I’M A HOOKER AND PROUD OF IT!

What’s that you say? The scandal! The horror! Read on as the long time Silhouette Special Edition author and three time RITA nominee bares all for fearless TGTBTU readers.


CHRISTINE RIMMER CONFESSES: I’M A HOOKER AND PROUD OF IT

Oh, well, no. Not that kind of hooker. But I did get your attention, now, didn’t I?

So I hear it’s Silhouette Special Edition month here at TGTBTU. How wonderful is that? Extremely. I’m so pleased to be invited to contribute the celebration.

I suppose a little introduction wouldn’t hurt. I’m Christine Rimmer and I’ve been writing for SSE for a very long time. I have about seventy published contemporary romances to my credit and fifty or so of those stories came out in Special Edition. Though I’ve written for other lines and imprints, I always seem to come back to Specials. The line suits my voice and writing style perfectly.

I love to write about families, and SSEs are often stories about women finding love while dealing with any number of family issues. Love that. Love writing that. Love stories about finding family, and many of my stories feature the “finding family” theme.

I also love taking a secondary character from one book and making him a hero in his own story. I do that a lot. With heroes and heroines. I’ve written three miniseries of my own in SSE: The Jones Gang, The Bravo Family stories and a contemporary Viking series, Viking Brides. The Bravo Family saga, my most successful series which has come out under three different miniseries titles, is twenty-three books long now, and counting. I’m just setting out to write a whole new branch of the Bravo family that will be ten books long-seven brothers, two sisters. And a Latina half-sister they don’t yet know they have.

And about being a hooker…

By that I mean, I love writing the most popular “hooks.” Yes, it’s true. Some may scoff at the classic romance plots. Not I. Secret babies, fake engagements, babies found on doorsteps, pregnant heroines, bosses and secretaries falling in love, marriages of convenience…you name the classic romance convention and chances are I’ve written a story based on it, most likely more than one. I love reinventing a classic plot every time I do it.

As Karen Templeton already said so perfectly, SSE focuses on stories of real women finding love in a world that might exist right down the block. The heroes can be beta, they can be the guy next-door. They don’t have to be macho tycoons or ranchers or sheiks-but it’s way more than all right if they are. That, to me, is the best thing about SSE. As long as it could happen in what most of us think as “real” contemporary life, hey, you will find it in SSE. And even the “reality” parameter is occasionally stretched. I wrote three contemporary Viking stories in SSE. I created an imaginary Viking country where the Norse ways still held sway. And one of my earlier SSE heroines had psychic powers. So even the “real people in the real world” rule can be stretched. And sometimes broken.

And then there’s the sex. In SSE, if the story doesn’t require a full-out consummated love scene-there won’t be one. Of course, such a thing would never happen in one of my books. After seventy books, I still adore creating a hot, character-driven love scene. Or ten.

In SSE, there’s a whole lot to love. If you haven’t given Special Edition a try yet, I hope you’ll take the plunge.

Questions? Requests? Advice? I love to chat. My internet provider is not being nice lately, but Sybil will help me respond to your comments.

Visit me at my website, www.christinerimmer.com or my blog, http://christinerimmer.blogspot.com/ or on Myspace, http://www.myspace.com/christinerimmer