With my newfound freedom, I decided to continue with the time-travel/Fae combination and develop the mythology further with twin druids whose clan had served the Fae for millennia. It was while writing those novels that my voice became very clear to me, and I began to develop a mythology I found fascinating and had a blast writing. Rule number two in the writing world: If the writer is having fun, the reader probably will, too.
When I took a short break between Kiss of the Highlander and The Dark Highlander to write Into the Dreaming for a different publisher, I could feel myself chafing at the way the confines of the genre were limiting the story I wanted to tell. I was becoming increasingly aware that I was skimming the surface, always pulling back whenever the waters started to get deep and dark—which to me is exactly when things get interesting. Over and over, I caught myself pulling my punches, muscling the story line, not letting it go where it wanted to go. My muse was getting more and more miserable and so was I.
What I didn’t realize was that I was dying to write urban fantasy—but the genre didn’t exist yet. It was still being spawned by writers with stories to tell that didn’t fit in any single genre, and by readers like you, who’d been waiting impatiently for the stories to get a little darker and deeper.
Fans have been asking me for years how Into the Dreaming fits into the overall scheme of my novels and world-building because the parallels with the Fever series are unmistakable—a dark Unseelie king in an icy fortress, a beautiful Seelie queen, an ancient war, an eternal love affair, the Song of Making—yet it was written long before I began Darkfever. Into the Dreaming was the birth pains of the Fever world. I was having them even then. But my romance novels were too successful, and the money too good to try to fix something that wasn’t broken.
I wrote three more Highlander novels after Into the Dreaming: The Dark Highlander, The Immortal Highlander, and Spell of the Highlander. When I finished Spell in 2004, I was more exhausted than I’d ever been after completing a book. Though I loved the characters and the story, I’d had to force myself to finish it. I needed to write grittier, darker books. It was where my heart was.
But my publisher wanted my proposal for my next romance novel.
I stalled.
They emailed and said, Where is it?
My computer died.
They called.
Cell signal encountered technical difficulties reaching my house.
They threatened to visit.
I moved.
That’s when I had the dream in which I got the entire story of the Fever series, all five books in one night, complete with all the characters, plot, even the installment breaks. Looking back, I see the culmination of years of repression. The stories were there, waiting to be told. They wanted to come out. It’s the pattern of my life: I get detoured, but eventually I’m going to turn down that one-way street with all those potholes that’s blocked off. May as well just move the barricades out of the way. I like the dark, less-traveled, road.
It’s funny to me how things come full circle. I began my writing career with the Fae, when everyone and everything around me—except you, my dear reader—was warning me to give up the paranormal, get serious, and write straight romance novels. Yet, looking back over my career, the one novel that was closest to being a straight romance novel has sold less to date than any other book I’ve written. I’ve learned many important things during my writing career but here’s the golden rule for aspiring writers: Trust your gut and trust your readers. Respect them both and they won’t steer you wrong. Don’t waste your time trying to find the “right” dock. Spend that time making your dock the best it can be.
Each time I’ve taken a risk, dear reader, you were right there, taking it with me. When I moved from romance to urban fantasy, most of you made the jump. Some of you didn’t and hope that I’ll eventually return to my romance roots. I can’t say that I have any plans to do that right now, but I’ve shared some pieces in this collection just for you.
I can’t thank you enough. None of this would have been possible without you. You followed when I jumped, you kept the faith when it got dark, and stayed to the lights on my promise alone that it would be worth it. (My books come with unique catchphrases. I don’t choose them. They present themselves in theme and repetition. For the Fever series it was “stay to the lights.”)
Iced comes out in October, the first book in my new Dani O’Malley trilogy. I’m jumping again. Some people are worried and think maybe I should stay on the safe dock, the one that the boats have been going to for the last five books of Mac and Barrons’s series. But when I get up in the morning, grab my coffee, and sit down at the computer, all I can hear is Dani O’Malley talking. It’s her turn now, and her voice has never been clearer.
