Piping Hot and Ready to Serve

Any time I have a book coming out, I'm excited and nervous. But this time it's different. This time I'm really excited! Maybe it's because I've thought about this book for about 10 years. I have wanted to write about psychic detectives and have rolled plots around in my head, but never wrote anything down. I've been writing nonfiction, historical romances, and contemporary romances. This next novel is my first stab at romantic suspense and it is a lot sexier than anything I've written before. It could be termed a bonfire.

Through His Eyes is hopefully the first book in a series of at least three using the same two main protagonists -- Levi Wolfe and Trudy Tucker. They are both psychics, but he can channel the deceased and she can channel the living. In other words, together they work both ends of a crime -- Levi can relive crimes through the victim's eyes and Trudy sees the crimes through the perpetrator's eyes. Levi is a showy psychic, appearing on television, radio, the Internet, and magazines. He's gorgeous and talented, perfect fodder for a celebrity-crazed media. He also has a checkered past that he's trying to keep locked away. Trudy is more reclusive and just starting out as a professional psychic detective. She's extremely gifted and vulnerable to the evil she can tap into in others. In this first book they join forces to identify a serial killer in the Florida Keys.

I've just approved the book cover and it's fantastic. Now I'm lining up advertising, begging book reviewers to read it, and finding "beta readers" to read it and post early online reviews. It's scheduled for an April release.  I'll post the cover here soon.

I'm blissful and hopeful that it will do well. Some of my fans won't like it because the sex scenes are more explicit and erotic. But this is written for a whole different audience.

Having made big plans for the next book or two in the series, I'm doing what I can to get the first one off the ground and running so that I can have the next ones published.

It wasn't easy. I did three complete rewrites of it. The first draft was more than 500 pages long! I just wrote and wrote and "vomited" everything on the page. Then I let my best friend/writer read it and she was . . . well . . . tepid, bordering on asking me, "Are you insane? You really think this is a good book?" She commenced to tell me everything that was wrong with it and -- damn it all, she was right! I hate when that happens!

Rewrite #2. It was better, but still needed work. My agent and her assistant told me to "sex it up." They informed me that if I really wanted to go "adult erotic" then Levi and Trudy were going to have to crank up their libidos. 

Rewrite #3. I took a deep breath and removed all my "don't go there" signs and went for it. The sex sizzled on the pages.  The suspense elements heated up. Everything came together. Finally. My best friend approved -- even though she doesn't like hot sex scenes -- and my agent said she could present this one to publishers. Amazon has accepted it, so it will be an Amazon Exclusive ebook. If it does well, they will consider a series. (I just broke out in a cold sweat thinking about how this book will be received!)

But I'm not going to stress about that right now. Now I want to relax in the bliss of having finished a book that I'm very proud of and experience the bliss of that accomplishment. Ten years of this book simmering in me and now it's fully cooked and ready to serve!