Family Man is the April Sizzling Book Club pick at SBTB!
Read the full details here, including those for the chat on April 25 (Marie & I will be there). Haven’t bought Family Man but want into the act now? All Romance Ebooks has a coupon code for a pretty big discount, which you can also find out about on the above post.
Please do come to the chat if you can!
Friday around 10:30PM, I finished a “truck draft” (if I’d been hit by a truck, they still could have published the book, though it’d have been a bit rough) of Better Than Love, and yesterday at around 9:30 I got done with the book placenta, which is all the not very sexy but very important stuff like making sure I polished all the edges, ran a spell check, etc happened, plus another read through to give everything one more look-see, and then after I fought Scrivener and its insistence on fucking over the chapter headings NO MATTER WHAT I FUCKING DO, I sent that bitch out to the betas. Last few books I haven’t done betas, but this one gets a big fat beta round. Before RT I’ll send it to my agent, and then it will be on to Samhain where it will begin its long journey to your hands, should you chose to purchase it.
All I can say is that I feel like I’ve been through a goddamned war. Twice I tried to put this bitch to bed and failed. This round sure started out well, but I kept worrying it would fall apart, and there was white hot terror behind that, because this time it had to happen. There was of course the great overwrite scare where I nearly lost the fucking flogging scene. Sometimes writing this draft I felt like this was the best goddamn thing I’d ever written in my life. When I wrote the end, I bawled my goddamned head off, partly because of something I wrote, partly because I have no shit been riding this horse since 2010, and I am fucking worn out. Now it’s done, which, thank you Jesus.
Of course, now I”m in EON, End Of Novel syndrome, and this one is bad. I had nightmarish, grisly dreams about trying to save my family from zombie-like aliens, which once they found out I was hiding the dead slimy tentacled corpse of their baby, they were really gonna get pissed. I woke feeling like I’d been on a ten-day bender, and I wasn’t even out of bed before the darkness swamped my head and I began to worry, sure the book sucked, sure nothing worked, that it had all turned sour, and the betas wouldn’t tell me because it would be SO HORRIBLY BAD they’d lie because they couldn’t bear to tell me how awful. (I confessed a shorter version of that in text to Dan while he was at work and he, who is already 15% into it said NO NO NO and proceeded to hand me my ass.) In the end I got out of it by letting a potential WIP talk to me and let my brain stew on new story instead of trying to tear down the old one.
Naturally, the sweet, cute romance I had planned informed me one of the heroes is a sex addict. Apparently my muses are sadists, but I’m a masochist, because after I whined this wasn’t what I wanted, they lifted the veil a little higher, and I said, oh… But we’ll see. Nothing is real until I have 30,000 words, and even then things can still go wrong.
The good news is that I only have two days and then I’m going to be in New York until the 10th. I can’t imagine there’s a better way to spend EON than hanging out with Damon Suede plotting our world domination.
I wanted to let you know, though, that the book really happened, and right now I have a sextet of angels reading and telling me what’s good and what’s not, and basically we’re on the road now, bitches, and thank God.
Here’s some show and tell for fun.
This is the collage I worked from. It was on my desktop the whole time and is still there, making me miss them already whenever I look at it.
This is a screenshot of the music I listened to. There was a lot of music, and a fuckload of JLo. Anna never wants to hear the Love? album again, and frequently said, “What is up with all this Spanish music?”
Finally, if you want an excerpt: I posted this on FB awhile back, and maybe I linked to it here, I can’t remember. But here’s that.
And now I’m going to go watch Doctor Who, fold laundry, pack a suitcase, and in general not write this book anymore. As a parting gift I leave you with a song never referenced in the book, but one that has been in the soundtrack since the very beginning and one which, were this ever a movie, I’d ask them to strongly consider working into a montage sequence somehow. Thanks for riding along with me, for being patient, and for being excited about this story even when sometimes it got the better of me and I wasn’t anymore. Because your letters, support, and love kept me together too.
