Reality 301 with @heidicullinan

 

Tonight Twitterverse roared with outrage over Kendall Grey’s post on Authors for Life where she bemoans the fact that sometimes, publishing is hard. Grey spent four years writing and a great deal of money and effort promoting an urban fantasy trilogy; it tanked. She wrote an erotic novel she describes as a “piece of trash” in two months, spent much less in promotion and gave it much less effort, and that book made some decent money. She’s angry that she wasn’t rewarded for her “beautiful, artistic” book and that by selling out she made money. Grey writes:

I know it’s depressing to hear that in order to find success, you may have to compromise your principles. I’ve come to grips with the fact that in the current market, trashy smut sells, and urban fantasy does not. Tough shit for me. If you want to sell books, you have to feed the market what it craves.

Grey goes on to state that

once you’ve done your part to feed the reader machine, and you get paid ridiculous amounts of money for publicly shaming yourself and lowering your standards, you’ll be armed with the power to write what you want.

I think the best place to start in response is to take a moment to acknowledge where this kind of selfish, angry thinking comes from, and like most things gone awry, it starts from something well-meaning. We could build several acres of affordable housing out of the stacks and stacks of books, blogs, and inspirational memes urging writers to write from the heart, to follow your vision, to let your voice ring out and be heard. The problem is that almost always after that advice comes the promise that should a writer (or any artist, really) follow this path of purity, success and happiness will unquestionably follow.

It’s not that this promise isn’t true, exactly. It’s that for far, far too many writers “success and happiness” gets equated with “lots of money and fame.” Here’s the reality of making art: the brass ring is BRASS, not gold. To believe even for a moment that simply producing the work of one’s heart means one will now be a bestseller is beyond naive. To proceed as if commercial success is due because of one’s effort or expenditure is embarrassingly foolhardy. But most of all, publicly ridiculing readers, especially one’s own, is a hanging offense, and anyone who commits it will very quickly feel the cinch of a brutal noose.

Without question, it would be wonderful if every time an author produced a work of her heart it met with commercial success—or if not wonderful, it would at least be very tidy and cute, like a toddler league of tee-ball where both sides go home convinced that they won the game. It’s understandable that writers approach publication with the conceit that if they write it, it will sell, and probably a little of that bluster is necessary to get through those initial rounds of trying to get published. It’s an incredibly conceited idea to put words on a page and ask other people to pay to read them. Hell, even asking for their time is arrogant. Requesting payment is graduate level self-importance, and being part of a corporation allowing many people beyond the initial author to make livings off these sold words is a doctoral thesis of hubris. To even consider stepping into the hot mess of being an author takes some serious mental jujutsu, and yes, imagining one’s story as some kind of messianic tome likely cuts through a lot of white hot terror.

Writers may live in that rose-colored bubble, but authors cannot. Anyone who puts words on a page and calls it a story is a writer; authors are those who intend to make at least a subsidiary living off their works, who write for more than themselves and their besties. Authors do not write because they believe they have innate truths they must impart upon the world but because they would like to be read. Most importantly, authors, true authors, quickly shed their writerly crutch of predestination and come to terms with grizzly truth: authors exist entirely at the pleasure of the reader.

Some genres sell better than others. This isn’t because best-selling books are more artistic or even better written than their peers. This is because the books that sell well are the books which more readers wish to read. Only in literature classes are books read because they’ve been put on a pedestal. Even the snottiest, the-smell-of-a-book-makes-angels-weep erudite societies read because the books they’ve chose to elevate give them pleasure. Every reader believes the books she loves to be the most holy of texts, and the truth of the matter is that every reader is absolutely correct in her conviction. What happens in this little thing we like to call a market economy is that when a great number of readers all happen to find the same kinds of books or titles of books pleasurable, the authors of those books make money.

A failure of a book to make money might be a failure of marketing, but it also might simply not be a book which gives a large number of readers pleasure. That’s as deep as this shit goes.

