romancewithsass.com

Hi, and thanks so very much for having me today! My latest release, TIDE OF LIES, is a romantic suspense set at the beach. I happen to live a few minutes from one of the most gawhr-geous beaches anywhere (not that I'm partial, LOL) and love setting my books there. (My previous releases RUN TO YOU and FAMILIAR LIGHT are also beachy.) The spouse and I escape there every chance we get—check out the photo for a glimpse of our paradise, where yes, wild horses *do* roam—and, while I don't think our lives have ever been on the line like my characters'  have, the thrills never end. I hope you'll stick around for a glimpse of TIDE OF LIES . . . that is, if I don't scare you off first. LOL

Let's get to know Sarah!

Biggest joy as a writer?

Finishing a story. In my day to day life, nothing is ever finished. With six kids, laundry and dishes are never done. School work is never, ever done. Messes appear faster than I make the kids clean them up. While writing is probably never really *done* (there's always  more to learn), I can *finish* a story. It's an amazing feeling of accomplishment in a world usually lacking in finish lines. ;c)

Biggest challenge as a writer?

Consistency with putting time into my works-in-progress. I can devote a decent amount of time to writing each day, but I end up behind on the ol' to-do list and have to use my "writing" time for "other" things—replying to email, loading blogs, completing interviews, etc.

Favorite time of day to write.

My favorite time is actually morning, but it seldom happens. My younger children (23 months and 4 years) tend to get up pretty early and usually wake me up, and I can forget concentrating until they go to bed! LOL.

Describe your writing year so far and what's on the horizon.

TIDE OF LIES came out April 2, and I'm working to finish LAST CALL, a romantic suspense coming to For the Muse Publishing in a couple of months. (I *really* need to get it finished. AK!) I also want to write the sequel to HAWTHORNE—readers are demanding it—and have two more romantic suspense titles in the works, one of which will be a free read. I hope to complete and publish three more books this year.

Tell us something unexpected about yourself.

Longtime readers may already know this about me, but it never fails to surprise and it's just fun to tell, LOL. My husband and I had our first five children on purpose. Then I had my tubes tied . . . then we had another baby. We think we're done now . . . again.

When I die, I want people to say this about me . . .

Okay, slight tangent, but I want either "Told you I was sick" (if applicable) or "I've been waiting for you" or "What took you so long?" engraved on my headstone. And whatever you're thinking now that you've read this is probably exactly the right impression of the real me, LOL. I find the humor in pretty much anything, and I want to be remembered that way. ;c)

Do you use your personal sex life as fodder for your books?

My husband refers to himself as my research assistant, LOL. Truth is, I don't issue a play-by-play, but I do tap into those moments through my characters' emotions. My guy still gives me butterflies after more than 16 years together, and I use those somersaults to relate to my characters and hopefully enable readers to do the same.

The thing that makes me want to go postal...

Poor editing in a published work. I know we all make mistakes and things slip by the best of us, but when I see a published story positively seething with errors it makes me crazy. No matter what a writer's style or genre of preference, every story should have good editing. Or at least an attempt at editing, because glaring and frequent errors are pretty much inexcusable in my book. (And anyone else's, LOL!)

Still with me? I hope so! (I bet I lost someone at my funeral, LOL!) Here's a look at TIDE OF LIES, but before you go I'd like to thank you so very much for allowing me to be a small part of your day. Hope it's a great one!

TIDE OF LIES | blurb

A devastating secret. A shocking betrayal. A deadly obsession.

Haunted by three unsolved murders, Detective Holden Whitlow is stunned when his cold case takes a heated turn. Julia Cohen, his ex-lover, is back in town, and in the face of a brutal attack she's ready to run. No matter how tightly she holds her secrets, for Holden, turning away from the woman he's spent a decade trying to forget isn't any more an option than walking away from his job . . .even when it threatens to cost Julia her life.

Julia is still reeling from a past she can't bear to face. When she becomes the target of a killer, fate throws her back into Holden's arms, but she's yet to recover from a truth that has stripped her of everything—and everyone—she loves. Will she tell him the secret that will destroy him, or will her lie destroy them both?

