Kerry Allen

I’ve been a busy girl, savoring the awesomeness that is Meljean Brook’s Demon Angel (plug coming soon to a blog near you) and doing what I hope is the final merciless self-edit on The Manuscript, at this point entitled Wish List. (Don’t judge—I suck at titles. This one is better than the last one, trust me.) In honor of the occasion, I’ve fulfilled my promise to put an actual excerpt in the “click fake book cover for excerpt” spots on the web site, and to get it there in fantabulous .pdf format. (KNOWN ISSUES: Font issue resolved. Bloody miserable sneaky bastard typo resolved. Adobe crash issue fixed with installation of Adobe Reader 8. If you still can’t view it, leave a comment or shoot me an e-mail.)

(This is why we put this stuff up now. Can you imagine it’s countdown-to-publication time and everything is buggy? It may not bother other authors, judging by some of the sites I’ve seen, but I can’t do that to you. I’m not a perfectionist, but when it’s something I can fix, dammit, I’m going to fix it.)

When there’s an actual book to pimp, the excerpt will be considerably larger. No point giving you a lot now, only to have it be unrecognizable when the editor gets through with it, is there?

Which raises the question—How big should an excerpt be? Talk to me about pages, since chapters vary too widely in length to make a good yardstick (mine, for example, are huge). How big a slice do you need to convince you to buy the whole pie? Is it something you can tell on the first page because of the style or a great opening line? Or is it getting far enough involved in the action that you must find out what happens next that makes you run out and buy the rest? Do you want to start at the beginning to mimic the reading experience, or do you want an excerpt from another part of the story?

I want to be reader-friendly. So tell me, reader, how friendly you want me to be. Sorry, I’m not the kind of girl who goes all the way (as in entire book for free), although I did think it would be pretty cool to throw the whole thing out there for, say, a month before the subsequent book’s pub date as bait to attract readers to the new release. (Subsequent book? My, aren’t I ambitious…) I don’t even know if that would be allowed, but I don’t see how it could hurt. After a year or so, sales are going to have slowed on Book A. Might as well get a little more mileage out of it to promote Book B, right?

But that’s a back-burner issue. For now, let’s focus on bringing you the excerpt of your dreams. Tell me what you want, baby.

To the casual observer, she is nutty, but she has a dark side and melts into a state of lusciousness in the right hands.

He may not seem like much—an average-looking guy with all the usual ingredients—but when he’s stirred, he rises to the occasion.

Thrust into close confines with the heat turned up, these two unite with a passion that will change their destinies forever.

(I was trying to find a way to share this recipe after deciding to limit myself to romance-related topics.)

She is a combo of melted peanut butter and Nutella, which is tasty enough to be eaten out of the bowl all by itself. He is brownie batter made of the usual kitchen staples, also yum with a spoon. Put them together, and the sound effects around the mixing bowl become downright obscene. The finished product inspires Fatal Attraction-like obsession: “You’ll make me fat, but I love you, and I’ll prove it by hacking off another big piece of you!”

Brownies of Love

1 cup butter, melted
2 cups granulated sugar
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
4 eggs
1 cup all-purpose flour
3/4 cup cocoa powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 cup Nutella
1/2 cup peanut butter

Preheat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Grease 13 x 9-inch baking dish (or use cooking spray).

Combine melted butter, sugar, and vanilla extract. Add eggs one at a time, mixing well after each addition. Add flour, cocoa, salt, and baking powder; mix well (batter will be stiff—ha ha).

Combine Nutella and peanut butter together in a small microwave-safe bowl and heat until of a runny consistency (try 20-second increments). Add to batter; mix well.

Pour into prepared baking dish. Bake 30 to 35 minutes or until toothpick inserted near center emerges with crumbs.

These brownies are moan-inducing as is. Add a cup of walnuts or toasted hazelnuts? OM effing G. I’m also considering modifying my peanut butter frosting recipe to incorporate the Nutella, in which case I’ll be arrested for lewd and lascivious, but it will be totally worth going to jail for!

Amended to add: Done and time served! Find Frosting of Love here.

