Sourcebooks Casablanca Romance Authors

Summer Camp Yesterday I dropped my daughter, Princess Galen, off at summer camp. She’ll be there five more days and four more nights—not that I’m counting. It’s funny how much I fight for time to read and write every week, but now that I have, more or less, unlimited time, I wish she was home again. The house is too quiet, my hours too unstructured, my evenings too peaceful. I remember before my daughter was born I almost never worked after five o’clock. I had my nights free, but now I’m so much in the habit it feels strange not to have to sit down again after eight o’clock. It’s nice to have time to watch TV or have a dinner with my husband or read more than a half an hour. This picture is from a visit to the camp a couple years ago because I forgot to take a picture at drop off. I was a little distracted... But there are negatives too. I’ve realized how much my daughter’s schedule keeps me on a schedule. I always have a long, long to-d...

When readers pick up a book they read it in a few short hours. But behind every finished product there is professional editing, critiquing, the authors polishing, first draft, plotting, daydreaming, researching, hunting down an idea with a club and a machete… The craft when the reader reads should be invisible, and yet if the craft wasn’t there the story wouldn’t hang together. Authors know about themes and motives (even if they aren’t there in the plotting or the first draft they appear gradually). They know about the three act structure and how to increase tension and also release it just a little. They know about end of scene and end of chapters so you turn the page because you have to know what happens even though you have to get up in six hours! Even though I have been writing (as an adult) for a decade I still buy and read craft books. I read novels and try to work out why it worked…or why it didn’t (that is harder because sometimes the voice just wasn’t my thing, it happens ...

Not all parts of a book a created equal. Some fly off the fingers, other bits have to be dragged out or coaxed with chocolate and bribes. And not all tricky bits are the same for all people. First page fear (or the horror of the blank document) doesn’t bother me as I plot and I know the start. I know the turning points. That pivotal bit in the middle is no drama, the black moment holds no terrors and I love the rush to the end. I get stuck in the second quarter. That bit that happens sometime after the story has started and the characters have met and the stage has been set and before the big thing in the middle. Something has to happen for 20,000 words in there…. This is the bit of the story where I also get the wobbles (my characters suck, this story is awful. What was I thinking there’s not enough to make a novel!). I get the second quarter blues on every story regardless of length. You’d think in a 30,000 word novella it wouldn’t be a drama, but it is. I have however discovered...

If you’re a fiction writer, you swim in a sea of abundance. Yes, Grace, you say, abundant deadline pressure, abundant self-doubt, abundant time management challenges, abundant pain in the butt from sitting too long at once, abundant chocolate wrappers on the floor around where you sit for too long too often, abundant whining from other writers…abundance on every hand. No, silly, not that kind of abundance. And I’m not talking about material abundance either though we’ve all heard the statistics: If you have a roof over your head, some food on the premises, some money in the bank, a computer, and a little retirement, you’re in the top one percent of the globe for wealth. That kind of reminder always makes me feel a little scolded, and while it’s good to appreciate one’s blessings, that isn’t the kind of abundance I refer to. As a fiction writer, you have abundant imagination . You can create whole worlds just sitting in yo...

By Robin Kaye For the first time all summer, I have all three of my kids home and I’m having a hard time setting limits. I haven’t seen my Boy Scout for 8 weeks and look forward to our late night talks, Twinkle Toes gets so little Mom time during the year, I need to take advantage of the 31 days she’ll be home before school and dance pull her away again. And my youngest is walking that tight wire between childhood and becoming a young adult—a precarious time at best, so for the next month, I’m busy being mom 24/7. My husband and I like to take advantage of having the whole family together, and this summer, I’ve seen the kids enjoy it too. I guess all the years of family dinners (no TV, no toys at the table, no excuses to cut out early) have really paid off. When I talked to the kids about what they want to do while we’re all home together, the one thing everyone has mentioned was to have as many family dinners together as they possible. I’m so glad they treasure family time. It’s impor...

By Robin Kaye Joanne recently wrote a blog about falling in love and the altered state of consciousness that is brought about by infatuation. This is something I tend to suffer from with every one of my heroes. Joanne’s blog was wonderful and as all great blogs do, it got me thinking. Always dangerous, I know. The one question I’m usually asked by readers and interviewers alike is which of my heroes is my favorite? The answer I always want to give is the next one. I have a nasty habit of falling in love with my next hero—the one hero I’m not supposed to be writing about. I’ll be writing one book, and a secondary character will invariably appear and steal my heart. I’m fickle that way when it comes to fictional men. I’m just lucky that hasn’t been my problem in real life. If it were, I doubt I'd still be happily married to the same man for over 20 years. When I wrote Yours For the Taking , which will be released in January, 2011, I met a bevy of new characters—several of which were ...

By Robin Kaye The theme for this month is new beginnings and since I’m beginning a new book and a new series, it seems apropos. For me, the beginning of a book is the hardest to write since I’m usually still learning about my characters. It’s as if I’m feeling around a strange room filled with furniture in the dark, searching for the light switch or lamp, and trying not to kill myself in the process. Normally, I know my hero/heroine, or both from one of my previous books but not in this case. While Hunter, my hero, was a character in Yours For the Taking, he was a very small secondary character. He may have had a line or two, but I knew what he did for a living, what he looked like, and everything there was to know about his family, yet Hunter was kind of an enigma Unfortunately, I knew nothing about Toni, my heroine. She just popped into my head one day in all her goth regalia, and introduced herself. I knew what she looked like, what she wore, and how she sounded, but it took a lot o...

By Robin Kaye Today was my favorite day as a writer—the day I finally wrote The End. This is a good thing since Yours For the Taking is due on my editor’s desk on Monday, February 1. I drove home today from my lovely critique partner’s house knowing I had to write this blog, and I thought about the experience of writing this book. I know every book is different, and no two experiences are going to be the same, but having just finished my 4th book for Sourcebooks, I’m beginning to see trends and subtle changes in my writing process. With every book, I find that writing that beginning and the end gets more difficult. It’s been my experience that the book will be almost finished for the longest time, but I go back and rewrite the beginning and the end over and over and over again. A book not only has to begin with a hook, it has to end with a hook. It has to make the reader want to reach for my next book. Unfortunately for me, hooks are not easy to come by. So I’ve been writing and rewri...

By Robin Kaye Fourteen years ago, I had a beautiful baby girl. (This is a picture of her in her very first tutu) She was a bit of a nightmare baby—she rolled over before she was a day old, screamed non-stop for the first year of her life, and at two weeks old, she managed to crawl the length of a king-size bed and didn’t stop even after she hit the headboard. I remember that day, running into the room, picking up my squealing infant, and telling my best friend, “She’s going to be out of the house by the time she’s fourteen.” Little did I know how right I was. Today I did one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do. I sent my fourteen year-old daughter to live with a host family, enrolled her in their local middle school, gave her a kiss goodbye, and left. It sounds horrible, doesn’t it? Well, it does to me too. Twinkle Toes as I affectionately call her, has been dancing since she was four. At two she told me that she was going to be a ballerina, and hasn’t stopped dancing since. Two ...