Guest Post + Giveaway: Tracy Cooper-Posey

 Fiction Vixen is pleased to welcome author Tracy Cooper-Posey today.

Would You Wait Six Years For A Kiss?

I have a love/hate relationship with television series.  I don’t watch live television because the advertisements and constant interruptions drive me so totally insane, I can’t stand it.  So usually, friends tell me about a killer new series and I’ll start watching once the show has built up a season or two of episodes.  Then I can watch whole seasons at a time, with no Christmas hiatus breaks, or sitting around all week for the second part of two-parter episodes, and dumb stuff like that.  And no ads.

I get to catch up with some stunning drama this way.  But again, I get driven crazy by writers and producers who have learned a thing or two over the last few decades of television drama.  I love and adore watching couples fall in love on these shows.  But the writers will keep those couples apart forever.

One of the biggest lessons Hollywood learned was watching Moonlighting tank big time once Bruce Willis and Cybill Shepherd did the deed.

Nowadays, writers will keep potential romances simmering for years, while viewers gnash their teeth in frustration.  The writers will dangle little moments and inch the romance along at turtle speed.  Castle is one example, although the series is only in year four.  But the two lead characters, Castle and Beckett, are circling around each other, getting closer and closer all the time. Tony and Ziva in NCIS is another – their romance has been creeping along at glacial speed for six years now, and viewers are still waiting for one decent kiss that isn’t a fake undercover thing.  (On the series’ official website, one viewer stated that if Tony and Ziva didn’t kiss in Season 10, she wasn’t going to watch the show anymore.)

I was kvetching to my husband about this phenomenon not that long ago.  It opened up into a big…er… “discussion” about what a romance really was — which prompted me to start a new series on my blog.  But that’s a side-issue.  The discussion went around and around in circles, which left me somewhat frustrated…just the way most romances in television series leave me.  I ended up throwing up my hands and stating that it would be great if these fabulous TV series would just resolve the romances, then get right on with another romance next week, while all the great storylines continued on, as usual.

Ding.

I would give anything to be able to say that the light bulb that went off over my head was what prompted me to write Bannockburn Binding.  But the truth is, an early form of Bannockburn was written a few years ago, and I already knew exactly what I wanted to do with the series, Beloved Bloody Time, well before the TV series discussion turned the light on for me.

The TV series thing is just a perfect metaphor for what I’m doing with Beloved Bloody Time.

Television series do some things very well indeed.  In particular, they tell very long, complicated and involved on-going storylines, and unravel in-depth character developments over the course of several seasons, via some very intense story-telling.  Because it’s television drama, it’s all showing, and not telling, so the character stuff is delivered via weekly doses of suspense, action, mystery, and more.  It’s some of the best story-telling out there, and I include novels in that statement.  You just can’t cover the sort of long-winded epic dramas in a single novel that long-term television series can.  It’s not to say that novels are weaker or worse.  It’s just a limitation of their form.

Novel series try to capture the same effect as television series — on-going, complicated storylines.  But usually, those series are short lived.  The fashion, these days, is for trilogies.  If a series is any longer than that, then the storylines inside the series tend to be stand-alone, and only the characters and their personal travails pass on from book to book.

The other fashion is to try to make each book as stand-alone as possible, so that the reader can start with any of the books in the series, with no need to catch up with storylines from before.

I won’t do any of that with Beloved Bloody Time.  I’m going for television serial-style story-telling, with one glaring exception:  Each book in the series is a complete, resolved romance with a happy-ever-after or happy-for-now ending.

Each book, however, is short, with maximized story-telling.  There’s no attempt to make the stories stand alone (there isn’t room).  The story-lines are on-going, with cliff-hangers at the end of each book.  Readers will need to keep up with the series to follow along, just like with television series.

It will make for long and involved story-telling, with complex storylines and a cast of hundreds, just like on television.

Only, you don’t have to wait six years to see the first kiss.

Bannockburn Binding

by Tracy Cooper-Posey

Time is theirs to keep. But it comes with a price.

MMF Urban Fantasy Futuristic Time Travel Romance Serial

In the early 23rd Century, vampires learned how to travel back in time, and created a time-tsunami that threatened life as we know it, until they corrected their mistake.  They created the Chronometric Conservation Agency, which is tasked with preserving history and therefore protecting humanity’s future.  The Touring arm of the Agency offers trips back into the real past, with vampire guides, called travellers.

When Natalia (Tally) Marta, vampire and traveller, takes her client to visit the siege of Stirling Castle in 1314, she is caught and held hostage for ransom by Robert MacKenzie, a Bruce clansman.  Rob finds himself drawn to the wilful, stubborn and very different English lady he has captured and the relationship becomes an intimate, highly-charged sexual pairing.  Swiftly, Tally and Rob realize their bond is more than sexual, that the emotions stirring their hearts are true.

Christian Lee Hamilton, vampire, one of the last true southern gentlemen, and Tally’s ex-lover, knows the 1314 time marker enough to jump back and help Tally return home. His arrival at Bannockburn adds complications, for Christian finds himself drawn to Rob MacKenzie as much as Tally is.  But neither of them can stay in the past forever.  To do so means certain death.