I didn’t get to round three of #DABWAHA, and as I told Abigail Roux, since I was tired just watching I think the best woman won. Honestly, it’s a bit of a relief—now all I have to do is finish Better Than Love, which is damn, damn close. I was on a roll until Marie Sexton showed up, which is fine, and then as she left it said, “Nah, we want to chill a little longer. Theoretically I was supposed to start back into it today, but in reality this afternoon I’m pretty damn tired. This is because I have gone back into physical therapy.
Though the whole pain thing has been better of late, it started getting worse again, and the last month in particular has been more than a bit shit. I had a quiet moment where I freaked out and panicked and worried nothing I could ever do would stop it or make things right. Then I got over myself and called my general practitioner. I have a new Vicodin prescription, and I’m back in physical therapy.
If you’re the sort who reads those things, you may have noticed that I thanked the Mary Greeley Physical Therapy Department in the acknowledgements of Dance With Me. This was because all Ed’s PT was my PT. I never played football, but my neck was really stupid. I bawled like a baby while I wrote the pain goals scene, and I had to write Ed’s goals (or have Laurie write them) before I could write my own. Well, now I’m back at MGPTD, and this time we’re playing with my lower back.
Today specifically I learned that my abdominal muscles suck ass, and that the right side is so incredibly bad I failed the most easy, inane, people-with-seriously-fucked-up-bodies-do-this exercise: floating in the deep end with a weight belt on and doing marches and scissor kicks. I kept getting shooting pains in my right piriformis muscle, though it’s actually right on my tailbone so I don’t know what what to make of it. The therapist in the water wondered if I didn’t need an MRI, but we’ll see what Matt, my main PT squeeze, thinks about that before I trip over to the metal tube. What we did suss out is that pretty much never are my right abdominal muscles aren’t doing much of anything. So they’re relying on the left side to do everything and the right lower back, which is pissing off my right hip and right side of my pelvic muscles something fierce. This seems to be the whole water problem.
Anyway, there is a whole lot more body work than writing work right now, and now that I’m at my desk to work, I’m barely able to stay awake. Working in the water is exhausting. I didn’t do much of anything, but tell that to my body.
In the meantime, I have a small addiction to copycat peanut butter eggs. These are vegan and can be made sugar-free. I’ve been eating them quite a bit so might try getting some xylitol, but probably I’ll just use powdered sugar and not think about inflammation. I’ve made them twice already, once with the cocoa recipie, and once I melted Enjoy Life chips. I still have some of the melted chocolate in the fridge, and I still have powdered sugar. I feel it’s my duty to make at least one more batch, don’t you?
I heartily, heartily encourage you to make these yourself, even if you don’t have to be vegan. They’re so much better than the store’s, and probably that’s because they’re fresh.
After a nap, I anticipate getting back into the game of writing and continuing it through the weekend. The bunny will visit our house and hide eggs all over as per usual. I have to get a few more things for Anna’s basket, but that’s about it. I don’t even think we’re doing anything for Easter other than going to the barn for Anna’s lesson.
Speaking of my child. A few weeks ago I introduced her to Bill Cosby: Himself and now she walks around quoting her favorite parts. Last night she was doing the high person at Burger King so well we were falling over with laughter. To that end, I’ll leave you with a clip of the real deal. Happy Easter, happy pelvis, and I’m serious, make those peanut butter eggs STAT.
It’s DABWAHA time again, which, if you’re all, “what the fuck?” go read it here. Actually, if you want to play this game, save that link. You’ll need it.
A Private Gentleman is a finalist. It made it through round one,with no help from me because Ms. Sexton was here, and then my body went to shit again (more on that in a minute), and all of a sudden I was looking at my twitter and seeing my editor doing my pimping for me. Fail, Heidi. Fail.
