Winter's Risk Promo Tour

On a scale of one-to-terrifying, organizing a promo tour falls squarely on the terrifying end. But with the encouragement and friendly advice from the brave souls who have gone before, I managed to email strangers and ask if they'd pretty-please mind a guest post. Ten stops is a nice number for a first blog tour, right?

Here is a list of all the lovely sites kind enough to allow me to babble about my new releases.

June 19th  - Cup O' Porn
June 21st  - Purple Rose Tea House
June 24th - Twitter Takeover
June 26th - Telling it Like it Was
July 1st    - The Hat Party
July 3rd   -  Regular Guys - Hot Romance
July 7th   -  Love Bytes
July 10th -  Because Two Men are Better than One
July 14th - Drops of Ink
July 17th - Grace Duncan

And no blog tour would be complete without a giveaway! I'm giving a copy of Winter's Risk to a randomly selected commenter who comments on any post in the tour. Only one comment on each site will count. The giveaway closes July 21th at midnight EST.

Winter's Risk and Misadventures of Mislaid Men are finally touchables!

Step right up, step right up! I have important announcements to make. I wrote a thing and now it's an official, book-shaped object that you, my darlings, can buy and read on the electronic device of your choice. Because that's how awesome I am. Kindle, Ipad, all varieties of phone, I got'cha covered.

Isn't it beautiful? Paul Richmond painted the cover and I am in awe how well he captured the book.

'Veteran park ranger Alexander Doyle is tracking a nuisance bear when he runs across obnoxious environmentalist Martin Ramirez. He and Martin have clashed before, when Martin and the protestors under his leadership ended a plan to expand the network of paved trails and improve accessibility. Given a choice, Alex would rather face the bear.

When the dangerous grizzly attacks them and Martin is gravely wounded, his only chance of survival is Alex’s determination to keep him alive through the night. But they’re stranded miles from any hope of rescue with the year’s first snowstorm coming in fast.'

It's very reasonably priced at the Dreamspinner store.


The other exciting news is my short story in the Not Quite Shakespeare anthology is so great it has TRANSCENDED the boundaries of electronic devices and is available in physical, paper-scented paper copies, just like grandma used to read.

Misadventures of Mislaid Men* is just one of the many entertaining stories contained within. Although now that it's safely published I feel secure enough to tell you that when I sent the submission to the publisher, I had a typo. In the title. That's right, I screwed up my own title. What can I say?

I called it Misadventures IN Mislaid Men. 

Think about it for a minute. How the hell do you have a misadventure in a man? It sounds like the horrible mishap that results when someone forgot to use a toy with a flared base, (most unsexy thing ever) but Dreamspinner saw beyond my typo-fail and liked the story anyway. Publishing it, even.

So you can enjoy it too!


*no sex toys were harmed in the writing of this story. It's a about a British solicitor and a Welsh pub owner. They bond over misplaced cows and thick, heady beer.

I Finished a Novel...kinda!

Not a novella, not a short story, a 70k novel! Hurrah! Minimum work-count achieved!

It's done, I'm finished. THE END

Except... I've got these notes in brackets scattered throughout the text...

(Add conversation between Mother and Lily to est. motivation)

(Write bad sex scene between Jasper and ex-boyfriend) <-- This is harder than writing a good sex scene, I'll have you know. Probably why I skipped it in the first place.

(Research courtroom procedure)

(Give Jasper some friends)

(Awkward - rewrite) (OOC - rewrite) (Illogical - rewrite)

Etc, etc.

Well then. 

Write a few more scenes to bridge the gaps and smooth the edges. No biggie.

THEN I'M DONE.

Oh, wait. I have to send it to my darling beta readers, and execute their notes about where they got bored or confused, then eradicate all the typos (except for the one that got away, there's always one).

Then do another pass just to tidy up all the character arcs and plot lines.

Then send it to the publisher... 

You're perfect just the way you are, lil' literate scribe Goblin.

Pray I'm not delusional and they think it's good too...

Do more edits for the publisher...

Egads, I'm nowhere near finished. Finishing the first draft is more like: 

I'm pretty certain by the time I've really, truly, honestly finished this book I'll have done the emotional equivalent of running from wargs, arguing with Elves, and getting lost in the wilderness with a bunch of grumpy Dwarves. I don't even care. The next part is the best part. Even if I end up in a burning pine tree.

Why Won't They Just Talk?

Writers are readers. Huge readers. I started reading romances by nicking my Grandmother's Nora Roberts and LaVyrle Spencer books. Probably younger then I should've, but there were worse ways I could have been spending my childhood, rather than curled up with a good book. Now I'm writing them, isn't that a plot twist?

Ironically enough, the book I'm working on now is the sort of book that drove me batty as a prepubescent, never-been-kissed, reader.

