Sexy Saturday!

Atlantis Allure

Available NOW!!!

http://tinyurl.com/AtlantisAllure (print) 

http://tinyurl.com/Atlantis-Allure-ebook

Below the Sea

By

Lynn Crain

I just couldn’t believe my luck. Jonas, the man, I had pursued for months had become my lover with a deep kiss and the clasp of my palm. Even now, I could remember just what happened as it would be forever etched in my brain.

The day had dawned bright and clear as many Caribbean days. But this one was special and I knew it. No matter just how much he had protested, I knew he was the man for me and I pursued him from the moment I saw him. He was smart and knew his way around a small submersible. What more could a woman ask for? He had no problem standing up to me when he felt I was wrong, or up for me when I needed defending.

And defending was something I seemed to need more often than not recently. But then again, who wouldn’t if they were determined to find the lost continent of Atlantis? Then again, maybe it had been just a city as many of the new theories proclaimed. At any rate, I would be the one to fully realize the dream. I was so close, I could taste it.

Still, today was not the day for lovers, it was the day for exploration. I should have known something was up when he arrived bright and early that morning, bearing gifts.

“Hey, sleepyhead, wake up.”

The fresh aroma of coffee filled the air and it was followed by a gentle nuzzle at my neck. I sighed and leaned into the gentle kisses as my crotch ached to be touched. Jonas couldn’t come into a room without me becoming aroused. In some ways, it was very much a nuisance while in others it made me remember the promise of pleasures to come.

This morning was no different except I had had another agenda in mind for the day. This time he wouldn’t dissuade me from achieving my goal. I’d just do it after the lovemaking, I suddenly decided. I stretched and put my arms around his neck, pulling him closer to me. I could feel the bulge in his shorts getting bigger. It didn’t take much to turn on my big boy. Pulling him away from my neck, I nipped at his bottom lip.

“So that’s how we’re going to play it today,” he growled and nipped me right back.

“And just how is that?” I whispered, my breath coming out slightly faster than intended. A girl didn’t need to appear too anxious, no matter who the lover might be.

Jonas Adaria was a glorious lover, the best I’d ever had and I have never been one to turn down a little nookey in the morning. The man was a virtual god, with golden blond hair, turquoise blue eyes, and muscles in all the right places. He reminded me of the perpetual surfer boy who had always been the man of my dreams. He was especially the one who would matter more than most to me in a few minutes time, I thought, and smiled to myself.

He’d shown up on my doorstep one day about two years ago and just didn’t leave. At first, all I wanted to do was shake him because I felt he was like every other person who swore they wanted to look for Atlantis. I didn’t need another soothsayer, as most were not serious researchers and were downright nuts when you started digging into their past. But Jonas, now he was different, as he didn’t give up, and hounded me again and again until I gave in, because at first I just wanted to shut him up.

But every day we worked together, I became more and more aware of him sexually. I wanted him more than I had ever wanted anyone else. At first, he resisted my feeble attempts at flirting, but eventually he started responding, until I finally enticed him into my bed. And it had been magic. There was no other way to describe it. It was the best sex I had ever had in my life and I was determined to get as much as I could for as long as I could. If I had my way, it would be forever, but just not now.


See you all next week!

Lynn

This & That Friday

Here are the links this week and I promise, I didn’t have hoof and mouth this week! Although, I did say some interesting things during the week, which I hope you all caught.

Enjoy!

Here’s another on self-promotion.

http://1stturningpoint.com/?p=4330  

Let me say something right here about 1st Turning Point. If you don’t belong to this group, join. It is an eclectic group which help each other out through blogs mainly. There are tons of great articles here and I read them almost every day.

Here’s another great writing loop. They talk about everything.

http://www.writerprofits.com/wp-blog/

An interesting view about a conference I never heard about and I should have. Sigh. I’m still such a newbie at times. http://www.paulcornell.com/2010/07/ten-things-about-convergence.html

A good poll for you to get in on.

http://mashable.com/2010/07/19/reading-faceoff-e-books-vs-print-books/  

Great blog on writing a synopsis.

http://thebookboost.blogspot.com/2010/08/get-synopsis-savvy-with-guest-blogger.html?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

Amazon has 60-70% of the market...really? How so? This article explains it all.

http://thebookboost.blogspot.com/2010/08/get-synopsis-savvy-with-guest-blogger.html?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

New type of punctuation called the snark. Yeah, you heard me. LOL!

