The Stolen Brides 02 -His Forbidden Touch (47 page)

The front cover on the paperback edition of
His Forbidden Touch
is, ironically, my absolute favorite
of all my Avon covers. I like the lettering, the crown, even the
colors they chose. I say “ironically” because this was my last book
for Avon, published five months after I had left and signed a
contract with Dell.

But then there’s the
back
cover on
the Avon edition. Yikes, what a going-away present that was. The,
um, “hero” looks like Donald Trump having a particularly bad hair
day. Seriously, what made the art department think it was a good
idea to give my tall-dark-and-handsome knight a mullet? Maybe it
was supposed to look like helmet hair? And who smacked my “plain”
princess with a mega-dose of Maybelline and an entire box of
flaming red Clairol? Poor Ciara. And why, oh
why
, is there
a paint pony in the background? In medieval Europe?

I can only guess that this painting was
originally intended for some other author’s book—maybe a
Western—and was re-touched to (kinda, sorta) fit mine. Recycling
unused cover paintings used to be one way New York publishing
houses saved money. (These days they save money by skipping the
paintings entirely and using digital art.) Unfortunately, authors
who write for New York publishers have zero control over their
covers.

Indie authors, on the other hand, have total
control over their covers.

One more reason why I love being an indie
author.

The cover on the new digital edition of
His Forbidden Touch
, created by designer Kim Killion, is
everything I wanted, everything the original cover wasn’t: it’s
sexy, medieval, regal —it’s even a rich, royal purple—and it has
mountains.

The “clinch” photo of the couple is actually
a stock shot that Kim had on her website. I was amazed to find a
stock photo that fit my story so perfectly. The first time I saw
it, it immediately made me think of the steamy bathtub scene in
chapter 12. Even the woman’s hair is perfect. That’s exactly how I
imagine Ciara’s hair would look after Royce had to chop it while
saving her life in the previous scene.

I know that some readers prefer covers that
show the characters’ faces, but I love the new trend toward
“cropped” people. I always find it jarring when the models’ faces
don’t match the characters I imagined (take Mr. Trump and Ms.
Maybelline, for example). That happened a
lot
with my New
York-published books. I’d much rather leave the characters’ faces
to each reader’s individual imagination.

Trivia

Celine, Ciara, Avril…I really didn’t name
all the heroines in this series after pop stars. Honestly, I
didn’t. (Only
one
of them was named after a pop star, but
it wasn’t Ciara. You can find out which one in the “Making of”
features in
Forever His
and
Timeless
.)

Actually, I had an unusually hard time
naming the heroine of this book. She was just “princess” in the
first drafts. Then she was Chantal for a while, but that didn’t
work. I tried Allegra, Juliana, Gwyndolen, Carina, Kassia,
Gianna…nothing seemed to fit her.

In the end, I named her after a perfume. I
saw an ad in a magazine that showed a woman wrapped in a fur throw,
wearing nothing but Ciara perfume. The image and the name suited my
heroine perfectly. Still, I hesitated because a secondary character
in
Forever His
is named Fiara, and I didn’t want to create
confusion. In the end, I decided to just go for it. Ciara fit my
princess better than any other name I had considered.

World-famous pop star Ciara was still an
unknown middle-school student when this book was first published,
so the two are completely unrelated. I do think it’s kind of fun,
though, that my Ciara also happens to be a musician.

Challenges

You may ask—and it’s a fair question—why
His Forbidden Touch
isn’t a paranormal when the Stolen
Brides books that come before and after it are.

The short answer: my editor made me do
it.

The long answer is a rather long story, all
about the challenges of writing for a New York publishing house.
Feel free to skip this part if you’d rather not venture into the
gritty, mean streets of Manhattan publishing. It’s kinda dark and
scary in there. This is not the pretty part of our
behind-the-scenes tour.

On the other hand, if you’ve wondered why so
many published authors are going indie these days, this story may
provide some illumination.

Still with me? Okay, we’ll keep rolling.
Remember to keep your hands and feet inside the ride until the tour
bus comes to a complete stop.

And please don’t feed the editors. Some of
them bite.

Avon Books published my debut novel in 1991
and by the time I wrote this book in 1996, I had been under
contract with them for five years. For the first three of those
years, I had a marvelous editor who never worried about the fact
that my “historical romantic suspense” novels didn’t really fit the
Avon mold. She loved my voice, allowed me to take risks, and
granted me a degree of creative freedom that I would never
experience again.

It pains me to admit that I didn’t fully
appreciate her until after she left. In 1994, I had just signed a
new multi-book contract with Avon when she accepted a position
elsewhere. I was assigned to a different editor. A high-ranking
editor who had strong opinions about what a historical romance
novel “should” be.

An editor who didn’t like my voice or my
style at all.

This editor was determined to squish me into
the Avon mold. By any means necessary. For my own good.

She wanted me emulate her favorite Avon
author, whom she mentioned frequently and by name. She encouraged
me to stop choosing “different” settings and switch to Scotland or
Regency England. She wanted me to cut the action and adventure and
suspense. And eliminate what she called my “sitting and thinking
scenes,” where the characters think about their feelings for each
other (which she called “a bad habit” of mine). She insisted they
should just say it all in dialogue. The more dialogue, the better.
She wanted witty ballroom banter and plenty of it.

Above all, she wanted charm and sweetness
and light. Nothing violent or “dark.” And the hero and heroine
needed to meet by page five.

In
His Forbidden Touch
, she asked
me to cut the entire Prologue and replace it with “something
charming.” She suggested a scene of Ciara and Christophe as
children, playing in the woods together, maybe gathering
flowers.

She asked me to add Ciara to the meeting
between Royce and King Aldric in chapter two, because chapter three
is much too late for the hero and heroine to meet in a romance
novel.

