My Harlequin Moment: Jina Bacarr

"And then Jina Bacarr's Blonde Geisha crossed my desk and that rule just flew out the window," according to Susan Swinwood during the Erotica Panel at the 2006 RWA Conference in Atlanta, Georgia.

I'll never forget that day. I was sitting in the audience, fumbling with my new digital camera, working the zoom, checking the sound, trying to get the darn thing to work, when I heard Susan mention my book, The Blonde Geisha. Set in 1895 Japan, it was my first book for Spice and the rule Susan referred to was not to include historicals in their just-launched erotic fiction program.

Talk about a Harlequin moment...

Her mention of my book was just a few seconds...less than a minute during her talk at the conference, but for me those seconds meant the culmination of years of hard work, rejection and perseverance.

It all started years ago when I studied the art of kimono with a sensei, teacher, at a school that makes kimono in Kyoto. She told me the story about a beautiful ghost who haunted the kimono factory, once a wooden tea house. The ghost was a geisha who had died in a fire many years ago...her journey forgotten, covered by the mists of time, until her diary was discovered by chance in a small work-box (called a haribako) containing her geisha makeup. According to the story, her diary was written on long, narrow sheets of soft rice paper, pierced with a silken string and alive with the strangeness and sensuality of her geisha world.

I never forgot that story.

Over the next few years I worked for several Japanese companies--writing cartoon scripts, acting in tofu and cola commercials for the Japan market, being a hostess for Japanese businessmen--and I began writing a story about a young girl who becomes a geisha. I wrote and wrote, but I couldn't get it right. Something was missing. What was it? I've published books about Japanese business and culture (including sex), but this time I wanted to try a different approach: I wanted the reader to experience firsthand the idea of becoming a geisha but with a Western sensibility. Living the fairy tale, if you will.

Then it hit me. What if the geisha in my story was a Westerner?

And what if she lived at the end of the nineteenth century during the time when Japan embraced everything Western?

What if?...and you have The Blonde Geisha.

I'm happy to say I got my camera working just in time to record Susan saying those wonderful words about my book, The Blonde Geisha, along with highlights of her talk at the Atlanta 2006 RWA conference.

Click HERE to see the short video of Susan's talk at the 2006 RWA Conference in Atlanta, Georgia.

Thankz for checking out my Harlequin Moment!
Best,
Jina Bacarr

In my latest Spice release, Spies, Lies & Naked Thighs (March 2008), meet Breezy Malone, a female Indiana Jones. Click HERE for a 30-second trailer for "Spies, Lies & Naked Thighs".

About The Author:

Jina Bacarr loves adventure in exotic locales, which led her to several adventures. Along the way, she learned to speak six languages and is an art history devotee, which led her to pose as an artist's model, first in Laguna Beach, then in Italy. Her travels have taken her to nearly every state in the U.S. and around the world. For her erotic novel Naughty Paris (SPICE, July 2007), she drew upon her experiences living in the City of Light and her love of French Impressionism to re-create the raucous and erotic world of 1889 Paris.