A few weeks ago, we had the opportunity to hear from China Mieville, the award-winning fantastical fiction author who currently writes an offbeat series for DC Comics, Dial H. Mr. Mieville's writing can be difficult to pin down, but he is often classified under the genre of "New Weird," and Dial H fits neatly into that realm. But DC isn't only looking forward, as two recently published, significantly sized collections prove. These two works highlight the dark, charmingly awkward, and literary publishing that DC and its Vertigo imprint allowed to flourish in the 1990s. Like Mr. Mieville's oeuvre, they defy easy categorization, so we'll call them "Old Weird" for now.

Writer Pat Mills and illustrator Kevin O'Neill chose to follow the Watchmen/Dark Knight heyday with a bizarre, outright shocking superhero-hunting-superheroes story, entitled Marshal Law. As The Comics Journal recently noted, the whole thing eventually devolves into a Judge Dredd-esque tale of "Who polices the superhero police?" but for much of the new Marshal Law: The Deluxe Edition's 480 pages, it's a fascinating snapshot of where comics were after a sea change in the 1980s. O'Neill's sharp-edged designs are housed in panels that feel more like frames to accentuate Mills' wry, anti-superhero sentiments, but they cannot shake the "across the pond" nature of it storytellers. Unlike American comics, a significant amount of action takes place between the panels, leaving the reader to piece together the transitions. It makes for a read punctuated by staccato jumps, and O'Neill populates the pages with jokes, puns, and mildly offensive winks to anchor readers to the page. This is not a breezy read, but it's a historically unsung one, especially for fans of O'Neill's later collaboration with Alan Moore, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

Then there's the House of Secrets Omnibus by Steven T. Seagle and artist Teddy Kristiansen (among others, including Guy Davis, Duncan Fedrego, Dean Ormston, and more), a 750+ page dollhouse-sized tome. Is it horror, thriller, dark fantasy? At about halfway through, even I'm unsure. Protagonist Rain Harper serves as witness and attempted savior for the souls who are called to the house in which she and a jury comprised of ghosts reside. The page layouts are untraditional, often jagged at the corners and imprecise. Kristiansen conveys haunted households and expressions with a graveyard ease"”the supernatural is present from the get-go, with sunken, hollow eyes and writhing bodies against flames. The collection doesn't begin with a hook but rather a slow burn, lengthy prose passages stack atop wide-angle panels. Eventually, the book settles into dialogue balloons and narrative boxes, and the story patiently creeps. Fans of Alan Moore's brand of horror and Matthew Sturges' House of Mystery series will appreciate the maddening twists.

In a publishing world where exhaustive collections are the norm, there still exists a rich undergrowth of cultish stories that deserve greater readership. DC dug deeply with these two hardcovers, unearthing dark soil from which new weird may grow.

--Alex

Today he's known simply as WHITEY
-- the Boston gangster whose epic crime story has become the stuff of history.
It's not just he's a stone-cold, hands-on killer (he faces 19 murder charges);
or his longevity (he's now 83, and his underworld reign covered decades). He's
made history because he brought the Boston FBI to its knees, corrupting FBI
agents so they acted as his palace guard and protected him from rivals in the
underworld and from other police agencies seeking to bust him.

Whitey Bulger has become America's
most notorious crime boss because he's at the center of the worst informant
scandal in FBI history -- and now, in June 2013, he finally goes to trial in
federal court in Boston in a racketeering case that has attracted media from
around the world. It's one of those rare legal spectacles -- a proverbial trial
of a century -- where Whitey himself has promised to take the stand to explain
his claim that the U.S. government promised him immunity against prosecution
for his reign of terror in Boston and beyond, a brutal, blood-splattered legacy
of extortion, loan sharking, drug trafficking, torture and murder.  The trial, expected to last throughout the
summer, will take viewers into the heart of darkness, featuring Whitey's secret
control of a band of Boston FBI agents.

