Diagnosis, Love - Thoughts

Hi everyone!

I just wanted to share a few things that have been on my mind about Diagnosis, Love - my paranormal romance.

Writing Diagnosis, Love gave me the chance to address several issues in my life and wrap everything up into a neat short tale. Melanie Marr's leukemia reflected the frustration, helplessness and fear I felt when my brother was diagnosed with Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma. (Although he was initially given a 30-40% chance of survival, after following chemotherapy and radiation treatments he's been cured for several years now.)

I regularly give blood and urge everyone to do so. As the slogan says: It's in you to give! Melanie Marr represents all those phlebotomists I've met at the blood clinics over the years, and it was my small way of paying them back for their dedicated service.

Then it just seemed right to have a doctor fall in love with one of his dying patients, especially when that patient also happens to be a health professional. Jakob Farkas filled that role perfectly. The fact that he's an immortal vampire, or claims to be one, gives a dying woman desperate hope for a new life.

Finally, I'm also an art fanatic, and the caves in Lascaux have always intrigued me, ever since I was old enough to look through art history books, yeah, I'm talking about Gombrich, Gardner and Jansen. Who were these ancient artists who felt compelled to draw on the cave walls and ceilings? So, of course, I just had give my explanation and to also set the climax of the Diagnosis, Love in one of the caves!

That's it. Just some thoughts on a hot summer day.

For those of you who haven't read it yet, I hope you will take a look at Diagnosis, Love.


Available from Noble Romance Publishing.

Ingrid, ;-)

What cold medication, SpongeBob, & Angelina Jolie have in common...

Hello everyone!

My name is Zee Monodee, and I recently joined the amazing Noble Romance Publishing house as part of the Hot New Talent program (feels all funky to see my name listed up there *grins*). I'm 28, married, mum to a tween hellion, addicted to Supernatural-- and I'll go back to the real purpose of this post before I bore you to death.

So, intrigued by the title question up there? Some might say they all put you to sleep, but then too, there's good to be ascribed to sleep. Especially when it generates new stories.

All three of the above have played a part in my story coming together. My romantic suspense-slash-mystery-slash-thriller, Walking The Edge (Corpus Brides: Book One), will be coming out with Noble Romance on June 27, under the Foreign Affairs imprint.

Now what on earth do cold medication, SpongeBob, and Angelina Jolie have in common with a romantic suspense-slash-mystery-slash-thriller? Let me explain, and for this, I need to tell you a bit more about the book.

I've always loved a good amnesia storyline. What does this past that the character cannot remember hold? What secrets hide in those darkened depths? I knew this was the starting point of my story - an amnesic heroine, who wakes up from a coma and knows -just knows - that something is off with the world her 'husband' wants her to live in.

What lurks in her forgotten memories? I'll admit that I hit a brick wall here. What was the husband's deal? Why the secrecy? How not to make this into a soap opera? By now I was halfway through a draft, and I shelved the story because it wasn't going any further.

Fast forward to few months later - it's now August, and where I live, the heart of winter (southern hemisphere, tropical island by the name of Mauritius, in the Indian Ocean. Yes, we do have winter in the tropics *grin*). My town is very much like England - always cold, always rainy, so winter months are spent inside. Not really helpful for your sanity when your kids go on winter break, and you're stuck with them 24/7 inside four walls. Add to this that you catch the cold of the century, and you're stuck in bed with fever, endless sniffles, kinks and pain in your body - you get the picture. Sleep is very welcome then - except that you cannot sleep, because there's a kid at home that you have to watch.

Enter the cold medication. Real good stuff - knocks your cold off in 3 days tops. Not to mention that it also knocks your socks and brain off too in the process. I would be out cold within half an hour of a dose, and then I would dream. When I'd wake up, everything would be hazy... and on a few occasions, my husband had to ask me what I was talking about because, you see, my dreams had felt so real I was experiencing deja vu when I was awake.

Eureka moment! I suddenly knew what it was like to lose all your bearings, to question your reality, to second guess yourself and doubt your husband's words when he goes, "honey, nothing like what you mention has ever happened."
And guess what? This is exactly what Amelia, the heroine from Walking The Edge, feels like when she wakes up with amnesia and goes to live with her husband in their posh Hampstead Heath home in London.

