Copyrighted by Lorna Tedder. Originally published in Third Degree Ebb and Flow.
For now, I’m going to call it the Scorpio Project. Not the working title, even, but just some way of compartmentalizing this project until I can give it the time it deserves. And keep me writing it on a regular basis while life unfolds all around me with other projects. I’ve written several books this way—blogging or tidbits at a time to my private mailing lists. A little bit at a time makes it easy and keeps the juices flowing if I can’t throw myself into it full time. I don’t want to lose this story—Shannon and I plotted the entire book on our way home from Daytona while Aislinn slept in the backseat and listened to her iPod. Actually, the entire first suspense novel and the basics of its two sequels. This could be a long-term series…a dozen books or more. It features Lilah, the daughter in Dark Revelations, and it’s probably not going to be a Harlequin/Silhouette novel for obvious reasons…like, er, well, let’s put it this way:
A lot of people were shocked at the body count in Dark Revelations, and in particular, one of the characters I killed off unexpectedly that raised the stakes and really did make complete sense—and made the reader wonder if there was going to be a happy ending for our heroine. It surprises me now how much of a big deal this was to a lot of people. I killed someone off, on-stage, for full impact. Even Shannon, knowing from day one that the death was planned for this book, cried through that scene. Silhouette’s Bombshell line was one of the few lines related to romance at all where I could have done that, and it was still risky and quite a push to get through. I’m just grateful that editor Natashya Wilson understood and cut me loose to do what had to be done to make the story work. As for other places, she kept telling me to pump up the romance in my dark suspense novel. I think
Aubrey probably walked on the wild side a bit but there just wasn’t time for her to explore it all when she was running for her life. It was tender in ways not related to sex and sexual in ways not related to tenderness. People in the Scorpio Generation seem to really like the novel, even if the heroine is the age of their moms.
An interesting aside: teens are telling me that today’s romances are something read “like at 13” and are other- wise rather boring to them. Or vanilla. What their parents consider erotica or dark is tame by their standards. They’re more eager to read than their parents were but they want intense, extreme, sexual, dark. I wasn’t planning to making this series quite as dark but it’s evolving in that direction anyway. I mean, I wasn’t planning on it being that dark when I still had forced bondage, electro, and grave-digging in it, and this is a step up from any of that.
So dark, erotic, intense thriller. That’s what I’m aiming for.
It’s a draft though. A living, breathing (gasping) work- in-progress. Typically, I’ll go back and add layers, but for now, I just need to get something down in pixels…put some body parts together before I can honestly say the creature lives.
