It was an overhaul again–HIS AT NIGHT, that is. One of those days I’d love to have only revisions but so far it’s been overhaul after overhaul. It’s still not finished yet, but it’s getting there and of course it was worth it.

Heard briefly from my fellow blogger Meredith at the end of October. She is superbusy in India but will hopefully be able to breathe easier soon. We miss you, Meredith.

And now onto the covers.

First up, German PRIVATE ARRANGEMENTS.  I have seen some German covers before–I think the Smart Bitches fugged one Laura Kinsale cover that was spectacularly clashingly purple and pink or some such hot mess.  And I wanted one of those:  Every historical romance writer should have an old-skool cover.  But I got a perfectly tasteful one instead.  A Regency, which totally cracks me up, since I write about 90 years later.  My German editor was apologetic for the wrong hair color on the hero, as apparently publishing houses there do not have a huge pool of covers from which to choose.  The title translates into “An Almost Perfect Marriage.”

The Thai cover for NOT QUITE A HUSBAND had me jazzed.  It’s my first landscape cover.  Folks, I’ve arrived!    The mountains on the cover look more like the north of Spain than the Himalayas, but it is very lovely indeed.  (And let’s face it, the Everest brings to mind oxygen deprivation and chilblains rather than passion’s undying flame.)  (Hmm, passion’s undying flame.  I think my dream job would have been to write blurbs for romances in the seventies and early eighties.)

And if I were a bestselling author, as is alleged on this cover, I need to know. 

Because every unfamiliar setting deserves one.    Passages in blockquote are from the book.

NOT QUITE A HUSBAND starts in Rumbur Valley, on the North-West Frontier of British India (today’s North-West Frontier Province, Pakistan) Rumbur Valley is one of the three valleys known as the Kalash Valleys, so called because of their unique Kalasha population. The Kalasha are a tribe of pagans who worship a pantheon of gods. They believe themselves to have descended from the soldiers of Alexander the Greek–and it is not unusual to find among the Kalasha fair hair and blue/green eyes. Unlike the Kafirs of Afghanistan who were forcibly converted to Islam in mid-1890s by the Amir of Kabul, the Kalash Valleys happened to fall on the British side of the Durand Line, and the Kalasha were allowed to continue in their ancient beliefs first under the British, then later under the constitution of Pakistan.

Across the stream, fields glinted a thick, bright gold in the narrow alluvial plain—winter wheat ready for harvest. Small, rectangular houses of wood and stacked stone piled one on top of another along the rising slope, like a collection of weathered playing blocks. Beyond the village, the ground elevated more rapidly, a brief stratum of walnut and apricot trees before the bones of the hills revealed themselves, austere crags that supported only dots of shrubs and an intrepid deodar or two.

Image by Yodod

LOL, this is not the exact same village, so it looks a little different.    But it is still a fairly recognizable as a Kalasha village.

He watched her wend her way past women in vibrantly embroidered black robes guiding water into the irrigation canals that supplied the fields of wheat, women in vibrantly embroidered black robes shaking ripe mulberries from trees onto blankets, women in vibrantly embroidered black robes cutting hay to make winter fodder.

Kalasha women’s costume is quite distinctive: black robe exuberantly embroidered, thick strands of beaded necklace, and headdress decorated with cowry shells.

Image by Dave Watts

Image by Dave Watts

Once Leo convinces Bryony to come with him, they leave the Kalash Valleys.   The Kalash Valleys are lateral valleys cut into the mountains to the west of Chitral Valley.  Chitral is a strategic forward hold for the British, who feared that the Russians could sweep down any moment and contest their crown jewel, India.

Chitral Valley

Chitral Valley is dominated to the north by the Tirich Mir, the highest peak of the Hindu Kush. Leo and Bryony, however, would only see the Tirich Mir when they look backward, as they are headed not north, but south, toward the plains of India.

Image by Dave Watts

To get out of Chitral Valley, Leo and Bryony brave Lowari Pass, elevation 10,230 ft.

