Picture my head in the clouds. I slap out floral arrangements and work around customers to write. My mom has an anemia bone cancer (doing well after treatment, thanks), and my loving parents put the last of six florist shops in my name including all the paperwork (their excuse, her vision isn’t what it should be), so as of June I’m not just a slave, but an owner also. Ashes’ release is scheduled for May, the worst month of the year for a florist, but priorities. I clearly know the Logan twins come before anything.
My life is as mundane as grey parchment. My family thinks I’m deficient, my son has to have a few beers to dummy himself down before he explains how to set up a word sheet in excel to do sales tax, blah blah.
I can’t say enough nice things about the publishers who’ve opened their doors to me.
Did I mention that Ashes comes out in ten months, 300 days, 7,200 hours, 43,2000 minutes?
Here's a sample:
Lyle Logan: “Why? Give me one reason I should believe this crap? I think, therefore I am. I don’t need some frickin’ deity to tell me—”
Arlene: “Yes, you do. Without me, you can’t form words. And, son, you will watch your mouth on this blog. Understand?”
Lyle: “No. I don’t understand a god@#$% thing. Because you’re bored, the sweetest guy on—where the @#$% am I? Cyberspace? Right. Anyway, my twin suffers a horrible death and it’s my fault?”
Sigh. “I’m not infallible.”
Lyle: “Just a self righteous, under worked florist who makes me hold the knife to the sacrificial goat.”
Arlene. “Idiot. Myles is a lamb, not a goat and if you’d called his lover, the cop still wouldn’t have been able to save either of you. Sorry.”
Lyle: “Screw you. Bring on hell. It’d have to beat listening to you.”
Arlene: “Myles, you there? Talk to your brother, will you?”
Myles: “Yes, God. What should I say?”
Lyle: “Hey, MyMy? Whaddya get when you cross a wimp with a puss?”
Myles: “I’m not a wuss, am I, God? But I am dead, right? Not a zombie who’s gonna eat Ren’s brains out.”
Sigh. “How many times does Lyle have to explain? No vamps, no zombies, you’re a sweetheart without a backbone. If I ask you to say no to the next predator who wants to jump you when Lyle’s not around to terrify them, can you do it?”
Myles: “Yes.”
Arlene: “A bisexual slut will remain true to one man?”
Myles: “Yes. I love Ren.”
Arlene: “You’re painting in the park. A lonely cougar eyes you. She asks you to carry her bags, walk her home, come in and step into her bedroom, what will you say?”
Myles “Yes. Right? I mean, I’m strong and I like helping people. Can I ask you something?”
Lyle: “Give it up, God. He doesn’t have a safe word. Only one way to save him, leave me and mine alone. Stay the @#$% out of our business. Don’t you have flowers to sell? Paperwork to do? Other bastards to torment?”
Sigh. “Myles, you didn’t answer. Can you say no?”
Myles: “Yes.”
Sigh. “What’d you want to ask me, son?”
Myles: “Why vanilla? Can my favorite flavor be hard spicy mango, thick sweet pistachio, a threesome with chocolate and strawberry, so many lovely things. And, am I seriously D-E-A-D? Murdered in Vegas? Where—exactly—am I? Lyle can’t die too, but he also won’t leave me, right? It’s fact. We’re binary. Can’t be separated—or, I’d die. Where’s Ren? Am I a bad man? Why does Lyle think….”
You’d find me on my website if my loving elder sister would either give me my domain name that she got for me 3-4 years ago and stop insisting I’m not capable of establishing a website, or she’d just get it done.
Yippee, I have a blog with links to tweet, FB, Goodreads, etc.
Hello Ginger and everyone. I’m nervous and excited to talk about what’s happening in my life as an upcoming author for Muse It Up Publishing / Muse It Hot!
I left the corporate world to follow a dream ten years ago. Much has happened since then.
My first interest in fiction was writing for Young Adults, under another name. After writing three YA books, all still works in progress, I dipped my toes into the romance genre, more specifically paranormal erotica.
Besides reading YA fiction, I’m an avid reader of paranormal erotica and find it fun, new, and exciting to write.
