Stacia Kane

So, yes, unfortunately I was all stressed out earlier this week and it made me sick and I’m only just sort of moving around again. Well, I started moving around again yesterday but today I actually feel up to spending most of my time in a vertical position, which is, you know, pretty exciting.

Anyway. Yes, CITY OF GHOSTS was released, and I feel all bereft and weird that my summer release odyssey is complete and there are No More Worlds To Conquer and all of that. At least not until I get books 4 and 5 written, which I shall be starting next month!

But let me quickly point out for those of you who haven’t seen that we’ve done some updates to the site here, including some Deleted Scenes from UNHOLY MAGIC. Check the Fun Stuff page for more, well, fun stuff, an the Media page for interviews and guest blog posts on all sorts of different aspects of the Downside books and characters.

I’ll be back Tuesday with a much longer and more in-depth regular post–tomorrow morning I’m heading to Orlando to crash RWA for a day or two–and in the meantime, my friend David Bridger has just had a book release with Liquid Silver, and here’s here to do a little guest post for me and be all mushy and romantic and stuff. No, seriously, I make fun, because I’m immature, but it really is a lovely post, and David is a lovely man, so enjoy.

Thanks for inviting me, Stace. It’s a pleasure and a privilege to be here with you today.

Since Beauty and the Bastard was released last week, I’ve been thinking about love a lot. Romantic love and other kinds of love, in life and in art.

I realised long ago that everything I write has love in it, and that came as no big surprise because I’ve always been a romantic. I’m someone who sees the romance storyline in action movies like The Terminator and Batman Begins. Yes, Stace, and Die Hard. [Hee! --SK]

Many paranormal romance and urban fantasy stories deal with love in its early stages, when everything is shiny new and heartstopping. And that’s great. I enjoy reading and writing that sort of love, especially when the world is exploding into some grim nightmare around the lovers and they have to deal with all that shit as well as coming to terms with their feelings for each other. It’s magical.

I’m on Team Terrible, by the way, but no spoilers please. Unholy Magic is still on my bedside table, waiting for this blog tour to end, and my pre-ordered City of Ghosts will arrive any time now, so you can bet my nose will be buried in them as soon as my feet touch the ground next week. Because Chess and Terrible? They’re exactly what I’m talking about here. (I hope. ? )

But the kind of love my thoughts have been dwelling on recently is an older love. One that’s had its share of good times and bad, yet still holds together. Maybe one that’s walked through hell and come out the other side, and still holds together.

My wife and I share a love like that.

We’d been married for nine years when our world slid into one of those grim nightmares, that are so great to read and write but not so great to live in. Up until then, we’d been through the normal variety of experiences and we were doing okay. We had three lovely daughters and each of us was enjoying a good career. Then I came home a bit war-damaged and everything changed.

I was paralysed at first, and we had no way of knowing if I’d ever move again. I did, but it was two years before that happened and several more years of wheelchairs and sticks until I got back on my own two feet again. It was very painful and very scary. And that was just for me.

She left her career to look after me. No quibble. No second thoughts. Just dropped it and came home to become a full-time carer. What neither of us knew about back then, is how full-time carers often become non-people as far as the rest of the world is concerned. So it wasn’t only me existing in a quiet cocoon while my old life sailed on without me. The same thing happened to her, too.

That part of our lives lasted about ten years, and it wasn’t fun. But she stuck with it. She’d be the first to tell you she isn’t a natural nurse, and that I’m certainly not a natural patient, but she stuck with me. And when we came out the other side, our love had been forged in fire. We’d been close before, but now we were a single unit.

Oh, I’m not going to pretend that we share some kind of hive mind. We’re two independent people and our ideas often differ. Sometimes loudly. But we’re strong together.

Which is why life became hell when she got sick last year. She was very ill for fifteen months. Still hasn’t recovered fully yet, but she’s on the mend now and it’s going to be okay. This time last year, though, we thought we were losing her.

I have never been so desolated, as the way I was when I considered what life would be like without her. At the time, she didn’t even know things were so bad. For the worst four months she was morphined up to the eyeballs and didn’t really know what was going on. But I knew, and I thought I was losing her.

It just hit me again now, remembering it.

You know where I’m going with this, don’t you? Our love, already strong and flexible and sharp, has been forged in the fire again. Twice-tempered steel has nothing on us.

That’s the kind of love I’ve been contemplating recently, and it’s that kind of love I want to write about soon.

Oooh, this is so exciting!

I know a few of you already know Bernita Harris, from around the wide wide internet, but if you don’t, here’s a little introduction.

Back when I first started blogging as December–well, actually, I found Miss Snark, and wanted to comment there, so needed to set up a Blogger blog, and that’s what I set it up as–I noticed this particular commenter there, this very smart and gentle and funny lady named Bernita. And then she started showing up on my blog, which was a surprise–a lovely one, of course, but a surprise nonetheless. (The fact that other people started showing up on my blog as well surprised me every time.) So of course I started reading her blog, and it was delightful and smart. This went on for a couple of years. Bernita was there to cheer my every success, and the success of everyone else in her wide circle of friends; people are simply drawn to Bernita.