She’s saying: Never. Going. To. Happen.
Karen
I wrote this in 1999. Looking back, I see what a rough proposal it was and the many things I should have changed or developed further. Still, after all these years, I think it would have been a great story!
PROPOSAL FOR THE NEVER-WRITTEN, NEVER-PUBLISHED
GHOST OF A CHANCE
When twenty-eight-year-old Dr. Penelope Jonté decides to begin a new life, she purchases a magnificent castle nestled above the sleepy village of Ballyhock, Scotland. She never dreams that the ancient and opulent legacy of Lyssford-at-the-Lea comes with a five-hundred-year-old Scottish warrior, cursed with immortality.
CENTRAL CHARACTERS
Dr. Penelope Jonté: heroine, twenty-eight-year-old doctor of psychology. She has an IQ of 165 and was a child prodigy. She graduated early, and after several of her publications received national acclaim, she was offered an extremely lucrative position in Cincinnati as exclusive staff psychologist for Interon, Inc., a prestigious engineering and research firm. There she counseled the overly bright, often-inarticulate, troubled employees. She is five feet eight inches, with a sleek fall of hair and dark eyes. Her mother is dead, and she has never known her father.
Adrian Bruce Douglas the Black: hero, Hawk Douglas’s brother, cursed to inhabit Lyssford forever. He is invisible, immortal, and cannot leave the estate. He resembles the Douglas Norse ancestors: six feet four inches, he has blond hair, light green eyes, and golden skin—if one could see him. He can touch, but if someone runs into him he can be walked through, unless his intent to touch is present.
Brunhilde: a Valkyrie endowed with special powers, the witch who curses Adrian.
Dinah Bancroft: secondary romance heroine. She ran away from home in America at seventeen with her high school history teacher (who should be shot). They were going to backpack around Europe, but when he discovered she was pregnant, he abandoned her in Scotland. She got a job as a waitress and miscarried the baby. She is stunning and has very large breasts, which are difficult to ignore. Men have always treated her only as an object and she has no sense of self-worth as anything other than a sexual companion. She longs to be loved for something besides her appearance. Two months prior to Penelope’s arrival, she caught mono and was unable to work (she has no health insurance). She stowed away in the carriage house at Lyssford and has barely been hanging on. Her character will demonstrate several things: healing the doctor in Penelope who comes to Lyssford afraid to counsel again, and falling in love with a blind man who finally “sees” her as she really is.
Jamie McIntyre: secondary romance hero. Twenty-seven-year-old, blind gardener at Lyssford. He is also the local attorney. He graduated from law school and returned to his hometown. Since he has a knack with flowers and plants, and there’s not much legal business in the tiny village of Ballyhock, he is happy to take the post at Lyssford, handling his practice in the evening.
Jenkyn Gilchrist: Lyssford’s eclectic butler, obsessed with the derivation of language.
Lizzy Gilchrist: Lyssford’s housekeeper, and Jenkyn’s wife. Both late bloomers and somewhat homely, they are deliriously in love and quibble happily over vocabulary while playing a nightly game of Scrabble in the kitc
hen. Penelope finds that more genuine, positive counseling takes place over their game board than in any office she’s been in. She draws up a chair in the kitchen more than once, as do most of the characters.
SYNOPSIS
Ghost of a Chance opens with a prologue set at Dalkeith-Upon-the-Sea. Hawk Douglas and his wife, Adrienne, are hosting a costume ball to celebrate both Beltane and Adrian Douglas’s thirtieth birthday. The hero is a dissolute womanizer and Hawk has determined that what he needs to mature is a little responsibility. As a birthday present, he bequeaths the title to Lyssford to his younger brother, who in a drunken bout of honesty informs him he’d rather take a vow of celibacy than live on that godforsaken moor.
