Release Day!

Today is release day for my SECOND novel (which I think means I get to call myself multi-published now, woohoo!), A Marriage of Inconvenience.

I got a lovely review at Heroes and Heartbreakers. Also, Carina Press is offering my first book, The Sergeant's Lady at half price through April 29.

Six Sentence Sunday - Release Day Eve

Since A Marriage of Inconvenience releases tomorrow (and can be purchased from Carina, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or All Romance, just to name a few), it seemed only fitting to post six more sentences from it before moving on to my current works-in-progress.

This week, something from James and Lucy's wedding night. Lucy's nerves are at war with her desires:

Freeing her hair was not the work of an instant, and Lucy was captured in the circle of his arms as James gently, carefully unwound the braid. His breath was warm against her neck, and after a tense moment she sighed and rested her cheek against his. Her nerves seemed heightened somehow; she was exquisitely aware of the contrast between the skin along his cheekbones, almost as soft as her own, and the faint rasp of beard stubble too short to see.

Still unbraiding her hair, James rested his face more closely against hers, then drew back to nuzzle her, nose to nose, and kiss her again. It was a gentle yet probing kiss, their tongues in a sort of leisurely, playful duel, and it did not end until he leaned back to fan her long hair around her, running his fingers through it.

“I’ve been wanting to do this since the day I met you,” he said.

As always, comments are welcome, and stop by the Six Sunday mothership for links to other authors' posts. Also, my blog tour for this book just started, and I'm giving away two copies this weekend. Stop by Romancing the Past to read a longer excerpt or by Risky Regencies, where I talk about my inspiration for the story and what makes A Marriage of Inconvenience a risky book. Leave a comment at either or both for a chance to win.

A Marriage of Inconvenience Blog Tour

A Marriage of Inconvenience releases Monday, and over the next couple of weeks I'll be visiting some of my favorite blogs to talk about the book, my writing, and my inspirations. At most of my tour stops, I'll be giving away a copy of the book to one lucky commenter. Here's the schedule as it stands now:

Saturday, April 9
Excerpt at Romancing the Past

Sunday, April 10
Q&A at Risky Regencies

Monday, April 11
Publication, the Second Time Around (With Bonus Cabana Boys!) at Romance Writer's Revenge

Tuesday, April 12
Horse Shopping With My Characters at History Hoydens

Wednesday, April 13
My First Time (um, that's my first time FINISHING A MANUSCRIPT, get your minds out of the gutter) at the Carina blog

Thursday, April 14
First Person vs. Third Person at Debuts & Reviews

Excerpt at The Season for Romance

Friday, April 15
Houses in Historicals at Historical Hussies

Saturday, April 16
Control Freaks in Love at Fresh Fiction

Sunday, April 17
TBD at Elaine Golden's blog

Tuesday, April 19
TBD at Rose Lerner's blog

Wednesday, April 20
TBD at Petit Fours and Hot Tamales

An Overnight Success (or Not) at Happy Writer

Six Sentence Sunday revisits A Marriage of Inconvenience

This week we're back in my April 11 release, A Marriage of Inconvenience. Last week we saw the hero, James, through his sister's eyes, and this week James gives us his perspective on Lucy, the heroine. (This is from a bit earlier in the story, before James and Lucy are engaged.)

“So, brother,” she said with unconvincing casualness, “what’s the trouble between you and Miss Jones?”

“Nothing,” he said. “She’s a very sweet girl.” Now, that was damning with faint praise. The more he knew Lucy Jones, the less he would describe her as anything so insipid as “sweet.” No, her flavor was sharp and complex, with the faint bitterness of fine wine.

Comments and feedback are always welcome, and do stop by the main blog and check out other writers' excerpts.

April Madness

April is going to be a busy month for me. To put it very mildly.

