Six Sentence Sunday #24

Welcome once again, Sixers! Got my shiny new ARCs of the print version of my romance The Reluctant Nude in the mail this week, which got me thinking about those characters again… (FYI, Max is French, hence his slightly odd dialogue.)

“When I touch you—” Max reached out his hands again, inching them forward until he touched her elbows “—you are like fireworks.” He slid his palms up, slipping them inside her T-shirt sleeves and cupping her smooth shoulders, that skin, as petal-soft as a cliché. “You are like those little sticks dipped in magnesium, that children use?”

“Sparklers,” she said, breath short.

“Your hands felt like sparklers, running up and down my body.”

“That sounds very painful," she said, faking flippancy rather poorly, in Max’s opinion.

Thanks for reading! Now head here to check out all the other Six Sentence Sunday excerpts this week!

Six Sentence Sunday #18

Happy New Year, sixers!

Another sampling from Headstrong (aka the New Zealand love-triangle book) which came out this past week from Samhain. The basic deal: Libby has an unrequited crush on Reece; Reece's brother Colin has an unrequited crush on Libby. Libby (who's just slightly crazy and rather persuasive) has fast-talked Reece into acting as her supposedly platonic kissing instructor, as a teenage trauma has left her skittish around men. Reece doesn't know she's actually nuts about him, and that he's the first man she's wanted to be sexual with in over a decade.

She knew this mouth well now—knew it with more fondness and intimacy than any other mouth on the planet, and it was the only one she wanted to know. This kiss was different than the ones they’d been practicing all week. Reece was kissing her with a different motive now, aiming to give her pleasure, not instruction.

Libby hadn’t known a kiss could do this. It made her feel that blush again, between her legs, the way seeing him helplessly turned on a half hour earlier had. She let herself surrender to it, let her mouth do whatever it wanted right back, let her hands roam wherever they wished.

Thanks for swinging by, everyone! Now head here to check out all the other Six Sentence Sunday excerpts this week.

Six Sentence Sunday #17

This week I thought I'd pretend I'm remotely good at self-promo, and share six sentences from my December 27 Samhain romance release, Headstrong (aka the New Zealand love-triangle book). The basic deal: Libby Prentiss has an unrequited crush on Reece Nolan; Reece's brother Colin has an unrequited crush on Libby. Colin is bartending at the Nolan family's pub, and Libby is sitting across from him.

From where he leaned against the back counter, Colin flung a coaster at Libby that bounced benignly off her forehead. She raised her chin to fix him with a stare, and her wide lips twisted into a haughty smirk. Colin was willing to bet this was exactly how her face would look as she coaxed the zipper down the front of his jeans.

“Don’t make me hurt you, Nolan.”

He flashed her an unapologetic grin. God, if only.

Thanks for swinging by, everyone! Now head here to check out all the other Six Sentence Sunday excerpts this week.

Six Sentence Sunday #12

Greetings, my sixy beasts! This past week I finished the initial draft of a romance I've been calling Meet Your Match (that book about the matchmaker who inherits her estranged father's shady boxing gym), and also ruminating about its untitled sequel. The new work-in-progress is currently little more than a file of notes and scene snippets and unfit for public consumption, so here are six sentences from Meet Your Match, with the first mention of its sequel's hero, mixed martial arts fighter and trainer, Rich:

Another man approached them, about Mercer’s age, dressed to fight in shorts and shoes, fingerless gloves. He had long hair and dark, aristocratic features, a Spanish prince with an aquiline nose and a raging black eye.

“Jenna, this is Rich Estrada, Rich, this is Jenna Wilinski.”

Rich smiled—an easy, deadly, sigh-inducing smile, and took her hand in his gloved one. His smooth, foreign airs evaporated the second he opened his mouth, his accent pure Boston sandpaper, even worse than Mercer’s. “You must take after your mom—your dad was a fugly son of a bitch, God rest his soul.”

Thanks for swinging by, everyone! Now head here to check out all the other Six Sentence Sunday excerpts this week.

