He was the traitor Commander Jason, who is officially dead. Now he is faced with the choice of
marrying the airhead, mischief-making fashionista Princess Martia-Djulia with whom he had the most ill-advised one-night stand of his life, or of dying a traitor's death for real if he refuses.
No one gives a thought to how Martia-Djulia might react when she sees
a shaven-headed, goatee-bearded, limping stranger being frogmarched up the aisle to marry her when she was expecting to marry the scarred, but otherwise Fabio-lookalike Commander Jason.
Her surprising reaction sets off a firestorm of rumor, scandal... and rattles a murderer who thought he'd gotten away with an ancient crime.
Title: INSUFFICIENT MATING MATERIALINSUFFICIENT MATING MATERIAL is Rowena Cherry's third alien djinn romance. The others were the award-winning e-book MATING NET, and the double PEARL finalling FORCED MATE.
INSUFFICIENT MATING MATERIAL takes up where Forced Mate ended, with Djetthro-Jason severely beaten, about to undergo surgery to change his face and identity.
Reviews for Insufficient Mating Material
"INSUFFICIENT MATING MATERIAL is an outstanding sequel to FORCED MATE! Cherry skillfully combines mystery, romance, and humor with a fast-paced science fiction adventure. I couldn't put it down!" ~ Jean, Fallen Angel Reviews
"Rowena Cherry is one of the best sub-genre writers due to her skill at placing the heroic characters in impossible scenarios." ~ Harriet Klausner, Affaire de Coeur
"I really like Cherry's writing; it is literate and fast moving, with active imagery, and it challenges the reader." ~ Jean Cooper, reviewer, Fallen Angel Reviews
Rowena Cherry has played chess with a Grand Master and former President of the World Chess Federation (hence the chess-pun titles of her alien romances).
She has spent folly filled summers in a Spanish castle; dined on a sheih's yacht with royalty; been seranaded (on a birthday) by a rockstar and an English nobleman; ridden in a pace car at the 1993 Indy 500; received the gold level of the Duke of Edinburgh's Award; and generally lived on the edge of the sort of life that inspires her romances about high-living alien gods.
Since I was very kindly asked if there is anything else I'd like to include, the answer is Yes! A confession.
With Insufficient Mating Material I went a little bit beyond my comfort zone. My hero used very "blue" language, and was highly sexually motivated. Moreover, his antagonist spiked the rainfall with aphrodisiacs. Only three ladies had seen the flashy tattoo on Djetth's tower of power, and he was stranded on a tropical island with two of them.
Knight's Fork is a bit of a withdrawal from "Blue" territory. The heroine is happily married to someone else, and she is locked in a chastity belt. The hero is a virgin, and he's very happy not knowing what he's been missing.
However, if some readers here like a walk on the MILD side from time to time, I'd like to recommend that you check out Forced Mate in a library.
FORCED MATE is a chess term for a race between the two Kings to be the first to make a pawn his Queen. It was written as a loving spoof of the Historical Romance genre. I took every traditional situation in an abduction/obligatory-travel romance and made the hero an all-powerful, alpha-male alien, a god-Prince with a nasty reputation.
I introduced Rhett as the ultimate altruist. He tried to stop one of his big brothers from having unwise sex. (He does that a lot, that's partly why his brothers get mad at him.) So, his big brother thumps him. As a result, Rhett is arrested, imprisoned and threatened with torture and death. He keeps quiet about who he really is, and risks his life to protect the bad-ass older brother who hit him.
In INSUFFICIENT MATING MATERIAL, 'Rhett volunteers his unsolicited opinion to the exceedingly dangerous Tarrant-Arragon after Tarrant-Arragon has forcibly marooned Djetth (the wild brother) on a tropical island with the slightly overweight and bitchy Princess Martia-Djulia who can't or won't remove her own wet ballgown to save her life.
Tarrant-Arragon has his reasons for shooting down the unhappy couple, and they are mostly political. Martia-Djulia balked at the altar of her shotgun Royal wedding (to Djetth), but she needs a husband before she creates a bigger scandal as a result of a really bad choice of bed partner for a defiant one-night stand.
Knight's Fork (the chess position) is about tough choices in an impossible situation where you can only save one of two (or more) threatened pieces. Often, with a Knight's Fork, it's the Queen and a Castle that are threatened.
