BOOK OF THE WEEK: Archives

Romance Readers Book Of The Week
October 10, 2005
ARCHIVED FEATURE

MATING NET
by Rowena Beaumont Cherry

Genre: Science Fiction Romance (Spicy)
Format: eBook (short story)
ISBN: 0976539713

Buy This Book:
Available at New Concepts Publishing

FROM THE BACK COVER:

Helispeta wanted to marry well ... but not THIS well.

What is an ambitious young princess to do when she finds herself irrevocably married to the wrong god? What is her jilted fiance to do?

Prince Devoron-Vitan, supreme commander of the Tigron Empire's star forces, wants to go home and find out what the star-blazes is going on. In one short gestate, his twin brother Djohn-Kronos has killed their father, taken the throne, nullified all existing royal betrothals, and started a war.

Then, rumors reach Devoron-Vitan that Djohn-Kronos intends to catch Devoron-Vitan's fiancee, Helispeta, in his MATING NET.

WHAT OTHERS ARE SAYING ABOUT THIS BOOK:

"FIVE STARS! Romantic science fiction fans will want to read this powerful deep tale (and its predecessor Forced Mate). ... Rowena Cherry is one of the best sub-genre writers due to her skill at placing the heroic characters in impossible scenarios as she has with the delightful Mating Net."
~Harriet Klausner, Affaire de Coeur

"FOUR AND A HALF MOONS! What can I say but FANTASTIC! .... If you're a fan of the author's Alien Djinn stories, you'll find that MATING NET is a requirement. Not only because it fills in some gaps in the mythology itself, but also because it's one excellent love story." ~Brenda Clark, MystiqueBooks

"This may have been short but it sure packed a wallop! I just hated that it was so short. Rowena's stories about Tigron and its people fascinate and I'm eagerly awaiting more stories!"
~Kathy Boswell, The Best Reviews

"Rowena Cherry had a vision, and it is brought forth beautifully again in the Mating Net. Filled with richness and intrigues, this short is a prequel to her book, Forced Mate, and again brings to light her talent for stimulation of the imagination. Mating Net is well worth a look, and a read. It … should be on your Romances to Buy list. You really have to laugh when you see how Helispeta and Devoran escape the clutches of his evil twin and emperor. So share the adventure! Mating Net by Rowena Cherry is fun, exciting, and a welcome addition to any romance library.
~Romance at Heart

"MATING NET is a fantastic romantic science fiction novel that grips the audience from the moment we meet the malevolent Djonn and never slows down until the final alteration. The story line is action-packed, but filled with developed characters especially the twins and their love interest; this threesome make for a powerful triangle in which fans will believe evil will win out. As with FORCED MATE, Rowena Cherry provides a strong relationship drama inside a thrilling sci fi tale."
~The Best Reviews

MEET THE AUTHOR:

Rowena Cherry is a self-described lifelong lurker and fact magpie.

Rowena's youth was spent on the tiny British island of Guernsey: a mystical, idyllic setting with its prehistoric earth-goddess statues, Martello towers, underground gun emplacements, and legends of faery men.

A school chess champion and winner of the Duke of Edinburgh's Gold Award, Rowena went to ancient Cambridge University for her four-year combined honors degree in English and Education, after which she taught at an exclusive boarding school in Dorset.

Eventually Rowena relocated to London , where she met and married her auto designer husband, who whirled her off to Germany to live the glamorous corporate life. Reassigned to America, she once rode in a pace car at Indy 500; has flown in corporate jets to exotic locations; stayed in multi-bathroom suites at the world's best resorts... fantastic inspiration for romance novel scenes and alien-world building.

Rowena lives in Michigan with her husband and daughter.
 

READ AN EXCERPT:

Prologue - In which the god-Emperor plots to steal his brother's fiancée

He was on the prowl for a new mate.

No one suspected. It was too soon after his last Empress's death. Everyone who knew anything about the Great Djinn god-Princes of Tigron would expect him to grieve for the rest of his natural life, because everyone assumed that he had had the rut-rage with his young Empress and had fixed his affections on her forever.

Though he had every right to mate again-and there were two innocent reasons why he should replace Djustine-Saturna as soon as possible-the chattering fool peoples of all the Communicating Worlds would call his haste indecent in the extreme.

