Charlene Teglia

TGIF! Here's a snippet from Wolf at the Door. Unedited, subject to change.

Wolf at the Door
copyright 2010 Charlene Teglia
Mammoth Book of Hot Romance, Spring 2011
All Rights Reserved

Karen parked by her cabin overlooking Lake Crescent and nearly ran from her car to the front porch. Once she had the heavy wooden door bolted behind her, she did a quick visual check of the cabin’s interior. The woodstove sat at the center of the open floor plan. Her living space circled it, beginning with the kitchen area that gave way to a trestle style table with two benches on either side, then a faded couch next to two tall and overstuffed bookcases.

Nothing looked out of place. She checked the bathroom that was pretty much a closet on the far side of the kitchen, the only room with a door. It, too, was empty except for a small sink, toilet and shower stall.
She climbed the ladder up to the half-loft that served as her bedroom. The big log bed covered with a bright quilt, night stand and dresser all looked just the way she’d left them before she’d headed out for a hike in an effort to find some peace or at least wear herself out. On impulse, she opened the deacon’s bench at the foot of the bed. Tucked under neatly stacked clean sheets and an extra quilt, an antique dagger rested. She covered it back up and closed the bench, exhaling relief.

The cabin and its contents had been left to her when her employer, an eccentric collector and historian, passed away. Jobless and bereft at the loss of the man who had been more like a grandfather than a boss, Karen had left Seattle for the rustic location to mourn and regroup.

When she’d taken possession, the post office had delivered the package they’d been holding for her. A package addressed by the man she’d just buried. She’d found the dagger inside, along with some notes about its history that read like the wildest fantasy.

Maybe Cyril Foster had started to suffer some insidious erosion of his brilliant mind towards the end of his life. Or maybe he really had left a genuine bone-handled Damascus dagger from the 1500s that contained the soul of a mad German werewolf in her keeping.

Since he’d also promised her that she’d be protected by a wolf guardian and warned her of dark forces that had hunted the dagger through the centuries, Alzheimer’s seemed more likely. Except that she’d just been saved by a guardian wolf.

Coincidence? Maybe. But the odd phone calls with nobody on the end of the line that ended with a disconnection, the men who had been waiting by her car and the frequent sensation of being watched that had dogged her since shortly after she’d arrived at the cabin meant something was going on, and that dagger was probably in the middle of it.

Cyril’s collection had been accounted for in his will. As his personal assistant, she’d helped catalog it. This piece hadn’t been included. She’d seen the dagger for the first time when she’d opened the package Cyril had mailed to the cabin the week he died. If nobody knew he’d had it, who would come looking for it? Somebody who knew it was in his possession, somehow. A piece that old, with a history that colorful, somebody must have known something about it. Maybe somebody suspected Cyril had kept it hidden even after his death.

“If you’d bothered to explain any of this while you were alive, it would make my life so much easier,” Karen said out loud.

But he hadn’t, and now he was beyond reach. She couldn’t ask him to explain, couldn’t demand that he tell her what was really going on. All she could do was carry out his final instructions to her and keep the dagger hidden.

Upcoming anthology info:

Third Time's the Charm will appear in the Cleis Press anthology
Passion: Erotic Romance for Women, coming in November 2010.

Wolf at the Door will appear in The Mammoth Book of Hot Romance from Running Press in Spring 2011. Wolf at the Door is set in the same universe as Wolf in Cheap Clothing and Wolf in Shining Armor but stands alone.

And I suppose I'd better add these to the website.

We've been making a list of things we want to do this summer. Visit a maker fair, a renn fair, take a ferry ride, go see a lighthouse, visit Chicago. The kids have workbooks for their coming years in school so they can review what they already know and practice some new things. Did you know that the educational gap between kids from low-income families and high-income families broadens every year due to the summer break? Kids lose ground over the summer when they're just left to their own devices. Kids from higher income families are kept busy with learning opportunities and over time, say by the time the low-income kid is in high school and really really needs a scholarship, the gap is impossible to close.

Learning opportunities are everywhere. Local museums, planetariums, art galleries, parks. Books. Library summer reading programs. Kids just learning to write can draw their letters in a sand box or at the beach and develop their hand/eye coordination and get comfortable with writing shapes before they start having to hold a pencil. Kitchen science experiments are cheap and easy to do (baking soda and vinegar, classic!). Backyard astronomy. Planting a garden lets kids experience science hands-on. Geocaching (kids love treasure hunting, and learn how to use a map and GPS). With a little time and creativity, you can fuel your kids' desire to learn and keep them from falling into that education gap as they grow.