Miss Fraser turns seven next week, and we're having her birthday party Saturday at Chuck E Cheese. After two hours of the noise and crowds there, I'm going to want to come home and sit alone in a quiet room for the rest of the day. But it's what she wanted and she only gets one birthday a year, after all. I ordered her cake today–chocolate, with Littlest Pet Shop decorations.

As regular readers of this blog know, my next book, A Marriage of Inconvenience, releases April 11. So I'm busy with all the things an e-book author does to promote a new release–preparing guest blog posts, making sure my online ads are ready, obsessively monitoring review sites, etc. And on the days those guest blog posts are live, I'll be busy commenting and interacting with readers.

And then there's Easter. I sing in a choir, and this is the busiest time of our year. We have two Palm Sunday services, Maundy Thursday, plus 3 services on Easter starting at 7 AM. Somehow Mr. Fraser and I have to squeeze in the family aspects of Easter, too–getting Miss Fraser's Easter basket ready, planning a festive meal, and so on.

To add to the fun, Mr. Fraser is teaching a college class this quarter on top of his full-time job. Some weeks at least one of us has an evening commitment four workdays out of five. He did this for the first time last year, only then it was even crazier because I'd just sold The Sergeant's Lady and was in the middle of edits, AND we found the house we wanted and were scrambling to buy it before the first-time buyer tax credit went away. But even without that added layer of insanity, we are going to be seeing less of each other, and I'll need to do more of the day-to-day housework and childcare than normal, until mid-June.

Some people might use my April schedule as an excuse to take a break from writing. And if I hadn't spent the last five months battling carpal tunnel syndrome, I might do just that. But I'm just now starting to write regularly again, now that my hands are feeling better and I've got a copy of DragonDictate for when they start to feel sore. (I'm using DragonDictate right now, so if there are any really insane typos or my sentence structure seems a bit less polished, that's why. I'm still learning to speak like I type.)

I've missed writing. I'm behind schedule on my manuscripts compared to where I wanted to be at this point in the year. So I'm going to write in April. I've made a resolution to write every day. I'm not setting myself a word count or page count quota. That's my one concession to how busy my schedule is. But I have to write every day. Even my daughter's birthday. Even Easter. Even on the days Mr. Fraser has class. Some of those days it will probably only be a paragraph or two. But I will write every day.

I won't make this blog boring by posting daily progress updates. But I think I will include a weekly report, maybe on Saturday, maybe it's part of my Six Sentence Sunday posts, just to keep myself honest.

Six Sentence Sunday - more from A Marriage of Inconvenience

For this week's Six Sentence Sunday, I'm returning to A Marriage of Inconvenience, my upcoming Regency historical romance from Carina. It releases April 11 and is available for preorder now at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and directly from Carina.

Here my hero, James, has recently been caught in a compromising situation with the heroine, Lucy, and has done the proper gentlemanly thing by agreeing to marry her even though she has no money whatsoever and is several rungs below his rich, viscountly self on the social ladder. His bride-to-be has two younger brothers, aged 13 and 17, and rather than being daunted he can hardly wait to meet his new brothers-in-law so he can start dictating their educations and planning their lives, all for their own good, of course. His sister, on learning this, sums up his character as follows:

“Come, James, surely you admit that nothing brings you greater delight than managing people’s lives for them. That’s why you’re so active in Parliament, and half the reason you love this estate—so much scope for giving orders and telling everyone how the world should be. You do your best to manage ME. It’s wonderful for you that Lucy has younger brothers and no parents living. You won’t have to wait till your own children are of a rational age to have someone to bring up according to your dictates. Though I’m sure you’ll have opinions on the proper dimensions of a cradle and when a child should have its first taste of pap by the time your firstborn enters the world.”

Comments are always welcome, and please stop by the Six Sentence Sunday blog to view other authors' contributions.

Available for preorder!

My second novel, A Marriage of Inconvenience, is now available for preorder in the Kindle Store at Amazon! So if that's your preferred e-reading format, follow the clicky link, place your order, and the book will be waiting for you bright and early on the morning of April 11.

