Categories, Cockapoos, and a Little Help from You

YOU CHOOSE WHERE I ENTER THE FIREBIRD IN THE RITA^® AWARD CONTEST!

Left: My dog Sam, Photo © Me    Right: Purebred Poodle © Appleping | Dreamstime.com

Why the dogs? More on that in a minute...
 
The RITA Awards, for those of you who aren't familiar with them, are the equivalent of Oscars for the romance-writing community, judged by peers and awarded at a gala evening ceremony where the gowns could rival anything that Hollywood could throw at them.

As a proud member of the Romance Writers of America it's been my privilege to help judge the RITAs (and find great new authors to add to my reading list), and it's been my honor to have two of my own books final for RITAs themselves: The Winter Sea in 2009, and The Rose Garden in 2012.

Although neither book won, I did get to actually touch a RITA statuette this past summer at RWA Nationals in Atlanta while celebrating with fellow author Simone St. James, who deservedly won two awards—Best First Novel and Best Novel With Strong Romantic Elements—for her debut romantic historical ghost-hunting mystery The Haunting of Maddy Clare.

Watching Simone win (that's her on the left, by the way...if she looks a bit blurry, it's only because we were all a bit blurry that evening) was wonderful but bittersweet, because the category that she won in, and that my books finaled in, is being retired by the RWA and, beginning next year, there will no longer be any RITA awarded for Best Novel With Strong Romantic Elements.

A quick read through the lists of past winners will show you that categories change all the time in the RITAs: new ones emerge, old ones vanish, and others are blended together, all of which is a natural consequence of the RWA continuing to try its best to serve the ever-evolving needs of its broad and varied membership while keeping to its mission.

But it does leave a writer like me with a bit of a problem. And here's where we get to the dogs...

Purebred Cocker Spaniel Puppies

© Fotoskat | Dreamstime.com

In the photo at the top of this post, the dog on the right is a Poodle—a purebred. The one on the left is my former dog Samson, a Cockapoo. Samson had elements of Poodle in him, as you can see, but they were jumbled up with elements of Cocker Spaniel, meaning in a dog show he could only have competed against other dogs like him—the crossbreeds—because he would never have been judged "Best Poodle" or "Best Cocker Spaniel".

My books are like Cockapoos. Actually, they're more like what you'd get if you crossed Cockapoos with Puggles (which themselves are a cross between Beagles and Pugs), because my novels tend to be "Contemporary-Historical-Romantic-Suspense-with-Paranormal-elements", crossing several sub-genres without fitting neatly into any of them. 

The Novel with Strong Romantic Elements category, given that part of its original purpose was to provide a place for works of romantic fiction "not belonging in another category", used to be a catch-basin for those of us whose novels crossed sub-genres, but I've been reassured by both veteran RWA colleagues and National head office that any book that meets the criteria for romance, by having a central love story with an emotionally satisfying and optimistic ending, should fit well into one of the remaining RITA categories.

I find that heartening, because The Firebird is definitely a romance. Two romances, in fact—one in the present and one in the past—both of which end happily. It also happens to be my favourite of the books I've written so far, and I really want to enter it. I just don't know exactly where it fits.

So here's where YOU come in.

I'm letting you choose. There are four categories, by my count, the book could be entered in. Here they are, as set out in the RWA's official Category Descriptions: 

Contemporary Romance: Novels that focus primarily on the romantic relationship and which are greater than 65,000 words. In this category, the love story is the main focus of the novel, and the resolution of the romance is emotionally satisfying and optimistic.

The word count of The Firebird is, not including the epigraph and afterward, 152,466 words, of which 64,889 words are used to tell the contemporary love story between Rob and Nicola. Which has a happy ending. 

Historical Romance: Novels set in any historical time period. In this category, the love story is the main focus of the novel, and the resolution of the romance is emotionally satisfying and optimistic.

The remaining 87,577 words of the novel are used to tell the historical story that follows Anna Moray from her childhood to her coming of age in early 18th century St. Petersburg, Russia, including her romance with Edmund O'Connor. Which also ends happily. 

Paranormal Romance: Novels in which the future, a fantasy world or paranormal elements are an integral part of the plot. In this category, the love story is the main focus of the novel, a futuristic, fantasy or paranormal element is blended with the love story, and the resolution of the romance is emotionally satisfying and optimistic. 

Rob and Nicola are both psychics. They communicate telepathically a lot. The book begins, in fact, with an accidental meeting of their minds, and it's Nicola's undeveloped ability to "see" an object's past while holding it that starts them on their quest to trace the history of the Firebird carving, with Rob using his more advanced remote viewing abilities to bridge the past and present while he tries to tutor Nicola in how to fully use her own gifts. So there's that.

Romantic Suspense: Novels in which suspense, mystery, or thriller elements constitute an integral part of the plot. In this category, the love story is the main focus of the novel, a suspense/mystery/thriller plot is blended with the love story, and the resolution of the romance is emotionally satisfying and optimistic.

