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Oh, that old saying… I’m trotting it out because I was in a haze due to lack of sleep this morning and forgot (yes, I know, how the fuck could I FORGET?) that it was Monday. Oy to the vey.  So it’s still Monday here on the West Coast and I’m gonna post my Marcus Monday. Heh.

I was up late on Sunday (until almost 1 am) because Rott decided to spend some money. He blew out a speaker last week and since he cannot be without music, and cannot abide listening to music with crackly one-sided, sounds like shit busted speakers… he went to Frys Electronics. He went to buy a $479 Onkyo 5.1 Stereo Surround Sound Home Theater System. 600+ watts. Oooooh. He came home with a 1200 Watt Onkyo 7.1 Stereo Surround Sound Home Theater System for $499. Yep. Only $20 more.

He made me laugh because he said out the window to the neighbors (who like to eavesdrop), “The last stereo was only 200 watts. This is 1200 watts.  This is ONE THOUSAND times louder and I’m about to drown out your basketball bouncing brats, incessantly barking ankle biters, whining, screaming babies, and all the shit you talk about me on your fucking patio.”

Oh, I love it when he gets all worked up and then blasts Motley Crue or Tool at them. Now, he can do it one thousand times louder! Woot!

At any rate, we were up late watching Law Abiding Citizen and drinking Vampire wine. The buzz of the saw in 1200 watts of surround sound was surreal. I loved it.

Also this past weekend, I got Nookie. Not sex. Nookie. I bought a Nook ebook reader at Barnes and Noble. In the settings, you can name your Nook. Of course, I just named it Nookie. I like the play on words. I read sexy erotic romances on my Nook. What better name for it than Nookie.

It must be time for Marcus. Rott is tweaking on the speakers again and we might be watching Up In the Air if he finishes before it gets too late. LOL

I might have posted this one before, but damn. It’s so hot it bears repeating.

Before I go I want to give a shout out to my friend Hilly who is driving back to California from Florida. She left here almost as if the hounds of hell were nipping at her heels, but she’s coming back better and stronger than ever and I just wanted to say how happy I am for her and ask you all to wish her a safe trip.

Hope you have a great Monday, what’s left of it anyway!

Um, yeah. I don’t do the vote begging thing very well. “Vote for meeeeee!”  I’m the type of person who will tell everyone there is a voting opportunity, but leave it at that. I’ll post it here, post it to the Yahoo groups I belong to on the appointed promo days, and pretty much leave it at that. The voting thing eats at me because it’s just not logical.

Let me backtrack for a second here and tell you what’s going on. Love Romances Cafe, a book review site, announced their nominees for the Best of 2009. Fire Season has been nominated for Best Shape Shifter Novel. I am, of course, honored. I posted excerpts and promo’d a little at LRC’s showcase day on their group yesterday. But voting starts today so I’m pretty sure the Yahoo groups are inundated with authors pimping for votes. *sigh*

To me this process is not logical. It’s backward. Of course, as much as I love Elisa Rolle, I thought the Rainbow Awards were a little backward too. (Although to give Elisa her due, she tried really, really hard to make it as agenda free as possible and I commend her for even taking on the project.) Here’s the deal. With the Rainbow Awards, Elisa allowed everyone to nominate books and vote on them. Then she took the popular vote winners to a panel of judges. I liked this… except that the judges then got to add to the list with books they thought belonged there. That didn’t feel right to me. I just wanted to yell, “Either or, people! Either or!” With the judges adding books to the list on top of the popular voting, it just felt like there were more chances for people to push an agenda.

With LRC’s nominees, I think (and don’t quote me here cause I didn’t ask) the LRC staff looked at the reviews they’d given that year and chose their nominees from that list. Now, they are asking the public to vote on them to choose the winner. And, as you can tell, I’m not so crazy about that process either. And don’t even get me started on Preditors and Editors! A well respected site letting people nominate themselves and vote as much as they want based on email and IP addresses. Puleeze. What a joke. I can’t for the life of me understand why they would do that. In my eyes, it simply tarnishes their reputation.

I guess I just feel that there needs to be a clear selection process for nominees and then a clear judging process based on criteria. Not this popular voting crap. I won’t win jack no matter how good my book is because I don’t “pimp the vote.” Yeah, sure Fire Season did get the popular vote win at Rainbow Awards, but I wonder if then it made the judges leery of it. Cause yanno, I might have been had I been in their shoes.

To me, you need a selection committee to choose nominees. (In a review site’s case, this would be people who make the selection from the top reviews of the year.) Then you need a group of judges (not the same people as the selection committee) to make their choices based on a set of criteria. Of course, I suppose I’m living in a rose colored glasses world to hope that things would be done in such a logical manner in all these awards. And I don’t mean to sound ungrateful either. I just like things to be fair and when you can’t bring yourself to pimp for votes, things become really unfair.

At any rate, Fire Season is nominated for Best Shape Shifter Book of 2009. If you would like to vote for it, and/or happen to think it IS the best shape shifter book you read in 2009, I invite you to send in a vote. Here is the information:

Voting begins FEBRUARY 15th and ends FEBRUARY 22nd.

To vote: Send an email to dawn_roberto AT yahoo DOT com with “LRC’s “BEST OF 2009″ Awards” in subject. If this is not in the subject it will not be counted.

All entries must be received by 2/23/2010. Any entries received after that will NOT be counted and automatically deleted.