The book made it to round two, so now I am coming in late to do my part. The idea of this game is trash-talking and vote whoring. So what this means is whenever my round of voting happens, sometime on Sunday either before noon or after noon, I need to get people to go vote. Round two will be tough, because if I read the tourney sheet correctly, I’ll be up against Stars & Stripes by Abigail Roux,and every time I turn around half of twitter is tweeting about those books anyway. So this could all be nice and short. I don’t have that kind of posse, and frankly one would exhaust me utterly and you’d need to be happy with whatever books you had now, because I couldn’t fathom writing again. This means I’m going to be a horrible vote whorer.
To compensate, I have come up with a cunning plan.
There are five rounds, counting the championship. I’ve already cleared the first round, so now it’s just two through five and then the championship. I think the odds of my making even the final four are almost impossible, let alone the elite eight, but what the heck, let’s live for a dream. To get anywhere at all, I’m going to have to convince people to go vote for this book and tell all their friends to do it too. Seeing it win likely isn’t going to do a lot for you, so I will provide the following to up the ante. Here are my ideas for bribing you to do that.
If A Private Gentleman makes it to the third round: I will share a steamy scene from Better Than Love here on my blog.
If A Private Gentleman makes it to the fourth round: I will host a poll to let you pick which two of my characters (any book, and they can cross-pollinate) you want to see together in a scene, and I’ll let you vote on whether it’s steamy, silly, or a surprise. I’d have this written by May 1.
If A Private Gentleman makes it to the fifth round: I will write the short story/novella of Sam & Mitch’s wedding (complete with Randy) by June 1
If A Private Gentleman makes it to the final round: I will write the short story/novella of Randy and Ethan’s wedding by August 1
This means if somehow APG makes it all the way to the championship round, I’ll be writing three free shorts. It’s theoretical I might write them all someday anyway, but if you go whore on my behalf, I will put them next on my list, I’ll stick to the above deadlines, and yes, they’ll be free.
So if seeing any of those gets you all excited, start planning your whoring tactics. You can vote with as many IP addresses you can muster, so the phone the tablet, the laptop, the PC–they all count, and so do those of all your friends. Anybody can vote. You can make your partner vote from work (and from their phone, their tablet, etc.). You can make your mom vote. There’s not even anything dirty on the site, so your kid could vote, but unless they’re adults, they’re probably using your computer anyway.
It is, by the way, totally okay if you don’t want to vote whore, or even vote at all. If you love Stars and Stripes, by all means, go join the throngs there. But this is meant to be a game, meant to be a wheedling, trash-talking festival of fun, so if you want the prizes I offered above? Get your whore on. Because I will, with the internet as my witness, do all the above as promised with each round I clear.
In the meantime, while you go do my work for me (but for a great benefit!), I’m going to finish Better Than Love by April 1 and unfortunately dive hard back into a physical therapy regimen. Because yeah, my body it turns out, is still my body.
Good luck to all the #dabwaha finalists, and good luck vote-getters! Have fun.
(You can also fill in a second chance bracket–maybe. You might have had to fill in the first round already to do that, which I didn’t tell you about in time because I’m a big fail. Sorry.)
There’s actually a whole newsletter with this and other stuff. You can subscribe or just read the link.
But because it’s release day, here’s the standard pic, blurb, and buy link stuff.
Available for preorder from Samhain, Amazon, & B&N.
Sometimes family chooses you.
How does a man get to be forty without knowing whether he’s gay? That’s a question Vince Fierro is almost afraid to answer. If he is gay, it’ll be a problem for his big, fat Italian family. Still, after three failed marriages, he can’t help but wonder if he’s been playing for the wrong team.
There’s only one way to settle it, once and for all—head for Chicago’s Boystown bars, far from anyone who knows him. Naturally, he runs smack into someone from the neighborhood.
Between working two jobs, going to school, taking care of his grandmother, and dealing with his mother’s ongoing substance abuse, Trey Giles has little time for fun, let alone dating someone who swears he’s straight. Yet after one night of dancing cheek-to-cheek to the sultry strains of Coltrane, Trey finds himself wanting to help Vinnie figure things out—no promises, and no sex.