I got the trigger point of dreams - highly lucid visualisations that make Amelia question her reality. What if the dreams were real, as in, fragments of her shattered memory? And what happens when they don't equate at all the 'reality' her husband wants her to believe in?

Enter SpongeBob. A SpongeBob GameBoy cartridge, actually. I'm an imperfect and perfectly-flawed mother, and my idea of school break babysitter is a new game cartridge. Anyhow, my kid is the kind who can conjure chaos in 10 seconds flat - I always need to have him close to me. Which is how I find myself drifting between reality and la-la-land (courtesy of the cold meds), to the background score of the SpongeBob Volcano Island video game.

Anyone familiar with the yellow sponge here? You'll know he is extremely annoying. The music on his video game is none less brain-bashing. One tune in particular, on a level my son was stuck on for days, kept playing over and over here. So much so that after a while, I could hear that tune in my head even when it was switched off. It did have a rapid, catchy pace to it, that escalated to a mind-numbing climax. Thanks to my cold meds, guess what sound became the background score of my dreams and daydreams about the story? You guessed it - SpongeBob.

So now I had my starting point. I had my pace, and I knew it all escalates to a climax. The big question was - why? Why is the husband so intent on having her drugged? What does he want to hide? What doesn't he want her to remember?

And what if the clue to her past lies in Amelia's dreams of the past, in the guise of this gorgeous Frenchman she sees in bed with her when she closes her eyes?

Back to my own reality, on the day I manage to tear myself from my bed to plop down on the couch, it so happens that my husband is watching this movie, Wanted, starring Angelina Jolie. Not my cup of tea usually, such movies, but hey, anything is better than listening to SpongeBob. So I sit down and watch this story about a total nobody (played by James McAvoy) who is told that he must avenge his father's murder, and the person who will train him is this kick-ass, no-nonsense, gun-wielding chick played by Angelina Jolie (that was long before her Salt days!).

And Eureka again! Amelia in Walking The Edge should be a kick-ass, no-nonsense, edgy chick a la Angelina-in-Wanted too.

From here on, I slid into Amelia's psyche, walked in her shoes, saw the world through her eyes and the limited frame of reference she had to process everything because of her amnesia. When she wondered that the Frenchman from the dreams could have the key to her memory, I cut and run along with her to Marseille, the old city on the Mediterranean coast. I met this man, Gerard Besson as he is called, at the same time Amelia comes across him in the flesh, finally.

Together, Amelia and Gerard took me on a journey through Marseille to find out who she really is. Start to finish, I had this story's first draft down in exactly 13 days. I wrote for every minute I was awake - I became Amelia. Along the way, with her, my heart broke, sang, took a few hits, found a safe harbour... and found the truth.

What was the truth, you ask? Ah, this I cannot say. Not yet. Why don't you catch Amelia directly, on June 27, to find out what her story is when Walking The Edge (Corpus Brides: Book One) comes out?

I hope I have managed to give you a glimpse of what an incredible ride it has been to put this story together.

From Mauritius with love,

Zee

Catch me on the Web at the following places:
Blog - http://zeemonodee.blogspot.com/
Facebook - Zee Monodee
GoodReads - Zee Monodee
Twitter - ZeeMonodee

Valentine's Day And The Married (Male) Romance Author

     First, I owe a very profound thank-you to Indigo Skye, who graciously agreed to share the space and the day with a (somewhat overeager) newbie due to a scheduling oddity, and whose blog will be coming out around 8am. If you can spare a moment, do please stop by and check it out!

     Being an erotic romance author has had a very peculiar effect on me.

     I recently sat down and counted out the actual hours I spend writing stories and novels, posting blogs and so forth. While I toil in minimum-wage Purgatory for the time being, it's physically demanding but mentally dull, so I use the time to plan, outline, and tweak various works in progress, most of which are in the erotic romance genre. When the math was all done, I concluded that somewhere in the vicinity of ninety percent of my waking hours are spent fantasizing about or writing for the pleasure of women who are not my wife.

     Most women would look at this as an unforgivable betrayal, placed in that context. Many would no doubt wonder what they lack that makes their husband need or desire the approval of other women. More than a few would throw up their hands, pack a suitcase, and head back to their parents and the birthing pangs of a nasty divorce.

     Thankfully, my wife is not most women. And as it's Valentine's Day, it's only fair that I should spend some time on her.