Whitey's life story is told in our
new biography WHITEY: The Life of
America's Most Notorious Mob Boss the most comprehensive study of Whitey
to date, covering his formative years as a boy on the streets of South Boston
during the Depression; his bank-robbing years, which resulted in his only stint
in prison, including Alcatraz; his role in the infamous LSD experiments in
prison, backed secretly by the CIA; his rise to power in the 1970s with the
help of the FBI; his sixteen years on the lam as a fugitive from justice and,
finally, his capture in Santa Monica in 2011. It's all there, a biography that
gives readers insight into the making of the monster and reveals the origins of
Whitey's sense of invincibility and entitlement above the law.

And there's more. By chance,
Whitey's saga will unfold this summer on a second stage besides the courtroom.
It's the streets of Boston, where film star Johnny Depp will portray Whitey in
BLACK MASS, the motion picture adaptation of our previous book about Whitey
that incorporates material from our new biography. Barry Levinson, the
Academy-award winning director, will be shifting his cast and crew around the
city to capture Whitey's rise and fall for the big screen while federal
prosecutors and Whitey's lawyers tangle in the courtroom over the mountain of
evidence showing Whitey as calculating psychopath and cold-blooded killer.

--Dick Lehr, co-author of WHITEY: The Life of
America's Most Notorious Mob Boss

As a screenwriter, Paul
Rudnick has some big hit movies under his belt and now he's put his cinematic savvy to good use in
his first young adult novel that we picked as a Best Teen book of May, Gorgeous. In Gorgeous, Rudnick skewers Hollywood and our beauty-obsessed
world with an over-the-top (in a good way) twist on the Cinderella story. In Rudnick's version, Cinderella-"“or Becky, in this case--is an
unremarkable girl living with her obese mother in a Missouri trailer park who
is offered the promise of irresistible beauty by the most famous fashion
designer of them all (you'll recognize the real-life inspiration). What's a girl to do? Say yes, of course"¦

Gorgeous is great
satire but it also asks the ultimate question--who are we when we take a hard
look in the mirror? Do we see ourselves
as others see us, for better or worse? And
maybe living in the limelight doesn't look so pretty to those under its glare...

I was curious about
Rudnick's choice to go from writing movies to writing for teens and asked him
to share the story behind his story in the exclusive guest post below.

My mom struggled with her weight
all her life. She tried every possible diet and stuck with the Weight Watchers
program for years. She learned to weigh everything she ate on a little metal
scale, but she hated the prepackaged dinners, which she said looked like frozen
diapers. She finally lost many pounds and bought a skinny new wardrobe, but she
eventually gained all the weight back. A few weeks before she died, I watched
while she went through a box of photos of herself as a teenager and a young
woman. She looked up and said, "You know, back then, I thought I was so ugly.
But I looked great!"

It broke my heart, but then my mom
laughed, because in my family, humor was essential. This was the inspiration
for Gorgeous, my first YA novel.
Women in particular are constantly bombarded with images of glamour and
perfection, in magazines, at the movies, on TV and online. I'm also mesmerized
by the dangerous glory of fashion, and about how designers can become
modern-day wizards, promising impossible transformations. So I came up with
Becky Randle, an eighteen-year-old from a Missouri trailer park, who receives a
tempting and scary offer. Tom Kelly, a legendary and reclusive designer, will
make Becky three dresses "” one red, one white, and one black. And if Becky
wears these dresses, she will become the most beautiful woman in the world.

At first I wasn't sure where this
idea might lead me: Should it become a book or a play or maybe a movie? I've
written in all of these forms: I wrote the movies In&Out and Addams Family
Values, and the novel I'll Take It,
which was based on the annual New England car trips I'd take with my mom and
her sisters. We'd claim that we were going to watch the leaves change, but we
were really hitting every outlet store between New Jersey and Maine.

After several false starts, Gorgeous came fully alive only when I
began to write in the first person, in Becky's own voice. That's also when I
realized Becky's story was a YA novel. I'd been reading a great deal of YA,
because the books are addictive and wonderfully entertaining. I've loved
everyone from J. K. Rowling to David Levithan, Veronica Roth and John Green,
all of whom have devoted and often global followings. There's a good reason for
that: Their books grab the reader and won't let go.

