The authors of the stories in Crazy Little Spring Called Love (pre-order here) sat down to answer some questions for their readers. For links to the full list of interview questions, teasers, and more, visit the blog tour page.
Question 1: Theme
The stories readers will find in Crazy Little Spring Called Love are written by eight wildly different authors. However, all the stories have three common themes: Spring, Renewal, and Awakening. How did you all manage to write to the theme?
Given that my heroine is the goddess of the dawn and Spring, writing to the theme of Spring awakening/ renewal wasn’t all that difficult for me. LOL. I did, though, try to go beyond that superficial connection to the anthology’s topic and explore how these characters who are so identified with their respective personas would feel about that and how they might develop beyond that into wholehearted people.
Awakening in “Girl With a Broken Wing” is about finding a new way to live and love when you’re thrown off course. Being able to love yourself, with all its imperfections, and then be open to being loved, is a true awakening.
My initial attempt involved a dryad who only wanted to protect the forest but was being forced to take a mate. About 400 or so words in, I realized this wasn’t working for me and let the story drop. At least another week passed before the phrase “djinn of the planter” settled in my brain. I immediately knew this was the story. It had “fun” written all over it, and it was appropriately “springy.”
I thought I was all set for renewal with a reunited lovers story, but I ended up doing awakenings instead! “Love at Dawn” is about two people who have spent their lives seeing each other a certain way, and then everything changes in an instant and brand-new awareness awakens. The biggest theme of the story is how important it is to shine a light on assumptions and think about our lives (and loves) in a new way. Sometimes love is right there in front of you, and you just have to open your eyes to see it.
Full disclosure, I forgot the theme was awakenings and renewal. I was totally invested in the spring and the fantasy elements of the romance so I had a dozen story ideas about magical creatures during the changing season and how it would affect them. There’s a story about were-bunnies that was just too silly even for me. My favorite idea (which became Seaweed and Silk) was about a mermaid from the far North who lived deep in the darkness under the ice until she’s hired by a group of sailors as a guide. She still ended up experiencing some awakenings, since she’s never seen spring or had legs…
There is no more perfect theme for love than spring. It is when the earth, and we – awaken. Not just to growth, but to beauty, and to love. Sometimes you can have something and not give it value, but when you lose it, you recognize what it was worth. Finding it again is like spring in your heart, and love is the most precious thing you will find.
My main character is tough and a bit hard. At first I couldn’t imagine her having an awakening or renewal, but then I started getting glimpses of her blushing and twirling her hair… we all have a soft side, even the toughest of us. It was fun watching her soften and fall in love.
Somewhere in some city, some building is burning down. Amid the spits of fire and falling ashes of the structure’s sordid past, two figures sit across a burning coffee table. One of them is Lea Bronsen, amazon best-selling author and two-time winner of Evernight Reader’s Choice Award. The other is a creature of darkness who is-
L.J.: *squeals* Oh my God! Lea Bronsen, I have loved your work since Wild Hearted. So excited to talk to you!
…the worst at being dark and mysterious…
L.J.: So where you from?
Lea Bronsen slyly lifts a cup of coffee and looks around the flame-soaked room.
Lea: I like to say I’m a European because I have ancestors from all over the place – France, Norway, Scotland, Germany…
A piece of timber crashes across the room. The squalls of a baby and the bark of a small dog are heard somewhere above. Lea notices the fire flare as if acknowledging the sounds, and sips her coffee.
Oh, she is so much better at being mysterious, L.J.
L.J.: I guess, what I’m really asking is… are you actually married to Charles Bronson and just changing the name ever so slightly to avoid being accused of using it to gain popularity?
Lea: *swoons slightly* No. No. I don’t have… Nothing ever happened between me and Charlie… I mean, Charles Bronson, actor extraordinaire, love of my life… Nothing.
A door breaks and a firefighter, who looks suspiciously like Charles Bronson, races in the room taking no notice of the two authors. Instead, he rushes up the staircase.
L.J.: Right. So we’re here to talk about Fiery10-16? That’s a cool title. What’s a 10-16?
