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Yes, Ride the Lightning came out on Black Friday. *grin* I hope you all will check it out. And for those of you who have, YES – Dave gets his own story eventually. I’m not ready to start working on the magical race the Magia yet, but when I do Dave’s story will be near the top of the list.  A Dom with magical abilities who runs a BDSM club and has a crush on Elizabeth Hurley. Sounds like a winner to me! *wink* For those of you who haven’t read any of the Tales books but want to, my publisher even put them in a bundle at a discounted price! Yay!

I’m in a rush this morning. I had Christmas tunes in my head all night and now I’m sitting here in my towel wanting something pumpkiny or pepperminty to eat and drink. So I may have to take myself over to Starbucks before work. I do have a $5 gift card I got for attending a Citrix webinar…

I’ve been buying all sorts of odd ball things at New Egg all week too. An inverter, gaming headphones, a DVD drive… small stuff all at about half off and free shipping. Man, I love free shipping and New Egg stuff takes like 1 or 2 days to get to me. I love it! That’s all I did for Black Friday. I had to work. LOL

For those of you looking for opportunities to pelt me with questions, I’ll be on Phoebe Jordan’s Blog Talk Radio show on Thursday December 3 from 9 pm to 10:30 pm EST.

Okay, a quick Marcus and I’m speeding out of here to get me some pumpkin bread and peppermint mocha.

I don’t remember if I’ve use this one before but I like the pensive pose. Okay, I like the nicely defined package too, but that a girly thing. LOL You all have yourselves a great Monday!

When I don’t like something, I have reasons for it. If I tell you not to buy X brand of disinfectant wipes, I will tell you why you shouldn’t. There are a bunch of people out there who won’t -  and maybe can’t – tell you why they don’t like something. Of those people, there’s this sub group who have to make a big stinking deal about the thing they don’t like. All without offering reasons for their stance. To top it off, of that sub group, there’s another splinter group who are belligerent and obnoxious about the fact that some people DO like the thing that they don’t like.

I’m deliberately being a little vague here, but I rather think that most of you get what I’m saying. I’m sure you all know someone who doesn’t like a particular thing and is pissy as all hell that you do like the thing or that others like the thing. I just wonder why the heck that is. Why get all obnoxious because I like the X wipes and you don’t? What they hell does it matter to you? You didn’t make the X wipes or market them or anything. You are just a consumer. So why the eff should I listen to you and dislike the X wipes just because you don’t like them? Especially when you offer me not a single reason for not liking them.

Don’t you feel that people like this just bitch to hear themselves bitch? That they don’t even have a real reason for not liking X wipes. They just don’t. And they push their favorite Y wipes at you persistently and act as if the only cool or smart people in the world are the ones who use the Y wipes.

That sorta attitude, the I-have-to-badmouth-this-even-though-I-can’t-tell-you-why-I-hate-it attitude, just pisses me off. And I hate walking into a room – or a chat – and being blindsided by that kind of attitude. And I hate it even more when the moderator ignores it even though I swear it was obvious I was offended by that sort of talk. I just leave in those instances. I won’t stay and continue to get more pissed. But I just can’t figure out how people can be like that. I know the world is full of badmouthers who have no concrete reasons for their stance, but I don’t have to like it or them. And yanno, I at least have a reason for not liking them.

Where’s my Marcus today? I need a purdy one to take the edge off my grumpiness!

People like to say Marcus is pretty. I don’t think he is.  To me pretty are those men whom you can never take a bad photo of even drunk and falling down. I’ve seen some less than flattering photos of Marcus. He’s beautiful because he just has a bone structure that never fails despite the fact that he’s pushing 40 now. But he ain’t purdy. They sure can make him purdy sometimes though!

I’m off to work now. Tonight, Motley has an appointment with admissions at the Art Institute so wish her luck! Have a great Monday!

I’m reviving my old Sunday Silence posts.  And, yeah, I know that if I’m typing I’m not silent but if I don’t say anything to explain what I’m doing, ya all will be like… HUH? So on Sundays I’ll try to post a Sunday Silence which is simply an image I saw during the week that captured my attention. I won’t say anything about it other than a simple caption.

This is author Debbie Gould’s daughter Renee who is currently in Afghanistan. Renee will miss the holidays with her son for the first time this year. If you would like to send Renee a postcard or an ebook or a box of cookies to thank her for her service, let me know and I will hook you up.

Today I have a litany of hos for you. Hos as in the plural of ho ho ho.

Hos.

It looks better with an apostrophe, but fuck me if that isn’t incorrect grammar.

