What Happens In Vegas...Stripped By Lauren Dane

So back in August of 2006, my husband and I went on our first vacation without kids since we actually had kids. We went to Las Vegas, one of my favorite places in the world and we ate in restaurants without paper tablecloths and crayons and had pretty drinks at three thirty in the afternoon by the pool.

We also went to a burlesque club called Forty Deuce. Now, I have a thing about pin up girls and the whole glamour age of feminine beauty. I love the pictures of women from the 40’s and 50’s and burlesque embodies that era so very well. Burlesque isn’t stripping, it’s not about showing as much skin as possible. Rather it’s about the art of the tease, of sensual smoke and mirrors where it’s about what you don’t see more than what you do.



There’s dancing on stage and a live jazz band. The women are truly amazing dancers, lithe, sexy, they clearly put a lot of time and energy into their routines as well.

Anyway, as we made our way back home after our vacation it was with an idea for a story in my head with the heroine as a burlesque dancer. Dahlia Baker was born in my head and by the time my agent contacted me a few days after I’d been back to ask if I’d be interested in participating in a pitch she was going to make for a Vegas themed anthology, I just knew it was meant to be. Stripped isn’t about stripping, it’s about being stripped of preconceptions - by the way.

Stripped in the anthology, What Happens in Vegas is now out on store shelves and available through all the usual places for online book shopping too.

Here’s a very small taste of Dahlia’s world:

STRIPPED by Lauren Dane from the Spice anthology - What Happens In Vegas…

The low, sensual beat brought her onto the stage like a siren. One gloved arm wove through the slit in the curtain and then the other, parting them as she stood, framed for a long moment. Her dark hair was piled up on her head artfully. Long, fake lashes framed big brown eyes. A deep blue satin dress hugged every curve lovingly, her breasts pushed up and out of the scooped neckline and as she walked, the slit on each side of the dress would show her legs to the upper thigh.

She let the music grab her senses and her rhythm as she slowly sauntered out onto the narrow stage. Dancer’s heels, still very high, led her through the beginning of her routine as she carefully maneuvered the long feather boa to keep from tripping.

Caught in the music, Dahlia’s muscles burned as she did a high kick leading into a round kick swiveling her body away from the audience all in a seamless set of movements.

A feather from the boa stuck to the sweat on her neck as she slowly rotated her hips in time with the horns in the jazz band. Her hands rose, slowly taking the boa to wind around her body. Down it went until she finally stepped out of it as it lay at her feet, kicking it to the side.

Giving her back to the audience, she raised one hand into the air as she turned her head, winking over her shoulder.

Knocking her hips from side to side to the smoky jazz beat, she brought the tips of her gloved fingers to her mouth to grab the material and pull it off slowly.

The first glove went over her shoulder, into the bar pit the stage encircled. The second glove came off as she stood in front of the trumpet player and pulled it off around his body.

A bump and grind circling the band and she lay down on the side of the stage near where the bottle service tables were. Throwing a foot into the air, she gave them all a lot of leg to look at as the dress slid back. Rolling up onto her knees, she unzipped the front of the dress and shimmied out of it. Then she turned, cleverly giving them her back and a pair of boyshort bottoms with a winking kitty on the ass.

The dress dropped as her forearms came up to cover her breasts and she bent, looking at them all upside down through the vee of her legs.

The cheers and applause bolstered her confidence. Up there she was beautiful and desired and that was okay. More than okay, it felt marvelous.

Still facing the band she reached out quickly, grabbing the hat off Timmy’s head. The trumpet player widened his eyes in a choreographed move and she spun, clutching the prop hat just so to cover herself.

Sensual smoke and mirrors. Dahlia didn’t show the audience any more than she’d show at the beach. They wouldn’t see her nipples and her panties would stay right on her booty with the fishnets below that.

Playing coy, she waved with one hand, pretending to almost drop the hat as she took the first step back up to the dressing room. And another step and two more. Once her body was in the doorway she turned and tossed the hat back to Timmy. With a hand over her mouth stifling a pretend giggle, she kicked up her leg and was gone behind the curtain.