I like a challenge, so I plunged
right in. I wanted to see if I could write a YA novel that would both do Becky
justice and reflect my own sense of humor. I showed the manuscript to a fifteen-year-old,
and she approved, which was a huge relief. Teenagers, I know, are tough-minded,
vocal, and passionate readers, and they have no trouble saying exactly what
they think. Becky's take-no-prisoners best friend is the always loyal and
always outspoken Rocher, who sometimes wears a T-shirt that says, "I Hate You
More."

The best way to write a YA novel,
I've found, is not to worry about any specific notion of what a YA book should
be. I've tried to make Gorgeous as
accurate, heartfelt, and as much fun as possible. I hope that readers will
understand Becky and cheer for her, and swoon every few pages. And as for me,
well, I've already started my next book, and it's YA. --Paul Rudnick

Not many authors can claim to have had a wide readership for
thirty years, but that's exactly the milestone fantasy writer Raymond E. Feist celebrates
this year. Back in 1982, Feist wrote his first novel Magician, a story about an
orphan boy named Pug who is thrust by a war into captivity in an alien world,
only to rise to become a Master magician.
That novel introduced readers to Midkemia and the Riftwars, an epic
series of battles between Good and Evil. It also began a rather remarkable run
during which Feist's success has outlasted that of many of his contemporaries.

Fittingly, after twenty-nine books (authored and coauthored),
Feist marks the thirtieth anniversary of the start of it all with Magician's
End, the final chapter of the Chaoswar Saga and the climax of his Riftwar
Cycle. Omnivoracious caught up with Feist to ask him about his career and his
books.

What
do you think has contributed to your longevity in the field?

I have no idea.
If I did, I'd bottle it and sell it. I started out to write a "ripping
yarn," and have a good time telling a story, and that's always been the
prime motivation. So I guess I can say that multiple generations have decided
to have fun with me. I know I get youngsters who tell me their parents gave
them the books.

What are you
most proud of about your body of work?

The longevity. I've
been continuously in print in the English language since 1982, and there are
not a lot of writers who can claim they've never had a book go out of print. It
pleases me more to have people discovering me as a "new writer" more
than it does to make a bestseller list.

How did you
survive the rough patches? What carried you through?

I got a lot of
support. I have some really good people in my life who took care of me during
the crazy times. Writers tend to live in mental caves when we work, and we do
need to get out and get some fresh air and sunshine now and again, and every
once in a while someone needs to drag us out of that cave.

Do you have a
favorite novel among your own work?

It's like kids,
really. You love them all, but each is unique. Magician is my first born, so to speak, so it really is special in
that respect. Magician's End is the
other bookend, really, so it's special in a different way.

What, really, do
you think has changed in the book culture over the last decade?

Tough one to
answer. If I was to point to one important thing it's that younger readers are
more attuned to the concept of content as opposed to a book as an objective
item. They don't mind reading on a Kindle, Nook, iPhone, laptop, etc.

Did you do
anything special to celebrate thirty years of Feist books?

Touring the UK,
US, Australia and New Zealand, so I can visit with my readers. Then I come home
and maybe take a week off and hang at the beach. When you live in San Diego you
don't need to go far for a vacation.

What's next for
you?

I'm already
working on King of Ashes, the first
volume of a new series set in a new universe. I hope the readers find it as
compelling as they did the Midkemian books.

What would you
say to a writer just beginning now, based on everything you've learned over the
years?

No one can teach
anyone to write. They can help someone learn, so don't confuse those two
things. The thing about writing is you have to practice, so write a lot and
don't stress if it's isn't perfect the first bash. If you want to play piano,
you practice. If you want to play piano well, you practice a lot. And if you
want to play piano in Carnegie Hall, you practice hard for years. Writing's the
same.

