Forever Valentine

Since this is our first Valentine’s Day post, we thought we’d deviate a little and tell you about how we got together. You can think of it as how Lynn Evans came to be.

We were friends before we were lovers and, when it gets right down to it, that’s the reason we’ve stayed together this long. For those of you who’ve taken us up on our offer and downloaded The Valentine’s Game for free (and for those wonderful friends who have bought a copy), you can find a succinct explanation of our view of romantic relationships in Chapter 3. It’s the part where Charli’s guiding angel, Crescent, explains like, love, and lust. This is not only our opinion; it pretty much explains our history together. (If you haven’t yet downloaded your free copy of The Valentine’s Game yet,click here!)

Next month, we will celebrate the 35^th anniversary of our first date. Before that, we’d met at church. It sounds a lot more Tom Sawyer and Becky Thatcher than it was, since this was the middle of the 70’s and the institution was a thoroughly Californian New Age spiritual enclave. Still, our attraction was mutual, sweet, and full of the promise that can only come from two unattached twenty-one-year-olds who still believed that there was magic in the world. We had a picnic at Presidio Park. Lynn made the food and even she will admit that the only thing edible was the chocolate chip cookies. It didn’t matter. We shared our first kiss on grass warmed by a San Diego spring sun and the next morning woke up in Lynn’s bed that was too narrow for two lying side-by-side. If that last tidbit shocks some of our younger readers, we’re sorry, but not too much. Our older readers will understand when we collectively shrug our shoulders and point out that it was the 70’s after all. 

If it wasn’t true love at first, it most certainly was true like and true lust. It wasn’t long before we were living together (the 70’s, remember) and spending most of our free time in each other’s company. Lynn introduced Evans to her multitude of friends and he, without any warning, dropped her into the middle of his crazy relations. We lived on spaghetti, fish-n-chips, quesadillas, and margaritas, while finishing our degrees at San Diego State. We were married a year and two months after we’d gone out the first time. True to our mutual belief in equality, we each retired our “maiden names” and formed a hyphenated existence.

There were four miscarriages and a failed adoption attempt before our first child, Laura, was born. As awful as those times were, it forged us together. So all through the child rearing years when there was never enough time or money, there was also never a doubt about our partnership. If it was less romantic than the backyard bungalow we lived in when we first got together, it was more mutually supportive. This was the time when we allowed each other the chance to discover what we wanted to do with the lives that were spent outside the clamorous walls of our modest Ramona home. 

When the children moved out, we rediscovered our passion for each other. To be fair, we really didn’t wait for Sarah to leave, we just bought her a car so she could escape when we started dating again. And here is a secret that none of the teenagers Lynn councils can believe: love, both physical and emotional, is splendid at our age. While we don’t have the energy (nor the gymnastic abilities) we once did, we now have a wealth of knowledge and experience about each other you can only get by living with someone a long time. And while there is a lot to be said for enthusiasm, we’re happy to expound the virtues of skill that comes with years of practice.

That’s our love history in a nutshell. Nothing special from the outside, but, from where we sit, it’s warm and glorious. Since we know we’ve been blessed, our first ever Lynn Evans Valentine’s Day wish to all of our loyal followers is for you to find someone with whom to practice years of like, love, and lust. Trust us; it beats the hell out of those little candy hearts.

A final personal note – Happy birthday, Sarah. You’ve always been quick at everything which is why you couldn’t wait to be born on Valentine’s Day, but instead came into the world sharing the birthday of our 16^th President. We love you, Bear Child.

We're Sharing The Love

We have something fun to tell you about this week. We found out about this great program – Rolling Readers – and their February promotion – “Share Your Love of Reading.” The group’s goal is to get children to fall in love with reading by getting ordinary folks to read aloud to them. We both remember getting read to as children and we still like it now that we are grandparents.  We are certainly all in favor of children falling in love with books.