     When I was a kid, the very mention of the day made me cringe. Have you ever seen the Charlie Brown Valentine's Special? Yeah. It was like that, complete with name-erased valentines and the puzzled stares when I went to thank the nominal senders for the valentines I did receive, followed by either vague "You're welcomes" or denials.

     It wasn't until I got older that V-day actually started to mean something to me. Even then, the connotations were usually mixed. It seemed almost inevitable that some disaster would accompany my grandest attempts at making the night special for my current lady love.

     Dinner date at seven? Seven fifteen, I'm still struggling to get the car to start.

     I'm glad we're together by the firelight eating a two-hundred-dollar dinner, and to hell with the rent? I don't want to be with you anymore.

     As a result, for years, I lived in a constant state of dread when I looked at a calendar and realized that it was already the end of January. I once even went so far as to request a month off from work so that I could dodge anything that had even the remotest taint of frills, ruffles, red, or heart-shaped you name it. (Needless to say, this request was not viewed favorably. Meh....can't blame a guy for trying.)

     Then I met my wife, and Valentine's Day took on a whole new meaning. If you've ever been part of a brand-new marriage, just starting out, where every penny you spend screams its way out of your pocket faster than you can earn them back, you have the general shape of the first two years. Valentine's Day became a dinner out at one of the local casinos, because the food was relatively cheap, a hundred dollars in the slot machines, a bottle of Southern Comfort and a mixer, and back home to enjoy the only form of entertainment we could really afford on a regular basis.

      Now fast forward to the present. We finally escaped the gravitational pull and fast pace of Las Vegas for the much slower clip of rural Texas, a dream that I'd been harboring for years. It was a good move for both of us, but, like everything else, it came at a price.

      I started really writing in earnest again a few months before I left Las Vegas, dreams of a quick sale and the money and fame that would hopefully accompany it dancing in my head. Once I left Vegas behind, my muse began to really kick into overdrive, aided and abetted by the denizens of various websites I joined with the express aim of furthering my writing career. And my wife took it, as she always does, with grace, humor, and her own droll perspective on things.

     Not to say it was easy, by any means, mostly due to my own writerly insecurities. She'd read something I'd written and tell me how much she loved it, only to have me come back with a thousand different problems, things that were wrong, reasons it would never sell, and on and on. But she'd still keep reading my work long after most spouses would have said, "If you're that unhappy with how it's coming, then maybe you're aiming for the wrong field."

      When I wrote "Angels Would Fall," it wasn't something I undertook with more than the usual seriousness that I bring when I sit at the keyboard. It was a good story, sure...but there are plenty of other writers out there who wrote things at the same time that were just as good if not better.

      Enter my wife, who, when "Angels Would Fall" won the contest I'd entered it in, said, "You should really publish this."

      A raised eyebrow and coughing fit later, when my nice round smoke went down square, I looked at it again with new eyes. Maybe there's something here. Hmm. Let's give it a shot.

     I've already chronicled what happened after that; no need to rehash. The irony is that now I'm working just as much on the erotic romance side of writing as on my horror. I create fantasies for other women day, after day, after day. It's my job to get inside women's heads and give them all the things they really desire, but maybe either didn't realize they wanted or were afraid to ask for.

     In that respect, there is an intimacy to the writing I'm doing now that just isn't possible in the realms of supernatural horror. I am, quite literally, giving ninety percent of my waking and working hours to the pleasure of other women. And when it's considered that way, it's nothing short of miraculous that my wife is still with me.

      So, this Valentine's Day, I'll spend a (very) little time keeping current with the news from the writing world; I'll spare a few minutes for a couple of dear friends who help, with my wife, to keep me sane and focused when the pressures and the awesome responsibility that I've taken on threaten to crush me. But the main focus of my day will be my wife, because for a miracle we have today off together. Dinner and a DVD never sounded so good.

      I'm one hell of a lucky man, folks.

      Again, a warm thank-you to Indigo Skye.  Happy Valentine's Day, y'all.

      And I love you a hell of a lot, Erin.

      Until next time,

      Best,

      J.S. Wayne

      Writer: (n) A supernatural creature with the ability to alchemically transform caffeine, nicotine, and a dictionary into literature.

      Also see J.S. Wayne on Wordpress @ www.jswayne.wordpress.com.