Sweet mother of God, I've finished Incidental Contact. (More about the delay after my #SexySnippet, if you're interested) Here's my seven, from the same title:
She’d seen him shirtless before, she just hadn't been expected to talk during the experience.
When he sat back, she eyed the rippling muscle and
bronze skin. Not graduating suddenly meant little. What mattered was how she
wanted to rub her nose in that perfect mat of dark hair on his chest. The urge
was foreign, like someone else stuck the idea into her brain. She’d never been
this close to male perfection. She wasn't sure she wanted to be, since their
proximity gave him ample opportunity to see her imperfections, yet at the same
time, she wanted to curl up against his strong chest.
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Okay, for those who've stuck around to hear why my daughter could have a baby in less time than it took me to birth this book, here goes:
I had Soft Sounds of Pleasure mostly written when I saw an open call for a Christmas short. I wrote Incidental Contact to those specifications. (At the time, it was titled Jingle Bells and the Last Oil Filter.) The story was accepted, then I learned the publisher wanted to publish books one and two first. Since Wildly Inappropriate was but a gleam in my eye at the time, much time passed before I looked at Amy and Eric's story again.
When the suggestion was made to expand the tale, I started writing. A lot of things had happened in WI that weren't accounted for in the Last Oil Filter, because I hadn't yet written Dan and Cynda's story. Naturally, the story line deviated from the one in my head when I'd initially written Eric and Amy's tale.
I had a new version completed to about 70k when all hell broke loose at my publisher. I won't go into all the gory details, but it's very disheartening to hear someone thinks it's cool to expand their business using money due their authors, then 'borrow' more royalties from other authors to pay those he screwed the first time around. While I was fighting to have my rights to SSoP and WI returned for breach of contract (so said publisher would no longer have money of mine to take), Wildly Inappropriate alone was pirated over 10,000 times. (Thanks, Scribd.)
So that drama translated into three or four months when I wrote nothing. Frankly, those two things can suck out your soul if you allow it. In the meantime, I'd found a huge hole in the overall De Marco timeline. Draft one tried too hard to fix that mistake Draft two was better, but had too much emphasis on the wrong characters. Frustrated and tired of the story, I set it aside to pursue other projects.
Honestly? Eric and Amy's story is better for the delay. Every new version has kept the best of the prior one and new material kept coming. I'm thrilled to say the manuscript's in the hands of my editor now, and hopefully, in a month or less, those hard-core De Marco fans still out there will finally see Eric fall in love.
And boy, does he suffer to do it. I thought that was only fair. <grin>
Thanks for stopping by! Have a great week.
Oooh...baby pictures! So glad you asked.
