On Friday the 26^th February, Dalia Craig’s  latest story – Weathering the Storm – releases from www.loveyoudivine.com

It’s the third of her tales I’ve had the pleasure of editing. Hold Me Tight introduced me to her work, with a dramatic m/m/f scenario and a woman in serious trouble. Loving Ellie is hot f/f and a beautiful expression of hunger.

 Weathering the Storm takes you into one of those erotically charged scenarios when everything just fits together. There’s barely time to think, or breathe, you just have to go with it. As in life, such encounters on paper are wild, intense things and this is a story to take your breath away. Weathering the Storm is an emotional whirlwind, with all the energy (and wetness) of a summer downpour.  It’s also an age gap story, and I have a huge weak spot for those. There’s the spice of an outdoor tryst, and the sheer delight of two women connecting with each other, both mentally and physically.

 I recently interviewed Dalia for the blog, so if you want to find out more about her, have a read here – http://blogspot.loveyoudivineinfo.com/?p=282 She’s a very interesting person (and I am envious of her badgers!)

Dalia Craig writes for the Femerotica line although she’s also made a forray into m/m/f with ‘Hold Me Tight’

Bryn: I gather you went all the way from Scotland to America for a book event last year. How did that work out?

Dalia: Last month actually.

It was a spur of the moment thing that actually started out as a bit of a joke…

When Cheri Crystal first publicized her Fresh Start reading at Bluestockings bookstore in New York I said something like “I would if I could but…” There’s this small pond called the Atlantic Ocean in the way.

Then the more I thought about it the more the idea grew on me. So I found a flight and a hotel and off I went. I’m a bit crazy like that.

Poor Cheri got such a shock; she didn’t know a thing about my plans until I arrived in New York.

I had a great time on my first visit to New York; walked miles, did all the touristy things and attended the reading. Sadly, my short stay ended all too quickly but I’m sure I’ll go back. I’m definitely going to Ptown in October and possibly to something else before that.

It was good to meet up with Cheri again; she’s a lot of fun.

The readings with Cheri Crystal, JD Glass and Rachel Kramer Bussel on Saturday were well attended despite the bitterly cold weather. Cheri, in particular, gave a show stopping performance with her excerpt from “Does The Butch Come With The Recipe?” I’ll never tire of hearing her read from that story; the humor comes over so well when read aloud–maybe she ought to think of doing an audio version.

 Bryn: That is a wonderful thing to do. I can see how that willingness to just go for it comes through in your characters too. What’s the wildest thing a character of yours has done on impulse?

Dalia: That’s a difficult question.

Possibly Bryana, in Taming Bryana.

Bryana meets Cassie, a total stranger, in the middle of nowhere and is persuaded to mount a horse and ride to Cassie’s home. However, when Bryana steps inside Auchtercairn, Cassie’s seventeenth-century castle, she soon finds there’s more to this sexy, rugged, butch than meets the eye. They share a common interest: a mutual love of bondage. This discovery leads Bryana to risk everything for one night of erotic pleasure at the hands of Cassie.

I want to write a sequel to Taming Bryana, when I have the time. I’m sure these two women have more to tell than just a one night stand. Who knows; they may be soul mates.

Bryn: That sounds well worth re-visiting. It’s always interesting to see how a relationship pans out over time. What defines a soul-mate relationship for you?

Dalia: You do ask some difficult questions.

I’ve yet to meet mine… I’ll try to answer as best I can. I believe it goes way above sex or being in love.

More a true meeting of minds where no words are needed and the couple are tuned into each other on a higher level.

Bryn: Let’s head in an easier direction then! Are you structured about your writing, or do you just work when the mood is upon you?

Dalia: I try to structure my days; I really do but too often life gets in the way.

My ideal day would be writing from 8am – 4pm then again from around 10pm ‘til midnight. Often, despite promising myself I’ll start writing first thing in the morning, it’s mid afternoon before I get anywhere near the computer.