Six Sentence Sunday #11

Got some cool and completely unexpected news this week that my first Blaze, Caught on Camera, was nominated for a Romantic Times Reviewers' Choice Award for best series romance debut. So to celebrate, I'll let it take over Six Sunday. Here's the basic premise—Ty is a television survival show host (think Man vs. Wild or Survivorman) and Kate is his personal assistant, best friend, handler, pretty much everything but lover. As the book starts, they're busy taping a show in snowy Saskatchewan…

She rounded the bend at the edge of the woods and discovered why Ty wasn’t shouting back—sitting splay-legged on a fallen tree, he had one of the other cameras perched on his broad shoulder, its lens trained on Kate, red light blinking. As she neared she heard him narrating for his own amusement, a raised whisper in the Australian accent that earned them at least a quarter of their ratings.

“… the natural habitat of the Kate Somersby. We can see from her stance that this approach is one of postured aggression, though the look in the female’s eye suggests that mating may be on her mind. Let’s wait and see what she’s after.” Ty abandoned the voice-over as Kate pushed her boot against the front of his vest, toppling him harmlessly backward into the wet snow.

Thanks for swinging by, everyone! Now head here to check out all the other Six Sentence Sunday excerpts this week.

Om nom nomination!

Well, the official list of nominees is out, so I can quit being such a cagey pessimist—looks like I'm up for a Romantic Times Reviewers' Choice Award, for best series romance debut! Pretty cool. I was nominated for my first Blaze, Caught on Camera, which came out last April. I'll be sure to celebrate by excerpting it for Six Sentence Sunday this weekend.

Thanks to everyone who tweeted warm congrats this week…especially my NEC-RWA chaptermate and fellow Harlequin author Barbara Wallace, who told me I must be on the list, before she'd even seen said list. Your faith humbles me, Barb! Congratulations on your own nomination, for Best Harlequin Romance!

Six Sentence Sunday #10

Greetings again, my sixy beasties! And happy All Hallows Eve's Eve to you all. We take Halloween wicked serious here in Salem, Massachusetts (aka Spookytown, USA) so I was thinking I ought to source a Halloween-themed six this week. Well, it turns out I've only written a single story thus far that references the holiday (don't give me that look, Ruthie Knox—the weird-ass WIP doesn't count yet), so you're stuck with this little excerpt from my 2010 Golden Heart finalist book (since published by Samhain) The Reluctant Nude:

Oh hai, Romain Duris! That's a very convincing

glare, but you're still in a tight race with 

Olivier Sitruk and Melvil Poupaud to play

Max when the book is inevitably [cough

cough, delusional] made into a motion picture.

Sex—sex sex sex.

That was all Fallon could focus on or remember in the following two weeks. Somewhere in her periphery a statue was taking shape, meals were being cooked and eaten, a yellow and black scarf was growing longer and longer between her fingers. Sun was shining or wind was howling or the moon was rising or falling. Beach grass and birch trees were changing color, she suspected, but the only thing she was aware of was Max: sitting beside her, standing across the studio from her, lying beneath her back in a bathtub by the fire, buried deep inside her body in his bed once the sun went down.

Addict, she thought to herself accusingly, watching him from across a display of pumpkins in the co-op market one afternoon, three days before Halloween…

Thanks for swinging by, ghouls and boys! Now head here to check out all the other Six Sentence Sunday excerpts this week. Happy Halloween!

—Meg

Why do I write?

I've been thinking this quite a bit the last couple weeks, probably because I fell victim to a week-long change-of-season funk, the annoying, lingering kind that makes you get all cerebral on yourself…

Why exactly do I write?

I've been able to come up with simple answers. There's the pragmatic reason—I write because I seem to be decent at it and am getting paid, with the potential to get paid more in the future. There's also the philosophical reason, which so many authors articulate as the over-simplified and frightfully hokey, "I write because I can't not write." Well, no, that's not really true, technically speaking. What they mean is, "I write because not writing feels bad," or "Writing gives my life meaning." Fine justifications, as legit as the money-based ones.

