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When my non-fiction book, "Teenagers! A Bewildered Parent's Guide" was released in the Spring of 1996, my publisher told me I should write a fiction book. He told me that I told a good story.

For the past twenty years, I'd carry this idea with me. I asked myself 'What would happen if the Declaration of Independence was stolen from a traitor in the past and given to the British before the American Rebellion ever got started? Again, I did my homework first--research. I found such a gentleman. He was a famous chemist and physicist by the name of Benjamin Thompson. A brilliant scientist like Benjamin Franklin, but definitely not a sociable person. Many of the items that people use today were invented by him. Mr. Thompson is also known as Count Rumford.

I had my villian. Who would I find next? I scouted through the Children's Section of the library and found a spy that George Washington used in the early part of the American Rebellion. (That's what the British called it. They never considered it a war of separation from them.) Through further investigation, I found that George Washington's spy had a file with the Central Intelligence Agency as well. His name was John Honeyman.

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My next foray into writing was learning how to write poetry. Before I started putting a poem together, the first thing I did was to go to the library and take out books on best-loved and well-known poets past and present: Shakespere, E.E. Cumings, Robert Louis Stevenson, Robert Frost, Edgar Allen Poe, Emily Dickinson and Carl Sandburg.

Unlike Dr. Seus and Tom Zart who can do rhymming poetry, I decided to stick to free poetry. My first attempts came out rather well. I focused on emotions, imagery, stories and self-expression.

Here are some samples of my poetry.

DESERT

lush green was my valley
tress blossomed pinks and reds
flowers burst into view, yellows, oranges, and white
fruits multipled and were many.
harsh southern winds
swept up from the Gulf
drying the sweet land of my sires
winds became full blown
blowing east, north and west.
until it engulfed my Babylon Gardens
and striped the water from the air.
brown, dusty bowls of emptied arid land

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During the interim between my first novel and the release of my non-fiction book, I kept reading and writing. Why? You start rusting. You find a new focus - a new output avenue. Upon the advice of friends, I started writing short stories. Writing a short story isn't easy. The author must tell a complete story in limited time. A short story doesn't allow the author to dwadle over characters, plots or story lines. A short story must deliver a consistent, well-paced story with a satisfying ending whether good, bad, or indifferent.

The first short story I submitted was based on a theme. While surfing through the net I came across a site that ran a contest. The theme of the contest was Spring. I read the rules thoroughly before I started writing to make sure that "Spring" was the only requirement for the contest rules. Always make sure you read the guidelines or submission text before submitting to a contest. Their editors receive thousands of entries. If the author doesn't follow the instructions, then your submission is dumped into the garbage can. This word requirement for this entry story was limited to twelve hundred words.

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My entrance into writing wasn't planned. It just sort of happened. One day twenty years ago, I remarried because I finally found my knight in tarnished armour. His dusty steed stood patiently as I proposed to the knight. He lifted his helmet and said, "I hope you're not settling for me." Once I digested that bit of information I told him that it was a practical marriage not one based on romance and lust. He agreed that it was a sensible idea. We married. Three months into the marriage we moved to a new kingdom in Cleveland, OH. Our son went to a new high school where all the kids looked alike to him. My knight went to work in his shiny new charger and for the first time in my life, I didn't have to work a day job. My knight told me to "write" to fill in the hours. I did exactly that. I started writing. Not because it was a noble purpose. Not because I took classes in college to prepare me for a life of writing. Not because I kept a journal or a diary. Because for the first time in my life I had the time to write.

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Today is my last day blogging. All good things must come to an end.

For a writer there is nothing more satisfying than typing THE END at the completion of thousands of words. But of course when you write those two words it isn’t actually the end of the book. I’d like to say I’m a writer who writes 50, 000 words and never has to see them again, edit them, fine tune, picking each word apart until it’s as perfect as I can get. But I’m not. And I’m not sure if there are any writers out there who can do this. Lucky them if they are like this.

But typing the end is in lots of ways the beginning. You’ve written your story, now it’s time to rehash it, analyse each word, the plot, the reactions of the characters, are they in line with their backstory and how they should react. What’s missing, plot holes, are they even wearing the same clothes they were wearing at the beginning of the scene. I once finished a book an on editing found that somewhere along the line my heroine had changed her hair color – and no she hadn’t had a dye job!

