9 new stories release today in the Lei Crime Kindle World including mine, Unforeseen Danger!

Genre-Hopping and the Untried Girl

     I suppose I could have said “Virgin” but let’s face it, I haven’t been one of those for a few years at least. Yes, I’m speaking about publishing. What did you think I was talking about? (Sorry, I was channeling Max Vos with his addictions for Milk, there. Hee hee)

     The fact is, I stepped into new shoes this week. I began my publishing career as a MM fiction author and it’s served me well. I have branded myself to the point that people know when a comical BDSM meme comes up as a profile picture, it’s most likely mine. But… things have changed a bit recently. Bear with me for just a moment.

     I’ve always been a romantic. I cut my teeth on dime store romance paperback novels in the 70s when I was a very young teen. Growing up in a conservative family, going to church and all the rest, wasn’t conducive to conversations with my parents about the bodice-ripping heroes appearing on those covers. That meant, I had to sit at the lunch tables in middle school and talk about the books and authors we loved… Kathleen E. Woodiwiss, Laurie McBain, Jude Deveraux, and of course, Barbara Cartland.

     My mother worked in a bookstore and had encouraged my reading from a very young age. I can’t remember a time when she didn’t read to me before I could read myself. It was an amazing bonding time and she shared books with me that she thought I’d like. She was constantly bringing home books for me to read and her favorite genre was mystery/suspense. I grew to love Edgar Allan Poe, Stephen King, Robin Cook and too many others to count. I can still remember a collection of Stephen King’s short stories called “Night Shift” which was so damned amazing to the 15 year old me, I wanted to write stories just like that. I wasn’t a tremendous horror fan, but then again, Stephen King’s books were more like suspense than horror. Of course, sometimes they took that bloody leap off the cliff at the end, but I always loved that about him. He was one screwed up author and I adored that.

     Back to recent changes. In May, AJ Llewellyn and I traveled to Austin to attend an author conference. While waiting to catch our plane, she told me that she’d been invited to write a book for a new-to-me author, Toby Neal, which would be included in Toby’s Kindle World collection of novellas. I’d never heard of the Kindle World books but from what AJ explained, they were Amazon’s answer to fanfiction made available to readers through legal means without copy write infringement. In other words, authors were allowed to take a character or several from a book written by another author, and give them their own stories, expanding on the world the other author had created. AJ was a huge fan of Toby’s Lei Crime Series books (9 of them). I wished her luck, bought the nine books, and dove into the series.

     The Lei Crime Series is a book series about a young Hawaiian female detective, Lei Texeira, who solves crimes in Hawaii. She is bright, pretty, and very very vulnerable and though the books are mystery/suspense/thrillers in the purest sense of the word, they also have just a touch of romance which really appealed to me. I thought to myself, writing in the Kindle World Toby had created sounded like a lot of fun, so when AJ persuaded Toby to give me a shot at it, and I received an invitation to write a book, I was over the moon with excitement.

     There were several caveats to what we could put into our novellas. One or two were quite daunting to me. First of all, I couldn’t use any characters I’d used in my own novels because the characters I use for the KW book become the property of the “World”. My readers understand what this means to me. I’ve written over 40 books and in some way, in NEARLY every book, there are crossover characters which appear in each other’s books. If I set a book in LA for example, Cassidy Ryan, my hot LAPD cop from Silver Ties, is probably going to appear in it as he did in the Master’s Boys books, the Assassins books, the other Silvers books, or the Marine Bodyguards book, “The Thief”. No problem. Create entirely new characters for the Lei Crime KW novella. Check.

     The other daunting thing was writing a book without sex or foul language. I’m an author of gay erotica so trust me, this was not an easy feat but that said, it was more than a bit of a challenge. My readers can testify to the fact that writing without an abundant use of swear words was more than just a bit of a challenge. It was fucking difficult. ß-See? Haha. Truthfully, leaving the sex out of the book was not as hard (pardon the pun) as I had envisioned it would be, since in truth, I’m slightly burnt out on writing sex scenes. However, my readers expect them and though I think they are important if the book calls for them, I don’t include as many as I used to. The exception to this are my BDSM books because they require more. But at this point I am much more interested in plotting out a great story and writing the narrative than I am in writing how part A goes into part B. This is a risk for me so I’m really hoping I’ve done a good enough job at it that my readers stick with me after this. This means turning out a really high quality book that keeps the pages turning. We’ll see if I was able to do that. The feedback has been positive so far and in fact, a close friend told me it’s the best book I’ve ever written. Well, I hope others agree.

     Next, the most difficult thing of all when writing a book in some other author’s “World” is staying true to my own voice and yet, making the book blend with her series and writing her characters with realism. I had to make her characters in my book sound as if they were written by her. Any author who has ever tried to do this knows how nearly impossible this is to do effectively. In fact, I finished the first 15,000 words of Unforeseen Danger and then after reading and re-reading it, ended up deleting 7,500 of them because they sounded flat. I was trying to sound like her and lost myself in the midst of it all. Not that Toby writes flat at all. Her characters are beautifully developed and her stories highly original but when I tried to write her characters, they didn’t sound like my writing. Once I realized they WERE hers and didn’t have to sound like mine, I was able to move forward. This little 32,000 word novella ended up taking me twice as long as it should have because not only did I want to sound like myself, I had to accurately represent her characters on the page because her readers would know it if they didn’t. I’m satisfied with the finished product.