Lea: 10-16 is the American police scanner code for “domestic problems”, and I wanted to use it in the title because one of the themes of the book is domestic violence.
L.J.: That’s dark.
Lea: I prefer the edgier side of romance.
L.J. So what inspired Fiery 10-16? Brooding love affair? Daring rescue? Troubled past?
Charles Bronson coughs as he returns to the staircase cradling a little girl who looks suspiciously like the mysterious Lea Bronsen and a mini-schnauzer.
Lea: *laughs* It’s pretty funny, because I got the idea for this book after responding to a private ad for children’s clothes last year. The seller gave me an address in town…and I ended up knocking on the door of the main fire station. Of all places! The guy just happened to be a daddy selling children’s clothes online. He wore shorts and sandals, like he was on the beach.
Another piece of falling timber lands directly across the stairs and Charles Bronson is caught behind looking suddenly underdressed in shorts and sandals instead of his protective gear.
Lea: I left the station laughing and shaking my head. It was a most surreal experience, but real enough that I started the book with the same scene! At the same time, a friend of mine showed me a pic of the excruciatingly handsome actor, footballer, wrestler, and rugby player Geno Segers.
Lea swoons a little as another door is kicked down by another firefighter, this one bearing a strong resemblance to Geno Segers.
Lea: And there and then I swore I would write him a book!
L.J. and Lea both watch appreciatively as Geno Seger sweeps Charles Bronson, the child, and the dog off their feet and carries them to safety.
L.J.: The weirdest things happen to me at interviews…. Anyway, what kind of research went into a firefighter story? Are you on any watch-lists for arson, now?
Now is when you ask her if she’s into arson, L.J.?
L.J. pointedly ignores the narrator and listens attentively to Lea. There are applauds and sounds of weeping from outside as the gathered crowd celebrates their heroes.
Lea: Research… let me see, I googled everything from firefighting equipment to the interior of a station, the trucks, the ladders, the schedules and routines… I looked up how carbon monoxide works, how a fire spreads… I visited firefighter forums and learned about their fears and hopes, personnel issues, interpretation of the law… I downloaded tons of photos from all kinds of situations… and I read a few firefighter romances to make sure I got the vocabulary and jargon right.
Lea leans closer and whispers, very mysteriously.
Lea: crucial, since I’m not a native English speaker.
L.J. looks at narrator and mouths “did you know?” Of course, not or I would have mentioned it. Do you want me to revise? Stop making faces. You have a guest.
Lea: If I’m on a watch-list for anything, it’s not arson but “hot, sexy firefighters.”
L.J.: I’m told if you google, “not an arsonist, just a romance writer” they take you off the list. Which sounds really untrue when I say it… New topic… new topic, uh… Sex or action scenes!
Smooth, L.J. By the way… upstairs there is a creak and a groan as the support beams of the building begin to lose their fight against the flames.
Lea: Honestly, sex is complicated. You need to include so many things like emotions and senses etc. My beta readers always tell me to extend, extend, extend. It makes me pull my hair out!
Out on the street Charles Bronson shouts in a husky smoke-stained voice. ‘The roof is collapsing. Stand clear!’
Lea: Action scenes are all about choreography and maintaining an intolerable level of suspense, and I find that much easier to write. I also LOVE to add a dash of gore here and there, lol.
Above the floor gives way and what appears to be a charred corpse lands on the coffee table.
L.J.: So… you’re just an arsonist, right?
Lea: I told you I’m not an arsonist.
Lea smiles mysteriously and winks before ducking out the back of the unstable building and being lost to the flames.
Lea: Thanks for the coffee.
L.J.: Well, I guess there’s other reasons to start fires… Thank you to Lea Bronsen for letting me interview her about her latest release: Fiery 10-16. Scroll on down to buy her sexy new novel. Follow Graceful Indecency to encourage me to meet more of these fabulous characters. Now, let me out of this firetrap!
She made this cover herself, folks! How frickin’ talented is this lady?
