Katie Allen-Final Day

*sniffle*

Day Three, and you're still with me? I am honored and grateful. For that, two hotties.

When I was once gainfully employed as an engineer, one of my male coworkers read my first book, Seeing Blind, and asked (with a smirk, of course. Guys can't read sex scenes, think of reading sex scenes or think about people writing sex scenes without smirking. It's like a biological reaction.) which of my real-life boyfriends inspired the character of Ty (hero and sheriff hottie). I blinked at him in confusion.

“None of them, of course,” I told him. “If he actually existed, I would've married him.”

Now it was his turn to be confused. If I didn't know Ty, how did I write him? I tried to explain that the characters are already in my head; I just have to get them down on paper. Something like that magazine article will trigger an idea, and then the character will pop out, pretty much fully formed. With Ty, his likes and dislikes, his good and bad traits, what made him laugh and what made him cry were already decided. What I had to figure out was how to bring him to life.
I think that, when I write a story, the hero is made up of thousands of snippets of other men--movie or book characters, acquaintances, friends and friends' boyfriends, and yes, even my former boyfriends. I take that man's temper and combine it with this man's sweetness, mix in a tiny bit of this other guy's sense of humor--all without realizing what I'm doing. Whatever the inspiration happens to be, it reaches into the dark, dusty corners of my brain and pulls out a character that I didn't even realize I was creating as I went about on the normal, boring, everyday business of life.

What this does is create a character that actually behaves like a human being. He reacts and talks and falls in love in a way that makes sense because he is made up in my brain from bits of real-life people. One of my favorite compliments to get from people is that my characters are true to life. I'm not trying to write deep, cerebral works of literature; I'm trying to write a good story with characters that resonate with readers. The way I do that is take everything--the parts and pieces of my characters, as well as the inspiration which pulls these imaginary people from my brain and plops them onto the computer screen--from the everyday and ordinary part of life. The down and dirty part. The real part. And that is what allows these characters to live.
Thanks for putting up with my babble (and I do like to babble)!

If you haven't had quite enough of me yet, you can check out my Website.

Katie Allen-Day Two

Here she is again! Still talking inspiration & cracking me up! :)

Welcome back! You actually came back! What a relief--sometimes, I'll be rambling about something when I realize that everyone has left the room. It's a little embarrassing, not to mention the damage it does to my self-esteem. Here's a pretty picture to thank you for returning:

Before I get started, here's a Website that made me laugh:

http://www.textsfromlastnight.com/. Thank you, Emma Petersen (writer extraordinaire), for sending me this link. Sure, it wasted a couple hours of my time when I could've been doing stuff like, oh, writing this blog, maybe, but I didn't plan to sleep tonight anyway.

Okay! Here we go. I was talking about how all my characters start off at a pretty boring place. Are they comfortable? Most of them, sure. Are they happy? Not really. Are they fulfilled? Nope. And that's where the story begins.

I tend to get inspiration from tiny things (I'd use a grain of sand in an oyster turning into a pearl metaphor here, but I thought it'd be a little self-aggrandizing to refer to my books as pearls). Inspiration for Breaking the Silence struck as I was reading a months-old, tattered magazine while sitting in a dentist's office waiting room that smelled like fluoride and ground teeth. I ran across an article analyzing the way that couples sleep. The article theorized that sleeping positions said a lot about two people's relationship. Spooning meant one thing, back-to-back meant another, head on the shoulder a third. Face-to-face, the article stated, meant that the couple was overly attached, in love to the point of unhealthiness.

This caught my eye, of course, since I am all about the obsessive attachments. (My editor asked if she should worry about me, since so many of my characters are slightly (ahem) dysfunctional. I told her not to worry; except for that inferior T.V., I had a pretty ideal childhood.) In that dentist's office, I started thinking about what would connect two people so strongly, and the seed of an idea for Breaking the Silence was planted.

As I said before, there was no grand inspiration, no swelling music as a brilliant disco-ball of a light bulb went off over my head while my muse danced around and wept with joy. Nope, just a pop-psychology article in a fluffy women's magazine, read while waiting to get plaque scraped off my teeth. Down and dirty. Don't say I didn't warn you.

This one's for the guys this time.

When I come back tomorrow, I'll chat about why down and dirty inspiration is a good thing.

Katie Allen-Day One

Hey all! Bridget here. I am so excited to have Katie Allen on our blog. She wrote one of my favorite books, Breaking The Silence, and has written some wonderful love stories. Without further ado, Katie Allen...

*fanfare*

Inspiration. It sounds so lofty, as if choirs of muses descend upon the ethereal, high-brow writer to gift her with their…I don't know--muse-iness? For me, inspiration is pretty pedestrian. It could even be described as down and dirty. This is fitting, as I do write down and dirty books (emphasis on the dirty). If the muses were to descend upon me, they would find me cranky and mussed, sitting sideways on the couch with a snoring dog sprawled across my feet. In an attempt at full disclosure, I have to add that I would probably have a smear of chocolate across my cheek and the dog would be snoring and farting.

Do you now wish I'd never drawn this mental picture? Yeah, well, just stick with me for a moment before you run to scrub down your brain. I've painted a pretty unromantic portrait, right? Wrong. And don't give me that “the reader is always right” line, either--I've hijacked this blog and I'm running with it. So anyway (you will soon learn, dear readers, that I'm the Queen of Distraction, the Empress of Random Segues and the High Priestess of Rambling Sub-Plots (probably the reason I couldn't write a short to save my life)), I think that starting with the most ordinary characters, on the most ho-hum day, in the most average place, creates the backdrop for some of the most heart-wrenching, deeply felt romance stories.

Here's where I give your reading muscles a break and hand you some eye candy, in the form of one of my book covers. What? Shameless self-promotion, you say? Never. Oh, by the way, Seeing Blind is out in both e-book (http://www.ellorascave.com/) and print (EC or Amazon).

Okay--back with me? Good. We were talking about boringness. The thing is, when my characters start out with their pencil-pushing jobs and stagnant sex lives and their Friday nights alone with Ben and Jerry, what happens next--a mystery or a hunky sex god or (usually) both--is so much more life-changing and dramatic.

To use a metaphor (I looove metaphors), I grew up with a black and white television. A small black and white television. All my friends had the big color TV sets, and my many siblings and I had to fight over which of the five and a half channels we would watch on our tiny, antenna-topped, black and white dinosaur.

We whined about it, of course, but what watching Scooby Doo and Magnum, P.I. in shades of gray did (besides encouraging me to be a reader) was to make the occasional time we went to the movie theater an amazing, exhilarating experience. Everything on that movie screen was huge and vivid and breathtaking, and I don't know if I would have appreciated it quite so much if the TV at home hadn't been so small and grey.

What makes romance so very wonderful is that it takes the dull, everyday grind of life and lights it up. It colors it with excitement and passion and love, with the stomach-fizzing knowledge that there is someone who wants you as desperately as you want him (or her or them). These books make it seem possible that, in the middle of paying bills or vacuuming dirt from the plant the cat just knocked over or having a root canal, you really could be swept away, that the hottie of your dreams could drop in your lap at any moment and break the monotony of the boring, unavoidable life-stuff with spine-melting passion.

Break time! Since you sat through one of my metaphors, here are two pretty, pretty men for your reward.


Good? Okay. I'm back tomorrow to talk about what this long-ass post I wrote today really does have to do with inspiration.