The book will of course also be available directly from Carina Press, not to mention Barnes & Noble, the Sony ReaderStore, the Google eBookstore, etc.--pretty much wherever ebooks are sold. But for some reason Amazon is consistently quickest off the mark getting books up for preorder. And since the moment the book is actually available for sale somewhere is the moment it feels real, crossing that Amazon threshold is a Big Deal to me.

In order to further motivate you to Buy My Book (if I can't shamelessly self-promote on my own blog once in awhile, where can I?), here's my lovely cover along with an excerpt from the novel:

James knew quite well that he had merely had the wind knocked out of him, and that the young woman leaning over him was therefore no celestial being. Also, angels were generally represented as fair creatures, golden of hair and garbed in heavenly blue. Nothing angelic about deep brown eyes that fairly crackled with intelligence behind their momentary anxiety, nor about those dark curls peeping from beneath a scarlet cloak.

Yet for all that, the girl was an angel. He smiled lazily at her.

Her brows drew together slightly, which only served to further highlight her deep-set, expressive eyes.

“Sir, are you injured?”

Her voice was clear and melodious. Angelic, even.

“Nothing worse than bruises, I trust, miss,” he assured her.

“Do you think you can rise?”

The angel could not possibly realize she had committed a double entendre. Sweet-faced and innocent, she was no older than Anna and likely a little younger. She spoke in the soft, cultured tones of a gentlewoman.

But he allowed himself an inward smile nonetheless. “I trust I can,” he said, pushing himself up to a sitting position with a slight wince. He had landed on his left shoulder, and it pained him when he moved.

She rocked back on her heels to maintain a correct distance between them, and the hood of her cloak fell back to reveal all her thick brown hair, which James knew must have begun the morning neatly coiled but was now wind-tossed.

“But you are injured, sir! I’m so very sorry.”

He blinked at her. “Whatever for?”

“I startled your horse.”

“Not deliberately, I trust, unless you have the power to summon the wind.”

Her lips twitched as though she wanted to smile but was uncertain of the propriety of such a course. “No, sir.”

“Well, then. You’ve no need to apologize. I’ve but a trifling pain in my shoulder, nothing more.” He glanced over the offending shoulder and spotted Ghost galloping down the valley, with Anna on Shade in close pursuit. “Ghost is uninjured as well, and giving my sister a chance to exhibit what a master equestrienne she is.”

“It must be a fine thing, to ride so well.”

The angel’s voice was wistful, and James turned to look at her again. “Are you a horsewoman, miss?”

“I never had the opportunity to learn.”

He studied her more closely. Her simple dress and cloak were well made, but without the fashionable line and elegance that marked the work of an expensive London modiste. She must come of family genteel enough to see its daughters educated, but not wealthy enough to keep a stable. She couldn’t be Lord Almont’s intended, as he had first suspected, and he rejoiced that this pretty innocent wasn’t to be the bride of a foolish lord almost old enough to be her grandfather.

-------------------
Copyright 2011 by Susanna Fraser
Permission to reproduce text granted by Harlequin Books S.A.

Six Sentence Sunday!

Today is my first week participating in Six Sentence Sunday, in which writers post six consecutive sentences from their work.

In honor of my new Regency historical, A Marriage of Inconvenience, which comes out April 11 from Carina Press, I'm posting the first six sentences:

“Marry you?” Lucy stared open-mouthed at her cousin Sebastian for a long moment before she remembered that she must always be ladylike and self-controlled. She closed her mouth and looked down at her clasped hands. She could not stop her heart from trying to gallop its way out of her chest, but she could and did force herself to breathe slowly and steadily.

This was the very thing she had always wanted most, the thing she would have dreamed of had she permitted herself dreams. It could not possibly be real.

Comments always appreciated, and please click on the link above to see other participants' work.

Cover!

