Thanks to Victoria Blisse for inviting me to this blog hop, where authors answer questions about their writing process.
Here goes with the questions 🙂 :
1. What am I working on?
I’ve just come up with a series about three brothers – all Doms, of course 😉 – and I’m writing the first book right now. It’s actually so new I don’t even have an excerpt to share. Or a title! But it’s going well and I’m really excited about it :). I’m also writing Shreds, the next book in Her Master’s Voice series after The Journal, and I’ve got another series set in a fencing club. I’m hoping to write the first one of those afterwards.
After that, who knows? It could be some short stories in an anthology that I have an idea for or the prequel to Coming, Ready or Not! Three Tales of Tease and Denial or any one of the long list of books I want to write.
Or I could come up with yet another new idea! 🙂
2. How does my work differ from others of its genre?
I write a mixture of Master/slave and Dom/sub relationships, usually with a whole lot of humour. The Journal is probably the only exception to that. It is serious but the subject was serious, although it does have a little humour towards the end. The rest of the series will be a lot lighter.
Here’s a short excerpt from Coming, Ready or Not!:
You don’t think you’re going to be thinking about the laundry and DIY in the middle of sex, do you? Painting the hall, plastering the kitchen? It never occurs to you that you’d think about any such things. Perhaps your parents might do that, but not you, oh no.
And yet, here I am, mentally counting and pairing socks while the evil, sadistic love of my life licks me so delicately inside and out; his tongue lapping at my clit, sucking it and… No! Don’t think about that. Socks! Green ones, blue ones, black ones, the pink ones with the little white flowers (mine, not Will’s!). Think about so… sock… No. Oh no. Ohhhhh. Nooo.
“Soooooooooooooocks,” I yell, as if my life depends on it.
Oh no. Please no.
Silence.
I open one eye, cautiously, and then the other, to find myself nose to nose with my tormentor.
“I’m sorry,” I blurt. “I’m so sorry, Sir.”
“Did you just come? Did you just dare to come without my permission?”
“Yes, Sir. I’m sorry. I really am.”
Your lips twitch ever so slightly.
“And what was that you just yelled?”
I blush and squirm on the, by now, sopping chair.
“Erm, nothing, Sir. Nothing at all.”
“Did you just yell ‘sucks’?”
“No, Sir. I…Not sucks. Socks.”
“Socks. I see. Well, okay then. Why…? No, actually, I’m not even going to ask.”
You can’t keep your face straight any longer and let out a roar of laughter.
3. Why do I write what I do?
I’m sub in real life so, very simply, I write the books that I’d want to read. There’s so much comedy in BDSM. Things go wrong, toys get dropped, Doms manage to zap their own teeth with an electroplay toy instead of me (yes, really! 😉 )… Of course, there’s a serious side as well and I hope I capture that too, but I love romantic comedies and that’s what I write. I just write them for people involved in, or interested in, BDSM 🙂
4. How does my writing process work?
I tend to get maybe a few lines of dialogue in my head, or a character just pops up from nowhere, sometimes a whole scene, and everything just goes from there.
The current series with the three brothers, for example, came from watching a TV series and seeing a character who had one of those wonderful Domly stares that seem to see right through you. That sparked an idea for a character, Ryan Haynes, the eldest brother (although I didn’t know he had brothers at the time), and then I noticed someone posting something about a celebrity on Facebook and that gave me the idea for the whole book. As I wrote notes about it, his brother, Josh, popped into my head and I thought I was going to write the second book about how Josh finds the person he’s supposed to be with, but then, as I wrote more, I found he was already married to Maddy and things weren’t going well…
Before I knew it, I had the idea for three books laid out 🙂
That’s pretty much how the start of a book or a series goes for me. From such a tiny idea, almost from nothing, to a whole lot of words on the page.
After that I write whichever scenes really grab me first. I usually find the end pops into my head at some point while I’m doing that, so I write the end as it occurs to me. I don’t force myself to write in scene order. I just write and get as many ideas out as I can.
I go back and do character sketches of at least the main players and then start organizing what I’ve got into order, do a sketch of an outline and then work on filling in the gaps.
Once I’ve got a first draft, I go through again and see where it doesn’t work, fix anything that needs fixing, then read it again for spelling and grammar, etc.
The next draft I read out loud because that helps me spot any dialogue that doesn’t work, any sentences that are too long or too awkward.
Then I just read it as a reader would for a last pass, then send it off to my beta readers and see what they think.
That’s it really. Well, apart from the blood, sweat and tears. Oh, and the coffee and chocolate supply that needs to be on hand 🙂
So next week, February 17th, you can find out about three lovely friends of mine, Natasha Knight, Renee Rose and Cochrane Gage.
Here are their bios:
Natasha Knight is the author of several BDSM and spanking erotic romances all of which explore the mind of the Dominant male and the submissive female, discovering just beneath the surface of each story that key element of love. Her characters are as human as she: powerful and vulnerable, flawed, perhaps damaged but with an incredible capacity to love.
http://www.natasha-knight.com/
Facebook, Twitter, Amazon and Goodreads.
Renee Rose is a modern dance teacher, Feldenkrais Practitioner(R), energy worker and kinkster. Named Eroticon USA’s Next Top Erotic Author in 2013, her books are all centered around her favorite kink: spanking.
http://www.reneeroseromance.com, Twitter, Facebook and Goodreads.
Cochrane Gage is a new writer of BDSM erotica. He is currently working on various short stories with Liv Honeywell and he hopes to have his first book out in the next few months.