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…AND OTHER MYTHS

Frequently writers get asked, where do you get your ideas from, are the characters based on someone you know, me? You write sex books, is this personal experience. Do you practice what you write?

Well firstly I hate to blow some myths out of the water but…

No you are not my hero in my latest book. In fact my heroes sadly are made up out of my imagination, but… and there is a but… they do have characteristics that I see in people as I go through life. I mean, those bedroom eyes of Tariq in THE SHEIKH’S PROPOSAL – well, they are based on my girlfriend’s husband. They dark like Hershey’s chocolate and yes, they did smolder. Very yummy.

And no, that creep Lord Tarquin in LOVE IN WAITING, is not my next door neighbor but all the unpleasant people I’ve met through life. A bit from here, a bit there. A recipe of a character if you like.

And lastly, the saddest myth to crush (at least from my perspective) is that yes I write books with sex scenes and yes some are spicy, but sadly, NO I’ve not experienced all my characters get to enjoy. It’s imagination! At least some of it is, anyway!

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OKAY…we’re at the halfway mark.
Today I received word that I was being offered a contract on my 11th book which was just as exciting as the first contract. But it isn’t always this way. But it has been interesting remembering all the highs and lows of the last ten years writing. Mostly.

Yes, at times you fell like giving up, that what ever you put on a page is a load of rubbish, but some how, some way, the next day you pull your proverbial socks up and get cracking again.

Years ago, after I had had a couple of sales, I submitted a book to a London publisher. Well, they sent it right back, yes a standard rejection letter.

There isn’t anything worse for a writer, because it tells you absolutely nothing, only that they thought so little of your work, they didn’t say if you ‘only did this, it might be better’. There is nothing to gauge where you went wrong, or how to figure it out.

But even more, was that I had so much faith in this book, it was ‘the one’ that would get me ‘the contract’ I absolutely desired.

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Happy day two Novelspotters
Getting my first critique really did throw a spanner in the works. I had to toughen up – Fast.
My first love in reading has always been romance, and of course the Mills and Boon and my children would simply roll their eyes when I arrived home from the library burdened by at least 20 books. So it was no surprise that I would write a romance in the vein of a category, or at least what I thought it was meant to be. I mean I knew nothing about POV, GMC, pacing, setting, plotting, and characterization.
You get the picture. I knew zip. Only that I loved to read, so how hard could it be to imitate what I loved to read, right?
My fingers continued to fly over the keyboard and hey presto I had a story, edited (or at least what I thought editing was), printed, a query and synopsis and off it went to London.
And right back, actually with a little wait, so it wasn’t summarily ignored, but that rejection came right back at me.

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Hello everyone at Novelspotters! A slightly delayed blog for my first entry…Apolgoies..you can blame it on jet lag and catching up on sleep.
So here goes….A writer’s life. My life. Well it is now. But it wasn’t always. I know many writers admit in interviews that as children they always wanted to write, that it had been a childhood dream, or they wrote their first book by the time they were ten years old! Eeek! Not me. So I guess that would label me as a late bloomer.

I started writing about ten years ago…but…hold on. I really should start at the very beginning…why does that sound like Julie Andrews in the Sound of Music.
But I suppose that is very apt really, because I will admit here and now that I watched that movie at least ten times as a child and each time I would imagine I was one of the children. .And that is the magic word. Imagine. My imagination as a child was avid, I mean how many cowboys could there really be down here in New Zealand?
Then if we skip a few years to the teens, I can remember as a 14 year old, sitting in the dark of my bedroom all summer imaging I was going to win a competition I had entered about the movie Anne of a Thousand Days (Anne Boleyn/Henry 8th).

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So I have to share an amusing story about the cover of my August release, On the Silver Edge of Time. First, if you haven't had a chance to look at it, go to my website (ciaragold.com) and take a gander. Hunky, right?

I got my cover about 2 months ago and my first reaction was not good. Nope, I groaned. Why? I mean, it is a beautiful cover. The artist did an awesome job capturing the essence of the novel. So why in the world would I groan. Well, the hero was a dead ringer for my brother. And I dunno, but thinking of my brother in the romantic hero spot for my novel just didn't seem right somehow. Of course, I got over my initial shock and fell in love with the cover. I'd love to meet the model, though, so I can see if her looks that much like my brother or not.