The origins of the Firebird carving do present a mystery, Anna has a woman-in-jeopardy sort of childhood, there's a spy plot in St. Petersburg, and overall the sort of older-style suspense one might associate with books by Mary Stewart. 

So, you tell ME: Which of these four categories does The Firebird best fit into? 

Leave a comment with your vote. I'll tally them before the contest opens in October, and wherever most of you believe the book should go, that's where I'll enter it. And thank you for helping me figure out just where my crossbreed belongs.

Me in a Very Pink Shirt, holding Samson as a puppy.

And the Winners Are...

Thanks so much to all of you for entering the giveaway, and leaving such great comments.

The Random Number Generator has spoken, and the three winners who will each receive a copy of Audible's edition of The Firebird, narrated by Katherine Kellgren, are:

LIANNE

TIFFANY DRAPER

JUDY C.

Congratulations! Please email me at susanna(underscore)kearsley(at)yahoo(dot)ca and I'll send you the redemption codes so you can collect your prizes!

Doing the Voices (and Giveaway)

Katherine Kellgren, Narrator of The Firebird, in the Studio at Audible

When my children were very young, reading them stories at bedtime brought certain demands. "Do the voices," they'd tell me, since Toad in The Wind in the Willows could not sound like Mole, any more than the Tin Man could sound like the Scarecrow, or Kanga like Winnie the Pooh. Every book was a challenge, remembering whose voice was whose.

So I have great respect for the narrators who bring my own books to life in their audio versions.

Whenever a narrator takes on one of my books, I'm always reminded of Neil Gaiman's reaction when he visited Pinewood Studios during the filming of his novel Stardust and saw the crew working to create the flying pirate ship: “I felt so guilty," he recalled in this MTV Interview. "I wasn't saying how great it was; I was going, 'I am so sorry I made it up!' Because it didn't cost me anything, just the price of whatever tea I was drinking and some ink. And now 70 people have spent two months working to build this thing and you can dance on the deck.”

I understand this guilt. I feel it in my gut each time I talk or correspond with those poor narrators who have to perform my books. Because I simply wrote the story as it came, and put the people in the mix with one another without ever once considering the headaches it would bring to any actor who would have to "do the voices".

Nicola Barber

For instance, it seemed natural when creating the heroine of my novel The Rose Garden to give her a wandering background: born in Cornwall, England, emigrating to the west coast of Canada as a child, and then moving south to California as a young adult, where she lived several years before returning "home" to Cornwall. I never once stopped to think that her resulting hybrid accent would be difficult to render into audio.

So I felt a bit guilty to dump it on narrator Nicola Barber, along with the various Cornish and West Country people my heroine meets, and the Irishman from County Cork, and a handful of Londoners, some of whom live in a previous century.

I felt guiltier still when I took the first phone call from Rosalyn Landor, who narrated The Winter Sea (for which she very deservedly won the Audie Award for Best Female Narration). Because she had to take on a Canadian first-person narrator and a host of characters, some fictional and some lifted right out of real history, whose accents came from very different areas of Scotland.

Rosalyn Landor (Photo by Arielle Rudman)

Accents are tricky. There's no one "Scottish accent" any more than there's one single "American accent", and just as a person from Tennessee doesn't sound anything like someone raised in Wisconsin, so too a Scot from Aberdeenshire sounds nothing like someone from Glasgow.

Roz was determined to get all my characters' voices exactly, from the Glaswegian doctor to the Perthshire-born past hero to the Doric-speaking landlord of my heroine. I listened in amazement as she mimicked all the voices I could hear so very clearly in my own head. But I still felt guilt.

And I'm surprised that Katherine Kellgren, when she called to go over the voices for The Firebird, didn't hang up on me right then and there.

Here's what she had to say, after the fact, about her experience with the novel:

"There were technical requirements in The Firebird in terms of the many dialects spoken in contemporary and historical scenes which made the book both a challenge and a joy to record. Luckily I was able to enlist the help of a wonderful and very experienced dialect coach when preparing to go into the studio - but we were both working overtime on this one! I was practically dreaming in Scots dialect by the time we were done!"

And here's why. When she first got in touch on the phone, we began with the Scottish voices. The Firebird, as a sort-of-sequel to The Winter Sea, contains a few of the same characters, so I was ready with the references I'd given Roz, sometimes matching the accent of a living actor to that of a character, to make things easier.

For example, Colonel Graeme, who's in both books, is a Perthshire man. He looks and sounds in my own mind like Scottish actor Brian Cox, which proved to be a useful thing for Katy, as she actually knows Brian Cox, so she's familiar with his voice.

Rob, the modern-day hero, is from Eyemouth, which becomes more problematic, since the accent is sui generis, unique to that one town, and even if you do it properly it can be somewhat difficult to follow. "But," I said to Katy in an effort to be helpful, "he'd modify the way he speaks when talking to the heroine, because she's English. So it would be sort of watered-down Eyemouth. Except when he's angry. Or drunk."