This weekend in San Jose,
California, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America announced the
winners of the Nebula Award, given for excellence in SF/F. Kim Stanley Robinson's 2312
won for best novel, confirming Omni's prediction that Robinson was among the
favorites. The full list of winners is:

Novel:

2312, Kim Stanley
Robinson (Orbit US; Orbit UK)

Novella:

After the Fall, Before the Fall, During
the Fall, Nancy
Kress (Tachyon)

Novelette:

"Close
Encounters," Andy Duncan (The
Pottawatomie Giant & Other Stories)

Short Story:

"Immersion,"
Aliette de Bodard (Clarkesworld 6/12)

Ray Bradbury Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation:

Beasts of the Southern Wild

Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy Book:

Fair Coin, E.C. Myers (Pyr)

Robinson has often been considered a master of world-building, plot, and inspired
exposition. In 2312 he created flawed, compelling characters and an intriguing vision of the future. Nancy Kress and Andy Duncan are perennial Nebula favorites, while the win for rising star Aliette de Bodard is her first"”and a rare Nebula win for any writer not from the U.S. or U.K. Bodard was also up for best novella for On a Red Station, Drifting, available in book form.

Kim Stanley Robinson viewed through his Nebula Award

Gregory Bossert, whose fiction has appeared in Asimov's SF Magazine, among others, attended the awards ceremony as a guest of Asimov's editor-in-chief Sheila Williams at the Dell Magazine table. He reported back to Omnivoracious that the
highlights included "Outgoing SFWA president John Scalzi's warm introduction of the Solstice Award posthumously to Carl Sagan, and Nick Sagan's gracious and inspiring speech accepting on his father's behalf," with Ginjer Buchanan also winning a Soltice Award. Michael H. Payne, meanwhile, was given the Kevin O'Donnell Jr. Service to SFWA Award.

Bossert thought toastmaster Robert Silverberg was "wry and sharp-witted throughout,
never more so than in his introduction of the Damon Knight Grand Master Award for
lifetime achievement to Gene Wolfe. Wolfe's acceptance speech was both funny and moving; he concluded by saying that as nice as the awards are, and as wonderful and strange the people in attendance, in the end there was no place like home, and for him, home was the books."

In
addition, Bossert found Aliette de Bodard's "shock and near-tearful joy at
winning short story Nebula a delightful break from the banter of the Nebula
veterans."

Kim Stanley Robinson's acceptance speech for 2312 "deftly wrapped up the ceremony by returning to the respect and appreciation he and the assembled SFWA members have for newly anointed Grand Master Gene Wolfe and his works. This led to an un-staged and riotous standing ovation for Wolfe, and then a long evening of celebration."

Gene Wolfe, David G. Hartwell, and Kim Stanley Robinson

Could
you explain the name of the street, which is also the name of the book?

The
street is named for the Sal Mal grove that cuts off the lane at its dead end
and are found in all the gardens of the homes down that road. There is another
significance to the Sal Mal tree - it is the tree under which the Gautama
Buddha's mother gave birth to him, and the four Sal Mal trees surrounding his
bed turned white when he passed away, and it is also a flower said to be
favored by the Hindu god Vishnu, and so it is rarely cut down. Further, the Sal
Mal flower and its stamen and petals are shaped in a way that depicts people at
prayer around the dome of a dagoba. It seemed fitting, somehow, to have this neighborhood
nestled in the heart of a grove of such trees, such flowers.

Your
novel is teeming with great characters, young, old, Sinhalese, Tamil. Do you
have favorites among them?

My
favorites are Sonna and Nihil. Sonna was, in fact, a very minor character in
the first draft. He came and went very quickly, nothing very important happened
to or because of him. Somehow, though, when I read aloud from this draft it
became apparent that Sonna had a great deal of potential - within himself and
as a character. He resisted being diminished in every revision; he just grew.
Nihil was always the driving force behind this story, the inspiration for it,
really. Together they embody what I am most drawn to contemplating: this drive
we have to keep what we love safe, and the way in which we yearn for things we
are rarely capacitated to deserve, earn, or keep.

At the
heart of the novel is an unlikely friendship, between the young girl Devi and a
neighbor, Raju, a misfit. What was the inspiration for their relationship?

Children.
When I was first living in a very upscale suburb in NJ, I found that adults
always assumed I was my light-skinned daughter's nanny. They never even spoke
to me, constantly looking past me to each other. Their children, on the other
hand, never made this mistake. They were paying attention to the relationship,
to the way I interacted with her. Children anywhere are usually able to see
beneath the exterior, to the human being. In Devi's case, she could see that
Raju despite his mishapen body and social inarticulateness held only good
intention in his heart.

