I am very excited about this one because it concerns an initial story idea I got from watching local news reports about the presence of the FLDS religious compound and the number of illegal aliens and drugs coming across the border south of Phoenix. After spending some hours on the phone with Big Mike talking about our characters, what they would be for a living, and how they would become embroiled in border and religious activities, we worked on putting together an outline, a timeline, and characterizations we could both follow along with.

That kernel of an idea I had so many months ago turned into a real nail biter of a suspense novel with, surprisingly, very little romance. This is something new for me. Yeah, when I started writing before Big Mike’s input, I was already adding romantic scenes. When the collaboration truly started, these scenes no longer made much sense so they were all deleted, for the most part. But I’m not complaining; I think the end result is incredibly good. Another bonus? Without the sex scenes this is one book I can be comfortable sharing with DMIL and my pastor’s wife.

Hopefully the next news we have regarding Whispers of Innocence is good news regarding publication.

Now, who will play the part of the heroine, Micki Lewis, in the movie? She looks like Scarlett Johansson so that’s a good choice. And the hero, Drake Elliot? I picture him looking like Dr. House but Big Mike modeled him after Sam Elliot.  That actor is a bit too old to play the part but Hugh Laurie might be perfect…

I use Google Alerts to let me know any time something is posted on the internet with my name and/or the titles of my books. My present this morning was a review of Veil of Deception from You Gotta Read Reviews. Shira, the reviewer, gave our book a “You Gotta Read” rating – the highest possible. She says:

Veil of Deception made me feel as though I were a part of this close knit community. I was the neighbor that got to peek into the lives of my neighbors sight unseen. I got to call them a best friend, a sister, or a brother. I felt their joys, pain, and anguish. I wanted to meddle and give my opinion every once in a while. I loved Danielle. She was such a strong woman that lived with a secret that haunted her for ten years. I felt that Hawk needed to stand up to his sister in law and tell her what he honestly thought. I enjoyed this book because it flowed. Even though there were two authors, it was very seamless. I enjoyed being a resident of Spenser Lake even for a few hours.

For Big Mike and I, this review is confirmation that our long months of work on Veil of Deception paid off. Yes, it was difficult at time, and even frustrating, but the experiment was a success. I know one of Mike’s biggest fears is that the reader would be able to tell the difference between our two writing styles but this was unfounded.

Now if we can just get our current collaboration, Whispers of Innocence, finished we will both be happy! If anything, I think it will be even better than Veil of Deception but we’ll leave that up to the readers.

Little Candy

He made me realize just how different our minds think, and the difference in our writing styles.

I sent out a blanket email asking for help with a tag line for my next Champagne Books release in October, FULL THROTTLE. I included a blurb about the book to give everyone an idea of what it is about:

Samantha Roberts partners with her cousin to run Dr. Doug’s Mobile Dyno, a motorcycle testing and performance tuning business. Spurned by an ex-fiancée and resolved to taking care of her aging father and his medical problems, romance is the last thing she’s looking for while expanding her business is at the top of her priorities list.

Along comes opportunity in the form of Linc Montgomery, a tough, business-savvy, ex-Harley racer and new owner of Full Throttle Custom Cycles in Phoenix. Linc is used to having gorgeous women fall at his feet. When he meets Samantha and agrees to contract her dyno services, he quickly realizes she isn’t one of those brainless bimbos he normally dates before carelessly tossing aside.

The challenge is on for Linc as he sets out to seduce Samantha just to prove he can. However, he doesn’t plan on the interference of his ex-wife and her ex-fiancée – both of whom serve to make him realize that along the way, his ‘love her and leave her’ seduction scheme causes him to fall head over heels in love. But it isn’t so easy to convince Samantha she belongs to him.

Now, Big Mike thought this was just a terrible blurb. However, he writes suspense novels, not light romances like this is supposed to be. He wanted to hear something about the heroine’s inner demons and how the hero would slay her dragons. Yes, Samantha’s got some inner demons, but that’s not the focus of this book other than how it relates to her sex and love life!

His suggestions were very apropos for his books, but not for this one. And it also made me realize that since I am targeting purely female readers, they are looking for something in a contemporary romance that is far different from what a male reader would look for to pick out a suspense novel. My women beta testers loved the blurb and the whole idea of the book; men not so much.

Anyway, I’ve added one more sentence to the top of the blurb: “Phoenix is hot, but the bikers are even hotter”. And so far it looks like the tag line is going to be something along the lines of “A sexy romp of full throttle seduction leading to slow burning love” or “When Linc embarks on a full throttle seduction of Samantha, the last thing he expects is love to throw a wrench in the works “. I’m still working on it, though. Any suggestions are greatly appreciated!

He’s right.

But that doesn’t mean I needed an oh-so-gentle reminder.

