Guest Post + Giveaway: B. Jane Lawson, Author of To the Cliffside

Hello all! Today I have B. Jane Lawson, author of To the Cliffside, a story about a small town full of bit mysterious Magicks and Morganna, who has just moved there to be an employee at Cliffside Inn.

Today she’ll be talking about the difference between romance and sex in a paranormal romance novel, and what she believes it takes to make us girls go gaga over the male lead.

Afterwards, she’ll be giving away two ebook copies of To the Cliffside (open internationally). So stick around and be sure to enter to win after the post!

B. Jane Lawson lives in Los Angeles where she is a business woman by day, writer by night and cyclist on the weekends. Her obsessions include Starbucks soy chai lattes, fashion, and music. She has had a life long love affair with novels of all kinds. B. Jane’s favorite genres include paranormal romance, historical fiction and true crime. Her favorite authors include Amy Tan, Karen Marie Moning, Pat Conroy, Jane Austen and J.K. Rowling. She loves to travel and her dream vacation is a safari in Africa. She can be found on the web at: Her Website and Twitter.

Foreplay in Paranormal Romance by B. Jane Lawson

Writing a novel is a lot like dating. The BIG question is, when does IT happen? It’s the question ever present in a woman’s mind when she’s on a date or meeting someone for the first time. The first date? The second date? Is the third date rule a legitimate thing?

Writing a romance or paranormal romance novel is a lot like this. If a reader is really going to appreciate the “fireworks” moment you’ve got to make them want it. If you get to the sex too soon, it’s a sex novel and not a romance novel. If you wait too long the reader, much like an erstwhile dater, loses interest.

Every once in a while, though, a story comes along where the author has gotten it just right. The right amount of build-up. Each word is mental foreplay and you can’t wait to turn another page and see the sparks fly and the situation sizzle. They create the right amount of sexual tension leading up to that moment, when neither the protagonist nor their love interest can deny their deepest, basest self.

So what’s the magic formula? How does a writer know when to make it happen?

Here’s my personal opinion: The moment that the writer makes the story only about the build up to the sexual encounter, they lose the reader altogether.

I believe Stacia Kane and Karen Marie Moning get this and deliver this better than any other writers out there. As a reader, we’re seeing something in the male love interest long before the protagonist is. We’re developing an emotional bond with them. They’re not always perfect. They’re actually the opposite of it – they’re highly flawed males whose redemption in many ways comes from their actions towards the women they love.

I believe we live in a world where fast communication comes easy and lies are as easy as breathing. What makes a great love story is not in the male’s prosaic exclamations of love, but in their steady, subtle, powerful actions that reveal their love in a way that words never could.

So, I believe that it’s not a number of pages or a number of words. It’s a point on a journey that we follow this multi-dimensional protagonist throughout the stories. We get a female lead who is at point “A” in her story and follow her to point “Z”, along the way we should have felt her experiences, we should have seen her grow as an individual, not just within the relationship she has with the male lead.

I believe we like those love stories best that show us that the male lead was there all along – enticing, seducing and protecting – but that the female had to REALIZE it for herself before she jumped in with both feet. This is what makes characters like Terrible and Jericho Barrons so powerful. They’ve got the mental acuity and patience to seduce slowly and thoroughly.

Your average male has neither the patience nor desire to stage such an elaborate seduction and the foreplay we so desperately enjoy is cut short since they can’t help but go for the gold, so to speak, as soon as they think we will let them. So, reading about a man who is comfortable to wait until we’re ready to make the move, and revel in the nearly tantric nature of a drawn-out seduction makes us women go crazy.

Morganna Cork has lived twenty-four uneventful years in Los Angeles under the thumb of her overbearing mother. The only thing barring her from a totally average existence is that she’s got a secret, magical ability to heal herself and others. An encounter with her mother results in exile to the small coastal town of Puesta del Sol. There, she will be a guest and employee at the Cliffside Inn, owned by her estranged cousin Maeve. Morganna resigns herself to a winter of work and boredom in this one-horse town.

Everything changes when she accidentally pulls into the driveway of the devastatingly sexy Callupo Stone. Instantly she is attracted to the infuriating man who makes no bones about his lack of interest, even if he seems to be right behind her at every turn. The sparks fly as she does her best to thwart his every attempt to corral her.

She soon discovers that she’s not the only one with gifts. There is an entire community of people known as Magicks, each unique and powerful in their own right.

As Morganna undertakes a journey of self-discovery and determination, she befriends Anya, the spunky, sassy, sometimes employee of the Cliffside and bearer of town gossip. Together, they begin to unearth the mysteries surrounding the strange reappearance of a vindictive villain, on a quest for power, in which Morganna finds herself directly in the middle. Simultaneously, they witness the succession struggles of a secret society, in which Callupo and many of their close friends are members, whose existence and purpose eludes them.

Morganna undergoes a radical transformation of self as she becomes an unsuspecting participant in a Magickal war that has been thirty years in the making.

Giveaway

Okay, now it’s time for some winning! Here’s what you could get:

TWO lucky winners (International) will get an ebook copy of To the Cliffside! Enter using the Rafflecopter form below.

Giveaway Rules

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Open between February 11th-February 16th. Form closes at 12:01am on February 17th.
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