie
The epilogue would be Jack painting Caroline’s bedroom! Well after the hours of non-stop sex! LOL
Hi Lisa, I’m having a total fan girl moment! That should tell you how much I love your work. I have a writer question and I understand if you don’t want to say. Do you work with critique partners/partner? I am not volunteering, WAIT, YES I AM!!! Just asking and trying to keep it to one question per post.
Um..I’m Gail Faulkner…see, I miss spelled my own name I was so excited to see you here
Just wanted to say hello, Lisa. I am a huge fan! I still daydream about John Huntington to this day! Ohmyohmy! I’m sorry to say I haven’t gotten my copy of Dangerous Lover yet, but I’m going to remedy that soon. I’m absolutely looking forward to it!
I really enjoyed Dangerous Lover. And thought Jack and Caroline were great. I did wonder why in the heck the bad guy got so much screen time?
Was that something you set out to do, just happened or did you even notice it until after the fact?
And… should we expect it in the next book? Cuz I didn’t like it. LOL and you know everything is about me *g*.
the books sounds sexy and love the cover too.
Hey I haven’t read this one yet but it sounds like a great book. Look forward to reading it soon. School’s about to start but there’s always the weekends!!!!!!
For GAI —
Actually, my critique partner is Shannon McKenna — aren’t I lucky? and I am the very first person in the world to read her stuff, so that makes me double lucky.
Finding critique partners isn’t easy for me because i also like to discuss things over the phone (and sometimes in person) which is kind of hard to do across the atlantic. shannon lives close by. but I’m super lucky because though she and I don’t have the same themes (how anyone could mistake us is beyond me) she GETS me and I get her. we talk over our characters & plots endlessly. bless her.
Hi Sybil — bad guy too visible? Hmmm. I feel a BAD GUY RIFF coming on…
Okay, I’m going to go back and see how much face time I actually gave Deaver. I think it might be less than you think, and certainly less than there was originally. the editor cut a lot of it out.
Readers sometimes skip over reading about the bad guy to get to the ‘good parts’, which is a shame, though it also means we writers need to do a better job!
The bad guy is important, though. S/he is the foil for the hero/heroine. And it is also important to see how the hero deals with the bad guy. Very few of us, thank god, will ever come across a serial killer, though the way SKs populate books, you’d think they’re a new demographic and you wonder whether they vote Democratic or Republican.
As an aside, you’ll never find a serial killer in my books — the psychopath with the pinwheel eyes who likes to cut people up for the fun. Psychopaths are actually quite rare and they aren’t really functional — they’re too nuts. You WILL find in my books a number of sociopaths, who are numerous in real life. These are highly functional people, utterly rational, who don’t see you as human. you are just an obstacle in their path to what they want and eliminating you is just like swatting a fly. They don’t kill for killing’s sake. they do it for money or power, which makes perfect sense to me. It’s easy to get into the head of a sociopath. Make him utterly incapable of empathy and voilà — you’ve got someone who’d do anything to get his way. the only limit is to be sure not to get caught.
The world is full of sociopaths and you will encounter them and have encountered them. They ruin lives so they can accumulate money and power and they get away with it, too, which is horrible. Your sister’s husband, who left her and the three kids after her mastectomy? He’s living very happily across the country with his 25 year-old new wife and has bought a BMW with the money he saved by not giving child support. The CEO who wrecked his company’s pension fund? He’s in Baja, enjoying his yacht. The cardiologist who crammed in 50 patients in one day for the money and totally missed your mom’s impending heart attack? He retired to Marbella and his golf handicap is improving daily. Your colleague who spread rumors that you were sleeping with the boss? She’s gone on to a fantastic career, leaving wrecked lives behind, one of them yours.
It’s how you deal with THEM that defines you and your real-life hero, who might not be a Navy SEAL and bulging with muscles, but who deals with humor and patience with his father’s Alzheimer’s and stands firm when his company skirts the law.
It’s how you and your real-life hero deal with hatred and bigotry and dishonesty that’s important. As a writer, our job is to make that a bit more exciting than in real life, so you’re dealing with the cold, rational hit man or the perfectly functional terrorist, but it’s all about how you and my fictional characters deal with adversity.
Riff over, for now.
Hello Lisa Marie,
I absolutely love your writing and cannot wait for the next in the Avon Red series. You write particularly strong wonderfully alpha male characters (Midnight Man, Midnight Angel, and Dangerous Lover). Some of your male characters have been written with great moments of real emotion and expression. Did you write these characters as a wish for what characteristics that you personally would like to see in men or was there a particular person in mind as your muse?
Just wondering. . .
~Stephanie
For Stephanie —
That’s a really interesting question. First of all, I like to think that my men are MEN. Not as in the other gender, but as in not children. they take responsibility for what they do, they mean what they say and they say what they mean.
my heroes are a compendium of traits I admire I’ve noticed in men. Some are traits my husband has, because he has a very strong moral core and is utterly incorruptible. of course MY heroes pick their socks up off the floor! 😉
I notice quiet heroism in men all around. The teacher who works tirelessly with the little boy whose parents are divorcing and who has started getting into fights. The men you can count on utterly when it’s an emergency. of course my job is to take that quiet everyday heroism and make it visible and dramatic.
I also observe men I find contemptible, see what makes them tick and make MY men not-them. The man who abandons his sick wife because the marriage isn’t ‘fun’ anymore. The man who uses the kids’ college fund to buy himself the Porsche when he has a mid-life crisis. The man who promises love to get you into bed and doesn’t remember your name in the morning. There was a movie a couple of years ago called, I think, IN THE COMPANY OF MEN, where two scumbags seduce and abandon a deaf girl, simply because they could. you study that behavior because you don’t want even an atom of that in your hero.
Oh, Gail — sorry to write your name Gai!
hee I just saw ‘the bad guy riff’ I may need to put it in it’s own post *g*
Did you reread and decide if you felt there wasn’t too much 🙂