Sink Your Teeth Right Through My Bones, Baby

Today, I am pleased to inform all and sundry, is the Beautiful brumeier's birthday! In honor of this auspicious event, I have forced cajoled bribed threatened been lucky enough to elicit Rodney McKay's help in creating a music mix for her. You can see how thrilled he is.



Happy birthday, sweetheart! I hope you have a great day!

Whoop! There it is!



Available (as of early this morning, actually--blame my spending most of the afternoon fighting uselessly with Adobe about Photoshop Elements 14 on why I'm only putting this up now) at these following fine online retailers:

Dreamspinner
Amazon
Apple iBooks
Kobo
Barnes & Noble
Google Play
All Romance eBooks

I'm also running a contest over at Tumblr, for those who may be interested. :D

Thank you kindly for your time and attention. I'm going to go back to making quiet dolphin noises now.

Yes it is! For only $3.00! Check out my nifty post about it here.

Or you can link directly to Dreamspinner Press here, if you prefer. :D I'm totally open minded like that.

Oh yes! You read that right, O, Best-Beloveds. It's hc_bingo Time! Last year I kicked that puppy to the curb (and then comforted it) with 16 fills. I don't know how I'll do this year, but I've already filled a square two squares and will have fills for at least two more by the end of the summer. \o/

I love this challenge so much.

Here's my card! And seriously, this is one of the least-stressful challenges ever. You can take part every year even if you never fill a square, and you have an entire year to write/make anything. It's awesome. :D And I love H/C like kittens, so it just makes me really, really happy.

Here's my card:

shipwrecked	caught in a robbery	Hugs	arena	Accidental Mating for Life
Magical Trouble	washing / bathing someone	Stockholm syndrome	forced to rely on enemy / rival	Unwanted Transformation
Forced to Face Fear	Dub-Con	WILD CARD	Healers	culture shock
Protecting / Losing Precious object Person	Motion Sickness	De-Age	Toothache	Atonement
prostitution	skeletons in the closet	Captivity	Blood Loss	arrest

Look at all that wonderful torment. :D

Wow, posting twice in one week! Luckily it's not actually the apocalypse.

Aiden's Angel is now available from Dreamspinner Press and Amazon.com. Dreamspinner will have an excerpt soon, but you can use the 'look inside' function for Amazon and read the first chapter and part of the second, in case you'd like to check it out. Which you totally would, because I'm awesome.

Now, I'm a bit late with my stupidly easy contest because my husband broke his arm and things have been hectic and horrible because of it for a good while and I was barely online. But I'm going to remedy that right now!

He could've used one, come to think.

And like I said, stupidly easy--The first four people to comment with their email addresses will get a PDF version of the novella. Just make sure you alter the email a little so you won't attract cooties bots. Such as:

awesome.person AT awesomemail DOT com.

There you go! Stupid easy, right?










Hopefully I'll get more than four comments.

The longer I don't post, the harder it is to think anyone might want to read any of my ridiculousness. You know how it is. (Or maybe you don't, in which case you are awesome.)

But! I do have some nifty stuff to mention, so I figure I should actually, you know, mention it. So here goes:

Dreamspinner Press, my favorite online purveyor of fine quality gay romance, is offering 50% off all of their in-stock paperbacks for the month of April! This includes my novel Black Hawk Tattoo, which is pretty great.

I also have a new novella coming out in the beginning of May (I know I've mentioned it before but it's still totally \o/), which I'll talk about more once I have the cover design. It's called Aiden's Angel because it has an angel in it, in case you were wondering if the title was a coincidence. It is not.

Another cool thing is that I'm going to the Romantic Times Booklovers Convention (May 12 - 17)! It's in Dallas, and it looks like it'll be a lot of fun. I'm also nervous because I'll have to actually talk to people about how I have a novella out.

Any of my flisties going to be there? I'd love to meet up with you. :D

Last but not least, on the fanish side, Spring Sign Ups are open for intoabar! I freaking love this community--where else can you have Bucky Barnes meet Applejack the Pony? Nowhere else, that's where. I've already signed up (they close April 5, Best-Beloveds, so get in on it!), and I can almost guarantee that my entry this year will have an even less likely pairing. I can't wait. :D

Never heard of them? Of course you haven't!

Hey, everybody! Yesterday on ushobwri (You Should Be Writing), the most wonderful brumeier posted about More Joy Day, started by sdwolfpup. The idea is simple: there's enough awful shit in the world, so why not mitigate it by spending a day being nice?

Obviously most of us try to be nice all the time, but I love the idea of a special day specifically for it. SdWolfPup has a lovely post about her motivations for it here.

Brumeier wrote me a story! So my day is already joyful. <3 I'm lucky to have her as a friend.

(And if y'all would like to participate, you can post about what you've done here.)

