HelenKay Dimon's Blog, page 47

Photo: Valentine's Day

It's Valentine's Day, the day all romance authors supposedly celebrate with wild abandon…well, not quite. When the hubby cleans the house while I'm on deadline? That's love. When he does all the cooking? Love, plus a good show of his survival skills because if it were up to me we'd have cereal over the sink every night. That's not to say I don't love getting flowers, because I do, and the cookies the hubby sent me on Friday were awesome.

Happy Valentine's Day to the awesome hubby and everyone else!

Booksigning

If anyone happens to be in Oceanside, CA this afternoon at around 2:00 p.m., stop by the Barnes and Noble on Vista Way and say hello. I'll be part of a romance author talk and booksigning with fellow authors Judy Duarte and Georgie Lee. B&N is generously donating part of the proceeds from the books sales to a local school, so this is a great way to stock up on some reading materials and do a good thing.

Snippet Saturday

Today's snippet is on the topic of love scenes. Oh, do I have a bunch of those. I went back and forth on what to post before I remembered an email I got last week. A lovely reader wrote and asked if my books from Harlequin Intrigue included love scenes like my other books. The short answer: yes! The longer version: In my mind love scenes aren't just or always about sex. They are about growing the romance and the characters. It's true that when it comes to sex, the scenes in my non-Intrigues are different in terms of detail, but all of my books are about love and the hope it brings.

So, this week I'm going back to my recent release, GUNNING FOR TROUBLE. Caleb and Avery have a history, and not a great one, so when they come together again they have a host of baggage to wade through. Here's a peek:

It wasn't as if he made it easy for her to open up to him. Even after they had sex the other night he shut her down. She wanted to talk and he wanted a mental breather as he tried to take in how his body reacted to hers.

Rather than kick and fuss, she accepted his coldness. It was as if she'd come to expect nothing more from him. That thought made him wish his leg had healed so he could kick his own butt.

"Avery?"

"It's nothing." She rubbed her palm up and down his arm as she talked.

He doubted she even realized she was touching him. "Tell me."

She tore her gaze away from Vince and stared down at Caleb. "You really want to know?"

"I trust your judgment."

Her head pulled back as if he'd slapped her. "Since when?"

Guilt rushed in at him. He'd down this to her. He'd convinced her that her opinion meant nothing to him. Little did she know she was the only thing keeping him moving right now. Exhaustion threatened to take him down at ay moment. Seeing her, fueling his energy off of her seemingly endless supply, made the pain bearable on limited pain meds.

He tugged her down closer, until his mouth brushed over hers. "You're not the only one who's learned a few things, you know."

She barely moved. "Like what?"

This close he could see the rich brown of her eyes, smell the sweet scent of her skin. The temptation to forget the job and kick the other men out nearly overwhelmed him. The only way to stay focused was to make her talk.

He smiled. "Let's stick with one conversation at a time."

"You're sure."

"Yeah."

__________________

Don't forget to check out the other Snippet blogs:

Lauren Dane

Leah Braemel

Mari Carr

Delilah Devlin

Eliza Gayle

McKenna Jeffries

Taige Crenshaw

Lissa Matthews

Shelli Stevens

Emma Petersen

TJ Michaels

Selena Blake

Favorite Day!

It's release day!! GUNNING FOR TROUBLE, the second book in the Mystery Men miniseries,* officially releases today. I'll be at the Intrigue Blog on the eHarlequin website today with fellow author Angi Morgan, talking about our releases.

And this is the part where I beg you to buy it….please, please, please.

~ahem~

But, really, how can you resist?

*This is actually the third book featuring the Recovery Project Agents but the second in the Mystery Men miniseries. I know that's confusing. My apologies. Clearly the easiest thing to do is to buy all of them:

UNDER THE GUN (Luke's story)

GUNS AND THE GIRL NEXT DOOR (Holden's story)

LOCKED AND LOADED (Adam's story – coming August 1st)

THE BIG GUNS (Zach's story – coming September 1st)

Guest blogging

I'm guest blogging at Access Romance today and talking about my new Harlequin Intrigue miniseries, Mystery Men. I'm also giving away a copy of GUNS AND THE GIRL NEXT DOOR.

Winner!

We have a winner of the January blog contest. Congrats to Judy F (from the January 22nd blog). Email me so I can get the book out to you!!

Photo: Kyoto

I've visited Japan twice. Both times I was with my hubby and his parents, which is good since I don't speak or read Japanese and my in-laws do. Last visit was in 2004.

Can you guess what this is?

