Blockbuster

At work, I earn movie tickets in the customer service program. Over the years, I’ve earned quite a few of them. When Nikki (Motley) was younger I always gave her the tickets because like most teens, her friends were always going to the movies. Rott and I rarely went to the movies so it was no loss giving her the tickets. In the last couple of years though, I haven’t given her the tickets and Rott and I acquired a little stash of them. Did I already say that Rott and I don’t usually go to the movies? Well, not when we lived in the Santa Ana-Orange area. Apparently, now that we live in Brea, Rott wants to go to the movies.

A few weeks back we saw the Avengers, which I’d like to see again. And it’s definitely a DVD we’re going to have to buy. This weekend we saw Men in Black 3. Oh, and last week we bought Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows. I wish we’d seen that one in the theater. They blow up a lot more stuff in it than they did in the first one.

Anyway, I juggled a lot of hats this weekend including the one where Rott and I went to the movies. I’m not sure where the idea sprang from but hell if I didn’t starting thinking that being a good multi-tasker is like being a good super hero or movie hero. When the bad guys are coming at you from a dozen different directions and you manage to fend them all off, it’s a lot like juggling a bunch of different things that need doing: send off cover mockup to one author, size and send final cover files to another author, do some website maintenance, update Facebook, send out a few tweets, answer a few emails, fill out a cover art form and send it in, look over edits, look for some cover images, start a new mockup, write a few paragraphs in my WIP because I had an idea, switch back to movie maker to add something I had an idea for there, back to email, then check my phone, back to Photoshop to finish an ad, send off the ad, post the ad graphic, send off an invoice, take a break to read a little and right back to the grind again.

Um, yeah. Super-hero sounds like a good title to me. I wouldn’t look very good in tights though. When I was younger sure, but not now. I might take the cape though or some of Ironman’s gadgets. Yeah, gadgets sounds good! Here’s a look at some of what I did this weekend:

Excerpt from Out of the Pocket:
Opening his eyes, Bryce saw that Joss’s expression had turned sad. He rubbed his thumb over Joss’s down turned lips. “When Evan broke his leg, I knew it was all over. I knew he’d go home to California and somehow he and Reed would end up together. I’m afraid I wasn’t very nice to him about it.” He shrugged. “I was scared of being alone again. Afraid to face the emptiness of my future. The façade I’d built to hide the fact that I was just going through the motions cracked wide open and the moment that woman asked about my true love, I lost it. Every emotion that had been held in deep freeze broke free and everything I’d felt the day you walked away from me came rushing back. And I broke all over again.”

He felt his tears spill over once more, unable to stem them, unable to stem the flood of emotions he’d held back for eight years. “The night you left me, I drove back to Atlanta and somewhere before dawn I found myself standing on a bridge in the middle of nowhere off I-75 wishing I had just driven out to the Port of Savannah and chucked myself off the Talmadge Bridge.”

Joss sucked in a breath, the sound sharp and harsh in the subdued quiet of the cabin. Bryce chuckled and the sound seemed rusty and self-deprecating even to his own ears. “Of course, I didn’t have the balls to do such a thing. I couldn’t do anything right except play football and after you left me, I couldn’t even do that right. Two concussions in the next five games all because I couldn’t concentrate. They told me to quit or I’d become a vegetable. Since I was already a zombie, emotionally numb and totally uncaring of my own welfare, I kept playing. Three more games and then Jackson’s hit. I was unconscious for more than a day. Even I couldn’t ignore the doctors when they told me quit or die.”

Hard arms tightened around him until his ribs ached in protest. “My God. How could you have kept playing after they told you to quit the first time?”

“I didn’t care.”

“Jesus Christ, Bryce! You could have died!”

The angry shock in Joss’s voice made Bryce sigh. “When my agent told the world I was quitting because of the concussions, when I came out that same week, I thought you would come back to me. I waited and waited but the phone never rang and you never showed up.” The pain of that horrible waiting time came back to him in an instant. He’d been so full of hope, only to have it crushed as days went by with no contact from Joss. He shivered, hunching his shoulders under the blanket.