In my writing journey, I’d joined a number of face-to-face and on-line writing critique groups. Big Kids Muse group is where I met Lea Schizas. She has an awesome Muse Online Writer’s Conference in October which I’ve attended for the past four years. I highly recommend it to any aspiring or accomplished writer.
When Lea opened submissions for her upcoming Muse It Up Publishing / Muse It Hot! online book and e-book store, I submitted Big Girls Don’t Cry Wolf.
BLURB:
After a tragic loss of her twin sister, Brea works hard to prove herself worthy of her adoptive parent’s extra attention. She focuses on the success of the rustic resort her parents deeded to her.
Priorities change when sexy twin wolves in human form walk into Brea’s life.
A dangerous rogue abducts her, but whom, if anyone comes to her rescue?
Lea accepted my manuscript, now scheduled for release on March 1, 2011.
It’s been a whirlwind of writing activity for me ever since, with edits, creating a blog, and marketing. The online groups offered to authors as part of ‘Muse It Up Publishing’ – http://musituppublishing.com and http://museithotpublishing.com – share knowledge, encouragement, and wisdom, everything a writer needs to help their writing flow at a steady pace. It’s hard to express how grateful I am to have found a place among such great authors.
I have an author page on the Muse It Hot! site where you can read more about my book.
Another short erotica novel I wrote, Alone On the Beach, was originally scheduled to be released on June 1, 2010 through Last Stand Productions. This novel is patiently waiting for its day in the sun…or rather, for their e-store to open, date pending.
My great admission in life is that I’m a sponge, always learning and growing along the way. It fascinates me, the multitude of ways to bring characters together, sparking relationships that blaze across the pages. I can only hope I do those characters justice.
What an interesting thing it is to write a first novel. I started my journey just over a year ago. My swirling imagination continually took me to places and adventures that left the hairs on the nape of my neck standing like soldiers. Then the day arrived when the twinge of an idea crept into my mind. I could write a novel.
As an Engineer by profession, I’d published numerous technical papers. My love of science fiction and the power of a fast paced read led my imagination down the Science Fiction Thriller trail. The plot, characters and conflicts literally unfolded before my eyes. Writers block – what’s that?
For months I became obsessed with my writing. Enjoying the gift of staying home to raise my two children, now teens, I managed my family and wrote.
By May of 2010, Spectra was a completed manuscript. The few friends and family that had helped with the editing gave it rave reviews. As I proceeded along the writer’s learning curve, I discovered the fun was over and the work had just begun: submissions, a swear word in an author’s world.
I glued myself to a chair and struggled through the painstaking query letter and synopsis stage of submitting a novel. Driven to find a home for Spectra, I submitted it to every agent and publisher that would accept simultaneous submissions. What a humbling experience: rejections by the swarms with a spattering of maybes. I’m certain that avid readers would agree that far too often bestsellers by known authors are terrible reads. Despite this, the book market is a very difficult market to break into if you are unpublished. I’ve come to believe that if you want to read a fantastic book, read a first novel. If they’re not stellar, they won’t be published!
My determination did not falter and in July I was offered a contract with MuseItUp Publishing, a new Canadian publisher headed up by Lea Schizas. Before signing, I did some additional research into Muse. Lea had sculpted herself an impressive reputation in the writing world with the award winning MuseItUp Online Conference she’s hosted for the past five years. The Muse business model was impressive with the ebook coming to market first to satisfy the changing demands, followed by a print version. As I signed on the dotted line, I firmly believed this is a recipe for success.
I’ve now had well over a month to enjoy being part of the growing Canadian business called the Muse team. The official launch is in October and I look forward to diving into the imaginative worlds of my fellow authors.
Spectra is due to be released in July of 2011. It is the story about the discovery of energy based life forms on a distant planet. Humans exposed to the life forms are temporarily gifted with enhanced intelligence, with the result of killing the peaceful life forms. One man’s obsession with his new found cognitive abilities, leads him down a deadly trail. More details about Spectra can be found at: http://museituppublishing.com/musepub/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=120&Itemid=82
I will close by saying to all first time authors: Never give up. Imagine and write.
