Cool beans!

I got a mention on the “Smart Bitches, Trashy Books” blog. Sarah raises an interesting question, and those of you who’ve read my book already know I blasted that “romance” envelope into smithereens.

In her comments, Sarah says: It makes me want to lock the Baby Daddy characters and the In the Billionaire’s Bedroom characters and the I Married a Mediterranean Oil Tycoon characters in the room with the Compass Rose characters and some Emma Holly romantica/erotica characters and have my own romance novel reality show.

Weird thing is, I kind of like reading some of those Baby Daddy and In the Billionaire’s Bedroom books. I started off there, actually. My first two books were Silhouette Desires. And the very first one was a sheikh book: Hide-and-Sheikh.

Yeah, a lot of the books are silly–but some of them aren’t. And that’s where some people’s comfort level lies. And even if they are just silly fun, sometimes that’s what one is in the mood for. Now, I have to admit, I’m not real wild about some of those Mediterranean Oil Tycoon characters because they tend to be a**hole jerks and not fun at all, but they do vent a lot of hostility for me because I just want to smack them upside the head and beating the book against the table (before I go back to read the rest of it) is somehow liberating.

I didn’t set out to explode any envelopes. I just threw stuff into the story that I thought would be fun to write. Now, I’m not sure the genie will go back into the bottle. The story of these particular characters will wind up with The Eternal Rose. But there may be more adventures in Adara when the little girls grow up. The next “universe” I plan to take on, the next proposal I want to write, is a very sexy Victorian steam-punk blood-magic-with-a-twist book. And I worry just how sexy and out-there these characters are going to push me…