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I was gonna do a Tuesday tune cause I had a song in my head all day that day. Of course, I was in a groove and wrote 6K so I didn’t have time to come over here and babble and post the song. Then yesterday I was busy posting hotties at Flirty Author Bitches. (They were pretty hot too, male, female, F/F, and M/M.) Today, on a Yahoo group, the wife of a friend posted a link to an article about him in their local paper. Well, to be honest, she’s my friend too, but I don’t talk to her like I talk to him. He and I shoot the shit about the oddest crap… databases and tech stuff… Geek-Speak.

At any rate, I wanted to share Garr with you. Cause I love him. And I love you. And you’ll love this song he wrote about his son. This music is hot. So is Garr. But don’t tell his wife I said that.

See the Sun – Garr

Have a great Friday Eve!

People use that phrase all the time when they need your help or want you to do something for them. Lately, in general, I don’t have a minute. But I never tell people, “No, I don’t”. It’s the same when they say, “Are you busy?” C’mon, I’m at work, of course I’m busy! And at home, it’s the same. I have a deadline so of course I’m busy.

Ever wonder how much more you’d get done if you could have those minutes back? One day, as little private test, I tried to keep track of the minutes I’d spent elsewhere at someone else’s behest. It ended up being about a quarter of my work day.  Of course, now, several years after I did that original little test, we call the spending of those minutes customer service. It certainly makes it easier to not look at them as time wasted or lost when you give those minutes the proper label.

Now, I did happen to lose some minutes to drama last week. Thankfully, it was only minutes. Once I realized what was in my Inbox, I shufffled it all aside and didn’t read it. I mean, c’mon, why would you read something you know is meant to irritate you? On top of that, people who indulge in that sort of drama are just waiting for you to respond. Ignoring it is the only logical choice.  You know it’s gonna bug you, know it’s not going to say anything meaningful, and know it will suck up your minutes. If you just set it all aside (you don’t delete it in case it comes back to haunt you in some fashion) you can get back to the stuff that really needs to be read.

At the moment, I’m in a race against time with a cantankerous muse who wants to veg. The really odd thing about it is that I can write, albeit a lot slower than my usual speed of light.  Those of you who know how quickly I can write when I write sex scenes are already laughing. Yes, I’ve stalled on writing sex. Every scene I’ve started that has sex in it, is not finished. The scenes that aren’t sex are flowing, but slower, like they usually do. So  where  I thought I’d be finished this weekend with Fire Season… I have  10-12K to go.

It feels weird not to be able to pull the sex scenes off in a flash. I’m not sure what happened to my muse. I thought he was okay with me writing M/M sex. And what sex I have written so far is quite hot. So I’m not exactly sure why the sex writing has slowed to a crawl. I don’t think I wanna analyze it too closely either because I have another M/M novella to write after this one.

A quick note about Tales of the Darkworld’s website, then I’ll give you a Marcus and get outta here. I did a little more work on the site this weekend. Basically, I started writing the page that explains the world of the Darkworld. My world building skills were exercised a bit because of the details I’ve been getting to in Fire Season and because The Pixie Prince is coming soon. If you were curious about the Darkworld, check out the site and read about the creatures and the Five Realms that make up this universe.

Ahhh, time for a Marcus. My favorite part of the week! I like the expression on his face here. Not sure why, just do. *sigh* I guess I can go to work now that I’ve had a Marcus…

Have a great Monday!

I had the opportunity to blog over at You Gotta Read Reviews over the weekend and I gave them a little insight into my mad scientist method of writing. If you get the chance, and you want to know how I do this, what makes me tick… check it out HERE.

I do kinda have a method to my madness. It’s not much of one but mostly I have this GPS in my head that steers me toward what I need to do. First and foremost is hie myself to the cemetery and do the best I can at the job I’ve held there for 10 years come June 14. Like any job, there are things about it that annoy me on occasion, but the truth of the matter is, I’ve been there a significant amount of time which means what I like about it completely outweighs the annoyances.

