Book launch day

Today is launch day for my eBook, DEADLY STAR. Available on Amazon, BN.com, iTunes, Google, Sony and other platforms. The POD is scheduled for later in the year.

      For me, writing this story, writing any story for that matter, is all about editing and change—once you get through the concept and research stage, of course. Sometimes, I see a "need" to change a character's name, a story thread, a sentence structure, or, as is true for Deadly Star, the whole genre. 

Deadly Star didn't start off as a romance. Over the years' long course of writing and editing the manuscript, one of my critique partners thought the story might be marketed as an action/adventure ... another said it was a woman-in-peril ... a third said it's a political thriller. Someone even floated the idea that it was sci fi (it isn't).

Hoping for some critiques beyond my writer's group, I recklessly entered excerpts of the manuscript into two romance contests. The judges in each though the concept and the story were good, except it needed a happily ever after ending. (One judge wrote on her evaluation sheet that she felt like throwing the pages against the wall when she got to the end! That forced me to take another long look at what I had written. Yep, there was a good love story there. Yep, it could, indeed, work as a romance novel if I made a change, or three, or four within the manuscript and, of course, changed the ending.

I reworked it and submitted it to Crimson Romance. They offered me a contract about three weeks after I first submitted my e-query and synopsis, and I knew I'd stumbled (been pushed) into the correct genre.

Today's romance fans, I think, like to see their heroines as more life-like and a little flawed, someone they can relate to and also, perhaps, admire from afar. On the other hand, they still seem to expect their heroes to be nigh-unto perfect.

Deadly Star is not about a perfectly imperfect woman or a perfectly perfect man. It's about a vaguely dysfunctional couple who, when sharing an imminent danger, find common ground in their love for each other. 

Mirabel Campbell, the protagonist, is a little flawed—she's no longer a svelte twenty-something, no longer gaga in love with a husband, hasn't been in a real relationship for a long time, and is a bit of a nerd. But she's also sassy, clever, loyal, and determined. 

Robert O'Sullivan, known to everyone as Sully, is an exciting hero, a ruggedly handsome CIA agent assigned to protect Mirabel. On the flip side, he's a bit of a bad boy, a controller, and a liar.

The connection between these two disparate people  share in the beginning of Deadly Star is Mirabel's accidental sighting of a secret government satellite and the fact that they were once married ... to each other.

In Deadly Star, Mirabel and Sully rediscover their love in the midst of a story about awesome 21st Century technology and international political gangsterism—where a sociopath's money can build a bioweapon, buy a friend's loyalty, and hire an assassin.

I was amazed when Mother Nature recently gave the book a promo. The reality of the asteroid flyby and the meteor strike in Russia that no one saw coming seem to make a Deadly Star even more possible.

I hope readers find the story as enjoyable and intriguing to read as I did to write.

Now, you-all guys keep on keeping on, and I'll try to do the same. 

cj

PS:  Maybe it picked up a cue from me changing my mind, but now I have to figure out why this blog has decided to change its own background. Sorry about that