Rough Dawn Breaking

The marble skin of Joseph’s perfectly-muscled chest sparkled like diamonds in the Palmyra sun. Emma stared, captivated by the velvet tones of his voice, the intoxicating scent of his tousled bronze hair. “You should stay away from me,” he had warned her moodily. “I’m too dangerous.”

But he couldn’t seem to stay away from her . . .

My masterpiece will be available at fine bookstores everywhere, just as soon as I get it all written. I expect you all to purchase copies for home and office, and as Christmas gifts for nieces, and open-minded nephews.

30 comments for “Rough Dawn Breaking

  1. Kevin Barney
    September 1, 2009 at 4:05 pm

    You can illustrate it with that artwork the church bookstores sell, with Joseph gently brushing Emma’s hair and such.

  2. Bro. Jones
    September 1, 2009 at 4:09 pm

    Make sure the cover art features Joseph as platinum blond and built like a pro wrestler.

  3. jsg
    September 1, 2009 at 4:13 pm

    “Ask me the most basic question: How do I translate?” She paused, speechless. Then, in aggravated whisper, he persisted, “Say it, out loud. Say it!”

  4. Latter-day Guy
    September 1, 2009 at 4:21 pm

    I don’t know whether to laugh or vomit. Maybe both.

  5. Hunter
    September 1, 2009 at 4:24 pm

    Ah, Mormon smut fiction. This is definitely a niche that needs to be filled. Sheri Dew are you listening?

  6. Katheryn
    September 1, 2009 at 4:43 pm

    So now are you calling Joseph a vampire or something?

  7. Aaron Brown
    September 1, 2009 at 4:44 pm

    Put in some sexually-repressed vampire sub-plots, and then watch how overnight the youth of the Church become experts in church history in a way their seminary teachers never dared to hope for. Well, at least the YW anyway.

    AB

  8. September 1, 2009 at 4:55 pm

    I told you reading Twilight was dangerous. If Edward is Joseph Smith, who is Jacob? Brigham Young or John Bennett? THAT is the question.

  9. Stephanie
    September 1, 2009 at 5:02 pm

    This is almost p*rnographic. I believe I’m blushing . . .

  10. September 1, 2009 at 5:08 pm

    Awesome!

    You can write a whole series! One for each of Joseph’s wives. Then Brigham Young will keep you busy forever!

  11. September 1, 2009 at 5:13 pm

    [Just in case anyone is missing the joke, this is my brief mash-up of church history told in the style of massively-bestselling vampire romance author (yes, she’s LDS) Stephenie Meyer. Rough Stone Rolling meets Twilight, so to speak.]

  12. Dan
    September 1, 2009 at 5:22 pm

    I haven’t read but the first five pages of Twilight (and as such I’m ignorant of the vampire rules in Twilight), but doesn’t a vampire out in the sun get, you know a wee bit of sunburn?

  13. dangermom
    September 1, 2009 at 5:30 pm

    Not in the Twilight universe. There’s another reason they stay out of sunlight. Read it to figure out the mystery…

  14. Dan
    September 1, 2009 at 5:57 pm

    dangermom,

    I tried. As I stated, I read five pages and was bored out of my mind. Please, reveal, because I already sold it off to someone more willing to get past five pages. :)

  15. Latter-day Guy
    September 1, 2009 at 5:59 pm

    They glitter. Like cubic zirconia. Which gives away the fact that they are vampires (or show girls). Which isn’t allowed. So they are killed. If they get caught.

  16. kevinf
    September 1, 2009 at 6:16 pm

    I had no idea the Smith family played baseball.

  17. Ben
    September 1, 2009 at 6:35 pm

    You know, if you just replace “Emma” with “Eliza,” you’d have one of the love scenes out of Virginia Sorensen’s “A Little Lower than the Angels.” :)

  18. Jeremy
    September 1, 2009 at 6:46 pm

    So the Strangites are the werewolves?