But why do we do anything? For the pay-off, financial or spiritual or social or manifested in our sense of self-worth and purpose. So, what exactly am I getting out of this gig?

Income-wise, divide what I make by the hours I put into writing, and in a good month, I'm making minimum wage, if I'm lucky. It ain't the money, honey.

There's a definite thrill in being praised, but truth be told, a lousy review hits me harder than a good one cheers me, as gloomy and ungrateful as that sounds. A bad review makes me feel more bad than a good review makes me feel good—if temporarily. That's a human instinct, to react more potently to threatening circumstances. Criticism is a threat in our modern society, as visceral a scare as being chased by a predator or attacked by a rival was in ye olde survival-times. It only makes good sense that our bodies manifest threats and criticism more potently than the triggers that tell us, "You're doing great! People like you! Five stars!" The latter is awesome…but it'll never compete, gut-impact-wise, with the negative. Not for me, anyhow, though I wish it would. I just have to keep reminding myself of that, so when I do stumble into a pile of the negative, a psychic foot-in-a-turd, my rational brain can remind itself that no, I'm not in mortal danger, my body's just awash with run-away-from-the-wolverine chemicals.

So it's not for the praise. The praise is a bonus, pretty blossoms worth dodging the turds for. What about success, the carrots of potential accomplishments dangling before me? The promise of the next contract, the killer agent, the big deal, the What's Next…? Those are good. I like those, as I'm very goal-oriented and I love qualifying my own progress. I certainly like the days when I make a new sale infinitely more than those naked-feeling book release days. Plus I've always been a bit of a teacher's pet, eager for authoritarian praise from on high. But that's not why I do it.

What about the characters? Do I owe it to my characters to tell their stories? Um, no. I made those people up. If anything, they owe me. Plus they're so much fun to abuse.

Setting aside the reviewers, professional and hobbyist and Goodreads-casual alike, do I write for the readers? Well, kind of. As a professional author, of course I do. I write stories that I hope strangers will read and enjoy. But I've had the good fortune of genuinely being able to accept Stephen King's advice on the topic of reader-pleasing; you can't aim to please everyone, because no book (or song or film or painting or person or recipe) will ever make everyone happy. Not even close. Not even remotely close.

You can only aim to please your Ideal Reader, as King calls him or her, and that's what I do, now. My Ideal Reader changes from book to book. Sometimes it's my targeted editor, or my avid-romance-reader-friend Amy, or my critique buddy Ruthie. But it's always just a single person I'm writing a story for, and hot damn, that's a huge relief. Especially since I have access to that person, and can ask them to read the story as it's progressing, so I know if I'm hitting the mark for my tiny, hand-picked audience of one. And in the end, as long as they're happy then the book's a success, and on an intellectual level, I can shrug off the knowledge that some people will be disappointed, inevitably. Thank you, Stephen King, for setting my brain free.

But I write for myself, I think, above everyone else. Not in a swoony book-of-my-heart-type way. I write because it puts me in such complete control—a control I relinquish the second the book's published, when it's no longer mine to fuss with and groom, set free to fend for itself in strangers' hands or on strangers' screens. But while it's still being written and polished, it's all mine.

It's no secret I used to be a designer. I stumbled across my penchant for fiction-writing three years ago, and though I was always proud as a designer to be able to say that I got paid to be creative all day…it doesn't compare. Ideal Reader aside, as a writer I spend all day doing exactly what I want, for myself. Even during edits and revisions, I still feel in control, because I trust my editors and I trust their opinions and advice will help me make my books better, which I want far more than I want to be perfect straight out of the gate. As a writer I've had incredibly free reign over my own creativity and process—freakishly free reign. And as a pretty autonomous, admittedly self-orbiting personality, that is fucking wonderful.

I guess I don't really know why I write. Not in a way I can distill into a single pithy line, at least. (Clearly not—look how bloated and gassy this very post has become.)

