Jennifer St. Giles Guest Blogging and Book Giveaway

Tighten The Screws Until It Hurts.
Hey, is there anyone else out there like me? I’ve always seen my life and the lives that other people live as worlds apart. Like they’re out there smooth sailing while I seem to hit every bump in the road and then some. I’ll take a four hour slice of my day for an example.

(Mind you, I am on a killer deadline, I leave for a conference tomorrow and have nothing prepared for it, I have a kid home sick, the house is in the middle of being repainted, and hurricane-now storm--Faye has sat over my house for three days, pouring buckets of rain.)
Now back to my day…

I’m furiously typing along on Bride of the Wolf (Book 4 in the Shadowmen Series 5/09), digging deep for how a blind, injured Blood Hunter from the spirit world who is chained in a dungeon will save my heroine from the damning fangs of a Vladarian Vampire-and his other penetrating thing we won’t mention now-when the phone rings AGAIN, jerking me from my writing focus that I’m already clinging to with my fingernails. No, it’s not the cable company, the charity drive, the political poll, or a chatty family member, it’s my daughter this time.

She’s had a tire blowout on then interstate. Thankfully she was at an off ramp as was able to get mostly out of danger. My husband is on a major conference call, so I nab my son out of the shower and we hop in the car, heading to the rescue. Reaching my daughter, we find her precariously stuck mostly off the roadway, but not quite with a ditch yawning to her right.

"Why didn’t you pull further down, all the way off the road?"

"The car won’t go. It’s stuck"

"The car won’t go?"

The car wouldn’t go. We put our city minded heads together and finally realize we can put the car into 4-wheel drive. So my son gets behind the wheel and we follow with flashers blinking until we move the fifty yards to a pull off where the tire can be safely changed. Along the way, bits and pieces of metal are falling off the flat tire and there’s loud screeching. I’m thinking OMG, what’s wrong with the car. It’s only a few years old, nowhere near as old as the car that the axle broke on last year. We get the tire off and discover the wheel rim thingy that the tire goes on had completely broken apart. To make along story short, 5 auto stores and 2 dealerships, and 4 hours later we get the part we need and put the spare tire on. What happened, you ask?

Screws. A screw didn’t get tightened as tight as it needed to be, vibrated out, and everything went to hell in hand basket. (By the way, this happens when you’re writing a book. If you don’t tighten the screws on your characters and dig deep for the conflict, making them hurt, then your story kind of falls apart like the wheel did and you have to spend hours running around, rewriting) Back to the wheel now. You see, with all of the changes in the economy, my DH (dear hubby) as been on a money saving campaign, a good thing, but---the brakes on the car needed doing a few weeks ago and to save money he and my sons did the job. Invariably my husband was called back to another business call and he left my oldest son in charge of finishing up the job. Which if he’d ever done the job before might have been fine, but he was new at this and likely didn’t realize he needed to tighten the screws until it hurt. Thus the brake mechanism loosened and rubbed the wheel until it fell apart.

This all brings me to the original title of my post, which was Kiss Him or Kill Him. (We won’t bring my DH into that equation at the moment.) where I was going to tell you about my heroine’s dilemma in Kiss of Darkness (Book 3 of the Shadowmen Series 4/09). The hero, an ex-special ops soldier, has been bitten by a vampire that puts his soul on a fast track to hell. He is determined to take as many bad asses with him. Only one problem, he’s in love with a woman with secrets who won’t let him go. As he battles the evil side, he has to fight the darkness growing inside him or he’ll condemn her to share his doomed fate. Little does he know that the heroine is a real angel with a big problem-- if she can’t save the hero then she’ll have to kill him, just as she had to kill her vampire bitten husband six years ago.

So, is anyone else’s life like that? Not the Kiss Him or Kill Him vampire thing, but other part?
Let me know!

Who are your favorite characters on which authors have "tightened the screws until it hurts"? At the end of the day I will give away three books. Touch a Dark Wolf, Lure of the Wolf. Silken Shadows.
Happy Reading
Jennifer St. Giles

Touch A Dark Wolf Book 1 of the Shadowmen Series
Lure of the Wolf Book 3 of the Shadowmen Series.
Other Books: The Mistress of Trevelyan, His Dark Desire, Midnight Secrets, Darkest Dreams, Silken Shadows.