🔥Hot Sale - Thunder on the Plains & Wildest Dreams!🔥

Thunder on the Plains and Wildest Dreams are on sale across all platforms for only $0.99 - If you don't have them, get them quick! The sale only lasts until May 7th.

Thunder on the Plains

Amazon | B&N | iBooks | Kobo

With more than 7 million books in print, RT Book Reviews Career Achievement Award–winning and USA Today Bestselling author Rosanne Bittner pens a historical Western romance filled with dangerous cowboys, capable heroines, and an epic love story that sweeps across the Old West.

The After-Book Let-Down

The theme of this blog refers to how I feel when I am done with a book and I send it in. When I finish a book, and probably because my books are so long, I feel a big let-down and am depressed for several days afterward. After writing a 400-500 page book, usually 100,000 to 110,000 words, it’s hard to let go of the characters and “send them away” to the publisher.

Imagine packing up your own children and sending them off to a stranger who will then manage their lives from then on (i.e. edit your book and do things to it to make it even more marketable) – and knowing once you send your children away, they will never be returned to you. That’s kind of how it feels to work on a big novel and then send off the finished product.

Writing a story doesn’t involve just sitting down to the computer and putting an idea into words. That idea might have been brewing for months or even years, the characters living in your heart and mind all that time. Jake Harkner from my Outlaw series has lived in my heart and mind since about 1991, when I wrote down the idea for his story on the back of a check book with an eyebrow pencil because it suddenly came to me and I didn’t have a pen handy. That first book was published in 1993 and it took me 20 years to convince a publisher to let me write a sequel, which of course turned into four books and now I want to write a fifth. Part of the reason I want to write that fifth book is because I DON’T WANT TO LEAVE THESE CHARACTERS! I want to keep them alive for me and for my readers.

And now I know why it has taken me so long to even begin writing the contemporary Native American romance I talked about on Facebook a few days ago. The characters have been inside my heart and head for about 20 years now – maybe longer – and I know that if I write this book and actually sell it, I will have to “let go” of these characters. They won’t be just mine any more. Sounds strange, I’m sure, to non-writers, but I suppose as a reader who might love my characters as much as I do, they get the same feelings when the finish reading a book for which they have waited months to be able to read, especially books that are part of a series. They get done and they wish there was more because they don’t want to leave those characters.

Back to my comment about writing not being about just sitting down and getting it into a computer. Any well-written book takes weeks or months (sometimes years) of research before you even write it. So you go through all of that, and then you write the story – which normally takes 3-5 months for me. Sometimes, though, as with DO NOT FORSAKE ME and with my recent new book LOGAN’S LADY, the story is so real and already written in my head that it just pours out of me. I’ll sit for hours and days and weeks on-end doing almost nothing else but write – in which case I can turn out a 400-500 page book in about 6 weeks.

Either way, that first draft is not the finished product. I print it out – read and edit – go back to the computer and enter the edits – print it out again – read it again to check those edits, in which case I find even more things that need to be “fixed” – go back to the computer and enter all the new edits – read it again for even more edits – go back to the computer and enter those edits – then print it out once more and read the whole thing before I send it in to the publisher. So overall, you are with the characters night and day for weeks or months.

Then you send in the book. It’s like popping a balloon. Your elation at finishing a big book lasts only a day or so and then it’s – “Now what?” I want to go with my characters to the publisher and “protect and defend” them. “Don’t mess with my babies,” I want to say. The publisher has ripped them out of my arms. Plus, I feel like someone just took away my job and now I have to find a new one. “What do I work on now?”

My husband says I deserve a break, and I suppose I do, but I begin to panic. What if this book bombs? What if I never sell another book? I need to start another story and work on more ideas and make sure my publisher will take more – or make sure I have new stories ready to publish on Amazon so that my readers always have yet another book to look forward to.

If I had my way, I would continue my series books on and on into the children and grandchildren. I would stay with those families or couples I created for as long as possible. And if it was physically possible, I would publish a new story every month to keep my readers happy. Alas, there is only one of me and this old body can only sit for so long without aches and pains. Still, I try to ignore them because I want nothing more than to keep writing and keep turning out new stories.

Yet through all the 67 books I’ve now had published, so many of my characters will live with me forever and ever – most notably Zeke and Abbie Monroe from SAVAGE DESTINY – Caleb and Sarah Sax (from my BLUE HAWK trilogy) –Maggie Tucker and Sage Lightfoot from PARADISE VALLEY, Sunny Landers and Colt Travis from THUNDER ON THE PLAINS, Gabe Beaumont and Faith Kelley from TAME THE WILD WIND, Addy and Parker Cole from UNTIL TOMORROW, Lettie McBride and Luke Fontaine from WILDEST DREAMS, Two Wolves and Claire from CAPTURE MY HEART and A WARRIOR’S PROMISE, and of course Jake and Randy Harkner from my OUTLAW books. There are so many more! If you go to Amazon.com and type in my name, you will find pages and pages of my titles.