“Shit.”

He stared into Joss’s remorseful face. “I thought that football meant more to you than I did. Your team was doing well, it would have hurt your career to be with a retired player who had just come out. Even as friends. Whatever hope I still had within me died. And I died right along with it.”

“Holy fuck.” Joss’s soft murmur held complete astonishment. “I didn’t know. When you retired, I was out on the west coast in rehab. I’d fucked up. I was drinking heavily. Not playing well. I got myself arrested, benched, suspended and sent to Betty Ford. They pulled a major intervention on me. I’m surprised you never saw any of that on ESPN or in the papers.”

“I couldn’t bear to look at either.” Bryce wondered how different things would have turned out had he know what had happened to Joss.

Yes, it was a busy weekend but my super hero self managed it all and I didn’t exhaust myself either. Of course, that could be because I’ve been drinking freshly juiced oranges from my yard thanks to Z.A. Maxfield who was kind enough and awesome enough to send me a juicer as a gift. It’s kinda weird to walk out to the tree, pick 4 oranges, peel them, stuff them into the juicer and have orange juice. Weird. But really, really good.

Now, it’s time for a Marcus and then off to work!

He looks like he could be a super hero. No matter what they put him in, he looks good! LOL

Happy Monday everyone!

A Mind of Its Own

I’ve decided that my brain has a mind of its own. No matter what I need to do when it comes to writing, my brain has its own ideas about that. I have two manuscripts I need to finish, one a novella length of about 25K and the other a novel length or at least a longer novella of at least 40K. My brain has decided it doesn’t want to help me out with these two stories. My brain has come up with a new idea and it’s digging in its heels and pushing me to write the new idea.

The new idea is a sequel to my NFL novel. The novel that isn’t even sold yet. The novel that has me biting my nails and planning what to do if the publisher doesn’t want it. Why the HELL would I want to write a sequel to something I haven’t even sold? Tell me why, Brain!

My brain doesn’t have an answer why. It just wants to write this story, tentatively titled Out of the Pocket. It wants to write it so badly that if I work on the story, my fingers fly on the keyboard and ideas rush from my brain to those fingers and onto the page. It’s already 6K words. It requires me to bug my friend Jen for info because the heroes play college football in Indiana (one for Purdue and one for IU.) It requires me to take a secondary character from Scrambling (the NFL novel) and show WHY he’s a slick, sophisticated, cheesy phony.

The answer to why he’s a phony in Scrambling is, of course, simple. He is broken. And therein lies the story.

So in this NFL story I have two heroes who meet as rivals. They meet on the football field as one of them tackles the other one. Repeatedly. And then they meet after hours on a practice field in the dark by accident and sparks fly. The sparks lead to a furtive encounter that not only changes their lives in the moment, but changes their dreams for the future. I follow them from that first encounter in college through their years in the NFL.

And then there is the moment where the quarterback breaks. Something happens between him and the defensive end that causes them to split after years of hiding their relationship. The quarterback’s heart breaks. His spirit is broken. He is numb inside and he makes a wrong move on the field that leads to a career ending injury. He thinks that his lover will come for him then, because he’s no longer an active player and is probably going to have to retire. But he doesn’t come.

So the quarterback retires and faced with a bleak life alone, his heart broken, his soul numb, he reinvents himself so he can survive. He becomes the poster child for retired gay NFL players. He’s a media darling making tons of money with his investments and always in the public eye as a successful motivational speaker. He has a relationship with one of the heroes from Scrambling. But when that man finds his HEA, leaving our broken ex-quarterback to face the reality of his lonely existence…he breaks again. Publicly during a live TV interview. He walks out and drives half the day to the place where the love of his life walked away from him and he falls apart. Luckily, the other hero, who has also since retired, sees the interview and knows what’s happened. He drives several hours and arrives after our broken hero…to finally pick up the pieces and make everything right.