Adrian encounters a stunning woman at the ball, clad in Viking costume, and slips off to make love with her in the gardens. When he behaves insufferably, she curses him. Adrian is unaware that he has just mortally offended Brunhilde, mightiest of the Valkyries. The curse she lays upon him is that he is condemned to live forever at Lyssford (since she heard him say he’d rather take a vow of celibacy than live there), confined by its perimeters and invisible (unable to exploit women by using his incredible looks) until he proves himself worthy of a woman’s love.
[Author’s note: The following information regarding Adrian and the terms of his enchantment will be presented throughout the story via dialogue with the heroine and Adrian’s reflections. It will be interspersed through the story, not dumped like this, but I suspect you may have many questions that can best be answered by fully explaining Adrian to you at the onset of the proposal.]
Adrian doesn’t hear Brunhilde’s curse, and doesn’t know the terms of it.
He simply disappears, then is suddenly at Lyssford, invisible, with no idea what transpired. He can’t see himself. He casts no reflection in a mirror. People can walk through him, but he can touch if he intends to touch. He can speak, hear, and all his senses are intact, but if he ever tries to discuss what happened to him, how he came to be the invisible, immortal prisoner of Lyssford, a rush of words come out of his mouth that are mortifying. “I am an arrogant, insensitive, lack-witted blackguard, who doesn’t deserve a woman’s love—and I’m lousy in bed to boot.”
(Brunhilde has a twisted sense of humor. She figures that if he ever is smart enough to realize what the curse is, he’ll deter any woman who might consider absolving him with those words. It’s quite comical the first time he answers Penelope’s questions.)
At odd intervals over the centuries, he seems to grow more substantial, for no reason that he can discern. Once he could even see the outline of his hands, and a foggy reflection of himself in the glass, but those times were short-lived and he swiftly became completely invisible again. (Although he doesn’t know it—because he doesn’t know he was cursed—Brunhilde’s curse lasts only a number of years, so she must come to renew it. In this manner she checks on him, to verify for her own pleasure that he is still not free.)
During the early years of his confinement he suffers extreme isolation. Hawk and Adrienne, so distraught by his disappearance and apparent death, seal Lyssford, and seventy-five years pass before anyone ever comes again. Unremitting, relentless solitude. Adrian does not need to eat, although he can, and enjoys it tremendously.
Various tenants occupy the estate over five centuries. Initially, Adrian tries to communicate and meets with disastrous results. If he doesn’t terrify the occupants, they think he is a druid spirit or a sorcerer and try to use him for gain. In the 1700s, he is drawn to an occupant’s children and plays with them. Initially the parents believe their children have an imaginary friend, but eventually they fear that their children are being beguiled by a demon, so they bring a priest to perform an exorcism. At first Adrian finds it amusing, until he feels something terrible happening to him and flees the house in panic, racing to the farthest perimeter of the estate. He has learned his lesson, and never again attempts to communicate after that. He knows he can’t die, but the near-exorcism convinces him that there might be worse things than his present condition.
In time, he savors having tenants in “his” castle because they bring new inventions, new ideas. During a vacancy of twenty-five years in the 1800s he thought he would go mad from the solitude. He can’t leave the estate. If he ventures past its perimeters, he endures excruciating pain, as if he is coming apart cell by cell. Once he nearly strayed too far, and now he believes that if he ever did again, he would simply cease to exist.
During the sixty years preceding Penelope’s occupancy, a childless couple, who loved with such a tender, selfless love that it rocked Adrian to his very soul, occupied Lyssford. Adrian never attempted communication with them, but he did leave little gifts and do small favors, making their lives easier in countless ways. Nothing ever broke in their castle (or if it did, it was repaired late at night by a benevolent handyman who charged no fee). Five hundred years later, Adrian the Black is a very different man.
Eight years of vacancy ensue after the childless couple dies and his precious companions—the TV, the CDs, and the books—are outdated and on the verge of breaking. The TV dies the day the latest owner, Dr. Jonté, arrives. The moment Adrian sees her, he is hopelessly drawn to her. He has been growing stronger again. The time seems rife with possibilities, and after studying Penelope and snooping through her computer files, he quickly concludes that the odds for communication with her are high—and relatively without risk. She is pragmatic, compassionate, and intelligent (almost as smart as him, he decides, although she hasn’t had the benefit of five hundred years of study).