So maybe I should ask myself, why didn't I write, before? Why wasn't I doing this, four years ago? And the answer to that is, because I had no idea how important it was to me, and how much more fulfilled doing it would make me feel. It's like asking someone who hasn't yet discovered their inherent love of exercise, why don't they take up walking or yoga? Well, because you don't think you need to, to live. It's easier not to, and you'll seemingly have more time to yourself if you don't. You don't know until it's gone from chore to habit to hobby to passion, just how essential it is beyond the basic benefits of physical activity and fresh air. You don't yet know that feeling in your body, that thing inside that nags you to go take a walk, tangible as a toddler or pet whining at your hip. That magic that happens when you discover something that's not only good for you, but that you enjoy doing, that some days you downright love. A compulsive, perfectly selfish love, the kind that gets a marathoner in their shoes and out on the road each morning, through rain and snow and injury, against doctor's wishes, the draw of the punishment for whatever reason stronger than an excuse to stay in bed, warm and unchallenged. It's always easier to leave the page blank, after all. But some of us just don't get off on easy.

I think that's why I write, anyhow. What about you?

Six Sentence Sunday #9

Greetings, my sixy beasts! By now you're all surely sick of reading about my evil twin's Parisian man-whore, so let's move on. Here are six sentences from my upcoming Blaze, tentatively titled Honeymoon for One. The seaplane pilot hero and runaway bride heroine are in the cockpit, headed for the mainland, and Will is teasing Leigh for having artlessly thrown herself at him the night before:

“Never been sexually assaulted by a guest before,” Will said, facing forward. “Just trying to be polite, lest you manhandle me again.”

“Womanhandle, you mean.”

Another grin.

“You can get away with a lot,” Leigh said, “since you’re the only man who can get me off that island.”

“If we’re being indiscreet again, I’m going to go ahead and delete the last two words of that sentence.”

Thanks for swinging by, everyone! Now head here to check out all the other Six Sentence Sunday excerpts this week.

Six Sentence Sunday #8

Greetings again, intrepid sixers! One final excerpt from my evil twin Cara's brand new release, Curio. Oh yes, the Parisian man-whore book is finally out, and available through Kindle, Nook, and direct from Ellora's Cave, if you're intrigued. Or go see what readers have to say about it on Goodreads. Right. Requisite promo done. Now, on to the good stuff…

As I took my final breath, knuckles poised to knock, the door swung in.

Didier was taller than I’d anticipated. He was more of everything than I’d anticipated. Which is saying a lot, because I’d purposefully built him up in my mind, so grand he could only fail to measure up and hence give me permission to do as I always do and declare myself above the bothersome magnetism of lust.

But Didier did not disappoint. My mouth went dry and I must have looked stoned, standing there with the blank expression I rely on when desperately trying to appear unaffected.

Thanks for stopping by! Now head here to check out all the other Six Sentence Sunday excerpts this week.

Man-whore release day!

Hey all! My evil conjoined erotica-writing twin Cara McKenna has a new book out today! It's called Curio, and it's as romantic as it is filthy, so I am deigning to endorse it. This is the so-called "Parisian man-whore book", with the virgin heroine and the male prostitute hero, and you may have caught some snippets from Six Sentence Sunday posts of late. If you'd like to read more, here's the official excerpt. And here's the blurb:

Caroly Evardt never expected to find herself patronizing a male prostitute. Then again, she never expected to be weeks from her thirtieth birthday and still a virgin.

When a friend mentions that a gorgeous male model in Paris sells his body as well as his image, Caroly’s intrigued. Finally, a chance to sample the gifts of a beautiful man—no strings, no stakes, no fear of rejection.

But she soon discovers that Didier Pedra amounts to more than a striking face and talented body. He’s a kind, charming, damaged man, and after a few evenings of pleasurable education, Caroly’s interest blossoms into something far deeper than mere lust. Her simple arrangement is suddenly feeling downright dangerous…

If you're interested, you can buy it here (and on Amazon, B&N, All Romance eBooks, etc. in the coming days). Five bucks for several hours with a French prostitute! What a deal! It's also on Goodreads, if that's your scene.