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2010/08/dear-snark-with-love.html

Very interesting bit about a NYU class.

http://www.magellanmediapartners.com/index.php/mmcp/article/making_frenemies/

B&N up for sale. Where will I get books now?

http://ebooks.epicauthors.com/?p=381

Very interesting roundtable discussion.

http://www.digitalbookworld.com/events/roundtable/

See you all next week!

Lynn

Thursday Blues

Yeah, I know I’m usually an up person but some days, even those who are happy have a down day. Today is mine and it had such promise when I woke up. Sigh. It is so not a great day here. The DH is getting ready to go to Vienna and this was a trip I should have been on. But I’m not, so I have to deal with all the computer problems I’m suddenly having.

Blogger is being a bear and while I can upload the actual blog information, it immediately goes to draft and won’t post. I’ve got a help ticket into Google but I’m not very hopeful as it takes them forever to answer questions it seems. I’m hoping it will resolve itself but with the latest issue of me not being able to upload pictures as well, I’m not sure what’s going to happen.

Then there is yahoo...what the heck happened to it while I was gone? :-( This is not good and again, things I thought I posted aren’t there and it took forever to get last Saturday’s post to show. All I tried to do was let everyone know I was out of town. There are some days where I wonder if computers are a help or hindrance.

And I remember the dark ages. No, not those times between the Roman Empire and the start of the Anglo-Saxon realm, but when computers were just beginning. Recently, when cleaning out an old box of odd things, I ran across an eight-inch disk. You heard me. I had an old eight-inch floppy disk stuck between two books in a box and I had to laugh. First, floppies were – well – floppy for one. Later they had a hard shell and now they’re flash drives or DVDs. But I know very few people who actually use anything but a flash drive.

I have what my husband calls the flash disk. It’s a passport that I transport between computers instead of saving everything on one machine. It actually saves on the problem of losing things when the box dies or the brain of whatever machine you might be on goes belly up. Right now, I have three backups and there are times when I wonder if that is enough. I’m praying it is. I never want to lose another story again. I haven’t recovered from the last one yet.

Now, back to the internet issues. The thing that gets me about this is these aren’t mine but extensions of what I do. Amazing how two things that are free on the net have become very important to authors and their promotion efforts. In many cases, these are the very essence of promotions. I know I do the majority of my promos on these groups and they give me access to thousands of people.

What’s an author to do when these freebies are bombarded with problems? Punt? But who can we punt to? The fact is that these two social media, along with a few more, are the basis of many an author’s web presence. And if you don’t have a web presence these days, you won’t have readers. Just think, if market standards hold true you will actually hook point one percent (0.1%) of all the people who see your name on the internet. If you can get that number to around ten thousand, that means a thousand people will look at you and supposedly one percent of those will purchase your product so about one hundred people will buy your novels. Therefore, you have to been seen by at least ten thousand new people a day in order to get any real sales.

All I know is that if my web promotions keep getting hit by mysterious ailments, I won’t even get the chance to be seen. And I apologize for not being where I’m supposed to be this week. I’ve been tired from my trip and then having a slew of computer issues, which are slowly getting resolved as I’ve outlined here.

Have you ever had computer problems so bad that all you’ve wanted to do was pound your head against the desk? That’s been my week since I got back. Tell me about your worst time and I’ll put your name in for another five entries for this month’s drawing.

See you tomorrow for This & That Friday.

Lynn

Wednesday's Classroom

Adding Steam to Your Love Scenes - Lesson #2

© 2010 Lynn Crain

We’re back for lesson #2 in the Adding Steam workshop. I sure do hope you all are enjoying this as I do love to share my information!

Lesson #2

Use your own experiences

I’m sure at this moment, you are wondering just what am I talking about. Your own personal experiences can’t be what people want to really see. Well, I’m here to tell you that they do. People must relate to your characters; they must find some common ground or your characters will be meaningless to them.

Have you ever caught yourself while reading a book saying some thing to the effect of, ‘I can see myself doing that’ and know you mean it?

And I don’t mean using the experiences literally…you all remember that blush first being in love…use it, use it to your best advantage because people like to read about other people. How many of you are sick of the heroine or hero always being perfect? I know that I am. Why? Because people are flawed, even the really great people have flaws. They put their pants on the same way we do. They wear underwear, they shower, they go to the bathroom and for heaven sakes’ most of them fart too.