It took dozens of one-hundred-eighty-degree turns for the road to zigzag up the steep slope leading toward Lowari Pass, ten thousand feet above sea level, a narrow gap in snowpeaked mountains that towered thousands of feet higher to either side. From the top, looking down at the way she’d come, Bryony thought the dirt path resembled so many hairpins that a careless goddess had dropped. The mountains, like a choppy sea, stretched blue and jagged toward the horizon.

Image by Rchughtai

The above image actually shows the descent side of the pass, which is not as steep and dramatic as the ascent side.

Once they have crossed Lowari Pass, they move ever closer to Swat Valley.

Upper Swat Valley

Swat Valley is called the Switzerland of Pakistan–please do yourself a favor and look at these spectacular pics here. Yet Swat Valley was nothing less than spectacularly dangerous in the summer of 1897. Inspired by the exhortations of a certain Mad Fakir, its population rose in a swift, powerful rebellion that caught the local British garrison by the short hairs.

Route Map (Or whatever I could get off Google Earth):

NQAH Route

Their journey started in the Kalasha village of Balanguru.  Nowshera is where they could get on the train.  The yellow line is the Afghanistan boundary.  The red line is the boundary between NWFP and FANA.

And here’s an aeriel view of the ascent toward Lowari Pass.  Notice all the zigzags.

The Climb Toward Lowari Pass

I wish I could show you more pics, but it’s hard to find good pics either in the public domain or in the creative commons.  So I guess this will have to do.    I hope you have enjoyed your mini-tour and I hope you enjoy NOT QUITE A HUSBAND.

While I was putting together the sidebar for the new blog, I noticed that my May release and Meredith’s August release bear more than a little resemblance to each other.  They are both red dress clinches!  So of course we must have a red dress-off.

First, a little background on the books themselves.

Blurb for Written on Your Skin, by Meredith Duran, on sale July 28, 2009  (just four weeks after her sophomore book, Bound by Your Touch, makes its bow):

Beauty, charm, wealthy admirers: Mina Masters enjoys every luxury but freedom. To save herself from an unwanted marriage, she turns her wiles on a darkly handsome stranger. But Mina’s would-be hero is playing his own deceptive game. A British spy, Phin Granville has no interest in emotional entanglements…until the night Mina saves his life by gambling her own.

Four years later, Phin is finally freed by his new title from the bloody game of spycraft. But memories of the girl who saved him won’t let Phin go. When he learns that Mina needs his aid, honor forces him back into the world of his nightmares.

Phin is a man intent on control. Mina is fiercely devoted to her independence. As they match wits, their practiced masks begin to slip, kindling an attraction more dangerous than any treasonous conspiracy. For in two lives built on lies, love can prove the darkest secret of all…

Blurb for Not Quite a Husband, by yours truly, on sale May 19, 2009:

Their marriage lasted only slightly longer than the honeymoon—to no one’s surprise, not even Bryony Asquith’s. A man as talented, handsome, and sought after by society as Leo Marsden couldn’t possibly want to spend his entire life with a woman who rebelled against propriety by becoming a doctor. Why, then, three years after their annulment and half a world away, does he track her down at her clinic in the remotest corner of India?

Leo has no reason to think Bryony could ever forgive him for the way he treated her, but he won’t rest until he’s delivered an urgent message from her sister—and fulfilled his duty by escorting her safely back to England. But as they risk their lives for each other on the journey home, will the biggest danger be the treacherous war around them—or their rekindling passion?

And now, the Red Dress-Off!

Does your heroine wear a red dress at any point in the book?  And if she doesn’t, would she?

Meredith: Oh boy, does Mina wear a red dress.  To wit:

“Hullo!”
Her cheery announcement won the ladies’ instant and wide-eyed attention. Phin turned. She was draped along one side of the doorframe, a small, curvaceous package done up in scarlet silk.  How the hell had she gotten out? “Miss Masters,” he said.  There was no help for it; he had to introduce her, as she well knew and had certainly counted upon. “Do come in.”
As she let go of the door and slinked toward them, he caught sight of his pathetic, incompetent, bloody fool of a footman skidding to a stop outside the door.  He gave Gompers a small shake of his head, which turned into an astonished double take as the full effect of Miss Masters’s gown became clear. All at once, he understood that his earlier unease had been a premonition of disaster.  The gown had no structure or tailoring, save for the high, square neckline and the capped sleeves.  The gold sash tied at her waist drew the thin fabric tight around her hips, announcing, very bluntly, that she did not wear a corset.
At her next step, petticoats also began to seem doubtful.

