My wonderful writing buddy has posted about how A King’s Ransom came to be. Check it out here. She had an integral part to play in this story’s creation, and I think it’s a very fun sort of origin story. It’s one of my favorites. *grin*

Oh happy day — A King’s Ransom is out today! It’s available here at Amber Quill Press. As an added bonus, AQP is running a 25% discount for all novels and novellas this month, plus an additional 10% discount for new releases, which means you can get it for 35% off until the end of the month!

I really love this story. Really, really love it. I had so much fun writing it, and even after revisions and edits and rereading it at least half a dozen times, I still love rereading it.

The blurb: As prince and heir to the Samari throne, Luke puts nothing before his duty. While sailing to wed a foreign princess he’s never met to secure a desirable alliance, his ship is beset by pirates and Luke is taken captive. The pirates and their charismatic captain, Conall, throw Luke’s carefully ordered life—and his emotions—into turmoil. Conall is charming and seductive, and Luke’s iron will softens in the heat of his kisses.

Getting back to Samar ought to be a straightforward matter, but there’s trouble brewing in Luke’s absence and not everyone in his court would be pleased to see him make it home safely. Luke must decide whether to put duty before love, or relinquish his throne, forsaking crown and country, for the lawless pirate who’s stolen his heart.

Or can he somehow find a way to cling to both?

And an excerpt:

“So tell me, Luke,” Conall murmured, bracing a hand against the wall beside Luke’s head. “What was so terribly important as to justify sending a Samari prince through these treacherous waters?”

Conall stood too close, his body caging Luke in. The first time Luke tried to answer, his voice wouldn’t work. He cleared his throat and dragged his gaze out over the pirate’s shoulder, where it was safe to look. “I sail to meet my betrothed.”

“Ah. For love,” Conall mocked. “People always do the damnedest things for love.”

“No. Not for love.” Luke tried to sidle away, to put distance between them so Conall’s presence would stop stealing all the air from the room. “For duty. My father desires an alliance with her country. They could provide access to trade routes–”

“You don’t love the girl?”

“I’ve never met her.”

Conall rocked back, frowning at Luke as though he were an entirely new and incomprehensible breed of man. The corners of his mouth turned up in a wry smile, and he tugged on a lock of Luke’s hair. “You’re handsome enough. I suppose you’ve left a string of heartbroken maidens trailing behind you as you go off to woo your princess?”

Luke jerked his head to the side, freeing his hair from Conall’s fingers. “Sorry to disappoint you, but no. My country needs an heir, not a litter of royal bastards.”

“A string of boys, then?” Conall mused.

“No!” Luke cried, appalled. He tried to shove Conall back. “Gods.”

Conall grinned as though Luke’s reaction had revealed something. “Celibate as a monk, are you? What a paragon you are, young princeling.” He leaned close again, though Luke braced his hands on the pirate’s shoulders and tried to hold him back. “Luke, my boy, I think it’s high time you had an indiscretion or two.”

Luke tried to duck beneath the arm Conall had braced against the cabin wall. “What are you going to do, throw me at the first disease-ridden doxy who greets us at the next port-of-call? I am not interested.”

“No.” Conall smiled faintly. He planted a hand on Luke’s chest, pinning him to the wall, bringing his body in closer. “That is not quite what I had in mind.”

Luke froze. It was entirely unfair, he thought, for a pirate to have a voice as smooth and comforting as warm milk and honey. A man so ruthless and violent ought to have a voice that scraped and grated and was harsh on the ears. But Conall’s made a shiver slide down Luke’s spine.

“I have a confession to make,” Conall breathed, so close that his lips brushed Luke’s cheek as he spoke. Luke shivered again, and forced himself to stay still. “When I said that you were not my type… I’m afraid that I was quite mistaken.”

“And what precisely is your type, Captain?” Luke asked through the tightness in his throat.

“Young.” Conall’s hand slipped to Luke’s side, fingers dragging over flesh protected by only fine linen. “Innocent.” He ventured beneath its edge. Luke sucked in his breath, his stomach jerking beneath Conall’s touch. “So pretty it hurts.”

“Unwilling?”

Conall laughed quietly. “No. I prefer my bedfellows to want to be there as much as I do.”

Luke curled his fingers around Conall’s wrist and tugged it away. “Then I am not your type at all.”

“Is that what you think?” He pressed closer. Luke’s clothes did little to mask the weight of Conall’s hips against his, the hard press of his legs against Luke’s, or the undeniable evidence that confirmed what Conall thought about Luke. “I doubt you’d take much persuading, young princeling.”

“I should like to see you try,” Luke scoffed, and realized his error a moment to late.

Conall’s mouth covered his the moment he made the challenge. The pirate’s voice may have been smooth and honeyed, but there was nothing gentle about his kiss. It was exactly the way Luke would have expected a pirate to kiss—rough, harsh and impatient, a flurry of gripping hands and coaxing lips and nipping teeth, his hips pressed close and moving in a way that Luke desperately did not want to think about.

There was no fighting Conall’s kiss, no resisting it. The pirate took what he wanted, plundered Luke’s mouth as though it was his right, and there was nothing to do but dig his fingers into Conall’s shoulders and hope to endure.

Buy it here!

Well, I’ve found that bloodhound metaphor very useful in the past week or so. The point I was working myself up to with that last post is that I don’t just have a writing bloodhound — I’ve got a whole pack of them, stored up there in my brain. There’s the general purpose bloodhound, which latches on to things like, “omg, let’s get a puppy!“, but also, to my surprise, I have a knitting/spinning bloodhound.