  19. claire
    September 1, 2009 at 8:27 pm

    You forgot the cold part again, Kaimi :-)

  20. Hunter
    September 2, 2009 at 10:00 am

    On second thought, Kaimi, I think you should retain the word “rolling” in the title (as in “roll, roll, roll in zee hay”) and that would give you: “Rough Dawn Rolling”.

  21. Raymond Takashi Swenson
    September 2, 2009 at 12:43 pm

    Re: Baseball–As Ken Burns noted in his TV documentary on baseball, one of the earliest historical records of the sport comes from a game played by Joseph Smith in Nauvoo. (Seriously).

    As for the association of Mormons and Vampires, a recent BYU Studies article documented the extensive way in which the vampirism theme was used to characterize the way Mormon missionaries would mesmerize young women into joining their harems, right into the era of early motion pictures.

    Clearly, both the polygamy stories and the modern vampire novels rely for their appeal on the fantasies of men and women about magical sexual potency. Americans WANT Mormons to be polygamous, just as they want vampires to be real, so they can think about someone getting away with stuff that ordinary people are afraid to do. They keep hoping that the monotony of modern Mormon monogamy is just a facade. So they get “Big Love” on HBO.

  22. September 2, 2009 at 12:47 pm

    LDS Bodice Rippers. Won’t we have to convert Fabio first, so he can do the covers?

  23. September 2, 2009 at 1:03 pm

    Kaimi, I eagerly await the next installment!

  24. bbell
    September 2, 2009 at 3:54 pm

    K,

    Thee is actually a historical fiction type LDS novel that involved a fictional account of JS and Eliza. Where Eliza actually watches JS take of his shirt to wrestle or play baseball and she gets all caught up in his shirtless form. Later they are married polygamously. I was dating a girl who was reading this novel in the early 1990’s and she showed me the passage. Maybe another commentator can recall the name of the book.

  25. Ivan Wolfe
    September 2, 2009 at 4:54 pm

    bbell –

    That’s Orson Scott Card’s “Saints” (aka “A Woman of Destiny.”)

  26. Raymond Takashi Swenson
    September 2, 2009 at 6:29 pm

    The character in Card’s “Saints” is not named Eliza R. Snow, but is Dinah Kirkham, an amalgamation of Eliza and an English convert, who joins the church along with her brother and travels to Nauvoo.

  27. September 2, 2009 at 8:14 pm

    #24–Eww. I don’t know, but the thought of a bodice-ripper novel involving joseph smith gives me the heebies. It’s like your mom and dad talking about their sex lives.

  28. Raymond Takashi Swenson
    September 3, 2009 at 11:48 am

    While Card’s “Saints” does feature the relationship between its female protagonist and Joseph Smith, it is overall a pretty gritty story of a family reduced to poverty in Dickensian England because of the father’s abandonment of his wife and children, who eventually encounter Heber C. Kimball and emigrate to America during the Nauvoo period. It is a study of what called so many thousands of urban British people to abandon civilized England for a place they had never seen on the American frontier.

  29. September 3, 2009 at 12:04 pm

    Please finish your novel quickly. It will be a great supplement to the current RS/Priesthood lesson manual.

  30. September 15, 2009 at 8:50 pm

    #8 – “If Edward is Joseph Smith, who is Jacob? Brigham Young or John Bennett?”

    If Edward were Joseph and Bella were Elvira Cowles, then Jacob would be Jonathan Harriman Holmes (think Mormon Battalion/Sutter’s Mill).

    Mike Newton would be a Brigham Young who couldn’t get Elvira to give him the time of day even when Joseph was out of the picture

    The vampire James would be John Bennett – so fixed on having Elvira that he turns from friendship to murderous intent wrt Joseph.

    And Charlie would be Austin Cowles, except in the Nauvoo version of this classic tale, the maiden’s father strikes the telling blow (more like the Vulturi leader, Aro) which leaves Elvira (Bella) to spend the rest of her life with Jonathan (Jacob).

    Real Mormon women don’t pine to death merely because their beloved dies. Sheesh.

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