I just got the cover for my April 11 release, A Marriage of Inconvenience:



Isn't it pretty? Yet another win for the Carina art department! I love how it echoes the look of The Sergeant's Lady while clearly showing that Marriage is a civilian story with a pastoral setting. And so far I'm two for two in heroes wearing clothes. Boo-yah! (I know some people love the shirtless covers, but to me historical clothes are so hot it's a shame not to use them. And I trust my writing and my readers' imaginations to show what the guy looks like nekkid when the proper moment comes.)

Research Wednesday: My philosophy of historical fiction

This week instead of talking about what I've researched lately, I'm going to say a little about why I research, and my goals when I sit down to write historical fiction.

I know there are readers and writers out there who love historical fiction, especially historical romance, for what I'll call the "once upon a time" factor. For them it's not so much about 1315 or 1815 or 1865 as escaping to a world unlike ours, and probably one with better clothes and manners and far more hot single dukes.



I get the appeal of that, I really do. And I hope that anyone who picks up my books looking for an escape gets it. I always try to provide a full dose of romance and adventure. Granted, I haven't written a hot single duke yet, but I like to think Will of The Sergeant's Lady could hold his own in more aristocratic company. (Way before I sold, I used to pitch the book to my friends as "Nathan Fillion in a Rifle uniform, ammirite?!") And A Marriage of Inconvenience has a viscount who looks a bit like Ian Somerhalder.



But as both a reader and a writer, I'm not looking for "once upon a time." (Not in a historical novel anyway. It's just right for certain kinds of fantasy.) If the logline atop Chapter One says "1815," I want it to BE 1815. I write Regency/Napoleonic era because I'm fascinated by all the upheaval of that specific quarter century. Many of the key figures of the era feel as real to me as anyone in 2011. In some obscure way I feel like I owe it to them to respect their time and their culture and to write it as accurately as I can--and when I do something as off the wall and unlikely as pairing an heiress with a common sergeant, to not make light of the degree to which my hero and heroine are breaking the rules. I know I can't recreate the past perfectly. But I feel obliged to try.

Writing Weekend: Edits In

A very brief post to say that I've turned in my last round of edits for my April release, A Marriage of Inconvenience. So that particular book-baby is out there in the big world, and if I think of a better way I could've written it or notice an anachronism or infelicitous word of phrase, too bad so sad. Too late to change it now.

There's still plenty of publicity work for me to do on Marriage, but now my primary focus must shift from polishing a completed manuscript to finishing the two new ones I'm working on. And to be quite honest, have barely started, between edits and tendinitis. Time to get cracking!

Guest post at Pink Fuzzy Slippers

Today I'm a guest at the Pink Fuzzy Slippers blog, talking about where I get my ideas and how I avoid giving writer's block power over me.

Stop by and say hi. One commenter wins a $10 Amazon gift certificate.

What if my characters had been born 200 years later?

Some authors, when developing characters for a new story, write their characters' biographies or interview them. I don't. For me, a story usually starts with a strong vision of two characters interacting--usually at their first meeting--and I think, "Well, who are you, why are you here, and is there a novel in you?" I build forward and backward, imagining what might happen next and what brought these people to the point of meeting in the first place, but it's not a structured process. In a sense, I know who my characters are as soon as that vivid first interaction appears in my imagination. Everything else is just fleshing them out.

Without getting into a long digression on my process, I'll just say that sometimes while I'm writing, my critique partners will ask questions about a character or I'll find myself wanting to verbalize my instinctive understanding of a protagonist or antagonist. One of the ways I approach this is by imagining who the character would be if they were born in my place and time rather than their own. What would they do, in a world where gender and class still matter, but not nearly as much as they did 200 years ago? This both gives me a clearer sense of what kind of person they are and what conflicts they have within their own time. (Though I try not to overdo the latter, lest they seem like frustrated time travelers longing for opportunities someone really born in the late 18th century wouldn't have begun to imagine.)

So I thought it would be fun to post about who Will and Anna from The Sergeant's Lady and James and Lucy from A Marriage of Inconvenience might have become if they'd been Americans in the early 21st century rather than Britons in the early 19th.


