Last night I attended a special screening of LOVE BETWEEN THE COVERS, a fantastic documentary by filmmaker Laurie Kahn about romances and the women who write them.

The film has been in the works since all the way back in 2009 when she attended the RWA National conference and thought, hm, I’m onto something here. She secured a grant from the National Endowment of the Humanities to not only work on the film but also a full cross-platform documenting of the subject with a website, The Popular Romance Project. At the website people can see hundreds of hours of interviews and footage that didn’t make it into the finished documentary.

And like romance novels themselves, the film has faced an uphill battle against sexism.

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Mirrored from blog.ceciliatan.com.

This Saturday I’ll be not only teaching a workshop on BDSM Relationship Dynamics at the NECRWA Conference (New England Chapter of the Romance Writers of America) at the Burlington Marriott, I’ll be one of the authors autographing at the book fair.

The book fair is free and open to the public and runs from 1:30 – 2:30 pm at the Marriott Hotel in Burlington, Mass. Any book bought at the event includes a donation to the Massachusetts Literacy Foundation! (10% of all proceeds)

Headlining are bestselling authors Sabrina Jeffries, Lauren Dane, Barbara Wallace, and Loretta Chase.

Complete list of authors confirmed:
• Judith Arnold •
• Isabella Bradford •
• Mia Gabriel •
• Sherri Browning •
• Lisa Carlisle •
• Loretta Chase •
• Lauren Dane •
• Dee Davis •
• Megan Frampton •
• Rosza Gaston •
• Emily Harper •
• Lauren Hawkeye •
• Gwen Hernandez •
• Hannah Howell •
• Sabrina Jeffries
• Julia Kent •
• Caroline Linden •
• Tracey Lyons •
• Teresa Noelle Roberts/Sophie Mouette •
• Tamsen Parker •
• Maggie Robinson •
• P. J. Sharon •
• Kathryn Shay •
• Amber Skyze •
• Kristen Strassel •
• Cecilia Tan •
• Susan Vaughan •
• Barbara Wallace •

Here’s the official flyer about the event: http://necrwa.org/conference/bookfair-flyer-2015.pdf

I’ll have some special new Magic University tchotcke to give away at the book fair! You don’t have to buy a book to come get a Veritas “Department of Alchemy” silver-embossed notepad…

Mirrored from blog.ceciliatan.com.

A reader commented over at AO3 that apparently this fic had disappeared from the Internet. “The Hermit” was written for the 2009 HD Worldcup fest, and though the fest was held on Livejournal, the actual fics were hosted somewhere else. I guess that somewhere else no longer exists as the links go nowhere. So I have now re-posted the fic to AO3 (here!) and now I’ll put it here, too!

Title: The Hermit
Author: Ravenna C. Tan
Fest: Originally written for Team Canon in the 2009 HD Worldcup
Prompt: The Hermit
Word Count: 16,000
Warnings: Explicit sex
Rating: NC-17/Adult
Thanks to: My beta readers scrtkpr and clauclauclaudia! Thanks for such great, quick responses!

A few notes before the fic:

Card Interpretation: The Hermit is one of the few cards that has a mostly consistent meaning over the many Tarot decks I own and researched. To quote from Tarot of the Cat People: “A loner or person incapable of interacting with other people. Failure to face facts. Self-denial.” The Vertigo Tarot says this: “Withdrawal, acting alone, seeking wisdom. Difficulty connecting with the world or other people.” I see this side of Draco first emerging in sixth year, when he tries to act alone to save his family rather than reaching out to Snape or anyone else for help. The downward spiral that begins for him then, I have carried forward four years after the end of Deathly Hallows, trying to project as accurately as possible from the clues in the canon what might have transpired in Draco’s much-traumatised head.

Reversed, the card can carry some interesting meanings, too, especially as regards a person who is engaging or integrating with society. For me, this refers to Harry. JKR has said in interviews since the release of DH that Harry would have taken up an important part in reshaping the wizarding world. I don’t count interviews strictly as “canon,” but for me that means to write a canonically consistent story, I could not, for example, turn Harry into a recluse who fades into obscurity now that his destiny has been fulfilled. He is the Hermit Reversed, engaged in the world and an integral part of his society.

Canon notes: I chose Team Canon because I really try to get all those little details right. There are many fanon conventions that we’ve come to accept, and yet they do not appear in the books. For example, there is no potion in the books that bears the name “Dreamless Sleep.” At the end of Goblet of Fire, Madame Pomfrey brings Harry a purple potion, saying “You’ll need to drink all of this. Harry,” she said. “It’s a potion for dreamless sleep.” She doesn’t tell the name to Harry, nor is it named later in the books. Fans have named it “Dreamless Sleep” in countless fics, which is not wrong to do–obviously the potion has SOME name–but it has no name in the canon, and therefore has no name in my story. Another thing that I try to match to the canon is the capitalisation, but this is something that is not always consistent. I had to decide whether to capitalise the “Cursebreakers” who help Harry–Ministry positions like Auror and Obliviator tend to be capitalised–or if it should be “curse breaker” as in the description Molly gives in Prisoner of Azkaban of “our eldest son, Bill, [who] works as a curse breaker for Gringotts Wizarding Bank.” And you’ll note, no apostrophe in Gringotts!

*** AND NOW THE FIC ***

Archived at Ravenna's Quill.

To begin the archiving of my fics on this site, I’m going to repost them gradually, starting with my more popular fics. This one even has a Christmas theme, and well, it is December…

Title: A Wizard’s Memory
Author: Ravenna C. Tan
Word Count: 5900
Rating: NC-17
Disclaimer: It’s fanfic and we know it.
Beta-reader: TwistedMiracle
Summary: At a big Christmas party, Harry runs into the one person he thinks he wants to forget.
A/N: Written for Charlotteschaos in the 2006 HD Holidays Fest. Her request said: “I like when there’s a lot of magic and banter is even better than sex. I love good banter. I’d be interested in writing and/or reading a good post-break up/getting back together fic.” Written pre-DH, and so only canon-compliant through HBP.

Archived at Ravenna's Quill.

I’ve got an erotic romance story in the new male/male ebook anthology RIDING THE ROCKET edited by Sascha Illyvich, just released by Sizzler Editions.

I wrote a fairly dark and twisted piece, somewhat dystopian. Here’s an enticing taste of it!

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Mirrored from blog.ceciliatan.com.

Guess what came in the mail? The copies I ordered from Amazon.com of my own latest book THE SIREN AND THE SWORD! Yes, Magic U book one is on bookstore shelves “in the wild.”

If anyone out there happens to find it in a local store, please send me a photo of it on the shelf? I’ll thank you with a sneak preview of an exclusive Magic U erotic short story! Email photos to ctan.writer AT gmail DOT com.

Two other books I have in the Red Silk paranormal erotic romance line are out now, too, MIND GAMES, my erotic thriller romance, and BITES OF PASSION, an anthology of erotic vampire stories including Eric Del Carlo, Jessi Holhart, A.M. Hartnett, Rakelle Valencia, Ed Fuqua, and others.

So… everyone who told me “I won’t read ebooks, but I’ll get it when the ‘real’ book comes out”? Have at!

Mirrored from blog.ceciliatan.com.