забавный и мэйл от кристины додд:
In this email:
—My Funniest Writing Mistakes
—Excerpt of STORM OF SHADOWS
—New York Times good news
I have been published for eighteen years. On September 1, my fortieth full-length book, STORM OF SHADOWS, hit the shelves. I’m not bragging (well, only a little), just giving you a framework for my story.
Because last year, I wrote a scene in INTO THE FLAME where the hero sees the heroine for the first time in two and a half years, and startles her. The line I wrote was, “She didn’t jump, he’d give her that. But Firebird Wilder had always had balls of steel, and she showed them now as she coolly turned to face him.”
I am a professional. Don’t try this at home.
In INTO THE SHADOW, my heroine stumbles onto the hero sitting in the Japanese garden. He jumps to his feet and says, "Is this your private place? Should I leave?" and she says, "No, it's okay, my private place is big enough for the both of us."
Unless I’m writing erotica (and I’m not), that’s just embarrassing.
There was the time during the passionate kissing scene when I described the hero as “big-boned” and said the heroine “stained against him.” Euw. Just … euw.
I don’t even want to discuss the infamous, "He pinned his eyes to her chest."
I’m not the only writer who does this stuff. At one of my first Romance Writers of America conferences, one of the award winners got up and thanked her critique group. Before she joined them, she wrote sentences like, "Angrily, he thrust his hands into his pockets and tried to get a hold of himself.”
My nightmare is that one of these lines will slip through all the editing and make it onto the printed page.
Oh, wait. That’s happened, too. My husband was reading my first published book, CANDLE IN THE WINDOW, a medieval, and came to me with a question. After the hero and heroine were married, I wrote, “They stood on the battlements and waved until the wedding guests were out of sight.” Scott wondered, since the heroine was blind, how long she had waved.
Storm of ShadowsSTORM OF SHADOWS is on the shelves now. Buy a copy for your chance to find the faux pas that will haunt me for the rest of my life. No, I don’t know for sure there is one. But the chances are pretty good. In the meantime, enjoy an excerpt from STORM OF SHADOWS:
“Do you ever get gut feelings?” Aaron asked.
“When I get the flu.” Rosamund laughed too long at her own joke, then grew uncomfortable under his steady regard. “I used to. Sometimes. But my father said gut feelings were nothing but wistful thinking, and I might as well depend on a fortune teller’s crystal ball.”
“He wanted you to stay in the real world.” And why? When Aaron had come down to the library basement with antiquities that needed to be authenticated or manuscripts that required translation, Dr. Hall had been brilliant, stiff-necked, and grim, yet keenly interested in the paranormal. Most important in Aaron's mind was his sharp instinct for the genuine above the counterfeit.
Never, ever had he mentioned that he had a daughter.
Why had he so emphatically quashed Rosamund's curiosity?
Had Dr. Hall foreseen a dread prophecy for her?
“Are you familiar with the legend of the Chosen?” Aaron asked.
“The Chosen …” He could almost see Rosamund flipping through the encyclopedia of her mind. “Yes. The Chosen and the Others. When the world was young, a beautiful woman gave birth to twins, each marked as something set apart from average people. Repulsed, she took them into the darkest woods — in these fairy tales, it always is the darkest woods — and left the babies for the wild animals to devour.” She looked at him inquiringly. “Is that the legend you mean?”
“That’s it. Do you know the rest?”
Rosamund continued, “Those two children were the first Abandoned Ones, babies left by their parents without love or care and to compensate, given a gift of power. The babies survived. The girl was a seer. The boy was a fire-giver. They gathered others like them and formed two gangs, one for good and one for evil, and they fought for the hearts and souls of the Abandoned Ones.”
“A battle that goes on today,” he finished.
“Yes.” Her brow knit. “It’s not a very comforting fairy tale.”
“How many are?”
“Most have endings of some kind. The witch is tipped into the oven, the evil stepmother falls from a cliff —“ She caught sight of his face. “All right, not happy endings, but still, there’s none of that, The battle goes on today, stuff.”
“Yet it’s so much more realistic to know there can never be an end, or at least not until the Apocalypse.”
“If the legend of the Chosen Ones was true, which it’s not.”
Aaron wished that she was right. Unfortunately for her and her future peace of mind, she was staring right into the eyes of one of the Chosen Ones.
Order STORM OF SHADOWS from Barnes and Noble:
http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?ISBN=9780451228130&ourl=Storm%2Dof%2DShadows%2FChristina%2DDodd&itm=3&rv=1Order STORM OF SHADOWS from Borders:
http://www.borders.com/online/store/TitleDetail?sku=0451228138Order STORM OF SHADOWS from Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/Storm-Shadows-Chosen-Christina-Dodd/dp/0451228138/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1251319370&sr=1-1Finally, I want to thank everyone who already bought STORM OF SHADOWS and helped put my fortieth book on the New York Times bestseller list. Even better, STORM OF SHADOWS and STORM OF VISIONS are both on the USA Today bestseller list. It’s a double-header!
Warmly,
Christina Dodd
http://www.christinadodd.com
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