One of the things writers are supposed to hate talking about is how they get their inspiration. I’ve no idea why it’s so often a topic that’s off-limits for discussion, but some authors are very precious about these things. The BBC produced an excellent comedy film a few years ago, called Cruise Of The Gods. Set during a fan convention for a low-budget cult sci-fi show which, for reasons I can’t now recall, was taking place on a cruise ship, it poked fun not only at the obsessive nature of the people who watch these shows, but the writers behind them. The creator of this particular show was determined to preserve his mystique at all costs. Taking part in a question and answer session on his work, he watched a sea of hands go up as he asked if anyone had any questions. “I’ll answer anything, apart from where I get my ideas from,” he told the assembled audience – at which point every single hand in the room went down. Of course, it turned out that he was trying to disguise the fact he was a complete hack, and all the exotic names he’d given his characters were actually anagrams of items on his local curry house menu. Still, genius or hack, the one thing your reader will always want to know is where you find the plots for your stories.
When you write a lot of erotic fiction, as I do, the other question that’s always asked is, “Do you do those things in your stories?” A friend of mine got so fed up of this, she started responding with the comment, “Did anyone ever ask Agatha Christie how many people she poisoned?” Seems everyone is keen to know whether we’re actually having all that hot, kinky, spontaneous sex we describe, or whether we just have very good imaginations. Given the vogue for women writing male/male stories, I’m surprised authors are still asked this. The same goes for paranormal erotica – unless that pale, interesting-looking man on their arm really is a vampire...
The other assumption if you write erotica is that you don’t have to put much in the way of thought into devising a plot. After all, you’re just describing two people having sex (or three people, or a woman, a vampire and a shape-shifting leopard...), right? Actually, it’s not as straightforward as that. If you’re sending a letter to Penthouse Forum, they want you to cut straight to the chase, but erotic romance demands – well, romance, as well as skill in the writing. Believable characters are important, as well as a strong sense of their relationship beyond the bedroom.
Take my forthcoming Christmas story for MuseItHOT!, Be Good To Your Elf, for example. The first thing you’ll be asking is where the inspiration came from. Well, it was a surfeit of those bad made-for-TV Christmas movies that borrow liberally from the plots of either A Christmas Carol or It’s A Wonderful Life. (You’ve watched them, don’t pretend you haven’t.) All those films seem contractually obliged to feature a scene in Santa’s Grotto, just to ram home the point it’s Christmas, which got me thinking. I’d read stories in which someone goes along to the grotto because they have a crush on Santa, or the person playing him, but the elves always seemed to be relegated to the background. It was time to take them centre stage and give them their fair share of the action.
In Be Good To Your Elf Maddie, a college student, meets cute, divorced dad Tyler while they’re both working at Santa’s Grotto. In a readers’ letter, they’d have dragged each other round the back of the model sleigh for a bout of steamy sex before you could say, “Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer.” Instead, I took the time to time to let them get to know each other, even to let Maddie have doubts about whether she should act on her attraction to a man who’s much older than she is. And what happens when she does? Well, you’ll have to read the story to find out, but let’s just say that if you can’t have a happy ending at Christmas, when can you?
So don’t be fight shy of talking about your inspiration. And if you really don’t want to tell people where you get your ideas from, then you can always borrow Harlan Ellison’s stock answer. “Poughkeepsie.”
Be Good To Your Elf will be published by MuseItHOT! in December 2010. Find out more about Elizabeth Coldwell and her writing at The (Really) Naughty Corner.
I sat here wondering what can I post? What can I possibly post that may spark interest? Then it hit me…what I’m good at preaching…Negativity Deletion.
As writers we tend to forget that the computer is not really a part of our anatomy. It’s there to allow our creative Muse to get her thoughts down before we bust a nerve cursing, “Why! Why didn’t I write it down!”
But this isn’t easy for us at times because in the background we have the whisperings of those who we call our ‘loved ones’ complaining that we spend more time on the computer than on them. No, wait, that’s my husband. GRIN! You get my drift though. These loved ones have no idea what it means to be a passionate and determined writer. You will turn blue in the face explaining this passion all for not. If it’s not in their blood then can’t truly appreciate the time spent typing away.
Now let’s turn to those ‘loved ones’ again when you are e-published:
“I thought you said you were published!”
