May 7, 2009
I bet you’ve been checking and checking, saying to yourself, Maggie posts once a week. She’s dependable, like a good bowl of oatmeal with cream and brown sugar and maybe even a pat of butter. Where the heck is she?
I’ve been lounging about like these ladies to the left, sitting on exciting news. Congratulations to Tiffany Chalmers, Vixen Extraordinnaire, on the sale of her exotic, delicious Hidden Beauty! Much better than oatmeal! Tiff is St. Martin’s Press’s (look at all those esses and apostrophes) latest author. We’re pretty excited in the Pleasure Gardens, so drop on by and wish Tiff the best as she begins what will be a long and luscious career.
As for me, I have been madly ripping apart the last seventy-five pages of Paradise (eventually to be re-titled). I said somewhere it’s been like drowning kittens. But when I’m done I hope to have a stronger third act. My perfect hero Hart’s bad boy side is finally showing itself. I always knew he had it in him. *w* My Courtesan Court trilogy is also making the rounds, so synopses had to be written and a few things tweaked. For a day I was working on four books simultaneously and I’m happy to say my head didn’t explode.
What secret have you been keeping? What’s making your head explode? Tell all!
Apr 24, 2009
My husband and I had a delightful time in Sin City. The temps were in the 90s, and I sat slathered in sun block and read Marrying the Captain by Carla Kelly, Cocktails for Three by Madeleine Wickham, Why Mermaids Sing by C.S. Harris, The Secret Wedding by Jo Beverley and Beyond Heaving Bosoms by those smartypants bitches Candy Tan and Sarah Wendell. The latter, a gift from Ely, is a hoot. Since I’ve been giving major thought to what makes the ‘essential’ romance, I’m paying careful attention to their theories and themes.
My books fall pretty solidly into what I call the Redemption Range. Everything I’ve written in the past couple of years features characters who have made mistakes, usually when they were much younger, but have not let the mistakes make them. Oh, there’s plenty of guilt and regret to go around, but I’m reminded of the layers necessary to form a pearl. Without the irritant, that mollusk would not secrete the calcium carbonate and conchiolin to create one of nature’s beauties. Everything in our past determines who we are today.
I’m looking forward to transforming Paradise’s Hart and Eden into lustrous, smooth, layered characters. It’s been a while since I reflected on them. Eden’s mistakes are rather more spectacular than the usual Regency heroine’s, and I’m sure I made a few of my own as I worked on the manuscript. I’ll keep you posted.
Read any good books lately? What’s your theme?
Apr 18, 2009
Thanks so much to all of you who stopped by to give me your good wishes! You didn’t ask, but I’ll tell my Call Story anyway. *g*
It was April 15, that dreaded day for taxes and tea parties. 🙂 I was at work in the high school library. It was quiet, extremely quiet. Usually I have about 25-30 kids and adults working on projects and using computers until 5 P.M. But when I got The Call, I was down to two teenage girls and one of the custodians, who came to take a break and eat a forbidden snack in our back office. Don’s a really nice guy. We talk philosophy and non-fiction, politics and family. I’d been out sick for three days with bronchitis, and we had a lot of catching up to do. The school and the country really can’t run without us. 😉
Then my cell phone rang. When that happens, I hardly ever answer unless it’s a number I know. I don’t need to pay for a call that tells me the warranty on my car is expired (duh, it’s a 1996 Ford Explorer—I’m surprised the damn thing even starts up in the morning) or that I ‘won’ a cruise if only I’d pay for it. But I recognized the area code of my agent,
Laura Bradford. She’d e-mailed me that something might be in the works for
Paradise. So I answered, and she talked. Trade paperback. Berkley Heat. 2-book deal. Summer 2010. Some revisions. We were disconnected TWO TIMES, and I was beside myself. Finally on the third connection, which was still all crackly, we agreed she’d call me at home after work. I kept saying, “I’d make more noise, or talk about sex scenes, but
I’m in the library.”
When I got off the phone, Don had disappeared. One of the girls—I don’t even know her name—was smiling at me. I told her I’d sold a book, and the girls got excited, more excited than I was, because I felt like I’d been hit by a very large, very yellow school bus. I’m just now picking myself up off the road.
I finished Paradise 3 1/4 books ago, in December 2007. My agent and my editor are more familiar now with it than I am, LOL. So, I’m off to reread, revise and tweak. Now I’m really going to Las Vegas.
And btw, do you know what happens when you type ‘woman’ and ‘phone’ into Google Images? Hello phone sex!
Apr 16, 2009
Words kind of fail, so I’ll just let this snippet from Publishers Marketplace say it for me:
Maggie Robinson’s PARADISE, in which an honorable man in the market for a virtuous wife must address the complication of his late Uncle’s ward, who he discovers was also his late Uncle’s mistress, the subject of an erotic book called The Education of a Young Lady of Doubtful Virtue and the woman who makes him forget all his good intentions, to Kate Seaver at Berkley Heat, in a nice deal, in a two-book deal, for publication in Summer 2010, by Laura Bradford at Bradford Literary Agency.
Posted:
April 16, 2009 at 1:05 p.m. Eastern
Thank you, Laura Bradford! Thank you, Kate Seaver! Thank you, best critique partners ever—Elyssa Papa, Tiffany Chalmers and J.K. Coi. Thanks to the wonderful women I’ve met along the writing road—super-inspiring authors, Pirates. Vagabonds, FanLitters and Bon Bons. Thanks to my family, most especially to my husband, who has done without dinner and matching socks for several years now.
This is beginning to sound like an Academy Awards speech, so I’ll stop babbling. Going off to pinch myself and celebrate in Las Vegas. The trip was planned long before recent events, LOL. The laptop is coming along for revisions. See you in a bit!
Apr 13, 2009
April is National Poetry Month. This year’s poster is kind of subtle, mostly shades of gray, but interesting. It features a foggy wet surface with finger marks dragged through quoting T. S. Eliot: “Do I dare disturb the universe?” It is formidable to think that one’s words have the power to alter the universe, but it’s true. Just ask Shakespeare, Thomas Paine, Voltaire or Jane Austen. While I don’t think anything I write is in the ‘disturbing’ and ‘important’ category, I hope to provide a few hours pleasure and release from everyday life.
(And that is a disturbing and important thought. For the book you spend months on—perhaps years—will be read in just a few hours. If writers got paid for the amount of time actually writing, we’d probably be getting invisible fractions of a penny per hour, LOL.)
As you know, I’m back in the risky business of taking a seriously fractured hero and taping him up together in Master of Sin. I need help with Italian (iGoogle!) and psychology. I’ve got to create a fictional Scottish island too, because my husband says we can’t afford the “research” trip to the Outer Hebrides. Heck, I’d settle for the Inner Hebrides. 🙂 But before I get too far into the book, I need to have my feet firmly planted in Andrew Rossiter’s universe, where poetry is a luxury and “freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.”
Classical poetry may have fallen out of fashion, but many song lyrics speak to the poetic souls in all of us. Here is humble romance from Jamey Johnson’s In Color:
This one is my favorite one—
This is me and grandma in the summer sun
All dressed up the day we said our vows.
You can’t tell it here but it was hot that June,
That rose was red and her eyes were blue.
And just look at that smile,I was so proud
That’s the story of my life—
Right there in black and white.
And if it looks like we were scared to death
Like a couple of kids just trying to save each other
You should have seen it in color.
A picture’s worth a thousand words,
But you can’t see what those shades of gray keep covered.
You should have seen it in color.
Go color your universe! Any lyrics/poems you’d like to post?
You will find poetry nowhere unless you bring some of it with you. ~Joseph Joubert