My litany starts like this: I need to write three Christmas short stories, but I hate all the Christmas crap that goes up as soon as Halloween hits. You’re wondering how does the one affect the other. In a word, inspiration. I wasn’t feeling the Christmas spirit this past weekend and the stories suffered.

I decided I needed to make the covers in order to start things gelling in my head better. I have the plots. I know how the stories go, but I didn’t have the words yet. Weird but true. I tried playing Christmas music while I was working on the covers but Rhapsody wouldn’t cooperate with me. I have this strange, niggling feeling that I must have somehow programmed the client years ago never to play Christmas music before Thanksgiving. It would be like me to do that. If the client had that function. Which it doesn’t.  Still, it did refuse to play the Christmas tune which pissed me off and amused me at the same time.

I figured since it was 3 am maybe I’d better just go to bed. I’d pissed away the whole weekend and now, faced with a Monday vacation day off before I get swamped at work for the rest of the month, I needed to show some progress. With that in mind, and knowing how I dream shit for my books all the time, I turned on the TV to the Sounds of the Season channel.  Oh, yeah. Happy Ho Ho to the nth degree. I had nightmares of course and nothing at all related to Christmas.

So that’s Ho number one. Ho number two actually happened before Ho number one but I felt the effects all weekend. It happened late Saturday night when the finalists for the EPIC awards came out and Hot Water didn’t make it to the finals. I was disappointed in a weird sorta way. An eye rolling sorta way. I saw a few people make the finals whose books I’d read. Whose books I’d thought were… ahem… not so tightly as others I’d read in the genre. (Note how I did not use the word crap in the previous sentence.) I noticed how someone connected to the awards made the finals with a book I’d thought was lame-o.

Yeah,  you can say it’s sour grapes, but it’s not really. I just know how the human brain works. No matter how impartial people want to stay… they still have biases. Hello! New name here! No one effing knows me! Stick me and my funny, hot little dragon falls for vampire novella of 23K words next to some 60K epoch written by someone everyone has known for years and guess what? I am ass out. Which wasn’t exactly unexpected on my part.  One of the main reasons newbs don’t tend to win awards is in part because judges don’t know who they are. It’s human nature to be drawn to the familiar. This part of the whole thing was just an eye roll moment for me. But I’d be lying if I said it didn’t put a bit of a damper on my mood all weekend.

For my last Ho, I give you my return to sucking down Tylenols. Fuck my hip hurts. And I worry like hell eating those little white caplets so I take one of a two pill dosage and limp along all day until near bedtime when I take one more. Pain is a motherfucker though. Not at all conducive to creativity.  Now, I’m sitting with my coffee, having sucked down the one Tylenol arthritis strength pill I’m allowing myself, waiting for the spams in my lower back and hip to stop, and complaining to you. I should really be feeling better, shouldn’t I? Maybe in a half an hour after the second cup of Starbuck’s Breakfast Blend has made it’s way to my bladder…

And now for the visual portion of my Ho, Ho, Hos this fine Monday. I will start with a lovely Marcus, move to a redhead with a great ass, and then give you some rippling muscles. Yes, Marcus and the two Christmas covers I made. Heh. Enjoy!

I feel better after my ho-ey bitch session. I can always count on all of you to let me get my rant on. Oh! And I have an update on the Bar. I finally moved it this weekend and moved Winterheart Design and it’s gallery. Well, I moved domains not hosting so I actually ended up not moving the forum off the server which is just as well cause I couldn’t make it work. LOL Now that the sites are all fixed and I’m done with my bitchfest, maybe I can get some work done for my publisher. If the Christmas music cooperates…

Have a great Monday!

I post this every year, but it still makes me tear up. At work, our company motto is that we serve from our hearts. For those in the military, I believe they serve with much more than that. As the daughter of a veteran from a war zone, my heartfelt thanks to all who serve my country.

In Flanders Fields

By: Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae, MD (1872-1918)
Canadian Army

In Flanders Fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

Happy Veteran’s Day. I’m off to work. Lots of flags flying and honoring of the dead. It will be a gorgeous day.

I’m done. With Ride the Lightning. Sent it off to my publisher last night. Yeah, there’s edits to be done (I used the phrase “like X spilling through a window” three effing times! You’d think I would have a better grasp of the English language, wouldn’t ya?), but I’m a good girl and spin through the edits pretty quickly. RTL will be out December 3.

With RTL Dave2 makes his literary debut, following in the footsteps of Karl (Karl with a K), Gooster (Corey Green), Marty (the Fairy Godfather), and Vahid who is the star of RTL. In this book, Dave2 is David Forrester, a powerful Magia (wizard) who runs a BDSM club called Far From Heaven. Dave is the best friend of the heroine, so he spends the length of the book wanting to kick Vahid’s ass. Unfortunately for Dave, Vahid is the one who gets to have all the sex in the book. In a gazebo, against the wall, in a bed, on the floor, in a shower, in a hay field (in shifted form), and in a BDSM dungeon.

