Category Archives: WIP Wednesday

I finished the revision of MAN FOR THE JOB! Almost! Still a hundred end-of-revision things to do, like make sure my characters don’t all use the same words for everything all the time, but I’ve done 98 percent of the work, and the book is 98,000 words long, and Dear Lord, I am tired of it. In today’s snippet, Ellen’s pissed off at Caleb. Sort of. “Sort of” is about the best she can ever manage, when it comes to him. ——— The van backed down the driveway to park on the street, and then the workmen and the security men formed a huddle between the vehicles, talking to one another and looking up at her intermittently, as if she were the enemy and they needed to regroup to come up with a superior plan of attack. Bring on the cannons, fellas. Bring on the catapult, and that big log thing they use to bust down the doors. She was in the mood to fight for her castle. She was in the mood to dump a big cauldron of tar on the handsomest, most obnoxious man in Camelot, Ohio. Henry was in the mood to get down. “Play with the chalk,” he said. “You want your sidewalk chalk?” “Yas.” So she got out the bucket of sidewalk chalk, and she and Henry drew pictures on the driveway, which wasn’t the best rage-sustaining activity, but toddlers did have a way of puncturing a good rage. Funny thing, that—how hard it was … Continue reading →

I’ve been hacking away at my third rewrite of MAN FOR THE JOB, which so far has involved writing the first four chapters from scratch, fiddling with the fifth chapter for way too long until it began to resemble something that might work, and, this morning, breezing through the rewrite on chapter 6 and some of chapter 7. So things are looking up. I may have a workable book here one day, folks! Today’s snippet is from a long getting-to-know-you conversation Ellen and Caleb have in my new chapter 4. Enjoy! ——— She fought back the urge to pepper him with questions. How big was his family? Did he have brothers and sisters, nieces or nephews? A girlfriend? The shamelessness of her curiosity worried her. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d cared so much to hear the mundane details of someone else’s life. There was nowhere this intense wanting-to-know could lead that she had the freedom to follow. “It sounds kind of nice,” she said. “To have all that family around.” He dropped his elbows from behind his head and rested them on the arms of his chair. “It has its moments. Better than the alternative, I guess. Does that mean you don’t? Have family or somebody around, I mean?” “Just Jamie, when he comes to visit. And my ex’s mom, I guess. She takes care of Henry on the weekends. She’s sort of family. My parents are both gone.” “What about the ex? Does he help out with … Continue reading →

As best I can tell, I started writing a year ago yesterday. October 4, 2010, was the day I opened up my first Scrivener file, named it “Romance Novel,” and started typing. I really loved writing that first manuscript, and I’ve really loved writing everything I’ve produced since then. But oh, man, have I ever learned a lot. Looking back at my earliest effort yesterday, I did a lot of cringing. And wincing. At one point, I may even have covered my eyes. But one woman’s secret shame is another person’s inspiration, right? Right? So for today’s WIP Wednesday, I give you 350 words I wrote yesterday morning — the completely rewritten opening of MAN FOR THE JOB, which I hope to sell soon — and 350 words I wrote a year ago. I’m not claiming the new words are genius. They’re new. But I think it’s fair to say the contrast isn’t entirely in my head. ——— MAN FOR THE JOB, 10/4/2011 “Tell her not to sign that contract,” Ellen said. She pushed her hair behind her ear and glanced to the left of the kitchen sink, where her brother’s face frowned at her from a six-by-eight digital display. Jamie had convinced her to try out an app on her tablet that let them see each other while they talked. He was on his cell phone, holding it in one hand and looking down at the screen—which meant she had a fantastic view right up his nostrils. Even Jamie … Continue reading →

I finished ANTE UP (aka “the Vegas book”) this morning! The world now has a first-person, unreliable-narrator, chronologically-screwy, Vegas-wedding buddy romance with spanking. Not sure we’re all better off for it, but hey, at least it’s written. Today’s snippet is from the beginning of the third part, heading toward the Black Moment. Each of the parts begins with a brief scene-setting thingy wherein Summer think-talks about Adam. They’re all tell, no show, and probably someone will eventually make me cut them, but in the meantime they’re my darlings, and this one is my favorite. ——— Adam Hamilton really makes me laugh. We haven’t been doing a lot of it the past few weeks, but when things are good between us, he can make me laugh until my sides hurt and I can’t clutch my stomach hard enough to hold it together. He’ll tease and bait and get me going, and then when my eyes are watering and I’m curled up in a ball on the floor, completely helpless, he’ll stand there sipping his beer and grin as if he’s just accomplished the one worthwhile thing he had to do all day. It’s like the laughter, the way I love him — elation so intense, it’s indistinguishable from pain. But the way he loves me is different. He stands apart, fond and amused. He tips his beer at me. He never falls down.

As of yesterday afternoon, I’m back at work on ANTE UP (aka VEGAS, BABY!), so today’s excerpt is hot off the presses (by which I mean “my fingertips”). At the beginning of this snippet, our beloved heroine, Summer, is talking to her mother about the hero, Adam, but then the discussion veers off to encompass how Summer feels about her ex-husband, Josh. ——— Mom cut right to the chase. “Does he love you?” I kept my eyes on my knees, studying the way my kneecaps poked against my black tights. Two bony white moons. “I don’t think so. Not any more than normal.” She sighed, and I sipped my coffee, unsure what to do with myself. “Do you love him?” I met her aquamarine eyes and shrugged. Maybe to someone who knew me less well, the gesture would’ve been ambiguous. My mom knew what it meant, though. She read the truth on my face. “Oh, Summer,” she said. “You’re really not ever going to learn, are you?” I pinched a little tent in my tights between my thumb and index finger, and I didn’t answer. “Josh was here,” I told her. “Yesterday.” “What did he want?” “I’m not really sure. He found out about Adam and left. But I think… You don’t think I ran out on him, do you? He seemed to think I’d run out when I should’ve stayed and talked. Like maybe our marriage wasn’t already over.” Like maybe I was the bad guy. The thought had … Continue reading →

I’ve had to take a brief break from Vegas to do edits on my cross-country bike ride book this week  (currently title-less, though I’m rooting hard for RIDE WITH ME). Thus, I offer you a sneak peek inside the head of Lexie, lying in a hot tent in Prineville, Oregon, and thinking about her surly, inconveniently attractive riding companion. ——— Lexie needed extra time around Tom like she needed a hole in the head. Not that he was so terrible these days. He was making an effort to be nice, at least intermittently. He was pretty bad at it, so most of their conversations went more or less like the one on McKenzie Pass—they started out prickly, got interesting, and then ended abruptly when she stumbled onto something Tom didn’t want to talk about and he either bolted or erected a stony wall of silence. That wasn’t the problem. She could deal with Angry Tom. Actually, she found Angry Tom fairly entertaining. No, the problem was that she was way too attracted to the other one. It was only natural. The man was seriously good-looking, and in the afternoons he tended to putter around the campsite wearing nothing but low-slung black basketball shorts, flip-flops, and a baseball cap. For most men, this would have counted as showing off, but Tom gave off this laid-back vibe that told her he wasn’t thinking about how good he looked, he was just comfortable in his own skin. Which of course made him even … Continue reading →