I’ve always been a romance reader (except when I wasn’t). 

I spent my formative years in a small town (4 streets, 4 avenues, bisected by railroad tracks) in Illinois. The town consisted of homes, a bar, a volunteer fire department, a teeny post office, a church, a playground, and a three-story brick school house containing kindergarten through 8th grade, most of its students bused in from outlying rural areas. With the exception of the break provided by the lone exit road, the town was surrounded by corn fields (and let me tell you, Children of the Corn really freaked me out). Television reception extended to four channels if the weather was favorable. There wasn’t a lot to do other than ride your bike around the block in summer or build snow forts in winter.

This dull environment made a reader of me at a very early age. The act of reading was a boredom buster, the stories themselves an escape from the suffocating sameness of every day. (Granted, I probably wasn’t thinking in those terms when I was five, but I definitely would now.) I quickly read everything I could get my hands on. By second grade, I had gone through the entire minuscule library of the school. (They didn’t know what to do with me. It was silly to have me sitting around reading Sweet Pickles books with new readers, so they sent me to the library for an hour every day. I remember having to write a report and present it to the 1st graders, which I believe is when my loathing for public speaking began.) We barely had money for luxuries like school clothes (fortunately my grandmother sewed me some pretty decent ensembles between those trips to Sears—my brother needed a larger portion of the clothing budget to save him from the humiliation of wearing homemade jeans), so feeding my voracious appetite for books by buying them was out of the question, and the nearest public library several specks on the map away was distance prohibitive.

So I read whatever I found lying around the house, and what was lying around the house (other than Playboy, which yes, I also read) were my mom’s category romances. I still remember some of those from years ago.

One featured a Siamese cat named Yaffa. The heroine was a jewelry maker who also worked at a runaway hotline. She hooked up with a dad using her to find his runaway son. The hero helped her rescue a teenage hooker from her pimp. The son, of course, had a nontraumatic runaway experience (boy genius made big bucks selling papers to college students and had a place to crash, so no dramatic pimp rescue for him).

Given my nonexistent memory for names, the fact that I remember the name of a cat is extraordinary. Naturally, I couldn’t tell you the name of the book or any of its human characters, but what do you need with those when you have Yaffa?

There are others I remember fondly, if in less detail. Then, of course, there are the memorably awful. (Spotlight on Betty Neels. Words cannot express my loathing for that woman’s writing. She’s responsible for the first book I could not bring myself to finish reading.)

I graduated to single-title historicals by the likes of Johanna Lindsey and Kathleen Woodiwiss. (One of my favorite books is still Tender Torment [gah, these titles] by Joyce Myrus, who apparently never wrote anything else.) Eventually, contemporaries by Jennifer Crusie, Nora Roberts, and Rachel Gibson, to name a few, made it into the rotation.

Did reading Romance, particularly from such an early age, give me a distorted view of real-life love? No more so than my parents’ less-than-happy marriage. I never expected one, never wanted the other. In fact, early exposure to the opposite end of the spectrum probably spared me a lot of emotional hangups in the long run. At least I knew there was a spectrum, not just what I saw around the house, which is much more likely to have scarred me for life.

We relocated several times, gaining better proximity to libraries. My older brother started bringing home Dean Koontz, and I continued my habit of reading everything in the house and branched out into Horror. My horizons expanded, but Romance still comprised most of my reading diet.

Then sometime in my early twenties, I got bored. Every romance I picked up, I could read the back and the first few pages and predict with eerie accuracy every major development in the book. I couldn’t read a romance for 10 minutes without putting the book down, frustrated by the predictability.

I turned my attention to the Mystery section, then Fantasy, then discovered there were a lot of amazing books in the Children’s section. With plenty to keep me occupied elsewhere, I completely abandoned Romance. I didn’t touch a romance novel for a good 10 years.

About three years ago, I received a much-appreciated box of hand-me-down mysteries. Hidden amongst them was Sherrilyn Kenyon’s Fantasy Lover. Much eye rolling ensued. Let me guess, the hero’s an underwear model? Dumpy, frumpy heroine with his picture thumbtacked over her bed saves him from a burning building or something, and he confuses gratitude with being in love with her? With some public declaration to his sexpot ex that he thinks the heroine is sexy despite her love handles and mousy hair?

