novels

Closing my eyes, I breathe in the air around me.When I slowly re-enter the world, I look into the most intense brown eyes I've ever seen. My breathing catches. I can__ look away. Fuck, he's hot. I can literally feel my brain cells frying. Who's dumb as a rock now, Alexis?I feel completely frozen and can__ move. I don__ even think I want to. Blink, Richards, blink."-AlexisWhat happens to someone who has everything figured out and doesn't let anyone rattle her?To some love is exciting. To her, it's a nuisance.

That was how the heroine of a book would play it and Diana was still writing her own story the best heroines she'd always believed took their fate into their own hands.

The attraction of reading is that it allows you to live, for a few hours, as someone else__rants you access to their head, their thoughts, their secrets.

I write about romance and passion to savour love twice, in the moment and in retrospect.

I write romance and passion to savour love twice, in the moment and in retrospect.

What is it about us lady authors and our fascination for the exclamation mark?

Great writers experience their dreams. They put them on paper, where others can read about them.

My only wish is to be buried with my books.

Part of the desire to see each other succeed is to stop putting a price on success.

A book is a place where my reality, escapism, hope, despair, love and death lie.

I read daily, not so much for the benefit of my writing, but because I am addicted to it. There is nothing in the world for me that compares to being lost in a really good novel. That said, reading is an absolute must if you want to write. It is a trite enough thing to say, but very true nonetheless. I cannot understand aspiring writers who email me for advice and freely admit that they read very little. I have learned something from every writer I have ever read. Sometimes I have done so consciously, picking up something about how to frame a scene, or seeing a new possibility with regards to structure, or interesting ways to write dialogue. Other times, I think, my collective reading experience affects my sensibilities and informs me in ways that I am not quite aware of, but in real ways that impact how I approach writing. The short of it is, as an aspiring writer, there is nothing as damaging to your credibility as saying that you don__ like to read

Every writer dreams about the day they can step into their fiction and wander its hallways.

It is a wonderful thing to be liked by a stranger, but without respect it is pointless. It is like pulling the pedals off a rose and throwing the stem at the person you like. It__ creepy, but had good intentions that suddenly experienced some strange form of verticillium wilt, during the climate change of their mood.

People who wrote novels about universities hardly ever got them right. Max had spent his short working life untenured, but still he'd managed to be a charming magnet wherever he taught, and Amy had surfeited on faculty gossip and professorial antics and the general behavior of academics, who were as a whole no more brilliant or Machiavellian than travel agents. They tended toward shabbier clothes and manners, and of course there was the occasional storied eccentric or truly original mind, but most college campuses _ especially the older ones _ functioned less as brain trusts than as wildlife preserves, housing and protecting people who wouldn't last a week in GenPop.

I believe books should be like a prime rib steak ~ good and thick.

To be motivated to write a novel, I need to be unable not to write.

Sometimes I wonder if novel writers aren__ completely f**ked in the head. ~ Drew Stirling

After finishing 1st draft of a novel, I have the characters, dialogue, scenes, and a plotline. I used to think this meant I knew where the story was going, and what the book was about.I have learned over the years, this ain__ so.As I work through its 2nd draft, characters start to nudge each other. The story itself takes its first soft and shallow breath, and one could imagine he hears a little bit of a heartbeat. Passions deepen, and emotional threads start to weave through what had earlier just been little more than a sequence of events.On the 3rd run through, the characters stand tall. Some break free of my earlier concepts of what they were all about, what they wanted, how they related to each other, and where they were going.From then on, THEY set the pace, and I do my best to honor them in becoming what THEY choose to be.From then on, my friends; we have a story!By the end of the 3rd draft, I have enough of an idea of where the characters are going, and how their passions empower the story, or tear it apart, that I can start cutting away, and cutting away, anything that isn__ that.Until we reach the point where there is not a single word left anywhere in the book, that isn__ a vital, dynamic, organic contributor to the living whole.