I understand that it’s disheartening to pour effort and money into a work of art and find that others do not value it with the same intensity. I’ve been to this rodeo more than a few times, and yes, it’s painful and hard on the soul. It is also the sort of thing that grown-ups do every day. Anyone deluded enough to think they are owed monetary success because they bled for their art is in for some hard, hard knocks and buckets full of tears. There will be many cries of “unfair” and much jealousy and hatred. And to be fair, all authors go through this every time they watch their books ride the waves of bestseller charts and the ego torture chamber known as Goodreads reviews. Even the most well-adjusted of us watch that horrible piece of shit book beat our baby to pieces and gnash our teeth and shout at our monitors demanding to know what brain-donors are shopping on amazon.com these days.

But holy Smart Bitch on a cracker, Batman, to write a post about how stupid readers are and worse to actually put it out there on the internet is so beyond the pale there’s a special hell for that kind of idiocy. Let me repeat: authors exist at the pleasure of readers. Without the people who buy and read my books, I am just another dizzy broad writing shit down. Readers aren’t just an author’s audience; they are her lifeblood. Yes, we make up characters and worlds, but readers are the magical, ephemeral beings who give their time and money to our work, who sing praises of our stories to their friends, who make this whole game possible. Readers are the holy ground where authors’ egotistical nonsense transforms into story. Readers are to be treasured and worshipped, and if an author has an urge to type a nasty review in reply to a reader or write a snarky post, she’d cause so much less harm to herself if she’d cut off her hand first.

Yes, it’s true, one can phone in a book in a popular genre and make more money than one can by bleeding out in a less popular one. However, “the market” is not some craven, slobbering beast created by men in smoky rooms twirling their mustaches. The market is made up of readers gathering without prompt or organization to purchase what authors write. The market is the reason writers are able to even dare to dream of getting paid for creating story. The market isn’t here to prop authors up so we can write what we want and tap our toes until our work gets the kind of attention we think it deserves. The market isn’t here to serve us. It’s here for us to serve.

Ms. Grey, what you’ve dished out for the market tonight might have come from your heart, but much like your urban fantasy series, it isn’t something anyone has a taste for. The market, your readers, and the internet have heard your scorn, and we won’t forget what you truly think of us anytime soon.

That isn’t just a promise. It’s reality. And yes, it’s going to follow you all the way to the bank.

 

Better Than Love is a goddamned book

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.

PSA: Back Up Your Work

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.)

The Definition of Success

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.

Big news about the Special Delivery series: Old Blue is taking a drive

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.

When will the books be re-released at Samhain?

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.

Why is it going to take so long?

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.

OMG DOES THIS MEAN YOU’RE CHANGING MY FAVORITE BOOK EVER???!!!!!

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.

What about the audio book? Is it going to go?

Yeah, sorry. My agent is looking into that, but for now, yes, it’s not hanging around.

Why are you moving your books?

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.

So you really are going to write Better Than Love now? You’ve been saying that for three years, you know.

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.

• Let It Snow, the first book in what will be the Minnesota Snow (I think that’s what I called it) Christmas series, will be available this year in November from Samhain. I think the 26th. My plan is one of those every year.
  
• Hero is also out of print. I’m looking at probably self-pubbing it this summer just so it’s available, but more on that later.
• Love Lessons, a new adult, almost-sweet romance is in the hands of my agent. She has Plans. I will let you know about them when they are firm.
• Tucker Springs is on my radar, but right now I so very have to finish BTL and it’s the only thing I’m allowing myself to process. Though I’ll confess, I have a few characters talking to me from that town.
• Damon Suede and I have many crazy cowriting schemes together, but first he has to finish his book, and I have to get ankle-deep in BTL before any of that gets serious.

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.

Merry Christmas Very Early and Dirty Laundry is Imminent

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.

Dirty Laundry

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.

Read the excerpt

Buy the Book

 

 

What I Learned as a Writer in 2012

As my family and my daughter’s friend watched the ball drop in the other room, cheering as 2012 ended and 2013 began, I sat in the easy chair in the living room, devouring my third book of the day and thinking, “Thank God. Thank God, thank God, thank God.”