BUY LINKS

NOBLE ROMANCE  https://www.nobleromance.com/Books/409/Tide-of-Lies

AMAZON (author link) http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B003WKYEJI

BARNES & NOBLE (author link) http://www.barnesandnoble.com/c/sarah-ballance

SARAH BALLANCE | bio & links

Sarah and her husband of almost fifteen what he calls "long, long" years live on the mid-Atlantic coast with their six young children, all of whom are perfectly adorable when they're asleep.  She often jokes that she writes to be around people who will listen to her, but her characters aren't much better than her kids.  Fortunately, her husband is quite supportive, having generously offered to help her research "the good parts" . . .  and she's never had to ask twice.

WEBSITE  http://www.sarahballance.com/

BLOG  http://sarahballance.wordpress.com/

AMAZON  http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B003WKYEJI

TWITTER  http://twitter.com/#!/SarahBallance

FACEBOOK  http://www.facebook.com/sarah.ballance.author.news 

  The recent success of a BDSM erotica book that is extremely poorly written and very predictable created a lot of discussion among authors. We all asked why we should work so hard to polish every manuscript or learn the craft as much as possible, when 50 Shades of Shit can have meteoric rise to the NY Times bestseller lists and get a movie contract.

It's disheartening, that's for sure. Like many authors, I know I've got better written books than that one, and have yet to achieve anywhere near the level of success that book and many others have. Can I change that? I doubt it.  I look at it this way. The reader wants what the reader wants and frankly, without a big publisher behind me, pimping my name and title from one end of the Earth to another, I'm pretty much on my own.

Karma has a lot to do with it, too.

Wrong place, wrong time – you're hit by a beer truck.

Right place, right time – you have a bestseller.

When Hard as Teak soared to #3 on the gay/lesbian charts, I was thrilled and stunned and, well, clueless. Is it a good book? Yup. How did it get that kind of attention from an unknown author in that subgenre? Karma.

I believe that my other gay male romance enjoys better success because of Teak, but the reader still has to be convinced to buy the book. No two of my books are the same. The story may continue, but there's going to be very different elements. And that might not appeal to the readers who want more like the last book. I think stories that are similar are boring, so I don't write them.

Writing is a solitary effort for me. When I conceive the story, I don't think about the reader until I'm deep into the writing. As the story really unfolds and I know my characters better, I'm thinking about how the reader will perceive them. Will they react the way I want them to? Will they think the plot is predictable (God, I hope not!)? Sometimes I think I've covered my bases, anticipated reader reactions, and I've still been off base.

How do I know? Readers told me. They comment on my books and I try to read and learn from those reviews. Many of my colleagues don't acknowledge reviews or comment on them. It's a personal decision I'm not going to debate – but I at least say thank you when I find a review. You spent time and money with me (yes, I take it personal – it's not just a product) and good or bad, I appreciate that. Some say authors like J.K. Rowling and Tom Clancy don't bother with their reviews. Well, hell no. They have teams of publicists to do it for them, but I don't think for a minute that they are arrogant enough not to care what readers think. Readers get you there…they take you down, too.

Readers have suggested ways I could have improved the story and asked for a new book based on a character they liked. I have granted some of those requests – Love Bites: Dangerous Love and Krewe Daddy are recent examples of reader requests. I can't fix what is already published, but sometimes I've seen a consistent negative comment about my work. I can choose to ignore that or I can consider who my audience really is. It's not me. It's not my publisher. It's you, the reader. You hold a lot of power.

Maybe you've never thought of it quite that way. Publishers make decisions about which book contracts to offer us based on what you're buying. They want to make money by selling books. Duh.  This is a business fraught with negativity. Poorly received books aren't likely to get a contract for a sequel. And, maybe the author won't get another contract either. When you slam a book – not just give it a poor rating, but a deep review that rends the fabric of the work unfairly - you could be negatively affecting a writer's career. One bad review isn't going to do it, but sometimes there's a pack mentality and before you know it, that book's chance of success could be down the drain.

Now come on, you have to have thick skin to be doing this, right? Sure. But remember there's a beating heart behind that book and the story was written for you with every hope and desire that you'd love the book and send it soaring to the top of the charts. And that same negativity has sometimes created such interest that sales soar. Go figure.