What did he care what aliens and lesser beings thought? His broad shoulders already bore the blame for his father's final atrocity. His friends and his enemies could not possibly think worse of him than they already did.

Consciences were for Commoners. He was the greatest of all the Great Djinn. He was the god-Emperor Djohn-Kronos. By All The Lechers of Antiquity, he had gods-Right to any virgin he wanted, and he hadn't had sex in a gestate.

He flung himself into the pilot's seat, snapped the canopy shut, and chopped his beringed right hand into the cradle.

"I'm Djohn-Kronos. Open the force field."

A hot, blindingly bright cross-hatching of light yawned ahead of him. He accelerated out of the apex at the top of the Palace's West Pyramid and enjoyed the sensation of being slammed back in his seat by Tigron's heavy G-forces.

His racing craft's sinister double shadow scudded over the rough flowering desert terrain below, startling large lizards, stampeding small herds of hardy ruminants. Moving fast and dangerously low, now his shadows skipped the ridge-backed mountain range and swooped over crater-worlds. Some craters were volcanic in origin. Some were ancient asteroid-impact. Some were both: crater-upon-crater.

Each crater was a distinct eco-system varying according to their depth, geology, whether or not they were spring-fed, and the overlaps of shadows thrown by the distant small white sun and by the nearer Primary planet-the Body Imperial. While not quite a second sun, it made the Royal Side of its moon up to six percent hotter than the Commoners' side of Tigron.

Unlike his twin brother who thought that Tigron was doomed to crash into its gas giant, Djohn-Kronos loved his home-world.

There! Below him shimmered the forbidden paradise of which all Djinn Princes dreamed. Created in more fertile times, the school for Djinn princesses had been built on an island which was surrounded by a shallow sea. Light blue, inviting, but dangerous was that sea. Tigron's most precious virgins were guarded by sea monsters.

Since a rut-enraged Prince would not be put off by monsters, the school for princesses was also protected by an overarching biodome to keep the fertile scent of the full-Djinn princesses from escaping and maddening the Great Djinn males with lust.

Damn and Deca-damn! Savage fury caused Djohn-Kronos to bank sharply and roll in the sky, like some great reptile displaying his power and prowess.

Secluding princesses at the school was not an infallible system for maintaining public decency and a civilized society. A girl had to be at the school to be safe. His good name and reputation had been ruined forever because some slack-damn sentimental royal widow whose name he was still, a gestate later, too angry to contemplate had home-schooled her pre-pubescent daughter until the damn girl wasn't pre-pubescent at all. Now Djustine-Saturna was dead.

Despite her young age, with care-and she had had the very best care-Djustine-Saturna might have survived a singleton pregnancy, but not twin males. Djinn males were always bigger.

There weren't many virgin princesses left at the school, but his imagination ran wild as he circled. Below him, veiled from his Djinn-sharp sight by the biodome and shimmering white force field were naked girls floating in black, gravity-warping murk pools, which allowed them to grow tall and willowy and high-breasted despite the cruel tug of Tigron's gravity.

One could recognize a princess of Tigron at a glance.

His next Empress was down there. Helispeta! The one precious girl who didn't seem to mind his monstrous reputation . perhaps she was one of the rare remaining Djinn who hadn't lost their legendary psychic powers.

Perhaps Helispeta knew how magnanimous he'd been, and how much he'd suffered in trying to do the right thing for the adoring child, Djustine-Saturna, whom he had befriended, but who had never been his sweetheart.

He circled, yearning to swoop down and seize his happiness by force, knowing that he couldn't. A deadly dangerous tyrant he might be, but he would never again risk his senses being ambushed by a girl who chanced to be in the rut-rageous time of her cycle. This time, he'd take a mate of legal breeding age. One of his own choosing.

And if she was the mate his damned father had chosen for his twin brother, so what? One might say that all unconsummated mating contracts had been voided upon the old Emperor's violent and richly deserved death.

The problem, and the solution, was that the fragrant Helispeta was still promised to his identical twin brother. By law she was still a virgin. Therefore, by law he had every right, god's Right, to her. Nevertheless, things were better done Djinn-style, by stealth if possible and by force only if absolutely necessary.

Meanwhile, to keep his heroic, too-adventurous twin out of the way, there could be no more convenient time to provoke an ancient enemy and re-ignite an old war.