The
street, Sal Mal Lane, houses a really wide variety of people. Was your street
like that in Sri Lanka? Is that typical of the country?

Yes,
my street, also a dead-end though with guavas, not Sal Mal trees, was very much
like this one. Most of the country except in the North where the Tigers (the
LTTE), held sway, was - and is - thoroughly cross-pollinated. In those areas,
through systematic slaughter of entire villages, the Tigers ensured that only
Tamils, and only the poorest of Tamils (those unable to leave), continued to
live in the North. Elsewhere we lived together, attended the same schools, so
on. In some ways that was the true shame of what happened with the riots in
July, 1983, this way in which all of that had to go on but the insides of
people - their hearts, their minds - were transformed. We went on to live
together and yet be suspicious of each other. To interact and play and attend
each others religious festivities, births, deaths, marriages, and yet there
came into being this reservation, something held back. That earlier time,
before what happened, that is the true measure of peace and that is what the
country is harkening toward again.

Well,
it enabled me to follow them to places where they were not supposed to be!
Devi, for instance, crossing the big roads that she is prohibited from
crossing, the children rehearsing their band in a neighbor's house, these were
really interesting for me, as a writer, to accompany these children that way.
As a child I did grow up in that way. We went wherever we wanted except at
night. Somehow at night all the rules changed - I suppose it is the same here,
too, with curfews and such. But in general there was a real fluidity to the
conduct of our days, where we entertained ourselves as siblings and with
friends, often doing precisely what we were not supposed to do. I climbed the
roof with my brothers, stole fruits from our neighbors (because it was always
better tasting when stolen than when freely given), and walked down the
terrible big roads to buy hard red sweets with which to color my lips and
pretend I was wearing lip gloss.

You
write so well about childhood, and about friendships between adults and
children. Was that easy material for you to write?

After naming Sylvia Day's Bared to You a 2012 Best Book of the Year in Romance and devouring Reflected in You, we've been anxiously awaiting the release of the third book in Day's scorching Crossfire series, Entwined with You. To whet our appetites and make waiting for the book's arrival a little easier, Amazon Romance expert Alyssa Morris spoke with Day about what's next for Gideon and Eva, her upcoming collaboration with Harlequin and Cosmopolitan, her all-time favorite romance novels, and much more.

Alyssa Morris: Now that you've had a bit of time to absorb the success of Bared to You, does it feel real? Or are you still surprised?

Sylvia Day: I'm still surprised! I'm glad I'm a veteran and that I've been publishing for close to 10 years, so I had some experience under my belt as far as dealing with it. But on the other hand, there's no way to anticipate writing something that becomes a global phenomenon, you know. I don't know about other writers--I didn't even dream about anything like that. I always figured that it just happened to the Stephenie Meyers and J.K. Rowlings of the world. So, yeah, I don't think I'll ever get over being surprised that I had a series that struck such a chord.

AM: It just hit such a moment in our culture, where all of a sudden this is what everyone wants to be reading. It's an interesting confluence.

SD: Right. We always talk about that, about right book, right time. Random House released Fifty Shades on the same day I self-published Bared to You, so talk about the right timing. Just"¦ wow!

AM: Do you have a favorite moment in the Crossfire series so far? 

SD: You know, I really loved the weekend that Gideon and Eva spent in the Outer Banks. These poor guys. When they're alone, they're fine. Life is perfect when they're alone. Unfortunately, they don't get a lot of time alone. [Laughs] So I just love that. I love seeing them together away from all of the distractions and intrusions and everything else that's going wrong in their lives.

I can't talk too much about Entwined with You because it's not out yet. And that's so hard, because I so want to talk tabout it! But there's more alone time with Gideon and Eva as we move forward in the series and they grow stronger, so I'm really enjoying that as a writer. 

AM: Can you tell us a little bit about what we can expect to see next for Gideon and Eva? And is Entwined with You the last book in the series, or it might continue farther?