The story won’t let me go. At all. I can’t stop writing it. So I guess I’m going to have to give in to my brain and just keep going on Out of the Pocket. Hopefully, Scrambling gets a home soon so I know Pocket will probably have one too.

Now, it’s time for a Marcus! I’ve never been a fan of the tighty whitey but on him, they look good!

Wishing you all a wonderful Monday!

Growling Cows

I can’t believe that in the Memorial Day madness of having to go to work, I forgot to post last Monday. Yeesh. I’m a dork. But yeah, I do work on Memorial Day. I have for the last 13 years because my company puts on a big Memorial Day event. I ate something my stomach didn’t agree with at the event (been having health issues related to my stomach lately) and spent the next two days in bed in agony. Meh. I’m better now and staying away from a lot of foods I used to eat.

Anyway, you’re probably wondering about the odd title of my post. Rott came in the house the other night and said the cows were growling. Well, I grew up across the street from a dairy. I’d never heard a cow growl before. Here in the canyon, the cows come up to our fence, thrust their heads over and munch our plants and grass. I often hear them mooing and lowing. I think the growling Rott refers to is lowing. However, to his city boy eyes the cows look mean and they sound like they are growling.

I realized it’s all perception.

Perception has been the thorn in my side this week. Luckily, not a bad thorn. More a resigned eyerolling type of thorn. And no, it’s not the growling cows that pricked me. It’s Goodreads reviews or maybe it’s just reviews in general and it’s just the Goodreads ones that stuck their thorny selves into my hide.

Here’s the deal: I wrote a FREE story for the M/M Goodreads group. Someone decided to attach the stories to the author profiles so people could click on them and review them. There are two reviews on my story where the readers obviously have very different perceptions of my story than I have. They didn’t trash the story, but their comments were slightly sarcastic and showed that they weren’t happy with how I wrote the story. Mostly, they weren’t happy with it because they just didn’t see things the way I see things.

Let me break it down for you a little. First, they complained about the realism of my story because one hero doesn’t realize the other hero is the son of famous parents. Their take on this was that in the age of the internet, Daren should have known who Taylor really was. My take on this is that I don’t fucking know what KK Downing of Judas Priest’s son looks like. A lot of famous people have kids whose faces aren’t known to the public and whom you might not find if you Google them. And my character doesn’t have a reason to Google the man he’s in love with. Not everyone is into Googling the people they know. And this is a family where the famous father doesn’t want his kids in the limelight, doesn’t want them in the music business and wants him to be an attorney! A father like that isn’t going to let the press take photos of his kids. And that is exactly who my character’s father is.

Next item, the reviewers complained about how callous Daren was with his fuck buddy Wes. Well, for one, have you ever seen how unsentimental men can be about a fuck? I mean, even straight guys can be that way. I said straight up that Wes was with Daren solely as a fuck buddy. Daren wasn’t using Wes without Wes’s consent. Wes puts himself out there as a fuck buddy. I clearly said so when I said Wes flitted from man to man like a butterfly in a garden. Daren at least likes Wes as a friend. Yes, he was using him for the occasional blow job without much reciprocity, but that’s how Wes arranged the relationship. It wasn’t Daren doing something that was hurtful to Wes.

You know, a man read this story before I turned it in. A GAY MAN read the story. He didn’t see anything wrong in the way I portrayed the men and their motivations. In fact, he reminded me that men don’t use as many words as women when they talk about themselves and their relationships. He reminded me that men aren’t always as sentimental as women and can compartmentalize sex. We also had a discussion about a certain set of female readers who expect all gay romances to be as flowery and emotion baring as het romances when in reality a lot of men – including gay ones – just don’t talk like that or explain themselves that way. So whose perception of reality is actually skewed here?

The third item that they didn’t like was how Daren and Taylor react when they finally reveal they’re in love with each other. After five years, they felt the two men should be swooning over each other. In the story Daren pinches himself hard to make sure he’s not dreaming, but overall, both men are relieved everything’s going to be okay. They’re eager to get to bed. They aren’t into a long discussion of feelings right then. You love me? Great, I love you too. Can we fuck now and talk later cause I’ve had a boner for you for five years?

