Guest- Tielle St. Clare

Viv writes:

This is a very appropriate guest to have the day after Sherry blogged about what got us started as writers. Tielle is the author of the first erotic romance ebook I ever read, the one that made me fall in love with the genre. She’s the one that unknowingly started me down the road as a writer. And the next book in that series is out soon! Woohoo! I’m excited to introduce Tielle to you.

I started by asking her three questions like we usually do.

1. A decorator is coming over to redesign one room of your house. Which one?

Oooh, the kitchen. I’d love a big, well laid out kitchen with all sorts of cool implements for, uh, cooking. Right. Cooking.

2. You’re traveling from Alaska to California. How would you make your worst enemy travel? And what would be your favorite method?

My family drove from Florida to Alaska back in 1972 (before the road was mostly paved) so I know just the way to torment someone…riding with 6 people in a 1970 Ford LTD, sitting in the middle of the back seat (where that bump on the floor used to be), crushed between two older siblings. My favorite method (cuz I make this trip quite frequently)…first class flight, Anchorage to LA, non-stop.

3. Werewolf verses Vampire. Who would be a better artist?

For my kind of art, the Werewolf. I like bold colors and an artist who takes chances. I like aggressive art and that’s what I see in a werewolf—power, aggression, animalistic tendencies (whew, is it hot in here?). I’d think a vampire would be much more reserved and sophisticated and while that might be pretty, that’s not what I want in my art.

Great questions! I’ve been spending a lot of time with werewolves lately so I’m feeling an affinity for them.

I’m working on the fifth in my werewolf series (my working title is “Moonlight’s Shadow”), and for this book I’ve tried a different method of plotting. Because I write in a non-linear fashion (yes, bouncing around the book), I have to know the whole story before I start to write. I tend not to write anything down before I begin but I have the whole story written in my head, major scenes written and re-written so that when I sit down, if nothing else, the dialogue is there.

For Moonlight’s Shadow, I’ve taken the process one-step further. I’m using a plotting board (`a la Cherry Adair). I’ve got a poster board with 10 different color sticky notes adorning my kitchen table (I’m afraid to lift it for fear the sticky notes will land in one big pile and they’ll never go back in the right order). Because I knew my story, it was fairly easy for me to lay out and at first, I thought, no big deal. I’m just making a visual of what I already know. But because I had the visual I could see that I only had my bad guy (the ugly yellow color sticky note) appearing at the beginning and the end. Not enough yellow on my board. He probably should show up a couple of times in the middle.

It also showed me where I had a fairly long stretch without a sex scene (used bright pink for the sex scenes). Looking at it, I realized there was the perfect place for a sexual encounter between my two heroes. It would ratchet up their tension (cuz one is a little freaked out about desiring another man) and give them a bond when they rescue the heroine.

I might have figured these things out as I wrote the book but I probably would have had to go back and re-write large sections and make sure everything fit.

So far, I like the process. I’m only twenty pages into the writing so we’ll see. My fear is that I’ve over thought it now and it won’t be fun to write. Still, I think that the two heroes in this book are going to make me come back again and again.

Have fun,
Tielle

Viv again:

I’ll let you all know when book three in the wolves comes out. (Oh, and just make sure Jambrea knows this…the stories are m/m/f.)

Tielle also has a new release called Kissing Stone

Kit Bauman has lusted after Jax for as long as she’s known him, but she knows she’ll never act on it. She refuses to risk their friendship for just a few nights of really great sex.

When a little man in an Irish knick-knack shop sells her a “magic rock”, she finds herself saying things she never thought she’d say, and doing things she’d only dreamed of doing—all of them with Jax.

But the magic will wear off…

Available at Ellora’s Cave