Once I’ve satisfied my requirements for the job for the day, and I can go home, the mad scientist inside me takes over. I go through my email and if there are no crises to avert, no people to help, no promo to do, no posting of hot naked men to my Tales of the Darkworld yahoo group, then I write, or do my plot work, or do subs for FB/WCP, or work on trailers for other authors.

In the mad scientist mode, I write like the wind as my friend author Z.A. Maxfield says. Sometimes this is in Word Wars and sometimes not. Weekend before last, I ruled by knocking out 11K. This past weekend… meh, not so much. A measly 2K mostly written on my netbook from bed. God I love that netbook. I wish I could get the fucking email to work though… all the settings match the ones on my desktop but damned if I can’t get the stupid thing to SEND. Okay, I digress.

A lot of writers get in mad scientist mode like I do. They live with the characters in their heads. I dream about mine a lot. Which is kinda weird because, as most of you who’ve followed this blog over the past 15 months know… I don’t sleep a lot.

All of this must somehow work for me and the GPS in my head keeps me on track with things cause this weekend I got a contract for Runaways, the companion story to Mating. On top of that my editor sent me the Mating edits and I worked on them for an hour and sent them back to her. Within a half hour she’d sent it off to the proofreaders and I sent her a cleaner version of the manuscript for Runaways. Then, M.E. Ellis sent me a cover for Runaways. Because this story is a companion story to Mating and Emmy did Mating’s cover, I’d wanted her to do Runaways cover too. I just didn’t expect her to do it in a half hour. It was a great weekend despite only writing 2K. I can’t say I didn’t do anything because I did get the blog post out, finished the edits, and had some forward progress on Fire Season.

Also, this past week seemed to be the week that all the authors I know found Twitter. Having been on Twitter about a year now, I ended up helping a lot of people. Lost count of the times I said the tweet in Tweetdeck is because someone you follow twatted. They didn’t understand the whole twat versus tweet thing either. Which is okay. They are not PRB after all. We seem to have our own language in the PRB. It’s like secret code, which also goes with me being a mad scientist type so I like it.

Now, that I’ve babbled away about my mad scientist life, I’m going to share a NEW Marcus photo. I just got this one and I’ve never seen it before. I’m already in love with it…

The man looks good for 40. If we all can’t look that good, we should have a partner who does. HEH. I could sit here all day and look at that photo and let my mad scientist have free reign, but I do have to go to the cemetery.

You lot have a great Monday!

After a 180 day wait (since Oct 15) Cobblestone Press has offered me a contract for The Pixie Prince. That means Marty, the Fairy Godfather, will have his day soon. This is an amusing novella, nothing deep or dramatic. Marty has an easy time setting this couple up. However, in the sequel… poor Marty – who does things by the book – fails! And the person who manages to get the couple together in that book is Karl with a K who is devious and lies to them!

At any rate, The Pixie Prince introduces us to underwear model Max Lefevre (Max Fever), vampire nightclub owner Bliss Wilde, and the Fairy Godfather. It’s a really fun story and includes a sex scene that culminates with a shredded king size pillow. I’ll let you know when it’s available.

It’s funny how so not excited you can get when you look at your phone at 2 am and read the email of acceptance in bed. This stuff always seems so much more exciting when you’re awake and dressed and at your desk. I was lying there on my giraffe pillow at 2 am reading the email from Cobblestone and thinking “Oh, cool! Finally!” But no wooo hooos until I got up and got into my email. Weird that.

Okay, news of the day over! Go back to your regularly scheduled stuff. OH, and if you want a HUGE laugh, head over to Socially Dead and read the Sparkly Vampire Nonsense, Twilight parody. You will laugh until your sides ache.

Happy Tuesday!