It’s a humorous scene which is how I intended it. So in this instance, there is a little literary license taken because the scene is meant to be funny not all that reality based. But again, a GAY MAN read this and didn’t find it to be out of the ordinary at all. Men downplay their emotions a lot and use humor to cover. So once again, the two readers have a different perception of reality than me and my gay male beta reader (who is an author as well.)

So I guess they heard growling cows. Meh. It happens. What can you do?

How about a Marcus so I can get myself off to work?

Such a fun photo! Well, that’s my perception anyway. LOL Have a great Monday!

Hurts

The stuff a person does in order to write a book can be pretty varied. Lately, all I do is read up on the NFL. Except when I’m reading up about player injuries in the NFL and then the specifics of how doctors deal with those injuries. When you start reading up on this stuff it becomes clear why these guys are paid so much money. The injuries they can sustain aren’t scraped knees and elbows.

In Scrambling, my quarterback is running with the ball because his receivers are under heavy coverage. He’s tackled from behind which causes his head to jerk forward then back as he’s on this way to the ground. And because of his forward momentum, he hits the ground pretty hard, knocking the breath from him for a few seconds. He has pain in his neck and, of course, they collar him to keep him immobile until they can discover the extent of his injury. He ends up with what is relatively a minor injury on the big scale of vertebrae injuries, a compression fracture of the C6 vertebrae which requires about 7-8 weeks of wearing a cervical collar. However, it leaves him with a decision to make about whether or not to continue playing. Another hit like that and the next fracture could be much worse. Much worse means damage to the spinal cord which could lead to paralysis and in some cases death.

Cervical fractures aren’t like breaking a leg. Those bones protect the spinal cord so any sort of injury to the vertebrae is a possible injury to the spinal cord. And trust me, you do not want to injure your spinal cord. Injuries to the C1 and C2 vertebrae are a very, very bad thing. They are the two that connect your head to the rest of you. And the other 5 vertebrae in the cervical area (the neck area) are all pretty important too.

There’s a chart I saw that shows the sections of vertebrae in the spine and what they are called and what numbers of vertebrae are in that section (ie the C numbers.) Also on that chart was a very scary thing. It showed at which place on your spine damage to the spinal cord would cause you to be a paraplegic, quadraplegic, where damage would affect your heart and other organs and where damage would cause you to stop breathing and possibly die.

Very scary stuff. Yet football players risk this continually. Makes you wonder if all that money they get is even worth it really. The top ten most horrendous injuries in football included Joe Theisman breaking his leg from a hit by Lawrence Taylor. I saw this live on TV. To this day, thinking of it makes me want to puke. It was awful to see. Other top injuries included Mike Utley of the Lions who was paralyzed and Stone Johnson of the Kansas City Chiefs who died on the field from a neck injury. There’s a lot of these out there on lists with gruesome video attached. Tough to watch unless you’re into that sort of thing. I’m not.

People can say players get paid the big bucks to risk their bodies and lives, but I don’t think you can put a price on being able to walk or be alive. It is their choice to play but man, this is a rough sport.

Now, how about a Marcus to make Monday better?

Oh, now that’s really nice. Very elegant and excellent for this sunny Monday morning! Have a good one!

Pride and Fear

I’ve been diligently working on Scrambling, my NFL romance but I took a break late last night to sit in the living room with the old man where it was cooler. He was puttering around, the 40 Year Old Virgin was on some channel with too many commercials and I was reading a book on my phone. In the book, one of the heroes denies himself and the other hero of a happily ever after because he’s got some weird ideas about relationships and love. His pride is mostly what stands in the way of his happiness. And even though he knows he hurts his lover by leaving him all the time, he feels the other man could do better than him so he won’t stay. He’s ravaged his lover’s heart and he knows it, all because of his own stubborn pride.