There’s nothing notable about 2012 to make it more onerous, not in a signpost way, but even so I feel like I’m crawling out of it with my legs bloodied and my soul shaken. Some of that is the usual end of the year, post-holiday jesusfuckingchrsist!!! usual, but something about this year was very carnivorous, something shadowy and dark and belonging on a Doctor Who episode. Leave me here without a sonic screwdriver and no Matt Smith and it was never going to be very good. I know a lot of writer friends who felt this way too: same nameless weariness, same sense of scrabbling and desperation and nothing to pin it on.

Well, now it’s a new year. The world didn’t end, the planets have shifted out of some pretty fucking crappy alignments, and even if they move into shittier ones or new doomsdays pop up, I’m ready. I survived 2012. I can do anything.

This is some of what I learned in the past 12 months about how to be a better writer.

• Mental and physical health are equally vital and are completely, utterly intertwined. Trying to write while either is diminished is a death sentence. 

I’ve always been one to try and push through, making my body do what I needed it to do, but not only would it not do this in 2012 but my failure to take care of the physical and mental aspects of my being affected my writing in just about every way it could. From failing to eat properly (though I didn’t know about the damn allergies until part-way through and I still swear I’m flushing some of those) to not exercising to not getting the right sleep to simply not taking breaks and resting–well, let’s just say I’m going to make it a priority to eat, drink, and sleep properly from now on, and when I can’t, I’ll build in time to recover.

• It’s entirely possible to travel for work to much. From financial strain to physical and mental strain, too much travel is hell. Sadly I appear to be poised to do it again this year, though I still don’t quite get how that happened. I’m a little annoyed, because what I really want to do is take a trip with my family where there is no work at all, where I don’t even check any email. Maybe next year.
• Sometimes books take a long time. Sometimes they don’t. Whether they do or not is a reflection both of the book itself and the writer’s frame of mind while writing, but trying to suss out the varied degrees and control them is a short chute to madness. That’s all there really is to say about that, but I’ll keep sitting with that one this year, and many years to come, because it’s a hard one to be Zen with.
• Conflict.  This year I learned that conflict really is vital to a story, like, really fucking important, and that it’s really fucking hard to get right. Another long-term sit-with concept I won’t be putting down anytime soon.
• I must write with joy or the book will suck.  Even if the book is darker or full of angry backstory, even if–especially if–it’s a story born out of my own rage and sorrow, it must be planted in joy and fed with more of it or it’s going to go tits up in a hurry.
• I have to shut my goddamn email off and let it pile up often or I won’t get anything done. There are days all I do is answer email and online sites and messages and forum questions, and none of that pays me a dime in royalties.
• No is a beautiful, powerful word, and I need to use it. Especially when I think, “Oh, that’s just a little thing, I won’t matter,” because I know damn well ten thousand little things that won’t matter become a huge thing that eats up my time.
• I need to journal regularly to myself, to my characters, and to my muses. That’s a recent one, and it’s sanity-saving. I’m not sure how much of it is real magic and how much of it is psychology, and I really don’t care so long as I keep getting results.
• When mixing business and friendship, I need to be very very careful. Holy crap, is this true. It’s so hard because especially in LGBT romance we tend to be so connected, but that closeness I’ve learned means we need to take great care of how we deal with each other. It’s impossible not to muddy the waters, and muddying the waters leads to cloudiness and hurt feelings.
• I need to keep my agent appraised of what I’m doing and actually listen to her because she is right every goddamned time. All my angst this year has come in cases where I went against Saritza’s advice. I won’t regret any of it because it’s served to teach me, and my vow this year is that I rely on our partnership and trust her to do the job I pay her to do. We’ve already had this conversation privately, but I want to state it publicly because I really believe in this one and want to make myself accountable to it.
• I need to take breaks and make time for my family and myself. I was so bad at that this year. But I ended this year feeling frazzled and empty in so many ways, and I keep looking at my daughter and thinking she’s growing so fast and soon she won’t be here, she’ll be off living her own life. My husband’s work is crazy too, and it’s easy to get in habits of being distant. None of this serves me and it doesn’t serve my writing either.
• I need to remember this is my job, but it’s also my joy. When I’m rested and healthy and using my support system appropriately, being an author is a job I love, struggles and all. The joy doesn’t come from success or from “doing it right” (Jesus that one’s a bitch) but from being part of the dance. I do love pushing myself and reaching for impossible things, but if I get too fixated on the pushing part and not the enjoying the pushing part, I’m going to get in trouble.