About Fiery 10-16
Runo Wiggins is a scarred man, the wounds etched into his psyche deeper than those on his skin. But he loves his job: fighting fires helps reenact his survival of a house fire as a teen, one that killed his mother and brutal stepfather.
Dawn Caravello is married to a psychotic drunk. She can take his beatings as long as he doesn’t touch their children, and she’ll do anything to put food on the table, even if it means stealing from the town hero.
When Runo meets the fiery Dawn, sparks fly. But he suspects she is victim of the same abuse as his mother was. As day turns to night, the past and the present blend in an exhausting, hold-your-breath chase to prevent another death.
Excerpt from Fiery 10-16
Dawn’s eyes shimmered with a mix of stubborn pride and extreme sadness. They seemed to be made of molten brown stone. Runo had never seen eyes like these. So vibrant, saying so many things. They revealed her life, her endurance, her dreams, her combats, her despair. And she was still so young.
While he stared, she leaned forward and kissed him, an act a whole lot more intimate than he was comfortable with. A short, hard peck, a statement. Not the tender gesture a kiss was supposed to be, but one telling him her gratitude as well as her dignity. She thanked him, but was going to go back to her life and continue fighting.
He stood shocked, his whole body rigid, didn’t know what to do. She, such a small woman thing a whole head shorter, shook him, a giant of muscle and stupid testosterones inside a hard shell.
He would definitely take care of Dawn and her kids. Any way possible. Alert the authorities and make sure they got the protection they desperately needed.
She stepped backward, her features softening, and turned on her heel.
Not so fast.
He cleared his throat and called, lifting a weak hand. “Hey, wait!” His heart hammered in his chest, blood pulsed in his ears.
She turned. “What?”
“Promise to be good. Promise it’s the last time you do it.”
“Do what?” Her eyes gleamed with humor. “Kiss you?” In the midst of this emotional turmoil, she found the strength to tease.
“Steal.”
And lie.
She pursed her lips, looking like a disappointed little girl. Maybe she still was a child inside. A child taking care of children. A child beaten savagely.
He swallowed. “Promise.”
After several long seconds, she nodded. But her gaze told a different truth.
The Dishonest Lover will be my first solo release with Evernight Press and I am so proud of this story!
It’s a typical Christmas story, you know with thugs and criminals and men tied up in abandoned warehouses…
Alright, not so conventional, I guess. George Morrison, a lasped Catholic and non-practicing gay man in Ireland plans on spending his Christmas alone. Until a dangerous German gang forces him to abduct a fleeing con-artist by threatening George’s family. George is an odd-jobs man, not a kidnapper, and he had no idea how to go about capturing Roy Chantileer.
Until Roy approaches him in the streets of Galway. The American instantly charms then accidentally seduces George, under the impression that George is only a local boy finishing up his last minute Christmas shopping.
Over the holiday, George falls in love with Roy and now, with only a few hours until the gang shows up to kill Roy, George has to earn Roy’s trust and come up with a plan to save him or they might both end up dead.
Sounds exciting right?
This idea first started as a submission for Evernight’s Dark Captives anthology. It ran too long, mostly because George and Roy were too interesting to be contained a novella. Once Uninvited Love was accepted into Dark Captives instead I was free to write Roy and George’s story in full.
I spent about a year in Galway, Ireland and a lot of that local flavor made it into this story. I hope you get a chance to read it and enjoy experiencing it as much as I enjoyed writing it.
I love Slash Fanfiction. I ship people in real life, so of course I got my start writing (and editing) m/m fanfiction. There’s an art to properly adapting to another author’s style and getting their character’s right, while adding appropriate sexiness.
For myself, I never keep it fanfiction. I find the kernal of the story and characters and let a new story and setting grow from the base.
Partly as an experiment, and partly because I have no publisher for these shorts yet, I’m making a contest. Right here. Right now.
Read my totally free stories from the category Shameless Slash Contest, and be the first to guess what novel/movie inspired this story in the comments and you’ll win a copy of my next book, The Dishonest Lover!
Find the stories here for the rest of December and January! Good luck.
