I'm delighted to welcome Jeanne Adams back to The Romance Dish today. A former marketing executive, Jeanne has also worked in interior design and landscape design as well as the funeral and cemetery business. Now a full-time writer and consultant, Jeanne lives in the D.C. area with her husband, children and dogs. She loves working in the garden, running with her dogs, hanging out with her family and Halloween. She really loves Halloween!
Jeanne joins us today to talk about her newest book, a Sci-Fi romantic suspense novel titled The Tentacle Affaire. I can't wait to dive into this one!
Learn more about Jeanne and her books at her website and connect with her online at Facebook and Twitter.
Little green men.
UFOs. Men in Black.
What do you think about all that stuff?
When I was a kid, I was a huge fan of Sci Fi Saturday! Which was a program on my local television
station. It was rotated with Elvira,
Mistress of the Dark and other Saturday night scary stories we watched during
slumber parties and sleepovers. All
those movies gave my active imagination a real ramp up for telling stories
about what might happen “out there.” I also
adored reading books by the legendary Andre Norton, and brilliant storytellers
like Anne McCaffrey and Ursula LeGuin.
Elizabeth Moon, Mercedes Lackey, Patricia Wrede, and Jana Oliver (just
to name a few) have continued that tradition.
I truly mourn the loss of Anne and Andre, as well as Ray Bradbury and Issac
Asimov. I recently re-read Rendezvous with Rama. It’s as fresh and current a storyline today
as it was revolutionary for its time.
All of that, combined with growing up as the Apollo missions began and
ended, and the Space Shuttle missions started up, gave me a thirst to know
about what’s out there in the deepest reaches of space.
Star Wars. Star
Trek. Deep Space Nine. I’ve watched them all. I think books and programs like those teach
us to dream, to reach deeper and farther, and, like old fashioned fairy tales,
remind us that sometimes the fairest face may hide the foulest heart.
My newest adventure in writing, The Tentacle Affaire, came to me
as an idea about 10 years ago. At the
time, I hadn’t sold commercially yet, and I was toying with the idea of
technology vs. magic. It morphed into
aliens vs. magicians. When I sold my
romantic suspense novels to Kensington Publishing/Zebra and my first suspense
novel came out in 2008, I put the paranormal/alien/magic story aside and
concentrated on blowing things up.
Grins. While I love that (my
short romantic suspense novella, Deadly Delivery is coming out before
Halloween), the story that became Tentacle Affaire lurked in the back of my
mind, calling to me. It needed to be
told. Those characters had gained life,
then I’d put them in the equivalent of Cold Sleep for ten years! Bad Writer! Well, finally, I made time, dusted them off
and pulled the story out to see if it still had something to say.
It did.
In Tentacle Affaire, the first Slip Traveler Novel, Cait
Brennan, retired marine, supposedly dead in the 9/11 attacks at the World Trade
Center, is back on Earth to retrieve a pet.
An ugly, interstellar pet. Not
the most taxing task, so she’s excited to get some down-to-earth time, maybe
check out some of her favorite DC nightspots.
That’s all going well until her next door neighbor, a philandering
senator, is killed. The killing is
brutal and messy and Cait’s across the hall neighbor is immediately suspicious
of Cait, something she can ill afford.
Little does Cait know that her neighbor Aiden Bayliss is a magical
protector – an Adept – charged with protecting DC. When she does find out, she has to reconcile
the fact that magic DOES exist on her planet, a planet she’d thought so
mundane. Aiden, for his part, has to
accept that there really ARE aliens out there, and Cait, though human, works
for them.
I didn’t get too techie.
I know I don’t like that in my reading that much. I love Tom Clancy, but I find that I skim
over the “…the lever that pulled up all the charts of the ocean’s depths was to
the left of the button that could send them all to hell…” kinds of descriptions.
I kept The Tentacle Affaire fast and active, and really, really
sexy. (Okay, disclaimer, I can’t write
Sylvia Day sexy, but suffice to say, it’s hot enough!) Tentacle Affaire is Men and Black merged with
a dash of Game of Thrones and a big dollop of Harry Dresden-esque magic-in-modern-society.
Cait and Aiden will be back in another adventure, continuing
their blossoming romance. In the
meantime, it sure was fun to write Tentacle Affaire and I hope it's fun for
you to read it!
So, what do you think?
Are we alone in the Universe? Do
you think we’ll “make contact” in this lifetime? Or are we too backward still to be
contacted? Or will WE be the ones doing
the contacting?
I’m picking the setting for the second Slip Traveler Novel. Which do you
prefer? Edinburgh, Scotland? Savannah,
GA? Or Boston, MA?
If you could have a walk on role in any sci-fi or fantasy type
story, like Once Upon a Time, Supernatural, or Star Trek (or any of the other
wonderful ones we’ve seen), which one would you pick?
One commenter today will win an autographed paper copy of The
Tentacle Affaire, a Washington, DC Starbucks mug and a coffee gift card from
Starbucks, along with some alien green jelly beans.
