Welcome Author Angela Claire to Dawn's Reading Nook today. She has a brand new book out called To Catch a Pirate which sounds really hot and sexy. If this pirate is anything like Capt. Jack of POTC then I am so there. *grins*
Contest Giveaway- Angela is giving away to one lucky reader of her blog post today one copy of readers choice of her ebooks. Comment to be entered (and make sure to put your email addy in with the comment in case you win) and your name is tossed in the hat. Contest open till Friday May 27th.
Humor in Romance or
How I Learned to Love the Laugh
By Angela Claire
Hi All –
I’m very pleased to be here to talk about my books and to wile away a Monday with you. Just to let you know a little about me, I’m a 40ish (okay, late 40ish) mother of two and lawyer who has had a lifelong dream to write romance. My first novel, Saving McCade, was published by Siren Bookstrand this year. I followed that debut up with two others, Heart of Stone and To Catch a Pirate.
I don’t have a particular genre that I stick to, but I guess you could say the common thread in all my books is humor. Even though Saving McCade is a contemporary mystery, Heart of Stone a historical western and To Catch a Pirate a pirate adventure, they all have heroes and heroines who can laugh at themselves and (I hope) make the reader laugh.
In Saving McCade, for example, there’s a scene right after the hero, a wrongly imprisoned man, and the heroine, the FBI agent who gets him out of prison to work with her in a safe-house, sleep together for the first time:
“Don’t tell me you didn’t want that,” he muttered. She could hear the anger still in his voice. No sweet words now, apparently.
“I won’t.”
“Because you did.” It was almost as if she hadn’t spoken. She sat up.
“I did. Don’t worry. I remember that part about how you asked me and I said yes. Okay. I’m sure that’s no surprise to you. Women have probably been throwing themselves at you all your life, even more when you got rich, I imagine.” She reached for her sweatshirt, noting grimly that it was practically in tatters. “And then we know how popular you were on the inside, of course.” She didn’t know why you’d lobbed that snide observation in. She supposed she was still angry, too.
He dropped his arm from his eyes and focused that intense blue gaze on her. “Don’t expect me to get all flustered by that and try to prove my manhood to you.”
“No need for another demonstration, I assure you. You did just fine the first time.” She stood up and reached for her jeans.
“Well, shucks. Thanks, ma’am.”
I just love the pique that each of the characters displays in that scene. I wrote something similar, in terms of pique anyway, between the main characters in To Catch a Pirate. The setting couldn’t have been more different than in Saving McCade. Instead of a modern safe-house in Maine, the conversation takes place on an eighteenth century pirate ship. But the snippy after-sex dialogue between the characters takes the same tone when the hero discovers the heroine is spying on him for the government because he’s been hurting her shipping business. (Fair warning…since I write on the erotic side of things, there are a few adult words in my excerpts!)
“What has Paxton Shipping to do with me?” Jamie asked.
“Well, frankly, you and The Ocean Jewel keep interrupting our voyages and occasionally taking a passenger or two for ransom. It’s rather bad for business.”
“Don’t tell me this Paxton Shipping is your company.”
“My husband’s.”
“Ah, hence the lack of maidenhead. Your husband must have the smallest cock on record, you were so tight,” he said callously, indifferent to his mate William’s presence.
She colored. “He’s dead.”
“Good. If I had a cock that tiny, I’d want to be dead, too. So what’s a respectable widow, and I’m being generous with that one, as I was fucking you no less than two hours after we met, at your insistence, I might add—”
William coughed and looked down.
“Yes, and you put up such a valiant fight, too,” she said hotly.
I guess you could say I don’t go for that mushy after-sex rhapsodizing. My characters have a little more fight in them. This holds true even in my scenes with the villains. One of my favorite passages at the end of Saving McCade is when the bad guy has taken the heroine captive and is explaining his plan to her, surprised that a big FBI agent like her hadn’t figured it out already.
“You are so lame, Meredith. I don’t know why you’ve made it as far as you have.”
Man, if she had not been naked on her knees with a gun pointed to her head, she so would have made him pay for that remark. As it was, she improvised. “Let me show you why.” Her current plan was somewhere between wresting the gun from him before he could shove his dick in her mouth and letting him do it first so she could bite it off.
The bad guy is similarly indignant in a funny way in Heart of Stone, when he takes the heroine captive in order to bump her off:
“You’re insane.”
“You’ll pardon me, Missy, if I don’t much care about your opinion of me at this point.”
Anyway, you get the idea. I try to keep it light in my writing. That goes for the flirtation too. There’s a part at the beginning of To Catch a Pirate where my heroine is trying to talk her way onto the pirate’s ship and overhears the hero telling his mate he doesn’t want to take her because she’d be too tempting:
“Oh, you overheard, did you, darling?” Banion asked. The black-haired pirate, handsome as the devil, she’d been told—truthfully as it turned out—smiled, his teeth white against his tan.
She smiled back at him. “Well, not all of it, but I think I get the gist of it.”
“Hmmm, so what do you think you heard?”
The one called William was scowling at her, but Banion himself looked indulgent.
“Well, I think I heard you…ah…admire me.”
He leaned closer and said in a conspiratorial tone, “That wasn’t exactly what I was getting at.”
“Like me then.”
“I’m not asking you to dance a quadrille, my sweet.”
She gathered up her courage, slanting a glance back at Nell. “You find me, ah, desirable.”
“If I do? What of it? Do you even know what that means, my beauty?”
She looked him dead in his sea green eyes. There was only one way to play this. “I do, Captain Banion.”
Something about the hero calling the heroine ‘darling’ and ‘my beauty’ and teasing her made me really like that scene. Anyway, let’s just say, I try to not take it all so seriously in my writing. My view is we get enough of that in real life.
So if you’re up for some fun (and hot romance of course), please give my books a try!
Thanks!
To Catch a Pirate is now available at Siren-Bookstrand & Amazon Kindle
Historical Romance
Jamie Banion, captain of The Ocean Jewel, comes by his piracy honestly. He was born into it, son of the legendary Bloody Mary. In deference to his mother, he’s respectful of his female captives.
Evelyn Paxton is tired of the pirate who has been interrupting the voyages of her shipping company. So she poses as the daughter of an earl to lure him into taking her for ransom so she can lead him into a trap for the British navy.
Jamie doesn’t trust himself to keep his usual respectful distance from the sexy-as-hell blonde, especially when Evelyn adds another facet to her cover, that of the seductress. But by convincing Jamie she is no innocent miss, she overcomes his gentlemanly inclinations and gets on board The Ocean Jewel.
Add a storm, a secret island and a shocking revelation of pirates past, and Evelyn and Jamie find themselves sailing through adventure to true love.
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