Guest Post

Special Treat this week.   I have two guest interviews.

  

           Alayna-Renee Vilmont on Tuesday and now I have Stacy Bender today.   

Please take the time to ready both.  

Why did I write ‘Emerald Tears’? In all honesty, I can’t answer that question because I don’t really know myself. You see, when I moved to Cincinnati I wanted to start fresh and so I got rid of several things including my writing, what little I had on paper anyway, thinking that I would never write again. However, my mind is not equipped with an off switch. So the next year I found myself once again sitting down with a pen in my hand, a notebook in my lap, and overwhelming desire to put a story on paper. It a story that I wasn’t even sure where it was going.

I was on a Mickey Spillane reading kick trying to complete my Mike Hammer collection at the time and decided that I wanted the story that I was writing to be in the 1930’s in some unnamed city, with two good friends on different sides of the law. I had always loved the old black and white mobster movies so it seemed a good place to start. Then in walks the Sav’ine my science fiction element, that has everyone including the Sav’ine themselves trying to put together the pieces of a mystery perpetuated by someone know only as the Old Man. After I had a couple of notebooks filled with my chicken scratch, I tossed it on the bookshelf and forgot about the story for the next year when I was doing some cleaning. I debated on tossing the notebooks but then decided to enter the story into my computer fortunately and for the next few years, I fiddled with the story adding or adjusting things. I even split the chapters into different files with odd labels to help me remember what was in them. These later became the chapter headings when I forgot to remove them and are now a reoccurring theme in the series.

I had never attempted to publish the book or any other book before and neither did anyone else I knew at the time, so when I came across a book in the library on ‘how to’, I decided to try it and let me tell you that the first rejection letter is a killer. If you can get past the first one, you’re doing ok but the first one hurts to no end. Still I had no luck but resigned myself to keep poking at it. I figured that I had time. Then as luck would have it, a friend of mine asked someone she knew if they had any advice to give me. Cathy was starting her own publishing company at the time and asked to have a copy of the story. The rest, you can say was history, as for turning ‘Emerald Tears’ into a series I never meant to but then I started thinking of my Sav’ine Guard and wondering why they were the way they were and questions like ‘what if?’ kept coming to mind along with how they relate to one another and those around them. Therefore, I wrote ‘Hands of Onyx’ to explain the clans and where the Sav’ine fit into the scheme of things. My reasoning was that the Sav’in needed each other but then I thought what if one was separated? How would they survive? Consequently, I wrote ‘Diamond Mind’. (Due out fall 2013)

I’m still asking what if questions in regards to the Sav’ine but I’m also working on other stories as the ideas catch me. ‘Ursa Kane’ I found gathering dust on my hard drive the only story to escape the purge. ‘Real Men Don’t Wax’ was written for a friend after a conversation about romance novels. She was also the one who introduced me to my publisher so it was agreed to release it on her birthday. Like I said my brain doesn’t have a off switch so there are other stories I have running around in my head that I hope to eventually have on paper. The biggest kick for me is to have someone enjoy them.

http://stacybender.wordpress.com/