What do you want to do this summer? If you have kids, ask them and make a list together. Then you can pick something from the list each weekend, or whenever you hear the whine, "I'm booorrrred."

As implied yesterday, there's a serious change in direction in the works for me. So I figure I might as well blog about it, because career change happens to everybody and blogging about going through it may be educational. Or may at least make you grateful you're not me. Good times, people.

My writing career that you're aware of has consisted of erotic romance. My writing career that you might not know about prior to that included poetry, greeting cards, literary fiction, technical writing and more. The first novel-length and "recognized" pro works I happened to sell happened to be to Ellora's Cave, which happened to be a hot market. In other words, a lot of chance things came together. My first EC book became an RT award winner, and voila, I had a career in erotic romance.

I learned a great deal writing erotic romance. Mainly I learned that I was a square peg in a round hole. Yes, I know, I did it well, I got recognition and subsidiary rights sales and magazine and bookclub and foreign deals, and I am truly grateful for all of that. I'm also grateful for the practical working experience I got, which is invaluable. I grew tremendously in my craft. But writing erotic was never my motivation. I loved stories. I happened to get published with stories that were hot, but hot was never the point for me. And eventually I began to feel that I had exhausted the material and my exhausted brain became slower and slower to produce.

I had no idea what else I wanted to do, though, so after I wrapped up my outstanding commitments, I went through the task of evaluating and finishing partials I had laying around. Finishing work is always good, and it made a logical starting point. Those partials became Two Knights in Camelot, Bride of Fire, Redline Lover, Undercover Lover, Adventure Lover, Dangerous Lover, and the as yet unreleased Wolf at the Door. I wrote one completely new story, Shoot to Thrill. On the unfinished partials Red Queen and Kiss of the Demon, my brain balked. Which is ultimately not a bad thing, although it will disappoint some people, because if I'm done in this genre, finishing two more works is just doing more work in a direction that's over for me.

Yes, you would think I could just finish them before moving on to whatever comes next. I thought so, too, but after 3 months of not being able to write a word of fiction, I have called it quits. These books are not getting done. I have no heart or brain to write anything further in this genre.

In the meantime, while working through the "I don't know what else to do so I'll finish things" stage, I got a nudge for a new direction. I ignored it for several months because I thought it was ridiculous and wrong, but yesterday I opened up a blank document and I started writing. 3 months of nothing and then six pages of something new. My husband said it gave him spine tingles, which I take as a good sign. It may not get finished, it may peter out, it may be no good in the end, it may finish and be good and not sell. I don't know. It's early days. But I'm following a new direction and I'm unspeakably happy to be writing again. I'll worry about what to do with it later. For now, my job is to sit down with it every day and do what I can with it.

If you've been following the blog, you'll notice I was keeping busy creatively while not writing fiction; photography, gardening, cooking, reading, watching movies and anime series. I kept my creative engine in tune. I kept throwing myself at the work I was supposed to be doing, and failing, and throwing myself at it again. I am nothing if not persistent. But eventually I did have to admit it was time to quit.

Seth Godin has fabulous advice on when to quit in his book The Dip which helped clarify that it was past time for me to quit. I highly recommend the book if you aren't sure when to give up. Nobody wants to give up too soon, just when things were about to turn around, but sometimes we're continuing on in the wrong direction and it's never going to turn around.

Now I'm writing something I feel passionate about, that I feel has meaning and gives me new opportunity for mastery, and I'm writing it with utter autonomy because nobody's going to see it until it's done. (Nobody in the biz, that is. Beta readers are another thing.) If nothing else, the combination of autonomy, mastery and meaning motivate me to keep going. And it's in a genre where I could write a book a year or less and survive, unlike the running treadmill romance has come to feel like. I may not be able to produce more than that without exhausting my brain so it's important to me not to head off in another direction that will require me to publish multiple titles per year.

Mid-career change. It's the end, and it's the beginning.

Today I'm guest blogging at Genreality on what really motivates writers. Financial incentives will work to a point. The carrot and the stick will work, to a point. But when you come to that point, no amount of flogging or bribery can budge the muse. At that point you must move on to true and lasting motivations.