Sneering, I read the back. Say what? Demigod cursed into a book, only to be brought out for use as a sex slave. Hmm… well, that’s different. “Different” excited me. It was the first thing I read out of that box of books. It was dark and sexy and amusing and brutal in ways Romance wasn’t allowed to be, in my experience. I had to have more, and I did some undignified squealing when I discovered there was more.

That box of mysteries is still sitting around somewhere, forgotten, overshadowed by my new reading love.

Thus, I discovered the joys of paranormal romance. It tends to be dark, which appeals to my semi-Goth, staunchly anti-perky nature. It relies heavily on worldbuilding rather than relying on the reader’s stock knowledge of Regency England or contemporary American living sans things that go bump in the night. When your boyfriend is cursed, has dietary restrictions, goes furry at that time of the month, or serves Satan, the conflicts tend to vary a bit from “we can never be together because Daddy doesn’t approve” or “I must keep my distance so he doesn’t find out about his secret baby.” (Which I know is a gross oversimplification, but there are themes we’ve all seen a million times, not just in romance novels but in real life, and there’s not much an author can do to make the million-and-first new and interesting.)

I recently picked up a historical off my mom’s TBR and couldn’t sustain attention through the first paragraph on the back cover. I’m clearly not ready to go back there yet. There have been a couple of paranormal historicals I was fine with (Shana Abe’s The Smoke Thief, notably). Maybe I need a really historical historical to make it interesting to me if there’s not going to be any bloodsucking or shapeshifting or spellcasting going on, maybe with some kind of political intrigue. It’s going to have to grab me and not let go, though, because I’m not forcing myself to read anything for the sake of genre loyalty, as the stack of unfinished books on my table can attest.

How did you get started? Have you ever fallen out of love with romance? If so, what convinced you to give it another chance?

I love paranormals. My 10-year hiatus from reading romance would be a permanent rejection of romance if paranormals had not lured me back to the genre with—finally!!!—something fresh. Therefore, it baffles/infuriates me when I blog hop and see people treating paranormals like the family bastard who made out like a bandit at the reading of Uncle Fester’s will, with contempt and resentment at the same time.

It is not a trend. It is not going away. If it’s not for you, don’t read it—simple as that. There are numerous books I don’t read, but I don’t endlessly bitch about their existence.

But that’s a subject for another post. (Seriously, I have a venomous rant about it over on Blogger, and next time my ire is roused, I’m reviving it here.)

This post is for those of you who haven’t tried paranormals for whatever reason. I’ve heard some of the reasons, and I’ve overcome resistance with the following responses:

“I’m scared of things that go bump in the night. If I met a vampire in real life, I’d throw garlic at it and run away.”

That’s how a lot of the love interests in paranormal romances react initially to their non-human attraction, so you might actually be able to relate there. Very rarely does the intended say, “So you’re not human. I can live with that,” right from the start. Getting over the “eek” factor is frequently a process that has to be dealt with during the course of the story.

“Vampire stories are all the same.”

That couldn’t be less true. They aren’t all Bram Stoker vamps or Anne Rice vamps or whatever you’re basing your vampire stereotype on. Every writer puts their own spin on the mythology and the mystique. Besides, not everything paranormal is a vampire, and everything with fangs isn’t necessarily a vampire, either, in the traditional sense.

I’m trying to think of a book where the plot was about vampirism (or whatever condition) and drawing a blank. It’s more a complication than the main conflict. Main conflict: Woman in peril. Complication: “You’re on your own until the sun goes down, babe.” That kind of thing. (And if she can’t take care of herself that long, she probably deserves to die anyway, just like in any other kind of story.)

I think the heroines in paranormals tend to be a little stronger. It takes more moxy to make it work with a supernatural stud than with a Windows systems analyst.

“The living for eternity thing doesn’t appeal to me.”