An Excerpt From: BANNOCKBURN BINDING
Copyright © TRACY COOPER-POSEY, 2011
All Rights Reserved.

The tent was utterly empty. The cold plate of stew sat untouched where he’d left it. She must have made her move the moment he’d turned his back.

Even as he rushed back out and around the tent, drawing his dagger as he went, he marveled at the sheer relentlessness of the woman. Despite the very real threat of having her throat cut before she reached the edge of the encampment, she still persisted in trying to escape.

No, to find her wretched manservant, he corrected himself.

Rob changed directions and slowed to a brisk walk, which wouldn’t stir curiosity amongst those who still were sober enough to take interest in one of their officers running through the lines.

He headed for the wagon where the manservant had been hobbled. It was on the edges of the camp, far from any warming fire, but there was hay in it for the horses and if the man had the sense of one, he’d bury himself in the stuff and welcome the soft bed.

As Rob neared the wagon, he slowed, studying the shadows around it. Finally, he saw her, standing as still as a stone in the shadows of the quarter-master’s big tent, watching the wagon and all who moved around it. She must have just found the man and was now scouting for her opportunity to free him. She still appeared unarmed, so how she intended to cut the rope was a mystery to Rob. As for stealing the bumbling fool out through a pack of well-trained soldiers…she was as foolish as her manservant.

Rob gripped his dirk and slid around the tent, stealing up on her from behind. He had years of experience at it and she was used to the ways of the great hall and castle keep. He slapped his hand over her mouth and touched the blade to her throat before she was able to so much as draw breath in reaction.

“Ye’re stubborn like a highland colleen, I’ll give ye that,” he breathed in her ear. “Back up now, back to my tent. Draw no attention to yeself. Every man still awake this night has drink and food in him and is just spoiling for a bit o’ light fluff like you to dally with. D’ye hear me?”

She nodded, and he felt her step back as he did. After a few more steps, he let go of her mouth and gripped her arm instead. He lowered the dagger, but kept it in his hand.

Finally, when they reached the comparative safety of his tent, he allowed himself to relax just a little. He adjusted the low-burning lantern and turned to look at her.

She stood with her arms around her, as if she were cold, assessing him with an expression that held no anger and no fear.

“Ye daft, ye hear?” he said, feeling fury building in him. “They’d’ve slit y’man’s throat for ye, and kept ye for sport.”

“I’d have made it to safety.”

“No, ye bloody wouldn’t!” He pushed his hand through his hair. “Don’t ye understand how this works?” It was uncanny the way her eyes seemed to pierce through his flesh.

“You keep me captive until someone who cares enough offers coin for my return. You get rich, and I get to go free. In theory.”

“In theory?” He took a breath, let it out. “Let me tell ye the real truth. I capture ye and keep ye in my tent until yer family come to claim ye, lest those restless, bored soldiers out there decide to play a different game. If I dinna pull ye here by sword point this day, and made sure ye were seen as mine, ye’d’ve been found by one of the others. They’re all good men, but they’re men, and they’ll see you as English…”

“I understand,” she said softly.

Her eyes were drawing him in. He found himself stepping closer, his temper converting to a more languorous heat. “Ye may be right about the English coming, and if ye are, this land will empty of anything but two armies intent on wiping the other off the face of God’s earth. I dinna care who ye think ye are, ye won’t survive that. Not if ye insist on taking that useless mare of a servant of yers.”

She took a breath. Another. “I can’t explain it, other than to assure you that I must take him with me.”

He nodded. “Then the only way ye get to go home at all is if ye remain my property until I can get ye home to yer family.”

“And if they don’t claim me?”

“Then ye must stay here until the war is won or lost.”

• Erotic MMF romance, time travel, urban fantasy story line, on-going serial storylines.
• This is the first book in the BELOVED BLOODY TIME series.
• Futuristic settings:  Australia, near-planetary space.  Historical settings: Medieval Scotland, France.
• Vampires and other fantasy species.
• Available at Amazon: Kindle format.  Print format.
• Available at All Romance ebooks: Adobe Acrobat, Palm DOC/iSolo, Microsoft Reader, Mobipocket (.prc and Mobi), Rocket, ePub
• Pages: 162 in PDF, including front matter. (Short novel-length story)
• $2.99 in all electronic formats, and at all retailers.
• $8.97 in print.

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Tracy Cooper-Posey is a national award winning author, with more than 35 romance titles published since 1999. She writes mainly romantic suspense and paranormal
romance, with brief forays into other romantic genres here and there. She has been nominated for three CAPA’s for best paranormal romance, and the CAPA for Favourite Author, and has won the Emma Darcy Award.

Connect directly with Tracy at her site…Facebook…Twitter…Google+…Amazon…All Romance eBooks… MMF Romance Novels (Tracy’s Facebook Group).

Sign up for her newsletter and get two free romances. And check out some of the 100+ articles on her site, too![/box]

Giveaway

Tracy would like to giveaway one e-book copy of BLOOD KNOT, which has just been nominated for the CAPA for best paranormal romance for 2011.

To enter leave a comment here on Tracy’s guest post. Feel free to ask her questions as she’ll be stopping by throughout the day.

Open to all until Jan. 7, winner announced soon after.