Daily Archives: May 17, 2009

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The Write Way……….

May 17, 2009 by A Slice of Orange in category The Write Way by Maureen Child tagged as continuities, Maureen Child, Silhouette Desire, the Hudson's

My turn to blog, so I’m thinking…a little shameless self promotion!

On June 9, my Desire SEDUCED INTO A PAPER MARRIAGE will hit the shelves. This book was a lot of fun to write for a couple of reasons.

First, well I love writing Desires, anyway! But secondly, it’s the final book in the Hudson continuity. In this book, all of the story lines are wrapped up, we see where the whole family is and everybody leaves satisfied. We hope.

The thing about continuities…You get to write a long throughline with five other writers. Silhoutte gives you the ‘bible’–character descriptions, where they all live, what the family is like and what the storylines for each book in the series is. Now there’s a lot of room to play around, but you have to maintain the stories that the editors have come up with for this particular in line series.

Oh, you can change your character’s name, or description. You can even finesse a few other small things, though you’ll have to talk it all over with the editor who wrote that bible. And you for sure have to keep the other authors in the loop.

And the email loops can get crazy as we all define the characters we’ve been given. Is your heroine crabby? A smart aleck? Does she dress well or live in jeans? What’s her dog’s name? All of these tiny things that add up to a living breathing character have to be kept track of–because trust me when I say, readers will call you on any mistakes!

In SEDUCED INTO A PAPER MARRIAGE, Devlin Hudson and his wife Val are already well known by the people who’ve been following the series. Silhouette did something fabulous in this continuity. They had me write four extra scenes–sort of prequel scenes to my book. These scenes have been at the back of all the other books in the series……. So hopefully, everyone will rush right out to see what happens to Val and Dev!

Continuity series are fun AND challenging. And isn’t that why we all wanted to be writers in the first place?

Maureen Child is the author of more than 100 romance novels and novellas. At the moment, she’s trying to break in a brand new computer who doesn’t seem very friendly….

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