As to setting myself targets–I do have a spreadsheet that calculates the words per day required to write a specific story length in x days. If you don’t meet your target for a particular day it recalculates the shortfall over the remaining days.

I suspect I’m not alone in having off days when everything I write reads like garbage. Thankfully I usually have several stories in various stages of production so if I’m struggling with one story I’ll put it aside for a day or so and work on something else. Also, I’m not a fast typist; my fingers rarely keep pace with my brain and by the time I catch up the perfect word, expression or whatever has evaporated.

 Bryn: I find hopping around helps, although these days I hop to other people’s stories and edit. Is there anything you particularly like to do when you aren’t writing?

Dalia: Yes, even working on other genres can help free the cogs. I for one find critting very stimulating, although these days I only work with one author on a regular basis.

Online, I help moderate both a busy crit group and a romance writing list where I also post a weekly talk prompt. I’m moderately active on various lists and social networking sites.

My spare time is pretty full though not particularly exciting…

Aside from being a carer; I love to both cook and garden. I grow a lot of fruit and vegetables for my own use. During the fruit season I also make jam (100 pounds last summer) to help feed a family of badgers, and five pine martens who’ve adopted me as their primary food source. They come to my patio each evening to eat homemade bread & jam, cake and biscuits.

If I could make a wish I would like to have more time to read but something has to give.

 Bryn: You have a badger family? That is so cool, and I’m deeply envious. Do you have any photos of them?

Dalia: I’m really lucky in addition to badgers and pine martens I’m surrounded by lots of interesting birds and small furry creatures. One night last summer the whole badger family came together, usually it’s just mom and the kids. Mr. Brock gave no quarter to his wife or children, hogging all the best food for himself even if it meant sitting on it. Sadly I didn’t have my laptop set up that night.

I do have videos of the pine martens and of Basil the female badger on MySpace. The picture quality isn’t marvelous as it’s filmed through glass on a laptop set up inside the patio doors.

http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=&release=103530073

http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=&release=103530246

The badgers aren’t very active at this time of year but when they’re out & about in the spring I’ll try to get some more footage.

Bryn: That’s so cute!  So, where can people find you online?

Dalia: You can connect with me online at…

daliacraig.com

loveyoudivine

myspace

Facebook

erotic musings

sapphicplanet.com/

amazon.com

Dalia’s latest story – Weathering the Storm – will be out on the 26th February!

Bryn: What brought you to loveyoudivine?

Lara: I am one half of the editing/conception team that developed the “To Love and To Cherish” project. Beth Wylde is my partner in this. We brainstormed that we wanted to do something to support the marriage equality fight after the devastating passage of Prop 8 in California. We wanted to raise money. We came up with the idea of writing stories that celebrated women loving women and putting it together in a collection to sell and raise the money. We needed a publisher.

Beth had just worked with Claudia at loveyoudivine on a story in the new FemErotica division and so approached her on lyd’s possible interest in publishing the eventual collection. Claudia loved the idea and so To Love and To Cherish was born, and that’s how I came to loveyoudivine. Previously I’ve been published by PD Publishing, Torquere Press, and Logical Lust Publications.

I’ve done a lot of the promo copy for To Love and To Cherish including the back cover blurb, and the cover art is my art. I also did all the final edit checks on all the stories before they went to Claudia for typsetting/formatting.

I am a writer first and foremost so I do have a story titled “Traditional Values” in the collection, which will be in the very first e-book mini-collection “Volume 1: On Bended Knee” being released Jan. 29, 2010. And, though it wasn’t planned this way, it will lead off the entire collection. It’s a “sweet romance” level featuring a long-term dating couple. One asks the other the marriage question on Valentine’s Day.

Bryn: Do you write contemporary settings, or do you like to wander into other places?