Sometimes I scan all my books and I wonder what will happen to all those characters after I am gone. Who will love and cherish them as I do? I’m so glad to realize that my readers will. And if they keep recommending those books to their family and friends, most of my books will continue to sell for a long time after I'm no longer in this world, which means my characters will live on for a long time to come. As far as I am concerned, they did live once for real and they told their stories to me from the past. I guess that’s why most of my books came out of me so easily. Those characters just visited me for a while and whispered their stories to me. I simply wrote down what they told me happened and how they felt about it. And yes, I’m just crazy enough to think that I just might meet some of my characters in another world, another life.

Can you tell I’m feeling sentimental? I hope Sourcebooks takes good care of my new “baby.” They are already working on a cover!

Outlaw Hearts, Do Not Forsake Me, Thunder on the Plains & Wildest Dreams Goodreads Giveaways!

I'm offering signed copies of OUTLAW HEARTS, DO NOT FORSAKE ME, WILDEST DREAMS and THUNDER ON THE PLAINS as a Goodreads Giveaway!

Outlaw Hearts
Amazon | Barnes & Noble | iBook | Kobo Books | All Romance
Genre: Historical Western Romance
Release June 2, 2015
Published by: Sourcebooks
Length: 576 Pages 

A decades long love story of two people, united by chance, that proves love's lasting power and its ability to overcome all odds.

Miranda Hayes has lost everything-her family, her husband, her home. Orphaned and then widowed, desperate to find a safe haven, she sets out to cross a savage land alone...until chance brings her face-to-face with notorious gunslinger Jake Harkner.

E-Book Specials - January 5, 2014 Only!

Tomorrow, July 5th Only!
Wildest Dreams and Thunder on the Plains e-Books will $1.99 

Now Comes E-Books!

There was a time when I moaned and groaned about the changes in publishing to e-books. I hated the internet (sorry, but I still don’t like “visiting” on-line – I don’t often post to Facebook or Twitter) – hated the idea of reading a book on a screen rather than holding it in my hand – didn’t understand blogging and all that “stuff.”

Well, here I am with a Facebook Personal and Fan page – a Blog – I’m on Twitter – I have a web site – and of course e-mail. My last hold-out … e-books and a Kindle reader. 

Hello To All My Fellow Bloggers!

Keep watch here for news about my Virtual Valentine’s Day Party beginning February 7th and how you can win some prizes! It’s all to celebrate the publication of my novel WILDEST DREAMS, both in print and as an e-book, from Sourcebooks. You can also find the book at Amazon.com. It’s a true “Bittner” western romance, set in the wilds of 1800’s Montana – a great love story filled with real history, lots of action and adventure. This is a love story that spans a generation, one you will not soon forget!

I want to talk a little more about TV and big-screen westerns. In my comments about some of the best western movies I realize I failed to mention DANCES WITH WOLVES. Don’t know how I managed to leave that one out! And then there is THE BIG COUNTRY, a magnificent western. And although I mentioned some of the best TV westerns, I failed to mention a couple of western movies made for TV. Yes, the new AMC series, HELL ON WHEELS, is great; but yesterday I watched (for probably the fourth time) BROKEN TRAIL, a full TV movie with Robert Duvall (who needs to be added to my list of some of the most authentic-looking grizzly old cowboys I’ve ever seen). BROKEN TRAIL is one of the most realistic westerns I have ever watched, actually difficult to watch at times because it makes us face the pitiful, shameful way the Chinese were treated in the Old West, especially young girls kidnapped from China and brought to this country to be sold into slavery as prostitutes. In BROKEN TRAIL Robert Duvall and the men with him end up helping some of these girls, a bit by accident at first, and then because they realize they need to protect them from evil forces who want them back for slavery. This is such an incredibly touching movie that it makes you cry, and the best part about it is how Robert Duvall’s character and his partner depict (perfectly) the role of the true cowboy spirit, and the cowboy way of respecting and protecting women. They come through as true, yet humble, heroes.

Robert Duvall does this yet again in OPEN RANGE, with Kevin Costner. Again, the true cowboy spirit shines through in this story of rugged ranching life, as well as the quintessential good vs. bad plot line that is so important in all good westerns. Both these TV movies are some of the most realistic I’ve ever seen as far as what life was really like for cowboys/ranchers and their women in the Old West. And realism is what I love to write. I try hard to put myself in the shoes of my characters and imagine what it would be like to live with no electricity, no doctors, no conveniences, in a time when women did all the cooking and baking, all the sewing, scrubbing everything by hand, made the butter and the soap and the candles and helped with all the chores. It was a hard life, and I have tremendous respect for America’s pioneers, especially the women. We have no idea how good we have it today.

I know all I seem to talk about is westerns and pioneers and Native Americans, but that’s the genre I love and the only one about which I write. I believe that to do a good job writing a story, you have to totally love the subject matter and then immerse yourself in the story to the point that you believe the characters really did exist. I’ve had many readers who have written me to ask just that – were these people real?

Thanks for your continued support of my writing, and be sure to visiti my comments on other blogs who participated in my blog tour for WILDEST DREAMS!