I’ve been knitting for about four or five years, but it’s only since I started spinning, last Christmas, that it’s really started to engage my bloodhound. There’s much more creative liberty and decision-making in choosing how to spin up a yarn than there is in following a pattern. So while, previously, I may have gone, “Oh, that’s a pretty pattern, I think it might be fun to knit”, now…

Now I see fiber like this:

and my heart skips a beat, my bloodhound catches a scent, and suddenly we are racing off after it, thinking, “OMG, progression dyes, our last progression dye came out SO WELL, this would make such a lovely shawl, oh, we could spin it into a nice laceweight 2-ply, preserving the progression, and oh, oh, we need to find a shawl pattern that looks like wings, or like feathers. Ohmigod, Seraphim.

How awesome would that be? Fading from grey out to charcoal, and then crimson just at the very edges? Dude.”

And the next thing I know, I’ve bought half a pound and am feeling a bit woozy about it all. (It’s going to be an awesome shawl, though.)

In high school, my best friend and I took AP English together. In one of the lessons, we read Paradise Lost and then spent a significant amount of time learning about poetic devices Milton used, such as epic similes — a simile which was dragged out for paragraphs, or even pages.

Sometime not too long after that lesson, I had gone out to dinner with and her family. She wanted to taste what I was having, and I told her she could have a bite.

The next thing I knew, she’d taken several. “Jen!” I cried. “I said a bite!”

And she looked at me and said, “It was an epic bite.”

That story’s kind of tangential to my point in this post, but it’s an anecdote that still cracks me up to this day.

Anyway, the point– over the past few years of conversations with on any and every topic imaginable, including relatively frequent heavy, emotional ones with a lot of soul searching, it has occurred to me just how much of our conversations are steeped in metaphor. Sometimes, we have entire, lengthy conversations that are nothing but one big epic metaphor.

And it’s awesome. I can’t really put words to how much I enjoy those conversations, the ones where we sit together analyzing all the ways in which revising a novel is like renovating or rebuilding a house (if the floorplan’s problematic, you really ought to deal with that first, and leave obsessing over the wallpaper or the bathroom faucets for later in the process).

One of the ones she came up with that we use a lot is the metaphor of her “muse” (for lack of a better term) being like a dog. A Saluki, in particular. Eager, excitable, with a keen prey drive that has it tearing off and bringing back ideas for her very frequently, but also a bit hyperactive and easily distracted from its intended quarry by shiny ideas or squeaky toys.

It took us a bit longer to find the proper metaphor for my “muse”, on the other hand. We finally landed on one a few days ago. Mine is the sort of dog that catches a scent and goes tearing off after it, dragging me along behind hoping I can hang on for the ride, and pursuing it with the sort of singleminded determination that led me to write Blood & Roses in one giant rush over less than a week in which every waking moment was spent living, working, breathing that book. It’s focused and intent, and if it loses the trail of the scent that it’s on, it gets frustrated and upset, and all the squeaky toys in the world aren’t going to distract it from that.

It’s not a Saluki–It’s a bloodhound. It’s only been a few days, and already I’m finding this to be a very helpful way of thinking about my writing process.

More later, I think. I was working my way up to a point (though it’s a non-writing one), but I’m getting a bit rambly here.

I’ve discovered a new addiction, and it’s delightfully awful.

I have a long history of loving awful things. One of my favorite ways to spend time with my best friend in high school was to hang out at her house watching Army of Darkness. A few years ago, I had the time of my life spending a weekend sprawled out on my bed, reading a truly terrible romance novel and giggling about it to my college roommate over IM.

I think I’ve lost a lot of my patience for bad things lately, though. I’m not sure if it’s because of the critical eye I’ve been developing as I grow as a writer, or if it’s because now that I work full time, there aren’t enough hours in the day for me to spend on the quality things I enjoy, much less the awful ones.

But this past weekend, I discovered the BBC show Sanctuary, and somehow managed to stick with it past my initial “Oh my god, this is terrible writing” reaction. The next thing I knew, I’d finished the first season and was frantically waiting for the second to finishing downloading from iTunes.

It is so insanely cracky, and the best part is that it’s completely deadpan about it. It’s like, “This woman is a hundred and fifty seven years old! Because she injected herself with a serum distilled from vampire blood! Also, back in the day, she was in love with the guy who was REALLY Jack the Ripper. And conceived his baby! But she wasn’t ready to have a kid so she froze the embryo until ‘the time was right’. Oh, also, Jack The Ripper can teleport. And he’s still alive today, too. Oh, and they were both BFFs with Nicola Tesla! Who is really a vampire. And is trying to recreate the race and take over the world. Also John Watson, who’s really Sherlock Holmes. (He’s alive, too, but only because a bionic exoskeleton is keeping him that way.) Also, she was present at signing of the peace treaty at the end of WWII. And watched the sunrise with the Beatles. (But only one of them.)”

When I told my writing buddy about it, she accused me of making that up, and I can’t blame her. But cross my heart and hope to die, I swear I didn’t make up a single word. It’s all there.

Is it any wonder I love it? Talk about kitchen sink writing! It’s been a very fun lesson in remembering that sometimes throwing quality to the wind and just having fun with something can be one heck of a ride.

Not that I’m taking any writing lessons from this. I’m not about to start taking this as permission to write terrible, over-the-top fiction. I am going to keep watching, though.