But the point is that you know and can relate to all those things. Use what you know. There is an old saying ‘Write what you know’ and the reason is that if you write about what you are good at, it comes more naturally.

If you are writing romance, there are some things that only women know. Most women remember their ‘first time,’ so use it. You can remember what it was like seeing your spouse for the first time. I do. I thought he was crazy because it was freezing and he was wearing shorts. I also remembering me thinking he wasn’t bad looking and maybe I should get to know him. I’ve used different version of this again and again.

Another one, most women remember the first ‘real’ date they were on, so use it. My husband and I didn’t date at first, we gang dated meaning we went out with a group of people. And we always seemed to pair up differently. Sometimes I look at my husband and don’t know how I ended up married to him. But I do know I worked my butt off to get him. This is something I can use.

The same can be said for men. When I decided to write from a man’s point of view, I realized I was out of my depth. I don’t know what a man feels during sex. But I do know my husband and trust his judgment. When I’m writing from the male point of view, he reads everything. He tells me things like ‘a guy wouldn’t think that emotionally about this’ or ‘no way would a guy do that.’ To be accurate, you have to have resources you can fall back on.

You can use anything you have experienced to make your writing richer and fuller. Everything you do in this mode just makes it so a reader can more readily identify with your characters. If the reader can’t identify with your characters, they won’t finish the book or maybe they won’t even pick it up.

Exercise


1. List ten experiences that you can use in a novel, be it romance, erotic romance, sensual romance or just a regular book.

2. Take one of those experiences and write me a whole paragraph about one of your characters doing the same thing.

3. What did you get out of the experience? Can you apply this to your writing.

4. List one outside resource you can use when you need it. It can be a person, a book, a library or even a place on the internet. The point here is to get you thinking about how you can find out the information you really need.

See you all next Wednesday!

Lynn

Home Again Tuesday

Okay, I’m here but just barely. I am tired and grumpy and don’t feel too well. I know I’ll be sleeping most of the day. And wouldn’t you know it, I can’t find my steampunk excerpt I wanted to put up today. Sigh. It is already one of those days. LOL!

BUT the trip home was lovely and I couldn’t ask for a better drive. For once, it was fast through Salt Lake City, the city of perpetual construction. In all the years I have gone there, and I started in the mid-80s with skiing trips to the area, there have always been a portion of the main road under construction. Matter of fact, my husband and I talked about one trip where the icicles were making the powerlines bend under the stress. That was when the freeway wasn’t complete between place called Fillmore and Nephi. It was still a two lane road. Boy, does that date me! LOL!

Now the whole way is one hundred percent freeway and should be a breeze to travel. Not so with all the construction as it makes traffic move at a snail’s pace. And it shouldn’t be that way at all. But there are so many people in the area, traffic can be a zoo. When we left, we knew we’d be out of the traffic zone, or so we thought, as we were traveling through the city late on a Friday night. This isn’t a slur against people who live in Utah, but I’d like to know what you all do around midnight of Fridays? There were thousands of cars lining the freeway which made rush hour look mild. I don’t think there was a college game or anything that I could discern.

Still, coming home had none of those problems and we traveled in the middle of the day and had hit SLT well before noon. We rushed through the city and kept a steady pace the whole way. Go figure. I had actually been hoping to go to Dinosaur National Monument which meant we’d pass SLT altogether but I was vetoed. Yeah, it would have been six hours out of the way but boy a wall of bones would have made the trip worth it.

And for those of you who have never seen a dinosaur graveyard, this would be the one to go to. The whole museum is built around a wall of rock so visitors can easily see all the exposed fossils. It is one of the coolest places I’ve ever gone to and we’ve been trying to get back for years. I thought this would be the trip but I was wrong as everyone wanted to get home as quickly as they could. Sigh. So much for travel plans.

Where have you all gone recently? Any special trips planned? What was the best trip you’ve ever been on? Or the worst? Answer these questions and you’ll get five more entries into the drawing for this month.

See you all tomorrow...I hope...LOL!

Lynn

On The Road Monday

Okay, today I am on the road coming home from my visit to my Dad. We had a great time and I enjoyed my visit with my family immensely. We weren’t able to get up there the whole year. We’d tried at Christmas but the snow storms heading in made us rethink our decision.

Now a friend and I had managed to breeze through in June when we took some things up to her son in Montana. That was a trip as we did 2300 miles in three days. Yeah, we basically started at around noon on a Friday and was home by Monday late evening. We had a great time but the whole thing was very, very rushed.