“I am.”
“Where?”
“On line in an e-book.”
“And how the heck am I supposed to read that?”
“On an e-reader…” you silently quiver and call them moron at this point, “and they’re so cool. You can turn the page just like a ‘real’ book, and the best feature is that you can enlarge the font and read more comfortably.”
“Are you saying I’m blind?”
Walk away at this point or else you’ll end up in jail.
But those hard writing hours at times are really hard because the laundry is piling up, food needs to be cooked, kids need to be taxied here and there, family/neighbour needs that cup of coffee and chatter with you, and the parent writer is left with exhaustion. This is your fault. You allow this to happen.
Perfect that nasty uplifted foaming at the mouth stare-down and you’ll frighten Godzilla himself if he dares to come knocking on your door for a cuppa when he knows it’s your writing time.
I believe a month or two ago two of my friends decided once again to drop by unexpectedly at a time they know is reserved for my writing and online business.
“Hey, what are you two doing here?”
“Came to surprise you.”
“You did but I’m in the middle of something.”
“You’re always playing on the computer.” Visualize that nasty uplifted foaming at the mouth stare-down at this point but also add a low-toned Exorcist growl, “Excuse me? Playing? Is that what you said? Let me ask you, do you see me coming to your office to ‘surprise’ you during working?”
Did I get pleasure seeing their pouts? No, but if they had the nerve to say I was ‘playing’ on the computer and didn’t respect my job then I didn’t see the need to reciprocate. Did I lose my friends? No. Did they apologize? No, but I’ve had peace and quiet when I laid down the laws of my home business to them.
So the gist of this post is to simply tell you that you are in control of your writing. Not your family, not your neighbour, and not your Muse because your Muse feeds off your emotional state and when you’re depressed she goes on a holiday without you.
Now I’m off to perfect that stare-down because someone’s knocking on the door.
Note from Ginger: This woman accomplishes more in a day than the energizer bunny. If you want proof, check out this page and discover more about Ms. Lea.
I want to thank Ginger for inviting me to come and visit with all her friends here on her blog.
She asked that I tell you a bit about what it felt like to get my first contract with Muse.
That’s easy. It was like having ten years of back luck breaking in one fell swoop. My daughter’s editor sent my story, a holiday tale called SANTA IS A LADY to Muse on March 28th. Five hours later on March 29th, the contract arrived, and I’m not sure my feet have touched ground yet.
I had written a whole bunch of new stories ten years before that had gotten the “Clothespin-to-the-nose” award from my then editor and agent, so I hadn’t really held out any hope that things would change this time around. I’m older, after all, are far less naïve, but surprise, surprise, Muse is a wiser place to be. In fact, I have done some investigating of those two from the past, and I can’t find hide nor hair of them….so I’m sort of suspecting they might have been conning me. Why?
Well, they wanted poetry…but with a twist. See, according to them, my agent, Steven was a published author, so everything was going to have to published under HIS name, and I suspect, NOW, that he wanted to be published as a poet, but couldn’t write the stuff fast enough to meet whatever deadline they had…and that’s where I came in.
I was excited about the prospect of getting my own writing published and they promised to work on my favorite stuff, my stories, once the poetry was done. I’m really not happy writing poetry. It’s too confining, thanks to the rules of pentameter and such. To make a long story short, they DID look at my stuff every so often and told me I was writing crap there, but the poetry…? That was top notch. Oddly, I don’t know if any of the poetry ever made it, but come December 1, 2010, Santa is a Lady, my favorite stuff, IS going to really be out there for the world to finally see.
So, my feet are still bopping around from cloud formation to cloud formation because once that first contract came, eight more have followed in rapid succession. It’s incredible, and here’s the craziest…six of those nine contracts were manuscripts I wrote back then that those two told me were CRAP!
Would you like to know a little bit about my stories?
Sure, I’d love to tell you. Santa is a Lady is the first and it will be out on December 1, 2010. This story centers around a Christmas catastrophe. Santa is arrested five days before Christmas and Beck Cavington needs to replace the Santa she’s advertised for her sweets store, but all the professional Santas are already hired out. Her solution? Badger her best friend Angie Brightwell into donning the red suit. Nothing can go wrong with such a plan, right?
