Megan Hart

Yes, it’s that time again.

C’mon. You know you want to see me LIVE AND IN PERSON!!!!

Saturday, January 26, 2008
Lebanon Valley Mall
2-4 pm

I’ll be signing copies of my latest release, Tempted as well as my previous releases Dirty and Broken.

Don’t pass up your chance to get yourself a copy and meet me (I’ll personally caress all copies of the books…right in front of you!)

Still no power!! Gahhhhhhhhh!!!!

Thank goodness for wireless at the coffee shop. *hearts*

Working on a short story called LAYOVER. Guess what it’s about? If you guess right, I’ll give you a sparkly rainbow fairy glitter kiss!

M

As friends of Spice Briefs, we know you like it hot! Now you can add some extra spice to your holiday season with our exclusive offer on Spice Briefs eBooks from eHarlequin.com!

Get our SPICE Briefs eBooks for only $0.99 each from December 1st – December 31, 2007! Simply enter coupon code BRIEF99 at checkout.

So get your copy of This Is What I Want today at a price you can’t beat!

My knees quake (from Someone Else’s Life, Joshua Radin)

Yes, so. Okay. Here’s my writing advice.

If your character is going to HISS, make sure he or she has some sibilance in his/her words, please. Because if your character hisses “Don’t do that!” instead of something like “Stop that!” I will mock you as I read. You can’t hisssssss if there is no sssss, m’kay?

Likewise with the purring and the growling and god help me, the mewling. Similarly but not identical, whimpering. I have growled when I’m angry, but it’s always inarticulate and I’ve never been able to growl while speaking. Can’t say as I’ve ever purred with delight or anything else. Mewling? Umm…no. And whimpering is NOT A SEXY WORD. Whimpering is what children do when they are being annoying. If your heroine whimpers because omg the hero’s cock is so damned gorgeous it’s giving her a spontaneous orgasm, I’m going to put your book down. If your HERO whimpers I won’t open it back up again.

I am not immune to the appeal of meeting a stranger and bonking him dry because omg he is sewwww dayummmm zexxay! Ok? I get that. Hey, I used love the Red Shoes Diaries, too. But if you’re going to use that as a hook in your book, please make me believe it. Give me a reason to believe your characters would really get naked and sweaty with someone they literally just met moments before. I already want to believe it; it’s not like I’m asking for a whole lot, really. Just make me believe it.

And enough, please, for the love of all that’s holy, enough with the heroine who’s had plenty of sex but none of it was much good until she meets the hero. Hey, look. Sex is good. Sex in erotic fiction is particularly good. It’s not unreasonable to believe that she had a life before he met her, that she had good sex before they got together, and GASP TEH HORRORRRRR she might even have good sex with someone else after they break up, if they do! I don’t know of many sexually active people who have only ever had good sex with only one person in their whole lives, particularly if they’ve had a lot of it. I mean, some of it ends up being at least okay, you know?

I could give you advice about grammar and spelling but let’s face it, if you can’t speel right or use grammar good, nothing I say can help you.

And I could talk to you about plotting and pacing and the black moment except I don’t know dick about those things or how to explain them or how to tell you where to put them — I know what works and what doesn’t by trial and error and I can only hope I do them well enough to get by.

I can, however, give advice on what makes writing sex ridiculous. And I’m tired of reading ridiculous. Okay? I’m tired of my chosen genre getting a bad rap because quite a bit of it is ridiculous and trite and overblown (I’m guessing mystery and sf and f authors have their beefs about what they get ragged on about, too.).

If you want to write erotica, please keep this in mind: Writing sex should be no more difficult or easy than writing ANY action. If you wouldn’t describe your character eating dinner or driving a car in such a fashion, then please for the love of battery-operated toys, don’t do it in the sex scenes.

I’m not talking about description — after all, in a sexy book you want to put some focus on the sex. That’s not what I mean. What I’m saying is, if you would describe them eating dinner or driving a car in a realistically detailed fashion — trying to make it real enough so the reader can taste the food or hear the music on the radio…do the same for the SEX! PLEASE!!!!!!

