Strange Brews

I think my aural memory is very good, but sometimes it isn't.

For instance, I was absolutely certain that I knew the opening lines to The Eagles quintessentially seventies song "Life in the Fast Lane."

Mea culpa. I thought the heroine was terminally vain.

I listened to that song a lot while writing about Insufficient Mating Material's fashionista heroine who was so pampered, she could not even undress without the hero's help, and the slightly brutal Djetth (Jeth).

It wasn't my imaginary theme song for the book, but I felt an affinity.

A couple of days ago, I learned that the heroine was "terminally pretty" (to rhyme with "the hard cold city"). How devastating to know that I have been mistaken for more than two decades!

OK. I will admit it. I loved The Cream song, Strange Brew but I never have been clear what it is about. When I was a giddy youth, I didn't read the transcripts on the backs of LPs.

These songs recapture my happiest memories -- well... I should modify that, but the late sixties, seventies and eighties were fabulous, and that's when I had time to listen to the radio, and when I judged potential boyfriends by their record collections.

Did anyone else do that? Or am I truly weird?

LP-Harmony!!!!

I've also been polling my internet acquaintances about their opinions of Newsletters put out by authors, because I am on a panel speaking about the virtues of Newsletters on behalf of the EPIC organization (for electronically published authors) at the upcoming Romantic Times convention.

More than once as my questionnaires came back to me, I heard that readers love recipes in authors' newsletters. Good grief, people are interested in what I eat, whether I cook it, and what ingredients I use! Who knew?

Music, recipes... now add Linnea Sinclair's barman, Sin.

When you write do you follow the What's In Your Wallet? line of characterization?

Some characterization pundits advise authors to make lists of what is in their heroes' pockets.

(I tried that in Insufficient Mating Material, with good reason. My survival consultant, Les Stroud, aka Survivorman always tells the Science Channel viewer what, apart from his multi-tool, is in his pocket when he is stranded on a deserted island or other hostile-to-life spot.)

How about, What's In Your Drink? (I have paranoid, intergalactic superspy heroes who wonder that, too.)

Let's take world-building to an appropriate level. What do your inter-stellar characters drink for survival, for sustenance, for pleasure, and for a buzz?

Is it basically a gin and tonic with dye in it? Is it green small beer? (That's a fraction deeper than you think). Is it Blue Curacao with vodka? Is water the champagne of the future? Or serum?

Who saw Antz? The Bar Scene? Drinking from the aphids' butts (not that I recommend it, but does it have potential for an alien lifestyle)? There was another bar scene in An Ant's Life. Cartoons can be highly creative.

Well, here's the kicker.

Tonight (Sunday 9 -11 pm Eastern), April Fools' Night, with the moon all but full, Linnea, Susan, Colby and Rowena are going to be appearing in character on the Passionate Internet Voices Radio in order to put the lot together.

We'll be in Linnea's Intergalactic Bar and Grille (a franchise thereof) with Sin the bartender making otherwordly drinks. And we'll be planning a big surprise for Earth.

Best wishes,

Rowena

Insufficient Mating Material... Excerpt

I encourage anyone thinking of buying one of my books to read a free sample chapter from my website or barnes and noble.com, or just stand in the romance aisle of your favorite local bookstore and check out a few pages.

These might be some good pages to scope out for a fair idea of whether or not this book is your cup of tea.

Royal wedding: page 33
Sexually frustrated swearing: page 199
A fish bit my ... : page 244
Battle scene: page 253
Cover scene : page 264
Grievous explains "the trots" to an alien: page 273


Here is a short excerpt with genuine survival advice.
------
In this scene, the hero, Djetth (pronounced Jeth) and the squeamish fashionista Princess Martia-Djulia (Marsha-Julia) are marooned on a Costa-Rica-like island. They have been shot down, landed in the sea, and Martia's elaborate gown is wet, and she will not remove it.

She is embarrassed about the corset she wears underneath her preposterous Court dress. She doesn't know that Djetth has already seen her corset and more, before his plastic surgery, when he had a wild one-night-stand with her.

Djetth has decided that their first priority should be to get a fire going.

-----

"There are a lot of things we could do without for one night." Dinner came to mind. Sex… Djetth grunted and rose to his feet.

The most natural thing in the world would have been to hook an arm around Martia-Djulia's tightly cinched waist, and point to the campsite he'd chosen. Instead, he put his left hand on his hip and pointed with his right hand.

"You see that little stand of trees -- the ones with twisted trunks, which fork into three or four branches at about the height of my hip? Those two, there, will make good supports for the entrance to a shelter. I'll thrust a long, straight branch between their crotches as a ridgepole."

She looked doubtful, but Djetth was on good ground with his woodmanship.

"A 'crotch' is where a tree bifurcates," he explained, simply so she'd think about crotches, and long, straight objects being thrust into them. "They're a good choice because their canopies lean inland, away from what becomes the obvious spot to clear for a fire pit. Do you agree?"

He took her silence for consent.

"Right. I'll start by digging the fire pit. Do you think you could find something we can burn? There are three types of fuel needed for a fire. Tinder is the most important."

Chivalrously, he assigned the greatest importance to the easiest, lightest, most enjoyable, most feminine task.

"I can't start a fire without tinder," he added with strategic disregard for the fact that he was a Great Djinn in possession of three Rings of Imperial Authority, one of which was the laser-like Fire Stone.

