Yawn. Last night, I stayed up way too late playing with my new iPad. However, it’s impossible to resist. I bought the white one and put a pretty pink cover on it. It’s sitting on the nightstand, and when I reach to turn off the light at night, I can’t help picking it up and flipping over that cover. Do you know how many free games there are to download? I haven’t even scratched the surface. But I did buy Pages—so, at least I have a tool on the thing that I can use to write. It’s there, buried in all those games.

The past two days have been a bust so far as writing. Monday, I had to work all day on reading through the copyedits for Girls Who Bite. I love how it looks! But no new pages Monday. Yesterday, I had a doctor’s appointment in Little Rock, which stretched into a trip to the mall because the red-headed hellion needed to see the optometrist. (I have a new purse!) But when we arrived home, it was hot as hell, so I spent the rest of the day in the pool, then went back out last night with the Tiki torches lit to swim again. Sounds like a rough life, doesn’t it?

So, in the interest of getting to work quickly, I’ll simply pose a question, then run and hide out at my desk while you do all the work!

Whenever you are having a bad day, what is the best thing
you can do to help cheer yourself up?

The Promo Ho and Red Ribbon Fairy contests continue! See details here!

UNDENIABLE is available for pre-order, now! It releases one week from today, but if you buy it now, you’ll save yourself some money: $3.50 $2.45
Buy link

The best defense is no match for desire this hot…

Kate McKinnon’s Sanctuary is an island of refuge in a western frontier shrouded in post-apocalyptic chaos. Her only escape from her crushing responsibilities is occasional radio contact with other pockets of survivors. Especially one man whose deep, raspy voice cuts through her exhaustion, straight to her heart. A man whose face she has only imagined.

When she and her ranch hands are surrounded by renegades, she doesn’t recognize the leader of the militaristic band that rescues them, but knows that voice.

Ty Bennett is already half in love with the human woman whose voice haunts his dreams. His impulsive offer to add muscle to the Sanctuary’s defenses is dangerous to them both. Helping her may redeem some of his sins, but proximity only increases his hunger to possess her—body, soul…and blood.

Without hesitation, she welcomes Ty and his men into the Sanctuary…only to discover the reason why they only ride at night. Yet the survival instinct that screams at her to drive them off is no match for Ty’s seductive powers. Or the need for protection from the threat that howls at Sanctuary’s gates.

“So where are we going to bed down for the night?”

Kate felt the earth move beneath her feet—so shocking was the undercurrent of sensual promise in his question. She drew in a shaky breath. “We’re not stayin’ in town.”

He laid his other hand on top of hers, enveloping her in heat that radiated up her arm and to places she had no business noticing when danger was still afoot. “My men need to top off the vehicles and find that crowd of troublemakers before we head out to your ranch.”

“Fine,” she said, her voice clipped. “We’ll see you at the ranch tomorrow. I’ll be sure to tell the men at the gates not to shoot you on sight.”
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Some things I took with me to Lori Foster’s convention were trading cards. Not for baseball heroes or X-men, but romance covers! I took more of them with me than bookmarks.

Have you seen them? Are you collecting them? There’s even a site where readers can go to peruse through romance trading cards and make requests for copies (Romance Trading Cards), but don’t click away yet!

I had these made just before I left. Kind of a rush job, and I want the next to be a little more distinctive, but I think they’re pretty just the same. I’ll be putting them on my EXTRAS page so readers can request them. If you’d like a set, let me know. Just send me an email with your snail mail address and I’ll hook you up! Are there any other of my older books that you’d like to see in trading cards?

I’m back from Ohio. Lori Foster’s was a great event. One I’d recommend to an author or a reader. It’s very laid back. I was bummed that I managed to forget to submit a list of books for the booksigning, but it worked out. I made it around the signing tables begging for swag. I have a ton of books, t-shirts, and signed bookmarks, trading cards, excerpt booklets, etc., to give away. The authors were very generous. Let me get unpacked and I’ll get started on that. For sure I don’t want it hanging around my office! 🙂

I’d love to send kisses—muah, muah, muah—to the ladies who chased me down at the booksigning with books they’d brought from home for me to sign. I was very thrilled to see so many!

I will post pictures as soon as my sister, Elle James, sends them to me. Yeah, I took a camera, but did I remember to take it out of my suitcase?!

This week, it’s nose to the grindstone. Sis and I managed a lot of brainstorming this weekend. I feel like the well (from whence all inspiration cometh) is refreshed. And I mapped out the external plot of the next Viking story! That one had been nagging me because I didn’t know how I could equal Enslaved by a Viking.

