Stephanie Draven has kindly
agreed to guest post here about her work, and share her inspiration for
becoming a writer in honor of her newest release, It Stings So Sweet.
About The Author:
Stephanie Draven is currently a denizen of Baltimore, that city of ravens and purple night skies. She lives there with her favorite nocturnal creatures–three scheming cats and a deliciously wicked husband. And when she is not busy with dark domestic rituals, she writes her books.
Stephanie has always been a storyteller. In elementary school, she channeled Scheherazade, weaving a series of stories to charm children into sitting with her each day at the lunch table. When she was a little older, Stephanie scared all the girls at her sleepovers with ghost stories.
She should have known she was born to hold an audience in her thrall, but Stephanie resisted her writerly urges and graduated from college with a B.A. in Government. Then she went to Law School, where she learned how to convincingly tell the tallest tales of all!
A longtime lover of ancient lore, Stephanie enjoys re-imagining myths for the modern age. She doesn’t believe that true love is ever simple or without struggle so her work tends to explore the sacred within the profane, the light under the loss and the virtue hidden in vice. She counts it amongst her greatest pleasures when, from her books, her readers learn something new about the world or about themselves.
Guest Post:
Why I Became a Writer
Whenever
I’m asked this question, I tend to give a pat answer. I say, “I used to
be a lawyer, but I decided if I was going to lie for a living, I’d
rather do it by writing fiction...”
There’s some truth in that, but only a kernel. Sometimes I think I was born telling stories. I would entertain all the little kids in the lunchroom by making up elaborate tales. At least until someone told me it wasn’t nice to make stuff up that wasn’t true.
After that, I took to keeping a diary. I wrote in a journal from the age of eleven until the age of twenty-four. On the one hand, it’s kind of cool to see myself growing up and trying to make sense of the world and put it in narrative form. On the other hand, it’s totally humiliating to read all the puerile, emo stuff I wrote about as a teenager. I’d really like to shake myself--and issue a blanket apology to everyone who knew me before I turned twenty-five.
I wrote my first novel at the age of sixteen. It wasn’t very good but someone at a publishing company wrote me a very encouraging and open-ended letter, which I made the mistake of bragging about to a classmate, who never let me forget it, demanding every morning when my book was going to be published. (Hey, guy who kept me humble in high school: it just took a little longer to get published than I hoped!)
I wrote lots of other books after that one, filling spiral bound notebooks with stories involving gymnasts in love. (For some reason I was obsessed with Bart Conner and annoying enough to all my friends about it that they burned one of my books.) Ah, youth!
So when someone asks me why I became a writer, the real answer is that I was always one. Now I try to use my powers for good--and I’m pretty proud of my newest book, IT STINGS SO SWEET.
The title is a bit of a play on the idea of cocktails, which were popular in the 1920s. But I also wanted to get across the notion that things that sting us with embarrassment can also be very pleasurable. This book is about three women from very different social classes who each experience a sexual awakening in a time when the world was changing the very definition of womanhood. I hope you’ll love reading it as much as I loved writing it!
There’s some truth in that, but only a kernel. Sometimes I think I was born telling stories. I would entertain all the little kids in the lunchroom by making up elaborate tales. At least until someone told me it wasn’t nice to make stuff up that wasn’t true.
After that, I took to keeping a diary. I wrote in a journal from the age of eleven until the age of twenty-four. On the one hand, it’s kind of cool to see myself growing up and trying to make sense of the world and put it in narrative form. On the other hand, it’s totally humiliating to read all the puerile, emo stuff I wrote about as a teenager. I’d really like to shake myself--and issue a blanket apology to everyone who knew me before I turned twenty-five.
I wrote my first novel at the age of sixteen. It wasn’t very good but someone at a publishing company wrote me a very encouraging and open-ended letter, which I made the mistake of bragging about to a classmate, who never let me forget it, demanding every morning when my book was going to be published. (Hey, guy who kept me humble in high school: it just took a little longer to get published than I hoped!)
I wrote lots of other books after that one, filling spiral bound notebooks with stories involving gymnasts in love. (For some reason I was obsessed with Bart Conner and annoying enough to all my friends about it that they burned one of my books.) Ah, youth!
So when someone asks me why I became a writer, the real answer is that I was always one. Now I try to use my powers for good--and I’m pretty proud of my newest book, IT STINGS SO SWEET.
The title is a bit of a play on the idea of cocktails, which were popular in the 1920s. But I also wanted to get across the notion that things that sting us with embarrassment can also be very pleasurable. This book is about three women from very different social classes who each experience a sexual awakening in a time when the world was changing the very definition of womanhood. I hope you’ll love reading it as much as I loved writing it!
It Stings So Sweet:
Title: It Stings So Sweet
Author: Stephanie Draven
Publication Date: February 5th 2013
Publisher: Berkley Trade
They vibrated with incendiary Jazz. They teemed with sexual abandon. The Twenties were roaring and the women–young, open, rebellious, and willing–set the pace and pushed the limits with every man they met…
In the aftermath of a wild, liquor-soaked party, three women from very different social classes are about to live out their forbidden desires.
Society girl, Nora Richardson’s passionate nature has always been a challenge to her ever-patient husband. Now he wants out of the marriage and she has just this one night to win him back. The catch? He wants to punish her for her bad behavior. Nora is offended by her husband’s increasingly depraved demands, but as the night unfolds, she discovers her own true nature and that the line between pain and pleasure is very thin indeed.
Meanwhile, Clara Cartwright, sultry siren of the silent screen, is introduced to a mysterious WWI Flying Ace. If Clara, darling of the scandal sheets, knows anything, it’s men. And she’s known plenty. But none of them push her boundaries like the aviator, who lures her into a ménage with a stranger in a darkened cinema then steals her jaded heart.
Working class girl Sophie O’Brien has more important things on her mind than pleasures of the flesh. But when her playboy boss, the wealthy heir to the Aster family fortune, confronts her with her diary of secret sex fantasies, she could die of shame. To her surprise, he doesn’t fire her; instead, he dares her to re-enact her boldest fantasies and Sophie is utterly seduced.
One party serves as a catalyst of sexual awakening. And in an age when anything goes, three women discover that anything is possible…
Find It Stings So Sweet Online:
Happy reading until next time!
Love the cover....beautiful
ReplyDeletesandy@thereadingcafe.com