More From Fio's WIP

     As they entered the building, a tall black man came out of the docent’s office, stopped in the middle of the hall to read through the playbill in his hand, then started walking toward the stairs.

     Bram jerked to a stop. “Derek Benson Edgefield, come on over here!”

     The man turned around, a big smile on his face. “Bram, you ol’ dog, you!”

     Sabrina’s watched in wonder as they did an elaborate knuckle and elbow thing that ended in both of them yelling out “Panthers forever!”

     Bram grabbed the man by his upper arm and pushed him forward. “Sabrina, I want you to meet Derek Edgefield, my best friend since high school and the greatest business partner ever.”

     The man laughed, a mellow, melodic sound, and put his arm around Bram’s shoulders. “Better not let Rafe hear you say that or we’ll lose our finance man.”

     Finance man? Business partner? Was this some kind of joke? Sabrina looked at Bram for an explanation

     Bram hurried to explain. “Derek and I are in an investment partnership with Rafe McAllister. He’s our money bags.”

     Derek nodded. “Bram is the brains of the operation. Rafe supplies the money, and I just sit on the sidelines and reap the profit.”

     Bram snorted. “Don’t believe him. Derek’s our wheeler dealer.”

    She could believe it. Derek Edgefield had a beautiful voice. The cadence, the overtones--she could listen to him forever.

Peep Show

OMG, has Fio gotten behind on her blog again? Well, she'll just have to give you a clip from one of her novels in progress:

Now, how about some of Aunt Sarah’s cow juice before she went to bed?  Lolly grabbed a paper cup from the cupboard and walked to the refrigerator.  As she started to pour the milk, the back door opened. 

Damn, she’d forgotten to set the security alarm.  Uncle Keith must be making it home for once, and here she was, barefoot, wearing nothing but bikini panties and a Harry Potter nightshirt.   But what the heck.  After all, he was Aunt Sarah’s husband.  Besides, he was a doctor, and he’d seen people a lot more naked than she was.

She flashed him a smile and lifted the milk bottle in greeting.  “Just finishing an assignment and thought I’d celebrate a little before I went back to bed.” 

Putting her cup down on the counter, she turned to replace the milk on the refrigerator shelf.

Rough hands reached around to enclose her breasts and she was overwhelmed by alcohol fumes. Uncle Keith’s voice was guttural and his words slurred. “Been wondering if these jugs were real.”

After the March Was Over....

Fiorella woke up yesterday morning still glowing from the success of her NEVER AGAIN march, spent way too much time on FB, but had enough glow left that she did a fair amount of work on a difficult scene in her WIP. In the afternoon, she  and met up with friend Patricia in the cafe adjoining la biblioteca and her glow returned as she recounted the progress of the march.  Patricia asked how her Spanish was coming along, and Fio told her in sorrow that she hadn't made much progress because she needed a telenovela that she could play over and over again to drive el espanol into her brain, but didn't know how to locate  one.

"Why not borrow one from the library?" friend asked. To make a long, thrilling story short, Fiorella checked out two telenovela DVDs and will try them out on Monday.

But wait--there's still more! To top it off, when Fio got home, she started working on la historia de nuevo and pretty much finished off the rest of that problem scene.

Fiorella is a happy camper.

Learning Pleasure

           

And here's the first page of a romance called Learning Pleasure that I'm thinking of putting on the market after I'm finished with Phillipa's story. It won a fair number of contests a while back.

 “How do you do, Mr. Graham,” Ann said, holding out her hand and hoping he wouldn’t take it. 
      Neil Graham was exactly the sort of man she tried to avoid--tall, handsome, and charming.  But handsome is as handsome does, and twelve years ago she had learned not to trust handsome any further than she could throw it.  She wasn’t too fond of height either, and risking a quick glance upward, she realized that the top of her head would barely reach his shoulder. 

            He shook her hand and smiled, revealing a dimple in his right cheek.  “I’m delighted to meet you, Ms. McCoy.  You’re my son’s favorite teacher.  He talks about you all the time.”  He winked.  “I think he’s got a crush on you.”

            “He--he’s a darling boy,” she answered in a tight voice, jerking her hand away before she had a full-blown panic attack.    

            Better to seem rude than crazy.  She readjusted her heavy, black-framed glasses on the bridge of her nose and backed up two discreet steps.  And better to seem crazy than ever again find herself in a situation she couldn’t escape from.