ROMANCE READERS CHATS WITH THE AUTHOR:

What do you find is the hardest part of writing? What is the easiest?

I like to do easy things first.

The easiest part--for me-- is characterization. That might be because I don’t generally start writing until the hero has come to life in my dreams.

The hardest part for me is the graphic love scenes. Why ? Firstly, there's the vocabulary. There are certain words one sees all the time in romance novels. I like to try and avoid as many of those words as possible.

I don’t avoid them so much in INSUFFICIENT MATING MATERIAL, because Prince Djetthro-Jason was educated on Earth. So it might be natural for him to use the F--- word. It didn’t seem reasonable that Prince Tarrant-Arragon, who had never visited Earth until he decided to abduct Djinni-vera would use Anglo-American terminology.

There’s been a fascinating debate on the FFandP loop (I think that’s the one) about the various C*** words and their place in romance. Language choices can be controversial. They are also an important aspect of character and point of view.

So far, I haven’t had my Imperial male aliens give their genitalia “Christian” names, or poultry names, either. Djinn is pronounced Jinn with the D silent. So, that rules out “Dick” for a start.

Actually, I might rethink the poultry names. Prince Djetthro-Jason has been exposed to human nursery stories, like the one about the Little Red Hen who does all the work to make bread literally from scratch. He is forced into a similar situation, and wonders resentfully why there are no fairy stories about a Big Red Cock.

However, that comes in a sexual tension scene, not in a love scene. He is not feeling very charitable about his heroine who does not want to spoil her perfect manicure by digging latrines or collecting firewood.

Secondly, it’s quite a challenge to find the *right* mix of advancing the plot, having something else going on at the same time, having realistic dialogue, keeping on topic.
I have trouble keeping on topic.

Writing in the best of good taste means controlling my lamentable sense of humor, especially during love scenes. I have a disastrous tendency to amuse myself (and only myself).

I call this sort of writing Gorilla Testicles. Too often, I need a Test Reader or an editor’s help to identify and remove them.

Why Gorilla Testicles, you might well ask! I once saw a wildlife program where the scientist found it necessary to measure the size of a sleeping gorilla's testicles using a monkey wrench.

I'm not sure why. He must have had an odd sense of humor, like me! The testicles, by the way, were remarkably small. Not worth the time and effort involved in measuring them, or in watching them being measured.

For good measure, I’ll tell you what’s the most fun.

I love weaving in uncommon knowledge...such as deviant frog mating behaviors, lion taming tips, fair-use quotes from Machiavelli, military uses for urine on the battlefield. (You won't find such unromantic and tasteless stuff in the Lovespell edition of FORCED MATE.)

What or who, if anyone, has influenced your writing?

David Attenborough. Desmond Morris. Erich Von Daeniken. Jacques Cousteau. The Jeff Corwin Experience.

I love to throw out the occasional curve ball!

The above named explorers, adventurers and serious men influenced content, of course. Now for the more conventional answer:

When I was thirteen my mother shared a Georgette Heyer Regency romance with me: These Old Shades. I still love well-written, well-researched Regencies. The Heyer heroes influence me (or my idea of what is romantic) on many levels.

Of today’s period romance authors, I especially like Jo Beverly, Mary Jo Putney, and Amanda Quick. I think I’ll limit my list to the three authors whose novels I buy on the strength of her name without checking out the blurb…. Or the title.

I should read the titles and blurb. Then I wouldn’t buy the same story every time their publishers reissue a book with a different cover.

Which is a great segué to point out to this audience that FORCED MATE comes in two versions and two covers. Please check them out at my website: www.rowenacherry.com
Yes, there is a difference. Here’s a heads-up. If the author is Rowena BEAUMONT Cherry the novel is either Darker or dirtier. I am not sure how it turned out that way, but it did. Originally, I wanted e-books to have the Beaumont and print books to just be my real name. So now you know.

However, since I’ve digressed, I might as well go all the way. When I ordered and printed my MATING NET bookmarks, MATING NET was a nice —relatively, the bad guy still got the girl first— short story of just over ten thousand words, and all the sexual activity took place off center stage, so I named myself ROWENA CHERRY. Then, I was asked for more “content” about ten days before the book was due to come out.

I added about three thousand extra words, so now MATING NET is a thirteen thousand word short story. Most of what I added was graphic, dark and sexual, so I added the Beaumont to the author’s name. ROWENA BEAUMONT CHERRY.

