Aphrodisia Authors :: Blog

Good cloudy morning folks. Would someone please explain this to me. A week and a half ago it reached 81 degrees here in the Northwest. Then it snowed over the weekend, and this morning I’m looking out at a cloud filled sky.
Ah well, can’t do nuttin’ about it except hunker down and write. Yesterday I was playing email conversation with our own Kate Douglas. She said she was dealing with the cold in her neck of the woods by getting to the getting of a new book. Sounded like good advice so I kicked out about 2500 words.
Hey Kate, I’m further along in this writin’ a book business than you are. I’m into chapter four of the middle book in a three book contract. It doesn’t have a title and I don’t want anyone giving me a hard time about it, because the rest of it’s starting to come together.
Interesting thing about growing a story, at least for me. I start with a blip above nothing and start adding fertilizer until something pops to the surface. In this case, I’ve been holding onto a well-illustrated booklet about Canyon de Chelly in Arizona, a place I visited and fell in love with. The Anasazi once lived in this land of canyons and sandstone, and the dramatic vistas grabbed me around the throat the moment I entered it. Setting is vital to me. I need an emotional hit from an area (real or imagined) or my characters won’t thrive in it.
So step one became keeping the terrain but moving it to a fictional spot so I could play around with reality. Then I needed some characters. Hok’ee was just waiting for me to pull him out of the muddy backwater of my brain. A cougar shapeshifter, he’s a restless and savage soul, wild and primal. There’s nothing politically correct about him. There’s a core of me in him, or perhaps I should say Hok’ee represents a don’t-give-a-damn side to this law-abiding middle class writer I try to keep under lock. He has no need for or interest in money, running water, political campaigns, or even whether he has any clothes. How did he get that way? It took a couple nights of insomnia for the answer to emerge, but I love it. A hint. If you know anything about the Navajo or Tony Hillerman’s writing, you’ve heard about the chindi.
Hok’ee needed a woman, specifically one with a reason to enter his primal world. More insomnia. More ranting to myself. More considering and then rejecting options. Then one morning while I was in the shower, Kai stepped in and started talking about the psychic gift that sets her apart. What’s that you say, psychics are a dime a dozen? True, but how many can tap into the souls of animals? Hot damn but do I love that idea. And her.
Next came the plot, or rather the need for one. Not so much insomnia this time but a lot of sitting at the computer with my eyes closed while I threw down everything that came to mind. Minor characters, check. Theme, check. Goals, check. Twists and turns, check. I’m still working on getting all that to mesh, but I trust that thing called creativity enough to know the minor characters and the direction things are headed will eventually make sense.
Maybe what I’ve written has bored the you know what out of whoever tried to wade through it, but I got a kick out of trying to explain the creative process, at least how it works for me. I’m deliberately not saying more because I lose momentum and interest if I say too much about what I’m doing. I need to be surprised and a bit scared every time something comes out of my mind, through my fingers, and onto the computer screen.
One more thing before I fade off. Last week’s mail brought a couple of great packages. I have a novella in Sexy Beast V which should come out in Sept. and the cover flats arrived. OMG that’s one hunky hunk!!! Only With A Cowboy (another anthology) will hit the stands on April 29 which means I now have a box filled with copies to use for promotion. The cover: another hunky hunk wearing nothing except a trashed pair of jeans and a rope slung around his neck. I can hardly wait to read P.J. Mellor and Melissa MacNeal’s contributions.
Vonna
www.VonnaHarper.com

p.s. Given what little I’ve told folks about what I’m working on, if anyone has an idea for a title, I’d be eternally grateful. In fact, I’ll send you a copy of Only With A Cowboy.

Hmm. I’m a little later creating this than I’d planned. For some reason, Google, which is the power behind the Aphrodisia blogs, decided to disown me. What? I’d signed on with no problem the last time I blogged but now my user name and password seems to have fallen into a black hole. Go figure. Ah well, looks like I’ve jumped through the necessary hoops. (Shaking her head at technology). Speaking of our modern and too-complex world, anyone interested in the hoops I had to jump through in order to replace my husband’s cell phone after he tried to teach it how to swim? Didn’t think so.

