First, I want to thank Delilah Devlin for allowing me to be on her blog today. I am a big fan of Delilah’s and she might not know this, but she is one of the authors who influenced me to take my writing to the next level.

If you don’t know me, my name is Melissa Schroeder and I write romance in time periods from historical to futuristic and in heat levels in sensual to erotic.

My newest book coming out this month is The Cursed Clan: Callum. It is the first of a five book paranormal series. The first book is a bit of a discovery for the reader and the heroine, Dr. Phoebe Chilton, and with each book, the magic and mystery will grow. There are five cousins, Callum, Angus, Logan, Fletcher and Anice, who will each have their own book as they race to break the curse. It isn’t quite as erotic as my Harmless series, but it his highly sensual. I really fell in love with Callum and Phoebe. They are a wonderful couple and I hope the readers like them as much as I do!

Meet me around the web:

WEBSITE
TWITTER
FACEBOOK FAN PAGE
THE CURSED CLAN SITE
HARMLESS ADDICTS

Here is a little tidbit from the book.

Preorder from Are.

As Laird, Callum Lennon feels he has always failed to protect his cousins. Callum’s impulsiveness caused the death of his father and the experience has scarred not only his body, but his soul. From that point on, he made sure to always go with the more logical choice in every matter. When his younger cousin Angus finds clues that might help break the curse, Callum begrudgingly hires Phoebe Chilton to investigate. Callum doesn’t like bringing outsiders into their family affairs. Their life would become fodder for the tabloids if anyone were to find out about the curse. It doesn’t help that the instant he meets Dr. Chilton he’s attracted. But, he doesn’t really have a choice because she might be their last hope.

An expert in archeology, Phoebe has always been dwarfed by her parents’ shadow. Their high standards had her in college by thirteen and earning a second PhD by twenty-two. But her career and her broken marriage have left her needing something more than just diplomas and degrees. She wants to prove that her interest in legends, especially Celtic legends, is as important as her parents’ work. When the Lennon family contacts her, she sees the opportunity to win a massive research grant. With a long-time rival breathing down her back, she jumps at the Lennons’ offer her, hoping it will ensure her the grant. But uncovering the Lennon family secrets, and her attraction to Callum, could prove more than she can handle.

Forces outside the family are determined to ensure that they fail. When an old enemy threatens both the well being of the clan and the fragile new love, Callum will have to choose between believing his mind or his heart.

 * * * * *

“I protect what is mine. I’ll not allow you to use Angus.”

She moved away from the counter, her body tense with anger. “I have never used another person, especially in that way. You’ve convinced yourself that I decided to somehow use my considerable wiles on your cousin to somehow gain who knows what.”

When she said it like that, he felt juvenile and petty.

“Don’t worry, Mr. Lennon. I’ll avoid your cousins from now on.”
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UPDATE: No more waiting! Strokes is live at Amazon! If you mosey on over there, please be sure to “like” and “tag” the book while you’re ordering you very own copy! Thanks!  🙂 ~DD

From National Bestselling Author, Delilah Devlin, comes a naughty collection of seven bedtime stories for a week’s worth of nighttime reading pleasure—a little “som-som” to inspire sexy dreams or a one-handed orgasm, or to be read to a partner and enjoyed together.

Witness one woman’s desperate attempt to seduce her busy husband in “Lily’s Last Stand”. In “Nip ‘n’ Tuck” follow a shy seamstress’s adventures with an online suitor that doesn’t go quite as planned. Dive into “Dreaming by the Sea” where a woman with a mysterious past is surprised by a lover who strides naked from the ocean to claim her. An adventurous Victorian nurse learns the pleasures of steam-driven technology in “Dr.Mullaley’s Cure”. A New York commuter shares lustful daydreams of with another subway passenger in “The Morning Ride”. A woman finds the limits of her inhibitions tested in a one-night stand in “All About Me”. In “The Obedient Wife”, find out what really happened between The Beauty and the Beast. Hint: It’s not your children’s fairytale!