I'm in search of those motivations now. I don't know how long it will take to find them. It will be interesting to find out. And I know that it starts with following my passions, however unpopular or idiotic or entirely unrelated to writing they may be.

1. It's National Donut Day. Really. A holiday to celebrate fried dough and frosting proves there is a God and he loves carbs. Go to Dunkin Donuts or Krispy Kreme today for your free sugar rush.

2. Borax does work on ants, but not immediately. Also, if you have a large area to cover, maybe not the most economical method. I'm now shifting to cayenne pepper in boiling water and I have an industrial sized container of cayenne.

3. I'm waiting for the arrival of my garden bench. Then I can sit under the arbor and watch things grow.

4. I'm also contemplating plans for a water garden. We have space.

5. The Kindle free promotion is going to be an interesting experiment. I don't know how long it will take to see the results; a few months, I'd guess. Undercover wouldn't have been my first choice of giveaway from this series since it's the only one of the four that is a follow-on to a previous story and thus doesn't stand alone as well as the rest. I also wouldn't have picked it as the best example to showcase my voice. But I still think it's going to be interesting and I'm looking forward to seeing the results. I'm very glad Samhain put one of my titles in for this.

I just finished reading Magic Bleeds by Ilona Andrews. The Kate Daniels series has been full of fun so far, and as I put down the book, I realized; sometimes fun is all you want. Our kiddo has been going through a very rough time with public school and while Kate ran around Atlanta with her sword and struggled with her love life, I had my mind taken off my worries about my kid.

I tend to expect too much of my own work, I think. When you're on the creation side of the book and struggling to make something worthwhile, entertaining doesn't seem like enough. It has to be fantastic, it has to be perfect, it has to be mind-blowing. But as a reader, as a mom, as a person with a lot of balls to juggle and some of them with pointy edges, entertainment is very welcome. A story that I can get caught up in and relax with is sometimes the best gift possible.

Maybe it's better not to have great expectations of writing but to simply strive to do a good day's work. If the end result only entertains me, well, some days that's saying a great deal. And if I'm lucky, the end result can entertain others, too.

Today Undercover Lover is #3 in all free Kindle books, and I sincerely hope it's entertaining those who downloaded it.

Undercover Lover is free on Kindle and Nook. Go get yours! It's #2 in the Take Me Lover series, but they all stand alone and can be read out of order.

In other Monday news, Dreamveil is officially out and downloaded to my reader. Looking forward to some quiet reading time to revisit the Kyndred. For some further entertainment from Lynn Viehl, check out her Jabberwocky cake.

We had a monster storm yesterday that caused some flooding and I was worried about garden damage. Turns out it just made everything grow about 2 inches overnight. Literally, the corn and beans shot way up and everything else is looking green and lively. 

Hope everybody had a good Memorial Day weekend. Back on our heads!

It's because of
things like this. Don't get me started on growth hormones in dairy products and meat. On the plus side, there's great opportunities for niche farmers to provide organic foods.

Also? It tastes better. And it's pretty. Not to mention a great fitness plan. Tending a garden takes work, but it gives back a thousand-fold.

Just to show that it's not all ants and wasps around here, I'm celebrating these good things:

1. New books! Look for Lynn Viehl's
Dreamveil and Ilona Andrew's Magic Bleeds on shelves this week. And in the coming soon category, we have two long-awaited series installments to look forward to: Cryoburn from Lois McMaster Bujold in November 2010 and Jean Auel's final Children of Earth release in 2011.

2. My oldest child is having a birthday. She wanted a chocolate cake with frosting flowers and sprinkles. It's hidden in the house to be whipped out at the appropriate time.

3. Did I mention the garden is done? Tilled, mulched, tilled again, planted, mulched with straw and organic fertilizer, beans and peas staked, tomatoes caged, and there are two kinds of berries ripening while we wait for the final seeds to germinate and sprout. A garden is a very good thing and every day there's something new to see. Although we're about to have a metric ton of kiwi fruit and I don't know what to do with it. Still, that's a good problem, yes?

4. We found a smoking deal on a
playset for the kids and it's en route. With free shipping. And as a bonus, shopping at Target means you're giving back to your community.

5. My dad is having surgery this week to cure a problem that could have killed him if neglected, courtesy of his annual checkup. Had yours recently? It can save your life.