It seems like a simple plan, until their “no-sex” night turns into the best date of their lives and forges a connection that complicates everything.
This book was co-written with Marie Sexton.
Last week I only wrote a little bit, because I was prepping for a big fat sequence I would eventually take all day Friday to write. It was 5800 words. It was one of those gigs where I finished and thought, “This is possibly one of the best things I’ve ever written.” It was a very intense sex scene, but it also contained a full on BDSM scene written from the perspective of a sadist. I was so proud of those 5800 words.
I very nearly lost them all.
I write in Scrivener for Mac, and I have since Jenny Crusie introduced me to it in about 2005 or 2006–I’ve been writing in Scrivener a long, long time. I also use Time Machine and Dropbox, though I’d only set up TM again after a nine month hiatus after I got a new machine because of a need to move things from an old hard drive which hadn’t happened because of sheer laziness. I’d set it up, though, so I thought I was safe.
Until Sunday, I always kept my recent work in Dropbox. It would save to the Dropbox site and to my computer and my laptop, which seemed like a trifecta of backup. Scrivener also won’t let you open a file if you have it open on another machine. I had every contingency covered, it seemed.
Except for one big thing.
Dropbox hangs for a minute before it syncs when I open the laptop, and since I got the new iMac, the laptop has serious trouble hooking up to the network. It takes upwards of five minutes to load, and Dropbox then gets off its game, because normal laptops would be halfway through the internet while mine is still fucking around trying to find the router it’s ten feet away from. So there’s this pregnant moment where, if you open Scrivener (which defaults to opening up your latest work) before Dropbox syncs, it runs the risk of overwriting your current file with an older file.
Friday night, the same day I’d written the work I was so proud of, this is exactly what I did.
The moment it happened, I kind of knew, but I told myself if I had biffed, I had Time Machine. Except when I went to work on Sunday morning, I found that for no discernible reason, it had not backed up since Thursday. Theoretically it’s supposed to do its work every hour, even if I’m working, but it did not at all. I had no backup. None. Whatever this Time Machine issue is, it’s still happening, because it’s still only occasionally backing up with no pattern and frankly, no justice.
What this meant was that I had lost all my work. All 5800 words.
I flailed around trying to make Time Machine show me the twelve hours of backups it should have done on Friday, tried to dig through every recourse in Dropbox. I communed with my computer in every way possible, and then I began to cry. Not right away–my family tried to talk to me, but I couldn’t, I wouldn’t. Not until I called up Damon, who said, “Is everything okay?” and I said, “no” and started to bawl like a baby.
“Honey, I told you to get a better backup system,” he said, because he had, and I said, “I know” and cried harder. Later Dan asked, hurt, why I hadn’t cried to him, and I couldn’t explain at the time, but I think it was because only Suede knew how badly I had sinned. He’d told me his horror story and how he backs up, but I have this paranoia about opening the wrong file or saving over it, and so I kept to my little pattern that had worked for six years, until it didn’t.
Everyone was so sweet, so good. I found out how many friends I didn’t know I had–my daughter sent me sad little chats (I love you, Mom. I’m so sorry you lost your story.) Dan kept rubbing my shoulder and helped me dig through Dropbox how-tos. Marie sent supportive chats. The whole of the internet social media sent commiserations and offered tips as to maybe find a secret stash. Damon said all the right things about how I’d written it once, it was in me, it couldn’t die, how I’d write it again and it’d be better–different, but even better. I really did think it was gone, because it felt gone, like it had gone to the gods. I even remember feeling a weird (and inappropriate) peace as I’d realized what might have happened on Friday night.
I began to rebuild. I reorganized all my files and pulled everything out of Dropbox that mattered. If I had to leave it in, I made it a duplicate of a copy on my hard drive. I forced Time Machine to backup. I emailed copies to Damon, to myself, to the iCloud. I put a backup in Dropbox. Then I went to Scrivener to stop that auto-open, and to set up the backups again, because apparently they’d turned off, since I didn’t see them in my Dropbox anymore.
