Dark Vow (sneak peak)

Dark Vow (Carina Press November 14) is a Western style fantasy, so there's magic guns, vampiric horses, a vow, a quest, a duel...and of course a happy ending.

Since I received the back cover copy this week, and the good news that it will be available as an audio book, I thought I'd share:

Jaines Cord plans to kill the man who murdered her husband, even though killing a Bounty Hunter is said to be impossible. One bullet took away her livelihood, her home and her love. One bullet made by her. Fired from the gun she completed for the Arcane Bounty Hunter.

Obsidian wears the scars of disobeying the powerful Arcane Union. He barely escaped with his life and now lives quietly, in a town the lawmen forgot. When Jaines arrives asking too many questions, he's faced with a decision. Help her or run…again. Obsidian knows that if he flees he'll always be looking over his shoulder. His name is one of the first on the Bounty Hunter's death list.

Yet when Obsidian is offered an opportunity to stop the stone taking over his body in exchange for retrieving the gun, he asks Jaines for her help. Now Jaines must choose: a dead man's vengeance or a living man's hope?

RWAustralia Conference

I spent the weekend in Melbourne (it was freezing as expected). As usual it was great to put faces to names and catch up with other who I hadn’t seen for a while.
Some of the highlights for me were:
Author day—very interesting listening to others speak about their journey and learn from their experience, I also got grilled by Jennifer St George in the media training.
Going to the Harlequin dinner for the first time—everyone was so welcoming and I sat with some lovely ladies including fellow Carina author Janni Nell.
Bob Mayer did the Friday workshop and the take home for me was that naturally we play to our strengths. So I need to look at my weakness and find some courses/books to help with them (no, I’m not sharing what they are)
Friday cocktail party…
Saturday I shopped, but it was for research (and an awesome pair of jeans, three pairs of shoes and a couple of tops).
Sunday I went to the King Tut exhibition. Very interesting and while ancient Egypt fascinates me, it doesn’t inspire me—not in the same way Celtic mythology does. Also on Sunday the Carina Press authors had lunch and it was great to meet them and talk to them and Angela James (who was the first editor to tell me ‘not this but send me something else’ 3 years ago).
By the time I left Melbourne I was exhausted and I have yet to read the conference notes in full.

The overall message was persistence, and it doesn’t matter how you publish it's about reaching the readers—they’re the people that count.

The advice that changed your writing

I’ve read or tried to read a large number romance novels, many of them poorly written. I’ve lost count of the number of books I’ve thrown at the wall after one chapter or even one page. All the writers of romance I know say the same thing and the comment is shared across manuscript length and genre. A lot of unsatisfying books are being written, published, read and discarded.

There’s also a massively greater number of wonderful romance novels that satisfy readers all over the world.

In writing my stories I didn’t want to add to the number of unsatisfying stories.

Important books for me in developing as a writer were The Hero With A Thousand Faces (Campbell 1949) and The Writer’s Journey (Vogler 1998), a writing guide based on Campbell’s monomyth. The twelve-stage journey based on Campbell’s mythic studies across cultures describes the personal growth, or life principles, of the hero in earliest storytelling and provides a means of sense-making of the experience of life by the reader. The more a reader is able to relate to the characters and their journey the more satisfying the reading experience.

I’ve tried to use the journey of the hero to improve my own writing.

What’s your pivotal craft book?