Back to influences:
Of the moderns, George Orwell influenced my writing on a less obvious level... About writing responsibly, the ethics of authorship, the importance of hands-on research.
My favorite Romance poets are Tennyson and Browning. I particularly liked the dark monologues, such as Browning's MY LAST DUCHESS.

I was very influenced by that monologue when I wrote the scene in MATING NET where the god-Emperor Djohn-Kronos asks the heroine’s guardian to vouch for whether or not the heroine is a virgin.

Do we limit “authors” to people who have written books? I'd like to include singer-songwriters, or musician-poets too... especially the mystical rock musicians such as Jim Morrison of the Doors and Stevie Nicks of Fleetwood Mac.

In writing FORCED MATE, I listened to Tannhauser’s Pilgrims’ Chorus. INSUFFICIENT MATING MATERIAL is a lot less dignified, and my hero likes Jetthro-Tull and the Rolling Stones, so that’s some of what I’m listening to, these days.

The late sixties and seventies were a time of Metaphysical Rock, I’d call a lot of it SF-Romance rock.

Do you do much research for your books?

I do lots, but I try to write so that you wouldn’t notice.

I like to fill my novels with a lot of uncommon knowledge, some of which is probably urban legend, but I try to avoid inserting interesting “stuff” just because I’ve researched it, whether it “fits” or not. I am probably not always successful.

For FORCED MATE, for instance, if a man who seems to know tells me that English mercenaries drive London taxi cabs when there is nothing more exciting to do, and which publications they read for the situations vacant columns, I've no idea how I'd safely verify whether my source was accurate or pulling my leg.

I got an amateur pilot to work out all the details of how to fly undetected from Cambridge (England) to Las Vegas in plane big enough to carry a limousine. In the end, I did not use this in FORCED MATE. It made no sense for Tarrant-Arragon to take Djinni-vera to Las Vegas –just because I had been there recently— when the obvious thing would be to take her back to his spacecraft as soon as the launch window opened.

However, it did make sense to date FORCED MATE a year later than 1993, which was a stand out year at the Indianapolis 500 ball, because the beauty queen was led out in a dance, by Fabio, and I was at the 500 with people who were at that Ball. I used the information they gave me to develop a rationale for how His Mightiness Tarrant-Arragon might chance to see a photograph that included the heroine of FORCED MATE.

For the sequel, INSUFFICIENT MATING MATERIAL, the worlds, the dating, and the Djinn Family Tree was already in place. Nevertheless there was plenty to research, including survival techniques, plane crashes, weapons, various methods of card fortune telling, and psychic detective work, light bondage, corset-wearing….

By the way, the Djinn Family tree is now up on my website, and it is interactive. Go to www.rowenacherry.com/familytree/

Click on the title of one of my books, and the major characters’ names will enlarge and highlight.

By the way, I am really dreadful at some kinds of arithmetic. I published the Family Tree a while ago, and never thought much about the ancestors. Then, one day to my horror I discovered that I’d inadvertently got my sums wrong and married off a couple of grandmothers when they were twelve years old!!!!

I couldn’t change it. I had to work with it. Well, twelve doesn’t sound quite so bad when measured in gestates (a unit of approximately nine months). Also, in our own medieval times Princesses were married off young. I suppose one can be officially married but not consummate the marriage until one reaches a more satisfactory age.

What, in your opinion, are the elements of a great romance?

I haven’t analyzed it, and I’m pretty sure what I write isn’t really Great Romance, so I will attack the question as if I were talking theoretically about why I love certain books.
The Hero, the hero, and the hero. I hope realtors will forgive me for borrowing their motto about Location.

For me, the most important element is the hero. He has to be magnetic, and complicated, strong, powerful and sophisticated. If he fascinates me, the book is a keeper and I’ll read it again and again.

Georgette Heyer’s Georgian and Regency heroes have always been my ideals…. The macho ones, at least.

For me, the heroine is not so important. I want to imagine myself in her place, anyway. She simply has to avoid being annoying, intrusive, or stupid.

I feel I ought to mention Plot, but honestly, I’m interested in characters. I don’t really care if they save a world, one tree, or a reputation.

There are some who like to say that the romance genre is trashy, too sentimental or without literary value. What would you like to say to them?

I don’t try to be a spokesperson for any genre.