Since I hate to be a slacker, I decided I’d better get busy posting.

The good news is that we are going forward on a brand new writing collaboration. As Big Mike likes to say, I am on top this time. So I picked the place: Arizona’s southern border. And my heroine: an investigative journalist. An the premise in a broad sense: drug smuggling and a fanatic religious cult based on the FLDS (the Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints, in case you haven’t heard of Warren Jeffs – who is now in prison – and his polygamist offshoot sect of the Mormon religion).

We are currently still hashing out the plot and the outline, but both of us are excited about the premise and the possibilities for action, suspense, and romance. I think you will be surprised at the hero Big Mike came up with, and I’m certain you will be more than a little surprised at what happens by the end of the novel.

So here’s to another successful writing venture, Big Mike. Cheers (clinking cyber champagne glass)… Now get off my case!

Now, I’m going to give it a shot, but I’m sure Candace will correct me since I am coming from a blind side. From what I’ve observed when young women refer to a BB, it’s someone that excites their physical drives via visual stimulation, appears aggressive or angry, someone they would enjoy a roll with, but would never consider viable material for a long term relationship, because such BB are all about the physical. To them the female is a receptacle, nothing more then a release. Crude, yes, but I presume that’s why they’re bad boys.

To a male a BG is also not commitment material, but for different reasons. In the traditional sense, the male attempts to select a life mate that he believes will remain true so that his efforts to provide for and secure the family are in deed in support of his own biological offspring. On the other hand, the woman always has the advantage of knowing the child burgeons from her genes, but she must insure her selection of a long term mate is aimed at a good provider and a protector, not someone that will plant and run. Indeed, I believe that the antenna of many young girls today has not been conditioned or mentored to recognize that a bad aggressive boy does not translate to a good mate. That’s why so many end up single mothers.

I’m sure others may disagree but that’s my take.

Big Mike
Davisstories.com

For some reason, it seems us women out here in the West are a bit more self-sufficient, though. We live by the code “git ‘er done” and we’re not afraid to get our hands dirty.

I’ve got a couple examples to illustrate my point about generalizations.

For instance, when we were writing Veil of Deception, Big Mike came up with a scene whereby the hero would take the heroine fishing and used the premise that the heroine had no experience in the sport. Now Veil of Deception takes place in a fictional lake community in Virginia. The heroine had lived in this community for a decade longer than the hero and had a boat dock on her property. There was just no way I could write a scene where the heroine was ignorant of fishing. What was she doing living all these years on the lake with a boat dock if she didn’t know how, or didn’t like, to fish?

According to Big Mike, in the real lake community where he lives, there are no single women who fish. Having just spent the summer going out on the lake in a boat with some friends of mine, baiting my own hook with night crawlers I dug out of a container, and catching trout on every trip (my husband has no interest), this just didn’t make sense to me. However, Big Mike was just using his own experience in his own locale to draw a picture of the heroine as he saw her. In the end we compromised and I agreed that maybe the heroine just hadn’t been fishing for stripers before.

Another time, Big Mike and I were chatting with some of our fellow authors in a Yahoo group and he happened to post that there was at least one thing women needed a man for: to kill spiders. I wasn’t the only one who immediately responded by saying if I were afraid of spiders, I’d never get able to get out of bed in the morning! Although I keep a clean house, I’ve got more spiders living in my mountain home year round than I have pine trees in my yard. And honestly, my husband is way more afraid of them than I am. My philosophy is “live and let live”. As long as I don’t see a brown recluse or black widow, I let the critters cohabitate and catch all the other bugs.

But again, this was a gender generalization because Big Mike’s wife is afraid of spiders.

I could be wrong, but I don’t think females suffer from this affliction quite as much as males. After all, if a man cooks dinner and cleans the house and writes romantic love scenes, we tend to say “Ah! How sweet! What a great guy!”. However, if a woman works on her own vehicle, fishes and hunts, and uses power tools, too often she’s seen as less than feminine, and it’s a negative trait.

In fact, if you read the comment Big Mike made in response to a comment from Mindy and I about “The Rear View” he states that he thinks we’re both just tomboys and anomalies in the world of the female. Naw, Big Mike, it’s just that we’re western women and we know how to “git ‘er done”!

I think we’re starting to close the gap, ladies, but we’ve still got a long way to go.

Candace Morehouse
www.candacemorehouse.com

Our latest writing effort is a collaboration resulting in the romantic suspense novel, Veil of Deception. Written from both the male and female points of view from two very different authors with a common goal, this book was an exercise in patience and compromise.

We’ll be using this forum to present the difficulties we encountered along the way as well as general tidbits we learned about the differences between males and females. Because that could take quite some time, you might as well put your feet up and set a spell here while you look through our ramblings!