She wanted the heroine to have some kind of
“charming, funny habit,” like sneezing all the time, except that
Ciara would never have a handkerchief, so she would constantly have
to ask Royce for one. So charming!

This, dear reader, is why published authors
are jumping at the chance to go indie.

Never—
never
—again will I be forced
to work with an editor who is determined to eradicate my voice and
my style from my work. Who tries to convince me that all my
strengths are weakness. Who demands changes that would wreck my
books and disappoint my readers.

If you’ve read
HFT
(and I hope that
you have), you’ll notice that I didn’t make a single one of the
changes listed above. It was an exhausting battle that went on for
weeks, but I managed to preserve everything I considered
essential.

Still, my agent gently suggested that I
cooperate in
some
way. “Be a team player.” (That’s one of
my least favorite publishing-industry phrases, along with “France
doesn’t sell” and “We’ll do a big push on your
next
book.”)

In the spirit of cooperation, I cut 34 pages
of narrative and added 10 pages of dialogue. I also complied with
one of my editor’s requests: “Put a dog in it.”

She couldn’t really explain why she wanted a
dog in the book. She just felt strongly that there should be a
dog.

I considered that the least damaging of all
her suggestions. So I did it.

Ciara’s puppy, the one who makes her first
appearance in chapter seven? She wasn’t my idea. That’s my editor’s
dog.

Yes, I was tempted to delete the dog when I
started working on this new edition. But I just didn’t have the
heart to kill her off. She’s kinda cute, and I had given her a
tiny
role to play in the plot in chapter ten. So Hera was
allowed to stay.

I’m actually able to laugh about the whole
thing now, as I sit here reading that editor’s revision notes from
so long ago. But at the time, it was no laughing matter. My three
years with this editor left me feeling bruised and battered. She
never stopped trying to remake me in her own image.

She’s also the reason why
His Forbidden
Touch
is not a paranormal. That was one rule she refused to
bend: Avon did not want me to write any more paranormal romances
because “there’s just no market for paranormal romance.”

No market for paranormals. Yes, that was the
conventional thinking, back before
Twilight
turned the
entire publishing industry upside down and the undead took over the
romance genre. Today, Avon has a large and thriving paranormal
romance program.

Unfortunately for me, I was just slightly
ahead of my time.

His Forbidden Touch
was never meant
to be the next book in the Stolen Brides series after
Forever
His
. I had submitted the proposal for
Timeless
first.

My editor hated the idea. She gave me one
choice: she would let me write
Timeless
—as long as I
completely removed the paranormal element and made it a “normal”
historical romance.

I called my agent to discuss my options. The
paranormal element is the heart of
Timeless
. I wasn’t
about to just yank it out. Rather than make such a devastating
change, I told my agent to pull the proposal.

Then I asked her to being planning my escape
from Avon. (As I recall, my language during that phone conversation
was slightly less dainty and more colorful.)

I had reached the end of my rope. I couldn’t
be the author Avon wanted me to be. And I wasn’t willing to twist
myself into a pretzel anymore to please them. I didn’t want to be a
synthetic imitation of some
other
author—no matter how
many books that other author might be selling. I wanted to be me.
Genuine, authentic, 100% me.

But I was still under contract to Avon for
one more book, and I had a deadline. The clock was ticking. And
Avon insisted on a book with no paranormal elements.

So I set Avril’s book aside and started
His Forbidden Touch
.

A few months later, my editor was
shocked—shocked!—when I left Avon and sold
Timeless
to
Dell.

I’ll share the rest of the story in the
“Making of” chat in
Timeless
.

Joys

The greatest, and most surprising, joy of
HFT
for me is how much I still love it, even after all the
editorial battles and turmoil that went into creating it. I’m so
glad that I stuck to my guns and made
His Forbidden Touch
the adventurous romantic suspense I wanted it to be.

In the spring of 2011, when I made the
decision to try my hand at e-publishing, I knew that I wanted to
release my medieval series first. The Stolen Brides books are some
of my personal favorites, and two of them are paranormals, which is
a hot genre with readers right now. So that was an easy
decision.

But next I needed to sit down to read all
four books—and I couldn’t decide which one to read first.

Falcon on the Wind
seemed like the
logical choice. But it was the first novel I ever wrote. I was
afraid it would be so bad, I would quit before I even started and
abandon the whole idea of e-publishing my books.

Forever His
also seemed like a good
choice. But it’s always been my personal favorite of all my books.
I was afraid it wouldn’t be nearly as good as I remembered, and I
would quit before I even started and abandon the whole idea of
e-publishing my books.

Yes, we writers are neurotic little bundles
of conflicting emotions. Seriously, we should all be kept under
lock and key. When we’re not having raging attacks of Godzilla-size
ego, we’re chewing ourselves to pieces with self-doubt. There is no
middle ground.

Anyway, I didn’t want to start by reading
either
FOTW
or
FH
. And at the time, Dell still
owned the rights to
Timeless
. I wasn’t sure yet if I would
even be
able
to indie publish that one. Which left me only
one choice.

I started my new e-book venture by sitting
down, taking a deep breath, and reading
His Forbidden
Touch
.

Within a few pages, I fell in love with
it.

I loved the hero. And the heroine. I loved
the conflicts and the adventure. I loved the chapter two scene
between Royce and King Aldric that I had fought so hard to protect.
The dialogue. The sensuality. The rebels! Even though I know how it
all turns out, I couldn’t put the darn book down. One morning, I
skipped a workout so I could keep reading.

The next day, I skipped another workout.

I’m a total gym rat these days and I
never
skip workouts. But these characters had become so
real, so important to me, I didn’t want to do anything but
read.

It was such a pleasant surprise.
His
Forbidden Touch
was definitely worthy of being published
again.

I
was worthy of being published
again.