He finds her impossibly alluring and quickly rationalizes contact.
Penelope is initially frightened by the “ghost,” but progresses through the stages of denial, fear, and anger, evolving slowly to incredulous belief. His unremitting tenderness and understanding woo her, despite her logical mind’s objection to his existence.
As he and Penelope grow intimate, she tries to understand how he came to be what he is. He can’t talk about it, but he can talk about his life before the curse. Later in the story, he directs her to Dalkeith, to search for information about what happened to him. At Dalkeith, she uncovers old diaries and personal effects and they start to piece together Adrian’s story. It is also there that she sees the first portrait of her invisible lover—and he is magnificent.
The middle of the book is devoted to the increasing closeness between Penelope and her “ghost,” with a secondary romance between Dinah and her blind gardener. With proper food and care, Dinah makes a rapid recovery and slowly she and Penelope become friends. Penelope bargains with her, offering the girl employment in her home on the condition that Dinah attends a nearby university and pursues an education. Dinah, growing close to the gardener, and stunned by her discovery that the man she initially pitied for his blindness is a lawyer, agrees. (She also makes the error of thinking that since he’s blind he must be a virgin—so many misconceptions, much like the ones made about her. Large breasts = bimbo?) Dinah begins to blossom and gets involved with her new classes. She starts out slowly, taking just two classes, and works at the castle for her keep and education. Her progress is hard-won and delightful.
Penelope’s motivation for nurturing Dinah is rooted in her recent professional and personal catastrophe. As staff psychologist for Interon, Inc., Dr. Jonté treated the firm’s brilliant, neurotic, and often-inarticulate employees. She counseled only adults, until an engineer she was particularly fond of begged her to work with his extremely bright daughter. Reluctantly, she accepted the case, but met with failure for the first time in her career. The adolescent girl committed suicide.
Suddenly, Penelope found herself challenging everything she believed in. She had tried all the classic textbook things, as well as more unconventional psychology with the child. She talked and listened, and exercised every ounce of her superior intellect—and still failed.
Distraught by her failure that cost a child’s life, she left Interon, Inc., and secluded herself for mont
hs on end trying to pinpoint where she went wrong. During those months, desperate for a distraction from her depression, she played with her portfolio, riding waves via the Internet. Angered by the inability of her “brilliant mind” to save a little girl’s life, she devoted her massive IQ to turning her already reasonable fortune into an incredible one.
But Interon wouldn’t leave her alone. The engineers were bitterly complaining that their doctor had abandoned them. Interon went through several replacements with no success, and tried to tempt Dr. Jonté to return, initially with a generous offer, but finally with thinly veiled threats about exposing her “failure” publicly and humiliating her.
Determined never to return to Interon or counseling, she left the country and traveled, then bought Lyssford, drawn by an inexplicable sense of belonging.
At Lyssford, Penelope learns to love life again, falls in love with her ghost, and learns to forgive herself.
Lyssford is a haven for a group of unusual people. They bond to one another, each character a bit odd, and perhaps for that reason, are more tolerant and sensitive than the average person. At one point, Dinah, who is slowly thawing, posts a sign on the outside of the castle that says, “Welcome to the Land of Misfit Toys.” When Penelope sees it, she laughs just like Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman.
Penelope and Adrian grow closer, and share much of their lives with one another.
Late at night, Adrian does research, gets on the computer, and delves into records. He discovers that the child Penelope couldn’t save had ADD, and that her parents, both brilliant engineers, refused to allow her to take medication and drilled it into their daughter’s head that if she had a problem concentrating, it was her fault, her failure to properly focus, her lack of discipline. They never told Penelope that their daughter had ADD. So the child was fighting ADD and, believing it was her problem, was too ashamed to admit to Penelope that she had it. Penelope is astonished and saddened when she learns this, and slowly starts to forgive herself.