I was wonderfully surprised by the weather this time in Idaho. We had a wonderful cool streak which is apparently rare for Idaho Falls and August. My husband and I got to do morning walks though he added a run to his exercise as well. The only bad thing about the trip has been the fact we had to leave our puppy home. But he needs more socialization as well as training before we make the family deal with him on anywhere but his own home turf.

Today, I had originally planned to have a wonderful steampunk excerpt for you from a great new author. Unfortunately, it’s at home on my other computer. When I went to look for it, I was severely bummed as I had really wanted to post it. Have you ever had that moment right before you realize you’ve forgotten something very important? I got that this morning as I ran through all the spots I might have saved it on my travel machine. Ugh, it wasn’t there and I just had to come up with something new and fresh.

Now, I have a lot of fresh ideas but most of them have to do with my writing. Again, I have been pleasantly surprised as my idea file filled up even more and stories I’d been plotting on for months, who had run into dead ends, have gotten some new life after this trip. Yeah, team Lynn! One of the hardest things a writer can do is to not come up with new and fresh ideas. This can be frustrating and downright disheartening for those who need the ideas to flow so they can be creative.

I will never have the idea problem as I’ve said before. Maybe I should auction some of those ideas off as I have way too many to ever write. And that would include me being able to do a short every couple of days to finish all those ideas. I usually go sifting through those ideas once a month or so to see if something is calling me as I do finish a story once a month. It’s the editing and fixing and cleaning up that’s the problem.

I write fast and I write ugly but when I edit I am through. I try to get everything my critique partners tell me is wrong fixed then I run it through my own special brand of cleaning. This involves a whole set of rules and highlights and other things I run the finished product through. I can take almost a week, sometimes more to get the work into shape for me to turn into my publisher. Then there is their rounds of edits. It’s a thorough process which produces some good work.

Again, I’ve put in pictures throughout this blog of Idaho and the places I’ve been on this and precious trips. What are some of your best memories of vacations? Long or short…a vacation should be a restful experience…LOL! Have you ever had those trips where you need a vacation from the vacation? Let me know some of those and the one who gives me the best story will get an extra five entries into this month’s drawing!

See you all tomorrow with that steampunk excerpt. Have a great Monday!


Lynn

Lazy Sunday in Idaho

I came up on Friday to visit my Dad as he turned 76 this week. We’re taking him out tonight to celebrate and I couldn’t be happier. However, to my Dad, it’s just another year, which makes me very sad.

I read an article once about how an older man had cared for his wife until the end and it made me cry. What really made me cry was to realize that article could have been written about my father. I’ll relate a little of the story here.

My parents married when they were fairly young and lived in a small Ohio town where they raised their children, me and my brother, until 1969 when they moved us to the southwest and Sin City. My parents did everything together and a day didn’t go by without them saying they loved one another. Yeah, living with my parents was hard at times but I always knew they loved us.

Fast forward to when my mother turned 53 and Dad 58. They were going to retire but Mom had been having issues for a few years. Lots of memory problems and I knew where that one was headed. She asked me once if I thought she was going crazy and all I could say was I knew she was ill. They had it confirmed when she was 53...Alzheimer’s...and medicine she couldn’t take. My father dug in for the long haul and cared for her until her death in 2005. He was then and still now, my hero. If you ever read a book called The Dragon’s Lady in the near future about a dragon named Alfred, you’ll know that’s for my Dad.

That same year my mother died, Dad fell in love with a wonderful woman who loved to travel and hanging out with him. I didn’t know Patti well but the very fact she made my Dad happy after the experience with my mother, made me joyous. Unfortunately, she had a reoccurrence of her cancer and died August of the same year as my mother.

Dad was devastated and I didn’t know how to help him at all. I would have taken all his pain away if I could. I would have done it for him but I couldn’t. He stayed here in Nevada for another year and a half before he pulled up stakes and moved to Idaho to be near my brother. We helped him buy a home there and try to get to visit him as much as we can. The pictures are from our various travels there. It’s cool and green and I like it to a point. The mountains are much too far in my opinion so I could never live where he does, but I could live close. LOL!

We’ve had a great visit so far and hope to have many more! Have you talked to your parent(s) today? If not, make the effort...it’ll do wonders for your heart...have a great day!

See you all tomorrow!

Lynn