Friend Friday: Tia Nevitt

          Kicking off the blog's new feature, Friend Friday (and remember, I am not promising we'll be doing this every Friday), I'm happy to introduce my fellow Carina Press author, Tia Nevitt, whose The Sevenfold Spell puts a new "spin" on the Sleeping Beauty story.

Isn't that a gorgeous cover?  Come on, show her some love!

Some of you know I have a special fondness for new spins on old stories.

Tia took the concept--not to mention the word--to a whole new level, exploring what happens to the other people in the fairy tale.

Not a retelling, exactly. More like a what if. A fun and intriguing what if.

Here's a little sumpin' sumpin' to whet your appetite:

Things look grim for Talia and her mother. By royal proclamation, the constables and those annoying “good” fairies have taken away their livelihood by confiscating their spinning wheel. Something to do with a curse on the princess, they said.

Not every young lady has a fairy godmother rushing to her rescue.

Without the promise of an income from spinning, Talia’s prospects for marriage disappear, and she and her mother face destitution. Past caring about breaking an arbitrary and cruel law, rebellious Talia determines to build a new spinning wheel, the only one in the nation, which plays right into the evil fairy’s diabolical plan. Talia discovers that finding a happy ending requires sacrifice. But is it a sacrifice she’s willing to make?

But I'll shut up now.  Here's Tia:

My Road to Carina Press

By Tia Nevitt

Taryn suggested I write about how I ended up as an author for Carina Press.


It started, of course, with a story. I wrote this little story called “Spin” that I hoped to market to short fiction magazines. However, it had a problem—it didn’t want to be a short story. When I finished it, it was edging close to 8000 words, which is the point where many magazines stop considering it a short story and start considering it a novelette. Since I knew it would be hard to sell that way, I trimmed a thousand words.


However, it still wanted to be longer.


I sent it to Realms of Fantasy, my top choice market because they would consider a short story with sexual content. The rejection came in, as expected. I sent it to a couple more places, and then I was looking at semipro online ‘zines. I sent it to a new online magazine that specialized in fairy tales. No response. After a very long time, I emailed the editor. She wrote back saying that it was on her table of contents, but she had not yet filled out the rest of the magazine. After a few months, I sent a polite note withdrawing it from consideration. As far as I know, that magazine never put out another issue.


I sent it to one or two more places and looked around some more, but could find no other magazines that would consider sensual content. So I went back to the story, saved off the original file, and ripped out the sexy stuff. It was like I ripped the guts out of the story. Its soul was gone.


I didn’t bother sending it anywhere.


I ran the original through a writing group for critique. I got enthusiastic response. One girl called it “marvelous”. If it was marvelous, why couldn’t I sell it? Some other writer friends helped me tighten it up.


Then, I got an email from one of those writer friends. She had sold one of her novellas to an erotic epublisher, and encouraged me to expand “Spin” to novella length and send it to an epublisher.


Wow, I thought. I get to make it longer! Just what it needs!


I knew about Samhain Publishing from my friend Joely Sue Burkhart, author of the fabulous erotic fantasy Survive My Fire. I noticed they had a Red Hot fairy tale anthology going. I didn’t know how erotic my story would turn out, but I saw enough there and elsewhere to realize that epublishing didn’t necessarily mean erotic anymore. So I decided to write it the way I wanted to write it and see how it turned out.


My muse was unleashed. “Spin” was soon double its original size, then triple. And at last, it was happy. While I was rewriting it, I came up with the concept of the Sevenfold Spell, and so I renamed the story. While I was writing, I heard about Carina Press. Right away, it became my top choice market. It was backed by Harlequin, a major publisher, and was open to my level of sensuality.


I sent it to my friend, revised and polished it until I couldn’t stand it, and then I polished it one more time. And then I sent it off to Carina Press.

Three weeks later, long before I started fantasizing about it, I got The Call!

Not even a stint in the military as an aircraft mechanic could erase Tia Nevitt’s love of fairy tales. To this day, she loves to read (and write) books that take her to another place, or another time, or both. Tia has also worked on an assembly line, as a computer programmer, a technical writer and a business analyst. When she’s not writing, she keeps a book blog called Debuts & Reviews, where she focuses on debut novels. She lives in the southeast with her husband and daughter.

Follow Tia on Twitter,
Facebook, Facebook Author Page, Goodreads, and at the
eHarlequin.com Community!

And be sure to check out Tia's great advice on how to read e-books without an e-reader!