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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!

We watched the Transporter 2 and 3 last night. Jason Statham sure is sexy. True, he’s got the male pattern baldness thing happening, but he deals with it well. And he’s got some seriously nice shoulders and arms. I wouldn’t turn him down if he wanted to… well, you know. *wink*

Really though, the sexiness in those movies came not so much from Statham as from the car. That Audi A8 was like Super Car. It flew through the air. It drove on two wheels. It jumped, wove, and spun. It went into the goddamned lake and drove away a half hour later. And  in the end, it was shiny and gorgeous, all growly with power and testosterone. I was in love. I think maybe Rott was too despite the fact that it wasn’t a stick. I know it made him want to get rid of his SUV.

It’s funny how we define sexy. Everyone has a different definition. Yet, last night, that Audi defined sexy for both of us. Maybe for different reasons, but still the same outcome. It’s not often you can call a sedan sexy. That’s usually reserved for sports cars. And Statham did drive a Lamborghini in the second movie when he’s chasing Alessandro Gassman. (Whom my friend Carol uses to define sexy. But he has big teeth so he’s not even close to my idea of sexy. Well, maybe if he kept his mouth shut and didn’t smile. LOL) Yeah, the black Lambo was sexy, but still, the Audi was more so.

Perhaps that sedan came out more sexy in these movies because of the way they treated it almost as if it was a character in it’s own right. Tires smoking, engine growling, shaking with anticipation like a cat about to pounce, it prepares to break through the guardrail and leap onto the top of a train. Oh, baby. It was sexy. And I swear, that visual I got has to be what the filmmakers intended.

Everyone has their own definition of sexy, but a good writer can take the most mundane of things and make it sexy. The Transporter screenwriter sure did. The car had far more RAWR than Jason Statham… because someone knew how to write scenes where they focused on the car in a particular way in order to create an aura of “Oh, baby, sexy!” around what is essentially, a plain black sedan. I swear they should give that screenwriter an Oscar just for all the hard ons and wet panties the car caused in those movies. And I bet Audi wants to kiss his/her feet.

For this Monday, I need an especially sexy Marcus to combat that Audi. And I think I found one.

A wet man is good to find. Yum.

Tomorrow is Tuesday aka Release Day for me and Marty with Weirdly 3. Don’t forget to stop by his blog and offer your congratulations on the publishing of his first work of fiction. I know it won’t be the last.

Have a spectacular Monday!

Thanks to Mina Carter who has no problems asking for what she wants, I have a new cover by the most sought after cover artist around. The buzz is that if you have an Anne Cain cover your sales will soar. I don’t know how true that is, but I’m about to find out. My latest contract with Liquid Silver Books has garnered me a cover I completely adore. And I stand in awe of this artist’s talent.  I can’t even describe how hot this cover is so I’m just gonna post it and let you all drool.

My Marcus for today seems nearly eclipsed by the beauty of that cover. Except that in my book, nothing ever eclipses Marcus.

If you want to see some vintage photos of me head on over to Facebook and look up one of my oldest friends, Kim Williams-Potts. Kim is Motley’s godmother and she posted some photos of me taken right after Nikki was born. Now, that is really back in the day stuff!

It’s a rainy week ahead here in SoCal so I’m gonna try to stay dry and warm. Hopefully, all of you do too! Happy Monday!

I love this guy. He is always there with a kind word. He’s the most supportive of friends. He’s smart and funny and makes you wish he wasn’t married. *wink* Now, he has something happening that he’s always longed for… to be a published fiction author. Marty’s first fiction release is due out January 26!

Last year, I inherited at project at Wild Child Publishing.  An editor left and the project fell to me in terms of finding authors and stories for it.  I wasn’t quite sure how to go about that. After all, I don’t usually hang with authors who write horror.

Weirdly III is an invite only anthology of horror stories. It’s full of twisted paranormal stories in the Twilight Zone genre. Finding freaky stuff to suit the book was just… freaky.

It became a labor of love, however, as I grew to enjoy the creepy stories that landed one by one in my Inbox. As I went along, counting word counts with an eye toward having 70K so the book would have a shot at coming out in print eventually, it dawned on me that I knew writers outside of the world of romance and erotic romance.

So I sent Marty an email and asked him if he was interested. And he was. Now, months after this book suffered many a set back, it’s ready for publication and there is Marty’s name on the cover. Oh, my name’s there too, but I’m not nearly as excited about that as I am to see Marty there!

I really loved Marty’s twisted story about a singer who wishes he could be in more than one place at one time. It was exciting and creepy at the same time and Marty did a great job learning how to write for a publisher. (No head hopping! *wink*)

On January 26, take a run over to Banal Leakage and congratulate Marty on his release day. Then head on over to Wild Child Publishing and buy yourself a copy of Weirdly III. You will not be sorry you did!

No, I haven’t really been writing. A little here and there, but not full on writing. Yes, I have been busy. What could be taking up so much of my time? Apparently, it’s a lot of this stuff:

http://www.reginacarlysle.com

Oh, and some of this:

http://winterheart.com/testsite

With a side order of this:

http://authorsalacart.com/tess

And some luscious…

http://authorsalacart.com/testsite

Oh, there’s a few more too, but you get the picture I’m sure. I’m trying to get all these sites up and running so that I can relax and finish two stories and then move on the new projects I’ve been laying out for 2010.Every day though I awake to a new request for a quote on a site. Huh. Now that I’m busy writing, I get offers all the time to make trailers and websites for pay. When I needed to do them for pay and had time to do them, I couldn’t drum up any sales. Go figure.

Now, that I’ve shown you why I’m yawning so much, I’ll pass on a Marcus and head on outta here.

This is such a nice photo and it’s really big too if you click on it. Yummy.