Sometimes it’s not for eternity. Sometimes there’s redemption in love that lifts the curse of immortality (which, face it, is not the joy ride some people would have you believe). Sometimes nobody’s immortal to begin with. Even if it really is happily ever after, the book ends eventually, so it’s not like you have to live with these people forever if you don’t want to.

And when it really is forever, you know the love is real if she’s willing to put up with his annoying habits literally for eternity. I couldn’t do it for a month. (”So help me, if you leave toothpaste spit in the sink one more time, I’m going to stake you in your sleep!”)

Besides, you know men mature less quickly than women. After a couple hundred years, there’s some hope they might grow up enough to not be complete idiots…

The appeal of paranormals to me is a new level of conflict. I still read other types of romance, and they can be well written and sexy and engaging, but very rarely will I say, “Huh, I’ve never heard that plot twist before.” I want something different from what’s been out there for the past 30 years. I’m ready to be taken to a new world, or at least a side of this one that ordinary mortals never get to see.

So if there’s some particular thing about paranormals that turns you off, talk to anyone who reads them on a regular basis. They’ll very quickly offer you a book that doesn’t include that particular thing. There’s plenty of variety.

Don’t be scared.

Much.

Ah, the requisite “happily ever after,” one of the defining characteristics of the romance genre. I support the concept, but I think the perception of what it means is oversimplified. The verbiage itself is limited, so I vote to change it.

Some take ”happily ever after” literally and believe it implies the characters actually live happily in conjunction with ever after. They then state that this is ludicrous because no one is blissfully happy all the time, much less for eternity because no one is immortal. (Guess they don’t read paranormals.) I’ve heard this from readers of romance, not just those pesky detractors, so it’s not springing from a lack of understanding of the genre.

Even the most loving couples squabble from time to time. If the hero and heroine butted heads at any point in their story, it’s a foregone conclusion they will again. Not to mention bad days at work, rush-hour traffic, stubbed toes, and all those other life events that harsh your happy. Nobody is happy all the time (at least not without serious pharmaceutical assitance).

Particularly when the worldbuilding constructs a dark, scary world in which bad things occur on a regular basis, the idea that everything is always and forevermore going to be hearts and rainbows and butterfly kisses once the hero and heroine declare their love is patently ridiculous. There will always be terrible goings-on in such a world, and unless the hero and heroine are selfish assholes and wash their hands of the rest of the world now that they have what they want, the badness is going to affect them, as well.

I don’t expect characters to float on a fluffy cloud of joy for eternity any more than I expect them to break up a week after the book ends and start seeing other people. I assume they’ll remain together. I assume they’ll have good times and bad, but on average, the scales are going to tip in favor of the good. I glean my satisfaction not from the idea that peace and harmony will reign for the rest of all time, but from the idea that whatever trouble the future may bring, it won’t be as daunting because they will face it together and overcome it, the way they did the conflicts in their story.

Therefore, I will hereafter refer to the essential romantic ending as a TEA: Together Ever After, because whatever route is taken from beginning to end, the only finish I demand from a romance novel is an enduring love.

What about you? Are you a purist, craving the wedding-and-babies epilogue of the traditional HEA? Or do you seek acknowledgement that sometimes the future is going to suck, but love will survive anything thrown at it?

Thin Air by Rachel Caine
Mass Market Paperback, 336 pages
ISBN: 0451461630 
Available Now
Retail Price $6.99
Book Six in the Weather Warden series

The sixth book in a series poses something of a pimping dilemma. I would neverever suggest beginning a series at any point other than Book One. I assume if you’ve already read the first five, you’re not waiting for someone to convince you to buy Book Six, so the goal would seem to be to steer the uninitiated toward Book One… but I’ve just read Book Six and am bursting to share. Hence my dilemma.

Perhaps my unbridled enthusiasm for the series, communicated in my lovefest for Book Six, will be persuasive enough to move you toward the beginning.

Minimal background information: Joanne Baldwin is a Weather Warden. Wardens tweak weather, fire, and earth to make them less devastating, but it’s a tricky business, since the redirected energy from the tweak has to go somewhere, which can cause devastation of its own. For many, many years, the Wardens made use of enslaved djinn, harnessing the djinns’ power to augment their own. The djinn, during the course of Book Five, became gloriously, catastrophically free, and David, Joanne’s djinn lover, was thrust into the unenviable position of their leader.