This week, Juniper Bell aand Berengaria Brown will be guesting with me. And I think that’s about it. Thanks to the ladies who have posted reviews for the books they’ve read. It’s greatly appreciated!

The Promo Ho and Red Ribbon Fairy contests continue! See details here! ~DD

CONQUERING FEAR

I am a true April Taurus—earthbound, practical, stubborn and temperamental. My life is ruled by fear. In true “bull” fashion, I tend to meet it head-on. It’s what drives me, not a weakness but a motivator.

I’ve always been a tomboy, preferring horses to boys growing up. I belonged to the Wilderness Challenge Club in high school (Wisconsin Academy in Columbus, WI). Whitewater rafting, caving, rappelling, canoeing, if it meant sunburn, mosquitoes and getting dirty—that was where you’d find me. Very glamorous stuff. Now, I’ve always been afraid of heights. Like—freeze atop a 6-ft ladder scared of heights. We won’t even mention airplanes. Sedatives. LOTS of sedatives…

So, the first time I went rappelling was at Devil’s Lake, from atop Devil’s Rock. Guarded by all manner of…rattlesnakes. Saw two, sunning on the rocks. So there I was on a snake-infested rock atop the world. Beautiful view. Wasted on a sixteen-year-old in a cold sweat. See, the secret to rappelling is to WALK down the rock face. Anyone who’s walked across a floor knows the easiest way to do that is to be perpendicular to the floor surface. So if the floor surface is almost entirely vertical, that means the walker gets to be the one who’s…horizontal. And that translates into standing backwards at the edge of a cliff, the true ground several hundred feet below, and LEANING back against a rope-and-nylon-harness-affair into thin air until you’re lying down on NOTHING—and then walk down the wall.

Sure. Uh huh. (Never said I was a BRIGHT kid. Well, okay, I was. Straight A nerd.) And Mr. Snyder was right there like some hairy bearded cheerleader from Buffy saying stupid things like, “It’s easy. You can do this. Nothing stops you. Just leeeeeean back and walk down.”

But it was my best friend stating “Don’t be such a chicken shit” that got me going. Okay, it took me 20 minutes of whimpering like a toy poodle in a thunderstorm before I leaned back enough to start walking. Reaching the bottom to more Buffy reject cheering felt like conquering Mount Everest.

That’s how I tackle life. I let fear motivate me into moving, defeating, conquering. It can either stop you or get you going. Being a Taurus, stubbornness gets me a long way through life. As a writer I try to let the quality bleed off into my characters. Set them up against a bad situation some would consider impossible, but the character just takes a deep breath, says “Who if not me?” and forges on to start, to try. And so the stories go.

Renee
http://reneewildes1.wordpress.com

About Renee:

Fantasy Romance Author Renee Wildes writes the “Guardians of Light” series for Samhain Publishing. She lives in central WI with hubby, 2 kids, a calico cat, a black Chow, and 2 half-Arab mares. She still considers herself a tomboy, although she hasn’t hoofed it down Devil’s Rock in years. Nowadays, writing, reading and scrapbooking occupy her time—when she’s not prying her kids out of a tree or off the roof… Her latest book, Dust of Dreams, comes out in paperback on June 8, 2011. Riever’s Heart will be out in ebook on Sept. 27, 2011.

The Promo Ho and Red Ribbon Fairy contests continue! See details here! ~DD

Writing…it really is just YOU

Writing is hard work. It’s grueling, mentally exhausting, sometimes stressful, anxiety ridden and SOLITARY! Well, unless you’re a NYT bestselling author with an agent, publicist, editor and an assistant or two LOL.

Even then, it’s still just you sitting at that keyboard creating and weaving stories. It’s all on you to come up with the next idea and execute it the way you see it in your mind and within a given timeframe. No-one else can do that part for you. It’s all on you to draw your inspiration from somewhere and wield enough discipline to keep going all in the face of increasing competition and possible rejection. Oh, and of course, none of us just write with nothing else to occupy our time.

There’s family, other jobs, LIFE, which sometimes just gets in the way! In addition to being THE ‘creative director’, an author also has to worry about sales and marketing, branding and advertising, business planning and strategy, epiracy, going to conferences to continue to improve on the craft of writing and to network, and…probably a hundred other things. At least! I have to say for me…I love that part about being an author.