Will is the easiest of the bunch. He would've still pursued a military career, but instead of enlisting would've secured an appointment to West Point or a spot in an ROTC program and generally become an officer and a gentleman. (And a damn fine example of both.)

Anna is more of a challenge. She's intelligent and fairly extroverted, but she doesn't have any one ability or ambition that leaps out at me and makes me think that in my world she'd clearly be a lawyer or a research scientist or what have you. Of the feminine accomplishments she learned as a Regency young lady, the one she most enjoys and has the most talent for is music, but she's no prodigy. She's more like the best musician in your high school graduating class than the best musician you've ever heard. So she's no concert pianist or opera singer, and I don't see her as a music teacher or choir director, either.

She's curious and adventurous, and she wants to see as much of the world as possible. I can see her doing a stint in the Peace Corps after college, and maybe going into international development or diplomacy from there. Or, heck, she was pretty comfortable with army life in The Sergeant's Lady, so maybe she'd go to West Point, too, since that's been an option for women for 30-something years now.

James, the hero of A Marriage of Inconvenience, is Anna's brother, and the siblings share a certain idealism. But where Anna's idealism has an inward focus--she's utterly true to her principles and willing to defy the rest of the world for both love and her own sense of right and wrong--James is more the type who wants to change the world. He's a visionary, and he enjoys exercising power (for the good at least 90% of the time, since he's a hero).

In my book, he inherits a title and with it a seat in the House of Lords, so he's already a rising political power broker at 24. In our world he'd have to be a bit more patient, but at 24 he'd be a star law student, and by his early 40's he'd be the junior senator from some state or other, possibly even meditating a run at the presidency or at least on his party's short list for the next VP nomination if he happened to represent a swing state.

Lucy is another easy choice. She's an unusually gifted amateur artist in Marriage, and in the 21st century she'd doubtless be a professional artist. I'm not sure what medium or style she'd work in, though. I can't see her as an envelope-pushing avant garde artist, but nor do I see her as conventional and conservative. Maybe she'd be a photographer. Yeah, that's it. She'd be a young portrait photographer starting to get a lot of buzz.

Casting A Marriage of Inconvenience...

Now that I've got another novel scheduled, it's time for another casting post! (Also known as an excuse to post pictures of some hot guys.)

The hero of A Marriage of Inconvenience is James Wright-Gordon, Viscount Selsley. He's young, just 24, but he inherited his title at 15 and came into full control of his fortune and a seat in the House of Lords at 21, so he takes power for granted and is confident he can control everything in the world that most matters to him.

James is an unusual romance hero insofar as he's a bit on the short side, but he's still quite the hottie. I imagined him with a lean and compact yet powerful body, something like Ichiro Suzuki (who at 5'10" is only short by baseball player standards, but still):



But my half-Scottish, half-English hero is obviously not going to look like Ichiro in the face. James has dark hair, blue eyes, and rugged features, a bit like Ian Somerhalder:



Somerhalder's eyes are too light a blue for James, and his nose isn't quite aquiline enough. (That's sort of a Thing with me--you can pretty much spot my heroes by finding the guy with the most prominent nose in the book. This may or may not ever be reflected in my cover art...and my money's on Not. Even if I write, say, a biography of the Duke of Wellington, they'll probably use the Goya portrait for the cover, which is a fine work of art but NSM a literal rendition of His Grace's bone structure.)

Lucy, my heroine, is a delicate, elegant brown-eyed brunette. A lot like Natalie Portman:



She's quiet and deceptively meek, but we learn over the course of the story that she's learned to hide her natural strength and spirit growing up as a poor relation in a difficult family.



James's sister Anna, the heroine of The Sergeant's Lady, also plays a prominent role in Marriage. It's a prequel, so we get to witness the beginning of Anna's misbegotten first marriage to Sebastian Arrington. Back when I did my Sergeant casting post in April, I had trouble finding a contemporary actress who looks like my image of Anna. I still can't find anyone recent, but I thought of a good Hollywood Golden Age Anna--Vivien Leigh.