In Scrambling, my two heroes don’t suffer from pride issues. What they suffer from is fear. Their fears are deeply embedded, something they’ve both lived with since their teens. And mostly, they are childish fears. After all, they first arose when the guys are in their middle teens. Kids that age have a ton of irrational fears. These guys carry the fears into adulthood which puts a whole new layer of fear onto the original fear.

See, in their teens, they are afraid to come out to each other for simple reasons. They don’t want to lose their friendship. Well, kids are weird and even though these guys have been friends since they were six, coming out can be a real unknown. Kids can be cruel. Someone you’ve known your whole life might not understand. So their initial fear at 15/16 is understandable.

However, when they go off to college for their freshman year they come out to each other. Unfortunately, that’s only half the confession. They’ve both been secretly crushing on each other for the last couple of years. Neither can say it though because of fear. One’s just been rejected by his parents for being gay. He doesn’t want to tell his best friend he loves him because he’s overly sensitive about being rejected. He’s afraid. The other one thinks his friend is involved with someone so he’s afraid his confession of love wouldn’t be welcome.

Over the years, these initial layers of fear have other fears dumped onto them so what happens is that they are almost thirty before the truth comes out. And what’s sad for them (but good for the book’s level of angst) is that they have plenty of opportunities to tell the truth. Sometimes other people advise them not to. Sometimes they just err in judgment. Other times, the fear just overwhelms them.

They even sleep together once and one of them says “I love you” but the other one misunderstands. In fact, the difference between “I love you” and “I’m in love with you” is one of the things that comes between them. They’ve spent years saying “I love you” to one another because they are best friends. When one of them says it (after the big sex scene) and means it on a whole other level, the other one doesn’t get it. It’s not until he’s the one blurting it out while under the influence of morphine in the hospital that everything becomes clear to them both.

“I love you,” Evan blurted out, the morphine and the pain making him feel like he was floating in a world where the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth should ever be spoken between him and Reed. He hurt like hell and half the pain was because he needed Reed and Reed wasn’t there. Except he was. On the phone. The lifeline of his voice in Evan’s ear making everything better.

“I know you do.”

Reed’s voice held warmth, caring and relief. Evan figured Reed had panicked when he’d seen the late hit and knew Evan had to have broken his leg. He would have been frantic to reach Evan by phone since he couldn’t just drive to the hospital from clear across the country. He also figured Reed didn’t know what he meant when he said he loved him.

Irritation washed over Evan. How many fucking years had he said the words without Reed knowing the truth? “No, you don’t know. I’m in love with you.”

Silence met Evan’s ears. And then he heard a muffled sound. A sound that could easily have been a sob.

“How long? How long have you been in love with me?” Reed’s voice was hoarse, tinged heavily with tears and emotion.

Evan couldn’t hold anything back now that the morphine, the broken leg and too many years away from Reed had made him confess the truth of his heart. “Forever. Since I knew what romantic love was.”

The sob came again, but this time it wasn’t muffled. And the voice that spoke the words Evan had longed to hear from the moment he’d left California had the distinctive tones of begging.

“Come home, Evan. Please come home.”

So you see, pride and fear are two of the most commonly used emotions when authors want to keep their characters apart. The reason they are used so much is because we humans cloak ourselves in these emotions to protect our hearts, even when our hearts don’t need protecting. And now you know how and why writers use emotion to fuel their manuscripts.

How about a luscious Marcus to round out this Monday and make it feel just a bit less like a Monday always feels?

I wish he was on Twitter. I mean I follow Dave Navarro, Nikki Sixx, Tommy Lee, and Ian Somerhalder. I just need Marcus to round out the famous hotties I follow. Heh. Happy Monday ya all!

No Romance in the NFL

No romance in the NFL? No, there isn’t really. I had to make it up. You see, there aren’t any out players in the NFL. Actually, I don’t think there are any out players in the NBA, the NHL or in MLB. I want to say WTF except for the fact that it gives me an opportunity to write something I think is pretty cool…a story about the first two out NFL players.