Now, if someone purchased FORCED MATE or MATING NET and feels that their expectations have not been met, I am very sorry for their disappointment. No doubt, they will not buy another book by me, once they know what to expect.

I write to please myself, so I am not going to take out the trash, or adopt a “literary” voice to please anyone else… except maybe a great editor.

I try to be careful not to misrepresent my books in my own advertising, and in interviews <<grin>> but with any purchase it should be a case of buyer beware. I’d encourage anyone to check out excerpts on my website –www.rowenacherry.com – or ask around.
I don’t think anyone is going to find FORCED MATE, MATING NET, or INSUFFICIENT MATING MATERIAL too sentimental.

MATING NET is definitely my “Darkest” work. Only yesterday on the Paranormal Romance loop I read a definition of “Dark” as applied to Romance. Yes, MATING NET is Dark and it has some undercurrents. Not everyone who liked FORCED MATE is going to like MATING NET.

The Prologue is available free on www.rowenacherry.com.

Your titles all have MATE or MATING in them. That is very in-your-face. Who chooses the titles for your books?

So far, I do. My titles are all taken from chess moves or positions, and so far my editors have agreed with me that the title is appropriate.

I love the fact that if you look up FORCED MATE on Amazon (unless I’m thinking of Barnes and Noble), the next two or three books with similar titles are chess manuals!

If you Google INSUFFICIENT MATING MATERIAL, you will come upon a fabulous chess web site. However, I am not sure if the title will survive my superb editor, even though it is a marvelous triple pun.

Chess themed romances are my “thing” so I plan for there to always be a chess scene for the reader to either skip or struggle through…. If the book is long enough. I did not throw a chess scene into MATING NET when they asked me to add word count.

Usually the hero learns to respect the heroine’s intelligence, or discovers that the heroine is not the airhead he thought she was, so there is a romantic point to the game. If you read the Djohn-Kronos/Helispeta/Devoron-Vitan story, you’ll perhaps see why. However, there is a chess allusion. The magnificent cover model is tightly grasping a Chess King. There is a reason for that.

Do your characters talk to you? 

As a rule, they don’t. But if they did, the males would say, “Don’t be in such a hurry to make me the bad guy. I want to be a hero. Tell my story. Find me somebody to love me.”
The females would probably say, “Don’t you dare describe me as feisty. Do you know the etymology of that word?”

How may readers contact you?

Email me

Rowena@rowenacherry.com

Write:

Rowena Beaumont Cherry
PO Box 554
Bloomfield Hills  MI 48303-0554

Do many readers contact you?

That is an interesting question. I have a newsletter list which people can join from my website, www.rowenacherry.com/newsletter/ but some people accidentally join several times so it is hard to keep track.

Then there are readers who very kindly email me, asking me to reply and tell them how to buy one of my titles, but when I reply, I discover that their spam filters reject my emails.
I’d like readers to know that I never send email FROM rowenacherry.com.

I get spam from rowenacherry.com. As I hope you can imagine, I have better things to do with my time than send myself information on how I could have a bigger penis.

Please, do not set your filters to receive mail from rowenacherry.com unless you want advice on how thrusting your extremities into a bees nest will make them swell up to double their previous size.

By the way, in a recent interview with a similar question, I made a joke about kamasutra@rowenacherry.com as an email address that was NOT me. Guess what?
Yesterday I got one of those phishing emails purporting to be from amazon.com telling me that Kamasutra’s account at Amazon was being suspended because of a discrepancy in the credit card information on the account.

That went off topic a little. Seriously, though, I have an aol account, and things do go into my spam filters, especially if there is nothing in the subject line or if there is a number in square brackets. I always delete those unread.

Is there anything you’d like your readers to know?

Thank you. I’d like readers to know that I really appreciate this opportunity to talk, and I thank them for reading my rambling answers.

MATING NET went on sale at www.newconceptspublishing.com as of Saturday October 8th 2005. There should also be live links from my website www.rowenacherry.com
 Both versions of FORCED MATE are available through links from my website. The download of a PDF from www.mystiquebooks is actually quite splendid, and very easy to read on a computer. The HTML version doesn’t have the pictures, which is too bad, but that is what HTML does.

The interactive jigsaws of bare-chested hunks are still available at www.rowenacherry.com/puzzle and will be there until the end of the year.