annoyance

Mar

2024

Monday, Monday…

Monday, Monday, can’t trust that day…

I have to admit that I like Mondays best when they’re not quite so… Mondayish. And today Monday is being an overachiever. Nothing I can share, mind, but beating my head against the wall would be a welcome respite, if only because I could STOP.

Needless to say, today has been a heck of a long week, and most of that was before noon. Some of it was even before coffee. It will hopefully all be resolved before dinner.

Hopefully.

Edits are coming in this week — I confirmed that. So I’ll be starting work on Morrigan’s Heir soon, and then doing a readthrough and editing pass on Morrigan’s Wrath. Deadline for me is having both back to my editor by the end of April (my target is to have everything done by April 27th — the day of the Indie Book Bazaar at Spellbound Books.) And I should hopefully have a rough synopsis for “Frog and Fae are Friends” done sometime this week, too, and then i can give a bit more thought to the worldbuilding. I’m still not sure if this will be a serial or a novel or a series of shorts. We’ll see what happens when I sit down to actually write it. Which, I have to say, not sitting down and starting either this or Tales from the Arena: Dead Man’s Hand is hard! Both of them want to be started right now!

The schedule for the rest of this week is packed solid, but it will end on a high note — someone has Senior Prom this weekend. The beginning of the fun part of Senior Year is starting.

I’d better lay in tissues…

Giveaways!

This is the last week where you can download a copy of my dark fantasy romance Counsel of the Wicked FREE through the On Fire Romance promotion. (Content warning — this book is the darkest thing that I have ever written, and includes on the page explicit sexual violence. Go carefully.)

Image of a flame. Text reads "On Fire. Free Spicy Romance Ebooks. March 1-31"

Feb

2024

It’s Blursday

I had my eyes dilated at 8:15 this morning. It is now 1:41 PM and I still can’t see clearly out of my left eye. The light sensitivity is better, but I had to turn down the brightness on both of my monitors. And I couldn’t see to drive a certain young man to class, but attendance isn’t mandatory so rather than pull Darling Husband out of meetings, we all just stayed in because it’s Blursday.

With everything going on last week, it wasn’t as much of a word week as I’ve had. I still made my target of 500 words a day for six days (words on Sunday are bonus words), so it wasn’t a bad week. It just wasn’t as prolific as the previous weeks have been. But that’s okay.

The synopsis for The Coral Throne is coming slowly. Which, it can come slowly — I’m not in a rush to get to it, and I want to make sure I get things figured out before I get to the scene where X has to attack Y and how does that work exactly? (You’ll find out. I promise. But I have to work out the details.)

There’s also this other project of mine, which currently has the placeholder title of “Frog and Fae are Friends.” I put the excerpt that popped into my head and wouldn’t get out into my newsletter a few weeks ago, and it’s been percolating in the back of my brain since. I think this might be the next Patreon project if the sex stays behind closed doors, and I’m trying to worldbuild without pushing the existing Coral Throne worldbuilding out of my head. If you missed the excerpt in the newsletter, I’ll pop a short sample of it down below. It may turn into a fantasy Sherlock Holmes kind of thing, which would be new for me, but that seems to be the direction it’s leaning. We shall see.

Still waiting on edits for Morrigan’s Heir, but if my editor’s week last week was anything like mine? I get it. I TOTALLY get it. And considering that I’m maybe a chapter and a half from finishing The Sea Prince? I can wait — a delay lets me get this manuscript finished before diving into edits, and gives me the space to let The Sea Prince get out of my head before I go back to reread it for revision. It’s all good.

So, tell me what you think of the excerpt.

Works in Progress

The Sea Prince
(The Coral Throne, Book 1)

92468 / 120000 (77.06%)

Placeholder title “Frog and Fae are Friends.” — Excerpt

Desperate times call for truly fucked up measures.

I know better than to mess with mages, let alone steal from them. I know. But I was at the very end of my non-existent rope. It had been a long, hard winter already, and there were still three moons before even an hope of a thaw. The benevolent shelters for the needy were full to bursting, and even I’d had the coin, the cheap inns were full as well. There was not a bed or a slice of floor to be had anywhere in the slums of Alatrea. Not for the likes of me.