I kept the idea under wraps for quite awhile. Only my pal ZAM knew what I was plotting. Eventually, I enlisted the aid of a co-worker to help me out with some football info. He and I discussed expansion teams and what one would be called if LA ever got one. Michael has been a huge help even though he thinks it will be a long time before an active player in the NFL does come out. I think it will happen sooner than Michael thinks.

Other than ZAM, I had my other reader all set up. Fellow author William Neale was excited to read this story for me. He knew football and he loved the premise of the story. Unfortunately, Bill died recently and I was bereft at losing a friend. Now, I’ve got other readers in place including Marty Mankins who is a brave het soul for reading a gay romance. It’s a testament to his masculinity that reading this book does not faze him in the least. GO MARTY!

Anyway, the publisher I wanted for this book has requested the full manuscript and I’ve been working on it diligently to get it finished by the deadline, June 1. I’m just over a third of the way through this and it seems epic to me because it spans these two players’ lives from age sixteen to thirty. Of course, the bits when they were younger are like vignettes. That section of the book has each chapter showing the reader a significant scene in their lives that has to do with football, being gay and their relationship with each other. The middle section of the book takes place a few years before the present day and its focus is on a milestone event in the two mens’ lives. The player who has been in a relationship since college finds out that his partner has been cheating on him and is HIV+. The partner has a family history of illness and dying young so, of course, it takes no time at all, despite modern day medicine, for the man to end up with full blown AIDS. And he dies.

That is the turning point in the book. Both of my players face their mortality, the possibility of having their careers in the NFL cut short and choices about love and friendship. I keep them apart romantically until the last half of the book, but I do get into key issues like the way the media treats them and the things they have to do in order to keep positive press flowing, how other players treat them, how injury affects them, and what you do when you are forced by injury to retire from a game that’s been your whole life since you were six years old.

It’s a deeper book than anything else I’ve written because usually, I focus on a relationship between two people and what they have to overcome to be together. This book isn’t just about the relationship between my two players (who actually do get a Happily Ever After with each other) but about how their relationships with others and with football affects their friendship and their love for each other. I don’t usually get into external forces much in my books but this time I do. It’s an emotional story, funny one moment and heartwrenching the next. I’m really proud of it thus far and I really hope the publisher likes it because I seriously want this house to publish it.

Anyway, that’s what I’ve been up to, putting romance – and gay romance at that – into the NFL. HEH. And now, here’s this Monday’s Marcus!

That’s such a pretty one! Oh, yum! Have a great Monday everyone!

Coming Home

Yup, yup. The baby is coming home. Her roomie is graduating and moving away. I am glad to have her back because she is a lot of help for me especially when I’m going through all the health issues I’m going through. (Getting old sucks.) I know Rott’s not exactly jumping for joy, but he seems okay with it. And the babies (cats) will be ecstatic. They adore her! I don’t relish sharing my computer or getting used to having another body in the house, but those annoyances are really small to be honest. The pros outweigh the cons in this instance and I’ll get used to having her underfoot again. She is my baby girl after all. (Who will be 23 on May 16! Where does time go?)

I’ve been doing a lot of ads for authors going to GayRomLit lately so I made Winterheart Design a little “commercial” so to speak. When I uploaded it, it couldn’t be seen. Grrrr. Used to be YouTube would email you if the music wasn’t something they had a license for. No more emails apparently. Grrrrr. I changed up the music and the commercial for Winterheart Design is now live on my YouTube channel. Still…grrrr.

I’m off to a dr’s appointment now so I’ll post my Monday Marcus and skedaddle.

Shirtless in jeans…oh, yum.

Oh, yeah. In case you didn’t see my Facebook page…Loose Id requested the full manuscript of my NFL story. Woot! Now I need to hurry and finish it! Have a great Monday everyone!

Research

Have you ever had to do research? For an essay or term paper? For a book? For information about something you knew nothing about, but now need to know? I’ve done all of those things, most recently, for a book.