Thanks for sitting through the promo!

Six Sentence Sunday #7

Greetings, sixers! As promised, another excerpt from my evil twin Cara's upcoming romantica release, Curio (out this Wednesday), aka "the Parisian man-whore book".

I slid my hand back to feel his damp hair, the heat of his neck. He cocked his head, the kiss still closed-mouth but promising more, soon.

I let myself imagine the acts he’d mentioned doing with others, and though they’d thrilled me before, now I couldn’t picture such things. In this moment he was my cautious first date, my maybe-a-boyfriend. He was no other woman’s, and he’d never kissed any girl and made her feel this way before. His body was far from innocent, but I fantasized that his heart was as untouched and virginal as mine.

Thanks for stopping by! Now head here to check out all the other Six Sentence Sunday excerpts this week.

Six Sentence Sunday #6

Greetings, sixers! This week and next I thought I'd share excerpts from my evil twin Cara's September 28 romantica release, Curio. Possibly better known as "the Parisian man-whore book". The virgin heroine has just admitted to the male prostitute hero the extent of her inexperience…

And it was in that moment in Didier’s living room that I realized, maybe not tonight, but some day not too far off, I could leave this place with that weight lifted from me. I could walk down his street and be like everyone else. I could have a lover. This is Paris, after all—having a lover is like having a pancreas, and I was suddenly very ready to quit being a medical anomaly.

All Didier said to my pronouncement was, “That is very interesting,” then he paused and squinted in such a way that it seemed he were taking a drag off a psychic cigarette. I worried he was about to tell me he had a policy against deflowering his clients, but he merely added, “It’s very flattering that you’ve come to me.”

Thanks for stopping by! Now head here to check out all the other Six Sentence Sunday excerpts this week.

Six Sentence Sunday #5

Greetings, sixers! This week I thought I'd share six sentences from my current work-in-progress, Meet Your Match. The heroine has just inherited a boxing gym from her estranged father, which she plans to close so she can use the space to open a matchmaking service…

Where the stairs doubled back, Jenna passed a landing with a water cooler, a huge vintage fight poster framed and hung beside it, Marciano v. Walcott. What struck her then was the smell—sweat and rubber. Leather, disinfectant. The odd, pungent potpourri of her father’s legacy. The sounds came next, slapping and grunting and the squeak of equipment joints. Jenna took a final breath and stepped through the open double doors and into the gym.

Thanks for stopping by! Now head here to check out all the other Six Sentence Sunday excerpts this week.

Six Sentence Sunday #3

Six sentences from Honeymoon for One (working title) just contracted by Harlequin Blaze. The sale came after a very challenging year of rejections, following my initial sale.

The heroine has just run away from her wedding and is en route to her honeymoon destination, sans groom, being transported to a private island by a very irksome seaplane pilot…

“Not too late to swim, if you’re offended by the service.”

“No, thank you, though I suspect I’ll be sitting in the cabin on the way back.”

“Probably wise—my old man was a cabbie in New York,” Will said. “My gifts of customer service are purely genetic.”

“A very rare and malicious disorder, I’m sure. Thank goodness you’re not contagious.”

Head here to check out all the other Six Sentence Sunday excerpts.

Six Sentence Sunday #2

Six sentences from my evil conjoined erotica-writing twin Cara McKenna's latest sale, Curio, a.k.a. the Parisien man-whore story (out in early autumn):

Didier Pedra is the name of a male prostitute who lives at sixteen Rue des Toits Rouges, in Paris.

It’s a relatively quiet street amid the greater bustle of the Latin Quarter, his flat in the top floor of a long tenement, two blocks from the river. I never expected to find myself standing on the front stoop of a prostitute’s building in the rain, on what should have been another unremarkable Thursday evening in March.

Then again, I never expected to be five weeks from my thirtieth birthday with my hymen still intact.