What there was, though, was a mage, who’d taken residence in a posh, new, townhouse right before the first snow. He hadn’t been settled long enough to claim the place as his home-ground – that took at least six moons for the strongest mage, and a year or more for the average spell-slinger. That mean that the usual protection spells weren’t going to be foolproof yet.

I just wasn’t usually that much of a fool.

Jan

2023

COLD!!!!

This morning, for the first time in nearly 17 years, I had to scrape a significant amount of ice off my windshield in order to go somewhere. Florida has forgotten how to Florida.

Thankfully, my office is the warmest room in the house in the winter (because of the sun positioning. The outside wall gets warm enough to make the wax in my wax warmer melt slightly.) I have writing gloves and fuzzy blankets if it gets cold enough that the room is chilly (which has happened a couple of times in the evenings over the past month.) So my office is comfy. And the words are flowing.

The White Raven: Morrigan’s Wrath
(The White Raven Duology, Book 2)

27510 / 90000 (30.57%)

I have reached the part of the book where my characters are going “Nope, the outline was wrong. We’re doing it this way.” Which happens in every book, so I’m not complaining. The villains are revealing themselves to be not the people I thought they were, and one of the characters who I thought was a villain has decided to redeem themselves entirely. Writing is being fun again.

I’m also on the final editing pass of The Chronicles of John Zebedee, which means that I printed the manuscript out and am going through it with a green pen. I’m waiting for the newest cover revision, which I hope will show up this week, and then I can start the preorders.

I think it was last week that I mentioned that I’m trying to split my week — the weekdays are for writing and editing, and the weekend is for admin. Part of admin is taking classes, and I took an interesting one on Facebook ads over the weekend, which introduced me to a nifty thing called Amazon attribution tags. If you use these custom links in your advertising, Amazon will track your conversions and spending so you can see which of your ads are performing best. It’s pretty neat.

Facebook DOES NOT LIKE THE LINKS. I started up an ad campaign with two ad sets of two ads each. (Four ads total). Each ad has a unique link generated by the Amazon attribution, and they all point to the Amazon page for the book.

Facebook kicked out all four ads because of adult content contained IN the URL.

Let me repeat that — FB THOUGHT THE URL WAS NAUGHTY!!!

They cleared the ads on review, but I foresee this being a regular thing — set up ads. Have the ads kicked out because FB thinks my URL needs a XXX rating. Ask FB what they’re smoking. Have the ads reinstated.

Here’s hoping the data and sales are worth the headache, and that FB doesn’t suspend my ad account because they think my finely crafted links are not safe for work.

Oh, and the best part? It wasn’t even an ad for one of my steamier books! This was an ad for Written in Water! Quite possibly the tamest book I have ever written.

Make it make sense?

Jul

2019

Work in Progress: Forged in Fire, week twenty seven

Forged in Fire
Heir to the Firstborn, Book 2

98263 / 95000 (103.43%)

This is the tome that does not end, and it goes on and on my friends…

</singing>

That’s how it feels, anyway. This one is going to be a monster — we’ll be north of 100K words when we’re done here. There are, I think, another four chapters. Perhaps five once all is said and done. So we’ll finish at thirty-five chapters or thereabouts. (I’m working on thirty right now.)

I was hoping to be further along than I am this week. But… well… Mercury went retrograde and all of my home technology decided to go haywire. We’re talking gas leak in the brand-new dryer and AC taking an unscheduled vacation in the middle of July.

Now, we’ve been talking about replacing the original to the house (aka 30 year old) AC unit. So when the AC went out, we starting getting estimates for a replacement. And that’s when we found out that they don’t make AC units that will fit in the space where the old one sits. Modern units are all too TALL (funny, I thought modern technology was supposed to be smaller than the older stuff).

So replacing the AC will involve, among other things, demolishing and rebuilding our AC closet.

Needless to say, I’ve been distracted by adulting and other things this week. I did manage to get some writing done, but not NEARLY as much as I wanted.

