Month: December 2009

Bonnie Edwards Guest Blogs Tomorrow!

Tomorrow erotic romance author Bonnie Edwards drops by as my last guest blogger of the year. Thank you, Bonnie! Bonnie’s blogging about from where writers get their ideas and is giving away a copy of her December 2009 Kensington Aphrodisia novella anthology, BREATHLESS. Yes, she is. Would I lie?

About BREATHLESS:

“Let go. Let go for me…” It was a house of sizzling seduction, and satisfaction guaranteed. Now the notorious bordello Perdition House bares all its secrets—and ignites your wildest fantasies…

Blue McCann longs to feel desired…needed…wanted. Now, thanks to a mysterious corset, she’s a lush-bodied beauty back in 1913. And she’s going to reward the caring, oh-so-capable hands of Dr. Colt Stephens with all the pleasure he can take…

Tawny James has legs—and secrets—that won’t quit. And since she likes her men big and bad, private investigator Stack Hamilton is uncovering all her luscious desires…

And when Mariel Gibson needs artistic inspiration, she calls hard-bodied carpenter Danny Glenn to work his masterpiece—over and over again. Because you can never, ever reveal too much…

About Bonnie:edwards_pic

Bonnie Edwards has worked at a variety of jobs but loves storytelling best. Raised in Toronto, Canada, she now lives on an island within view of the Coastal Mountains and the City of Vancouver. In 2006, she helped launch the Kensington Aphrodisia erotic romance line. December 2009 brings BREATHLESS, a single author anthology from Aphrodisia. Look for her Harlequin Blaze, Possessing Morgan, in March 2010.

To learn more about Bonnie and her books, please visit her website.

2009 Box ‘O Books Holiday Give-Away

**UPDATED** December 11, 2009. Karen from the comment trail won the Box ‘O Books and a copy of my romantic comedy, HEAD OVER HEELS.

Congratulations, Karen, and thank you to everyone who entered!

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I had so much fun with this give-away last year that I’m doing it again this year. I’m a little late, so if you enter I can’t guarantee you’ll receive the books before Christmas, but, depending where you live, you should receive them before the end of December. Got that? Ready? Go!

The holiday season is upon us—what better time to tame my TBR pile and give away a Box ‘O Books?

The books I’m giving away to one lucky winner are comprised of free copies I’ve received at writing conferences and haven’t found time to read, as well as books I’ve bought but have never found time to read, or books that I’ve accidentally bought two copies of (hey, it happens).

These are all new, never-read books. Not ARCs. Not used books. Brand new, never-read. Not by me or by anyone else.

Here’s what’s up for grabs:

Leanne Banks, Some Girls Do

Gemma Bruce, Who Wants to Be a Sex Goddess?

Rachel Gibson, Simply Irresistible

Shirley Jump, The Bride Wore Chocolate

Karen Kelley, Double-Dating the Dead

Cindy Kirk, When She Was Bad

Susan Mallery, Married for a Month

Christie Ridgway, First Comes Love

Gena Showalter, Catch a Mate

Kelley St. John, Flirting with Temptation

If you’ve read this far, I’m also including a copy of one of my romantic comedies, your choice of either BORROWING ALEX or HEAD OVER HEELS (please click the links to find out more about each book). If you already have copies of both (aren’t you sweet?), feel free to enter anyway, because you can always ask me to sign the extra copy to your mom, your best friend, or your guppy.

The Rules:

  1. Contest is open from Saturday, December 5th to Thursday, December 10th. I’ll choose the winner’s name at random Thursday at midnight and contact the winner Friday morning, December 11th by email for your snail mail address, so I can ship the books. I’ll ship the books within 2 or 3 days of hearing from you.
  2. Only one entry per person please.
  3. I am very sorry, but because of the weight of the Box ‘O Books and because Canada Post doesn’t provide discounts for shipping books, I can only open the contest to residents of Canada and the contiguous United States. This means that if you live in Alaska, you can enter (seeing as Alaska borders the Yukon), but if you live in Hawaii, you can’t. I’m shipping the winner the books by ground, not airmail.