I must first confess: I am a David groupie. Total squealing fangirl, a disgrace to upstanding romance readers everywhere (and the Warden books are fantasy, not romance—although the romance is one of the greatest I’ve ever read—so my embarrassing behavior transcends genre boundaries to make you cringe). Would I choose him over Acheron (Sherrilyn Kenyon’s Dark Hunter honcho), whose bitch I am? Yeah. In a Marysue fantasyworld, I would either/or Ash—be his personal naked trampoline or his galpal. I could totally handle being Simi.

David? Hell, no, I do not want to be just friends.

Why the disparity? I’ve seen how David loves, and it is fierce. All-encompassing. Heartbreaking. Five minutes being the object of that kind of passion would tide a girl over for the next hundred years or so.

So at the end of Book the Fifth, when Jo’s memory was wiped and David, in all his inhuman intensity and perfection, scared the hell out of her, I was anxious—and not for Jo. Would she end up turning to Lewis (mentor, friend, and former lover who is comfortingly human), who’s a decent guy, but not so decent he would respect the sanctity of her forgotten love for David if she put the moves on him? That would kill David. He would atomize Lewis first, which would hardly convince Jo he’s not a monster, and then he’d die, heart shattered, and I would cry for a week.

Let me tell you, it’s been a long, cruel wait for the continuation.

The guts of the thing: There’s a demon loose in the world, sucking energy from anything that will feed it. When Jo’s memories were taken, they were flung off in the form of energy and gobbled up by the demon. Now it’s bent on taking over the rest of Jo’s life, and the only obstacle is, well… Jo.

Jo finds herself alone, wanted by the Wardens, wanted by the police, wanted by the press, hunted by a demon who has her face and her memories, and not even David believes she’s herself anymore.

Unfortunately, there’s no federal task force to address this kind of identity theft, so it’s up to Jo to stop her doppelganger from using her power to tear open a portal and invite her demon buddies over to earth to party.

And, more importantly, keep her slimy skank hands off David. (Whaddya mean that’s not more important? Sez you.)

Mercifully, this book did not end on a panic attack-inducing cliffhanger, so I can await Book Seven with a normal level of anticipation.

To pop your Weather Warden cherry, start with Book One, Ill Wind.

The “Up Close and Personal” column of the August 2007 edition of Romance Writers Report contains the sentence “RWA is working a ‘new image’ for the genre of romance,” contradicting an earlier statement I made that they’re doing nothing to further this cause.

I still can’t find any other evidence of it. What are they doing? How are they doing it? Whose input are they seeking? Not mine. Yours? If not, whose?

But it’s sweet that they say they’re trying, at least.

Unfortunately, I imagine it will be another piece-of-fluff campaign like Harlequin’s perennially embarrassing Romance Report (view any of them here—but you might want to have a drink first).

I strongly believe the only time people who don’t read romance think about romance is when they see someone holding a romance and that smirk hijacks their lips. Therefore, the front line of defense for romance is always going to be the person on the receiving end of the smirk and inevitably forthcoming snotty comment. The only effective way to do that is to arm yourself.

Do you prefer a blade, firearm, or cudgel?

Words. Arm yourself with words. Of course that’s what I meant.

(But cudgels are on sale at Target this week. Right next to the cordless drills, which also make… No. Forget I mentioned it.)

Detractors will never respond to a generalized public statement that “you’re wrong about romance” because they will never feel it’s aimed at them, because of course they’re right about everything. But when you, the assaulted reader, get in somebody’s face and make it personal to them because they chose to make it personal with you, there’s no getting around the fact that it is meant for them.

(Yes, I do so love the wondrousness of italics.)

Therefore, I continue to encourage you, romance reader, to study Self-Defense for Romance Readers. Share your concerns, your experiences, your guerrilla assault tactics. If each of us makes one person think twice before saying something ignorant and insulting to the next romance reader they see, the world will truly be a better place for romance.