To vote for Fire Season just state in the body of your email “Fire Season – Best Shape Shifter.”

In other news, Flirty Author Bitches is back up and running with a line-up of Monday-Friday blogging with some of the hottest authors and aspiring authors out there! Today’s blogger is my friend Regina Carlysle. Please stop by and show her a little belated Valentine’s love and you’ll be entered in a drawing to win a prize.

I’ve submitted Insolence to Cobblestone so now it’s a wait and see thing. Still waiting on edits for Where There’s Smoke. The AWH contest for Rekindled ends today. AND, I need to power on with the reluctant Common Ground. I thought the addition of Weylyn to this story would make it easier, but it started turning into the Weylyn show because Marius and Sair have… issues. *sigh* I’ll be spending lots of quality time with them today.

Now, my Marcus for today is a little bit of yummy that I seriously need on this holiday Monday.

If you’ve been by Winterheart Dot Com lately, you’ll have noticed that there’s some sawdust from construction. I still don’t have all the graphics up nor have I figured out the stupid thumbnail script yet. I will. I just need some time. I have plans to revamp this blog too but the header will stay so don’t worry that you won’t recognize it one day. LOL

Have yourselves a simply wonderful President’s Day Monday! MUAH!

I’m in a tearing hurry this morning because I’m very close to finishing Insolence, which puts me back on track to get done all the stuff I need to do.  A part of the scene I’m struggling with came to in the shower so I need to spit it out so I don’t forget it. So forgive me if I rush through this Monday’s inane chatter.

First of all, I’m guest blogging at Cindy Jacks’ about Love. CLICK HERE to see what I had to say! Second, Fire Season’s trailer was reviewed by 1st Turning Point and received 4 parrots! That’s a great score! Third, I tore down Winterheart Design this weekend and it’s slowly coming back up. I needed to change some outdated links (a former client took down the template I made for her and didn’t tell me) but when I looked at the site, I went… aw, fuckit. Fourth, I was in a chat with publishers and editors and the like and the Editor in Chief from Ellora’s Cave (generally considered THE big romance epublisher) made it clear that she’d been looking at my work. Off the group, in email, she invited me to submit a manuscript directly to her rather than through the regular channels. Even if I didn’t send her a manuscript, it’s a feather in my cap to have her issue the invite. As far as I could tell, I was the only one in the chat she spoke to like that. Yup, I am flattered. After all, didn’t I just start this journey a year ago?

So now, I’m gonna slap a Marcus on here and head out to clean my inbox and drop that bit of scene into Insolence. That story is so hot I don’t dare open it in the office to work on at lunch!

Yum! Even in a hoodie and jeans he looks great!

Wishing you all a very happy Monday!

Later this week, on the 7th, I’ll be over at Cindy Jacks’s blog talking about love.  It’s February, so people tend to wanna talk about those tender emotions.  I write about them all the time because my books and stories always have a happy ending.  I’m the kind of person who has to have a HEA (happily ever after.) Or some sort of happy ending at any rate. I don’t want to read about the angst without having it all work itself out, handing the hero and heroine a reward.

In real life, things don’t always work out that way. In my life, the angst has always outweighed the HEA. I think some of us are meant to have to struggle. Very little in my life has come easy, ergo I learned to appreciate the hard won victories.  Things mean more to me if I have to work for it. I tend to hang on to people as long as I can, try to work out issues, try to give them what they need and want, try to keep and nurture the love I have. But sometimes, no matter how hard you work, love still slips away. I’ve lost a lot of people in my life so I prize the ones I have right now. I know that our hearts seem to be the regenerative type, and if we lose someone today, later on we’ll find someone else to love. Still, I’d rather not have go through that again. I just want this HEA to work itself out NOW.

Someone I’ve known and loved since I was 17 years old (I’m not sure I should tell you how many years that is… but it’s more than thirty LOL) did a nice thing this week. He told the readers of his blog about me and sent them here. I think most of his audience are mommy bloggers, which I’m so not. After all, Motley (Nikki) is twenty now and I don’t think she ever called me Mommy anyway. *wink*

Anyway, David told people about me in a little post that exposes some of the framework upon which my heart sits. It felt strangely timely to read his words about my past and feel the connection to my present. You should click THIS and hop on over to see what he said. He was probably my first real love, first real lover, odd as that may seem since he’s decidedly gay. But back then we were just kids, beginning to work our way out of the teens, learning about emotions and sex and a host of other stuff we just really had no clue about. The piece of my heart that David owns is just one of those things about love that we can’t exactly quantify. It just IS.

I must need a sweet, sexy Marcus today. Something to make my old heart pound.  I used to think about my Bar characters a lot more than I do now and thinking about my signature character Alexandria and her mate Alaric always meant that I had that image of Marcus in my head. I miss Lex so I think maybe I need to a write a post about her. After all, she lets me use her name on my books, the least I could do is visit her once in awhile, eh? So here’s my Marcus for today, all sexy and smokey-eyed.

Don’t forget to come by Cindy’s on February 7th to see what I have to say about that thing called Love.  Also, don’t forget that Marty and I have a new release filled with spooky stories. You can pick up Weirdly 3 at Wild Child Publishing.

One last thing… go give my pal Tess some love. Her book Latin Rhythm is scheduled for release on the 4th but the buy link is live NOW. Her cover is probably the best cover I’ve ever done.

Wishing you all a very wonderful Monday!