I believe in Karma. While I wonder how a book makes the bestseller list when it's so far below usual standards, I have to remind myself it's about sales. There's no accounting for what readers love or hate. One day, I hope it'll be my turn. So, in the meantime, I'm going to keep crafting the best books I can. I won't lower my standards and I won't stop listening to readers.

Thank you for buying my books and being a fan. You rock.

Until the next time.

Margie

US customers can find all my romances on Amazon. UK customers click here.

*Waves* Hello everyone! Thanks for coming by today. And, thank you Madame Margie for hosting me! You don’t mind if I help myself to the contents of your fridge while I’m here, do ya? Uhm, if so, I may have to reimburse you for a soda and a few slices of pie.

   I was wondering what to write about and wracking my brains this morning. I was outside, watching the sun come up, the colours on the clouds as summer wars with winter and autumn tentatively holds on as victor of the season of the day. It was a beautiful morning, even with the loud traffic from the two main highways that I live very close to, and I could smell the scent of the sea blowing in on the breeze.

I live in Adelaide, capital city of the state of South Australia, and, like all Australian capital cities (except for Canberra), it’s a coastal city. Most of the major cities are coastal, which means that we love our beaches. We happen to be blessed with a national coastline that varies between gorgeous, paradise, and heavenly. It’s not uncommon to get sea breezes here, there’s really nothing like the scent of the sea as you go about your day.

Margie said to me, as we were talking about travel, that she couldn’t imagine living somewhere without snow. This led me to remember that I have only seen snow once in my entire life, and I’ll be 40 this year. Australia isn’t really renowned for its snow; we’re known for our deserts and our beaches and yes, our very weird and frightening mass murders, too. (No country is perfect, what can I say. Don’t believe me about the murders? Watch the movies “Snowtown” – based on a true story or “Wolf Creek”, also based on a true story.)

Anyway, snow. I was in Victoria in my final year of high school, as part of my high school’s annual sporting exchange with a pair of Victorian private high schools. The boy’s school had come to Adelaide that year, and we girls had gone over to Melbourne to do battle against the girl’s school. I was on the debating team. On the way back to Adelaide, we had an excursion to the Victorian Alps, the snowfields that are so popular with snow fans, along with the New South Wales snowfields. This was my sole experience with snow.

What I learnt about snow is that it’s hard, cold and wet. And that tobogganing is an activity best done when there isn’t a tree to crash into close by. Odds are that you – or rather, I and my friend – will crash into that tree, every time.

Friends overseas always express surprise that I’ve only seen snow once in my life. I didn’t fully appreciate how strange it must sound until I had a friend come to stay for a month from Texas. She had never seen the sea. How can this be, I wondered! It’s the sea! It’s everywhere!

I was amazed at this – the sea is so much a part of life in Australia, just as the desert and summers that are analogous to Hell – that I kept asking her how she’d managed to live without ever seeing it. And then, my friend and I proceeded to take our Texas buddy to every beach we could get to. Subsequently, we gave her a tour of the South Australian coastline that covered not just the amazing diversity of beaches and coastal wilderness, but the best fish and chips ever, crispy battered and piping hot fish with golden crunchy chips with fluffy centers. (Which are in Semaphore, in case you’re in Adelaide and want fish and chips.) We drove along the Esplanades, walked along the boardwalks, sat on the sand and watched the moonrise over the sea, and shivered as it rained, because it was winter and very, very cold. And my Texas friend said that now she’d seen the sea, she’d really seen true beauty.

As a lover of the sea, even if I’m not swimming in it, I couldn’t agree more. And I’m very blessed to live in a country with amazing coasts and cities built by the ocean. Now, if summer could be a little less humid, it’d be perfect!

BLURB: Book 1 of the Archangel Chronicles

You would never know it from his flamboyant lifestyle, but Gabriel’s not just the cheerful, fun-loving adoptive father of a pair of indulged young adult humans. He’s an Archangel, commander of Heaven’s legions of Seraphim, and despite his apparently easy virtue, he’s harboring a serious crush on his superior officer, Michael.

EBOOK: http://www.dreamspinnerpress.com/store/product_info.php?products_id=2853

PAPERBACK: http://www.dreamspinnerpress.com/store/product_info.php?products_id=2854