Backlist Boogie--1st Entry

I am a day late and hopefully not a dollar short. Circumstances beyond my control, computer problems, delayed my kick off for Backlist Boogie. Oh well, stuff happens!

Okay, now to the business at hand. My very first release in the Amber Heat line, before Amber Allure came to be, was a long time ago. I had been playing with something 'erotic' from the time I attended the RT conference in the fall of 2003 and learned that hotties were the up and coming thing in romance. It was going to be a switch for me since I had been writing pg-13 romance and took awhile to be able to leave the bedroom door partly ajar!

Maybe it just felt easier or more natural but I set this tale in the prehistoric past--in ancient Greece to be exact, in the time when the gods, goddesses and all kinds of fantastic entities were felt to be real and present. My heroine was a semi-wild girl, raised by dryads in the woods although she was the daughter of Diana, the huntress. Diana was alleged to be virginal but who knows...in this world, she could have a daughter, anyway! Of course this girl was very naive and innocent having really not seen other humans at all--until she meets a youth who comes to hunt in "her" forest.

That was the premise of Karola's Hunt. I worked on it for some time, setting it

aside for a bit after the sudden death of my husband, but took it up in a sew weeks to try to break out of the writer's block that hit me hard on some regular novels I was working on when he passed away. We were even working on one together. It was not easy to get back into the projects.

Early in 2004, I heard the then-new publisher Amber Quill was going to be offering erotic romance and was sponsoring a contest to find some new authors for that line. I talked to a couple of friends, one who unbeknownst to me entered the contest also, and they encouraged me to try it. I polished it up as well as I could and sent it off. When the "call" in the form of an email came on April 1, 2004, I at first thought it a joke. But it was real and Karola's Hunt released in June 2004, the very first work to come out over the Deirdre O'Dare pseudonym Since then there have been many more!

At the time I had no idea how much would come about as a result of that rather timid start!

Here is a link to the page where it is sold--yes, it is still available although I have been considering pulling it after over then years. We'll see. http://www.amberquill.com/store/p/706-Karola-s-Hunt.aspx

An excerpt and blurb follows in a second post.