In fact, were she limited to wearing one color for the rest of her life, Mina would probably choose scarlet.

Sherry: LOL.  It’s completely the opposite in my case.  This is what Bryony wears:

He was completely enamored of the severely cut jacket-and-skirt suits she wore, so serious and put together–his lady knight, in her armor of crisp silk, ready to do battle with London’s microbes and infirmities.  At night he lay awake and thought of her prim little hats, her utilitarian walking boots, and the buttons that strained just slightly at the rise of her breasts.

I think Bryony would go through life never wearing red, and never notice that she never wears red.

Does your hero have that sort of build/musculature?

Meredith: Erm… well, let’s put it this way: if any British aristocrat is going to look so fit, it would be Phin.  Once upon a time, Phin served in India with the Royal Engineers, which entailed climbing a whole lot of mountains in order to contribute to governmental maps of contentious border zones in the Himalayas. Since mountaineers tend to be extremely muscular up top (takes a lot of strength to haul yourself up cliffs!), I can imagine he was in pretty good shape.

His more recent, and rather more nefarious activities also require a good degree of physical fitness, albeit of a different type.  To maintain the vein-popping magnificence we see on this cover, I will assure you that only the restriction of word count prevented me from including a riveting scene in which Phin does his nightly round of push-ups and pull-ups.

Sherry: I was very, very thankful that my beefcake does not have that vein-popping magnificence.  Still, the model has got a lot of meat on his bones.  This is what Leo just went through:

Weeks upon weeks of trekking across some of the most inhospitable terrains on Earth, sleeping on cold, hard ground, eating what he could shoot and the occasional handful of wild berries so he wouldn’t be weighed down by a train of coolies carrying the usual necessities deemed indispensable for a sahib’s travels.

Also, he is in denial about coming down with malaria.  Malaria does a heck of a job destroying appetites.  So when Bryony first sees Leo again after a three-year separation, this is what he looks like:

But he had shadows under his eyes. He was thin almost to the point of gauntness. And despite the tan of his skin, his face had a pallor to it.

Of course Leo, when you strip him down, is still ripped from all that climbing and trekking.

The weight he’d lost and the illness had not been enough to diminish what months of strenuous daily exertion had done for him. His body was efficient and compact, his shoulders strong, his abdomen ridged, his legs longthewed and shapely.

In other words, less bulk, but still the same hawt!

Does your title reflect your book?

Meredith: Yes.  Both Phin and Mina are profoundly influenced by (separate) incidents that left a physical mark on their bodies.

Sherry: Absolutely.  He was her husband.  Now he is not.  Ergo, NOT QUITE A HUSBAND.

Does the font size of your name indicate your stature as an author?

Meredith: Ha!  All I can say is: 1) Sherry came up with this question; 2) Sherry is nominated for two RITAs!

Sherry: Hehe.  I am tremendously unobservant.  So for me to notice the font size of Meredith’s name says something.  When I did notice, I went, whoa, them’s some NYT bestselling font size!  Of course the font size of my own name accurately reflect my  modest, relatively new status.

And I’ve been treating Meredith much nicer since I noticed. 

What input, if any, did you have on the cover?

Meredith: So here’s how it goes: the art department asks me to physically describe my hero and heroine, and then they come up with a cover, which they send to me to make sure that the people on the front sufficiently resemble the characters within.

This one wasn’t changed at all, I believe. This pic is a little muddy, but the actual cover is much warmer and richer in color, and I was very happy with that, as it seems to reflect Mina’s personality.  There is a height discrepancy between Phin and Mina that isn’t represented on the cover, but if it were, the clinch would probably look… odd.

