EQ Welcomes Missy Martine!

EQ Welcomes Missy Martine!

Author Interview Series

EQ: What has been the most exquisite moment of your life?

Missy: I spent twenty years of my life in a bad relationship.  I lived with a man who convinced me that nothing about me was special, or worth loving.  When I finally pulled together the courage to leave him I was convinced I would be alone for the rest of my life, and that was okay.  Being alone is so much better than being lonely, and hurt.  I was content living alone for the first time in my life when my best friend introduced me to the internet.  It was an inexpensive way for us to keep in touch since she lived in another state.  She directed me to a site called Friendfinders.  They had this ridiculous chat room that looked like the ocean.  You choose the color fish you wanted to be and then your words appeared under that fish.  I thought it was ridiculous.  They had other, more dignified chat rooms, but my friend loved the fish.  One afternoon the ocean room was down so I logged into one of their other rooms just to see what it was like.  There were two people chatting when I signed in.  I lurked, watching their words, until nigel1960 brought me into the conversation.  He showed real interest in what I had to say on many different subjects and pretty soon, we were chatting alone.  That was in May of 1997.  We exchanged email addresses and wrote long letters daily for the next month.  Then, we exchanged phone numbers and our phone bills soared.  He was living in Oklahoma and I was in Tennessee.  In November we made the decision to meet face-to-face with each of us driving halfway.  When we met in West Memphis, Arkansas we were already in love even though neither of us had seen the other’s face.  I moved to Oklahoma in December and we were married the following July.  We’re still together today.  He’s my true soul mate in every sense of the word.  I consider Nigel’s first message in that chat room as the most exquisite moment of my life.

EQ: Which of your characters do you most connect with and why?

Missy: I feel the closest to Cass Abernathy, the main character of “Table for Three”.  That book was loosely based on my own first marriage.  Like Cass, I had an abusive husband that pretty much controlled my life.  I wanted people to understand that it’s never too late to turn your life around and find real love.  You just have to be willing to open your heart to the possibility.  Like Cass, I was reluctant to move on and have new experiences.  And, like Cass, I found myself falling in love with a much younger man.  The biggest difference in her story and mine—I ended up with one younger husband while she ended up with identical twins!

EQ: Describe how you came up with the plot of your novel.

Missy: All of my books have been different, but developing “Anna Doubles Down” is perhaps the most interesting.  My husband and I were on vacation, taking our Jeep off-road all over Nevada.  We stumbled across the sign for the ghost town of Hamilton by accident and couldn’t resist exploring it.  There’s practically nothing left of the town itself.  But the old dirt roads still remain and I followed one of them to the Belmont Mill while hubby explored the town’s old cemetery.  The mill was still standing, at least most of it was.  The windows were all broken out while the ropes from the ore car still ran from the top floor, over the tops of the trees, disappearing up the side of the mountain where the Seligman mine was located.  It was eerie, standing there, listening to the wind.  The upper floors of the old barracks had shadows I couldn’t explain, and it seemed as if the old building was whispering.  I don’t think I’ve ever felt so alone.  Then I began wondering what it must have been like to live back when the mill was full of hopeful young men, each yearning to make his fortune.  I walked further down the road and stopped to listen to the sounds of the woods and the idea came to me.  What would I do if I suddenly woke up in 1871 with all of my knowledge of the future?  By the time I made it back to the cemetery, and my husband, Anna had been born.  I took the names of the former residents of Hamilton from the headstones, and we headed home so I could begin my research on the old town.  Many of the characters I created actually lived during the time I based the book.  And that’s how “Anna Doubles Down” became a story.

 EQ: Tell us about your most recent release.

Missy: My most recent release is the second book in my new Wind River Pack series.  It’s called “An Officer and Two Gentlemen.”  The series picks up twenty-five years after the last book of the Wolfen Heritage series with the children of the alpha’s family.  In this book, Synia Wind River and Kinnith Kowana are asked to travel to Tennessee to protect a young woman.  She’s the daughter of a close friend of the leader of the shifter’s National Council.  Despite the fact that one of them is a wolf and one a falcon, the two men are mates.  They’ve kept it secret fearing their pack won’t accept them.  Both are surprised when they meet Kati and discover she’s also their mate.