Hope you enjoyed the pretty websites. Have a great Monday!

I’ve had so much time off lately with the holidays falling as they did that I’m not very motivated to go to work. And the truth of the matter is that I’m not very motivated with a lot of things right now. I’m kinda in a BLECH mood. Here’s some of the things I’ve been doing. I think it will explain best.

I took down rottnroll.com so I could move it to new hosting. Cancelled the old hosting last night then didn’t bother to put in the nameservers to get rottnroll.com back up. Instead, Rott and I watched Taken. (Good flick BTW.)

I started to put the final scenes in a book for Cobblestone, stopped to make lunch, and then decided clean up my hard drive instead of write.

I discovered some of my books had earned silver stars at All Romance eBooks. I thought about putting the award banner on the book pages on my website and ended up chatting on IM to my publisher instead.

I went to the horse racing sim and set train for weeks for some of my horses. I pondered entering the ones that need to be entered in races for this week then decided to chat in their chatroom instead. (It was a funny chat too.)

So I procrastinated and dicked around. I did some stuff but not really the stuff I shoulda been doing. I was kinda BLECH. I think it’s a holiday hangover. (BTW Rott and I saw The Hangover on New Year’s Day. Very funny movie!) I even stood in the kitchen intending to make stroganoff for dinner on Saturday night and as soon as Rott said, “Want me to go get something?” I sent him to Burger King. Ahh, fries. Yum.

Speaking of YUM, here’s today’s Marcus.

This picture is in honor of the fact that I started Common Ground, book 5 of the Tales series. The prologue is Weylyn and his mate having sex out in the open in the Scottish highlands. They meet a female werewolf who’s been watching them get it on. She turns out to be the heroine of the story.  Chapter One starts off just bad. The hero is masturbating. LMAO Not sure where I got these crazed ideas from, but I think they are gonna work! Now, I just gotta ditch the BLECH and get to work on this stuff.

Have a great BLECH-free Monday and Happy New Year!

I’m late, I know. I promised New Year’s Eve and it’s New Year’s morning. Still, I do have something for you to show you that my life is not all bloggy goodness. It’s a bunch of numbers. The numbers represent what I did as an author in the last year.

They are an interesting lot these numbers. They are the reason I often don’t blog more than once a week. They are the reason I sometimes have more money in my pocket. They are the reason I’m actually kinda sorta managing to send Motley (Nikki) to art college.

I’m going to post the link to a blog post that talks about the numbers. I’m not going to talk about them in quite the same way here in this post. The link I’m giving you really explains the numbers and talks a little about how much promotion I had to do to sell all the books I’ve sold, gives you an idea of the number of books I’ve sold, and talks a little about how much money I’ve made. It is an interesting post if you want see whether all the time I spent was worth it or if you’re interested in being an author yourself.

So here’s the post: A Year in the Life.

And here’s the numbers:

Submissions: 17

Contracts: 17

Releases: 15

Print books: 3

Rejections: 3

Revise and Resubmits: 2

Anthologies: 3

Short Stories: 8

Novellas: 6

Novels: 2

Bestsellers: 4

Publishers: 8

Radio Interviews: 3

Feature Author Spot: 1

Interviews: 13

Guest Blog Posts: 15

Two things happened after I posted this on the 30th.  On New Year’s Eve, I discovered that Christmas Catch hit All Romance eBooks’ main top ten bestseller list. It was the ninth biggest seller over the past three days.  Making that list is a big thing.  This morning, it’s moved up to number eight. Definitely WOOT worthy.

The other thing that happened hit me in a way that touched on every facet of who I am. Not just Lex Valentine the author but Winter the person.  One of the most respected review sites posted a list for 2009. Now, back in September they posted a list, compiled by recommendations from the readership of the site, of the all time best gay books. Fire Season was on it and I was stoked. The list posted yesterday was the owner’s own top ten best of 2009 list.

Now, Wave is well known in the reviewing community and in the GLBT writing world. It’s almost as if you’re golden if Wave likes your book. When Wave reviewed Fire Season earlier in the year, you could tell she really liked it. But then she posted her list yesterday and I discovered she REALLY LOVED Fire Season. My book was number nine on her list.

I got really excited seeing that. Then I looked at the list of her honorable mentions and this huge sense of awe came over me. Some of the best and biggest names in GLBT romance fiction were on that list of honorable mentions. And she liked Fire Season more.  I can’t remember when I’ve been more awestruck.  My little dragon book beat out Victor J. Banis,  Z.A. Maxfield,  James Buchanan, and my publisher Laura Baumbach? I could barely believe it.

As an author, my chest puffed out. Egads, what an accomplishment to close out the year! As a person, it brought tears to my eyes.  Recognition is important to all humans. I’ve not really received much recognition for anything in my life. After ten and a half years at my company I got the Employee of the Quarter award in December. One of my co-workers was amazed that I’ve never won this award before. In fact, she was shocked I’ve never won the Employee of the Year. Her shock actually meant a lot more to me than actually winning an award. It meant that someone recognized how much I do there. Then to make this top ten list… What a way to close out 2009.

Being recognized for what I do means a lot to me. It makes those numbers truly mean something. It acknowledges the sacrifices I’ve made.  It helps gives me a sense of worth. And even though I’m broke and in debt this New Year’s Day, I still feel a bit bright and sparkly from the recognition with my achievements sitting out there for the world to see and some of my longest held personal goals finally met.

It’s a new year and because of the recognition I’ve received, my outlook is more positive than it’s been in years. Instead of wondering how I’ll ever be able to match or top what I did in 2009, my thoughts flow along a positive line that hums with energy. How big can I dream? How much can I accomplish this year? And where the hell is my coffee? I need to get started!

Wishing you and yours a happy, productive, and prosperous New Year.