I probably learned more than this, but these twelve points sum up the big ones. 2012 is done. 2013 is here, and as Papi likes to say, “All new mistakes.”

Bring it on.

PSA to Authors: Why Writing Is Hard

In the past week the book I’ve been wrestling with like Jacob and his angel has decided to gel, organize, and come out of the chute so fast and clean it’s all I can do to keep up. It’s a wave and I intend to ride it to the end, which hopefully is middle of next week at the latest. It’s what I’ve been doing and why there have been no blog posts, limited social media, and limited everything.

Today, however, as I prepped the next sequence and realized I was ghosting a scene I’d cut, I peeked into the “old stuff” folder to see if I could use the first version or if I should rewrite it. I ended up deciding the latter, though I pasted in the opening for a prompt. While I was there, I looked at the pile of cut material and thought, “I wonder how much I’ve cut from this novel?”

Answer: 35,000 words.

I knew it was a lot, but holy shit, that’s a lot of words. That’s a fucking novella. This too is only the stuff I kept when I cut it. Usually if it’s a whole scene, I drag it to an “old stuff” folder in case I need to use or reference it later, but I axe plenty in media res, and that just goes in the bin. This section was so big because I’d cut 16k in one go, because I knew I’d gone down the wrong road. (It turns out it wasn’t, actually, just that I tried to write the third act opening at the midpoint. I’ll have to rewrite it, but it’s odd how similar they’re going to be.) I had no notion, though, that I’d cut that much again in bite-sized chunks.

Why am I posting this? Well, one, because holy shit, that’s a fucking lot of words, and I’m kind of stunned. Mostly, though, I’m posting this because I can feel that this one has the big sparkle, and someday some of you reading this are going to read this book and think, I love this book! Some of you doing that are authors too, or want to be. Some of you will find this after a bad, bad writing day and be ready to hang up. Some of you might have a pile of novels under your belt like me and maybe you won’t even read this book because you don’t have that kind of time, and right now your writing has you feeling like raw exposed neck tendons and you don’t know how you’re going to live through your next contract.

To all this, I submit the 35k of cut words, and I do it right now like a bet I’m laying down that someday Love Lessons will do very well and be loved, and we can all remember this St. Crispin’s Day moment when it wasn’t done and it had tried to kill me and that I’d had to cut a novella out of it to make it work. And I bet I cut more before I’m done. If you’re a reader, you can relax and think, “golly, glad I don’t write.” If you’re a writer, take up your banner and get back in your trench, because if I can cut that much and more and emerge with a book, then by god, you can do it too.

I’m not kidding, either. Walter and Kelly. You’re going to love them. I’ll go back now and finish so you can share the joy by the end of summer or so.

As a Writer: Pretending No one is Looking

Once upon a time I blogged in Livejournal, and on a good day thirty people saw what I said. Most days I would put up a post and know my husband and a few close friends would see what I wrote. Even when I first got published, my readership was largely my LJ community, and there are days I miss that. I started blogging to get myself used to the idea of being exposed–definitely I’m one of those authors who wants to tell stories and make a living at it, but the whole social navigation thing, even when I’m good at it, wears me out. I found however that one of my favorite things about blogging and writing was talking through the process out loud, but unlike emailing a bf or talking to Dan, people either responded or didn’t in a way that was totally okay. Usually my favorite parts were when nobody said a word or the usual two people said, “You go get ‘em!” I know I could go reboot the LJ or make a private new one, but it feels wrong, like I’d be deciding who got to see behind the curtain and who didn’t, plus there’d be pressure on how to filter…no. It’s all or nothing now.

Today, though, I’m going to pretend none of you are here. What I want to do is talk through my latest WIP, which I was all set to finish until it snagged this week, and when I pressed on it a little it opened like a lotus.