~*~*~*~*~*~

From “Lily’s Last Stand”: The F-bomb fell effortlessly from her mouth, leaving him feeling bemused. “Who are you?” “Can I tell you who I want to be?”

From “Nip ‘n’ Tuck”: She suppressed a grin. He was being a good sport about this. She’d been the one to design the scenario. Something she’d always fantasized about doing to a stranger, but had never had the courage to try. Not until “TallDarkBanker” teased her in a private chat room into revealing her innermost desires.

From “Dreaming by the Sea”: He leaned his forehead against mine. “A kiss, Despy. Let me give you a kiss. I promise all will be answered.” A kiss. How simple. How frightening. Everything would change. I knew it.

From “Dr. Mullaley’s Cure”: “I feel…nearly…oh, the agony…oh, doctor!” Mrs. Headley gave a choked little scream, her upper body arching on the table before settling again. Her flushed cheeks shone with sweat, but the smile she gave the doctor was so filled with gratitude I felt a stirring of something akin to pride for the doctor’s skill.

From “The Morning Ride”: She saw him, or at least from the knee on down. Shiny black loafers. Knife-edged creases on his charcoal trousers. Sweeping her gaze upward, but still not looking directly, she eyed his tall, lean body, embracing the quickening tattoo of her heart. When he took his seat along the opposite wall and two seats down, she let out the breath she’d held, the pinpricks of darkness that had narrowed her vision to a tunnel, fading back. All was right in her world again.

From “All About Me”: “Why don’t you go first?” He shook his head, a smile twitching at the corners of his lips. “Now, see? That’s not what I want. And you said I could have anything I wanted if I made you come.” I snorted. “How do know you I didn’t fake it?” A sexy grin stretched across his face. “Baby, you came so hard you peed on me.”

From “The Obedient Wife”: The door swung open, and every word she’d rehearsed flew from her mind, because a great hairy beast dressed in trousers and boots and nothing more filled up the door. “This be the girl?” the beast rumbled. The daughter shivered at the deep, warm sound, unsure whether it was pleasure or fear and also unsure which excited her more.

~*~*~*~*~*~

Buy at Amazon
Read an Excerpt

This is going to be a hodgepodge of announcements, but I do need to get some reminders out there, and I HAVE to talk about work or I won’t take it seriously! (New Year’s Resolution, you know— 😉 )

Strokes

First off, I should be uploading this one to Kindle today! I’ll let you know when it goes live. I’m rather proud of this collection. It’s got a little bit of everything so you are sure to find something to your taste. It’s a “naughty collection of seven bedtime stories, for a week’s worth of nighttime pleasure—a little ‘som-som’ to inspire sexy dreams or a one-handed orgasm, or to be read to a partner and enjoyed together.” Click on the cover and read more about Strokes!

The Ellora’s Cave Grab Bag Contest

Remember this?

• A signed book by Lila DiPasqua (not an EC author, but since I had a copy of The Princess in His Bed, I thought I’d add it to spice up the pot!)
• A sexy mouse pad signed by Liz Andrews
• A J.K. Coi and Christine D’Abo water bottle
• A multitude of trading cards, bookmarks, excerpt booklets, pens, Post-It pads, etc.

Well, it ends on Tuesday! See rules here. Every comment counts!

Rose’s Plotting Bootcamp

For you writers out there, my sister (Elle James/Myla Jackson) and I are leading a plotting bootcamp starting tomorrow. If you’ve never taken the class, you’re missing out on an experience. It’s a month-long class, so you can complete the exercises at your own pace. We provide feedback and support every step of the way. By the end of the class, you will have a fully fleshed outline for a novel. Besides the lessons, there are live chats where you can pick our brains for industry know-how or brainstorm your story. We’ve had folks return numerous times to plot a new book because we really do help you dig deeper. If you’re interested, click on this link: Rose’s Plotting Bootcamp

The Report Card

Even considering I returned from a vacation on Wednesday, I accomplished a lot this week.

