RWA Debuts Self-Publishing Forum

WOW! The RWA is now offering a hosted self-publishing forum for Romance Writers of America members.

Join!

More from my upcoming prequel to "Legs"

Here's a sample:

Nothing to fear. Nothing to fear. She chanted the words in her mind like an Eastern yogi muttering to himself along a verbal journey to nirvana. Of course, a yogi would not need to ruminate over the silly phrase. He would simply be enlightened.

Lilith held no illusions of her own enlightenment when it came to this strange fluid.

She was frightened. No chant would cure it.

Perhaps Dr. David Burnham could.

His office was as peculiar as his receptionist. Both were large, dark, and shabby. While Burnham seemed to have taste – the oak-lined walls in the reception area and New Hampshire granite floors attested to that – the anteroom was a man's room, decorated by and for men. An oddity for a doctor who treated women for the most part.

“Who is your decorator?” Lilith asked the receptionist, using a finely-honed, clipped voice. Leaving people no choice but to answer an authoritative question had served her well for years. She didn't really care about the answer. How the subject replied, though, revealed everything she needed to know.

Silence. Her face was bent down over a manuscript. Thick black waves of hair streaked with the occasional craggy grey, like broken guitar strings, were twisted into a knot at the base of her head. Tea-stained cotton covered the woman in a tent-like dress, her bosom rising over a misplaced drop waist. The effect made her appear to have stuffed a pillow in a bra the size of a saddlebag.

Tipping her face up slowly, the receptionist's sharp eyes belied her mollasses demeanor. Raven black, pupils blending into the iris like spilled ink. An angry scar from right nostril to ear, covered with a sad attempt at pancake powder.

“I wouldn't know. The doctor has kept his office as such since I began working here, Miss.” Gravel mixed with sand came forth in her voice, the words infused with an Irish lilt. Lilith wondered who gave her that scar.

And then the receptionist stood, towering a good foot over Lilith. “Excuse me while I attend to a pressing concern,” she said. Limping away, the woman's gait appeared to cause her great pain. Lilith snatched a glance at the desk. A small placard read “Mary Murphy,” a name you could shout in south Boston and hear fifty women cry “aye!” on any given day.

And concern she held for Mary dissolved when Dr. Burnham stepped through a door that was built into a wall panel. He seemed to materialize from nowhere, a spirit at a séance.

“Miss Stone? Do come in. I apoligize for my tardiness.”

She glanced at the clock. He was two minutes late.

“If two minutes is tardy, Dr. Burnham, then you are as exacting a physician as I would wish to see. You inspire confidence.”

“I seek only to find answers, Miss Stone. The rest is a byproduct.”

An arched eyebrow was her reply.

She had come to the right place.

Nothing to fear, indeed.

Writing romance novels pays off, finally!

I just received this email:


Attn:Winner
AMOUNT WON: 790,000.00 (Seven Hundred and Ninety Thousand Great Britain Pounds).

Your e-mail address was selected and confirmed by our co-sponsor Bank Of England, through their latest internet software. You are therefore been approved by Coca cola ® /International® Award Promotion UK the sum of 500,000.00 (Five Hundred Thousand Great Britain Pounds).

CONTACT CLAIMS ADMINISTRATOR
NAME: Dennis Barrios
Email: cocacolaclaimsdepmt@w.cn
Phone #: +447045707432

Coca cola ® /International® Award Promotion Department

Do email the above Claims Administrator, at once with all the claims requirements below. To avoid unnecessary delay. They are needed to proceed.
Claims Requirements:
1. Full Name:___________________________
2. Address:_____________________________
3. Nationality:___________Sex:____________
4. Age:_________________________________
5. Occupation:_________Martial Status______
6. Cell Phone Number:____________________
7. Country:_______________________________
8. Your comments about Cocacola:_____________

Contact the Claims Administrator with all your claims requirements well filled.Congratulations once more.

Secretary,
Barbara H. Bond
Coca cola ® /International® Award Promotion(UK)
---

I'm so excited! I sent my Social Security Number and bank account to them right away. Coca-Cola: It's the Real Thing!

A new review for Legs!

A month (or so) break isn't right, so pardon my absence. It's been an interesting month, for various reasons with which I will not bore you (but that include Hurricane Irene. I hate that bitch.).

I was wandering the Interwebz and found that Legs received a lovely review on The Paperback Pursuer blog! Read it here.

Romance Kills Science -- for Women?

So when a girl wants to find herself a romantic partner -- specifically, a male partner -- she becomes less interested in science, technology and math.

Huh. I must be a weirdo, then, because science and math brought me closer to my now husband.

What say you?

Kindle Authors: You need 3 Different Author Central Accounts: US, UK, DE

Someone on a Kindleboards.com thread posted a link to the Amazon.de Author Central account. That made me realize (duh! doh!) that my frustration with being unable to customize for DE (my husband and MIL are fluent German speakers and are offering to translate my description/bio/etc.) is not a function of Amazon, but of my own ignorance!

For anyone else who didn't know this, here are links:

US version
UK version
DE version

If you don't speak or read German (I read enough to find a bathroom, order a beer, or upload a bio and picture), I suggest you have one of the other two versions open in a separate tab, and then toggle between the two pages to make your way through the German site. The interface for the UK version is similar to the DE one (the US version has more features), so that's your best bet for being able to understand the DE version.

I've now updated all three with my bio, Twitter feed, picture, etc. I can't wait to get my German description and bio up -- maybe I'll make a sale, finally, there LOL.

FYI -- hope this helps someone else!

Can you hear me screaming across the globe? Lost work.

I back up my files. I email copies of work to myself. I make duplicates of everything. I really do.

I lost my entire master's thesis a week before it was due, back in 1993. Back then, we used 1.44" disks and a megabyte was BIG. Like, as in, MEGA byte. Now it's a quaint notion that you stack thousands of in a two year old's toy phone so the device can light up and talk and do math.

But in 1993, my life was in that disk, and in the hard drive of the Apple IIe in the grad school office. And, somehow, I lost both.

All I had was a hard copy, well-marked from three different professors' comments. 70+ pages, plus bibliography. All painstakingly written and developed long before it was due.

OCR scanning was miserable, so when the wonderful folks at ITS helped and scanned it, it read like this:

"WH&i~le Sen543ederiiiiio Lumi*&^!!@~noso @rem@~`ins popular !n"

Oh, you get the point. I just retyped and reformatted (1993 software for graphs, tables, and footnotes was archaic) the entire document and got it in at the very, very last minute.

So two days ago, I was working frantically to finish a piece for a contest (The Golden Pen). I'm working on a regency historical (who isn't?) for the contest. Needed 11,000 words or so, plus synopsis. Was down to my final 1,000 words. I'd just finished writing some of the BEST work I've done in ages and hit "save."

Two seconds later, my laptop's battery died.

When I rebooted, it was gone. 0 bytes in file. My software developer husband gave me a highly technical explanation for what had likely happened.

Basically, gnomes ate it.

Well, um, ok. So I'd lose 500 GREAT words, but it wasn't the end of the world...until I learned that my backup system hadn't been working.

And that email I sent myself? It was only the first 5,000 words.

So I've lost 5,000 carefully-honed, beautifully turned words. I know I can "recreate" but it's not the same. And not with a deadline tomorrow.

My message? Back up, back up, back up some more, and don't trust your laptop battery!