It never really feels real until you get the cover art. But when you get to see the naked men and your name, that’s when you know you’ve written a new romance.
Just found out in this latest round of edits, that my soon-to-be-released novel, The Dishonest Lover is an editor’s pick at Evernight Press!
I’m so excited to share this story with the world!
I’ll be honest… I’m not entirely sure what Editor’s Pick means. I asked Evernight. It’s that seal on the cover because an editor really liked the novel. Personally, I’m choosing to believe due to the season, that this is a major award and my particular story single-handedly ushered some highly-imaginative, dazed but clearly precocious editor into the dawning of her sexual life.
I’m just after teaching my creative writing class and I’ve been thinking a lot about character. I’ve been reading and watching a lot of Horror for the MFA and I’ve been seeing a lot of shitty characters.
So I chatted with the students and we thought about character and what makes a good one and I’m going to make a few suggestions today.
Defining Traits:
A good character will have at least five defining traits. This was tough to wrap our heads around. We spend a good deal of time struggling to separate motivation and goal from character. Do we love “Life of Pi” because it’s about a boy in a boat with a tiger or do we love Pi because he is a resourceful and optimistic Indian boy? Is there a difference.
I’m pretty sure I would read a short story about an entitled rich racist in a lifeboat with a tiger (for purely fantasy fulfillment), but to hold the novel Pi needs too be a rich character.
The traits could be emotional, behavioral, or physical. But most of us could come up with a fairly complete list of three to five for our favorite movies/films.
My go-to example: The Batman!
Intense desire to see criminals brought to justice
Intense desire to save people
Dresses as a bat
Intelligent
Extraordinarily athletic
Notice how those traits can contradict themselves (Batman can’t kill The Joker because he badly wants to save him). If a writer finds himself unable to write a list of five traits or sees too many synonyms or physical traits popping into the list, it’s probably a sign that more work needs to be done.
To use a personal example, in my novel Evasive Love, I have a character in a steampunk society who is 1) an intelligent scientist, 2) a repressed homosexual, 3) entitled and 4) used to a high standard of living, but 5) an essentially good person.
To see how all those traits impact the character, here’s his backstory. Elliot’s sexuality puts him in conflict with his society (Victorian ideals) so he loses his wealth and privilege. He gets back to his standard when he uses his intelligence to design drugs for his boyfriend, a wealthy criminal. The boyfriend starts using the drugs to kill and poison people and Elliot can’t morally allow this to go on so he uses science to destroy boyfriend’s business and flee.
Character and Archetype
We also hit on using stereotypes and archetypes to access characters. This was tied into creating writing prompt which involve an adjective, a noun, and a scenario. The noun tended to be an archetypal noun. So we had a cocky warrior, a loving mother, a stuck-up hobo entering into scenarios.
While this approach seems a little mad lib in the idea generation. It’s actually very useful in developing a character. If you can identify the archetype your character fits you can play to the type, play against the type, or play inside of the type.
Play to type (a hard-boiled detective in a noir murder mystery)
Play against type (a hard-boiled detective who is works as a janitor)
Play inside type (a hard-boiled detective who is a deeply romantic woman)
Like most things in writing, there’s no hard fast rules, or right and wrong. So a character could be playing with type, against, and inside at the same time.
For example, The Batman!
Batman falls neatly into The Hero archetype. He is motivated to do justice. His traits are goodness, intelligence, drive lead him to go fight bad guys.
Batman plays against the trend of superheroes by being obsessed with the darkness, dressing as a bat in black instead of in bright colors, being fairly violent and gritty. (Now-a-days, we call that an Anti-hero, but Batman also holds to his no-kill rule, usually so… still predominately good).
But some writers have also attacked Batman from a different archetype. If you apply The Orphan to Batman, you show his vulnerability and his longing for a mentor. If you apply The Mentor archetype to him, you can show a different side of him working the Robin. All of these conflict and compliment the original archetype of Hero in interesting ways.
No matter how original your characters are, they are going to fit into some archetype. So why not bring that eventuality into the foreground and use it to make rich characters? Be aware of the type and work with or against it.