Actually I’m stalling. I know what I want to comment on because it’s what kept me awake much of last night, I’m just not sure how to get started. Ah, how about the beginning, if I can find that particular thread. When I started writing erotica, it was a brave new and uncharted world. Plot choices were unlimited, at least it seemed that way to me. Anything from historical to futuristic to sci/fi to paranormal to shape shifting to–you got the picture. Much the same with themes or genre. I tried a little of this and that with my early works which were for Ellora’s Cave. Then in a moment of mad inspiration, I wrote Forced, or maybe I should say Forced used me as its vehicle for getting into print. It was plain and simple, bondage. Bondage has been my fantasy of choice for as long as I can remember. I can honestly say I’ve never plunged deeper into a story (its by far my best-selling e-title).
Forced was followed by other bondage-themed stories because that’s what I wanted to write. The genre is also a hot, hot seller, but that was less important to me than exploring my needs and curiosities. I danced at the edge of BDSM and that shows up in all of my Aphrodisia stories, but my comfort level kept me at the edge. I might be able to read about true submissives, particularly the whole pain thing, but my macho heroes draw the line with elaborate rope work. They don’t crack whips. I simply can’t mark up my heroines. What it gets down to is that I don’t get the pain/pleasure connection and if it’s foreign to me, it’s foreign to my characters.
The point of this is that I’ve written a LOT of bondage and am beginning to suspect I’ve explored most of the situations my brain can come up with. Am I in danger of starting to repeat myself? Shoot, maybe I already have, but fortunately that short-term memory issue insulates me from reality. I don’t want to bore my readers, or myself by playing the same tune over and over again.
So, now that I’m pulling together possibilities for book two in my current Aphrodisia contract, my mind is digging around in all kinds of directions. I love adventure. Adore suspense. Dig man against nature. Maybe I don’t want to fashion those passions in such a way that they’d fit under the bondage umbrella. Maybe I just want hot and heavy sex while fleeing the villains or trying to outrun an avalanche or flood. Maybe I don’t want to deal with the separation of power between master and sub; I need equals. Hell, maybe I even need the woman on top.
That in a less than articulate explanation is my current quandary. Bondage is familiar. I know that dance (or I’ve deluded myself into thinking I do) Just because I’m intrigued by the man against nature plot possibility that went to bed with me doesn’t mean I have the skill to fashion it within the erotica world.
And the thought that I want to end with: has Vonna Harper made such a name for herself as a bondage slut that readers won’t pick up anything else from me? I’d love to read your responses. I really, really need to know. But if you don’t give a darn what I write as long as I shut up, keep that to yourself.
Vonna www.VonnaHarper.com
p.s. Can I get away with a non Aphrodisia plug? On Tues, my first and so far only Samhain book BloodHunter comes out. And yeah, it has bondage running through it along with time travel and shape shifting and the sexiest jaguar on the planet.

I’m part of a local group that’s part friendship, part critique partners. Last night we were mostly about sharing a potluck, watching the lunar eclipse, and catching up. Finally we got around to the business part of things, or to be honest, the rest of us hung on her every word while Gail told us about her most excellent weekend.
The weekend? Glad you asked. Gail is an awesome writer and has had both fiction and nonfiction published, but for reasons I don’t quite get, her first love is screenwriting. To my way of thinking, straight writing is competitive enough while it appears that half of the population is trying to get a screenplay published. Granted, the payoff can be like hitting the lottery–only the odds are even higher. Back when I’d briefly given leave of my senses, I tried my hand at a couple of screenplays and loved the process, but I have all I can do to pay the bills doing what I am which these days revolves around erotica for Aphrodisia.
You think there are a lot of rules to fiction, try screenplays! The workshop Gail attended is taught by Cynthia Whitcomb who knows what she’s talking about. Among Cynthia’s credits: she’s sold more than 80 feature-length screenplays, 30 of which have been filmed. Her scripts have won and been nominated for the Emmy, Cable Ace Award, Edgar Allan Poe Award, Humanities Award, and Writers Guild of America. She’s taught screenwriting for many years, including seven at the UCLA Film School. So what I’m thinking is, Gail’s competition includes Cynthia. Good luck my friend. But Cynthia really cares about her students’ success and is open and honest about what separates a pro from those, like me, who are clueless. Think about it, how many NYT writers teach those who might become their competition?
So Cynthia knows all the tricks that separate her from her students, little things like aiming for over 100 scenes in a script that averages 120 pages, opening with an outdoor scene because it paints a larger landscape, not describing the actors or giving them ages, knowing who you want to play the various roles (yes, that is contradictory), starting scenes in the middle of the action and leaving before the action winds down, keeping the clock ticking, limiting dialogue to three lines, giving no stage directions (that’s the actors’ job) sticking to present tense, using active verbs, keeping it lean and cutting it mean, knowing the format.
Writing those two screenplays was an incredible experience for me. No exposition, no thoughts, no internal monologues. Nothing but dialogue and action. I loved it. I’m also going to stick with print publishing.
Speaking of said print publishing, the anthology Only With A Cowboy will be released April 29, I now have the yummy cover for Going Down which shows a man lapping at a female torso, have turned in Hawk’s Talons, and am in desperate search of a story for book 2 in my current contract.
Anyone with a spare plot or characters hanging around, PLEASE send them my way. Or I could use what was in those screenplays. Hmm. Something to think about.
Vonna
www.VonnaHarper.com