This month, Rolling Readers is promoting a Valentine’s Day “Share Your Love of Reading” with spontaneous read-alouds and YouTube positings of San Diegans reading out loud from their favorite books. Lynn’s going to it for us. She’ll be reading from our recently published novel The Valentine’s Game. Not only will her reading be particularly appropriate given the day and the book’s theme, but it will come one week after what will be a very emotional and highly confidential program she’s putting on at Poway High. She’ll need the chance to do something a little more lighthearted.

In honor of both Rolling Readers and our participation in “Share Your Love of Reading,” we are giving away The Valentine’s Game  for free to anyone who wants to read it. For the month of February, you can go to www.lynnevansbooks.com and click on any of the “Free Book” links then follow the easy instructions on how to get your own copy of The Valentine’s Game. After that, you can read along with Lynn when we get her posted on YouTube.

Sequel Writing

Since book-3, The Dragon Princess, is with our professional editor, we’re working to get book-4 into a final draft so we can send it off to our advanced readers. Bobbie Titan in The Alternate Way is a sequel to our first novel and we’re finding new challenges from continuing a story instead of starting a new one.

When we write a novel from scratch, our goal is to get the reader hooked right away and then let the characters and plot deepen as the story continues. In a sequel we’re finding that it takes a new balancing act. We’re wrestling with how much background from the first story is required to remind return readers and provide foundation for new readers. We don’t want to lose anyone, but we also want to keep the new story fresh and not bog it down rehashing what happened before. And we really want this story to expand the world of super-teenagers we invented in the first book. We’re not fans of authors who are so in love with what they created that they can’t move the story along in a sequel. We want our loyal readers to think, “I didn’t see that coming,” while reading Bobbie-2.

We also don’t want our characters to stagnate. Since we received a lot of compliments on the characters in Bobbie-1, there was a tendency to keep them the same and just give them a new story. But that doesn’t feel real to us. They may be super, but they’re still teenagers and young people experience radical changes, particularly emotionally, in very short periods of time. We wanted our characters to do the same, even at the risk of making them less appealing. And we wanted to let our characters live the full range of emotions that teenagers do today, even if they aren’t universally accepted. It would have been easier to stick to the standard formula for young adult novels and not risk offending some sensibilities, but we decided against it. One of the real joys of being independent is that you are not forced to play it safe to appease a publisher’s idea of what is politically correct.

Finally, in this book, we want to propose a completely unique moral dilemma for our characters. We want our readers to stop and ponder what they would do given the same choice we give the KARI kids, and come away not sure what they would decide. To do that, the reader needs to understand the structure underlying this difficult decision; however, we can’t turn our adventure story into a dry dissertation on super cells. We think we’ve balanced the information flow with the right amount of narrative, but we won’t be sure until we get the comments back from our advanced readers.

We should be done with the final draft in a week or two. Then we’ll send it out and wait to see if we’ve achieved our desired results. If you would like to read an advance copy of Bobbie Titan in The Alternate Way, and are willing to answer questions we’ll post on the last page, let us know. We’ll send you a copy in your favorite electronic format.

A Fantastic Liberation

As our loyal readers know, Lynn Evans isn’t afraid of the fantastic. Even when we are touching on subjects of the heart, like we did in The Valentine’s Game, or are diving into teenage angst, like in the Bobbie Titan novels, we love stretching the story past the everyday into the whimsical realms of our imaginations. But in these obviously fictional stories, we tried to keep it “feeling real.” Even when we describe some event that is clearly beyond the boundaries of what is possible, we want the reader to come away feeling like it could happen that way.

In our latest novel, The Dragon Princess, we freed ourselves from even this last modest constraint and have allowed our imaginations to run wild. This time we want the reader to go somewhere they’ve never been, to experience wonders that are only real inside our dreams, and meet characters they can’t meet anywhere else. When you finish reading The Dragon Princess, we want you to feel like you’ve escaped mundane reality and have soared, at least briefly, beyond what you could have imagined.