I know what happens next. There’s that… and that other thing. There’s the big blowoff, and the big surprise. And the holy crap moment. And… maybe more mountains getting dropped.

And many, many more words. Which I’ll get on the page starting tomorrow. For now, it’s after 10PM, and I need to get some sleep. I have to wrangle AC contractors first thing tomorrow, so that I CAN word.

This whole adulting gig is overrated.

Oct

2013

A certain movie…

There’s a certain movie coming out, written by a certain Bigot. And I know a lot of people are conflicted about wanting to see it, but not wanting to support said Bigot.

So… here’s a suggestion. Go. Go see the movie. Enjoy it. (Let me know how it is. I’m not interested in going. I’m waiting for Thor and the next Hobbit movie.)

Then… donate the cost of your ticket to FCKH8, or some other QUILTBAG organization.

AND do it in HIS name.

If enough people do it, then his head just might explode…

Edited because it has been pointed out to me that one of the organizations I originally suggested isn’t as positive as I’d previously thought.

Apr

2011

Hypocrites and idiots abound…

By now, I think most people have heard about Judy Buranich, the high school English teacher who writes erotica under a penname, and who is being accused of everything up to and including pedophilia because of this. Personally, I think that the two women who are leading the charge against her are the fruit-loops here (one of whom admits to being a former student — wonder if Mrs. Buranich failed her or something?)

Something similar happened to me late last year. You see, I didn’t put the WHOLE story in that post. Later that same day, I was contacted by the school admins, who were FREAKING OUT about my talk. Despite the fact that the teachers told them that I said nothing untoward, and despite the fact that they had my website information and could have looked me up at any time, they had only just then looked at my blog and seen what exactly it was that I wrote. And they went ballistic. They were also not happy that I had the presence of mind to turn it around on them (You’ve had my information for a month. You’re only just looking at it now?) I’m lucky, thought. I don’t have a teaching career anymore that could have been jeopardized.

And now, today… there are groups now, over on LinkedIn. I found one for Authors and Writers, and I applied to join, sending them the requested information (professional credits and website). This morning, I was not only declined membership, I was blocked — I can’t even access the page anymore!

On the Groups site, the description of this group is: “This is a group for all serious and would-be Authors, Poets, and Writers, of all categories to mix, meet, and make friends.”

Really? I don’t think so.

Dec

2010

>Google Books

>Google opened their Ebookstore yesterday. So of course I had to play with it.

Right now, I only have one beef with it. And it’s not with the bookstore per se. It’s with the program they tell you you HAVE to use to download. Last night, I followed Google Books directions on how to download books to my reader. Downloaded Adobe Digital Editions, registered, and plugged in my Nook, just like it said.

The damn thing tried to delete the books I’d downloaded from Barnes and Noble, Project Gutenberg and Google Books before they opened the bookstore. Told me that they were licensed to a different user and I shouldn’t have them. Needless to say, I stopped the program and ripped it out. I only lost one book, and because of the way that the filenames are coded, I’m not sure which book it was.

So, if you want to use Google Books, here’s my advice. There’s a add-on for Firefox called Epub. You can read and download from Google Books using it, and it doesn’t get uppity about books you’ve legally downloaded from another service.

Apr

2010

>And this is why we save things to disk!

>I’m writing two different erotic stories that have Russian characters (three if you count the ongoing Man from UNCLE fanfics). So I have several Russian language websites bookmarked. One of them was a whole page of Russian mat (really, REALLY profane insults. Usually sexual in nature). You can see how this might be useful to me.

Except that the page is gone. ARGH!!! Now I have to spend valuable writing time looking for more sources of mat that aren’t written in Cyrilic!

annoyance

Monday, Monday…

Giveaways!

It’s Blursday

Works in Progress

Placeholder title “Frog and Fae are Friends.” — Excerpt

COLD!!!!

Work in Progress: Forged in Fire, week twenty seven

A certain movie…

Hypocrites and idiots abound…

>Google Books

>And this is why we save things to disk!

Works in Progress

Appearances

Find My Books!

Social Media

Let's Keep in Touch!

Thanks for signing up!