1) I wrapped up final line edits of Lone Heart, my next Samhain book scheduled to release on January 31st. Was I cutting that a little close? The book was messier than I normally allow so it took time to read through and correct.
2) I received edits for Strokes, worked through line-by-line to clean it up, then attempted to format the thing for release at the Kindle store. However, I realize now, I haven’t the patience for that sort of thing. I shipped it to a professional formatter for her to whip it into shape. Believe me, it’ll get done faster—and it’s better for my blood pressure.
3) I put out the call for submissions for Wild at Heart. I need short stories featuring exotic animals in need of rescue and refuge. I’ve been answering questions and promoting the challenge every where I could think of. If you have ideas for where to send it, let me know. This is a really good cause.

And that’s a wrap, folks! Be looking for a brand new contest this week. Nag me to write every chance you get! And if you’re a writer, invite me to sprint with you. I could use the company.

Setting, especially in a historical or paranormal tale, can serve as another character. Here, Gabriela is introduced to the Land of the Dead. Because most of the story takes place in that realm, I was able to let my imagination fly while I built that world, brick by brick. There’s an entire other world with it’s own rules, unique inhabitants, and dangers lurking. Enjoy seeing Gabriela get herself into another pickle. 🙂

“Delilah Devlin delivers an erotic tale of good and evil elevated to a higher level… The erotic scenes in this book are hotter than Hades and ten times more tempting. I dare you to resist!”
5 Cups, Coffee Time Romance

“Darkness Captured is…another steamy sensation!… Delilah Devlin is definitely the mistress of erotic romance!”
Reader to Reader Reviews

“Another hot read of dark sensuality, riveting situations and jaw-dropping desire.”
Fresh Pick!, Fresh Fiction

“Devlin creates memorable characters with exceptional emotional depth. Her magical worldbuilding sets as atmospheric scene for a fast-paced story. The sexual tension runs high and the encounters are smokin’ hot.”
4 Stars, RT Book Reviews

Driven by insatiable desire, a werewolf will enter hell to rescue a princess captured by the Master of Demons…

Headstrong and proud—a royal creature of sinuous grace, all primal instinct and lethal beauty—the shapeshifter Gabriella has agreed to serve as emissary to the vampires who rule in the shadows of the New Orleans night. But she cannot resist the pull of the demon she glimpses on the other side of a mirror, and she is drawn to him hungrily, through a magical portal into the Land of the Dead. Now an eternal nightmare awaits Gabriella at the hands of a mesmerizing dark lord who satisfies her every erotic need…while slowly devouring her soul.

The powerful warrior wolf Guntram Brandt is responsible for the safety of the vanished princess he swore allegiance to years before. Yet it is more than a soldier’s loyalty that pulls Guntram down into the depths of nightmare—for Gabriella ignites within him a burning animal passion that must be satisfied.

But when offered an escape, will she follow her rescuer to safety—torn between her lustful obsession with the dark lord who has enslaved her and her fierce sensual attraction to the only wolf who could ever master her?

Gabriella landed on her knees in the middle of the Persian carpet. Once again facing the crudely carved stone walls of Alex Broussard’s magical bolt-hole. “Alex, you lousy bastard, you can’t do this to me—”

Her shout was cut short when the object of her bitter tirade grabbed the hand of the pregnant woman who’d been resting on a deep sofa inside the cavern when they’d flashed inside. He cast Gabriella an apologetic smile, palmed the crystal key to the room, and they both blinked out in a narrow flash of white light.

“Sonofabitch,” she muttered, reaching up to grab the silver-linked choker from her neck that he’d used to subdue her and ripping it off. How could he do this, leave her in his bolt-hole, after everything she’d done to help him in his quest to usurp command of the vampires?

While he’d disappeared for hours, clutching the phoenix-creature he appeared to love against his chest, she’d helped round up the sabat, nipping at the council-members’ heels to herd them toward their rooms where Nicolas posted guards to keep them in lock-down.

Malcolm, Nicolas’s next-in-command, had led away Inanna’s private security force to the barracks for “debriefing” and posted their own men around the compound to keep things quiet while Alex’s closest advisors sorted through the chaos that was the aftermath of Inanna’s expulsion into Hell.