SD: Yes. It's definitely continuing, so I can say that for sure. I was not able to wrap up the entirety of the storyline into three books, and I was absolutely adamant that I was not going to try to rush or cram the third book to try to make it fit. And I was fortunate that my agent and my editor they both agree that it would be a big disservice to the series to not let it play out the way it needs to, so there will definitely be future books.

The first book was really the introduction to Gideon and Eva. That's where we first become familiar with their flaws and their issues, which are of course very prevalent in the first book. The second book they were really apart most of that book. They were mostly broken up through that whole thing. It was very angsty and dark. The third book is very different. Eva's in a different place. At the end of Reflected in You, Gideon has made a pretty large sacrifice for her. Her big issues had been insecurities, concerns about other people and other women particularly in Gideon's life. It's hard to have those sorts of fears and self-doubt after somebody makes a huge sacrifice, like Gideon did for her. So she's in a much more stable place as far as her comfort level with the relationship and being able to accept the depth of his commitment to her.

Gideon, however--what he's done, there's a lot of ramifications. Not just externally, but internally. So as she grows stronger, he's actually struggling with more. That said, she's really the anchor for that relationship. She has been from the beginning. So with her being stable, it brings new stability to the whole relationship, and readers will see a lot more moments of calm and connection between the two than we have seen in the previous books.

AM: Awesome. So this is sort of a pet question for me: Will Cary ever get his own book?

SD: You know, I'm not sure. At this point I'm so wrapped up with Gideon and Eva that I haven't really gone into tangents with the secondary characters. Now of course, Cary's story continues through the course of the book, but in a lot of ways he's more messed up than the other two are [laughs], and he's juggling these two relationships. He also has some pretty pivotal things happen in Entwined with You that readers will see that have a very enormous impact on him and his growth.

Can I finish his story along the course of the Crossfire series? I mean, it's possible, especially considering that I'll be going into more books, but then again because he has so much more work to do, it's possible that he could have a spinoff series, if I can't fit it in around Eva and Gideon. That was another reason why the series is continuing, because all of the secondary characters have their own stories that are going on.

AM: Yeah. Eva's parents"¦

SD: We've got Eva's parents, we've got the Stanton issue, we've got Cary, we've got her work issue, and of course Gideon's got his whole family relationship. His whole family dynamic is just a mess, so you know all of those things are progressing along with Gideon and Eva's relationship. So, I'm sure some of those things, a lot of those things will get resolved because Eva and Gideon are not going to be in the place where they need to be to reach their happily ever after when everything else around them is in such flux. On the other hand, bigger issues might have to go into a separate series, and while I don't rule it out, I'm not planning on it right now.

AM: I think that that's part of the reason why the Crossfire series has caught on so well: all of the characters and all of the secondary characters have so much depth.

SD: Right. Actually, after Lionsgate picked up the Crossfire series for development, one of the biggest things I've heard from readers is "I'm so glad that it will be on television rather than a motion picture because you'll lose all of those secondary characters if you try to fit it into an hour and a half to two hours," and I absolutely agree. The investment is in their whole group, their whole family dynamic and friend dynamic, and you really can't lose any of that without losing them.

AM: Can you give us any updates about the status of the Lionsgate project? Is it definitely going to be a TV show? What's your involvement?

SD: As far as whether it's definitely going to be a TV show, I'm not sure. Lionsgate has both the television and motion picture rights, and it's their decision to go one way or the other with it. So far, we're on the same page as far as television being probably the best medium for telling the full breadth of the story and really getting to explore all of those secondary characters and their impact on Gideon and Eva. I'm in talks with the producers, so they're very definitely keeping me involved. I'm an executive consultant on the project, and I'll be working with them in terms of script development, so hopefully, because it's more of a collaboration rather than a complete takeover, I hope that we'll be able to hang on to the things that made the series as successful as it is, while still making that adaptation to the different medium that works in that regard too.

Other than that, there's a lot of it that I'm not allowed to discuss! My poor husband gets to listen to me ramble on and on. I'm like, "You're the only person I can talk to about any of this." It's very exciting, and I know that they love the series for the way it is, so that's always a good thing.

