Hullo again!
Please drop by Unusual Historicals tomorrow (as in, Thursday, April 30th). We’re celebrating their Excerpt Thursday together with a taste of KISSES LIKE A DEVIL. It’s taken from later in the same scene as the excerpt posted at my website comes from. (And yes, I have been called a dreadful tease before!)
I’m blogging at Unusual Historicals this Sunday, May 3rd about THE SOUTHERN DEVIL and the very special Colorado mountains of 1872. Please feel free to drop by and ask any questions you’d like. Heaven knows those were a wild and crazy time and place, which were almost as intriguing to research as they must have been to live through.
Happy reading, y’all!
Diane, diving back into writing THE ARIZONA DEVIL, aka Lowell and Portia’s story
11:34 pm |
Hey, guess what? Renee Bernard grabbed me for another session of Canned Laughter and Coffee, over at Blogtalk Radio!
Please join us tonight at 8 PM Eastern Daylight. You can either dial-in at 646-200-4071 or there’ll be a live chat session going, too. After the show is aired, you can download it at COS Radio.
I guarantee you that you’ll never guess what the two of us will talk about. Heaven knows I can only predict a whole lot of laughter!
After that, The Southern Devil comes riding into a store near you on April 7th – all dressed up in a budget-friendly, mass-market format. I love it when my publisher does nice things for my readers’ pocketbooks. Yeehaw!
Happy reading to all of you -
Diane
2:52 pm |
Hullo there! I’m being interviewed today over at Bitten by Books who came up with the most intriguing list of questions.
My darling publisher is giving away 10 copies of BOND OF DARKNESS. If you have time, please stop by!
1:17 pm |
Hi, there!
I’m blogging today over at Brava Authors about KISSES LIKE A DEVIL and how William and Viola’s sons got their names.
Please stop by and chat if you get a chance!
Diane
3:00 am |
KISSES LIKE A DEVIL, the latest episode in my Devil books, just arrived in your bookstores this week. (Whoopeee!) It’s about Brian Donovan, the second son of William and Viola Donovan, who you may remember from THE IRISH DEVIL. Teddy Roosevelt sends him off to the Grand Duchy of Eisengau in 1900 where he meets with many adventures, including meeting Meredith Duncan, the young student radical who steals his heart. (She has no use for marriage and the Russians want her at least as much as he does.) But I digress.
When I first started working on this book, Meredith announced very firmly that she had a black Standard Schnauzer. Nobody was more surprised than yours truly to hear this. She had a dog when she spent her days in school and her nights promoting revolution in turn of the century Europe? Huh? Could he handle keeping bullies away from one of the first young ladies to attend a university? Was he intelligent and strong enough to cope with the varied surroundings – and dangers – of beer halls, back alleys, firing ranges, and her mother’s drawing room?
Not to mention, just why did he have to be jet-black? Meredith was very, very clear her dog had to be completely black, as opposed to the more typical salt-and-pepper.
At the same time I was fumbling through this bit of characterization, a friend at Virginia German Shepherd Rescue announced there was a German Shepherd Dog in urgent need of a foster parent. She was petite, shy, and jet-black and had been rescued from a pound hundreds of miles away. Could we look after her for a few weeks until something more permanent could be found? One look into those deep brown eyes ringed by all that black fur and I was a goner.
Honey is now a permanent part of the household. In fact, I have to be very careful when I get up in the middle of the night. She patrols her new home – and there’s no way an intruder can spot that pure black dog moving through the shadows.
Research soon told me that Standard Schnauzers are great watchdogs and were well known before World War I. Some have always been pure black, including one of the earliest favorites. I named Meredith’s dog “Morro” after him.
I began writing and Honey watched me do it, just the way Morro guarded Meredith’s adventures. Heck, he even discreetly protected her from her abominable parents if he could. And whenever I needed a little extra inspiration for a scene with Morro, Honey was right there with an example. She was his guardian spirit.
I hope I did her proud. She’s certainly been a blessing for me and everyone in the family.
9:19 pm |
Six months after moving into my new house, my library is finally unpacked – all sixty-plus boxes of it. (I stopped counting at sixty.) I’d given myself a year to finish the job, planning it around research for books. Unfortunately, I hadn’t realized I’d be writing this particular manuscript right now, a tale which depends on one and only one reference book. And guess what? Yup, you’ve got it right: my aspiring anal-retentive self may have labeled all those boxes – but I hadn’t marked which one contained the unique reference book upon which this tale depended. So I needed to open box after box after box until I found it.
Well, I needed to find and enjoy my library again, right? My bookaholic self certainly thought so. My back disagreed but it was overruled.
Now I’m enjoying having all my treasures out in the open where I can see and touch them. All those dictionaries next to my desk, and my volumes of poetry just a few steps farther. My enormous Civil War atlas finally rejoices in a tall enough shelf, while Mount TBR has a bookcase to itself. Okay, it’s deliberately only a small bookcase but it is a dedicated one!
Some odd juxtapositions popped up along the way, too. Cats and baseball coexist on the same shelf. Okay, maybe that’s because the number of books on each subject worked out that way – or maybe cats and baseball players both scamper after balls? Perhaps. And Chaco Canyon, home of fascinating Native American ruins, lives right next to Washington’s spies, who in turn snuggles up to the Battle Cry of Freedom. My family took one look at that grouping and very firmly told me that I really needed to start writing more about pre-Civil War America! Harrumph!
As for fiction – well, at one point, Emma Holly was cozily sandwiched between Robert E. Howard’s Conan and E.M. Hull’s The Sheik. (Personally, I suspect she might have enjoyed their company.) If I find another auto-buy author starting with a ‘D’, I’m in serious trouble; that bookcase is already groaning. I’m barely coping with Kathleen Dante’s career, since I grab everything she puts out.
Of course, there was the horrific moment when I realized a single one-foot-wide bookcase was expected to cope with four auto-buy authors: Emma Holly, Linda Howard, Angela Knight, and Mercedes Lackey. Ack! Peace was restored when Angela Knight and Mercedes Lackey moved to another bookcase. Hopefully, they can coexist with Elizabeth Lowell, since I buy everything she publishes on the first day it’s out. But if not, I’ve got a few spare shelves hidden away for expansion purposes… Life is good.
And if you’re wondering where that unique reference book was, which started the mad rush to unpack my entire library? Right where Murphy would have predicted it: the last stack, the bottom row, and the last box.
12:14 am |
So many riverboat stories talk about life from the passengers’ point of view, where the river looks safe – or at least relatively placid. Well, rivers aren’t tame, as this spring’s floods reminded us. I visited the Missouri River after the great 1995 floods swept through. Those scenes haunted me while I wrote THE RIVER DEVIL
When the time came to think about a book trailer, I wanted one which would convey the danger facing the riverboats’ crews. Men who could only travel the Missouri River by daylight because every shadow could conceal a deadly enemy. Men who balanced on drowned trees to cut them apart with axes so boats could pass, carrying desperately needed food. Boats whose round-trip voyage from St. Louis to Montana occurred only once a year and but whose lifespan was probably only 2 or 3 years before its bottom was ripped out by a drowned tree or its boiler blew up. And a river that runs so fast Lewis & Clark clocked it at a whirlpool’s pace and it’s now 500 miles shorter from the Rockies to the ocean than it was in their day…
I hope you enjoy the book trailer created by Circle of Seven Productions! I sure did.
Diane
11:14 pm |