     Finally, this book is a mystery/suspense story. It is not a romance, although it most definitely has elements of romance toward the end. It was a good exercise in writing purely mystery, although my readers know how much I love writing mystery. It appears in one way or another in nearly every book I write. I’ve definitely written my share of bad guys and they always get theirs in the end. I’ve shot them, run them though with a broadsword, and burnt them alive. Haha. Yes, my bad guys always get it in the end. That is one of the elements I DIDN’T have to change when writing Unforeseen Danger. I won’t give it away, but I think you’ll like how it all turns out.

     If this experiment in writing mystery/suspense works, you’ll see more of it in the future. I am encouraged by the rankings on Amazon and the positive reviews so far. I hope you guys will give it a shot, if you haven’t so far, but be prepared for something just a little different from this author.

     Thank you for your support and encouragement.

Patricia xoxo

"Unforeseen Danger" is now available on Amazon.com... Mystery/Suspense!!!

http://www.amazon.com/Lei-Crime-Unforeseen-Danger-Novella-ebook/dp/B017AB33WI/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1446229334&sr=8-1&keywords=Unforeseen+Danger

Unforeseen Danger... Excerpt

     Lane tried to relax. He hoped if he tried to send out enough positive vibes, Jack would be able to pick up on them and know that his brother was still alive somewhere. That meant Jack would be looking… probably looking for him right alongside his partner because if there was one certain thing in this world, it was that those two men wouldn’t stop searching for him until they found him, alive… or dead. As Lane heard the scrape of chains against the solid wood door barring his escape from the room, he knew Crewcut had come back and that his suffering would begin again.

     He sat forward, feeling the strain in his arms, accompanied by the other agonies he’d had inflicted on his bare chest and back. Lane was covered with cigar burns, knife cuts, and the coppery scent of blood rose to his nostrils as his newly scabbed wounds broke open and began to bleed. As rusty hinges creaked and the door swung wide, Lane sighed quietly as Crewcut stepped inside the room. The huge barrel-chested bear was dressed in black leather pants, a wide leather harness crisscrossing his chest, and he was biting down on the stub of a cigar clenched between his teeth. He gripped a wide black leather belt stained with Lane’s blood. Crewcut eyeballed him evilly as he drew on the cigar, lighting the end with a crackling red-orange flame for just a second, before lifting his face to the ceiling and blowing the smoke toward it. Lane watched as it swirled in a mocking gray circle, escaping out of the room through a vent high in the wall only seconds later.

     “Are you ready for more of the belt, boy?” Crewcut’s voice scraped across Lane’s raw nerves as the man looked back down at him, moving forward into the room, blocking the ceiling lamp from his view with his flat-top blond haircut and throwing his evil face into shadow.

     “Fuck you,” Lane spat. The sharp taste of blood from the split in his lip slid onto his tongue as he glared at the huge biker in front of him. If he was going to die, it was going to be with every last bit of fight he had in him. He struggled to rise to his feet as Crewcut put a huge Doc Marten boot on his chest and pushed him back on his ass.

     The thug chuckled. “As much as I’d like that, we’re gonna have us a little more fun first.”

Lane tensed as Crewcut pulled the cigar out of his mouth and bent down, holding the burning ember inches from his face. “I don’t know what you want from me,” Lane snapped as he scooted back, coming up hard against the cinderblock behind him. The feel of it was cold against his ravaged back and as Crewcut squatted in front of him, he winced at the pain.

     “Ya hurtin’ boy?” he growled. “All this can be over if ya just convince me ya ain’t a cop.” He reached out and caressed the side of Lane’s jaw with the side of the cigar butt, leaving heat in his wake as Lane squeezed his eyes shut, turning his head aside. Any second he expected the sizzle of burning flesh, the same way he’d endured it so many times in the past several hours.

     “Jes think… there’s so many more fun things we could be spendin’ our time doin’, now ain’t there?” Crewcut nearly purred and Lane swallowed hard.

     Lane turned his head back and found Crewcut’s face inches from his own. “FUCK YOU!” Lane glared at the big man, braced himself, and then jerked forward, head-butting the biker in the nose as hard as he could.

     With a sickening crunch and a loud grunt, Crewcut fell backward in a sprawl, landing all ass and elbows on the filth-covered floor. He grabbed his face where Lane’s forehead had connected. Lane relaxed back against the solid wall, feeling victory in the instantaneous agony in his forehead; he took great pleasure as he watched blood spurt out of Crewcut’s nose and pour through the fingers he held up to it. Lane had known the move would enrage the biker but the smugness in Crewcut’s voice made him crazy and even though he was restrained, Lane knew he had to fight. I’m not going to just lie down and die.

     Crewcut scrambled up, hissing as he regained his footing and he flew at Lane, tackling him to his back on the red mat with his handcuffed arms behind him. He clutched Lane’s shoulders as he climbed over him, digging his meaty fingers into them painfully as Lane grunted in agony. When Crewcut snarled and leaned down in his face, Lane knew he’d overplayed his hand.

     “That was a mistake!” he gritted out, his eyes flashing fire and hate. He balled a massive fist and before Lane could turn his head, it landed on his left jaw with a hard enough blow, he was certain the man knocked something loose. Lane grunted and braced himself for the next blow that landed on the right side of his face and only a second later the breath hurled out of his lungs in a loud WHOOSH as Crewcut connected a balled fist with his solar plexus. Pain exploded in his brain as the blows rained down and Lane reached up and grasped for unconsciousness, grabbing a hold of it as the lights mercifully went out.