How to Enter:

  1. Enter your name in the Comment trail, and please let me know if you would like a copy of HEAD OVER HEELS or BORROWING ALEX along with the Box ‘O Books. OR
  2. Email me at cindy AT cindyprocter-king DOT com with BOX ‘O BOOKS in the Subject line, again please letting me know if you would like a copy of HEAD OVER HEELS or BORROWING ALEX included in your holiday surprise. OR
  3. Facebook friends can enter their name in the Comment trail of this note on my profile or by options 1 or 2, your preference. If a Facebooker wins, I’ll message you through Facebook. Oh, and in case you haven’t guessed, when you leave your Facebook comment, let me know if you’d like a copy of HEAD OVER HEELS or BORROWING ALEX along with the Box ‘O Books.

Go forth and enter! Tell your buddies, tell your chapters, tell your guppies.

The Great Christmas Tree Debate

An innocent posting (of mine) to Facebook last weekend sparked a bit of debate, so I thought I’d bring it here. Not the debate necessarily. Just the questions. You see, I’ve been harboring a bit of Christmas-decorating guilt. Because I haven’t done any yet. And I probably wouldn’t think of doing any if not for My Liege and Youngest Son doing it for me. Doing the outside decorating, that is. The blow-up Santa on the motorcycle is on the carport roof, the blowup_santalights are on the house. But I’m not, no way, not even considering, putting up our Christmas tree until at least December 15th. I’ve never been able to fathom putting up the tree earlier than 2 weeks prior to the big day. Part of this is because we use live trees, and I like them to last until after January 1st. We put our tree in the family room in the basement, because that’s where the monster TV and fireplace is, and My Liege does love his fire every night. We have a huge living room, but when we first moved into this house it served as a living room/piano room/partial dining room AND office (complete with two desks). There was no room for a tree. So the stockings went on the upstairs fireplace and the tree went downstairs. My kids grew up like that, so that’s how they want the tradition to remain. I can’t argue.

Thanks to social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook, it has recently been revealed to me that it might be something of an American tradition to to do all your Christmas decorating—including putting up the tree—on Thanksgiving weekend a month before Christmas. In some ways, the idea makes me jealous. American Thanksgiving kicks off the holiday season, so dispensing with the turkey one day, observing Black Friday the next, then decorating for Christmas makes sense. For me as a Canadian, however, it doesn’t make sense until I’m staring the Christmas countdown in the face, and that’s always ten days before.

Now, some say you can put up your tree a month early even if it’s a live tree, that proper watering will keep it going until Christmas. Thanks, but I don’t want to try that with a roaring fire in the same room every evening. The other option that is becoming more and more popular is the artificial Christmas tree. Twenty years ago, I found fake trees laughable. I mean, they looked pretty darn fake. Now, they look great. I can easily see the argument for an artificial tree (which I’ll refer to as fake from now on for the sake of my typing fingers). They can go up earlier and you don’t have to worry about them catching on fire or your toddlers playing in the water or eating the needles xmas_tree_farmthat fall on the floor. If you buy a good fake tree, I’m sure you could expect to keep it for twenty years before dumping it in the landfill. Whereas, with a live tree, you replace it every year.

We get our live trees from a Christmas tree farm down the road (that’s a picture from last year). The farm is within walking distance, but the trees are up a steep hill and we always seem to have to go to the top to find THE one. That’s enough walking without needing to haul the tree all the way back to the house without benefit of the pickup. Before we discovered the Christmas tree farm, we’d cut a live tree from our woodlot or a piece of property we once owned, or one of my dad’s properties. We called it juvenile thinning. Now, it’s much easier to just visit the tree farm, which didn’t grow anything but dry yellow grass and cow pies before it came into existence. Every year around about this coming weekend, we go and flag which tree we want. Then, when we go back around the 15th, we’re rest assured there’s still a tree left to buy. The tree goes up until New Year’s Day, and then we take it into town for chipping. For getting a live tree, I figure the way we do it could qualify as “green.”

I didn’t realize until I posted about live versus fake trees on Facebook that there’s a bit of a controversy over the environmental greenness of Christmas trees. I can see arguments on both sides, so I thought I’d do a little survey here.

