Leap Year Special at Phaze Books

Leap Day only comes around once every four years, and Phaze (who will be publishing Lady Sun Has Risen and Pirate's Booty) is celebrating
with a special sale and Take a Leap Giveaway, with two ways to win! My Phaze titles aren't available yet, but check out our offerings tomorrow and try some new authors or old favorites at a discount.

All through Leap Day, 2.29.08, you can get 29% off all eBooks in our store
using the checkout code LEAP2008. When you purchase a title from the
Phaze.com catalog on Leap Day you will be eligible to win one of TWO
Phaze.com gift certificates valued at $29 each.

You can also enter the drawing by sending an e-mail to leapyear@phaze.com
with your name, e-mail address, and one sentence describing the best way
to "take a leap" on this extra day.

How would spend your Leap Day: an actual "leap" with a bungee cord
attached your ankles, or a metaphorical "leap" toward an exciting new job
or romance? Let us know; we'll post the answers we like best on our blog.

All entries for the giveaway must be in by midnight, 2.29.08 to be
eligible. No purchase necessary to win!

www.Phaze.com

Various things

Before I get going, be sure to check out Lust Bites tomorrow. Dayle and I will be talking about Future Women (that is, our favorite science-fiction girl crushes.) Drop by and add your own favorite sexy women of the future.

Lady Sun Has Risen releases this Sunday, March 3. I'll be annoying you all with more details when the link goes live. Meanwhile, a teaser...

What Adimirdid next, though, was nothing Miryea could have anticipated.
He pulled his hand back and smacked her ass.
The force of the blow would have made her stagger except for his firm grip on her wrists. She squeaked, more from surprise than pain, tried to squirm away. Shocked, and drunk on sensation from the kiss, she was slow to react, her body sending mixed signals to her brain—was this pain or pleasure?
The second thwack made her knees buckle, and the third was just as forceful. By the third, though, she'd found her voice, if not the coordination to fight back effectively in any other way, and exclaimed,"Stop it!"
"That should teach you to be more sensible," he snarled, giving her one last thwack, as if carried by momentum.
Like the spankings her grandmother had administered when she was much younger, these smacks were more loud and startling than painful.
But being spanked by a handsome beast of half-Kulchu male was a very different experience.
These swats left more than her bottom throbbing.
Her breasts, her sex, and everything in between, already sparked to life by the kiss, tingled with excitement. Her ass throbbed rhythmically, but it was far more pleasurable than painful. The rhythm of sex, in fact. She felt herself swelling, moistening.

*

Managed to get Threshing the Grain going again, although I'm still having some doubts I'm going in the right direction. Then again, I reach that point with everything I write, so I'll keep plugging along.

Enough promo. Back to actual writing!

Come visit Lust Bites today as Dayle and I wax rhapsodic over the men of science fiction. If you've ever wanted to be carried off in the Tardis, romp with the men of Firefly, or get sandwiched between Jack and Daniel of Stargate, come and join in the fun. Tell us who your favorite "future men" are.

(We're equal opportunity. Next week, we'll talk about the women of science fiction media, and I'll try to figure out my fetish for gun-toting women in uniform. Ah, Ivanova!)

This post, by the way, had some kind of curse on it. It kept getting eaten by email. Torchwood needs to investigate, because there are clearly aliens in cyberspace. They need to send Jack and Ianto to my house ASAP!

stagnant

The problem with Threshing the Grain, at this point, is not the lack of nookie. It's the lack of...oomph. I started the story with what seemed like a good plot and a good premise, but it's wandering all over the place. The hero isn't interesting, the heroine seems interesting but not necessarily likeable (she's an escaped slave who's reacting to her freedom with panic and an urge to find a male "protector" since it's what she's used to--believable, I think, but if she stays in this state too long I run the risk of losing readers), everyone is being much too introspective, and I haven't really figured out what the hero's journey needs to be, other than going from "about to marry the wrong woman" to "about to marry the right woman, after getting thoroughly shagged a few times." And the external conflict? It has the potential for excitement and character growth, but I haven't really set it up properly.

What I need to do is step back and decide if the instrument is hopelessly flawed--if I need to brainstorm more about Nikos so he's not such a stick figure, then start pretty much from scratch--or if I can retrofit.

I suspect "start from scratch" will be the order of the day. This prospect makes my head hurt.

Luckily I'm going out to see the Big Bad Voodoo Daddies tonight. That should keep me from moping about my messed-up novella, at least until tomorrow.

Pirate's Booty is through initial editing and back to the publisher. Yay!

Once again, I managed to avoid bronchitis. Yay! (I hate winter. Have I mentioned how much I hate, hate, hate winter?)

Threshing the Grain...well, I'm 11,000 words into this supposed erotic novella and so far there's sexual tension, but no actual sex. This concerns me quite a lot. I think my heroine needs to jump the hero pronto.

stuff, nonsense, and more stuff

So much for those weekly-or-more updates I'd resolved to do!

I do have an excuse. In the middle of life as we know it, which is busy enough, I had some special medical stuff going on this month. I'm all right in the big picture--that is, it's nothing dangerous, just something annoying and uncomfortable--and steps are underway to fix it. This will take a while and be annoying in its own right, but at least there's hope. (Yes, I'm being oblique about what it is. I don't want to use this blog as a forum for whining about my medical woes, but it does seem worth mentioning, since it has been affecting my writing and may continue to do so.)

But anyway, enough about that...

Dayle and I got the best rejection ever on Out of the Frying Pan, from Kensington. You know? It's almost more painful when you get a rejection that makes it clear that someone really adored your manuscript but couldn't buy it because it didn't quite fit their line. Sooo close! On the other hand, if one editor liked it that much, so will another, and with luck, she or he will have just the right slot in the line for a super-hot romantic comedy. We'll be blitzing the New York publishing world with queries and partials shortly.

Finished my pirate-ish novella (it's not really about pirates, but plays with the notion of pirates) today. One more pass over a printed copy to make sure I didn't make any dumb errors I missed onscreen, and it's off to the editor.

And now to look at my list of projects and decide which to focus on next. Revising Lion's Pride is one priority, but I want some new words going on at the same time.