My Personal 100 Books To Read List - Part Three of Four

Or, as I like to call it:

My Husband and The Writing Years

When it comes to my love of fantasy, I have my husband to thank for taking me from the foundation I’d created in my teen years with Lloyd Alexander, CS Lewis, Mary Stewart and Stephen Donaldson, and building upon it with the likes of Raymond Feist, Mercedes Lackey and Katherine Kurtz. Though he was a strong high fantasy fan (hence the Raymond Feist), he appreciated any well-done fantasy story, and read a lot of stuff that crossed paths with our contemporary world (and would later would be called urban fantasy), a la Harry Dresden type work. Some of those were books/series like Mercedes Lackey’s Elves of LA, the Shadowrun series, and Katherine Kurtz’s work.

By hanging out with him in the fantasy racks, I also found names/titles I wouldn’t have otherwise. Jennifer Roberson’s Tiger and Del series, for instance. We discovered Laurell K Hamilton together, and it was there the idea was spawned for my Vampire Queen series, seeing how paranormal and erotic could tie together (and the intriguing D/s possibilities of vampires and servants). LKH was more about positing erotic scenarios and letting the reader’s imagination take it from there, rather than writing those details herself, but still, an important seed was planted (grin).

Now, a little segue from the book list to the personal. I had pursued creative writing all the way to college, but then my lifelong passion for animal rights/welfare accelerated to a far greater level. So for the next eight years or so, my writing drive “turned off.” To this day, it’s somewhat of a mystery how that switch flipped so decisively, but if I tap into my own belief system, I think there were two parts to the "why" of it. The more important one was I wanted to try and do what good I could do, with a committed approach to a cause that remains essential to who I am. The second part was my writing needed a strong dose of life experience/insight. When I picked up the pen again in my mid-to-late twenties, I brought that richness back to my writing, but I also continued reading, and found key influences that would set me more decisively on my writing career path. Enter one of the most vital influences: Nora Roberts.

I can’t undersell the impact that Nora Roberts had on my writing with her work in the 1990s. And how did I discover her? I’m sure I read a couple category romances with her name on them in my teen years, but my husband and I bought a sailboat in 1997 and sailed our beloved Shadowfax from the sale point back home. It was a three-day sail, and on one of the stopovers for fuel, there was a book exchange in the little provision store. I picked up a three-story anthology of Nora Roberts stories.

Suddenly I found an author who brought together a lot of important things for me – strong, high-quality writing, well-developed, unforgettable characters, sexual tension that was mesmerizing and, very important here, a discarding of the ridiculous “misunderstanding” conflict in the love story. Instead, her characters faced emotional obstacles – bad experiences in past relationships, doubts, self-esteem issues, and to resolve them, they worked on them together. These were things that resonated with my own journey with a life partner, not some idiotic “I overheard him say he didn’t want to be with me, so I packed my bags and left and didn’t talk to him about it until he chased me half way across the country to find out what the hell happened” nonsense, lol.

She was also the first author I read where I noticed she changed POV in the story – and did it well enough it told me the “one POV only” rule in romance COULD be broken, quite effectively. [Note: It could be argued that learning this rule could be broken in romance played a small part in the journey toward writing male/male for female romance readers, as romance authors found they really enjoyed being in the male POV – grin]

Finally, Nora had a way of writing sex and sexual tension in a way that aroused and immersed. Intriguingly, without breaking any of the rules of the time about being too graphic. Like many of her 80s bodice ripper predecessors, her stories also had strong undercurrents of Male Dom/female sub dynamics without calling it such. Now, while I enjoy being an erotic writer who has free license to be more graphic, it underscored something important to me – that word choices that engaged a reader’s libido and heart at the same time would be as essential in erotic writing as in mainstream romance.

You can throw graphic words and outrageous sex toys at a female BDSM romance reader all day long, and you’ll be lucky to get a “meh” reaction at best. But let the sexual tension build, provide an emotional scenario that touches the heart, unfold those delightful Dom/sub mind dynamics, and then, in the key moment, ramp things up more graphically. When that all happens, a reader who seeks a more sexually explicit romance experience, in a story chock full of emotion and good writing, gets what they hoped to find.

Tastes change, and I drifted away from Nora Roberts’ work some time ago (though I am still VERY addicted to the In Death series – love Eve and Roarke!), but that doesn’t mean that I will ever forget the influence of her 1990s work and how incredible and full of inspiration they were to me as a reader and an aspiring author.

