I'm with you, Paige. I can listen to music no problem, but not if there are lyrics. Much too distracting. If there are lyrics, I actually sit down and listen to them, and think about them, and dissect them - I married a songwriter - and that's not good at all. I need quiet when I write. Dead. Quiet. So there's no such thing as a playlist for any of my books. I always thought I was weird. Now I see I'm not. And I thank you for that!
Definitely agree with the man in uniform thing. Or the man in jeans. Though a man in a tuxedo can do all kinds of things for me too. James Bond, anyone? But alpha males aside, it's a lot of fun taking a guy who isn't in a 'hot' job - say an accountant or a professor or maybe a computer hacker - and make him be a hero. In a book, I mean.
Thanks, everyone! It's a really freaky coincidence, which makes for a very interesting backstory the next time I have to go up front of a group and talk about my books! Don't forget to go enter the drawing for a free copy of the book over on BooksOnTheHouse.com!
I don't know that I agree with that. Two friends have recently published or are soon to publish books set in the 1930s and 1940s (Rebecca Cantrell's A TRACE OF SMOKE, June 2009, and Kelli Stanley's CITY OF DRAGONS, early 2010) and both are firmly historical works. Both authors have done a bang-up job of nailing their time-periods, which may have something to do with it. Those books could not have been set now, but are very well rooted in their respective time periods. I think the problem may be less in the time the book is set, and more in the author's execution. I don't write historicals, but I've always been told that some of the difficulty is in creating characters that are firmly of the time period you're writing about, and not modern men and women dumped into a different time. If you can't do it, maybe time travel is the way to go...