That was when the magic happened. That was when I found out how wonderful Scrivener is, how they have saved my ass, and when I decided I was giving a huge on-my-knees thanks to them in the acknowledgments. Because when I went to the backup settings, I found out they’d been backing up for me after all–and they’d moved them to a secret file in my Library.
Breathless, afraid to hope, I went to the Library. I saw, as the last file about to go away, a Friday afternoon copy of BTL. I opened it—and saw my missing 5800 words.
I shouted. I cried again, and with shaking hands I saved it in six different places. I emailed it to myself. I called Damon back, and he said before anything else, “EMAIL IT TO ME RIGHT NOW,” and I did. Because why not have seven backup copies.
It took me until last night to be able to write in the file again, in fact, to write at all. I had a huge headache all day Sunday, and even though I had the file back, I felt wrecked. I still twitch when I open the file. I’m having to walk through work like I’m going through a pile of corpses, even though everything’s fine. I still fear I’ll overwrite something by accident, but I “save as” at the end of every writing session and give it a new name, so now I’ll have literally sixty copies of the file before I finish. And two hundred if you count the backups. Because I turned on the feature to save all Scriv backups in that library, I save to Dropbox, I email it into various boxes, and I’m looking into more reliable online backup with tech support (still haven’t received any feedback from Dropbox). I’m remembering now why I was so reluctant to “save as” with a new version: for a period of time around 2010, Scrivener took away that button, and you had to duplicate and rename the file. I always feared I’d fuck it up, so I moved to the Dropbox method. The downside is I’m going to have to be more deliberate about moving and fetching my files between my iMac and laptop, which is a huge pain, but I’d rather not be able to work sometime because I forgot to transfer an update than to lose my work entirely.
So, this Mercury Retrograde, go back up your stuff. Get a system if you don’t have one, and if you have one, double check it. Let me be your horrible warning so that you never, ever have to feel what I felt on Sunday morning. Back up your work. Back it up, back it up, back it up.
(I’ve listened to too much JLo, and it’s killing me to not add, “like a Tonka truck” after “back it up.” See below to understand why.)
Yesterday on my Twitter stream, someone posted what appeared to be an auto-reported update from an app describing how many follows and unfollows that account had received in the last twenty-four hours. The poster was a book blogger, one who takes her charge very seriously, and I’m certain she’ll find the app a useful tool for measuring the success of her venture, or that if she doesn’t she’ll discard it as a nice idea that didn’t pan out. She’s a smart, savvy cookie, that blogger, and I’m sure she didn’t lose a minute of sleep last night over finding out a few people who had been following her no longer do.
Having said that, I feel fairly confident in saying that most authors who tried to use that app would find it to be a gateway to the deepest circle of hell.
I’ve been an active part of professional author communities since 1999, and in those fourteen years I’ve only deepened my conviction that by and large authors are the most beautiful hot mess of ego and self-consciousness that has ever walked the planet. As a friend of mine once pointed out—we slave (alone) for months and years over a work, crafting and honing and sweating and weeping, and then we not only share it with the entire human race but ask to be paid for it. There’s no escaping the ego, no matter how humble we are. Yet at the same time, to be able to successfully access the stories of the human condition, we must be humble, we must put ourselves aside and reach into truths where ego must be stripped away.
Maybe it’s a bias, but from where I sit writing romance is even more of a schizophrenic split. It is and likely always will be the best-selling sub-genre of fiction, the Big Kahuna of publishing, and yet it isn’t just the story of the human condition but a chronicling of humans at their most vulnerable: falling in love. Even if we try to shut out the world, we know our potential audience is huge, and as we strip ourselves away to write emotionally vulnerable stories, we find ourselves that story’s biggest champion, wanting it to become the biggest story ever, not for our ego but for its own sake. To give it that boost we often must gird ourselves and send the introverted writer out into the void, to be the shill and the advocate and the ringmaster for our book’s success.