Character A assumes a thing, Character B is hurt, then angst, angst, angst. I remember getting so irritated they wouldn't just act like adults and talk. Pouty sulking was immature.

But as Kipling says: There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays, and every single one of them is right.

There's far more than sixty-nine (hehe) different sources of personal conflict and drama in romance novels.

So I'm going to narrow my focus down to the the type of romance novel when the main conflict between the characters is based on a simple misunderstanding.

Something that could be cleared up with a little honest discussion.

But that discussion cannot happen easily.

For romance, there's a Main Character and an obvious (or not so obvious) Love Interest (or more than one). As a reader, you know after roughly two hundredish pages, they're going to kiss, have some epic sex, and live happily ever after.

Because that's what romance is. That's the promise made to you when you pick up the book. You will wade through the trials and tribulations of these characters and eventually, they'll find True Love and you'll get a happy wobbly feeling when they admit how they care about each other and throw themselves into each others arms.

But wait, but wait, why don't they just do that from the beginning? Since they're so obviously meant for each other? Two halves of a single soul, and all the other sickeningly sweet cliches.

There has to be a reason they don't boink (or boink with tender loving feelings sprinkled on top) until after most of the book has happened, otherwise it's just a casual hook-up without an emotional angle, unless one character is using the casual hook-up to avoid intimacy and-- and I'm going off target. Ahem.

After Main Character and Love Interest meet, but before Main Character and Love Interest do the beast with two backs, stuff has to happen. Important stuff. Plot stuff. Character stuff. Because there has to be a reason these two (or more) people dance around each other and hold off the boinking until the end of the book.

If their eyes meet and they run toward each other while At Last plays over the loudspeaker, and then commence violating public nudity laws, it's interesting, but it's not long enough to make a book. Something has to keep the climax (harhar) from happening. 

For dramatic reasons. But there's a fine line between drama and melodrama.

So if the reason they aren't together is because of a smallish misunderstanding that could be sorted out with a brief conversation over some caramel lattes on a sleepy Saturday afternoon, then that conversation has to be danced around like negotiations with North Korea over taking some chill pills and developing a national hobby that doesn't involve Geiger counters.

Get me? It has to be a huge thing, with some element of danger or apprehension surrounding it. An 'I might die if I say this right now' sort of atmosphere. There has to be trepidation. There has to be a solid reason the conversation absolutely could not happen in the course of the casual 'getting to know you' chatter amid the heated glances and magnetic pull they feel toward each other.

How tedious and unfulfilling would it be if they met, had a misunderstanding, then retired to some trendy cafe to work things out by the end of the first chapter?

'Oh, I made an incorrect assumption about your life/job/values/personality/relationship status/family. Allow me to kiss away your hurt feelings.' Then nothing else happens except sex in every possible position for the next twelve chapters?

If you've been reading romance novels any length of time, you've read lots and lots of sex scenes, and you know they're not nearly as rewarding when the characters haven't bled, sweated, and wept copious amounts of tears to get to the emotional climax, not just the physical climax.

You want them to work for it. You want them to clench their hands, bite their lips, and take deep, shuddering breaths while they force the words out with their eyes squeezed shut because they can't bear to watch the reaction to whatever they're struggling to say.

The conversation to clear up the simple misunderstanding has to be radioactive. It has to be enormous. It has to be a giant, world-view shifting moment that causes stress, anxiety, fear, nerves and running through it all has to be the faint, thin shred of hope that maybe it might work out after all.

This is when character motivation becomes vital. You have to know exactly why your characters would flee to the ends of the earth rather then have that particular conversation. Then you can make a simple misunderstanding work to keep them apart for 70k+.

So go forth and obfuscate.

Published!

Who's published? Me, baby! I'm published! Whoohoo!

*ahem*

I'd like to thank the academy- sorry, wrong speech. A long time ago I made a sacred vow not to start blogging about writing until I'd written something worth writing about. As in, someone is going to pay me money for it. There's a contract and everything. That's a good standard, right?

It's been a long time coming (ooh). If you count all the way back to the beginning when I was flailing around with fanfic, it's been about twenty years. If you count all the way back to when I got serious and found a fabulous beta reader who sorted out my random pov switches and inability to deploy the comma in a sound tactical fashion, it's been about three years.

Three years. That's a long time. Not to say it took me three years to write, but it took me three years of writing a metric fuckton that won't ever sell (because it's shit) to sort of work out how to write quality hot guy on hot guy action. I'm certainly not claiming to be an expert.

Anyway, I sold a 15k novella, not 50 Shades or Twilight, but now I'm vacillating between looking forward to my first professional editing experience and petrified that they'll send me back to the farm team once they get a really good look at my story. This is third grade math class all over again. I've never seen so much red ink in my life. I still have nightmares about the sevens' multiplication table.

I don't care. I wrote it and they bought it and that means I'm a real author.