Ann Stephens's Blog, page 11
September 2, 2010
The Shameless Escapist
photo by Anna Cervova
My daughter brought home a four-inch-thick volume of fairy tales (Spells of Enchantment, 1991, Penguin Viking, ISBN 067083053) from her high school library yesterday. She picked it because fairy tales and folk tales convey so much of the culture they originate in. That's an excellent reason to read fairy tales, but I leafed through it because my two favorite genres, romance and fantasy, have the fairy tale a few branches up their literary family trees. I skimmed a...
July 27, 2010
2010 RITAs
It's awards season for romance writers! The RITA Awards are announced every year at the Romance Writers of America durning their Annual Conference. This year, the lucky attendees (of which I am not one — sniffle, sniffle) get to go to Disney World. While the days are filled with any number of excellent workshops, seminars and panels, one of the high points is the ceremony that acknowledges, as the RWA puts it, "excellence in the romance genre."*
Categories cover a range of subgenres...
July 13, 2010
A Month in the Country
The London Season might have been the pinnacle of the social year, but a family's showplace and the source of much its prestige (and income) was the country house (and the estate it sat on). Even in America, Astors, Vanderbilts, DuPonts and Belmonts aped the British aristocracy by building lavish homes on Long Island and in Newport, Rhode Island. Diantha, the American heroine of my March 2011 release, Her Scottish Groom, belongs to a family who aims to belong to this social elite. Her...
July 6, 2010
TBR: Life, Libertines and the Pursuit of Hotness!
It's July, and I just celebrated the 4th. In the spirit of independent heroines and the bad boys they love, here are some books that I hope will heat up some of my summer days. (And nights.) Yup, time for another entirely subjective, unscientific list of recent and upcoming releases in my TBR pile:
My Reckless Surrender, by Anna Campbell: The premise of this book involves the maiden running headlong into the arms of a practiced seducer instead of away from him. (And really, in our...
June 29, 2010
Dream On!
No one accomplishes anything in life without goals. We hear this every day on talk shows and read it in newspapers and online. This is because it is true. Unless we establish reachable goals and stick to them, we are subject not only to what life throws at us, but to our own short-sightedness and bad habits. Goals are proactive. Goals are concrete, unlike wishy-washy dreams and 'what-ifs'.
Of course, writers live with 'what-if'. That's how we spin ideas into words on a page. I've never ...
June 22, 2010
Resurfacing
Having turned in my revisions after weeks of steady work, I spent a week mentally catching my breath and another one literally looking around me. I don't know if this is the case for all writers, but after days and weeks of immersing myself in characters and their time period, returning to my own life is a bit like breaking the surface in a pool. Under water, the sights and sounds of life above the surface can be heard, but they're muted. When you come up for air, that first breath of air ...
June 15, 2010
Romanticism and Reality
First of all, let me say how happy I am that MY REVISIONS ARE DONE…for now anyway. I got an unexpected reprieve from finishing them when out power went out in my neighborhood for a couple of hours last week. I composed this post longhand while I was waiting for the lights to come back on.
I'm writing this at my grandmother's table by candlelight while a light rain patters outside the open windows. All that's needed is the presence of my beloved in a swallowtail coat and knee breeches.
Alas, ...
May 25, 2010
The Voices in my Head
My background includes theater, and during my studies in that area, I learned that there are no new plots. The human condition has a large but finite combination of interactions, and writers have been stealing from each other since the Greeks invented drama.
What makes a book, play or movie stand out isn't the pacing or how realistic a plot is. (Seriously, even some of Shakespeare's plots have more holes than a colander.) It's the characters who inhabit them. (Again, Shakespeare is a...
May 18, 2010
Why Demons are Our Friends
Sorry, not an entry about paranormal romance! I'd have to leave that one to my daughter.
This is about our personal demons, the things external or internal that make us break out in a cold sweat. Not stuff like being afraid of bugs, which I consider PERFECTLY NORMAL even though my Dear Hubby laughs at me every time I make him kill a spider. I'm talking about the fears that make us break out in a cold sweat and want to dive into the nearest dark corner to hide every time we think of them.
Dea...