That is a side street in Kyoto. Those are houses.

Photo:

I've visited Japan twice. Both times I was with my hubby and his parents, which is good since I don't speak or read Japanese and my in-laws do. Last visit was in 2004.

Can you guess what this is?

That is a side street in Kyoto. Those are houses.

Ugly Little Secret

I thought it was time to come clean. Tell the truth. I am a Syfy channel original movie addict. I blame my dad. Not that he likes science fiction movies all that much. I remember him being offended by the movie Independence Day because Will Smith's character easily found his girlfriend at the military base during the alien attack. Dad thought that was unrealistic. Never mind the fact the movie is about an alien attack. My mom is actually the bigger science fiction fan than my dad, but I don't think she watches the Syfy channel all that much, so I can't blame her.

No, I blame dad because my ability to watch truly terrible movies without changing the channel can be traced back to him. I spent a lot of time watching the Sunday morning political talk shows with my dad. Every now and then, usually after football season had ended, we'd get lazy and watch whatever bad movie came on after the talk shows. This is how I saw almost every early Arnold Schwarzenegger film. One of my fondest memories is of sitting with my dad and watching Commando. At one point dad turned to me and said, "Did he just kill 100 people all by himself without reloading his gun?" The answer was yes. And, no, we couldn't change the channel. He watched the whole thing…and the movie that came on after.

So, having developed this early love of bad/unrealistic films, I turned to the Syfy original movies. One debuts tomorrow called Mega Python v. Gatoroid. I am not kidding. And it stars 80s pop stars Tiffany and Debbie Gibson. Again, not kidding. I could not make this stuff up. There was even an article about these Syfy movies in a recent issue of Entertainment Weekly.

My favorite quote from Thomas Vitale, a VP at Syfy:

There's the campy creatures, like Sharktopus. There's the supernatural horror movies, like Mothman. There's action-adventure, like Monsterwolf. And then there's the very successful unnatural-disaster genre. An unnatural disaster is like a volcano, only a volcano in New York, where you wouldn't expect one. That's the twist that makes it a Syfy Saturday night movie.

For the record, the unnatural-disaster movies are my favorites. Mega-earthquakes, meteor atttacks – I love them all.

Don't judge me.

Writing Real Life

Sometimes you write a book and worry you didn't get it quite right. Years ago, before the show Hoarders was on tv, I wrote a book called HOT AS HELL. The heroine in the book is the child of hoarders and she struggles with some OCD issues of her own. Her past haunts her and plays a part in her adult life, no matter how much she tries to overcome it.

I'd dealt with the hoarding issue as a lawyer. It would come up in family dynamics and played a role in several cases where I represented kids in their parents divorce. The book is not based on an actual person. Rather, the idea of hoarding stuck with me. And the HOT AS HELL heroine was born.

Writing about hoarding, an actual disease and a serious one, was a bit scary. It's not funny and I didn't want to be insulting. After the book came out I got dinged in a review where the reviewer didn't like the heroine or understand hoarding. Then I got an email from someone I admire who told me about a hoarding issue in her family. She assured me I nailed the family member of a hoarder's feelings just right. I can't tell you how good that felt. That's why I was especially moved when I read an article by Sarah Wendell (of Smart Bitches) in Kirkus Reviews. She talks about not being able to finish HOT AS HELL because it hit too close to home. She said the writing was "too vivid." While I'm sorry she skipped the end of the book, I appreciated this comment:

Another book I couldn't finish or review was HelenKay Dimon's Hot as Hell (Kensington Brava, 2008). The heroine is the daughter of a hoarding couple—yes, like on TV, those people who don't throw anything out and have 6,000 cats. Dimon's heroine was struggling with her own OCD tendencies (hoarding is a manifestation of obsessive-compulsive disorder, to my understanding) and struggling to separate from her parents and the effects of their hoarding. Stuff took on impossibly complex meanings for the heroine, and on top of the plot of the book, her private struggle with her feelings of rage and helplessness, both against her parents and at herself, was totally overwhelming for me. I've long struggled with a hoarding member of my family, and it is so not easy. I can't watch the shows about it without getting nauseated and wanting to throw up or hurl breakable objects. Dimon captured the rage and helplessness and sorrow in the heroine that again, I couldn't separate long enough because I was seeing too much of my personal experience in a romance. And I didn't want my review to veer repeatedly into whether I thought, based on my own perspective, Dimon got the details or the feelings or the experience or the reality "right." [emphasis added]

I can't think of a nicer compliment. Thank you, Sarah.