Note for Jennifer Leeland: I think the wall sex scene in this one is hotter than the one in Hot Water.

Not as much humor in this book as there has been in previous books. Oh there’s a touch or two and there is my trademark of a running gag of some kind. In Hot Water, it was Eden’s pretty pink pussy. In Fire Season, it was Garret being a bean counter. In RTL, it’s the fact that Emily loves meat – steak mostly.

Now that I’m done with the novel (it’s longer than Fire Season) it’s time to move on to Christmas. I’ve got three holiday short stories to crank out, one of which will be FREE. I love that word.

On the personal front, I’ve been battling my damn arthritis and I think I’m starting to have hip issues. It sucks majorly. I’ve been able to manage my pain pretty well without having to suck down a lot of meds which are bad for my liver and stomach. Lately though, I’ve been eating Tylenol for dinner. Never a good thing.  Gonna have to put my thinking cap on and figure out how to better manage the pain. I don’t like sucking down meds.

For those of you who know Motley (aka Nikki), I’m not sure if I mentioned it but she and Tyler (her boyfriend of three years and her first real love) have broken up.  It wasn’t a bad breakup in the sense that they hate each other and all that shit, but it was a horrible breakup nonetheless. Distance did them in. He lives in Bakersfield now and we live in Orange County and the distance thing just doesn’t work. I think they were both heartbroken, but they just aren’t in the same place in their lives either.

Motley’s kind of lost these days and all she really does is draw on her tablet and play WoW. I figure she’ll come out of her tailspin eventually. We all did when we lost our first love. It’s hard to watch from the Mom-sidelines though, especially when I catch her crying.

As for me, things are… okay. Not great. Not bad. But okay. Bearable. Liveable.  Communication would make things better I think, but there’s a small percentage of me that says it wouldn’t, that it would blow everything the hell up, and that keeps me from pushing the issue. The little devil’s advocate inside me pokes me with his pitchfork and says, “But wouldn’t you rather KNOW?” while my brain tells him, “Fuck off. Half a loaf is better than none asshole.” So that’s where I am. Loverly, ain’t it?

So now I’m down to needing a very pretty Marcus this Monday. I picked four winners at the Breeder’s Cup this weekend (Goldikova, Conduit, Dancing with Silks, and Zenyatta) so between that and finishing Ride the Lighting, I feel like a bit of a celebration.

Isn’t that purdy? *sigh* Almost has a John Stamos look to him. Cept that Marcus has more muscle. HEH. Alrighty, I’m off to work. You all have yourselves a great Monday! MUAH!

Thank you to everyone who came by here to comment and wish me a happy birthday, who left it on my wall at Facebook, emailed me, twatted me, texted me, wrote blog posts and Yahoo group posts about me, etc. Your wishes made my workday (my deadline yanno) go much smoother.

No, I’m not done yet, but I’ve done a self-edit on Parts One and Two and fixed some continuity issues that were plaguing the story. One hundred and ten pages are as cleaned up as I’m going to get them for now. Now, I’m on the last bit.  Part Three is a wrap up. Get through all their issues and give them the HEA. Then a quick epilogue which will have a bit of my trademark humor (this book has very little humor) and it will be off to my editor. YAY!

I must say, Vahid has been a difficult character to work with. Stubborn. Secretive. Loyal. All of which serve to cause him problems with his mate. And all of which almost lose him his mate. You do get to see the tender side of this tough character though. When his mate tries to commit suicide, his reactions make you want to cry. When he tries to make up for three years of mistakes with her, you want to cry. He’s a character with very deep emotions and his intensity will hopefully draw readers to him.

Well, it’s Monday and I do have a Marcus and for my birthday I had… the Motherlode! WOOT! Damn. The M’s sure do have it. Marcus… Motherlode… Mmmmm chocolate. Rott bought birthday dinner from Claim Jumper including the Motherlode. Not the whole cake. Gawd. We’d be dead now if he had. One slice was enough for us to eat on all weekend long. I feel like I’ve been OD’d on chocolate cause I had some with Extreme Moose Tracks ice cream. Gah. That’s waaaay too much chocolate. It sure makes for a nice birthday cake though. One slice feeds all.

Here’s today’s Marcus. I needed something right up there with the Motherlode. Something to OD on…

Mmmm, yeah. That works for me. What a gorgeous Monday Marcus. The M’s truly do have it today. Have a simply fantastic M-Monday!