When Alex had at last returned, looking like he’d just had the sweetest sex of his life, Gabriella shook her fur, pulling on her human skin, ready to remind Alex about their agreement when his gaze fled up the staircase, again.

The look on his face, one filled with a mixture of impatience and tenderness, had made her heart sink. When she’d cleared her throat to remind him she was still standing there, another look crossed his face—one that had her backing up a step and stammering.

The collar had been a real kick in the ass. He’d pulled it from his pocket and apologized, all the while grappling her to the ground to loop the damn thing around her neck. “I swear. It’s just for now,” he’d ground out as she wriggled beneath him. “Just until I get everything sorted out.”

If he thought she’d be in any mood to talk to him, to negotiate a transaction to ensure the peace between their nations remained in place—well, he’d have to do a whole lot of begging, preferably on his knees and naked, before she agreed.
Read the rest of this entry »

For all you writers out there who are also animal lovers, here’s a challenge. The proceeds of this book will go to the Turpentine Creek Wildlife Refuge. I wrote about the facility back in October. Check out Sweet Refuge! for more details about the good work they do.

Wild at Heart
Editor: Delilah Devlin
Publisher: Diamond State Romance Authors
Deadline: April 1, 2012

Wild at Heart is open to all authors.

Editor Delilah Devlin is looking for stories for a special project to benefit the Turpentine Creek Wildlife Refuge.

Recently, six Diamond State Romance Author chapter members spent a weekend falling in love with the Turpentine Creek Wildlife Refuge and its exotic inhabitants. The refuge is home to large cats and a variety of exotic animals that would otherwise have to be put down because they aren’t suitable for placement in zoos or to be returned to the wild. The need for financial support was apparent. Our chapter decided to pool its resources and find a way to help.

What we propose is to produce a volume of short stories, all centred around animals in need of refuge. All proceeds from the sales of the book will go directly to the Turpentine Creek Refuge. We will edit the submissions, seek professional cover art and formatting, and assist the refuge by uploading the anthology to online bookstores like Amazon’s Kindle store and Barnes & Noble’s Nook store.  Additionally, we will help upload the book to CreateSpace so that printed volumes can be available for sale in brick-and-mortar bookstores throughout Arkansas and inside the refuge’s shop.

This is an international call for submissions of short stories to be donated for the cause. Only the best stories will be accepted. All genres of fiction (contemporary and paranormal, sweet adult romance and Young Adult) will be considered. Please keep in mind that stories must be PG-rated as the book will be two-sided—one side geared toward adult readers and the other toward teenaged readers.

Examples of the kinds of stories we seek:

• A maimed Iraqi war veteran learns to accept his disability by working with equally damaged animals
• A teenaged girl helps a were-cougar hide his true nature while both hunt for an escaped cat
• A teenaged couple encounters a tiger escaped from its private owner’s cage and work together to find help to capture and care for it
• A pushy animal psychic must gain the trust of the refuge’s veterinarian to help a depressed bear
• A troubled teenager discovers a tiger living in a national forest, then seeks a way to prevent locals staging a hunt from killing it

How to submit: Prepare your 1,500 to 4,000 words story in a double-spaced, Arial, 12 point, black font Word document with pages numbered (.doc, NOT.docx) OR rich text format. Indent the first line of each paragraph half an inch and double space (regular double spacing, do not add extra lines between paragraphs or do any other irregular spacing). US grammar (double quotation marks around dialogue, etc.) is required.

In your document at the top left of the page, include your legal name (and pseudonym if applicable), mailing address, and 50 word or less bio in the third person to dsrawildatheart@gmail.com. If you are using a pseudonym, please provide your real name and pseudonym and make it clear which one you’d like to be credited as. Authors may submit up to 2 stories.

About the editor: Ms. Devlin has published over one hundred stories in multiple genres and lengths. Her published print titles include Into the Darkness, Seduced by Darkness, Darkness Captured, Down in Texas, Texas Men and Ravished by a Viking. Her short stories are featured in Zane’s Purple Panties, and Cleis Press’s Lesbian Cowboys, Girl Crush, Fairy Tale Lust, Lesbian Lust, Passion, Carnal Machines, and Dream Lovers. She is published by Avon, Kensington, Harlequin, Atria/Strebor, Ellora’s Cave, Samhain Publishing, and Berkley. In Fall 2011, she debuted her first anthology with Cleis Press, Girls Who Bite.

