Bewitching Book Tours Guest Post and Book Excerpt By Gabrielle Bisset

Dreams

People are always curious where writers get their ideas from. Particularly with romance and erotic romance, I get the question about if my writing is from real life. I wish. No, my ideas come from my imagination. They often come while I’m sleeping. I’ve had a number of stories pop into my head while I was asleep, and when I wake up, there they are, waiting for me to do something with them.

One Tuesday morning last summer I woke up and an entire book concept had played out in my head while I was in dreamland. The first book of what’s become a series from that one dream comes out later this month. I had the same thing for Vampire Dreams earlier this year. I went to sleep without thinking of anything concerning vampires or Victorian England, the setting of the novella, and I woke up with almost the entire first chapter in my mind. Something in my unconscious mind was obviously thinking of those things, and I had a beginning to a novella.


I remember most of my dreams, I think, but can we ever be sure if we remember what was going on while we slept? The human mind is an incredible machine, capable of incredible feats of intelligence. But when the lights go out and our bodies go to sleep, our minds don’t. They continue to mull over the day we’ve just experienced, good or bad, often working through the problems under cover of darkness that our conscious minds couldn’t.


I’ve been curious about dreams since I was a teenager. There’s an entire field of study that approaches dreams through symbols. I wonder what my mind was trying to tell me when it created the beginning of Vampire Dreams, a scene in which a young woman, homeless and with no family to care for her, is chased by a would-be attacker and rescued by a man later found out to be a vampire. It’s a curious question.



Whatever my mind was trying to tell me, I took that dream and made a novella out of it. Here’s the scene that played out in my dream that night in February:



Excerpt


The dark streets of the city lay sprawled out in front of her, filled with both possible danger and salvation. As she ran, her feet pounding against the stones beneath them, her breathing came in pants that stole the moisture from her mouth. Her eyes frantically scanned for someplace to hide as she pushed her legs to run faster.

She could hear his feet as each one solidly hit the ground behind her. His stride much longer than hers, he was coming closer with each step.

If he caught her...

The pounding of her heart hammered in her ears as the blood pushed faster and faster through her body. Up ahead, she saw a door ajar in a rundown building. If it was empty, she might be able to find a place to hide and hopefully escape from the pain of what awaited her if he captured her.

She slipped through the doorway, but her cape caught on the doorknob, costing her precious moments. As she worked to free herself, she heard his footsteps slow down to a walk, a sign he was as sure as she that he’d won.

Finally, in desperation, she tore the fabric from the knob, and free to run once more, she turned and ran headlong into the chest of a man who stood silently watching her.

“Please save me! He’s coming for me!”

Without a word, the stranger took her by the arm and led her to a table near the far wall. With his hands on her shoulders, he hesitated a moment and then spun her around.

His voice deep, he commanded, “Place your hands on the table and bend over.”

Unsure if she’d chosen a fate as horrific as the one she’d fled from, she did as she’d been told and waited in terror for what was to come.

The noise of her stalker entering the building caused her to turn her head, but the voice behind her sternly warned, “Face forward.”

She felt hands lift her cloak and dress, allowing the cool night air to hit the bare skin of her thighs. The feeling at once thrilled and shocked her, and she instinctively stood up to cover herself.

The man behind her forcibly pushed her back toward the table and leaned over her to whisper low in her ear, “Trust me,” as he pushed his body firmly against her backside.

“Hey you! Where’s the girl who came in here?”

With his hands on her hips, the man who gave her no choice but to trust him pushed his hips toward hers and thrust toward her still clothed body to simulate sex, complete with throaty groans.

“Hey! I asked you about the girl who came in here!”

Never looking back, Arden squeezed her eyes closed, shutting out the moonlight that streamed in through the window above, and waited for the attack she feared. Instead, she heard the man whose body continued to meet hers bark, “Go away! This whore’s mine!”

Indignant at the use of the word whore to describe her, she started to push herself up but his hand held her by the neck and forced her to remain still on the table. A sound like a hiss came from her protector and the other man hurriedly ran out of the building.

Vampire Dreams can be found at Amazon, All Romance eBooks, Barnes and Noble, and Smashwords. Readers can contact Gabrielle at gabriellebisset@gmail.com and visit her blog at http://gbisset.blogspot.com/

Bio:


College history professor by day, Gabrielle Bisset spends her nights and weekends writing erotic romance. An avid reader since childhood, she read her first romance novel before she'd entered high school and was hooked. Every step of the way since, through college and grad school, moving to Europe, marrying and having children, romance novels were with her. In addition to a love of reading, Gabrielle loved writing. After a humble start with her high school newspaper, she continued to write in college and grad school, enjoying the erotic romances she wrote far more than the research papers she was assigned. A desire to eat and have a roof over her head led to a teaching job, but the desire to write never went away.



Her first novel, Stolen Destiny, will be released by Siren Publishing on June 29, 2011. In addition, her trilogy of erotic novellas set in Victorian England will be released summer 2011. The first novella, Vampire Dreams, will be published on June 10, with the second novella, Love's Master, and the third novella, Masquerade, out in July and August.

You can read my review of Vampire Dreams here

Giveaway!

Gabrielle is offering one ebook copy of Vampire Dreams.

How do you win?

Just leave a comment with your email and on June 27th I'll choose a winner.