Secret Project #1 revealed

M. Lush is the author of the upcoming erotic romance series Deepdale Acres, a very adult throwback to those horse books we all read as kids. Horse-crazy girls become horse-crazy women, and who’s to say they don’t have other adventures as well?

Hi M, and welcome to my blog. Can you tell me where the idea for the Deepdale Acres stories came from?

Well as a kid I was totally horse-crazy. I read everything I could get my hands on about them, from dusty old books from the sixties I found in the library to the Saddle Club series (way before it became a tv show), the Misty books, Walter Farley and Thoroughbred. After I moved to Louisville the Thoroughbred books became favorites since, well, they’re here! In high school I got up my courage and asked a local barn if I could volunteer there on weekends. Volunteers groom and saddle horses, help bring them out for trail rides and help with other things (like unloading hay, pony rides, and exercising horses in the winter when business is slow). I ended up getting hired to clean stalls and teach summer camp too. Then came senior year and I just sort of fell out of it. I didn’t have a license and couldn’t find ways to the barn anymore and was burnt out on taking care of other people’s horses. Also I realized without my own car and a job I’d never be able to have a horse of my own, which was the goal.

Life intervened as it does and ten years or so later I found myself a mom, a writer and aching for horses again (not that it ever went away, I just got distracted). Since lessons are damned expensive (and so is gas) I’m still looking for another way to get back in the barn. In the meantime I have stories, of course, and I figured if I was sitting here missing those horse-crazy days so were other people like me. Grown up-type people who might want different kinds of stories.

And what happened then?

I wrote two novelettes based around Deepdale Acres, a fictional dream barn based on a mish-mash of the barns I’ve worked or taken lessons at. It was a whole lot of fun, and challenging in a completely different way than my usual writing.

But?

But I’m a science fiction/fantasy/horror writer and audiences tend to “brand” an author and get rather disappointed or lose interest when an author jumps around like that.

And?

And the first book, Private Lessons was actually accepted twice, but the publisher dissolved or dropped the project. And my small, but real audience didn’t like the romance. I was really tired of trying to sell spec fic and romance. These days the pressure is on to brand yourself and my SF/F/H audience wanted nothing to do with plain old contemp erotic romance. On the flip side there were also concerns with any romance audience I built picking up one of my other works, and well, there are no happy endings guaranteed in those books. I risked pissing off both audiences. So I decided to split up the two. Nora Roberts does it, why can’t I? (Okay, don’t answer that question. La Nora does a lot of things I couldn’t.)

You said that Private Lessons was accepted and dropped before?

More or less. Of course it’s more complicated than that, and the dropping bit is no one’s fault. Sometimes things just don’t work out. So in the end, after years of trying to sell it, sort of succeeding and ending up back where I started I decided to self publish the books.

Why?

Many reasons. First, these books are like my vacation. They were pure fun to write, I still think they’re a lot of fun to read. Years of the battle and close calls are threatening to leave me with a bad taste in my mouth about all this, which really takes all the fun out of it. They’re supposed to keep being fun, for me and for readers, and they won’t be if I keep trying to find publisher validation for them.

But they’re good. I mean, even read years later and after many times I still think they’re a lot of fun.

Plus, it’s not that self publishing is more accepted now, it’s that it’s easier to reach a direct audience with it. When I wrote Private Lessons Amazon was doing their digital shorts program, but the Kindle wasn’t out yet. So there was less buying because it was just so awkward to read ebooks. Now, though, there’s a real appetite for ebooks, and with the awkward size of the Deepdale books (they run in the 40-60 page range) ebooks are the only way to go. (Which is why you’re not going to find my SF/F/H/UF books self published any time soon. Different projects have different goals.)

Plus I wanted to run an experiment and evaluate what this new audience for ebooks could mean to my career. You have people like JA Konrath and Scott Nicholson self publishing. Some people are really, really successful. Some people aren’t. This isn’t the kind of thing you can explore without trying it. You can’t see all the effort someone like Konrath has put into it, and you can only speculate how other things, like a pre-established reader base from a print book career, can affect sales. I always thought if you want to understand something you study it, and it’s come time for me to try it out myself.

Maybe it’ll be a failure, but the way I see it I’ve got good, fun books that are doing nothing but glaring at me from my “To Submit” folder an audience who doesn’t want anything to do with them, when I know there are wonderful romance fans out there who can enjoy them. If people read and enjoy the books and I learn about one more tool for my career there’s been no loss.

Has this been the most awkward interview ever?

I expected it to be, but no, not really. At least “you” know the subject matter and have read the books. LOL

Anything else?

I’m blogging all my romance-related stuff at deepdaleacres.wordpress.com There’s a sample of Private Lessons, the first book in the series, up over there and I’m about to release the cover (which I really, really like). I plan to have Private Lessons up by the end of the week, as well.