Nothing, nothing feels more horrible than rising out of that selfless pit of story, putting on ego we didn’t want—and finding the story not only missing the goal posts but sometimes failing to even get out of the sidelines. Did we do something wrong? Did we not promote enough? Too much? Did we burp in public at a conference and that killed the book forever? Did we make a stupid comment on a blog post or social media and now our stories must suffer for our foolishness? Did we not give it a strong enough editorial pass? Did we edit too much and stripped away the soul? Why, how, did this work we slaved over become passed over? How did we see such a beautiful gem and fail it so completely?
Put a few books under an author’s belt, and this kind of nail-biting ego soup/self-consciousness spirals to wild and crazy heights of hysteria, and usually it isn’t allowed to bleed out until something random makes us spill our carefully guarded jar of crazy. It might be a review. It might be a reader’s random comment on Twitter. It might be the failure of a book to hit a bestseller list. It might be a disappointing paycheck. It might be a failure to be mentioned in a magazine citing several of our genre peers—but not us.
It might be hearing that a conference will extend pre-invitations to a small number of high-profile, reader-requested and bestselling authors—and we must now get a bigger crock for our crazy juice, because now someone will make a judgement, a call, our peers will make a call, and we if we don’t make that list, it will cut us, it will send us so deep into that hysteria that we may not write again, because we’ve been wondering this whole time if maybe we really suck, if those lower sales numbers and meh reviews are tea leaves, if this is the final Tarot card that says, “Jesus, you fool, give it up already and go back to the accounting job.”
Don’t. Don’t you ever, ever let anyone, anything, any list or invitation or blog or review site or magazine article define you that way. Don’t let any outside force, anything of any kind tell you who you are, what your stories mean, what potential your career has. Don’t, not even for a minute let anyone but you define what success means for your career. Continue Reading →
If you go to Amazon, B&N, and the usuals right now and try to buy Special Delivery, you’ll only have the option of picking up a handful of paperbacks, and before long those will be gone too. The book is, as of today, out of print.
PLEASE REMAIN CALM.
Special Delivery and Double Blind are on the move–today the contracts are in the works between my agent and Samhain, and that’s where the series is going. This includes, as some of you have been hoping, book three, Better Than Love. There might yet be more, but for right now, let’s take it one book at a time.
To be clear, though, there WILL be a third book, and it is for real coming, and its production is 100% my top priority right now. I’ll be delivering it to my editor by June, straight-up.
Let me anticipate some of your questions.
I forget which months exactly, but basically this time next year. As I understand it, the releases will be 1-2-3 in a row, one month apart for each.
Because I really, really care about these books, and I want to do it right. This production schedule will help Samhain give the books wider exposure, do solid, solid editing, get new covers, the whole works. Also, to clear three months of release, we had to look a bit ahead.
NO. Absolutely NO. The edits, I swear on Sam Keller’s cute peach-shaped butt, will not eat your favorite scenes or even one-liners. I’ve already cleaned up a lot of “and thens” and some stupid spacings and other things that always get left over. Sasha will push me to clean up any other bits and pieces, and we’ll clean up things that you’ll never realize were change and yet will make the whole thing smoother and sharper. If you notice what we did, we didn’t do our jobs. I promise, we will be good at our jobs. This goes for Double Blind too.
Yeah, sorry. My agent is looking into that, but for now, yes, it’s not hanging around.
That was probably your first question, but it has the longest answer, so I put it later in the queue.
The why is very complicated, but the short answer is because it’s the right thing to do. There is no dramatic behind-the-scenes story here–moving the series is what was best for it, and this was a decision reached after discussing things with my agent, Dreamspinner, and Samhain.
Editors, publishing houses, agents–these are all relationships, and as in all relationships, it’s important that everyone is happy and feels good. Everyone needs to want the same thing and share the same vision. It’s not okay for one party to need something different and have to not get it because another party can’t give it, and when that happens, it’s time to go. It says nothing about any of the individual parties’ worth, and polite, professional partings are a sign of strong individuals who are good at their jobs. Consider this one of those moments.
