Mexican Candy

In the summer of 2006, I finished my final draft of the final installment of a trilogy of medieval vampire romances called Bound in Darkness for Pocket Books. For the past six years, I had gone straight from one romance novel into another for Pocket, and I had no reason to imagine this time would be any different, even though my current contract was up once the book I'd just finished came out in December. My editor and I had casually discussed continuing the vampire series, and I had started thinking about how that might work, where I might go.

In a lot of ways, I was disenchanted with romance as a genre. While I had always been fairly well-reviewed and had a lovely core audience who seemed to enjoy reading what I was doing as much as I enjoyed writing it, after six books, I still hadn't found widespread success. That I had a hard time finding romance books by other people in the bookstore that I wanted to read seemed like a bad sign, too. The romance audience seemed to want something lighter, more Sex in the City, less bloody epic, even from vampire novels, and I knew that would never be me. My editor was feeling the pressure, too, I could tell - my notes were always to get out of the characters' heads, make it lighter, make it hotter, skip the historical detail, skip the angst. When I had started, I hadn't felt the restrictions of the romance genre as restrictions at all - hitting the marks while concocting an original tale was fun, a challenge. But more and more, the noose was tightening. Still, I had been asked for a new proposal, and I loved the series as a concept, so I wasn't really worried. I made a few notes for a new installment, then set the work aside to go on my family's annual pilgrimage to the beach.

While I was there, I found a stack of tabloids some other vacationer had left behind, and stuck inside with a sunburn at mid-week, I started flipping through them. They dated from the great Brad/Jennifer/Angelina triangle, and mostly they made me sad. But the more I read, the more I thought about what these people could really be like, what their real emotions and motivations could be, and, more importantly, how dramatically different those emotions and motivations probably were from the way they were being publicly portrayed. A character popped up inside my head - there's no other way to describe it; one minute she wasn't there, the next she was - a woman who has lived her whole life in the spotlight, whose every tragedy and joy has been part of this great soap opera for strangers. I knew where she started; I knew where she would go; I knew she had only the most sketchy sense of her true self, and I knew she needed to define it. I heard her voice inside my head so clearly, I actually bought a spiral-bound notebook at the grocery store that night and started writing it down, not as an outline or notes but a full-fledged narrative in first-person, something I hadn't done since high school. Half a page in, I knew her name was Scarlett, that she was completely different from any heroine I had ever written before, that I didn't have a clue how to "sell" her for publication, and that I was going to have to write her story anyway, just for myself. I decided she would be my "fun" project, the thing I picked up to play with whenever I got stuck on the serious business of writing for money.

When I got home, I got back to that serious business; I wrote what I considered to be a truly kick-ass proposal for another trilogy of Bound in Darkness books - I was thrilled with the hook I had conjured, excited at the prospect of diving back into that world with a point of view that felt fresh and new. I sent it off to my editor at Pocket and actually started writing, confident that she would love it, too. And she did, bless her heart. She just couldn't buy it. She said my sales on the last book and the pre-sales on the book set to come out in a few months didn't justify doing more, that they were heading in a new direction, that they weren't even sure they wanted to keep doing historical romance at all. Whatever . . . . . the big point was, I was out.

Needless to say, I was devastated. I just kept thinking, "What am I going to do? What the f*ck am I going to do now?" And the very fact that I was having that thought scared me - when had I gotten so locked into doing this one kind of book that I couldn't even imagine how to do anything else? I had started writing historical paranormal romances for fun and profit, not as a life's pursuit. Smart, well-meaning friends within the romance community suggested I take my ideas elsewhere, that surely I could find another romance publisher, but the very idea made me cringe. As scared as I was, I realized I was ready to move on. As hurt and angry as I felt, the romance market had done me a favor. I didn't belong there any more, at least not in its present incarnation, and I had been too caught up in the habit of a steady contract to notice.

Which still left me with the problem of what next? That's when I went back to Scarlett, not as a lark or a mind-cleanser, but as the voice of a real novel. I knew I had gotten into the habit of scribbling in her notebook rather often; I was shocked to discover I had more than 50 pages written and literally decades of her life sitting around fully-formed inside my head. I even knew what her story should be called - Mexican Candy. I typed up what I had and showed it to my agent, half-apologetic, half-hopeful - is this anything? Oh yeah, he told me. This is.

So I've been working on it ever since, pretty much to the exclusion of everything else. When I had a hundred pages - standard proposal length for the genre fiction I was used to - my agent and I tried sending it out to a few publishers. The general consensus seemed to be "it reads well, but . . . . what the heck is it?" Again, the sensible thing would probably have been to abandon the project and focus on something that had a better chance of selling, at least temporarily - losing my book contract was a big blow to my finances and continues to be. But I can't. When I told my agent I couldn't, he agreed - we talked about it and decided it would be easier to sell as a complete document, that we needed the whole story to know what it really was.

So I'm eating a lot of soup and pasta, not taking a lot of vacations, and writing what I hope is the best book of my life so far.