AM: That is exciting! I think a TV show would be a really interesting format for your series.

SD: I do, too. Of course, their story is so psychologically based that it's their flaws and their damage and their histories that make them who they are and make the series what it is. If you couldn't explore that, you run the risk of it falling into just "This is a highly charged sexual relationship." And while that's a large part of the series, that's not its core. And of course in order for us to care about these characters having sex, we have to care about them as individuals. So I'm definitely glad that we're working to keep that integrity, the character integrity and the story, so it can be sexy still and still be that depth of story that readers connected to.

AM: So what can we expect to see next from you outside of the Crossfire world? I know that you have Afterburn and Aftershock with Harlequin and Cosmopolitan.

SD: Yes, I'm really excited about that, too. Exploring new frontiers has pretty much always been a part of my career. I started publishing ebooks back in 2005, and of course there was no Kindle or Nook at the time. People were just buying the files online and reading them on their computers.

AM: I definitely did that.

SD: I couldn't understand the appeal of that myself, but of course I was working at the computer all the time, so I didn't want to do my leisure time there, too. But I knew it was going to be an expanding medium. My New York publishers were not digitizing books at the time, but I thought this is exciting, this is fun. And I had a lot of writer friends at the time who were like, "What are you doing? Ebooks are like where you go when New York won't publish your stuff!" And I'm like, "You're missing it, guys, I'm telling you this is going to be it, this is going to be the future" --and of course look at it now. So to do a collaboration with a magazine, I thought, "OK, this is taking it to a different level." I find that really exciting.

The series is actually one story following one couple across both books, Jackson and Gianna. It's a contemporary story set in New York, Gianna's the narrator, so Crossfire readers will have a certain comfort level with it because of that, but it's a totally different story and they're totally different characters. It actually took me a while to get into it because I was so stuck with Gideon and Eva that it was like trying to fall in love with a different couple, but they won me over, and now I love them, too. I can't wait until it comes out. Again, because it's a digital first release, we can get it out quickly. I don't have to wait a year, or a year and a half as we would have in the past. The collaboration with Cosmo is really fun.

AM: You're obviously a very prolific writer. You've had several books come out in the past year, and several more  coming out next year. How long does it take you to write a novel? Do you work on them all simultaneously?

SD: At the start of my career, I used to be able to work on multiple projects at once. I can't do that anymore. For a full-length novel, it takes me anywhere from 4-6 weeks to write the initial manuscript, and then of course there's editing and tweaking and so on and so forth. About a month to a month and a half for a full length book. I do a lot of novellas and short stories. I really enjoy the format, and those can take me anywhere from a week to three weeks"¦.  Sorry, my husband just walked into the room carrying an award for me which apparently just came in the mail.

AM: That's exciting!

SD: Yeah! It's actually really pretty. Ah! It's from the Australian Romance Readers Association. Favorite Erotic Romance of 2012, Bared to You. Nice!

AM: Congratulations!

SD: Thanks! He came in like Vanna White. He has it balanced on one hand. [Laughs]

AM: When did you start writing? I know that before you started writing full-time, you were US Army military intelligence, so that's a big switch, career-wise.

SD: Well, you know, when I was 12, my mom handed me my first romance novel and said, "I want you to find a man like this." I read it, and I absolutely just loved it. It was this sweeping saga sort of romance. I got to the end, and I just wanted to go back to the beginning and start all over again. And I was like, "I wanna do that. I wanna write stories that people don't want to end." That same week, I had an essay that was due for my English class on what we wanted to be when we grew up. My essay was on how I was going to be a romance novelist, so that was always my career choice.
But then of course there's school, and then we had Desert Storm and I felt like I needed to contribute, so I joined the Army. It turned out that I had an aptitude for languages, so I was offered the opportunity to go to the Defense Language Institute and learn a different language. Of course I jumped on the opportunity. And I went and learned Russian, and that was a marvelous experience. I'm so glad that I did it--so much so that my sister, who's 12 years younger than I am, ended up joining the Air Force and becoming an Arabic linguist, just based on my stories of how much I appreciated and how much I got out of my time in the military.
So when people are like, "How do you go from being a linguist to being a writer?", it was actually that being a linguist was a detour from my dream of being a writer, because I decided on that when I was so much younger.

