Texture {Guest Blog: Taryn Kincaid}

Today I have fellow Decadent Publishing author Taryn Kincaid on my blog to talk about her newest releases, Lightning and Thunder. She also has a giveaway running here, so make sure you read all the way to the end!

I’m a pantser. I don’t write many drafts. I write and edit and rewrite and edit as I go. It’s a slow process. But when I finally get to the end, the ms is in pretty much the condition that it’s going to be in when editors and readers see it. Maybe some minor tweaking here and there.
So as I go, I try to weave things in about the characters, to illuminate who they are, what informs them, how they got to the spot where they are when we meet them.
This is what I mean:  In HEALING HEARTS, my Regency romance for Carina Press, the heroine gets her first glance at the hero after his return from war with Napoleon on the Iberian Peninsula, where he was wounded. She adored him when she was a young girl, but now she blames him for her brother’s death at the hands of the French. Instead of musing about his sparkling sapphire eyes she makes it all about the war that affected them both so powerfully:
Thank God she remained too far away to see his eyes. From the rigid set of his jaw, Emma suspected the horrors of war had doused the ready light that had once shined there. She was certain bleak shadows now dulled their remarkable blue the way a pall of smoke turned day to dusk on the battlefield.
And the hero, Adam, thinks of Emma in terms of his own recent experience:
The young woman’s sudden appearance, after she’d remained hidden so long, broadsided Adam like a cannon shot.
He’d sensed her presence but had never actually seen her as anything more than a vague shadow, concealed in the gray mists of dawn as she darted to her secret observation post like a French sharpshooter.
I love metaphors and similes, as you can probably tell. I used to drive my old critique group to distraction with them Why choose one, when you can have 45? Uh, no. One of my wise partners used to call such over-baking “an embarrassment of riches.” 
I still tend to go into overdrive. But writing shorter works, such LIGHTNINGand THUNDER, my 1Night Stand stories for Decadent Publishing, have forced me to writer sparser and cleaner.
In LIGHTNING, there wasn’t word count enough to go into pages and pages of backstory, although the history Lily and Campbell shared was essential to the plot.  They were a couple in high school, but after their first fateful and scorching hot time together on their prom night, Campbell ended up in a coma, Lily vanished from his life, and they hadn’t seen each other in ten years.  A successful architect when the story opens, Campbell has acquired special powers along the way:
He only ever lost himself when he was drawing. Most of the time he was hyper-aware. Scents, sounds, a cornucopia of sensation. But the feel of the pencil in his hand grounded him, the stroke of graphite on paper, one bold line connecting to the next and the next. He could soar, and remain earthbound at the same time.
When writing Lily, a succubus whose difficulties with sex and lightning strikes have made her gun-shy around mortal men, I tried to amp up the references to electricity, especially when describing her reaction to Campbell:
Taken by surprise, her reaction sparked immediate shimmers of electricity. Ozone crackled, brief as a spent match, a mere flicker in the air before her eyes.
The man seemed not to notice her charged reaction. Fingers, strong and firm, meandered up the side of her neck, holding her in place. Small bursts of sizzling arousal popped across her nerve endings. A broad masculine chest grazed her backless cocktail dress, the soft fabric of a dinner jacket and crisper texture of the shirt beneath shocking against her bare skin, setting off a string of firecrackers that jump-started her heart.
And…
Whoever hell this guy was, the megawattage he put out made the small buzz she’d gotten from the Sex on the Beach look like a blip from a fizzing quadruple-A battery.

It’s a way to describe who your characters are, set a specific mood around them, tip off the reader to what’s to come.
Want more of Lily and Campbell?
You can find them here: Amazon| Barnes and Noble | Decadent Publishing | All Romance | Smashwords| Bookstrand
Campbell’s brother, Sean, has his own story in THUNDER. Here’s a sample:
Blurb:
Lonely young witch, Veronica Hardwicke, has struggled to get on with her life after the death of the elderly husband who’d left her a fortune and a sprawling estate in mystical Sleepy Hollow. When frightening things go bump in the night on a stormy Fourth of July, who better to call than the sexy developer and contractor, Sean Jones, who's been renovating her mansion for months?

Sean may grace the tabloid pages with a different supermodel on his arm every night, but it's Veronica who drives him nuts. Ignoring his instinct to stay away, he answers her summons.

Will the thundering passion of their 1Night Stand tear down the barriers between them?



Excerpt:Veronica paced back and forth in the grand entry foyer of the Belmont mansion, the kitten heels of her Prada mules clacking on the marble floors.The rest of the place might not be finished, but she’d insisted on having a few rooms completed, so at least she felt like she was living in a home, rather than a massive, never-ending construction project. Well, her contractorhad insisted, even though working around the main entrance and central hallway created more work for him and his crew. But she was forced to admit he was right.Her cell phone chimed on top of the antique credenza shoved flush against one wall. She leaped for it. Probably Geneviève, to regale her with all the fun she was having in Paris. Or Sean, to advise her he couldn’t make it after all. She sighed and read the text message on the small screen. Congratulations, Veronica. 1Night Stand has found your date. Have a good time. With both anxiety and mounting excitement, she stared at the screen and waited. No other info. Outside in the night, thunder boomed. She jumped then laughed at herself. Ghosts are one thing, but freaking out at the weather now? Cripes, you really do need this date! She let her imagination run wild, then texted back for more details: When? Where? Who? An insistent pounding at the front door jarred her out of her fantasy. She swung the door open on another explosive crack of thunder.Sean stood on her doorstep, his soaked T-shirt molding sculpted pecs and abs, his drenched hair flattened over his brow. Rain poured down as he fiddled with his iPhone, a bemused expression on his face. Behind him, jagged arrows of lightning tore the dark sky. He glared at the screen, glanced at her in confusion, then back at the screen.Veronica’s own phone pinged again. Thunder roared. She read the message in disbelief. You’re looking at him. Decadent Publishing | Amazon | Barnes and Noble | All Romance | Smashwords| Book StrandI’ll give away an ebook from my backlist and some Lightning and Thunder swag to a random commenter.