My one warning in creating characters this way is you end up with stereotypes not archetypes. Stereotypes are bad because of their specificity and predictability. A dumb blonde is not an archetype. Innocent is the archetype and you’ll notice it had nothing to do with gender or hair color. Ditto to black thug vs. warrior. While it’s possibly to write a deep and interesting character that matches the stereotype (we live with them every day after all), a good writer will be aware of the stereotypes are work against them. For example, Legally Blonde plays against type by making the blonde ditzy and fashion conscious but wicked smart. The Wire plays with type by giving us the interior lives and struggles of a depressed and violent community.
At the end of any day where I’ve spent time with people, even if it’s friends or family, I am exhausted. After a four-hour game DnD session, the next day I usually sit by myself in silence for about the same length of time, often writing. When I worked in an
office, I would regularly get stress headaches not from the work but from teamwork, client calls, and every day meetings. My partner has even observed that some days he just needs to leave me in the house by myself to recover from a social-overload as if I can only
take small doses of people, even the ones I love.
But if you know me, especially if you’ve met me in a writing group, you probably think I’m an extrovert.
While I’d love to say that my passion for the craft has raised me from my pit of self-doubt and anger (my breed of social-anxiety trigger the fight, not the flight response), that’s not true. I’ve spent years learning how to interact in polite company so I could learn more about the craft. I knew I would have to take criticism from publishers, editors. I wanted to share my writing with other writers in critique groups, and I could not wait for the perfect combination of special waterfall princesses to mollycoddle my quirks and phobias.
So I actively searched out writer’s groups and threw myself in, forced myself to engage, and tried to be pleasant. In some ways, it was anti-Disney, I always felt like I’m not being true to myself. But what I’ve realized since – now that I can walk into a room and not feel like everyone wants to attack me, now that I can smile an interact with a stranger without worrying that I’m going to hurt them – is that I faced some demon in my and changed what was true to myself.
In exchange, I found the amazing reward of writing communities.
I don’t care if you’re starting out or if you’re a published writer, there is nothing as rewarding as sitting around with a group of other writers and talking about the craft. It is electrifying to hear other people who’ve had characters come to life and dictate their adventures. It’s uplifting to find that other people get stalled and doubt the time and effort they just spend writing that ten thousand words. And when you start to know more yourself, it’s immensely gratifying to encourage someone who needs support, someone who needs only to hear the words ‘yeah, that’s happened to me too’ to find the courage to finish the rest of that story.
I’m writing this now because I was reminded in force of this yesterday when I went to a NaNoWriMo write-in in Philadelphia. Now I live on the Jersey Shore, but I used to live closer to Philly and I’ve met some of these people before. Since I was going into the city on other business and I thought I’d go early to participate with this group.
I’ve found my waterfall princesses.
There was around sixteen to twenty writers in the same library basement for about four hours writing or talking about writing depending on whether or not a writing sprint was going on. It was gratifying, uplifting, electrifying everything you could ask for when you meet with other kindred spirits.
It took me about two hours to join in the conversation. I did end up making some people nervous and offending other because I forgot to check my crazy. But the community still accepted me, invited me back, linked with me on twitter, too interest in my craft.
I feel inspired not by the work, but by the need to work. I know that there are others sitting at their laptops or writing by hand on notebooks also doing this crazy thing of writing their stories and it makes me want to be part of them, to have something to share and talk about when I meet some of them. Maybe not in Philly, maybe in Ocean City, NJ where I’m going to another write-in today.
NaNoWrimo, national novel writing month, is a perfect time to meet other local writers. There is no judgement if you don’t make the word goal of writing a novel in a month. There is no sharing of the stories if you are nervous about the quality of your stuff or the content. It’s just other people trying to write together.
So my best writing advice to you, especially in November, is to go out and find a community to support and encourage your writing.
It’s lonely to write, don’t go it alone.
– My third novel will be released soon. Follow me on Twitter or on this blog to learn more.
Embrace adventure, magic, romance, and the power of escapism.
NaNoWrimo
Graceful Indecency 