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Author’s Note:

The History of the book Heart Thief

When I wrote HeartMate, I knew it was a fantasy romance, it focused on the
relationship between T’Ash and Danith. After I finished HeartMate I continued to write about Celta with Heart Thief. I have a long term critique group who has stuck with me in this journey, but they HATED Ruis. He was a thief, he was unsympathetic, he was NOT a hero. Sigh. I did want him to REALLY grow, but starting out as unsympathetic doesn’t work, so REVISION 1 was whipping Ruis into a more likable character.

As I sent HeartMate out to contests (winning, placing, not making finals) and editors and agents (multiple rejections) and years passed, I decided that since Heart Thief was a different story, I could market it either as a paranormal romance or a fantasy with a romantic subplot. I joined a fantasy/sf critique group. REVISION 2 was accenting and adding fantasy scenes, more description, more guy-approved stuff.

REVISION 3: I tried a difficult technique that fantasy writers use – putting a shorter excerpt of another story at the start of the chapter. In Heart Thief’s case, this was the Captain’s Log of the last Captain of Nuada’s Sword, the colonist starship. I wanted to mirror the Captain’s and Ruis’ lives and problems. However, every time I changed/revised a chapter, I had to revise the Captain’s Log. I still have the Captain’s Log and hope to make it into a prequel novella at some point in the future.

I sold HeartMate. To a romance house: Berkley Jove. Heart Thief was half finished – a fantasy with a romantic subplot. REVISION 4 was ripping out A LOT of description, fantasy, guy-stuff. ADDING romance, romantic scenes, girl emotion stuff.

Shudder.

I joined the sensual romance e-list and decided that my love scenes needed work. I finished Heart Thief and handed it over to friends to read. REVISION 5 was making the love scenes longer and hotter, and since the book was now FAR over word count, CUTTING, CUTTING, CUTTING.

I rationalized that I could add the cut scenes (fantasy, guy-stuff, description, cut scenes) to my website under the Celta page, thus this page was born.

REVISION 6: A subplot was not explained well, the conflict between the characters wasn’t deep enough, motivated enough, believable enough.

REVISION 7: The copy edits and page proofs are now done. My editor requested MORE information on nanotechnology. Nanotech was added. Subplot cleaned up more. Love scenes revised.

The last two revisions weren’t too major, but before that....Heart Thief DID
go through five MAJOR revisions.

From May 2003 on, you will see A LOT of uncut scenes from Heart Thief and
hopefully will like them.

Merry meet and merry part and merry meet again, Robin.