Unfortunately I don't have much reason to go out of the house today, but the box o' pencils I ordered arrived in time for my kid to donate them to his classroom today, which is awesome. And I plan to bake cookies for some of my neighbors and maybe my kid's Taekwondo instructors, if I have enough. :)

And for you guys, here's a video of a cat being awesome:



And information I got recently on a UK and NZ-based website which presents itself as a safe place to help yourself deal with emotional issues, with the guidance of trained professionals available 24/7. Please note that I haven't joined it, but I looked at a lot of the site and it seems to be both free and legit. :) Big White Wall

And finally, my favorite, super-simple recipe for a really delicious single-serving microwave cake:

2 Tbs of any kind of nut butter (we've tried it with almond and peanut; both are great though almond rises better).
1 or 2 Tbs of honey, depending on how sweet you like it (maple syrup, corn syrup or cane sugar, would work just as well, or regular sugar, though you might want to add more liquid).
2 Tbs of cocoa powder.
1 Egg
1 Tsp vanilla or essence of choice (I also like almond).
1/2 tsp baking powder
About 1 Tbs chocolate chips, if desired (or available where you live).

(Omit the egg and baking powder for a delicious, pudding-like version)

Directions: Mix everything into a microwave-safe mug or bowl, adding baking powder last, if using. Microwave for one minute. Eat out of the container with a spoon. :D

Have a wonderful day, guys!

I have fun and happy news to share, O Best-Beloveds. Attend whilst I explain.

My awesome internet buddy Sarah Madison (or sarah_madison) has a new book out!

Actually, it's been out for at least two weeks now, but I literally forgot to post anything last week, for reasons I'll explain in a moment. But first let me enthuse about Walk a Mile.



I enjoyed the prequel, Unspeakable Words very much, so I'm extremely excited to find out what's going to happen to the characters in Walk a Mile. What I especially loved in UW was how imaginatively and unflinchingly Sarah wrote about telepathy--as in, it would suck. John Flynn is the accidental and unwilling telepath, and in UW I was cringing on his behalf pretty much every time she described what was happening to him. Imagine not even being able to know if anything you feel is true, or just your partner's wishful thinking--it'd be hell. But reading about it being hell was awesome.

Basically, the emotional H/C was off the hook in Unspeakable Words. I'm very much looking forward to more of the same, as well as having some of the questions raised by the prequel answered.

So you should totally buy both books. Just saying. ;)

And now, as promised, is the reason I forgot to post last week.

Back in August, I sent a novella to Dreamspinner, because DSP is my boo. DSP's turnaround time for submissions is no more than eight weeks. They are really, really good about this, but eight weeks is still eight weeks. The last day of the eight weeks would've been tomorrow, and by the time last Monday rolled around I was so fucking incredibly stressed I could barely function. Which apparently included remembering I'd intended to post about Sarah Madison's new novel to LJ. Luckily she's not just talented but also very understanding of authorly freakouts. :D

And then on Friday, I found out that Dreamspinner is going to publish my novella! \o/ Aiden's Angel will come out between May and June, 2015. I'll post more about it as the release date nears. :D

Congratulations, Sarah! (And me!)

This is truly biblical, o, Best-beloveds. The end of an era. The future opens before me full of opportunity and hope. And the slim possibility of no-longer receiving another Leah's emails.

Oh yes, it finally happened. I did it. After years of following another Leah's academic carreer, I have managed to make contact.

I'd already managed to make contact with the Leah who likes to order online from Macy's, and was able to verify a few months ago that she was indeed not the Cooper Union Leah when I had to call her again. (I didn't even try to contact Macy's this time, just went right to the phone. She remembered me, which was nice.) That Lea spells her name without an 'H', which Macy's seems to feel is a grave error on her part and strives to correct it as often as humanly possible. I anticipate being forced to call her again in the future. At least she's friendly.

But the other, younger Leah who likes skiing and photography proved much more difficult to find. See, her email differs from mine only by one initial in between her first and last name, something I found out from one of the several places I've called on her behalf. But I didn't know what that initial was, and with 26 letters to choose from, I didn't think I ever would. But after some luck and a great deal of effort, I managed to find her on Facebook (where else?).

"Lo, it is accomplished!" I thought (in exactly those words). "For I shall forewith contact yon maiden fair and request of her kindness to make sure no one sends me more of her fucking emails." But sadly she never replied to my friend request or FB message. And I kept getting emails meant for her.

And then, I got yet one more email for Leah the Younger, this one was the second from the Cooper Union Photography Department. Not the first place I'd called who didn't change their records. Except, it turned out, they had. But the bright spark sending out the notices had decided to cover all his or her bases and use both Leahs' addresses.

That's right: mine, and hers.

I emailed her immediately, as you can imagine. I explained the situation, with enough details I've learned about her life to hopefully scare her into understanding how serious this is. As I've said before, she's really, really lucky I'm a nice person.

And she replied.

She seems to be as sweet and vivacious as I could hope for anyone with my namesake. She thanked me for my help and assured me she would make sure it doesn't happen again. She did not, however, tell me she was going to change her email address. I really hope she does before she starts going for job interviews.

Fun fact: aside from having the same birthday, I also had a premonition about what her middle initial is. The might be less about me being wicked psychic and more about me being familiar with the naming habits of Jews. But it was still pretty cool.

I'm hopeful that this email problem may well be over. But I admit I'm a little sad, too. It was kind of fun, getting the other Leah's emails, much as it was also annoying.

Mostly annoying.