Inventing a world wholly within our minds was an immensely liberating experience. It is amazing where a story can take you when the only limitation is what you can think up. We wanted a place where even earthly prejudices could take flight, literally. We wanted a place where nobility was earned, beauty was unquestionably in the eye of the beholder, and where the unexpected was common place. If our advanced readers are to be believed, we just might have accomplished it.

We have finished updating the story based on the comments we received, and the novel is in the hands of our editor. With a little luck and a little more effort, this spring you should be able to find out how well we can imagine somewhere you’ve never been before.

Happy New Year

Like everyone else, this is the time of year when we like to look back on what has happened in hopes that it might guide us in the new year.

A year ago we were planning on attending two writers’ conferences; the first in San Diego and the second in San Francisco three weeks later. We learned a lot at both but the biggest takeaway was that the traditional publishing world is nearly paralyzed due to the digital revolution. Agents and editors who can barely use email were lost on where eBooks were going to take them and most of them were in denial on how much of their lunch Amazon was going to eat. We dutifully followed up with letters introducing ourselves and our work but were convinced by spring that, since we hadn’t slept with anyone famous or were related to a failed vice presidential candidate, it was going to take years to get noticed by the trade press and years more to get anything out of their cumbersome and outdated process. By Saint Patrick’s Day we had decided to be independent.

Our collaboration blog launched shortly after that. We introduced Lynn Evans on the last weekend in March and tried, mostly successfully, to put out a post every week. While initially designed to help us 

connect to people who would want to read our eBooks, the blog soon had a life of its own that encompassed more than our shared struggles to develop, produce, publish, sell, and distribute our stories. We decided early that it was better to write about what was on our minds than trying to limit the virtual discussion to just stuff about collaborating. So, even though we posted about the trials of writing and editing, we also tried to show how living our daily lives influenced what did and did not make it into our work. Along the way we learned that if we included pictures of people kissing or bikini clad rear ends, our anonymous Google hits increased. We ended the year by acting as journalists and covering another independent author who found our blog while looking for places to announce her own recently completed eBook.

Our favorite part of the year was doing the thing that got us started in the first place – writing stories. At the start of the year we had four draft novels. When we decided that we wanted to help support Poway High Student Services, we poured all of our creative energies into finishing our young adult paranormal adventure, Bobbie Titan in the Mark of Kain, the proceeds from which we are donating to the school. We worked hard and dutifully adhered to everything we learned to make our eBook a professional product as well as a great read. We were delighted and full of nervous anticipation when we announced in late June that it was available for download. It’s hard to describe how anxious we were while we waited for people to read it or how giddy we felt when the reviews were good. This was followed in the first week of October with our second eBook, The Valentine’s Game. The first reactions to our hybrid chic-lit novel have been very encouraging and we are looking forward to reading full reviews as the folks who bought the eBook over the holidays have the chance to finish it and write down what they thought. In between these two momentous achievements came the sad realization that one of our novels just didn’t meet the high standards we hold ourselves to. We decided not to pursue Promise any further after we failed to get our advanced readers to fall in love with the story. It was a hard decision, but, even though there wasn’t anyone telling us we had to stop, we are absolutely committed to only publishing eBooks we’re sure are worth the readers’ time and effort.

Looking forward, we are planning on using everything we learned last year while we finish our fantasy novel, The Dragon Princess. We’ve just started incorporating the readers’ comments and completing our final edit before handing it over to our professional editor. We’re still on track for a spring release. We were pleasantly surprised when we finished the first draft of the Bobbie Titan sequel a couple of days before New Year’s. We know that there is a lot of work to do before we get it out in the fall, but we’re anxious to learn if our advanced readers think Bobbie’s next adventures are as wild as we do. And, yes, Bobbie is going to fall in love, but like everything else in her life, it’s not going to be a typical teenage romance.

2011 was a good year for us and 2012 looks to be even better. We hope you’ll join us and find out if that’s true.

