JAYNE WELCOMES CHRISTINA DODD

I just finished Christina Dodd's hot, fast and deliciously witty new book, THIGH HIGH, and couldn't wait to bring her back here to RWQ. Yes, I know that for a while she hung out with that Squawk Radio crowd but that's old news and, anyway, we all know that this is where she should have been all along. Welcome, Christina!

CHRISTINA DODD TALKS ABOUT HER FUNNIEST MISTAKES

I have been published for seventeen years. This month, my thirty-fifth full-length book, THIGH HIGH, is on the shelves. I’m not bragging (well, only a little), just giving you a framework for my blog.

Because in February, I wrote a scene where the hero sees the heroine for the first time in two and a half years, and startles her. The line I wrote was, “She didn’t jump, he’d give her that. But Firebird Wilder had always had balls of steel, and she showed them now as she coolly turned to face him.”

I am a professional. Don’t try this at home.

In the story I wrote in December, my heroine stumbles onto the hero sitting in the Japanese garden. He jumps to his feet and says, "Is this your private place? Should I leave?" and she says, "No, it's okay, my private place is big enough for the both of us."

Unless I’m writing erotica (and I’m not), that’s just embarrassing.

I don’t even want to discuss the famous, "He pinned his eyes to her chest."

Let me assure you, I’m not the only writer who does this stuff. At one of my first Romance Writers of America conferences, one of the award winners got up and thanked her critique group for stopping her from writing sentences like, "Angrily, he thrust his hands into his pockets and tried to get a hold of himself." Sadly, I was laughing too hard to take note of her name.

Connie Brockway, author of SKINNY DIPPING, gave me her own favorite faux pas, "He eyed her with relish." Pickle relish, with a touch of mustard, she adds.

Susan Mallery, author of ACCIDENTALLY YOURS, is the queen of great typos. Instead of, “He dropped the wrench and swore loudly,” she wrote, “He dropped the wench and sweat loudly.” (Please note, that was a double typo.) Her personal fav (and mine,) “She stood like a deer caught in the headlines.”

Lisa Kleypas, author of BLUE EYED DEVIL, composed this gem, “Held in his gaze, she felt shaken and stirred.” It seems her hero had the eyes of James Bond’s bartender.

My nightmare is that one of these lines will slip through all the editing and make it onto the printed page. That’s the kind of mistake that would haunt me forever. Mistakes have a way of doing that. In THIGH HIGH, Nessa is a banker who made one mistake seven years ago, and she’s still paying the price. She works hard, she cares for the employees, she handles the customers, but she’s never promoted — and that’s enough to convince the reclusive CEO of her bank, Mac MacNaught, that she has a grudge against his bank. Here’s an excerpt of THIGH HIGH:

Mac dressed in expensive, conservative suits. He kept his black hair severely trimmed. He wore his broken nose and the scars on his throat proudly, never considering plastic surgery to soften the impact. His office provided him with a fitting background, with a floor of polished concrete. What artwork hung on the walls was stark, modern, splashes of black and red. No flowers softened the industrial feel of the large room. He was a self-made man, a man who enjoyed the brutality of corporate takeover, a cold, unfeeling bastard.

So what was it about Ionessa Dahl that made him watch her, over and over again?

Almost without his volition, he reached for the remote and flipped on a single video screen.
An overhead camera showed him what he’d seen so many times before: a traditional bank lobby, rich with marble and polished wood, customers standing in line, tellers conversing as they accepted deposit slips and counted out money. A problem developed, the customer arguing vehemently, and into the picture stepped a young woman, tall, slender, leggy, calm. She wore the conservative blue jacket and skirt of a woman in charge. Her hair was black, and severely styled back from her face.

MacNaught caught her in the crosshairs and zoomed in.

She was pale, with a hint of pink on her lips and cheeks, and she wore large glittering sapphires in her ears.

When Mac adjusted the focus, her down-turned head filled the monitor. She looked up, and he froze the frame. Leaning forward, his elbows on his knees, he stared compulsively.

The long distance shot didn’t do her justice. She was no more than pretty, with stark cheekbones, a dramatic chin and wide, smooth, smiling lips. But the corners of her wide blue eyes slanted up, Mac believed the sooty lashes were real, and the way she gazed at that customer, as if his every word was gold, made the poor sucker stammer and falter and finally wriggle like a puppy.

She was Ionessa Dahl. Graduate of the Goizueta Business School in Atlanta, summa cum laude.

She was the woman Mac suspected had planned and executed the robberies in his banks.

She was his obsession.

I’m sure you’re like me and never make mistakes (never hardly ever once in a while regularly), but I’ll bet you’ve made at least one that’s just as funny as mine and Connie’s and Susan’s and Lisa’s. Tell us about your funniest mistake ever, and I hope you enjoy THIGH HIGH!