Stella & Dane: A Honky Tonk Romance is OUT!

Deanna / Books, Writing / Stella & Dane /

Not long after my novel Baby Dust was out, readers immediately began writing me asking about Stella, the group leader who is a central figure in the book. Where did she come from? What happened to Dane? Why did she stay with him?

I knew Stella had a heck of a story to tell, so last November I went ahead and started writing the romance between her and Dane, when this Harley-riding bad boy roars into her small Missouri town and upsets the balance of the locals by dating too many hometown girls in too quick a succession.

But despite either of them—Stella with her determination to leave town for good, and Dane with his insistence on avoiding entanglements—their collision spirals out of their control.

Including Dane’s temper. He’s been on the bad side of too many of the town’s hot heads, and eventually trouble was going to erupt.

I’m so excited about the book and how it played out. I’ll talk more about it in the coming days, especially leading to the broader release in August, when the paperback will come out, and I’ll be on a ten-blog tour where hard-core romance reviewers will be chewing up and spitting out their opinions about my first actual romance. (I’m terrified!)

I hope you’ll go download the sample and see if it fits the sort of reading you like. Both of the authors who (so wonderfully!) endorsed Stella & Dane read it within a day or two and at least one early reader got through six chapters in secret bathroom breaks since she decided not to call in sick, which she regretted. I LOVE you guys!

Go see Stella & Dane on the Amazon book store!

Nov 8, 2011

On writing love scenes at 7 a.m.

Deanna / Writing / Stella & Dane /

So last night Stella and Dane finally got to meet, carefully dove tailing this introduction to the way it was described in Baby Dust.

Of course, Dane already HAS a girlfriend, but that doesn’t stop Stella. It’s not like he’s married, and besides, they’d been together all of what, two weeks? She had zits older than that.

But the meeting doesn’t quite go as she planned, and Dane takes off with Darlene on his motorcycle. And in Chapter Four, the book switches point of view. So we start to get to know Dane himself.

Last night I found I’d written myself in a corner. I was so afraid of Dane’s POV that I ended the scene at a page, which technically made it a sequel, not a bonafide scene. So I shut down for the night and lay in bed thinking about how to write myself out of the hole. I needed a problem for him, something with some meat in it. That’s when I wondered–what would Darlene do? She saw the sparks with her long-time rival. She’d go for broke.

And so Darlene leads Dane out to her uncle’s hunting cabin in the Ozarks, planning to make her move.

I had the scene.

Unfortunately, I woke up early, and with the sun just entering the horizon, and me in my decidedly unsexy flannel jammies, hair in some indecipherable knot, I made my first attempt at a sex scene from a man’s point of view.

Did I succeed? And more importantly, did Darlene? I’ll assess the scene tonight and decide if it’s worthy of inclusion in the next excerpt, going out in Thursday’s weekly newsletter to subscribers. Not on the list yet? New subscribers will get links to the content they missed in previous emails.