"What is tinder?" she asked, sounding suspicious.

"Ahhhh," he drawled, overcome by a mischievous instinct. "Look here."

With his left hand he lifted his T-shirt, with his right forefinger and thumb he reached into his navel, confident that after eight weeks of hard exercise he had well defined abs and a very deep and attractive "inny" of a tummy button.

He withdrew lint.

"Oh, slurrid!" his squeamish Princess exclaimed, predictably, but she stared at his lower abdomen and perhaps at the bulge in his trunk briefs with flattering interest.

"This fluff--" He placed it in the palm of his left hand as reverently as a scientist explaining an important specimen, "is created from the action of hard work. Friction attracts filaments of fabric from my cotton T-shirt, and works them into a flat, fluffy mat."

He moved his cupped hand closer to her.

"Good tinder needs to have irregular edges, plenty of airspaces." He teased his tummy button fluff into a looser wad. "It must be dry. Would you like to touch it?"
----

Best wishes,

Rowena Cherry

PS
Some readers might be interested to recall that in one episode of Survivorman, Les Stroud plucked lint from his socks to use as tinder to start a fire. When I saw Les do that, I sensed that he and I shared a sense of humor, and that he would be the perfect "survival details" expert for Insufficient Mating Material.

Another tip... besides surprising things that are flammable, is that it is better to be naked and dry rather than clothed and wet.

It's all about the Horny Berries

"What's it about?" the potential Reader asks at a book-signing.

I panic. I know I'm not good at this. More often than not, I say too much, and bore people. On the four hour drive down to Cincinnati for this signing, I've rehearsed over and over, with the loving help of my biggest critic. My thoughts spin like a tickertape parade.

Do I say, "Horny Berries"?

Do I say, "Remember that Harrison Ford movie where he was a hard drinking pilot who crash landed with --I think it was Ann Heche, playing a Vogue editor-- on an uninhabited island, and they had to survive. Only it's different, because in my book, the hero and heroine are politically embarrassing alien royalty, and someone is trying to kill them--"

"Someone tried to kill Harrison Ford," my critic snarled.

"Those were pirates. It's not the same as assassins sent to find them. Anyway, I didn't see that film until after I'd written Insufficient Mating Material."

"Who cares?" My critic shrugs. "What's different?"

"My book has this 'Face Off' element. The hero has had his face changed. He's the same guy that the heroine fancies herself in love with, but he can't tell her, and she doesn't know. Since she thinks she's in love with someone else, it's the worst thing in the world for her... to be marooned with a horny stranger."

My critic grunts.

"Oh, I'm soooo lame!" I wail.

Critic laughs.

"And, they don't have a plane-load of supplies to live off. After they are shot down, their plane sinks..."

"You shouldn't call it a plane if it's science fiction," critic objects.

"Their two-seater spaceship sinks in eight feet..."

"Shouldn't you use alien words for measuring?" he interrupts again.

"How polite is that, when I only have a couple of seconds to get my message across? The couple has to survive with what they are wearing and what they can find, like my book's survival consultant Survivorman..."

"Good! You should talk more about Survivorman."

"I don't want to give the impression that the book is about him. It's futuristic romantic fiction. It's not even quite "Alien Survivorman with Sex." It's true that Les and I both use entertainment to communicate some vital --and accurate-- wilderness survival advice, and Les read my book, and gave me some extra tips, and set me straight on a detail or two that I got wrong... And he gave me the cover quote. Anyway, when I show people my poster, it's the horny-berries that they ask about."

Critic snorts. "Are there horny berries in the book?"
(He hasn't read it.)

"No, but..."

"Can you say HORNY in a bookstore?"

"There are horny toads. They're respectable. Horny doesn't just mean 'in the mood to be sexually active' but it does suggest to the reader that this is a book with sexually graphic language. Berries are an important food source, but if they are alien berries, you have to find out if they are edible or poisonous. You start by smearing a little juice on your wrist... anyway, my hero does all that, to the heroine, and at first she thinks he's building up to kinky sex.

"Of course, when she realizes that he's using her as a food-testing guinea pig, she is furious. And very depressed. And, she is a fashionista, a bit like Paris Hilton only crossed with the most scandalous female member of any European royal family you can think of. She doesn't like having to wear a plain white, man's T-shirt. So the hero uses berries' juice to tie-die her T-shirt... while she's wearing it."

Meanwhile, while I try to remember my best pitch, my potential Reader is reading the blurb on the back cover. The keywords there are "shot down", "failing to mate", "guitar glue", "psychic sleuths", "disguises", "a killer", a "damning tattoo" on the hero's "tool of seduction", and there is Survivorman's quote.

There's no mention of Horny Berries. I came up with horny berries when making the Insufficient Mating Material book promotion video. One has about eight frames (excluding frames for titles and credits) to tell a story, and between three and five words per frame. I should probably throw out something new.

But, it's too late. While I've been tongue-tied, my potential reader has moved on. Next time, I'll do the 'Carpe Scrotum' thing.

"It's about horny-berries," I'll say in my best BBC English voice.


Best wishes,
Rowena Cherry

(Speaking!!! and signing Sunday February 11th, 2pm to 4pm at the Barnes and Noble on Telegraph and Maple, in Bloomfield Hills)