Writing, Sweating And Writing Some More

To be a writer is to sit down at one’s desk in the chill portion of every day, and to write; not waiting for the little jet of the blue flame of genius to start from the breastbone – just plain going at it, in pain and delight. To be a writer is to throw away a great deal, not to be satisfied, to type again, and then again, and once more, and over and over….
John Hersey

Earlier last week I finished a book. Well, the first draft anyway. Then I put it down for a few days and Saturday, I picked up that huge binder and began the process of editing and revision. Then I’ll send it out, chapter by chapter to my crit partners who will pick it apart and send them back to me and then I’ll revise again. And then, I’ll send to beta readers and of course they’ll see things I need to address so I’ll revise again and then I’ll send to my agent. And then after it’s been looked at, read, picked apart, put back together, tightened, shortened, lengthened and honed - it’ll be printed up and mailed to my editor.

I was sort of afraid to pick it up. In fact, last night I was afraid to.

Afraid for a multitude of reasons - this is my first NY single title. Will it be good enough? Will my editor like it or when she sees it will she rue the day she signed me? When I read it, will it be what I remember? Better? Worse? How much work will it be to revise?

The list goes on really because I’ve found fear to be a constant companion since I sold my first book. In truth, I’m not sure anything is truly worth working for if you don’t want it bad enough you have fear of losing it.

The secret of becoming a writer is to write, write and keep on writing.
Ken MacLeod

But I will pick it up again tonight, and tomorrow and every day after until it's done. I will revise it and I will make it the best I possibly can. Because it’s the only way to finish. Because I love the story and I want my editor to love it too. I want the readers to love it. Because I’m a writer and we write.

Lauren Dane is currently working on Undercover - a futuristic, menage, bdsm flavored erotic romance due to release from Berkley Heat December 2, 2008.

www.laurendane.com
www.laurendane.com/blog

Lauren's Winner!

Was commenter #3 - Cathy! Cathy, email me with your format preference and I'll get your copy of Fire and Rain your way! Congratulations!

Writing Sex

I’ve heard the opinion often enough that what we write is porn or nothing more than sex scenes strung together one after the other for no logical reason.

Writing sex is hard, er, difficult. It’s not a matter of sitting down and typing the same intercourse scene over and over. Although I have read those books and they bore me to tears. Writing a good sex scene, one that the reader has to stop at the end of because she’s tingly and a bit out of breath, is much more difficult than most other things about writing. Because sex in a book should have a purpose.

Now, sometimes that purpose is to get your heroine off. And that’s okay. But the best thing about a sex scene is that sex is rife with opportunity for depth of emotion. You can have major breakthroughs for your character, big emotions communicated without a single word spoken, deep insight into the main character - a good sex scene will leave you more than tingly, it’ll communicate something to you.

There’s a scene in Emma Holly’s, Personal Assets that is probably one of my top five favorite sex scenes ever written. Bea, the heroine of sorts, is under David’s desk and someone is in his office so she has to be quiet. Okay, so you know what happens next, that’s obvious of course. But Holly takes the office sex cliche and puts a twist on it.

With David’s cock in her mouth, we see how much Bea yearns for this man who appears unobtainable to her. Her yearning for him is so huge that it takes your breath away as you read. And we’re in David’s head and we can see how tempted he is but also how conflicted as well.

All in all, I think the depth of yearning by both characters against the backdrop of this scene where neither can speak of it for a whole host of reasons is a great example of writing good sex.

What about you all? What are some of your favorite scenes and why?

I'll run a contest! I've got a book coming out tomorrow, Fire and Rain. I'll choose a winner of an ARC from all answers posted at say, hmm 7 pm pacific/9 eastern!

Good luck!

Threat of Darkness and Letting Go

So I had a book release yesterday - Threat of Darkness.

Mei is a Warrior for the Balance. She stands between good and evil. So when her boss tells her she's got to head to Tir na nOg to help the Fae she is most displeased. Mei's mother Aine, the queen of the Fae, betrayed and exiled her millennia ago. Or so she's been led to believe.

But Aine was misled by her own sister, and suddenly everything Mei has thought was true for thousands of years falls down around her ears as she looks up to see the face of her husband. Her first husband, a man she'd thought was dead.