Sherry: My publisher does its own secret plotting and just shows me the close-t0-end product.  The first round result looked like this:

The art department made the correct choice to remove the border–which is now tinted red and on the back cover–for the figures of the models to pop much more. I wanted longer fingers for him and hair enough on her to engulf small villages, especially since the latter is specifically referred to in the book.  Didn’t get too much more hair on her–art department said it would muddy the picture–but did get longer fingers on him.  Also, art department gave him a deeper tan and changed his trousers.  Nothing like black trousers on a man to say mysterious virility. 

And why clinch instead of ladyback/mantitty?

Meredith: You know, the covers are designed with an eye to attracting browsers in a bookstore, and it’s safe to say that Pocket has done a lot more research than I have in regard to what attracts a casual browser to pick up a book.  I’m guessing, then, that clinches appeal to readers.  And here’s a confession: I don’t mind clinch covers.  I’ve long dreamed of opening a bar that would be wallpapered entirely in old-school clinch covers.  It would serve drinks with names like “Purple-Headed Passion,” “Throbbing Banana” Daiquiris and “An Ecstasy of Oranges”, and have dim, velvet-lined booths with private jukeboxes constantly tuned to Frank Sinatra and Etta James.

Without clinch covers, this fantasy would be horribly incomplete.  Long live the clinch!

Sherry: According to Sue Grimshaw, Borders’ romance buyer, for newer historical romance authors, the clinch is a must.  And since I do write very hot books, I like that the heat level is reflected in the cover.  (And I especially like her expression on the cover.  She’s thinking: My God that is a bloody cricket bat he’s got there.)

And man, Meredith, the Old-Skool clinch covers are as abundant as hydrogen.  Your bar would run out of walls to display them all.   And even though I don’t drink, I plan to order a “Purple-headed Passion” just to say that I’d experienced it once in my life.  May I also suggest “Explode Like a Ripe Melon?”

I shed my first tears within moments of the beginning, when the clockmaker’s backward-turning clock was revealed, and he spoke of how he wished that time could flow back and bring back all the young men (his own son included) who had perished in the Great War.

The tone of the movie was set. From then on, I was completely and rapturously enveloped in the gentle yet unsentimental journey of a man who ages backward. I’d read other aging backward stories, most notably in Dan Simmons’ Hyperion, so I already know it is a peculiar genre that moves me. But still, I cried and cried at the end of the movie and then went home–it was like 2:30 am when I got back–and cried for another half hour. Because it touched me so. Because for me it spoke so eloquently of the fragility of life, the inexorability of death, and the gallantry of love, knowing in the end that it might not even be remembered or recognized.

But I seem to be in the minority in my uncritical love of this movie. When I’ve talked to people about it, they feel the movie was too long and rather boring at parts. My mom in particular, from whom I inherited my shallowness, complained at length that there wasn’t enough young Brad Pitt for eye candy.

Now, what else do I love uncritically?

Some of you might know that I had a lot of trouble with DELICIOUS, that I had to throw out the equivalent of two entire drafts before my editor accepted the third version. (I am, without a doubt, the best edited writer in all of romance–bar none.) When I received the first final copies of DELICIOUS hot off the press, I sat down and read it through–for probably the very first time, since before that I always had to make changes. My verdict? “Powerful but imperfect,” as I wrote in an email to my editor, vowing to keep the powerful but get rid of the imperfect with my next book.

Some of you might also know that I had some major trouble with NOT QUITE A HUSBAND in the home stretch–namely, I sent it in and my editor sent it back with a few choice words that had me wander around my house shellshocked for half a day or so before I pulled myself together to redo the book in the three weeks. (Otherwise my pub date would have to be moved back to 2010.)

Having gone through three drafts with DELICIOUS, getting a sucky draft sent back shouldn’t be anything new for me, right?

Well, it was a new experience. Each time I handed in a not-okay draft of DELICIOUS, I sort of knew that it wasn’t okay. The first time I actually prayed that my editor wouldn’t hate it too much–she did, and I wasn’t too surprised.

This time I was really, really shocked. Even after I’d rewritten and resubmitted and had my new version accepted, I couldn’t stop wondering about it. Why was my assessment of the original version of NOT QUITE A HUSBAND so diametrical from that of my editor’s? The ability to judge one’s own work is an important quality to have for a writer, especially a professional writer. And I’d thought that I’d finally acquired that ability.