Hmm. I’m trying to remember which day I mailed off my latest ms. for Aphrodisia. The deadline was Jan 15, and I think I made it with a whopping 3-4 days to spare. Hawk’s Talons took me in fun directions, at least for me because I love paranormal. Although I drew on Native American spirituality in part because under another name I wrote seven NA historicals, with Hawk, I didn’t have to stick to what’s known about the belief system. Instead, I let my imagination take flight and didn’t know until the end how powerful Hawk Spirit would turn out to be–or how lusty my characters.
As soon as Hawk went off, I tackled a couple of have-to projects, most notably a complete revamping of my web site. If you’re so inclined, please take a gander at www.VonnaHarper.com to see what a pro (not me) can come up with. Now, hopefully, I can maintain the site. We’ll see. Then I had a couple of editing jobs to do for two ebooks that’ll come out later this year (not with Aphrodisia).
Even before I finished Hawk and certainly while clearing the decks, my mind started playing with something I haven’t tried for a long time–thus the title of this blog. I love romantic suspense, absolutely love it! Suspense is my genre of choice when I’m reading for pleasure, and I’m in awe of writers who can keep the pacing going throughout all the twists and turns and excitement of a big suspense book. But that’s not what I’m diving into starting today. Instead, I’m trying a less ambitious route by tackling a 55-60,000 word story, hopefully for Harlequin Intrigue. I’ve been reading a lot of Intrigues and am impressed with the sophistication and reality, the variety. Can my plot and characters match what’s being published? I don’t know but I’m stoked by the challenge.
And when I’m done with the proposal, I know I’ll approach my next Aphrodisia title in my current contract renewed and rejuvinated. At least for me, change of pace keeps me fresh. I’ve asked this in other blogs but what about you, do you stick to reading one genre or do you read across the board? What about non-fiction?
Vonna
p.s. Speaking of non-fiction, my son gave me John Grisham’s The Innocent Man. Two thumbs way up for this true tale of an innocent man condemened to death.
Vonna

Talk about being in the right place at the right time!
To set the stage, I’d finished my latest contract with Kensington Aphrodisia and had submitted a new proposal to my editor hoping to again become gainfully employed. Then because my editor had a month to make a decision on that proposal, I wandered off and wrote something for another publisher. Then one day last week I received emails from both my editor and agent. The editor had read the proposal, zeroing in on the title, Hawk’s Fangs. She was looking for novellas to include in the 2008 Sexy Beast collection. Would I entertain changing the Hawk’s Fangs storyline from book length to novella length? Worth thinking about because no less than Kate Douglas (dear friend and leading Aphrodisia writer) is anchoring the anthology. But I love Hawk’s Fangs as it is and didn’t want to try to compress and lose huge chunks of the plot in order to shorten 80,000 words to 30,000. So when my agent called, I threw out a suggestion. What if I give the editor a whole new idea to hopefully fit into Sexy Beast 2008? She had some reservations for complex and legitimate reasons, but I was getting excited. All I lacked was a plot. And characters. And setting.
Not the first time.
Okay, I started brainstorming. My editor wanted a sexy beast. I thought PREDATOR. Headed for the Internet with the word cougar running through my mind because the something I’d just written for another publisher had a cougar in it. But I didn’t want to repeat myself. What do you know, pumas are even larger and bolder than cougars and range from Alaska to the tropics. Best of all, ancient Native American legends are rich with references to all kinds of predators. I’ve written a lot about NA legends and have a number of reference books. Started pouring through them about 9 p.m. the same day all the excitement started. Picked up just enough information to be dangerous, specifically that the Apache believed that the night scream of a puma signaled impending death. Is that sexy or what?
Went to bed knowing damn well I wasn’t going to sleep. Plotted and planned, ran myself into and out of brick walls, conjured up a couple of characters I couldn’t put names to for the life of me. Because said editor had, in part, been drawn to Hawk’s Fangs become that hero was a shape-shifter, guess what I did with my nameless hero? Of course it made sense for my heroine to be a modern woman who doesn’t buy any of that wo-wo nonsense.
Staggered from the bedroom around dawn, mainlined some caffeine, plunked myself in front of my computer, and hammered out a one page synopsis which I emailed to my agent. By the end of the day, the editor had read and approved it, and I had a whole new gig—a novella called Night Scream which will be in the Sexy Beast 2008 anthology with Kate Douglas!!! As for Hawk’s Fangs, well that’s all good too.
If only all writing was that easy.
What do I mean easy, I still have to write Night Scream. And find names for these characters.
Vonna Harper
http://www.vonnaharper.com/