Direct any questions you have regarding your story or the submission process to Delilah at dsrawildatheart@gmail.com.

First, thanks to the authors who kept you entertained while I was gone! I appreciated the fun commentaries and the fact I didn’t have to worry about posting while I was away. 🙂

My trip was a fun one! My daughter, the 7-year-old hellion, and I flew to DC last Saturday. We visited with my ex and my son and his family. I think it’s funny how we all ended up divvied up so neatly between Arkansas and Virginia. It certainly makes it convenient. The visit was lovely. We ate too much, shopped like fiends, and took tons of pictures of kids doing cute things. Then the three of us drove back in my “new” used Honda Pilot, which hubby passed along to me. For folks who like to drive to “get ‘er done” it should have taken us 17 hours, but the Red-Headed Hellion and I believe in enjoying the journey, so we took two and a half days to get back to Arkansas. If we saw a sign from the interstate that intrigued us, we followed it. More about our stops later.

While I was gone, I got exciting news from Maxim Jakubowski, the editor of The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica, volume 11, which is due out next year. “Dr. Mullaley’s Cure,” which appeared in Cleis’s Carnal Machines, was selected for the anthology! Yay!

I also learned that I’ve lost my editor at Ellora’s Cave. I’ll miss her, but hope she’s going on to bigger and better things. Love you, Mary!

I’m settling back in, looking over the schedule for work I have to complete by month’s end, and making tweaks. I ALWAYS put too much on my plate, so I’ve been skinnying down my goals. Today, I’m working on the final revisions of Strokes, which I plan to format and upload this weekend, and hope will be available for purchase by next Tuesday. Be looking for it!

I think that’s it for now. I missed my daily chat. Now, I have to go unpack and start some laundry. Then I’ll unbury my desktop and get to work!

Building a Series

There are two ways to do it, and I’ve done both. First, there’s the series that just grows from a single book: a new story about a secondary character readers liked a lot. The other type of series is planned from the beginning and generally begins with a group of potential main characters or a special concept.

Siblings—a family connection in which all the main characters are members of one dysfunctional family.

They don’t have to be actual siblings, These characters could easily be best friends from childhood, back together after they’ve grown apart, or coworkers thrown together for a project that causes conflict among them/their significant others. The only limitation as to creating characters for a series is the author’s own imagination.

One series I’ve sold to Ellora’s Cave for release in 2012 is based on a family connection. I developed aTexasranching dynasty led by a patriarch with secrets and feuds with neighbors that has spanned a generation. Tired of cowboys and oil wells and little else, I gave the heir apparent, a bad boy with a history of failure and a passion for the wind farms he’s developing on his mother’s land—a source of conflict between him and his father. Scandal is always good for spicing up erotic romance, so I created Daddy’s secret love child, a  high-achieving guy who tries to show the heir up at every turn. Finally, to round out the series, I chose the only daughter, known as “Wild One”, for the final book. CADEN KINK seems to be shaping up pretty well. Look for the first of the three books in the second quarter of the year.

A special concept—A series with continuing secondary characters and a common but mostly independent theme throughout.

Think connections: a common setting, a thread of similar but independent situations, a cast of secondary characters who pull the series together. The series might spin off a previous series, bringing continuity and providing secondary characters who were fully developed when they were main characters in the previous series books.

COURTHOUSE CONNECTIONS, also coming this year from Ellora’s Cave, will consist of four books in which the main characters of each book have reason to engage the lawyers whose stories were told in the LAWYERS IN LOVE series. All the main characters are 1) in some kind of trouble that places their freedom in jeopardy, 2) in a legal situation that could ruin them financially and emotionally or 3) in an employee situation with the members of the firm.

I’ve never done a series like this before. So far, it’s been a lot of fun. I hope the results will go over with readers!

Check out my website: http://annjacobs.net.