Yeah, I know. Thankfully, George R. R. Martin has set the bar really high for how long you can let a series go. Though while we’re on the subject of long breaks…
One of the biggest reasons there hasn’t been a book–in addition to needing to be at the right place–is that I have had a bit of a hellish three years. Health, professional stuff, personal stuff–it’s been a ride. I have, actually, worked on this story the whole time, sometimes actively, sometimes just in the back of my head. Being in the right place, having a solid plan, and having cleared my desk for the project is going to help a lot.
The thing to remember is that Special Delivery, Double Blind, and Better Than Love are what I call “big books.” Big in that they’re not just lengthy but full of meat. I do, truly, work like the devil to make them sing, and I am, frankly, relentless in my standards for them. Special Delivery took over two years to write, and I have probably about 200k (not exaggerating) of dead manuscript beneath what you currently read. Double Blind is a bit of a fluke–It took 25 days to write and has the least editing ever in any book I’ve ever done, but I wrote it under extraordinary circumstances and spent three months prepping the research. I also wrote it in the dark. When that book got birthed, none of you knew who I was. That you do now? That you’re watching? Yes, it changes everything, and it makes it very hard at times. It makes it slower, because I have to keep shutting off my head.
The current reality of publishing, especially in indie, is that we must produce with incredible speed, speeds that ten years ago would be considered inhuman. In 2004 I went to a national writing conference where authors (NYT bestsellers) were angry that their publishers were beginning to require a book a year from them. Please enjoy that fact a moment when you consider how many books in m/m most authors crank out right now. I produce on average three a year, and I’m one of the slower producers. I’m not when you consider that a “short” book for me is usually 60k. Not only is a 100k book (my preferred length) longer, it’s more difficult. It’s not simply more words. It’s more complex plot, more to hold in one’s head, more pacing to make sure doesn’t flag. I do not make more money for that length, either. In fact, were I to crank out 20-40k on a regular basis, I’d make a lot more money.
At moments this reality–too fast a production, too unstable a landscape–has been very hard for me to come to terms with. I suffer too from too many ideas and too many fingers in too many sub-genres, and while I’ve corrected that a bit, it came at a financial and branding cost. When you add how visible and connected authors have to be to fans to stay relevant–social media, conferences, etc–I sometimes wonder how I have managed to do this at all. I think, weirdly enough, my unstable health has helped, because it becomes a sort of laser focus, making me constantly assess.
But yes, there will be Better Than Love by spring next year. It will be as big, if not bigger, than SD & DB. It will be worthy of your fandom and pleasure. It will be worth the money you’ll pay for it and the reviews you’ll leave on social media sites. I will give it, and you, the gift of my full authorial attention.
This is how, honestly, I’d prefer to proceed from here on out. I’m open to some fun small projects, but my meat, my core, is this sort of thing. I honestly enjoy taking a big, crazy idea and taming it. I love taking subjects we shouldn’t write about (trucker fantasies, casino heists) and making them beautiful. I love inserting painstakingly detailed research and real things into works so that they feel so real they take your breath away. I love hiding little plot devices and structure you won’t notice, ever, but will make works stronger and smarter and better. I love crafting art out of same-sex romance, better yet when I can put a bit of dirty sex in it to boot. I love taking what is a rather extensive and expensive education on writing and story and how to do this job and writing not a staid piece of LITERATURE but a raunchy, riotous ride.
That, however, takes time. And energy, and focus. It’s why I moved the books, so I have the best opportunity to reach for those things. It’s why I have an agent to sell my books and advise me where to go. It’s why I have started saying a lot more NO to everything that is not writing and supporting the writing. Because the writing is what I want to do, always, forever. Without it, the rest of life is so tasteless I cannot bear it.
So this is the big Thursday news. Books are moving, new book is coming. Heidi is getting her game on, and we’re ready to go.