February is the month of Valentine and the month Forever With You will be released. Coryne has hired the all too handsome Keith Patterson and his crew to build a very special house for her within a limited timeline. She doubts he’s capable…he’s too good looking, plus he scrapes nerves she doesn’t want to have scraped, but friends convince her to hire him. Still she decides to move a small camping travel onto the site and oversee the crew. This of course, puts her in close proximity to a man who causes her to have powerful reactions and dreams she so does not want to have. Can she resist him, especially since he is giving off enough vibes to let her know he’s not the least bit against merging their interests? And can you guess what surprise ending is in store for Coryne?
The Pendulum Swings due out on March 1, 2011 is sort of a Time Travel with a twist. She wakes up with amnesia in a body she does not recognize surrounded by people who hate her. None of it feels right, and soon she knows why. Her last memory, her body being skewered to death in ancient Rome, and then waking here, in this body, in this future, married to a man who hates her so much he can barely stand to look at her.
May brings spring and change and change is about to befall Mick when Twilight Comes is released May 1, 2011. Mick is a successful stockbroker. Out there in the “world” he is polished, secure, and admired, but no one knows his secrets, but the lid on his secrets is about to blow sky high. Will anything he holds dear be left standing when the dust settles?
Winter in June? Well not quite even though the title of my story coming out on June 1, 2011 is In From the Cold. Mari is 50 and swore off men not downing Geritol on a regular basis a long time ago. On her mountain there’s her and Hector, her 90 year old neighbor until he ups and dies willing her the proceeds from his cabin. She tries to arrange it so only men with advanced prostate problems can buy Hector’s cabin but her son’s marriage out west requires her signing temporary Power of Attorney over to her real estate agent and that brings down her ruination. He’s 35 and moving in the day Mari returns. All through the spring and summer she’s forced to endure the hunk parading around her mountain in all manner of undress, stirring hormones Mari’d long ago buried. It had to stop. How? Only one thing…she had to jump his bones, so the deed, get him out of her system and get back to being herself. Yeah, bound to work, right?…Three nights later a big blizzard is coming their way.
The dog days of August will be heated up with the release of This Time Forever. They’ve never met in person although they have talked together on the Internet and phone for months. Finally he has business that brings him east and they agree to meet at the Hilton. From the moment he arrives at LAX he begins having strange daydreams of a lifetime, vivid images of a Roman warrior and his Grecian slave lover. Driving her car from her home to the Hilton she begins having these flashes of, she knows not what, a life, a strange life unlike anything she’d ever seen on the History channel, triple x-rated visions. Is she losing her mind? One minute she is sitting in a barrel chair in the lobby of the Hilton, the next she is in Pompeii watching the hottest passion and equally most virulent rage she’d ever experienced or observed in her whole life. Time Travel? Insanity?
September 1, 2011 Tricia is called like a homing pigeon back to the tar shack she grew up in after seeing the video Reba MacEntire did for her hit song “Fancy”. She hated growing up here, and hates being back here, but equally hates the mansion that is a dying testament to the bitterness of her grandparents who’d lived in that luxury while forcing their only son and his family to subsist in this squalor. About to turn away from all of this Tricia hears her name carried on the wind, reaching out like a fist to grab on and pull her relentlessly towards that hulking shell of what had once been grandeur. She couldn’t stop her forward trek. Something was forcing her to move Beyond Yesterday.
December 1, 2011 brings us back to Northeringale and Beck Cavington and the sequel to Santa is a Lady. This time Beck’s mother Irene is determined to get Beck married within nine days and thus we have The Christmas War.
February 2012, She’s Gone is a story that pits a man against the subtle clues to a mystery. He comes home to an empty house and confusion. He cannot…will not believe his wife has left him, and yet her side of the closet is empty…only his toothbrush remains in the bathroom…still there are clues…can he unravel them and learn the truth before it’s too late for both of them?
That’s all I have for now. Every time I think my feet might get close to landing, another contract has come my way. So Muse It Up and Muse It Hot Publishing have given MY muse a glorious home and I couldn’t be happier.