Katherine Mathews is a New York policewoman who’s hiding out in Tennessee while she recovers from a gunshot wound she received in an undercover operation.  She managed to take out her assailant, but he was the oldest son of the head of the biggest drug syndicate in New York and they want revenge.  When she meets the bodyguards her father sends, she’s astounded.  She’s just learning to accept their differences when her enemies make their move.  She’ll have to make a hard choice to keep her new family safe.

Check out Missy's Books:

Table for Three

Discovering Her Wolfen Heritage

Denying His Wolfen Heritage

Changing Their Wolfen Heritage

Catch Her When She Falls

The Magic in Her Gift

Anna Doubles Down

When Kat’s Away

Forever Eva

Space Bride

My Chameleon Loves

Meredith’s Pride

Star Wishes

Blind Acceptance

If you want to know more about Missy's books, or just keep track of her, here are some places you can look:

Website:  http://www.missymartine.com/home

Facebook:  https://www.facebook.com/missy.martine

Twitter:  https://twitter.com/Missy_Martine

Amazon:  http://www.amazon.com/Missy-Martine/e/B00328055M/ref=sr_tc_2_0?qid=1382534258&sr=1-2-ent

The Genesis of a Book - Domingo's Angel by Jenny Twist

DOMINGO'S ANGEL – by Jenny Twist

a novel about the Spanish Civil War

 I retired and moved to Spain eleven years ago and I am ashamed to say that before I came to live here I knew nothing of Spanish history other than than the stuff we were taught at school. I knew that it was the Spanish Ferdinand and Isabella who financed Christopher Colombus and so conquered the Americas. I knew about the Spanish Inquisition and I knew about the Spanish Armada.

But I had no idea, for example, that Spain was under Moorish rule for hundreds of years and had a rich heritage of Moorish architecture and culture. I had not realised that the same Ferdinand and Isabella finally drove the last of the Moors from Spain and instituted a harsh and repressive regime which kept the Spanish people in fuedal  poverty right up to the twentieth century.

And nobody told me about the war.

I was horrified to find out about the dreadful atrocities committed by both sides during the Spanish Civil War and the appalling cruelty perpetrated against the Spanish people under Franco's fascist dictatorship – which lasted from 1939 till his death in 1975. I had actually been to Spain on holiday while he was still in power!

I didn’t actually set out initially to write a novel about it.

What happened was I wrote a short story and it grew. But as it grew I realized I had a lot to say.

The first chapter is essentially the original short story and tells of an English woman who came to Southern Spain in the early 1950s. Tourism had barely touched the country at that time and the people were only just beginning to recover from the deprivations of the war. She arrived in a remote mountain village and caused some consternation amongst the inhabitants, who had never met a foreigner before. But Domingo, the goatherd, fell in love with her. When she introduced herself, he believed she was saying she was an angel (‘Soy Ángela’ in Spanish can either mean ‘I am Angela’ or ‘I am an angel’). Hence the title of the story.

I entered the story for a competition and it was short-listed, which was encouraging, but didn't win.

In the meantime, I had become more and more intrigued by one of the characters, Rosalba, the shopkeeper, and I found myself writing a sequel and then another, and before long it came home to me that I what I had here was an embryo novel.

Because it was initially a series of short stories, the first few chapters, to a large extent, stand as individual stories; and I did, indeed, publish them as such in a local magazine.

But it wasn't too difficult to go over them later and make them into a more homogeneous whole. And as I learnt more and more about the history of my adopted country, I incorporated it into the novel, introducing past events through the memories of the major characters.

I had huge difficulty researching the history because there is so little written about it. You can find out a great deal in the way of historical background from books like 'The Spanish Civil War' by Anthony Beever, which has a lot of (some might say rather too much)  information about what went on in the major cities. But there is virtually nothing written about what went on in the little villages, and the people are very reluctant to talk about it. It was a nightmare for them. Brother fought against brother, and in Spain the family is everything.

I relied on what I knew about my own friends – the story of Salva the Baker, for example, who was imprisoned for years for giving bread to the starving children, is true. I also transposed some of the real events from the history books to my own imaginary village.