As I stood on Didier Pedra’s front stoop—precisely six minutes early for my appointment and unwilling to go in, lest I appear too eager—I knew only a few things about him; that he’s in his early to mid-thirties, that he’s always lived in Paris, and that he has a reputation for being supremely good in bed.

As if I have any basis for comparison.

Thanks for stopping by! Head here to check out all the other Six Sentence Sunday excerpts this week.

The Bits That Must Not Be Named

Warning: cuss words, straight ahead.

Sorry, Georgia, but "black iris" is 

too purple a euphemism for me.

Interrupting my own manuscript polishing to air a bit of word befuddlement. Since my evil conjoined twin writes erotica, I've gotten very used to having a couple of handy, if inelegant, words at my disposal when referring to the female nether regions—pussy and cunt. In romance, at least category romance, those are still a no-go. And yet the two most useful slang terms for the male goodies—cock and dick—are fine. Why the double-standard?

Is it because in romance, it's okay for the male anatomy to still be given names that sound blunt and crass, but the lady-area must be euphemized into gentle desirability, lest we offend our delicate readers' dewy orbs? Is it because male characters are allowed to be, well, blunt and crass, while heroines are still stuck toeing the propriety line? Another permutation of the Stud v. Slut gender debate?

Whenever possible, I name specific bits of the lady-situation, like lips or clit. Good words. They say exactly what they are. But for the region as a whole…? Her sex? Her center? Her entrance? Sometimes I really wish pussy were on the table. Vagina and vulva and labia are far too clinical (I rarely use penis, incidentally, for the same reason). Breast is such a lovely word…I feel our southern climes got shafted (as it were) in the taxonomy department.

Writers—what words do you use in romance, in lieu of pussy and cunt? Readers—what words work for you, and which are InstaSquick™? Would you be offended to stumble over pussy in a category romance? Does vagina get the job done, or does it bring to mind one of those female anatomy cross-section posters from the gyno's office for you, as it does for me?

Mah latest book, you can has!

I'll keep the self-pimpin' brief. Samhain released my latest romance today!

It's called Trespass, and it's about a woman on the run from the law after a crime of self-defense. She takes shelter in the home of a stranger, deep in the heart of Montana's ranch country, and much lust and betrayal ensues. It's been getting shelved under such awesome Goodreads categories as "hot-cowboy-lovin" and "cowboy-stud-fever", but I feel obligated to point out to any true cowboy fetishists, Russ is technically a large animal vet. Though he does own horses and the requisite hat. Here's the official blurb:

He opened his home. She stole his heart…and his money.

Many would envy veterinarian Russ Gray’s life in rural Montana’s wide-open spaces. Russ calls it lonely. In a country with more cattle than eligible females, he doesn’t envision his seven years as a widower ending anytime soon. Until a mysterious woman lands at his door in the dead of night, riddled with buckshot.

Sarah Novak hates lying to such a kind, handsome man, but if an upstanding citizen like Russ finds out why she’s been three weeks on the run, he’d surely turn her in. Yet she can’t refuse his offer to let her stay until she heals, no questions asked.

From the start they fall into an easy companionship, then teasing flirtation flares into an unexpected intimate connection. But no matter how right it feels in his arms, guilt tugs at Sarah’s heart. Russ doesn’t deserve what she must do next.

When Russ wakes up with an empty bed—and an empty wallet—his first instinct isn’t to call the cops…it’s to catch her and find out why his urge to protect her overshadows all reason. Because he’s had a taste of real passion, and he’s not letting it slip away without a fight.

If you want more details or an excerpt, check out Samhain's Trespass page, where you can order and save 30%. It's also available through the Nook and Kindle. You can read an early review here.

Six Sentence Sunday #1

Six sentences from my July 26 release from Samhain, Trespass.

