Hey all, make welcome the lovely TARYN KINCADE into Inezland! She got a hot new release that promises to tingle your senses. Take it away, Taryn!

LOST IN TRANSLATION

On Friday night,  late Friday night, when I was done staying up too late dozing on the couch to the new fall shows I’ve got  queued up in the DVR, I did one more quick pass at the email in-box before hitting the sack.

EMERGENCY! EMERGENCY! DANGER, WILL ROBINSON!

The editor proofing the galley changes I’d turned in earlier that day, for a ms I’d thought all safely tucked in and put to bed, had discovered something with the potential to destroy part of a scene. Which might have meant a lot of rewriting. Which might have meant the publication date was going to be pushed back. (It might be anyway, but not because of that!)

Yeah, so as it turns out, I don’t really speak French. 

Luckily, my editor did.

I took Spanish in high school, which has given me the ability to tell street vendors selling Mexican wedding shirts in Cancun, “No habla espanol.”  And I took a smattering of Latin (for the fail!) because guidance counselors were instructed to inform the unwitting that a dead language course would be excellent help on English portion of the SATs.  As it turned out, I did do pretty well on the English portion of the exam. But I’m fairly sure that was less because of agricola, agricolae, agricolarum yadda-yadda-yadda as the fact that I read. A lot. And struck out during the third-grade spelling bee on “picayune” (“Pick-a-what?”) compelling me to learn new words. In my native tongue. And hey!  I can read menus: Steak au poivre, for example. Osso buco.  Moo goo gai pan. Causing waiters everywhere to go into hysterics. 

So all that kinda of lulled me into thinking I was multi-lingual. When I am, in fact, not even close. After all, there’s Babblefish and other on-line translators, right? Wrong. These will variously tell you, for example, that two Cokes with lemon are either “deux Coca-Cola avec citron” or “au citron.” The only thing we can really be sure of is that Coca-Cola is universal.

The bastard pidgin French I’d inserted into my ms had the right words, kinda. But in the wrong order. And without any sort of attention paid to actual French grammar.

I thought a whole scene was going to have to come out at the eleventh hour.  But my editor saved my hash on that. As editors have done for me, time and again. But not necessarily on stuff like that, because I am usually not quite so sloppy as that. No, on taking bare words on a screen and dressing them in their Sunday best. (Or stripping them naked, as the case may be.)

In the beginning, when you first start writing, you are frighteningly insecure but secretly stroke your author ego, which is approximately the size of the QE2. When you are given a critique or suggestions on improvement (listen up, contest entrants, I’m talking about you) you believe that the person who has given up his or her valuable time to read you, doesn’t know what she’s talking about, or just doesn’t get you. 

Then you work with an editor. And you get over that. Fast.

You learn, for example, that people need not merely move when they can slither. Or eyeballs dancing around the room my provide the reader with hilarious Halloween images you did not intend.  That sixteen metaphors are not truly necessary when one will do.  (Yeah, okay, so I still have trouble with that. At least I don’t think they’re all South Sea pearls anymore.)

As Mark Twain said, “The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter—it’s the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.”

Editors know this. Thank them.

Oh, look! A segue into info about LIGHTNING, my new 1Night Stand release from Decadent Publishing.

Blurb:

In mystic Sleepy Hollow, succubus Lily Night put her prom date, Campbell Jones, into a coma after a night of wild, unbridled sex. She has steered clear of mortals ever since, afraid of damaging them or worse, not to mention the inconvenience of knocking out the power every time they have sex.

 Successful architect Campbell Jones has lived with strange powers and a sexy secret since that prom night. He’s buried himself in work to forget the woman who’d dumped him at the ER then vanished from his life without a trace.

 Neither Lily nor Campbell have forgotten that night or the love they’d shared. Will a 1Night Stand help them bury their past?

Excerpt:

“A little higher and more to the left.”

Lily Night narrowed her eyes as the building maintenance man shifted her framed diploma on the freshly-painted wall opposite her desk. She tried not to ogle the firm ass encased in a pair of tight jeans or the way the man’s shoulder muscles rippled beneath his T-shirt.

Maybe if I pop an Altoid, I’ll have an excuse to wipe away the drool.

She refrained from jumping the handsome worker dude’s bones. The last time she’d dallied with a human, the encounter had not gone well. Vivid images of that long ago prom night bombarded her. Campbell Jones had been a young, strapping, hunk-and-a-half football player and they’d started their date full of hope and expectation and lust. When he’d adjusted the fragrant gardenia corsage on her wrist, she’d inhaled his crisp, citrus scent and thought she might swoon at the sight of him in his tux. The black material stretched across broad shoulders that mirrored the promise of the bruising man he’d be in his prime. But she’d all but sucked him dry as flashes of lightning crackled over their heads. By the time dawn painted the sky, she’d turned him into a mere shadow of his former self. Literally.

And briefly knocked out cell phone service in the lower Hudson Valley, as well.

She’d sworn off humans ever since. Instead, she pulled all-nighter after all-nighter to evade the dreams in which men called to her—and to avoid the university dating scene that inevitably led to frequent and addicting sex.

Mortals. Bleh.

Web site:  http://tarynkincaid.com

LIGHTNING video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g2gz0LqF-fs&feature=youtu.be

LIGHTNING buy links:

Decadent Publishing

Amazon

Barnes & Noble

All Romance