Then I read the new version of NOT QUITE A HUSBAND in anticipation of the line edit and the copy edits. I cried–and cried and cried. It dawned on me finally that NOT QUITE A HUSBAND, even the much-flawed original version, was just like Benjamin Button for me.

Have you ever read a book that hurts so good that you lose all critical faculties? A book of deep lovely pain that make you feel with such intensity and rawness that you cannot grade it on any objective measure, because you don’t care, because it just knocks you out in all the right ways?

That is NOT QUITE A HUSBAND for me. Me, not my editor, fortunately. The book as it originally stood had a couple of significant structural weaknesses which I completely ignored because I was an emotion junkie getting her fix with the rest of the story. My clear-eyed editor pointed them out and made me fix them.

And the new version gets to me even more.

It feels unsettling, almost, to speak of a book of my own that way. And I’m not sure whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing. I could very well end up in the minority here, as NOT QUITE A HUSBAND is not an easy story, nor does it have a secondary romance to lighten things up from time to time. But it is, in a way, a marvelous experience, to write something that jives with me so much that I’m utterly blind to its faults, that upon reading it I am incapable of anything but teary-eyed happiness.

The rest of you, prepare to be sorely disappointed.

And here is the preliminary cover design for NQAH.

The cover isn’t final. The border might go, since it juxtaposes rather weirdly with the rest of the image. The background color might change to make the red pop more. The art department thinks the cover will feel bolder and sexier if the couple take the whole cover. And I’m all for it. I write pretty darn sexy stuff. And my previous covers, although gorgeous, didn’t reflect The Hawt.

So just a little news before I hunker down and go back to work. Until then, everybody vote! (And yes, I did already.)

I have about 25-26k right now–need to delete most of what I wrote yesterday, therefore the uncertainty. So I’m looking at minimun 2000 words per day to finish the darn thing. Feel free to bet that my editor wouldn’t see anything until the first week of October is over–that’s just how I roll. But I do honor my deadlines in an approximate fashion so I will be going after it.

To make sure I’m honest, I’m going to post daily (probably) updates here.

In the meanwhile, here’s a recipe addendum to DELICIOUS, in case you are hungry.

September 1: The word count stands at 27k exact at the end of day. I spent most of it writing in the master bathroom (where most of Delicious was written, and you’d have thought it would have been the kitchen, wouldn’t you?), while His Hawtness spent a lot of quality time with the kidlets.

September 2: 27,500 words. Spent most of the time kidlets were in school getting together a mailing list for the published author network of my local RWA chapter. Need to do better tomorrow.

September 3: 28,800 words. Did do better, but not by that much. My favorite way to write is to have a 14 hour day and spend the first five or six hours doing nothing, and then get alarmed as the end of the day approaches and start typing. Alas, can only do that when the kids are away at Grandma’s. 2nd graders have to be picked up five minutes after they’ve walked to school, it seems.

September 4: 1,200 words progress; total, 30,000. Not impressive, but okay considering that most of my day was spent following politics, which I haven’t looked at since 2006, and most of my evening spent having fun at The PHADE.

September 5: 2000 words progress; 32,000 total. His Hawtness came home early in the pm and picked up junior kidlet from school. Then Mom had the kids for the evening. So I got my 14 hour day.

September 6: Eked out 1000 words; 33,000 total. Usually after a good writing day I’d be totally chillin’. But I guess this public reporting is making me stick to my goal better than I otherwise would. Not sure how much of everything I’d be keeping in the end. But this story in the middle sections has an actual external plot–H/H have to get from place A to place B in time for big trouble at place B–so it is the external plot that is moving.

Interestingly enough, I had several days of awful time moving the story forward–see the bit at the top of the post about having to delete most of what I wrote on 8/31. And that was because I was stuck trying to sketch something of a big picture of the political situation of the Northwest Frontier of India (today North West Frontier Province in Pakistan) in the summer of 1897, right before the lid blew off. You’d think that with all the information already at my fingertips, I’d have no trouble doing a bit of a summary. But no matter how I summarized it, it was boring, boring, boring.