  1. Do you have a fake or live tree?
  2. What’s the reason for your choice? Are you motivated by environmentalism or something else?
  3. Are you staunchly against live or fake trees? Why?
  4. How early do you put up your tree?
  5. When do you take it down?
  6. If Canadians celebrate Thanksgiving in October, why can’t we kick off our Christmas holiday season then?
  7. If not for Halloween, would we?
  8. Can you imagine drinking eggnog for two freaking months?

Doggone It

While my American readers were enjoying Thanksgiving feasts last Thursday night, I was having conniptions (and doing a great job of not showing it, I might add). I lost Allie McBeagle! And it was all my fault.

Any hound owner knows not to leave their beagle, foxhound, walker hound, bloodhound, basset hound, whatever-else-sort-of hound or partial hound, unattended in the great outdoors. Beagles have been described as a “nose on legs,” and that pretty much describes my Allie. She’s motivated by food and scents. We live on a double lot and don’t have a fenced yard. Well, we do have a fence, but it’s one of those post-and-board thingies like they put up back in the Sixties (when our house was built) when dogs ran free and you were lucky to have even a decorative fence. We’ve lived in this house 19 years and we have considered replacing the fence. But then we’re also considering selling this house and building on the empty lot within the next several years, and then we’d just have to build another fence. Too lazy to do it twice (not to mention the expense).

So…I took Allie grocery shopping. When we returned, no males were home. Usually, the dog is in the house with me while my guys bring in the goodies. Not this time. Allie was wandering the yard while I did it. And then…I thought I called her in. I remember her actually being in the kitchen. Was it her doppelganger? It must have been, because I closed the door and went about my business confident that all was well and good.

About 30-40 minutes later, I realized that the house was too quiet. No pattering of little dog claws. My first thought was that Allie had had an epileptic seizure (as she does a couple of times a year), so I scoured the house for her. No luck. It was already getting dark by this time, so I scoured the yard, then phoned My Liege while I set off through the neighborhood to look for my dog.

My Liege came home and did The Whistle (that I can’t do) from the deck. No luck. He went on the roof and did The Whistle several more times. Still no luck. It was dark by now, and we both started driving and/or walking the neighborhood. I called the SPCA and a local radio station. Every 30 minutes to an hour I’d return to the house to eager_beaglesee if someone had called. No luck.

What really scared me was that she didn’t respond to The Whistle. She always responds to The Whistle. She’s eight years old now and will come if she hears it. Not like when she was one or so and ran away while I was walking her in the orchard. She saw a deer (dead of winter) and took off after it high into the hills and into the provincial park. I thought that was it, I’d never see her again (courtesy of hungry coyotes or cougars). About 6 hours later, the orchard caretaker found her and returned her to me.

Another time, she was found two roads away. The person who found her called the SPCA with her dog tag number, they gave the person my phone number, and the person phoned me. At that point I realized not all people would know to call the SPCA, so I got Allie a tag with her name, phone number, address, province and even country! I mean, you just never know. That tag has saved her twice now, and it saved her Thanksgiving night. After more than 2 hours of looking, I came home to find a phone message. She was the next neighborhood over, far enough away that she couldn’t hear The Whistle, but traveling a route that she and I travel frequently on our walks.

It was only after we got her home that I broke down in tears. Of relief. I already have one dog’s demise on my conscience (Blackie, from my childhood, who my dad had to put down after he bit my BFF, formerly known as Sandorf Verster, sometimes now referred to as Claudia Zenk). Another dog, a stray that we took in when I was a kid, Rufus, was hit on the highway above the subdivision where I lived. That wasn’t my fault. But for some reason it still felt like my fault. And I won’t get into what happened to Kai, a pooch my friends gave me for my birthday to help me get over Rufus. The point is, I had doggie-owner guilt, even though My Liege told me over and over it was no one’s fault.

If those very nice people (who were going to a hockey game, so we gave them $20 to buy snacks) hadn’t phoned when they found Allie in their front yard, would she have come home for the night? She never has before. We always have to find her. I like to think she’d come home once she became hungry and cold enough. But there’s always the fear the dog is lying in a ditch somewhere. And then, while looking for her, I thought of all those poor people who turn their backs on their child for a handful of minutes and in that time the child is kidnapped. If I felt horrible about my dog, how horrible must those poor people feel? That thought helped put my experience into perspective.