But then, after I had finished the novel, I discovered a wonderful book by David Baird – ‘Between Two Fires,' which is the history of his own white village of Frigiliana. It contains the actual testimony of those who survived. Most of these witnesses were already old men and women when they told their stories and many of them had died before the book was published. If I had known about it when I was writing Domingo's Angel, it would have saved me months of work. As it was, it proved invaluable to me as a way of checking that I had got it right.

I wrote to David when my own book was about to be published and asked whether he would mind me referring to him in my acknowledgements. He was, as I expected, very approachable and courteous. I hope a lot of people read his book. It is unique.

Some of the events in this story are bloodthirsty and shocking, but there is a lot of love in it too. I hope that I succeeded in portraying for my readers the cheerfulness, humour and exuberance of the Andalusian people. And it would be nice to think that it might do something to dispel some of the ignorance about this fascinating period of Spanish history.

If you would like to know a little bit more about Domingo's Angel, here is the blurb: 

DOMINGO’S ANGEL

When Angela turns up in a remote Spanish mountain village, she is so tall and so thin and so pale that everyone thinks she is a ghost or a fairy or the dreadful mantequero that comes in the night and sucks the fat from your bones.

But Domingo knows better. “Soy Angela,” she said to him when they met – “I am an angel.” Only later did he realise that she was telling him her name and by then it was too late and everyone knew her as Domingo’s Angel.

This is the story of their love affair. But it is also the story of the people of the tiny mountain village – the indomitable Rosalba - shopkeeper, doctor, midwife and wise woman, who makes it her business to know everything that goes on in the village; Guillermo, the mayor, whose delusions of grandeur are rooted in his impoverished childhood; and Salva the Baker, who risked his life and liberty to give bread to the starving children.

The events in this story are based on the real experiences of the people of the White Villages in Southern Spain and their struggle to keep their communities alive through the years of war and the oppression of Franco’s rule.

Published  by Melange Books 10th July 2011

http://www.melange-books.com/authors/jennytwist/twistdomingosangel.html

Available on Amazon and Kindle

http://www.amazon.com/Domingos-Angel-ebook/dp/B005EH5U8G/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&qid=1312020721&sr=8-5

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Domingos-Angel-ebook/dp/B005EH5U8G/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1312020847&sr=8-2

ISBN: 978-1-61235-202-2

You can follow me on:

my Website: https://sites.google.com/site/jennytwistauthor/

Amazon: amazon.com/author/jennytwist

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Jenny-Twist-Author/291166404240446

Goodreads Blog: http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/4848320.Jenny_Twist/blog

Twitter: https://twitter.com/#!/JennyTwist1

Or email me on casahoya@gmail.com

First Kiss Wednesday

Kisses are the mainstay of romance writing.  No matter how sweet or spicy our stories are, they usually involve at least a kiss or two.  And the first kiss is especially lovely - that first, soft touch of lips - or perhaps the kiss is fierce and hungry.  Maybe the characters murmur words of love or words of teasing while discovering the texture and taste of each other.  Maybe the only sounds they can emit are gentle, timorous moans or deep, throaty groans.

 

Okay, now that we've set the premise, here's what you can do for First Kiss Wednesdays.  In the comment box, give us a maximum of 300 words of the first kiss of a published work or a work-in-progress and one link to your website or blog or Amazon Author Page. 

 

Read and luxuriate in the glories of the first kiss...

Oh, and lips only...  ;-)

Set the Scene in Six Sentences - Sunday

One of the finest aspects of fiction writing is the ability to set the scene.  Characters act and react, but they don't do so in a vacuum.  In their world, they meet, fall in love, solve problems, sometimes horrendous problems.  Maybe it's a small town, maybe the big city, the green, humid jungle, dust-dry desert, a mountainous region.  On the sea.  Under the sea.  In space! 

Setting the scene is also done by using character dialogue to paint a picture of loveliness, danger, evil, trepidation, excitement, awe...

Give us six sentences that set the scene.  Set the Scene in Six Sentences - Sunday is a new opportunity on the Exquisite Quills! Blog to tout your talent.  How have you set the scene in your books?  How have you put the reader into the life of your characters?

Every Sunday, the blog will be open to six-sentence scene-setting.  Just post your six sentences, your name, and one link in the comment box.  We can't wait to read you!

Pass the word!  Open to all!