Lucifer, French Rent Boy and an Admiral's Sofas

Talk about a roller coaster week! I hadn't even uttered any dangerous phrases like 'Now What.' I've learned to never say or even think anything like that. It all began with me feeling fairly good about the world last Thursday. I managed to drag myself around to a couple of supermarkets, including the always daunting Costco before the arrival of a big, scary storm the I'veweatherfolk dubbed Lucifer. I don't usually take the hysterical rantings of local weather prognosticators seriously. A little rain in Los Angeles can send them into a tizzy. But the radar forecast looked like something from The Day After Tomorrow. The big red blob is the heaviest rain, and it hovered over LA from the early morning. Jon got to work relatively unscathed. We had a short power outage here lasting less than ten minutes. I thought the biggest problem we had was Jon's soaking wet work shoes. And then, he turned on his PC.

The PC and everything else on that power strip should have been fine. It is a very expensive power strip/surge protector. It had one of those insurance policies to replace damaged equipment up to $5,000. We weren't concerned until the danged thing refused to power up. After many a frantic message and a lot of Google searching, we discovered the problem was the motherboard. Fabulous. It was a refurbished machine that was cheaper to replace rather than buy the part and pay to have it installed. Either way, we would be down a computer for a week, if we were lucky. Worse was ALL of the Sybpress book files were on that hard drive, and they hadn't been backed up in who knows when. Why yes, I did give him that wifely 'I'm seconds away from taking a frying pan upside your head.' After some deep breaths and several cocktails, I decided that all may not be lost. The two books we had in the pipeline weren't under any kind of deadline, and there seemed to be nothing wrong with the hard drive. Thankfully, the current Ensnared Installment was live while the one I was working on was on my laptop (and an external and a thumb drive, because I back up stuff). There was no hurry, book wise. 

Great News/Bad Timing

One of the best aspects about the Indie Publishing community is that it tends to be generous in every sense of the word. Writers share tidbits that would be helpful to colleagues and often offer a shoulder to cry on or an ear to vent at. One of the classiest authors in my genre, Yamila Abraham , posted that a distributor of homoerotica in French was looking for content. I hemmed and hawed about sending a query. I wondered if I had enough sales or good reviews for them to be interested. One morning after a big cup of strong coffee, I just went for it. Two days later, I had a contract! They will be publishing Vampire Rent Boy – For Love and Money! I was stunned and elated. My track record with queries has been mostly bad. The last time I had one that worked was with the original publisher of The Companion. I hardly ever get paid for stories upfront. I was over the moon. And then, I realized they needed the finished word doc of the story by March 1^st along with the cover without the title. Yes, all of those files are on the hard drive in the dead PC Tower. Yikes! I was worried that the tower wouldn't get here in time or that the hard drive reader wouldn't work as advertised. It was a stressful week even while I was really happy. The PC tower arrived on Wednesday and the hard drive reader arrived today. I have all the files I need to fulfill my end of the contract. Jon is also out of the dog house. I plan on backing up those publishing files at my first opportunity. Oh, his shoes dried out by Monday, and the pool never spilled over into our living room. We were, in many, many ways, far luckier than many others in California. Lucifer was a bitch.

Writing Updates

I've started writing the third installment of Ensnared Volume 4. I have new research to distract me.

This time, it's the Lake Como region of Italy. The Lake Como research was a lot of fun. I went shopping for villas in my search for the right settings. Now, the villa rental company is stalking me across my internet travels. Mind you, I was love to rent a six-bedroom villa with a heated pool and its own dock. However, that's a little out of our budget right now. And since the world doesn't yet have military spaceships, so I had to go with the next closest thing – aircraft carriers and submarines. Admiral's quarters aren't nearly as lavish as I thought they would be. No matter. Darius is always an exception to any rule. Meanwhile, I have discovered some interesting facts that will be very useful in the narrative.

A reader of Ensnared and my blogs brought up a valid concern about changes over the course of a series. Don't worry, I'll answer in generalities. No spoilers! Would profound trauma and life altering change morph the characters readers have followed for so long into something that was unrecognizable? Please, do not fear. Aside from having a firm understanding of why these characters are appreciated and why they continue to find readers (thank you to the lovelies who keep hawking my wares), there are aspects of these characters that make them enjoyable for me to write. I have to spend many, many hours with these beings during the writing, re-writing and editing. I have to enjoy watching them at some level, or I'd never finish any of these stories.

As an example of this issue I have with depressing characters, there is a short story I wrote for the same publication that bought The Companion. It is called Product Development (this story and a roster of other awesome sci-fi can be found in this edition of Full Metal Orgasm ). That story got a lot of praise from folks who typically don't like my erotica, and I have had a lot of encouragement to make it a novel. I'd love to do it. That story was one of the best meshes of hard science fiction and erotica that I've ever done. However, Ambrose Mortimer was the most depressing and dismal soul I have ever created. I have yet to find an angle that makes me want to write the arc of a brilliant man's downward spiral into moral and ethical bankruptcy. I've got an outline, but it's been really slow going.

Ensnared just leaps out of my head. I've had a fully formed character I didn't know was there pop out on the page this week. It is a joy to spend time with those characters. And a drastic change to them would also be at odds with the plot. It is who Andreas, Darius and company are that was part of the reason the Watcher chose for them to come before him. Changing them drastically would defeat that very wise being's plans. So, worry not. The traits that make the guys and gals from Ensnared attractive to readers will endure, but that does NOT mean that the road ahead of them will be easy or that they will never suffer pain to offset the joys they share. A saga has to have some drama!

Now, I must get back to work! I will let everyone know when Tristan and company are in French. I'm am writing the next Rent Boy as well.

Stay tuned.