          

A Bit of a Bite

Lookee what Fiorella found in her document file--her never-published vampire novel, and here's a taste of it!

Tally huddled in the far corner of the back seat of the cab returning her to the ferry terminal.  It reminded her of her first trip to New York four years ago, covered with a dark sheet and curled up in the back seat of a limousine with heavily tinted windows.  She'd been seventeen then, confused and alone, heading toward the only sanctuary she knew.  Now she was twenty-two, confused and alone, with no sanctuary in sight.

            So, Helen had been right on the money about the effects of sexual excitement.  Tally curled her fingers into her palms.  There was blood beneath her nails.  Well, at least she hadn't bitten Stephen, but the thought of tasting him made her hunger surge again, almost painful in its intensity.  She pressed a hand to her stomach and studied the loutish cabbie's thick, fleshy neck.  Would anyone really miss him?

            No, Tally, you have a choice!  Even louts have families who love them.

            Breathing slowly and deliberately, she tried to calm herself.  She could handle this. In fact, she had prepared for emergencies like this.  Opening up her purse, she searched methodically for a small silver flask, unscrewed the lid, and lifted it to her lips., then rolled the thick, dark liquid on her tongue before letting it slide down her throat.  With all the insulation, the flask couldn't hold much, but it was enough.

            She licked lips and smiled in satisfaction.  God bless anti-coagulants.

            The cab driver's eyes followed her in the rear-view mirror.

            "Just for emergencies," she called from the darkness of the back seat, with what she hoped was a jaunty smile.

            He didn't reply but his eyes snapped back to the road again.  She took one more sip. Why had she thought she had to explain herself to him?  So what if some loutish cab driver thought she was an alcoholic?  He'd probably seen a lot worse--and at least he wasn't dead.

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

Here and There

The older Fio gets, the more she likes clouds. Hope that means she's headed to heaven someday.
*
 Ah, a new month, a new chance. And this month has Fio's birthday in it, which gives her a double chance.
*
Fio's book is jolting along, and what drives it is some advice Fio's literary agent, Liza Dawson, gave her four years ago: every scene must move the story forward. (To which Fiorella adds what Tracy Wolff once said at an RWA meeting: let the POV be from the viewpoint of the person who has the most to lose.)
*
Fio's getting closer and closer to signing up for an on-line Spanish class. She just can't stand not knowing what the characters on the telenovelas are talking  about.
*
Speaking of telenovelas, Minnesota Son said most of the guns the characters on La Piloto were toting were berrettas. Apparently there is not much diversity in the television gun wardrobe closet.

Goodreads Choice!

Fiorella is ecstatic!  Friends Jeanell's new book, Where the Heart Leads, which comes out on November 17, is top-listed by Goodreads as "to-read!"

And, ahem, it's so well-deserved.

Truth to Tell

I am a writer. I work on my novel from noon till midnight every day. My Christmas decorations have yet to be packed away.  I have no idea what is going on in world news. My upstairs office is littered with notes and discarded pages, and my downstairs office is piled with the same. My husband has been doing the grocery shopping for the last month.  I haven't even been outside for three days.

This is not the way Hollywood told me it would be.

Runneth Over

Thank you for the random kindness of strangers--well, an almost-stranger.  Fiorella used to go to Office Depot a lot more than she does now that her recently-retired husband has taken over the chore, and, being her father's daughter, she got to know the clerks. In fact she became sort of chummy with one of them.

So when Fiorella dropped by the store for some of those snap-closed paper clips the other day, and  Nancy commented on her long absence,  Fio explained she'd been spending her time writing.  Then she gave Nancy one of her promotional bookmarks and told her she'd had a romance novel published.  Nancy's face lit up like a Christmas tree, and she said she'd read Fio's book right away.

And she did.  Fiorella got a nice message from her last night.

Again, Fio's cup runneth over.

Shameless Hustling

Fiorella's romance novel comes out on Tuesday.  As you know, it's called WHAT THE HEART WANTS, and Fio's pen name is JEANELL BOLTON.  The reason she tells you this is that there are nine--count'em, NINE--other novels on Amazon with the same title.

Anyway, she hopes you'll give her book a try.  Like most of her stories, it involves a woman living in shadow.  The digital edition of WHAT THE HEART WANTS will be available for $2.99, and the trade paperback will cost $17.00.

Wish Fio well.