Daily Archives: May 11, 2009

I dreamed a dream…seeing my book on the shelf at Barnes & Noble

by Jina Bacarr

I’ve been making the rounds of the bookstores in So Cal signing copies of my latest Spice release, Cleopatra’s Perfume, and talking to booksellers. I always get that tingly feeling when I spot my book on the shelf in a bookstore. It’s like running into an old friend you haven’t seen for awhile.

By the time your book is on the shelf, an author hasn’t been “intimate” with her characters for awhile so your emotions run high when you see the finished product in a bookstore. Looking at my gorgeous Cleopatra’s Perfume cover, I couldn’t help but think about the long, winding road it took to get there.

I felt like a talent contest winner when I ran my fingers over the shiny cover and soft silky pages, remembering the endless nights at my computer creating these characters and bringing them to life. The writing process is a complex one. Sometimes it’s like inhaling an exotic perfume and letting the story flow with a richness and luminosity that takes on a life of its own

Other times, it’s a gut-wrenching assault on your senses, wondering if you’ll ever get there. In the end, it was that magical combination of craft and creativity in the pursuit of romance and the mystical that enabled me to tell my story about a woman with an insatiable appetite for sexual adventure in 1939 Europe. “One whiff and every man was her slave.”

Join me as I take you on a video podcast tour of the Barnes & Noble Fashion Island bookstore in beautiful Newport Beach, California, where I signed copies of my Spice release, “Cleopatra’s Perfume.”

Thankz.

Best,
Jina

PS: I’m writing a daily blog for the month of May about my heroine in Cleopatra’s Perfume, Lady Eve Marlowe, and her wild adventures in Berlin in 1928 (my novel opens in 1939).

It’s called: Hot Weimar Berlin: What you always wanted to know but were afraid to ask

Follow me on Twitter: www.twitter.com/jinabacarr

Jina Bacarr is also the author of The Blonde Geisha , Naughty Paris, Tokyo Rendezvous, a Spice Brief, and Spies, Lies & Naked Thighs, featuring an Indiana Jones in high heels.