Sorry about the title. I truly suck at them; just ask my editors over the years. While waiting to fall asleep last night, I convinced myself that I’d come up with a great topic for my blog, but after reading several that came before, my idea lacks a certain heat or energy. It’s not specific to erotica which is what Aphrodisia is about.
Just the same, I’m going to stick with what I came up with because I’ve convinced myself that people (at least a few) care what goes on behind the scenes in a writer’s life–not the actual writing (especially erotica) but the whole balance thing.
So here’s the deal. I’ve been writing since shortly after the first ice age which means I have a lot of experience or something under my belt. When the writing bug first hit, my sons were babies. I’m not crazy about admitting this, but I sometimes resented the time and emotional energy motherhood took away from the creative process. I WANTED TO WRITE, WANTED TO WRITE, DAMN IT! But as all parents know, children need a certain amount of love and attention and have their ways of getting it. Then they hit school age and suddenly I was handed what felt like vast amounts of time to myself, and I made the best of it. I became a writing machine, and my production reflected that.
Maybe I’ve mellowed, maybe I’m just getting old and lazy. Whatever the reason, I’ve learned to embrace whichever hat I’m wearing at the time. Case in point. Last night I had 12 people at the house for a family get-together and enjoyed every moment of it. My nephew’s wife asked, as she always does, about my writing. I responded only briefly because last night was about her, her husband, and their growing children.
Writing is what I did earlier that day when I had my office to myself, (and no, I didn’t tell her about the foreplay I’d written) but I’d switched off that part of my brain and wanted to focus on where those beautiful children were in their development, how much they’d grown and changed in the year since I’d seen them. I also wanted to observe the interaction between my sons who’d recently had to resolve a conflict. My mind was filled with processing a multitude of family dynamics, observing and recording. This was real life, developing personalities, husband/wife communication, three generations each with their own place in the march of time.
And at the end of it when my brain was shutting down, I acknowledged that the evening had enriched me as a writer in vital ways. I might not be aware of what specific observations I’m drawing on when I’m writing, but in subtle or maybe not so subtle ways, my characters will be full-bodied because I lived in the moment last night. Even if I’m writing hot and heavy sex, my hero and heroine will or should be complex human beings because I was privy to the human animal from ages 5 through 70.
This morning I’m refreshed and renewed. The creative well is fuller than it was 48 hours ago. Thank you life.
Vonna Harper

Howdy all!!!Talk about being slow getting to the dance. I now have three Aprodisia titles out with, I think, four more in the pipeline so it’s about time I jumped onboard the blog here. Hmm. Let’s see, if I was reading about some broad named Vonna Harper, what would I want to know about her? Not the personal stuff ’cause that’s pretty boring and doesn’t sell books. Okay, how about the stuff she writes followed by the question of why anyone would want to read what I write? Okay I can go with that ’cause I’m having a ball!!!First a little name dropping and blame credited–both of which go to our own Kate Douglas. Ya see, several years ago a gal pal and I attended a conference where Kate was enthusiatically explaining the then new erotica concept. She was writing for an epublisher, something I’d never considered but since I was eager to try something new, I sat up and paid attention. Hmm. Can I write about sex, real sex, not the flowery stuff I’d been doing for Harlequin and Silhouette? Not sure until Kate emailed me one of her stories. OMG, talk about real!!! Talk about a turn-on!!! Yeah, I can do this. I just can’t tell my mother or sons.It was definitely a matter of being in the right place at the right time because nearly everything I submitted to that epublisher was accepted. And, surprise, surprise, my stories started coming out mere months after I’d written them instead of years as had been the case with Big Apple publishers. I had a personal e-friendship with my editors and felt as if we were all in this grand new adventure together. Down the road a couple of years with a growing number of stories under my belt, I was again in the right place at the right time when Kensington started looking for books for the new and edgy and fun-as-hell Aphrodisia line. With my soon to be ex agent’s (long story) encouragement, I submitted something to an editor there and had an acceptance less than a week later. Hammered out the details while standing by the mountain lake where the family cabin is, barely remembering to swat mosquitos I was so excited.Probably because what I’d initially sent them was a bondage/BDSM theme, that’s what they want from me and since I always try (okay, sometimes) to do what I’m told and paid for, that’s been my speciality. I keep wondering if I’m going to run out of ideas with that theme but not so far. I truly dig the covers Aphrodisia come out and am really excited about the one for my Dec book Night Fire which shows a naked woman’s rear torso with her hands cuffed behind her. Sexy! The earlier covers (Surrender, The Cowboy, and Roped Heat) are also winners but were a little harder to make out the details–well, except for the hunky cowboy.A question before I fade into the woodwork: how important is cover accuracy to readers? Night Fire’s model has artificial nails and the cuffs are fur lined whereas much of the story takes place in ancient Aztec times where neither of those things existed.Waving good-bye–until next month.Vonna Harper