I was busy writing all weekend but another writer popped into Word Wars to explain the #amazonfail that was all over Twitter yesterday.  Apparently, Amazon stripped rankings from lots of books with “adult content”. Well, the stripped books turned out to be books with decidedly GLBT themes.  Ron Jeremy’s book still had it’s rankings. So did the books about dog fighting and building bombs.  Some authors I know who write GLBT themed books that don’t even have sex in them were stripped of rankings. A huge outcry ensued…

So there’s a petition traveling round. I signed it when it was about 1800 sigs. It’s pushing 10K sigs now. However, Amazon is now touting this as some sort of database error or glitch.  Now, I deal with databases all the time.  It’s true that things can happen to them to corrupt them. But corrupt them in such a specific manner? I rather think not. I mostly think Amazon tried to do this and got caught red handed being a homophobe. The only thing that seems glitchy to me… is their weak explanation.

At any rate, there’s still a lot of talk going on about the subject. It doesn’t affect me since I have no books there yet and I’m hopeful that it will be resolved before I do.

Here’s a quick update on my writing stuffs: Fire Season is at the mid-way point with 21K words. Author Jason Edding is checking me on my M/M-ness currently. If this story doesn’t turn into one big long sex scene I might be able to finish it next weekend at around 35K. Otherwise, two weekend should see it completed at somewhere between 30 and 40K.

I’m almost done with Weirdly, just waiting out the May 1 deadline on the remaining few stories that need to come in soon.  I’m determined that this antho get its shot at print so I need to have more than 70K for it. Once Weirdly and Fire Season are out of my hands it will prolly be edits for Mating since I just got an editor on Friday. Then it’s on to Rousing Caine for MLR Press. That will make Kris Jacen happy.

Since it’s Monday, I must post my Marcus for this week. I thought I’d posted this one before but I’m not seeing it in the media library so maybe I haven’t. It’s one of my favorite photos because it’s so pretty and he’s so pretty…

I’m so not talking about dinner with Hilly on Friday cause if I do I’ll have wet eyes again, but suffice to say, I’m glad she likes to travel because if I thought I wouldn’t see her again I’d really sob! Have a great Monday!

I remember Jester talking on Twitter about reconnecting with people from his past on Facebook.  I haven’t done much with Facebook but recently,  I was talking on a Yahoo group about what inspired my story Silver Lining that will be out in July and I thought of a way to try to reconnect with some people from my past.  It worked and I connected with a guy I’d known more than 20 years ago. He was best friends with a guy I’d been seeing.

Now, for those of you who don’t know or don’t remember me talking about Silver Lining, what spurred this story was the fact that I’d been daydreaming of what it would be like to find this guy online by happenstance. So I wrote the story of a woman who left a man she loved because she couldn’t handle the age difference.  The man let her go and always regretted that he hadn’t fought to keep her. Fifteen years later they meet online, only they don’t actually realize who they are until they meet face to face and their past relationship – one that neither of them forgot – is rekindled.

It’s a romantic and erotic story filled with yearning and pain and renewed hope. Nothing like the reality of my life I assure you! *wink* At any rate, one of the authors on the group thought I should find the man from my past and I told her nah, don’t think so. I’m happy where I am and with who I’m with.  She insisted that maybe he still thought about me too. I told her he was probably married with a bunch of kids and that his wife probably wouldn’t like it if he sat around thinking about ME! LOL She let it go. But only a handful of hours later I got a notice from Facebook that I had an email from the guy who’d been his best friend. In that email, Sid said he’d heard Paul was a meth addict now.

Okay, aside from the fact that it totally shattered my vision of Paul’s life, that news made me incredibly sad. And I wondered if his descent into that hell was in any way something that happened because of what had happened to us. Not that what had happened was my fault. I didn’t feel guilty but I did wonder.  So all the little daydreams I’d had became ashes with that email. I know what meth addicts are like and I wonder how much of my Paul is still left inside him. And… I’m just sad that his life turned out that way.  Still, my Silver Lining dream was a nice one and it fueled the story which is still one of my favorite things that I’ve written.

Funny how odd life can be that Sid popped up right after Lisa told me I should look for Paul.  Very karmic.

So now, how about a nice Marcus to round out my Monday rambles? The posed stuff is awesome but I still like the Marcus candids best.

Wishing you a happy hot Marcus Monday!