Like a lot of Americans, I’ve been a football fan. I’m from NoCal so I’ll admit to being an Oakland Raider fan. My brother is a referee and he’s been a big football fan since before I was born so when I eventually started watching he taught me a lot about the game. I used to watch religiously, but now I don’t even watch the Super Bowl.

But now that I have a football story I’m working on, I think I’ve learned more about the game than I ever thought I’d know. First, I asked a co-worker some questions to help me solidify my plot outline. Then, once I started writing, I had to do some research. Mostly about the draft, but I’m sure at some point it will be about something else. I’m going to pull out the snippets that involve football and see what my co-worker thinks. If Michael thinks the football related parts sound okay, I’ll just keep moving along. If something’s not right though, I’ll have to go back and fix it.

For now, I still have a long way to go. I have about 10K words on a book that could go as high as 60K. I have almost half of the first part of the book done. I’ve got a few bits and pieces of the latter half done as well. A couple of scenes. But all that research is stuck in my head now. Mostly, I found this fascinating list of a dozen of the highest paid rookies. Ten of the twelve were NFL players and they told how much these guys signed for and how much the signing bonus was. WOAH. We’re talking some serious numbers although there was at least one on the list whose numbers were lower due to the salary cap instituted some years ago. The guys in my book would have signed before the cap so I gave them numbers like 32 million and 40 million with a few million in signing bonuses. That’s so much money I just can’t even imagine it.

Once this story is done, my next bout of research will be emailing with a co-worker’s son who is a professional ballet dancer. Instead of salary caps and signing bonuses in my head, I’ll have ballet moves. And that information will reside in my head until that book is done and the next bout of research replaces it.

Writing paranormal stories means I can make up whatever I want. No research. Just world building. I do that in my head. I lay down to take a nap and start planning the creatures and how the world works. I do this over and over for a few weeks until the world is pretty fixed in my mind. Then I write.

For now, I’m enjoying my football story. It’s more serious and more dark than any contemporary I’ve ever written. It deals with coming out, risky sex, HIV and AIDS as well as the media. I mess with these two heroes quite a bit before I let them have a Happily Ever After. I’ve sent the partial (the first three chapters) to the publisher and now I have to wait to see if they want the book. I hope they do. I’ve wanted to get in with this publisher for quite awhile but I never had the right vehicle before. Cross your fingers for me!

Before I head in to work, here’s a Marcus for this Monday morning.

Ah, one of my favorite photos of him! Sure brightens up my rainy Monday morning. I hope everyone has a great day!

One Down More To Go

I finished the expansion and revision of Mating yesterday. I was so glad to have it done! Now, I’ve just got a partial to finish, my Father’s Day story and Fire Storm. I honestly can’t wait to get back to the Darkworld. I’ve missed it while writing all these contemporaries. But Runaways is out now (came out on Friday) and I’m sure Mating won’t be too far behind now that the hard part is done.

Writing has been going smoothly for the most part, if a little slow. Being tired a lot has slowed down the process for me. I’m still doing cover art, videos and now promo graphics for ads. And an occasional website. I’m about to start one for author Tim McGiveny. I’ve been looking at templates for his and I think I’ve got one he’ll like so it’s time for me to have him get his hosting. New websites are always so exciting!

The promo ads are a new thing for me sort of. I’ve done a few in the past but now I’ve put up some samples for GayRomLit. I quickly made some examples of ads in the different sizes yesterday at Ethan Day’s suggestion. He then pimped out the link and thus far I have one bite for creating an ad! Yay!

Nikki (aka Motley) will be coming home soon and to be honest, I’m really glad about that. I could use her help with some things and I missed her this past year while she was living with a roomie. Which reminds me that I was supposed to email her a to do list because she’s going to help me whip my website into shape since I haven’t had the time to do it. My book pages are a mess.

The day job is going really well these days. I have help now (yay!) and it frees me up to do some of the things that got backburnered when we were short staffed. For one, I need to work on cleaning up some stuff in our cemetery software database. Ugh. It’s a nasty task but it needs to be done and until recently, I haven’t had the time.