KNIGHT'S FORK --the book-- is a quest story, but just as Jason and the Argonauts set out to steal a fabulous golden fleece, then discover that it's just a ratty old ram skin once it's removed from the magical tree, Rhett's quest doesn't turn out the way he expected, and he gets exactly what he went on the quest to avoid.
I love the official cover art for KNIGHT'S FORK (which you can see on Amazon and which captures a lot of the undercurrents and symbolism about the aloof and sexually unattainable Rhett.)
Although Rhett's quest story was inspired by the Greek myth of Perseus (who was sent to get the Gordon's head), the official cover is like the Greek myth of Tantalus... the hero who was doomed to be half submerged (up to his neck) in water that he could never drink. So, I created an imaginary Tarot card, which I called The Tantalized Male, although it is based on The Hanged Man. It draws on the ideas of still waters running deep, of everyone having a dark side, of the chess-like battle between the White Knight and his inner Dark Knight.
Why a Tarot card? Insufficient Mating Material ends with a violent scene in a fortune teller's parlour, which is a front for a brothel. Knight's Fork is what happens next as -too excited to go to bed-the rogue Royal family turns on Rhett to discover the truth about his sex life, if they can.
Thank you very much for your support, and please watch my website for summer contests, and interactive free jigsaws of 12 cover models.
An Interview with Rowena Cherry
By Holly Hewson for The Romance Studio
HH: Rowena, thanks for talking with us at TRS. Please tell us about your featured work, Insufficient Mating Material.
RC: Thank you for the warm welcome, Holly. I don't feel that I'm trespassing on TRS Blue when it comes to Insufficient Mating Material. I went a little bit beyond my comfort level with this book... and I don't just mean the last minute research into what sex is like in the surf of a cold sea.
It was "last minute" research because there wasn't a "From Here To Eternity" scene in Insufficient Mating Material until my editor surprised me with the cover, and I realized that I was somehow going to have to write that scene, because I don't believe in covers that mislead the reader.
Insufficient Mating Material is **not** about a guy who would eagerly read the contents of his spam filter, unless he had a case of Schadenfreude... which is delight at the misfortunes of mankind.
My alien heroes are not men. They are aliens who are looked upon as gods, and they never suffer erectile difficulties because they are blessed with a penile bone.
(Quite a lot of mammals have a bone. A friend of mine has a walking stick made from a bull's bone. Yes, it is an ugly thing. I wouldn't want to touch it! Mice have surprisingly fearsome skeletons. And as for a walrus....!)
I've digressed. I do that.
All my titles are googlable chess positions or moves. INSUFFICIENT MATING MATERIAL is a chess term for a no-win situation. It's the point in the game when it dawns on at least one of the players that no matter how good his moves, or how bad a player the other guy is, there aren't enough pieces on the board for a decisive win.
There are a lot of nuances to "Insufficient Mating Material", it doesn't matter if you don't "get" them all, and some of them aren't revealed until the end of the book.
At one point, "Insufficient Mating Material" was a triple pun, because I hadn't intended to put a lot of sex into it, given that the hero and heroine are on a desert island with no fresh running water, a lot of sand, and various DIY hygiene issues.
However, my editor wanted plenty of sex, so I found ways around bristles, insects, sand, morning breath etc. Some of the people I chat with online thought I was mad to start a romance with hero who has a broken jaw, and then to strand him in a survival situation with a heroine who is so "Green Acres" that she can't even undress herself, and doesn't have the survival sense to know that it is better to be dry and naked than wet and clothed.
Why were they marooned?
Djetth (that's the hero's new name) was the antagonist in FORCED MATE. For several good and compelling reasons, Tarrant-Arragon could not kill his unrepentant rival, so he maneuvered Djetth into the sort of marriage that would ruin any prospect of a political come-back.
However, the royal shotgun wedding goes wrong. Martia-Djulia balked at the altar when she realized that she wasn't getting the package she expected (a Fabio lookalike), but she needs a husband before she creates a bigger scandal as a result of a really bad choice of bed partner for a defiant one-night stand.
No one realizes that when she hurls her unsatisfactory groom across the throne room without touching him, she reveals hidden powers, and alarms a villain who thought he'd gotten away with an ancient crime. Now, he'll stop at nothing to kill the unhappy couple, and marooned on a deserted island, they are sitting ducks.
Insufficient Mating Material has been honored with several awards including the CAPA, the Fantasm, a Night Owl Romance award, a singletitles.com award, and finalist placement in the USA BookNews award for print Romance, also in the PEARLs, and in the Golden Quills.