Last Thursday wasn’t Thanksgiving in Canada, but I ended the night very thankful all the same.

Have you ever lost your dog? Did it come back on its own?

Welcome Guest Blogger Susan Lyons

ROMANCING THE LIBRARIANlyons_pic

Cindy, thanks so much for inviting me to visit Muse Interrupted.

Recently I attended a great workshop presented by Susan Wiggs, one of my favorite authors. She illustrated her presentation with examples from her current release, Lakeshore Christmas (which I highly recommend). I’d just finished the book and had noticed a similarity between her heroine, Maureen the librarian, and the heroine of my December release, SEX DRIVE, Theresa the sociology professor.

I knew exactly where my character had come from and I’d wondered about Susan’s, so I was very interested when she said that her Maureen was a librarian archetype. Yes! That’s exactly how I see Theresa.

What’s an archetype? There are certain characters who immediately resonate with readers (or viewers) because we recognize and understand them. They’re often “larger than life,” yet we feel that we know them. These characters, in numerous incarnations and variations, appear over and over again in myths, fairy tales, books, and movies, and we never get tired of them. They’re not stereotypes – e.g., each librarian character is unique – but they share some common features. For example, the following are all lyons_sex_drivelibrarians: Katharine Hepburn in The African Queen, Kathleen Turner in Romancing the Stone, and of course Marian the librarian in The Music Man. Get the picture? (And can’t you just imagine a dashing hero ripping off her glasses, pulling the pins out of her hair, and releasing all the passion that’s hidden inside that buttoned-up exterior?)

Do you know the movie, The Big Easy? It’s one of my favorites. Ellen Barkin plays Anne Osbourne, a repressed rule-bound lawyer who has a hidden sensual side just waiting for the right man to bring it out. The man is Dennis Quaid, playing Remy McSwain, a sexy, charming cop who isn’t much for respecting any rules. She’s a librarian and he’s a charmer archetype.

That’s the same heroine/hero mix I used in SEX DRIVE.

Prof. Theresa Fallon was a child genius who aced her schoolwork and flunked Boys 101. When, on the flight from Sydney to Vancouver, BC, she’s seated beside Damien Black, one of Australia’s ten sexiest bachelors, she’s about to get a crash course in flirting, fooling around, and maybe even love. As typically happens when you put a librarian and a charmer together, she learns how to lighten up and have fun, and discovers her own sensuality and sexuality, and he learns that while games are fun, life’s even more rewarding when you find something – or someone – to get serious about.

There are many different kinds of archetype schemes: e.g., zodiac signs, Jungian archetypes, enneagrams, Myers-Briggs personality types. The one that really clicks for me is the one developed by Tami D. Cowden, Caro LaFever, and Sue Viders, in The Complete Writer’s Guide to Heroes & Heroines: Sixteen Master Archetypes. This is a fascinating book to read, with examples from classic movies, TV shows, and books. (And of course you have to do your homework by rereading the books and renting the DVDs. Such a tough life, doing all that research.)

If you’d like to see an example of archetypes in action, I hope you’ll check out SEX DRIVE. It’s the first in my four-book Wild Ride to Love series (planes, trains, automobiles and a cruise ship) starring the four Fallon sisters.

Now, how about you? Who are some of the heroines and heroes who stand out in your mind, and what makes them so memorable? If you had to describe them in a word or phrase, what would it be? Let’s come up with more titles of books and movies so we’ll have lots of enjoyable homework to do over our winter holidays!

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Please leave a comment or question for Susan to enter to win a copy of SEX DRIVE. If you’re reading Susan’s post from a feed at Facebook, Goodreads, or another social network, please note that in order to enter the draw to win Susan’s book, you need to leave your comment on her blog at Muse Interrupted.

To read Susan’s bio and the back cover blurb for SEX DRIVE, please visit yesterday’s post. To learn more about Susan and her books, check out her website.