Long time ago, when I listened to the commentary on Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, the editor talked the big battle at Helm’s Deep, a few hundred men and Elves against ten thousand Urukhai. Their first cut of the battle was 28 minutes. And they thought it was awesome. So they expanded it a few minutes and expanded it a few more minutes. But with each expansion the fight became flabbier and less interesting. Their revelation? Just a battle, no matter how well shot, does not interest people. They had to keep the focus tightly on the protagonists and never leave them for more than a few seconds.

That’s a similar lesson I’m learning here. By itself, the danger that my H/H face isn’t interesting, even as we move toward the big fecal-matter-hitting-oscillating-mechanical-device moment in terms of the external plot, it still must be the conflict in their relationship that dominate the narrative.

September 7: 700 words today; 33,700 total. Writing barebones scenes can only take me so far. At some point, I lose my grip on my characters. I miss the little details that actually make a scene, and I cannot dig as deep into their hearts when I have not been dealing with their emotions, only their actions. So I took off much of the day to potter around the house, cleaning up stuff and cooking. Tomorrow I will be revisiting the half-scene I wrote today to put in paint on the wall and a rug on the floor, so to speak, cuz right now it’s just all bare plaster and concrete.

September 9: Aha, I took Sep 8 off totally. Read Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed instead. It’s my favorite kind of nonfiction, informative AND entertaining, with a strong narrative. (And besides, disaster stories have a certain fascination of their own.) Will have to read Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies next.

Yesterday sort of got back into the groove. Progress: 700. Total: 34,400. I can truly say even when I’m working, I’m not blowing anyone away.

September 10: Progress, 1,200; total, 35,600. It is the kind of day where I actually ran out of hours in the day, what with running errands and kids homework and what not. I stopped at a very easy point. So should resume tomorrow without much problem.

September 11: Very decent day of writing. Progress, 1,600; total, 37,200. And I got to chat with Janine. And I surf around a bit. And I did homework with the junior kidlet. And I went to sleep at 10:30. Tomorrow might be less productive with Ike breathing down our Texas. Would be cooking most of the perishables we have in the freezer in case electricity went out. Was in Baton Rouge when Andrew landed in Louisiana and we were without electricity for three days.

September 12: 600 words; 37,800 total. Spent a lot of time looking at Ike stuff–like I need to feed my already chronic case of blog-titis. Then cooked a few things to last us the weekend should power go out. Chances are nothing much would come to Austin, Hurricanes tend to turn east when they hit land, and Austin is way west of the Galveston-Houston area.

Had a thought today. The kind of historical romance I like to read and write is sort of analogous to old-fashioned painting, sometimes even like miniature portraits that require a lot of precision and very fine brush strokes. But when I try to go really fast, as I do right now, it feels like I’m pouring buckets of paint on canvas. Or rather, to borrow another analogy, the story as it currently stands is like an impressionist painting: okay when you look at it from a distance, a mess up close!

September 13-14: Progress, 2,200; total, 40,000. Yay, finally moved into a new 10k band. And I did something I rarely do. I jumped forward a couple of scenes to write a crucial turning point scene–again, thanks to that scaffolding of external plot.

As for Ike, it didn’t even touch Austin. A bit of breeze and no rain at all–we put out our wash in the backyard as we usually do. But it looks like the situation on some part of the TX gulf coast might be dire. Best hopes to minimal damages and the swift return to normalcy.

September 15: Progress, 900; total, 40,900. Good review day. Bad review day. The Chicago Tribune liked DELICIOUS. Mrs. Giggles did not like PRIVATE ARRANGEMENTS. I am relieved she didn’t review PA when it first came out. I used to get much more affected by a negative review than I do now–if I came across a bad review then I’d spend the rest of the day googling anxiously. Yesterday I said “Oh well, maybe next time,”–cuz you gotta give Mrs. Giggles credit, she does give authors second and third chances, unlike moi–cooked dinner, and then went back to writing.

September 24: I had a blast on tour. Account coming soon. Now must stop most other kinds of voluntary online activities. Not Quite a Husband has just been given a June 2009 pub date. And it’s only half-done. So I’m freaking out and will be going underground any minute now. (Don’t worry, freaking out does good things for me.)