HH: This is the third in your incredibly popular Alien Djinn series. How did this series come to be?
RC: I had a dream. Honestly. It was a 200,000-word saga, much too long! Basically, that was Forced Mate, but the adventures of Tarrant-Arragon and Djinni-vera continued after their marriage, which was totally unacceptable.
You can't mess with a happy ending.
Mating Net was sprung on me after I sold Forced Mate to NBI (who promptly went out of business) and before I was a finalist in the Romantic Times/Dorchester Publishing "New Voice In Romance" contest, which has been replaced now by "American Title".
Foolishly, I hadn't thought beyond Forced Mate, and the small press publisher wanted a short story -no definition of how short-that showcased my best writing, and the style, voice, humor, sexiness etc of Forced Mate.
Thus, I wrote the prequel, Mating Net, elaborating on the grandmother's very interesting sex life... or at least, the worst mistake she ever made. The original Mating Net was never published. It was too long for its intended purpose, and that small press publisher allegedly hadn't paid her editors (never paid me, either) so no one wanted to edit it.
A couple of years later, I sold the electronic rights to NCP, and added an extra 3,000 words, most of them about sex.
Meanwhile, I'd promised my Dorchester editor the option book.
I don't know whether you noticed, but Forced Mate was a loving spoof of a certain type of Historical Romance. I took every stock situation -the abduction, the enforced bath, the escape attempts, etc-and made the abductor an alien.
A spoof doesn't work twice, so the next book had to be something else. Moreover, an author has to tell stories in the correct chronological order, even if her heart is with one of the other characters. That might have been the case. I've wanted to tell Rhett's story for a long time! But his story begins where Insufficient Mating Material ends.... Rhett is sexually elusive and unattainable, and it wouldn't have been plausible for him to break his vow of chastity on his second date with the reader.
Insufficient Mating Material is a very heavily disguised survival manual with elements of action adventure and mystery. I'd wanted to give the dangerous old ladies in the royal family more of a role, but my editor set a strict limit. (And, she was delighted with how sexy the book ended up being.)
HH: So your main characters are stranded together for sticking to their principles - even though they didn't meet the expectations of others. Where?
RC: In Insufficient Mating Material, Djetth and Princess "Marsh" are shot down into the sea off "Freighter Island" which is an artificial island that was created when an interstellar soil transporter crash-landed into the relatively shallow seas of An'Koor and wasn't considered worth the expense and inconvenience of salvaging. In time, the space freighter disintegrated and the seeds in the stolen soil (taken from prehistoric Earth) grew, and blow sand from the An'Koori mainland was deposited.
Cover blurb is a very interesting phenomenon. It can be misleading. "Failing to mate in public" doesn't necessarily mean that the Princess stuck to her principles.... well, maybe she did. In Forced Mate, she fell madly in love with "Commander Jason" and never noticed her brother's lawyer-like quibble when he promised to bring "Jason" or someone like him back to be her mate.
On the other hand, when she sees Jason after his identity-changing surgery, she wonders why he is bald, if he has a communicable disease, what that fungus on his face is (it's a goatee), and whether he has been tortured.
The superficial "Ewwww" reaction is much more to the fore than any high principles.
For Djetth... the situation is a great deal more complicated. His deal with Tarrant-Arragon (Princess Marsh's big brother) is that he marries her without ever revealing who he is, or he faces a traitor's death.
As a result of a botched assassination attempt involving pheromones, Djetth isn't sure whether he is irrevocably in love with the Princess who is now Tarrant-Arragon's mate, or with Tarrant-Arragon's bitchy, (excuse my language), airhead of a sister with whom he had an unforgettable one-night stand of mind-blowing and slightly kinky sex.
HH: What do you like in particular about Djetth?
RC: Well, for sure, it is not his language. This IS the "Blue" side of TRS, isn't it? I once had an acquaintance who would announce to anyone within earshot where he wanted to put his tongue if he saw a young woman strut past him. It was the era of "hot pants", and his fantasies frankly shocked me.
Djetth is quite willing to discuss sex with Martia-Djulia, and his anything-goes attitude is probably suitable, given that he has to dig a latrine, and one of his first gestures of tenderness towards his Princess is to carve her a toilet seat.
I like his competence, his broad sense of humor, and his inner decency.