There actually is other news, which sort of steps on what was a nice closer there, but whatever.
I think that’s about all I have for news. So there you go. Ask whatever other questions you have, and I’ll do my best to answer them. Just don’t expect much detail on BTL yet, because the story is hot and doesn’t want attention. I can’t even tell Damon or Saritza about it right now, it’s in that kind of state. I’ll just say there are some high awesomes, and I’m excited. As for a Randy POV? Maybe. Only if it works and adds to the story, but so far, he seems to be determined to make himself essential.
Can’t say that surprises me at all.
Yesterday I had the incredible joy of sending my agent a new manuscript to sell, this one a Christmas contemporary which, if I have my way, will be the first in a multi-year series. I had a lot of fun writing it, not the least of which because for once it happened fairly quickly. Dan started reading it in bed and seemed to be having a good time, so things are looking good so far. Something to look forward to, I guess. More on that one as it gets sold, etc.
In the meantime, Dirty Laundry releases in less than a week. Some of you have been waiting for this moment for a year, because it was about this time last year the free short showed up on Coffee and Porn in the Morning. Speaking of that, you’ll want to stop by there on Thursday around 10AM CST for a special surprise. There’s a book tour you can follow during release week (see info below). You can also try your hand at the Goodreads paperback giveaway. Unless you wait too long.
Now I get about ten minutes to sit on my laurels, and then it’s back to work on the book that’s overdue and 3/4 done. Because I have to start on yet another something in the middle of February, and when you hear what that is, you’ll be very happy. But no more on that until Valentine’s Day.
Here’s the usual blather for DL: link, tour, blurb, excerpt, and buy link to Riptide. It’ll be on third party sites (Amazon et al) shortly after release day. I tend to post those my my FB fan page and twitter, so you can watch there or keep hitting refresh or whatever pleases you.
Available January 28, 2013
(Click here for tour info)
The course of true love doesn’t always run clean. But sometimes getting dirty is half the fun.
Entomology grad student Adam Ellery meets Denver Rogers, a muscle-bound hunk of sexy, when Denver effortlessly dispatches the drunken frat boys harassing Adam at the Tucker Springs laundromat. Thanking him turns into flirting, and then, much to Adam’s delight, hot sex over the laundry table.
Though Denver’s job as a bouncer at a gay bar means he gets his pick of geek-sexy college twinks, he can’t get Adam out of his head. Adam seems to need the same rough play Denver does, and it’s damn hard to say no to such a perfect fit.
Trouble is, Adam isn’t just shy: he has obsessive compulsive disorder and clinical anxiety, conditions which have ruined past relationships. And while Denver might be able to bench-press a pile of grad students, he comes from a history of abuse and is terrified of getting his GED. Neither Denver nor Adam want to face their dirty laundry, but to stay together, they’re going to have to come clean.
This title is part of the Tucker Springs universe.
I’m making one NYE resolution early: next year I’m going to juggle my schedule so that I have no writing after Thanksgiving and that I’m all done with everything publishing from the 15th of December to the 2nd of January. After several sideways panics, my agent all but decreed this, and as in all things she’s right, this is a wise stance. My family is too big and widespread to allow work and play on the kind of level I tried this year.
Hopefully you’re all happily settled into your deepest holiday traditions at this point. We’ve had two of our Christmases so far, two to go, and two which I think will happen in January because I’m crying uncle. Tonight we plan to watch Smoky Mountain Christmas and maybe Avengers and then try to get the child unconscious so Santa can happen. Tomorrow is Dan’s family. Today I have to get my act together and get just a few more things and wrap one more present.
In the meantime, there are two Goodreads giveaways of my books you can enter: paperbacks for A Private Gentleman and Dirty Laundry. When I signed up I selected every country available, so it’s as world-wide as GR goes. And if you’re looking for a holiday read, a few years ago I wrote The Twelve Days of Randy, which you can enjoy as well.
Merry Christmas, happy holidays, and I’ll see you in the New Year!