You can be realistic and still maintain the fantasy. You don’t have to go into every sopping, spurting detail about fluids or hair being pulled or joints creaking, which is the realism of sex…but…my goodness, do we really mewl? Sex is messy, it’s noisy, it’s awkward and embarrassing and fantastic and wonderful, and in erotic writing you want to capture all of that so the reader feels as though he or she is inside the story, being made love to or making love, the same as you would like them to experience the dinner and the car ride.

I don’t think you have to invent positions or describe body parts in a thousand different ways in order to achieve that.

Chances are, most of the folks reading your stuff have had sex. (Probably more than once.) THEY GET IT, okay? So, just as you can make them understand what’s going on in everything else without hammering them on the head, you can do the same in a love scene.

Writing smut is not approached differently than writing anything else, is what I’m saying. You still need emotion and description and detail. Just, please, please, please for the sake of my bleeding eyes…make me believe it. Okay?

But then again, what do I know?

M

I should think it’s no secret that I like to write and read about sex. And I’m not the only one. I think it’s fantastic there are so many female-friendly sites out there now for women who want to find quality erotic fiction and media — not male-oriented porn (though hey, some of that’s not bad, either.)

In my web wanderings, I came across this site: The Erotic Woman.

And what do you know? They happen to have some Tempted Excerpts up and an interview with none other than little ole moi. So head on over and check it out, and don’t forget to check out their stories and links, too. Lots of good stuff there, including lots of pretty, pretty pictures in the galleries!

M

Well, well, well…I asked for a cowboy and they gave me a niiiiiiice belt buckle…

Cripes. Those hands! Guh!

So it’s up for pre-order at Fictionwise, but not yet at eHarlequin. I don’t really care where you buy it from, just that you do.

Here’s a little taste to tease you…

This Is What I Want
By Megan Hart
copyright Megan Hart
available Dec. 1 2007 from Spice Briefs
Excerpt: NOT FOR UNDER 18!!

This is what I want.

Your hands make circles around my ankles. They shackle me for but a moment before your fingertips move upward over the edge of bone, the dip and hollow of muscles and flesh. Over my calves and the prickly stubble of my knees, where they linger to stroke the soft, smooth underside. Those untouched places. Your fingers linger there, seeking creases.

Your thumbs move up the sun-warmed flesh of my thighs, which I part for you beneath summer’s bright golden light. Like the breeze that twitches the ends of my hair, your fingers drift along my skin. Moving higher.

This is what I want. You. Touching me.

You take the time to trace the faint white line, the place where once my flesh parted beneath the edge of a razor wielded by an unsteady hand. You don’t ask about this scar. You ask nothing, say nothing. You have no voice but that which I grant you, and so far I haven’t given you permission to speak.
You kneel in front of me, and this is where I like you. How I like you. On your knees, my body aligned for your worship and your hands smoothing their constant upward path.

This is what I want, your breath on my skin. Your fingers parting me. I want you to lick me as I stand over you, you upon your knees.

I want you to worship me.

Cowboys! Cybersex! Sexblogs! Dominance! Submission! Role-playing! Coffee! It’s all in there.

M

DO IT.

OMG moments…

First, the fabulous one.

I’m sitting here in my local Barnes and Noble drinking coffee and thinking about writing – should I pound out pages or should I plot, and plotting is winning because I don’t really know what to write…

I’m sitting here and a woman comes up to me and says “Excuse me, is your name Megan?”

“Yes.”

“Megan Hart?”

*cautious* “Yeeeesss?”

“I met you at a book signing a few months ago. You signed Dirty for me. I wanted to tell you I read Broken and I just bawled. I hope you don’t mind me coming over to tell you.”

Umm…no way! Cue me almost crying because a stranger came up to me in a bookstore!! to tell me that she loved my book(s)!

THANK YOU, TRUDY!

That was truly an OMG moment. She said she recognized me by the hair. Thank you, purple hair. ☺

The other OMG moment is when I went to lunch with my dad and he told the waitress I write romance novels, “really spicy ones,” and the waitress said, “And are you her inspiration?”

