Friday, July 29, 2016

Alien Contact - Jackie Baker's Journal (A Narovian Series Extra)

(This is a sneak peek insight on one of the characters in my new Narovian Series Novel coming in 2017)

We watched it three times on TV.  It played every hour for 24 hours. Then we watched it a few more times on the internet. News reports are downplaying the broadcast, but that gorgeous Captain Marrek sure looked like an alien to me.  He had blue hair and golden eyes like a cat's, and ears that came to points---not big points like and elf or Mr. Spock but points. 

TV news is not shedding any light on the subject, but today there is a website up about the United Alliance of Planets.  Captain Marrek is from a world called Narova and he is a feline humanoid. The felines share the planet with homo sapiens and they can inter breed.  The felines seek mates throughout the Alliance through genetic matching. Or they will recognize their mates if they meet by chance. When they find them, they mate for life. They have pheromones and hormones that keep them attuned to each other emotionally and physically.

Because some felines have found their mates on Earth, we can submit our DNA to YourGeneticOrigins.com.  So Rhonna and I sent in our DNA.  They found her feline match...but no one for me.  My letter said that it might mean that my match might not be registered with the service and they would keep my DNA on file for future reference. 

I am so jealous, even though she is my best friend. They sent her pictures of the guy---a feline named E'Dar Karinott. That's pronounced long 'E', accent on Dar. He is every bit as gorgeous as Captain Marrek with longer and lighter blue hair.  His bio says he's a government official in the capitol city of Narov on Narova. He wants a true mate to bond with and eventually have a family.

The catch is, if Rhonna wants to meet him, which she does, she will have to go to Mars. Why would anyone go to Mars?  It's a desolate planet with extreme temperatures and an atmosphere with barely any oxygen.  Oh, but the Alliance has a whole city there underground.  Can you believe that? Yeah, and she wants me to go with her because she is not quite brave enough to go on her own.

I wanted to tell her 'no', but that would be spiteful, and I love Rhonna, I really do.  We have been friends forever and I know she would do it for me.  But if she decides to take him as her mate, she will go into seclusion with him for a week to ten days of bonding sex.  If that happens and it probably will, what the heck am I going to do in an alien city where I don't know a soul and probably not the language either?

But, yes. I will go.  How many people can say they have an all expense paid trip to Mars?  Should be exciting, right?  We'll see.

Jackie

Copyright © 2016
All Rights Reserved

Saturday, March 26, 2016

Alien Romances Need to Show the Love

Before I started writing alien romances I read dozens on Kindle and I still read them. I've read some really good ones and some that were pretty awful. Some of the bad ones seem like poor translations or they have been written by people whose English is their second language. Even some of the latter are pretty good despite some of the awkward phrasing. The better ones would benefit from good editing by someone whose first language is English.


I most recently read two that were not horribly bad, but were merely mediocre. The author made a lot of common mistakes that budding authors make. Instead of building three dimensional characters, they simply tell what happened. They tell what the characters did and saw, but we don't know what they are thinking and feeling.


A lot of these alien romances are based on the premise of an alien world in need of females because their civilization is unbalanced with a great surplus of males and not enough breeding females to keep the race going. Some of the writers are quite creative about how this came about, while others give no plausible explanation. The explanation is not always vital to the story due to the reader's willingness to suspend disbelief.


Going back to the two samples in which each protagonist is abducted by an alien or aliens. Both had a pretty good framework for a story, but they both fell short. The first one started out like a close encounter abduction where the heroine finds herself being experimented on with no idea how she got there. She is obviously scared and confused then resistant against the plan for her to bear young for the prince of the realm.


Way to much prose is spent on the experimentation and we don't get a real sense of the hero with little interaction between them. The heroine finds him attractive physically, but not until the very end did I find a reason to like him much. Unfortunately, by that point I just want to be done with the story that left me with more questions than answers.


The second alien romance was a better story, but the beginning was tedious in wading through a broken romance for a number of pages. All of those details were boring. All we really needed to know was that she had a broken romance and moved to a new town because of it. That was background, not the story the reader wants. They want to know about the alien romance. I didn't want to know about her unpacking and getting groceries. The first date with the grocery clerk's son was unnecessary to the story. Only the second date was pertinent.


The heroine goes to a bar and leaves to be accosted by a biker gang(?) and the alien hero rescues her and takes her back to his planet to be his mate. For me the biker gang was even further out there than the alien abduction romance. The alien world and diverse culture was interesting but again I wasn't feeling the love---and not even much of a sexual attraction.


I feel the point of the alien romance just like any romance is to take you away from your mundane existence to a place far away to spend a sexually satisfying life with an attractive male who loves you like no other for the rest of your life. You have to make the reader feel the love if you want to call it a romance. 

Copyright © 2016 by Clarissa Lake

Thursday, February 4, 2016

What Do You the Reader Think?

Anyone who has read any segment of my Narovian series knows they delve heavily into the sexual relationship between the hero and heroine. After reading a number of reviews of stories with heavily sexual plots that called them pornography, it's obvious that some people don't want to read this kind of thing. I have also seen reviews that openly praise the very same books for their spicy sexual content and the relationship between the characters.


Next week, the sixth entry in the Narovian series “Mated to the Alien Female” goes on sale on Amazon, and I am currently working on the seventh of the series, “Mated to the Alien Trader”. Both of these sequels are spin-offs from “Abducted by Alien Pirates”.


The whole premise of the series is the lengths the Narovian feline humanoids go to find their true genetic mates. They are a race that bonds physically and sexually forming an emotional bond in the process. After the urgency of their first mating, their sexual relationship becomes a quest for mutual satisfaction through which grows genuine affection.


They talk to each other before, during and after sex. I could tell the stories in a much less sexually explicit manner, but I wonder if that's what the reader really wants. So I'd like to put it to you the reader. Do you want to see more details and character developments and less sex? Or more character and plot developments with just as much sex?


Clarissa