She regretted what she’d done back in Buffalo, and until this morning she thought she’d never regret anything that badly for the rest of her life. But this, seeing the kindest man she’d ever met so clearly disappointed and untrusting… Right now she’d give anything to fix what she’d wrecked, or maybe to have never crossed paths with Russ Gray in the first place. He deserved her like he deserved a kick in the teeth, the way she deserved a second chance—not at all.

Sarah watched him clearing the dining room table as she settled into the blankets, and she saw the biggest regret of her life standing there by the window. She had another urge to run, run far and fast until her lungs burst, if only to stand a chance of forgetting what they’d had for two glorious nights, the thing she’d wrecked, just like she’d known she would.

Head here to check out all the other Six Sentence Sunday excerpts.

Another name rant!

I love a good name rant, so I eagerly clicked on a Twitter link to this Gigi's Closet post about real-life baby-naming WTFery. Of course it got my head spinning, so please permit me a fresh curmudgeoning on the topic of character monickers.

I've been reading the voicetastical Kristan Higgins' Too Good To Be True, and the name of its [rowwwrrrr] hero is Callahan O'Shea. For realz?! But although normally such a name would propel my arm to launch the book clear across the room, this time it didn't. This is solely because of the heroine's reaction to the name—she's as agog at its over-the-topness as I am, as the reader. It also works because the heroine has a troublesome habit of inventing boyfriends, and giving the hero a fake-boyfriendworthy name like Callahan O'Shea completely reinforces that theme.

Pulling off a wacky or cutesy or über manful character name is all in the believability. Higgins did this again in All I Ever Wanted, when she named her heroine Calliope, of all gaggably adorable things. But Higgins is good—the wackadoo name and its reference make sense when you meet the heroine's parents.

As I've said before, the first place I turn when I need to figure out my characters' names (which I do very early on—the name for me often comes before the personality, even) is this site, where you can view the top 1,000 [American] baby names by decade. I head to the decade my character was born and pick from the top 200.

I know, I know…it sounds so boring, so willfully, joylessly realistic. It's my book! I could make up any name I like! But that's not my scene. My characters, and my heroes in particular, tend to skew a bit, well, nuts. They're weird enough on their own. A special name would be overkill. Plus I get the specialness fix by writing foreign heroes on occasion—Maxence, Rasul, Rory, Didier, Ian, Reece. All fairly common names in their respective cultures, but I still get to indulge my inner writerly impulse to extra-specialify my characters. I've also done the same with surnames-as-nicknames. Flynn, Pike, Mac, Daisey, Ty… Atypical names work best (in my noisy opinion, anyhow) when they're made believable in the face of their oddness.

In my evil conjoined erotica-writing twin's latest manuscript, the heroine ended up with a weird name, which was not my intention. She's a pretty quiet, conservative character (despite the fact that the story centers around her deciding to lose her virginity to a Parisian male prostitute) and I'd expected to name her something like, I don't know…Anne, maybe. A safe, simple name for a cautious, no-frills character. But she ended up getting named Caroly. The name fell right off my fingertips without me really thinking about it, because sometimes names just present themselves. And in the end it worked, because the next words that plopped onto the page told me why:

“Good evening. You’re Carolyn?”

I managed to say, “I am.” My name is in fact Caroly, a misspelling on my grandmother’s prospective baby name list that my mother found exceedingly fetching; no sympathy for her daughter, doomed to be addressed as Carol or Carolyn for the rest of her days. And because of how Caroline is pronounced in France—Caroleen—nobody here ever gets my name right when I introduce myself. But that’s fair, considering how badly I mangle their entire language every time I open my mouth.

So I'm not immune to the weird-ass character name impulse, as harshly as I judge it. And from the Higgins examples above, I'll admit I'm not a true stone-cold bitch about it in others' work. But there's got to be an reason for a weird name. Fine, christen your thirty-year-old contemporary hero Greyson or Rayvyn or Chance McO'FitzFlannahan, but you better clue me in to what in the heck his parents were thinking. Or smoking.

To reiterate what I've said before—your characters are special enough on their own. Or in other words, tossing glitter on a perfectly delicious cupcake doesn't actually improve the thing.