Lara: My published work is all contemporary settings. I have several historicals set in other times that I haven’t quite finished yet. I really enjoy historicals as a reader and writing them too, but the contemporary setting stories seem to finish up a bit quicker. LOL.

Bryn: There’s a distinct advantage to not needing to do so much research! Do you have any preferred approaches for that with the historical stuff? Do you read around and write what you find, or think of situations and then hunt down the details?

Lara: I don’t mind research. I enjoy much of it. What tends to happen that siderails a project is that I lose the character “voice”; they stop “talking” to me, or their voice begins to sound too “modern” and I know it’s wrong, but I can’t focus right then — something in real life is usually a distraction — and I am delayed getting back to it, so finding the voice again becomes increasingly harder.

One of my favorite methods of research though is newspapers, movies, and books published in the time period in question. There’s nothing better at getting accurate “voice” than that, also there’s the esoteric setting things that are different from today’s world.

Bryn: How do you feel about trying to capture accents (thinking of voices)? Does that work for you on paper or would you rather just hear it in your head?

Lara: I try to stay away from extended dialect in my dialogue. Yes, dialect is dropping h’s, and g’s and contracting words, but something I learned in language classes. People with different backgrounds linguistically (parentage; region) actually construct their sentences differently. That conveys dialect very effectively without the constant need for my apostrophe key. I wish more writers were aware of that actually. Most I read have a poor grasp of how people really speak, or they all sound the same — like lazy speech overexcited 17 year olds, something I hear quite a lot every day as a substitute teacher.

Bryn: I agree wholeheartedly with that! Dialect words and phrasing are for more important, and a lot more readable. There’s also the issue of what constitutes ‘normal’ as well – that can get very politically charged.

Lara: Politically charged yes, but also misinterpreted. When you want to have a character with a particular mien, it’s an important thing to think about readers’ natural inclinations of classifying people by speech, income, etc. They do the same to characters, and it is always shaded by the readers’ personal experiences, which can be unknown, but which can be utilized to aid in giving characters depth if you can trigger the right impressions/reactions.

Bryn: So, what are you working on at the moment? Anything in the pipeline?

Lara: I was just invited to submit another short story to a publication planned for late 2010. I have a couple other short stories roughly drafted in the bisexual/lesbian romance and erotica categories.

The launch of To Love and To Cherish and the release of Turn for Home are keeping the editor/promoter side of me really busy, as is keeping up with scheduling guests and topics for my radio show Readings in Lesbian & Bisexual Women’s Fiction.

But I have found time to work on another novel. This time it’s more of a mystery with romantic tension than a purer romance plot. And while there’s a sexuality bent to my characters, it’s not about sexuality or sexual attraction. Deputy Kennedy McMasters (my heroine) isn’t interested in falling in love. She’s interested in finding the killer of her father’s best friend.

She’s a Sheriff’s Deputy in a rural Florida community (like the place where I grew up) and the case is complicated by the entanglements of a community that close-knit… where some people think they can be a law unto themselves.

I’ve had Kennedy’s story percolating in my mind for the last couple of years. Within the last few months though I’ve been getting the scenes onto the page, and have about 30,000 words of what eventually should be a novel of 80-90K words.

Real Life being the interfering thing that it can be at times for a writer, I’m going through a sort of rough patch right now. I do keep aiming to finish my draft by the end of March 2010. Then the really good work begins: editing. A half a dozen passes later, probably somewhere in late 2010, I hope to be sending it to publishers.

Bryn: Where else can readers find you online?

Lara: hank you for letting me share my thoughts! My website is http://www.lzfiction.net

My blog is linked from there, or direct at http://lzstuff.blogspot.com

Friend/Follow me on Facebook or Twitter (search “larazielinsky” on all three)

Add me on MySpace (larazielinsky) And subscribe via RSS or iTunes to my bi-weekly radio show: “Readings in Lesbian & Bisexual Women’s Fiction” http://blogtalkradio.com/Lara-Zielinsky