I could hear Katy jotting that down, at her end of the phone. 

We moved on, to the cast of historical characters. Irish nuns in Flanders. Siberian servants in St. Petersburg. In the house of General Lacy, who was also in St. Petersburg, we had the general's wife, who was Livonian; their children, who had been raised on the general's estate in Livonia; Edmund O'Connor, an Irishman from County Kerry; the family priest, who would most likely be Italian, and the general himself, who had come out of Ireland as a young teenager and lived abroad ever since. "So his accent," I said, "would have altered a bit, though it may become stronger when he's speaking to other Irishmen."

"Right," Katy said. More notes jotted. "And Charles, the nephew of Vice-Admiral Gordon...?"

"Well, Charles," I said, "is a second-generation expatriate Scot. His father was born and raised near Aberdeen and sent as a young man to serve under a Scottish general in Russia, where there was a fairly large community of British expatriates, so Charles would most probably have grown up speaking English with an Aberdonian inflection but also some influence from his mother, who may or may not have been Russian…"

And that's where she should have hung up on me, really.

I'm glad that she didn't, because her performance is beautiful, as were the others. (Below you'll find samples of all three American audio books, so you'll see what I mean when I say I've been much more than lucky with all of my Audible narrators). 

I still do feel guilty for making my narrators build the equivalent of a full-scale flying pirate ship out of the voices I've put on the page. But it is always an awesome experience seeing that ship built, and getting to dance on the deck.

Thanks to the generosity of Audible, I have three copies of the audiobook of The Firebird to give away to American listeners. Leave a comment below before midnight on Saturday, September 7th, and I'll choose three winners at random from all who have commented. Best of luck!

Adventure Across Time

Today's Adventure: The Firebird (by Me)

10 Great Authors, 10 Unforgettable Adventures. With every “Today’s Adventure” post between August 1 and August 13, you can register to win the featured book and the grand prize of all 10 books. We’ll announce winners on August 14.  You may enter today’s contest by leaving a comment right here on my blog. 

Nicola’s not looking for adventure. But when a client brings a family heirloom—called “the Firebird”—to her gallery to be appraised for sale, she has to help, despite the fact that helping means she’ll have to use the psychic “gifts” she’d rather hide, and call a favor in from an old boyfriend, Rob, whose gifts are even greater than her own.

Using Rob’s abilities to “see” the distant past, they start their search in Scotland for the client’s long-dead ancestor, a little girl they know will one day own that family heirloom. When they find her, she’s in danger.

Anna sat up fully, straightening her back as her own gaze slipped to the colonel and she asked him, ‘Is the devil really on his way here?’

Colonel Graeme, as he often did, delayed his answer with a question of his own. ‘And do ye fear the devil, Anna?’

Anna heard again the wicked wailing of the wind, and was not sure. She looked to where her mother and her father stood, and then towards the door that was still blocked by Captain Jamieson and guarded by the colonel, and it seemed to her that nothing could so easily get past those two men and their swords, and suddenly she knew that she was not afraid. Not really.

So she said as much. And when she asked the colonel, ‘Can your ship outrun him?’ she felt something stir within her, like the thrill at the beginning of a great adventure.

Nicola knows there are risks in following a firebird. In Russian folklore, when a firebird drops a feather, any fool who picks it up and tries to chase the bird itself is in for trouble. But…

A single white feather had snagged on a low clump of blowing grass and withered wildflowers, fighting the wind that was trying to tear it away.

It was only a gull’s feather, ragged and plain, not a feather of flame from a firebird, but I felt Rob’s amusement before I looked up at him.

There were those eyes again, daring me, waiting.

‘That’s how it begins,’ he said, ‘isn’t it?’

Hands in his pockets, he patiently watched while I looked down again at the feather. The wind caught its end and it started to lift and on impulse I bent down and reached for it.

So two women in two different times set out on separate quests, connected by a simple carving that—just like the Firebird in the fairy tales—may lead them to a treasure nothing like the one they each set out to find.

Leave a comment below before 8 p.m. EST today and you'll be entered to win a copy of The Firebird. And don't forget to check out the other authors who took part in this Summer Adventure week:

Alison Atlee, The Typewriter Girl     Facebook
Jessica Brockmole, Letters from Skye          Facebook
T.J. Brown, Summerset Abbey: Spring Awakening  Facebook
Sarah Jio, The Last Camellia            Facebook
Katherine Keenum, Where the Light Falls 
Stephanie Lehmann, Astor Place Vintage   Facebook
Kate Noble, Let It Be Me        Facebook
Deanna Raybourn, A Spear of Summer Grass       Facebook
Lauren Willig, The Ashford Affair   Facebook

The adventures are now officially concluded, but be sure to come back here tomorrow for a full list of winners for all of the contests! And thank you for travelling with us.