EWWWWWWWW!!!!!!

What’s really disturbing about that is the fact I’m now old enough to be mistaken for my father’s wife. GAWD.

Which is worse, do you think? Having your husband mistaken for your father? Or having your father mistaken for your husband? Gawd, that was just…ewww…and let me say that I don’t care if my dad reads my books, I’m not squicked out by the thought of him reading about sex, or anything like that. Just, you know. That anyone would assume I’m his wife!!! (Considering his wife and my husband are the same age I know it’s not necessarily a crazy thought, but just…ew!)

So I’m working on SWITCH and I have a number of pages written and I feel great about what I want to happen. What I don’t feel so great about is how I’m going to get there. And this is because I haven’t really done any plotting. I have thought about it and I’ve talked about it, but I haven’t written down any plot. Not even a plot I know is going to change. So I think I need to do that today. Just write a list of things I need to use. I got word my contract for it came which means I’ll now have an official deadline, but that’s fine. It should be ample time. This is going to be a complicated, complex book and it has the potential to be my best or my worst, depending.

I don’t feel that way about every book. I don’t have that polarizing emotion every time. With Second Verse I just wrote the story I needed to tell. I’m pleased with how it came out. I think it’s good work. But it’s not like with Broken, when I wrote it thinking, I’ll never pull this off.

I feel that way about Switch. I’ll never pull it off. And I still don’t know about the ending; after all that’s going to happen, how can it have HEA? Then again, how can it not? But that doesn’t mean it’s a romance. And I know people will be reading it thinking it’s supposed to be romance.

But I can’t help that; I can’t help how they market the books or where they put them. I can only write the stories I feel compelled to tell. Sometimes those are romances and sometimes they are not. Switch is a love story, in the end, and the ending will be the right one.

But why am I worried about the ending when I haven’t even figured out the middle, and my beginning is shite?

Risky Business on the other hand, is going to be a romance, no doubt about it. I thought originally it wouldn’t but after finding the characters, there’s no way it can’t be. Guh.

And one last thing before I actually come down off my OMG moment high – Shia LeBoef, mmm mmm mmm. I’ve liked him for a long time in various projects but he’s always been a kid. Saw him in Disturbia last night and…whoa. He’s still a kid, of course, but golly he’s a good actor. And tonight we’re watching Transformers so I wonder how I’ll like that!

Disturbia gave me an awesome idea for a screenplay, though. Not terrifically original, but super scary and freaky, and I wish I wrote screenplays so I could write it. Oh…or an episode of Supernatural. Better yet, a Supernatural MOVIEEEEE!!!!

Except I never want to write for Supernatural because I want to enjoy it, never go behind the scenes and see how they pull the strings. (I’d like to write a SPN tie-in novel, though, because that would kick ass. Alas, not sure how one goes about pitching such a thing and doubt I’d get picked to do one anyway…besides, mine would have too much sex and angst in it, along with the killing and scary stuff…hey, I think it would be great.)

So that’s it for now. My right hand hurts and I hope it’s not something oogy like carpal tunnel. It’s my wrist, actually. Now that I think about it, it’s my whole right side, which is the same side which has the deformed thumb and birthmark in the shape of the United States and part of Mexico. My right side is possessed!!!

Clearly I’ve had too much coffee today!

M

PS – there is this ULTRACUTE boy sitting by the window and he’s wearing a newsie’s cap and I want to sing and dance on the table just like Christian Bale. Well. I don’t want to. I’d like it if ultracute boy did, though. He’s very earnestly discussing something with the man sitting at his table and drinking something from a coffee cup. Seriously, who can pull off a newsboy cap like that without looking like a fool? ULTRA.CUTE.

PPS– I figured out what I need to do with SWITCH.

3750 / 100,000 (0.3%)

line of the day:

I have a bit of a stationary fetish.

Finished a chapter. Got some good WOO HOO HA HA UH HUH moments. It’s happening! It’s happening!

M