Another thing I’ve been doing at work is blogging! Yes, blogging. And coordinating the blog. Finding guest bloggers can be daunting when your topic is specific. Every now and then I actually have to write a post myself. Last Friday, I did that while in the midst of an IT emergency…our internet was down! Luckily, it was the carrier so there was nothing for me to fix other than reboot the firewall. The internet was down for only an hour or so but afterward I couldn’t reach the company blog because of a router issue with the carrier. Waiting around for them to fix stuff sucked. But I finally got the blog post up at 5 pm before I went home.

So yeah, been busy. Nothing new there. LOL And now I need to head off to the office where I have a lot of stuff to do today. I’ve got a full plate for sure! First, before I leave, here’s a Marcus!

Oh, yummeh! Have great Monday!

To the Bone

I’ve been working my fingers to the bone and some of it feels like it’s for free. A bunch of cover art, a lot of writing, some website work…Enough stuff that I can’t even get to my own author website which has non-existent and messed up book pages. (I really, really need to fix that.) But there are rewards for what I do. When I write, I have releases and those bring in royalties. When I do covers, mostly I get paid right away for them, for which I am grateful because with any cover there is an outlay of money on the artist’s part to create the cover. If I spend my grocery money for the week making three covers and I don’t get paid for two weeks on them, we don’t eat. Which is why I sometimes wonder why I agreed to do some covers and be paid based how well the book sells. This goes hand in hand with why the heck I wrote a story for the M/M Goodreads group for free and why you can download Breathe Me In at All Romance eBooks tomorrow for free.

So here’s the deal. I thought I’d give the new cover thing a try because I thought it might bring my work to the eyes of other publishers and authors who are looking to self-pub and need covers. I thought it might be a good investment in terms of getting my work in front of more people and a different audience.

The same goes for the Goodreads story. This group has nearly 6,000 members. I’m willing to bet a lot of them don’t know me and/or haven’t read my work. Doing the prompt for their Love is Always Write event is a chance for those members to get to know my work. If they like it, they could go looking for my backlist (damn, need to fix my website!) in order to find other books they might want to read.

So you could say that both ventures are an experiment. Obviously, if the cover art one doesn’t start paying out more than I’ve paid in, it won’t be a viable venture long term. I’m keeping track of what I spend and will compare it to what I make to see if this is something I should continue with. It’s only one publisher, if I decide it’s not working out, I can stop. The other publishers pay me up front, one directly via Paypal (for which I’m grateful) and the other via Paypal echecks which means I get paid in about 4 days. Sometimes the wait sucks, but at least it’s not quarterly.

With writing, you always have to wait to get paid if your publisher is a small indie press. Sales come in and then the pubs pay out royalties (unlike the big NYC houses that pay an advance and then you have to earn that out via sales.) I’m used to royalties trickling in from my different publishers at different times of the month. It’s cute when Rott calls me at work to tell me I got a check from “The Cave.” Some pubs pay with a check mailed to me and others via direct Paypal or Paypal echeck.

So I’m working my fingers to the bone to get all my projects done as quickly as possible. Now, that the Goodreads story is done, I’ve got to finish my expansion of Mating which shouldn’t take long. After that, I’ve got two more manuscripts to work on. One is a novella (probably about 15-20K) for MLR Press’s Father’s Day releases. It will be the last story about my pilots Sebastian and Ryder. The other manuscript is the long await sequel to Fire Season, Fire Storm. I’m so looking forward to writing Holden and Garret again.

As for really giving my work away for free…tomorrow you can get a copy of Breathe Me In for free from All Romance eBooks as part of their Earth Day celebration. I did this once before and it was great. For those of you who like the Tales series and/or like M/M books, you’ll definitely want to download this one!

Now, it’s time for a Marcus and then off to work with me.

Oh, what a yummeh Marcus! *sigh*

Have a great Monday!

Sunlight Sucks

Author Lex Valentine Blogs About Stuff