And, I'll tell you a secret. As I was writing his story, I kept the cover photo of MATING NET in front of me. At the time, I was a bit worried about my motives, but as his character grew, the connection between Djetth and his grandfather made very satisfying sense (at least to me!)
HH: So are you a fan of chess? Tell us of your talent for this game.
RC: Chess is a very cool game... less so these days, I regret to say. I deplore the "Big Bang Chess" on my computer where the virtual opponent trash talks, and some of the small children I've taught in school have also spoken to each other like football players before the snap.
There always were cheats even at the highest levels, according to chess lore, but it was confined to such dirty tactics as kicking the table, drumming fingers, turning off hearing aids.
I never cheated, and I only lasted for 3 hours in a 27 board exhibition match against Dr Max Euwe because I was a mere school chess champion, and was playing my own game as opposed to memorizing and trying to duplicate a classical set-piece game.
Chess was important in Forced Mate, both as a metaphor, and as a plot device. The first opening I wrote (which was ditched) showed the dark hero, Tarrant-Arragon playing correspondence chess against his rival Commander Jason (who was really the White King), and taunting Jason that he was about to take his queen.
Later, the heroine plays chess all night long against the hero as a way of keeping his mind off sex... it's a combination of Penelope unraveling her tapestry at night, and of Scheherazade telling 1001 fascinating stories so the sultan won't kill her at sunrise.
The hero, who is very smart, quickly realizes what she is doing, and plays along in the most wicked fashion, making moves for the sake of the sexy puns about mating, pinning, forking.
HH: What can you tell us about Knight's Fork?
RC: I'll prioritize.
Knight's Fork is intended to be a stand-alone book, but since 'Rhett was an important secondary character in Forced Mate and Insufficient Mating Material, those who have read the first two books will "get" more of it than those who try Knight's Fork cold.
Knight's Fork is not as sexy as Insufficient Mating Material. (Have I said that already? Well, I don't want to disappoint! It's better to not make a sale than to misrepresent what a book is or isn't.) This is not a book that I will ask JERR to review, because there are no four letter c--- words, and the only two f---s are villainous expletives. In fact, I skip the insertion-of-the-penis entirely (but not the grunting). Moreover, I put the heroine in a chastity belt and threw away the keys.
However… in case a booklover of delicate sensibilities is reading this interview, I should mention that the heroine performs fellatio, and annoys the hero mightily.
Knight's Fork follows many of the conventions of a quest story. The oracles are Tarot Cards, and various British bureaucracies. Artifacts and companions are loaned -including Grievous, for those who have enjoyed him in the other books-and not all the companions are helpful to the questor.
Knight's Fork is to be released on September 30th. Until Aug 20th, five free copies of Advanced Reader Copies are being given away in the GoodReads.com First Reads program. http://www.goodreads.com/giveaway.
HH: What else can readers look forward to from you?
RC: I'd rather not promise, because I don't like to break promises. My editor had me write out not one but two characters who were originally in Knight's Fork, because she didn't want to cramp my scope if one or both of them has a book.
They're the twins, Devoron and Deverill. If you've caught a sneak peek into Knight's Fork, you'll know that Devoron is in at the beginning, and he plays an interesting role in precipitating the action, but he wasn't allowed to go sniffing around on Earth for his alleged scent-love.
Some of my Djinn fall in love at first whiff.
'Rhett's quest was initially intended to end much more neatly, with a clear revelation about the mysterious Queen of Pentacles whom he was sent to find, and a new series based around several misfit heroines was supposed to be launched.
But, I like the guys. And, I do leave a very intriguing fellow in a position to cause havoc among human hearts. He has some quite ignoble ambitions involving seven supermodels…
Moreover, I have unfinished business with the god-Emperor Djohn-Kronos…. or he has unfinished business with me!
HH: What has been the most rewarding experience of your writing career?
RC: Holly, that is the toughest question to answer!
Honestly, one of the most rewarding experiences is when I chance upon a generous line or two that a reader has posted about my writing, that she (or he) never expected me to see.
HH: What are you looking forward to in the remainder of 2008?
RC: Do you mean privately? I'm looking forward to my first European Christmas in 15 years. It's been too long since I spent Christmas with my family, and took time off to visit some of the friends I've hardly seen since I moved to the USA.
Thank you very much, Holly. And thanks to everyone who has read this interview. I hope you've enjoyed reading it half as much as I've enjoyed answering Holly's questions!