Yep, I like to be in charge. I’ve been the boss before and I really, really like it J. It’s gratifying to know that it is just you. You’re the one in control of your own writing destiny, you’re the one steering your career, you’re the one who gets to make all the decisions. It’s kind of like being the CEO of your own little (perhaps VERY small J) empire and it requires you to learn and utilize a wide range of different skills. I just LOVE being an author!

Do you love YOUR job or do you yearn for something else, secretly or otherwise?
Do you have a dream job you’d prefer?

About Kaily:

Kaily Hart, a seemingly straight-laced mother of four left corporate America and a high-powered, lucrative career to be a stay at home mom. Ha! That lasted about four weeks, during which time she realized she had a deeply repressed dream —to write. And romance at that! By day, Kaily plays conservative wife and soccer mom, but at night crafts hot and steamy tales of romance and love with gorgeous heroes who wouldn’t dream of leaving the toilet set up. Ever. She’s smart and sassy, at least in her own mind, and is trying her best to bring the alpha male solidly back to contemporary romance, one hot story at a time. Two years ago she never would have thought she’d be doing this, but now that she is? Well, you couldn’t pay her enough to do anything else.

Kaily’s books, PICTURE THIS, PAY UP & PLAY ME are all currently available from Ellora’s Cave and other ebook outlets.

If anyone would want to contact me (which I would love by the way) or just keep up with what I’m doing, you can find me all over:

Web – www.kailyhart.com
Blog – http://kailyhart.blogspot.com/
Facebook – http://www.facebook.com/kaily.hart
Twitter – http://twitter.com/kailyhart

The Promo Ho and Red Ribbon Fairy contests continue! See details here! ~DD

TIMELINES IN SERIES BOOKS
—more important than you’d think!

Well, summer’s here, at least it is in the steamy part of Florida that I call home. My orchids moved months ago to shady spots outdoors, the DH’s tomato plants are just about burned up from the sun…and I’m fantasizing about cooling myself off at the beach or in the pool. BEST RECEPTION, my latest contemporary BDSM, came out last week—I hope it went to Memorial Day picnics or into vacation to-be-reads with lots of eager buyers!

My good friend Delilah asked me to talk about the writing process, so I’ll try to put into words my convoluted method for writing series since I’m now working on PRIME DEFENDER, the last of four books in my Necessary Roughness series for Ellora’s Cave. First, about this time last year, came the idea for a spinoff from my Gridiron Lovers series—one that would deal less with football and more with the BDSM club where the guys go to play. That took very little effort because I loved Jimmy Bronson, a secondary character in COACH ME. I wanted to give him his own story—a big, lovable guy with a very unusual fetish that readers heard a hint about from Coach and his lady love.

So…I had my hero for one of the books. A person would probably think I would then sketch out the other main characters for the books. I didn’t, though. Since Jimmy had this unusual fetish—and since I had decided up front that each of the books in the new series would explore an unusual BDSM practice, I picked three I found interesting. Then I sat back and did some research, trying to figure out what might cause different people to be dominant or submissive, why some would get turned on by things that would scare others away…and more.

Once I felt I had the psychology of my chosen kinks sorted out in my head, I sketched out a series proposal for my editor—descriptions of each hero and heroine, a brief idea of how the story lines would go in each book and a separate synopsis for each book. What I also should have done was establish a formal (written) timeline for the series. If I had, I would have avoided many revisions made necessary when my eagle-eyed editor noted inconsistencies among the books. But I didn’t, and I digress…

Next, I started writing the books—one at the time, because I rarely bounce back and forth from one work in progress to another. SACKMASTER, the first, came out last fall; END RUN in February; and BEST RECEPTION last month. I’d hoped to have them released closer together, but two things came in the way: the publisher’s decision to release a seven-book series of mine alternately with the Necessary Roughness books, and my aforementioned stupidity at having written myself into a corner by writing the Necessary Roughness series books as solo titles, not parts of an integrated, planned whole.

The series will come to a close with PRIME DEFENDER, which I set after the other three stories in order to avoid any lingering, head-scratching problems like the ones I encountered earlier. It’s been a learning process. I’ve brought away the knowledge, if I ever again propose a series with multiple books sharing a tight time setting, that I need to outline the action in the first book and verify the consistency of action in subsequent ones, in order to save myself a great many unnecessary headaches.

Hopefully, this book will go well, and I’ll be able to take a breather at the beach before the weather gets too hot to venture out from air conditioning. Thanks for inviting me to your home on the web!

Ann Jacobs
www.annjacobs.us