Viva Independence

A couple of summers back we went to the Midwest to watch baseball and to drive around a part of the country we’d never seen. While there, we unexpectedly fell in love with Chicago. We still find it amazing that a couple of California suburbanites could harbor such affection for America’s Second City, but we found Chicago’s sassy self-reliance and stubborn Midwestern charm irresistible. Last month we virtually met a Chicago independent author whose personality reflects the city where she lives. Elizabeth Marx’s undeniable charm and her robust wit won us over completely. Straightforward while also self-effacing, Elizabeth has an ability to enliven her novels with unforgettable characters, no doubt due to the fact that she is one herself.

Elizabeth discovered our blog when she was looking to promote her novel, Binding Arbitration, which is a story about a major league pitcher and a powerhouse lawyer who have a past they must come to terms with for the sake of a child. Swapping emails, we found more in common than just baseball and the law, so we agreed to read and review each other’s “chick lit” novels. Elizabeth also proposed that we conduct a virtual interview of her for our blog. We were more than happy to oblige since we’d never done anything like that before.

The interview and the emails before and after left us with the impression that Elizabeth is as funny as she is hard charging. We’re sure her two daughters must complain regularly about the embarrassment their mother puts them through but we would also bet that the Marx house is where all the school kids stop by because there is always something entertaining going on. We also wouldn’t be surprised if Elizabeth’s husband has a difficult time getting party guests to leave once she gets on a roll. This take-no-prisoners approach to life, love, and humor is the essence of Binding Arbitration and we figure with her novel, the apple that didn’t fall from her personality tree.

We’ve posted the interview with Elizabeth at http://www.2blynnevans.com/Interviews.html.  At the bottom, you’ll also find our full review of Binding Arbitration. It can be read on Amazon and Barnes and Noble, which is where Elizabeth was kind enough to post her opinions of The Valentine’s Game. Elizabeth has also offered to provide a free copy of the prequel to Binding Arbitration called Cutters vs. Jocks and you can collect your e-copy at http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/103123. The novella is about a small town girl versus a big man on campus. Love at first sight versus lust you can’t fight. Can anyone win when you don’t play your heart out? 

When we became Lynn Evans, it was with the idea of creating the kind of books we liked to read. We never guessed that such an endeavor would lead us into crossing virtual paths with a lively independent soul from Chicago whose thirst for life is only exceeded by her desire to write it all down. Now that we’ve met Elizabeth Marx, we are really glad that we did.

Words

Lynn sent around an email she received about funny auto correct mishaps. (They are all over on the web, just Google “auto correct mishaps.”) When we quit laughing it got us thinking about words.

 

Our second grandson is a couple of months past his first birthday and is just now starting to make sounds his grandparents can recognize (Mama, Dada, and uh-oh). Not that he needs many words. He knows where we keep the cookies in the cupboard and, now that he’s fully mobile, there no need to ask if he can have some. Just grab and go (he takes after his granddad.) And when he smiles and raises his arms there isn’t a human alive who wouldn’t pick him up for a cuddle. With Aaron, sometimes words just get in the way.

His brother is three years and a month older but the vocabulary difference is astounding. Ethan already has a dictionary worth of words at his disposal and he seems to add more every minute. There is always something new to describe in Ethan’s world. While we struggle to declare an original thought, everyday there is a new four-year-old wonder and new words to describe it. We yearn for a mind that flexible and expansive.

After the holidays, we will sit down for the final edit of our third novel, The Dragon Princess. As it stands now, we’ve used close to 80,000 words to build a fantasy world full of people and places that can only be found in our imaginations. And even with all the words we have at our disposal, we will spend hours and days adding, removing, or rearranging no more than a thousand just to make sure our story is as readable as it can be. Like all the authors before us, we’ve found it isn’t just the number of words you have but how you meld them together that makes the difference. But we love the challenge. That’s why we write, rewrite and edit. And it’s why we really think it wise to have two sets of eyes to make sure what’s written is what we meant. We really do not want to end up on the “I can’t believe that’s in a book” Google search.