Next on the hugely influential list? Laura Kinsale. If I had to choose one author in the whole wide world whose work impresses the absolute stuffing out of me, it would be Laura Kinsale, particularly the books she wrote in the 90s. Flowers from the Storm, For My Lady’s Heart, etc. She pushed herself, wrote amazingly intense, deep love stories that picked up the romance elements we all love, but she took us even further, opened our hearts at the same time she did those of her characters. And when I read her books, I was awed, demoralized (because no mere mortal could write that well, lol), and thinking “Yes, that’s the kind of books I want to write.” From there I discovered more along the same vein. Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander series (with one of the most unforgettable heroes of all time), Julie Garwood, Jude Devereux, Elizabeth Lowell…

Okay, you say. I get it. Nora and those like her laid the foundation. But where did you first stumble upon “real” examples of the erotic romance you wanted to write? At the time this evolution was happening for me, there were a VERY small handful of publishers (pre-ebook) putting out stories that had the elements of erotic romance. Red Sage and Black Lace are the two I think that received the most notice. I stumbled upon a Secrets anthology (Volume II), with an Angela Knight story in it called “Roarke’s Prisoner.” Shortly thereafter, I also found Anne Rice’s Exit to Eden in the “literary” section of the bookstore (that’s where they used to put explicit erotica that wasn’t self-help nonfiction, lol). Though I’d picked up one of her Beauty books, and it was undeniably arousing to a submissive person with a healthy erotica fantasy imagination (grin), it wasn’t exactly what I wanted to read. I wanted Kathleen Woodiwiss or Nora Roberts, with bondage. When I found Exit to Eden and “Roarke’s Prisoner,” I recognized that I’d found it.

Every book was adding to a style proposal in my head, a goal for me to achieve in my own writing, such that I can look back and put it this way: Mix together Nora Roberts 1990s work, Angela Knight’s “Roarke’s Prisoner,” Laura Kinsale, Kathleen Woodiwiss, Penelope Williamson, Anne Rice’s Exit to Eden, Outlander by Diana Gabaldon, Linda Howard’s Son of the Morning, and you have a pretty good amalgamation of the kind of writer I wanted to become. To this day, if you ask me my favorite deserted island book, it’s Once in a Blue Moon by Penelope Williamson. It sort of brings all of it together in a perfect storm kind of way, though it’s possible only I understand why that is, in my poor twisted brain, lol.

Character development/exploration, intense love story, BDSM erotic content. My books usually break down to an integration of those three main elements. Now, I would be leaving out something critical if I didn’t mention one final pair of authors who were essential to my development as a writer at this point in my life. In fact, my husband is likely to never let me forget that I spent most our honeymoon waving him away while I was steeped in a book by one of them - ha! Stephen King.

A smart writer always looks for a good story to read, no matter the genre. I’ve never really been a horror person, but when Stephen King’s books started gaining traction, I made the mistake of reading Salem’s Lot and spending the next six weeks looking in my closet and under my bed before I went to sleep. However, when I started reading The Stand, the character development was what caught my attention. The journey they took amid these horrifying challenges, and they persevered – that’s what set it apart from the normal horror book. Stephen gave us a scary book with wonderful characters we loved…and a freaking HEA!! Then there was It, and that was the one that added to my writer’s style guide. These characters formed a bond of strong love and friendship that made this horrible, scary story romantic and caring. A love story of sorts.

The other author was Dean Koontz. He followed in King's footsteps with Watchers and Strangers, and later (during my fourth and final segment of the 100 book list), Odd Thomas, still one of my personal favorites, which has at its core a very strong central love story. I have my father-in-law to thank for Dean Koontz, because he was a big fan and persuaded me to read Watchers.

Anyhow, somewhere during the journey with all the authors I mentioned above, I learned something that set my writing compass. I wanted to write romance, yes, because I love the elements of good romance. But in the depths of my heart, what I really wanted to write were love stories - and I realized that all the really good "romances" on my keeper shelves were exactly that.

So that’s what I set out to do. And when I wrote my first erotic romance, Make Her Dreams Come True, and it became a D/s love story, the erotic became another immutable element of what I wanted to write.

Next month I conclude my personal 100-book list with a discussion of the books I read NOW to keep my style fresh and on target. Until then, here’s the third segment of my 100-book list. As always, feel free to comment and tell me about your own!

[Oh – PS, the honeymoon killer book was The Stand – grin.]

Watchers by Dean Koontz

Strangers by Dean Koontz

Fear Nothing by Dean Koontz

It by Stephen King

The Stand by Stephen King

Guilty Pleasures by Laurell K Hamilton

Shadowrun Novels (various authors)

Demon Dance by T. Chris Martindale

Forever King by Molly Cochran and Warren Murphy

Children of the Night by Mercedes Lackey

Charlemagne's Champion by Gail Van Asten

Knights of Ghosts and Shadows by Mercedes Lackey and Ellen Guon

Tiger and Del series by Jennifer Robeson

Riftwar Saga by Raymond Feist

Hidden Riches by Nora Roberts

Dream Trilogy by Nora Roberts

Midnight Bayou by Nora Roberts

Montana Sky by Nora Roberts

Son of the Morning by Linda Howard

Untamed by Elizabeth Lowell

Roarke's Prisoner by Angela Knight

Exit to Eden by Anne Rice

The Gift by Julie Garwood

The Black Lyon by Jude Deveraux

Outlander by Diana Gabaldon (first trilogy)

Once in a Blue Moon by Penelope Williamson

Flowers from the Storm by Laura Kinsale plus everything else she wrote around that time period

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Did you know that Vampire Queen’s Servant and Mark of the Vampire Queen, books 1 and 2 of the Vampire Queen series, are now both available as $4.99 ebooks? With new covers under the Story Witch Press self-publishing label!

Read Lyssa and Jacob’s story and discover Joey’s Vampire Queen series…