Robin D. Owens | Writing Fantasy

One of the wonderful things about writing fantasy is that you can make up your own worlds – and all the names. :) Sometimes naming things – planets, continents, rivers is fun (Huckleberry Finn River, Great Platte Ocean, Hard Rock Mountains). It can be easy. I knew I wanted a Celtic background for my "Heart" series so naming the planet Celta didn't require much thought.

But naming the planet in my Summoning series (average American women summoned to an alternate dimension to fight invading evil) was harder. This planet was sentient (and who's to say they aren't?), it's weak because an evil, alien Dark has been feasting on it for years. But it loves the people who are trying to save it and themselves (oh, and creatures – the flying horses and magical shapeshifter animal-companions). The language is French based, and I tried several names that didn't work. I finally decided that the defining characteristic of the planet was love, so it became Amee.

It's also very cool to map the planets. I did a hand drawing of Celta, found software to make it more real looking, then have recently gone beyond my drawing of two continents to the whole world. All fun and motivating to write more about wonderful places.

The best thing about writing your own worlds, though, is sharing it. All my coworkers at my day job got to pick a river or a mountain or whatever to name. I got the Ruby Ananda River from that. Or I can offer contests to name things. I have a passion flower called An'Alcha from that, and, of course, the Plano Straight – that's a huge geographical feature on Celta. I've had characters (murder victim and cop in Heart Quest) named by my readers.

That's the most fun of all, sharing the world with readers who enjoy it as much as I do.

Blessings

Robin D. Owens
Robin, EXCERPTS: http://www.robindowens.com/reads/reads.htm
On Writing & Publishing http://www.robindowens.blogspot.com/
2002 RITA(c) Winner

Chris Marie Green | MIDNIGHT REIGN, Vampire Babylon, Book Two

Years and years ago, when I still played with Barbies, Saturday nights were a magical time. They were all about steak dinners with the family around the candlelit table and my dad smoking his cigar in the backyard afterward. Saturday nights were also when IN SEARCH OF… aired on TV, and I remember watching it, enthralled, and oftentimes, scared to death when Leonard Nimoy told us about things like The Loch Ness Monster and Bigfoot.

Of course, I was young, and I freaked out at everything. So when a certain episode about vampires aired, it left an indelible impression that’s stayed with me until this day.

Long claws, sharp teeth, a woman in bed with a gnarly shadow creeping over her…. I was hooked, and it’s no surprise that I’m writing about vampires now for Ace Books.

In keeping with what scared me when I was younger, my own vampires usually have a mean streak and will do anything to survive. In fact, my first vamp book THE HUNTRESS (for the defunct Bombshell line from Silhouette) featured a tribe of female bloodsuckers, feral and hard to slay. I loved those gals, but the real villain in that story was vampirism itself.

I suppose you could say the same about my Vampire Babylon series, a noir-mystery-fantasy with romantic elements. This particular group survives because of secrecy; among their many gifts, they’re great spies who continually mess with the heroine, Dawn Madison, and her new team of hunters. Every book in the series revolves around a vampire-related mystery, but to me, the horror comes from how far a person might go to capture long-lasting life, youth, and fame.

Here’s a hint of what the first book in the series was about:



But NIGHT RISING, Book One (2/07), concerned more than Jesse Shane’s death. Dawn got sucked into the search for a vampire underground when her dad went missing, and her personal discoveries go hand-in-hand with what she finds out about these vampires—and what her own mother’s death might’ve had to do with them.

As you can see in this next trailer, the second book, MIDNIGHT REIGN (2/5/08), continues Dawn’s search for her dad.



There are a lot of twists and turns for you mystery fans. And for those of you who want to follow the relationship between Dawn and The Voice? There’s plenty of that, too, and BREAK OF DAWN, Book Three (out in September) is going to delve into Dawn’s search for who "Jonah" really is!

I hope you stop by my Web site at http://www.vampirebabylon.com/ because, among other things, I’m giving away a great prize for the contest. It’s a "museum quality" Giclee print called "Little Blood Sucker," and it’s signed by the artist, Billy Martinez of Neko.

Isn’t it great? I’ve got one hanging on my own wall.

Thank you for reading, and happy hunting!

Chris Marie Green (AKA Crystal Green) writes full time across the genres. Besides her Vampire Babylon series, she writes for Harlequin Blaze and Silhouette Special Edition. You can visit her other web sites at http://www.crystal-green.com/and www.myspace.com/vampirebablylon.

Melissa Marr | Secret Passages & Mirrors? Not So Much.

As a writer, I've found the misconceptions about writing fascinating. Now, as a rule, I don't tell people what I do, but somehow or another it almost always eventually comes out--at which point there are several typical responses.

1. "Who'd you know? You have to know someone to sell a book."-- This is utterly false. I wrote a book, researched agents, queried, wrote another book, queried some more, signed with an agent who shopped my book. Then I accepted an offer. There were no secret passageways, networking, muttered passwords, or any of those things. No tricks. Write, research, repeat as needed. It's pretty straight-forward.

2. "Who are you in the book?"-- I've been astounded by how many people ask this. I write multiple points of view, so there are various guesses. Ash likes photography, so do I . . . so maybe she's "me." Hmm. I have friends who like photography too, but I'm not them either. Having an interest in common with a character isn't being that character. Those commonalities help me write the characters, but each character has something of my beliefs or interests or ant-interest or anti-beliefs. It's an exercise in adding veracity, not a mirror into the author.

3. "Ok, but am I in the book? Or will I be in the next one?"-- I'm sorry, but no. You're alive; they're fiction. I'm aware that some authors do this, but I'm not at ease with any conscious insertion of real-world people into my texts. It feels uncomfortable to me. In retrospect, I sometimes see traits of people I have known. These aren't intentional on part when they do happen. My fave example is that a person I dated 14 years ago had a shoulder tattoo that I ended up giving a minor character in Wicked Lovely. I didn't do this deliberately, but after the fact, I realized that this tattoo had impressed on my memory and was in text. The character has no similarity to the real person beyond the tattoo. Little bits of life swirl in our memories and end up on the page, but again, there's no mirrors.

I love my job. Spinning out stories is exciting to me. Sometimes, though, the misconceptions are as interesting as the fiction itself. Secret passwords, hidden versions of people, and identification games--this is exciting stuff . . . but a sort of fiction as well.

http://www.melissa-marr.com/