Occasionally Bernita would post snippets from the book she was working on, a fun paranormal about a character named Lillie St. Claire. And I always thought they were great; snappy and fun, well-written, interesting…and I was right. bernita finally submitted the book to Carina Press, and they of course snapped it up, and now you can buy DARK AND DISORDERLY, a delightful book by a truly delightful lady. I urge you to do so.

So without further ado, here’s Bernita’s post (with occasional comment from me in brackets, just for laughs).

No Sex? What Do You Mean, No Sex?

Stacia, you blessed girl, thank you for having me here today.

A recent poll at Dear Author indicated that 30% or so of readers skim sex scenes. I don’t understand that. Once the basic plot has been established, I’ve been known to skim until I get to the sex scenes! I dearly want to know how the writer has used intimacy to explore and develop the relationship. I have nothing against sex scenes. Dear me, no. [Oh, sure, you say that. But I still feel betrayed--SK]

But. There is no explicit sex in Dark and Disorderly. I admit it. Erotic fail! Oh, there is body-to-body contact and nothing chaste about it either—like this:

“You warned me you were a danger, Leannan, and I think this is what you meant,” he said, and fitted his wicked mouth to my open one. His wicked tongue. Instant lust. I wanted to wrap my legs around him, lock my ankles and pull him tighter. Public place with people passing by be damned, indeed.

I despised myself for that impulse. I despised him for my impulse.

So I bit him.

And it’s not that Johnny doesn’t try to get lucky, more than once:

“Nathan didn’t like to kiss,” I mumbled. “He didn’t like face to face…” Why had I said that?

“Selfish, stupid bastard,” said Johnny, pressing my fist against his chest, moving my hand in slow circles against the sleek fabric of his sweater, then sliding my fingers slowly lower toward his belt. “I like it very much. I like to watch a woman’s face when I make love to her. Lillie, let me take you home.”

As you can see, I took Stacia’s “How To Be A Sex Writing Strumpet” course–and failed. (There’s something puzzling and contradictory about getting an “F” for that, though.) [I hardly think that's failure--SK]

However, Lillie has some quaint, old-fashioned attitudes and though she is strongly attracted to the big, ugly lunk of a psi-crime detective; in the scene above she’s known Johnny Thresher barely a week. A very confusing, busy, dangerous week at that, with a zombie bursting through the front door, a grave-robbing and a riot and so on. She suspects Johnny might be just looking for a casual lay; but at the same time she has the feeling he’s not the sort who thinks with his balls. And there is the additional problem of her husband rather recently and indecently dead and who doesn’t want to stay that way. A husband who, while not destroying her libido, obviously, fractured her sense of worth as a woman. Lillie is cautious because she had been impulsive before; she’d been taken in by smooth flattery once.

Even though sex and death, sex and danger, are irreversibly entwined in our psyches, hot ’n torrid, pick the horizontal/vertical surface of your choice, did not seem to fit with the characters or the plot at this time. Dark and Disorderly does not contain explicit sex. Violence, now, and ghosts and bodies and murder, that’s a different case altogether… [Sigh. I guess violence and ghosts and bodies and murder and grave-robbing work as substitutes.--SK]

Dark and Disorderly: The Adventures of Lillie St. Claire, a paranormal suspense by Bernita Harris, is available from Carina Press, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and most places where ebooks are sold. The first chapter is a free download here. You can find me at An Innocent A-Blog, and I’m on Facebook, somewhere.

When you have a ho like Jaye Wells in your stable, yo.

I’ve been friends with Jaye for a while, and she is awesome. But what’s even more awesome are her books. See, last year when we were moving and all of that stuff, I really needed something to read during the journey. I grabbed a few books to take with me–can’t remember which ones–during a last-minute trip to my local Waterstone’s.

But what did I see there but Jaye’s RED-HEADED STEPCHILD. And lucky for me I did, too. Like I said, I don’t remember the names of the other books I bought to take along, but I know that after struggling to get through the first three or four chapters of each, I finally gave up and grabbed R-HS. Aaaaaaah. It was like finally getting to take a shower after four days of heavy physical work and sweat. I felt cleansed and refreshed. Yes, it’s first person and we all know that’s not my favorite thing. But, as with all the best first-person POVs, I hardly noticed. I loved the book. Good, crisp writing, likable characters who said interesting things and thought interesting things, humor in just the right places that was not over-the-top or silly (but also not mean-spirited, contrived-sounding snark). I practically cried, I was so happy to finally be reading a well-written book again.

Aaaanyway. The sequel, THE MAGE IN BLACK, comes out tomorrow, and to celebrate, I’ve invited Jaye here to do a guest blog (Ann Aguirre will be here next week, as well, so be prepared). Let’s all be nice to her, shall we? Heh.

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