In 2003, I had 2 very small children, and one day they were down for a nap, and all the laundry was done and the house was clean, and I was sitting here going, "You have this me time right here, these next few hours while the kids are asleep. What are you going to do?" It was the perfect opportunity for me to start doing what I had always wanted to do, which was write. I told myself, "I have three years before my kids start going to kindergarten," so really, "Three years, you can try to get published, and then after that, if it doesn't happen, you can go back to work, no harm, no foul."  I had no idea how unrealistic an expectation three years to publication was. I had no clue how difficult it was to break in, and I think it's probably great that I was so green, because if I had listened to all of the advice I got afterwards, I don't know if I would have gotten off the ground.

As it was, I sat down in October of 2003 and wrote my first novel, which turned out to be Ask for It, which is a historical romance. I finished that by November, and then I started another book that turned out to be In the Flesh, which was released as Livia Dare later on. I just kept writing and writing and writing. Lori Foster had the Lori Foster Brava Novella contest because at the time she was writing for Brava, and you submitted three pages of a novella to her and she chose 20 finalists and then there was a reader's choice and an editor's choice. The editor was Kate Duffy. Via the course of that which I entered in June and in December of 2004, which was just a little over a year after I started writing in October of 2003, I got the phone call from Kate where she offered to buy the book, which became Bad Boys Ahoy, now being retitled as Scandalous Liaisons.

During that whole year, I had been submitting. I was already writing erotic romance, though I'm not sure we were calling it erotic romance then. It was just sexier romance, sensual romance, and the only places that were really publishing that at the time was Brava of course, and Red Sage, and Virgin Books had their Black Lace, and of course there was Ellora's Cave, which was digital. So I submitted to Black Lace and Ellora's Cave. Within two weeks after I got the call from Kate, Ellora's Cave picked up the story I submitted to them, and Black Lace picked up the story I submitted to them. And it was kinda like when it rains, it pours! Over the course of about a two week period, I ended up selling four or five different things to multiple publishers and it was just like, wow. Ok! I guess I've started!

Of course you don't realize that the hard work doesn't actually begin until after you go to sell all your other stuff.

AM: That seems to be a theme in your career. Things happen really quickly, and then you do a lot more work, and sitting down, and then there are these big periods of excitement and change.

SD: Yeah. Really, that's true. You go through a couple years where it's just heads down and get it done, and then something happens, and it's like "Wow!" and "Yay!" And then head back down and write more.

But I'm grateful all the time, because the hard part is selling the next book. And I've been fortunate that I've always been able to sell the next book.

AM: Can you give us an idea of some of your favorite romance writers and some books you're looking forward to reading?

SD: My favorite romance novel is a book called The Fifth Favor by Shelby Reed. It's just one of those ones where I could not stop reading it, and when I got to the end I was so devastated it was over. Oh man, I could have just kept reading this story for like ever. I love Lisa Kleypas. I love her historical romances. I'm a huge fan of Nalini Singh's Guild Hunters series, JD Robb's In Death series. Oh! Another one of my favorite books is The Search by Nora Roberts. I really love that book. The hero was so grumpy, and I just loved him. I absolutely loved him all the way through. He's just a classic Nora Roberts hero. And of course you have the search dogs. I just thought the whole thing was beautifully done. Of course Nora doesn't do anything that's not beautifully done.
I love Patricia Briggs's Alpha and Omega series. I think she writes romance so well.

AM: I've just been reading the Mercy Thompson series lately and they're so good. I don't know what took me so long to find her.

SD: She's just fabulous, she really is--I love her stuff. Those are the ones I always rattle off the top of my head because I follow them so religiously. I still love Lora Leigh. She's not releasing books really a lot right now, but I love her stories. Karen Marie Moning. Love her. I fell in love with her for her Highlander series, but of course I've followed her since then.

AM: Thanks so much for taking the time to talk with us, Sylvia!

SD: Thank you!