And Sebastian himself, as mentioned in my April villains post, looks like Ralph Fiennes, but with lighter blond hair.



Only he'd also have a mustache, because such was the fashion among cavalry officers then. Though I admit to struggling to picture him that way.

Since Marriage is a prequel, Will Atkins, the hero of Sergeant, doesn't make an appearance except for a brief mention in an epilogue that may or may not make it into the published book. (The draft I'm working on now to return to my editor by the 21st includes a long comment with the pros and cons of the epilogue, pitching the ball into her court, because I just can't make up my mind.) But I like Will, and he looks like Nathan Fillion (Firefly-era), and you really can't have too many images of Mal Reynolds, now can you? So I'll close with this:

...and the blog tour is back!

Today I'm at Historical Hussies, talking about the history I left out of The Sergeant's Lady and giving away a $10 gift certificate to Amazon, B&N, or Books on Board to one commenter.

I haven't had much time for blogging here lately, between work, editing A Marriage of Inconvenience, working on my desert island WIP, and getting my daughter ready for school. (She starts first grade today.) But I promise a real post soon, maybe a nice picture-filled one so you'll know what James and Lucy, the protagonists of Marriage, look like in my head.

I can has release date!

I have a release date for A Marriage of Inconvenience now. It's set to come to a Kindle/Nook/iPad/etc. near you on April 11, 2011. Mark your calendars now. :-)

September

I've spend most of my working life in academia, and I now have a daughter in school, so September still feels at least as much like the beginning of a new year as the one in January. The school year starts, the days get shorter, the weather turns cooler (though in Seattle this year it never really got warm), and it feels like time to Take Things Seriously again.

To suit the pseudo-new-year, I've got new projects and resolutions. And to help myself stick with them, I'm talking about them here on my blog for all the world to see:

1) My editor sent me developmental editing notes for my Spring 2011 Carina release, A Marriage of Inconvenience, yesterday. I have three weeks to work on them. Compared to my first round of edits for The Sergeant's Lady, when I had just four days, this feels like all the time in the world. But I don't want to put myself in a position of having to do the edits in four days because September 21 just seems so far away until, oh, September 15 or so. I'll go into more detail about the editing process later. I started doing so here, then realized it was turning into its own post.

2) I'm also working on the first draft of a shipwreck novella called Uncharted. I'm about 10,000 words into what I'm projecting to be maybe a 40,000-word story, and I want to pick up my writing pace between Marriage edits. Goal is to have it finished and darn near submission ready by Oct. 31 so I can devote November to a new project...and that's only two months away! Better get moving.

3) Marriage edits permitting, November is going to be all about a new paranormal/fantasy project (I'm still not sure which side of the genre divide it'd fall on). For the second time in my life, I'm going to try NaNoWriMo, with the goal not a finished draft, but getting 50,000 words into the story and seeing if it's as cool an idea as I think it is.

4) I'm going back on Weight Watchers, with the goal of losing 20 lbs. by Jan. 1, which, incidentally, would take me below a major milestone by my 40th birthday (also Jan. 1). I'd started on WW back in March, thinking that I couldn't control whether I sold a book by my 40th birthday, but I could have self-discipline enough to get below said weight milestone. Selling Sergeant derailed me a bit, and it's time I got back on it so I can turn 40 published AND healthier.

5) Our new house is still full of packed boxes. By the end of December, I want to at least open all the boxes and look inside them, splitting them into unpack-and-find-a-place-for, donate/throw out, and long-term storage (as in labeled and neatly stacked or shelved instead of piled in the middle of the garage).

If I can do everything on that list by 12/31, I'll feel accomplished, and in a good position to make plans for the calendar new-year. We'll see. #5 sounds like the easiest, but I'm thinking it's Most Likely To Not Get Done of them all.