I shared with my mom and we shared a laugh or two. Well, I thought for sure she'd share with my brother and his wife. Nope. Today, I go to lunch at her house as my brother and sister-in-law are down for the weekend. We share a leisurely meal of bbq and beans, and I finally ask if they've seen the cover of my new book. Mom, gets this odd look on her face like she forgot all about it. But she rushes to remedy the situation and comes back to the table with a magazine that just happens to have an image of the cover in one of their ads. We show my sister-in-law first and she does a double take and starts laughing. "Oh man, I want one of those. I have the face already but what about that body?" My poor brother just shakes his head. It takes a lot to rattle his cage so he was very good-natured about her ribbing. We then show him. He blushes a tad and smiles. Anyway I got permission to post his pic so folks can compare and see for themselves. Of course, I haven't had time yet, but I will. I'm fixing to give my website a complete makeover and I'll do it then.

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On the road to publication, I believed so strongly in this story that I submitted it to several RWA sponsored chapter contests. Writers enter contests all the time with the hope that this might be their doorway into a contract. Yeah, I had the same dream. I'd enjoyed many wins with my best selling novel, Celestial Dragon so I was hopeful On the Silver Edge of Time would fare as well. Nope.

They say when the comments are so varied as to provide no real benchmark for gauging marketability that your voice is distinct. Having a distinct voice isn't a bad thing. In fact, it's a great thing but not everyone is going to love that voice. Granted, my first attempts to begin this story were not all that good to begin with. I just like to make excuses for some of the poor marks it received. But, I also began this book while in the beginning stages of my writing. I have since learned a ton about craft and organizing a great story. I'm still learning. So - I knew from the comment that I needed a fresh approach. Back to the writing board I went.

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I love time travels because I love to see the reaction of each character when introduced to a new time. However, time travels present their own special challenges. The whole “what if I go back in time only ten years and meet myself” scenario or “what if I inadvertently cause a chain reaction that will change the course of history forever?”

The questions are endless and there’s no good answer but the way an author deals with solutions is what makes a time travel unique.

For me, language was the difficult part. Unless my heroine had a Norwegian parent who taught her to speak Norse, chances were she’d be unable to communicate with her hero. Which is exactly what happened. But – my hero’s brother, Sank became my solution to this dilemma. I allowed him to have taken French in college. And since Erik being the mighty traveler that he was had landed in Normandy after having lived in Ireland, it made sense that he would have learned French. Of course, it was “old” French, but still. Sank became my bridge of communication between Keelin (the heroine) and Erik (the hero).

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Well, that’s how I feel when someone mentions plotting. I feel like I have to pull weeds, plant flower and water – a lot. Yeah, I’m not really a plotter. My garden is okay, but I don't have much of a green thumb either.

Once I settled on a time for my story, I dove right in and started to write. The problem with not plotting is finding out that you have to rewrite and rewriting causes its own set of problems. You throw something out but your mind remembers that you’ve written that piece of information so you allude to it in another scene.

That’s why having someone else help you critique the work is so important. Ever pick up a book and become enthralled with the first 3 – 5 chapters only to become disillusioned by mid-story? I think a lot of critique groups work with the first couple of chapters before the author gets excited about another project and begins posting it. That’s the way it was with On the Silver Edge of Time. I don’t think I ever posted past chapter five for this story. Why? Because it really did have a lot of internal problems that I just couldn’t figure out. Not until I’d written 7 previous books and gained a better handle on how to weave the story together.

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Having settled on a time for my hero, I now needed a time and place for my heroine. I swear this was one of the hardest decisions I made. Why? Well, dang. Eclipses just don’t happen when you want them to. In fact, solar eclipses are rather rare. Well not so rare but rare in places I thought would be a good setting.

Sure, I could have chosen July 22, 2009. That’s right around the corner but I really didn’t want my heroine living in India. Don’t get me wrong. There’s nothing wrong with India except I haven’t been there. And placing her where I haven’t been would have required a lot more research.

That said, I also didn’t want her so far in the future that I couldn’t imagine what it would be like. After much debate with my muse, I settled on April 24, 2024. I felt this was far enough in the future I could take creative license with world building and it was close enough to our present day that some things would remain a constant. This eclipse will be visible from Texas and that was perfect. "Write what you know" is always a great plan when everything else is rather complicated. And I know Texas. I also chose to put her in a really big city so I could have fun with Erik's (my Viking hero) reaction to the busy streets and technological stimuli. I think that's half the fun of reading/writing time travels, seeing how characters react to the past or future.