 

Probably you should ignore that “Hope University” novel, because I don’t think this is going to be a series like I ultimately thought. When I started it was supposed to be fun and short and light, a little something to keep me busy before GRL and give Saritza something to sell. Now it has morphed into something between Special Delivery and Dance With Me. Definitely it’s a longer novel, at least 80k is what I’m thinking. It would be fun for it to be over 100, but that kind of makes me tired. This is the problem with doing this to make money: there’s almost no incentive beyond “writing the best book that can be” in making the book longer. In fact, everything is geared to keep novels at 65k or less.

I could see this book, though, making me go long. The irony is it’s not a pushy book. It’s very soft, like the aforementioned lotus. It would totally let me shove it out at 60k, which was my original goal, and most of you would still enjoy it. I think it would feel slightly flat, like I rushed. But it would let me close off the doors, if I wanted. It would sell well enough, and it’d clear my plate to write something else which could behave much the same. Or I could knuckle down and do this thing up with bows and ribbons and really, really make it hum.

That’s the funny part. I’m not used to being given a choice. Usually there’s a hard furrow to find and follow, and if I get out of line the book shuts down. Usually it’s either big or it isn’t. I will never, ever forget trying to find the line in Special Delivery. Every time someone says it’s their favorite book I want to say, “Good, because it tried to kill me.” This book is a lot like SD in that it started as something simple but revealed itself to be something bigger. I wanted to write a cute little number about kids in college, and that’s still there, but this is definitely what I think of as a “big book.” It’s like the difference between Second Hand and Family Man, the books I co-wrote with Marie. We love both books, but SH was light and fun and not complicated, whereas FM has veins that run deep. I thought Love Lessons was going to be more like SH, but it’s not. What it might be most like is Dance With Me, not an erotically focused novel, but probably even though I think the sex scenes will be sweet, nobody else well.

Still can’t get over this idea that I could chose to make it simple, and let me tell you, the urge is there, and it’s very tempting. I could knock this off and have it out and in the circuit before I left for Albuquerque. I could maybe come home to a contract. I could have another book in the editing hopper. Or I could let the writing days come to a full stop and change the Scrivener due-date to “November 1″ and that word count from 65k to 100.

I think the only reason it’s letting me think I have a choice is it knows there’s no way I would choose anything but to do it up right. I say this because when it built the story soundtrack (that’s always like reading a tarot deck for me) it pulled all manner of stuff from Special Delivery‘s soundtrack, so when I hear those songs I think of how it felt writing that story–not obsessing over it, just writing, the bits that were good and strong and hummed. So every time I think about trying to cut a corner, one of those songs come up, and I sigh and get ready to adjust the word count. To put a nail in my coffin I just added the majority of the soundtrack to Partition, which that combined with the instrumental tracks of Imogen Heap’s Ellipse send me straight into the cab of Mitch’s truck and Sam’s head. This story isn’t even close to that one in structure, but it’s definitely coming-of-age in the same way that one was, about boys finding themselves. It’s just that this time they’re both coming-of-age. And if I’m honing these two out of stock, Walter is Randy, not Mitch. Except really Walter is Walter, and Kelly is Kelly, not Sam.

Just now I went over to the document and changed the settings: officially 100k, officially November 1. Which will undoubtedly get pushed further back, unless I can somehow write the back half of a novel while also going to a big fat con I’m helping organize. Fine. I just bumped it to November 15.

It feels good. It feels like going back to August 2009 when Hero hadn’t yet sold and Special Delivery was still beating the shit out of me. Because back then I would never, ever have let myself cheat. I would never have taken a short run to completion. Back then I still believed only the best would do. So this is me pretending this is Livejournal and nobody cares, that this is still a book nobody’s seen or cared about. I have to do my best because if I don’t, the book might never see the light of day. I have to work like hell because that’s what writing is, and 100k is the length of books. 60k is a novella to me again. This is going to be a big book, and so I’ll take my time and do it right.

Feels pretty damn good, to be honest. Thanks, book, for letting me get here on my own. I think this says a lot about your character.

Family Man, coming your way in March 2013

 

 

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.

 

Warning: This book deals with alcoholism, broken promises, and overbearing little sisters.