Jayce MacTavish is surprised to find that his wife, thought millennia dead, is alive, but his joy is tempered by the realization that she's got another mate.

Mei, Card and Jayce must find a way to be together as three while a threat from the Dark Fae and a new enemy darkens the horizon.

TOD taught me a few things - most importantly, you have to let go and write the book that wants to be written.

I started with an idea of this female warrior who met Jayce by accident. She was half human and half Fae, bad Dark Fae, blah blah blah.

But it wasn't working. I'd get like 15K in and it wouldn't go. So I changed Mei a bit because Aine, the queen of the Fae wanted to be in the story more. I re-wrote from scratch but this guy, Mei's partner, kept not wanting to leave when he was supposed to. He was in love with Mei and wasn't having me just give her to Jayce.

At the same time, a minor character I had, the warden of the demon prison Mei was in for a thousand years, wouldn't go either. I had a full blown riot on my hands because my damned characters and story wouldn't behave.

So. I gave in. I wrote a menage so Card and Jayce could share the page, I realized Aine was Mei's mother not her aunt and the bad guy wasn't so much the Dark Fae but this other dude, Xethan. Once I gave in and wrote the story as it wanted to be written, the book was finished in just a few weeks.

Sometimes as a writer, I have an idea and the book follows that pretty closely - Stripped, Triad, etc.. Other times, I start off with one thing and end up with something else - Enforcer was this way too, Tri Mates, etc. I love that. I have to say I love it when I just let go and write.

It's a balance, finding the place where you need to whip your idea into submission and when you need to just let the idea take over and allow the book to meander. Each book I write enables me to recognize the difference a bit more. It's like magic sometimes.

Three Million Words For Process

Last week, I was chatting with Megan Hart about process and writing and how authors spoke about writing. Some authors talk about it in that "one true way" sense, like their process is "THE" process. Others are more of the "this is what works for me" school and still more find it hard to put what they do into a frame of reference. Me? I tend to be in the "I don't know if it makes sense but this is what works for me, try your own thing though because your mileage may vary."

Talking about writing is an odd thing because it's like a unique language for every writer. How many words are there for writing or process as they're seen through the lens of different authors? They're just words and they hold meaning to me with regard to process but not so much to other people. I don't think about writing in technical terms at all. I just write.

I have notebooks in stacks in and on my desk. Each notebook is for a different book or story idea. Some of them have detailed notes about characters, snippets of dialog or other text, research notations, and others have the story kernel - the whatever it was that tickled my fancy to give me the idea - just a line, a picture from a magazine, etc.

I'm working on being more organized with this, we'll see if that happens or not. Right now, I'm writing on a deadline. Reading Between the Lines is due by August 1 and I'm pretty sure, given my current pace, I'll be finished with the first draft by this time next week. This gives me plenty of time then, to leave it for a few days and then to come back and edit, revise and turn in.

This is my process when I work on timelines. I used to just plow through, draft, edit, revise and turn in but now I like to have a bit to let the book sit when I finish so when I come back to it later. For me, I can see it through more objective eyes with a little bit of distance.

Inevitably, when I'm working on a book, more book ideas come to me. Right now I've got two other books in progress but I forced myself to stop working on them until I finish with RBTL. Sometimes though, I have to get stuff down so I treat myself like I do my kids, I set a goal (pages or words) before I can stop and work on anything else. (I don't normally do page or word counts unless I'm hard on deadline or something like this happens)

Anyway, a little illustration of how that works for me:

Last night I'm on the exercise bike (where I read and sometimes plot, etc) and I'm listening to The Prodigy. Suddenly, an image comes to me and as I'm pedaling away, sweating, more of the scene begins to unfold. And the line of dialog, just one.

Bang. My new story unfolds just like that. I finish my 45 minutes and jump off, write that line of dialog down and after I shower and get my goal met for the day, I wrote it. I now have to figure out the rest, the length, the meat of the story, etc, but essentially, that's how this works for me. An image, a lyric, a smell, a sound, someone's voice - little triggers and a bizarre movie begins in my head and a book is born.

Lauren