anna katherine

As an editor, I have always been really concerned with whether or not the readers would be able to hold a picture of each character in their minds. I stand pretty opposed to the trope of looking in a mirror or comparisons to celebrities to describe the characters (Wow, she thought, standing in front of the full length mirror in her bedroom. I look exactly like Jennifer Hudson, except I have a chin dimple! We could be twins!), but I support working their physical characteristics into the text somehow.

As an author, it was much less important to me! At the time of writing the story, I was much more concerned with getting across the characters’ personalities. What do I care what people think they look like?

(Kat and I did, though, have extremely specific pictures of the characters in our heads. We are method writers; we know who is queer and who is not; we know who is a person of color and who is white; we know who went to college and who did not bother; we know all!)

Readers know what Allie looks like because she’s on the cover of the book. (Actually, her skin is less pale in the book than on the cover! But, yeah, she’s white, with darkish hair, and wears a pendant with the Seal of Solomon on it. She’s not anywhere near as thin as the woman on the cover of the book, though.)

When I wrote the novella we ultimately based Salt and Silver on, I had a very specific picture in my head of the character of Ryan. I knew exactly what he looked like, down to the glint in his eye. Yet nowhere in the book is he concretely described for the reader!

I did a search for the phrases “Ryan’s eyes” and “his eyes” to see if we ever even described them. Ryan closes his eyes, and rolls his eyes, and there’s sympathy in them at one point, and later in the story they are sad, hot, lost, uncertain, and filled with something Allie’s never seen before.

(Okay, now I am laughing. I would like to do this with every book I’ve ever read! I actually both love and hate books in which eyes do amazing things, like crawl across the room and bore into people’s souls and jump from one person to another. Just picture a pair of eyes jumping around, and you will never read a scene like that the same way again!)

Anyway, his eyes are “hooded and dark” and have “tiny lines crinkling the corners” — but most of the time? Most of the time Ryan has pulled his Stetson down over his eyes so they are hidden.

We don’t describe his hair. We don’t describe his skin. We mention that he’s taller than Allie, but not how much taller — but we do say he’s shorter than Owen. We describe his scars more than his looks (and, come on, that’s pretty hot!).

Maybe this is a shortcoming, but I don’t think so. I don’t think so because it means that someone can read the book and picture whoever they want in the role of Ryan — Jensen Ackles or Taye Diggs. Or John Cho. Or Sendhil Ramamurthy, or Kirk Acevedo. Or whoever!

And that is awesome.

We’ve said this before, but if you review Salt and Silver on your blog (or someone else’s), please let us know! We’d love to link to your review from our site.

And here’s our newest review! This one comes from Aja, who can be found at livejournal (with a mirror at dreamwidth).

Salt & Silver is hellbent on giving you dark social satire with your demonslaying. In addition to populating the book with a host of complex, dark, memorable characters of all sociocultural backgrounds [...] the authors have gone one further and taken us on a taut, well-paced journey straight from our privilege zones directly into Hell; and, you guys, Hell is New York City, with all its excess and oblivion and disconnection from reality on display in horrific, compelling beauty. more…

Phew! Horrific, compelling beauty, huh? Wait until she gets the sequel about the vampires…

We have a guest post up at Victoria Janssen’s excellent writing blog, about rolling your own kind of vampire:

One of the biggest issues with writing any paranormal beastie is the need to bring something new to the table. With everybody writing about vampires these days, why should someone want to read about yours? Let’s say you want to make your vampires stand out from the pack by being different from your everyday Count Dracula stereotype. Where do you start? (more…)

Check it out for a quick mention of what’s coming up in the Door-world sequel!

– a kiss of youth and love. (Oh, Byron, you are so dreamy.)

I often think that the kiss, rather than the sex scene, is the primary romantic force of the romance novel. For me, a sex scene is emotional, sure, but for the most part shows up as titillation for the reader. The kiss, though, is where the love comes from. A kiss can tell you a lot about how two characters feel for one another, how they approach this strange new thing between them.

And there’s nothing quite like kissing someone for the first time — the leading up to it, the uncertainty, the raw delight and aching tension in the “what if” and the “when.” If a book just brushes past the first kiss to get to something ostensibly more sexy… well, it just makes my little heart break a bit. That there is a missed opportunity to make your readers really feel the investment your characters are putting into this thing.

Here are some examples of my favorite kinds of kisses:

• I’m a sucker for the slow approach. I mean really slow. Sam and Jill’s kiss in Gilliam’s Brazil (skip to 7:00 in the link)? Fantastic. And my shame when it comes to loving the kiss-before-the-reveal in the 1995 Sabrina? Epic. Though not as epic as my love of the kiss between Bella and Edward in the first Twilight film. If it takes two people five minutes just to close the distance, I am weeping with joy by the end of it. This works better on-screen than in text, I think.

• The unexpected kiss. Yes, this is somewhat in contrast with the above. I first discovered my love of this many years ago in Rosemary Edghill’s Turkish Delight, when the female lead is ranting about something (perhaps English weather?) on the back of a horse, and immediately following the end of an impassioned speech from her, the next line reads, “He kissed her.” This works absolutely best in text, though on-screen is no slouch.

• The kiss everyone is pretending means something else. My absolute favorite example of that right now is from Sophia Coppola’s Lost in Translation, when Bob and Charlotte (both married) are on the elevator in their hotel, returning to their separate rooms, and they’re both pretending that wanting to touch, wanting to be together, isn’t why they’re kissing goodnight — even though they both know it is. (4:10 in this fanvid shows a little bit of what I mean.) It’s awkward, it’s a little bit wrong, and it’s fooling no one, but you can feel every second of it on your skin.

• Kissing as seduction. This would seem pretty straightforward, but think about it — usually you get stuff like “witty conversation”, “deep spiritual connection”, “shared history”, or, you know, “mutual feelings” as the way to get characters to fall in love. And those are all great, don’t get me wrong. But sometimes, I just want there to be kissing. Kissing for bad reasons, like bets, and kissing for no reason, like an empty terrace and boredom. Kissing because someone’s there, and the character just really wants to kiss someone. Basically, I want all the characters to be wearing this t-shirt when the book starts. And then… it becomes something more. Maybe it’s a really good kiss. Maybe it’s all a lot less boring than everyone thought it was going to be. Maybe it was an awful kiss, and everyone backs away and says, “Whoa, what? What happened there?” — and has to think about what they’re doing. Mary Jo Putney’s Thunder and Roses has kissing thrown in to shake up a bet; the heroine just wants to get through it without embarrassing herself, and the hero just wants to see what happens if he messes with her. That entire book (and a lot of Putney’s works, come to think of it) basically becomes an ode to “kissing is awesome”.

• Finally, the memory of kissing. It’s not a kiss that happens onscreen — it’s the kiss that happened years ago that no one can forget. The kiss that’s been built up and worried over and made huge (sometimes even when it shouldn’t be) — the kiss that dulls every kiss after it, because nothing can compare. With movies and television, I like little sudden flash-cuts of hotness in the middle of mundane activity. With fiction, though, I like a good solid wallow. I want every detail, and then I want to know exactly what made this kiss the one that’s stuck. Everything builds from that. Yum.

So: Kisses! Those are my favorites — what are yours?

Thanks to Fox Literary Agency and Books Crossing Borders, the Russian language rights for Salt and Silver have been sold to Azbooka Klassica Publishers! Russian-language readers, look out for demons and Doors to Hell!

More information as we have it…