I’ll be heading out of town tomorrow for a plotting bootcamp in Jackson, Mississippi. I have fun stuff lined up for you while I’m gone and some great guests! And I started today because I have a million things to do before I leave. Take a look at the line-up—then be sure to drop by and play with my guests. On Saturday, I’ll be running a little contest for a free book, so be sure to post for your chance to win! ~DD

Friday: Lacy Danes
Saturday Snippet & contest
Sunday: Katriena Knights

The Accidental Series

By Teresa Noelle Roberts

This week, Phaze released my latest erotic fantasy/paranormal romance, Threshing the Grain: Seasons of Sorania Cycle 3.

Only if you look on my author page at Phaze, you won’t see covers that say Seasons of Sorania Cycle 1 and 2. The books are there, all right. Lady Sun Has Risen is Book 1 of the series and Rain at Midsummer is Book 2. If you read the blurbs, you’ll see the series mentioned. But I didn’t set out with the intention to write a series when I stared Lady Sun Has Risen.

It was supposed to be a one-off, a story written for a particular call that was a homage to Conan the Barbarian and other stories with slightly barbaric alpha heroes and semi-captured heroines. When I ran it by my critique partner, though, she said my world seemed too generic. She knew I’d been reading a lot about Arabic-ruled Spain in the Middle Ages and suggested I incorporate some elements of that rich setting. But that seemed too grounded in a specific monotheistic culture—and it was important to this story that the setting be a pagan one with multiple deities. So I stole some elements from the late Roman Empire and some from pre-Islamic Persia, added a lot of imagination—and being me, a healthy dollop of sex magic—and Sorania was born. In the process, my heroine ended up less ditzy, with real strengths of her own, even if she’s out of her depth, and my hero ended up less barbaric and more complex. Oh, and they both ended up kinky.

(Mind you, I missed the call deadline while doing the rewrites, but I ended up with a far better story.)

It seemed natural to return to this setting and elaborate on it for Rain at Midsummer. I’d mentioned that the mother of the Lady Sun hero was an escaped slave from a neighboring country. Her story deserved telling, and thus Rain at Midsummer was born.

Unfortunately I came up with the series title after I turned in Rain at Midsummer and approved the cover. Oops! Maybe someday they’ll be reissued with new covers.

But once I came up with the series title, it was obvious that the next book would involve the Harvest Festival and that it would be a much darker book. In the ancient world, harvest festivals were a time of rejoicing, but often had elements of mourning for the vegetation god, cut down so humans might live—and in the very ancient world, the sacrifice made in the god’s honor might not have been a barnyard animal, but a young man. Fall pagan holidays also call to mind Samhain, Halloween, Day of the Dead. Threshing the Grain plays on these elements of horror and pits the hero and heroine of Lady Sun has Risen, Adimir and Miryea, against a demonic threat that demands Adimir sacrifice his life in exchange for his people’s safety and prosperity.

Adimir’s a nobleman, and in the remote province where he was raised, that means he has magical bonds enforcing his responsibility to the land and the people who live on it. In his worldview, sacrificing himself to a demon to save others might be his destiny. Miryea is city-raised, the child of a university-educated doctor and studying medicine herself. Although the events in Lady Sun awakened her own magic, she takes the “modern” (roughly 5th century AD) view that the gods let you shape your own fate—and she’s determined to save her husband by any means necessary.

Even means that might undermine the very foundations of their marriage.

Did I mention there are mysterious, sexy satyrs? And kinky sex, of both male-dom and fem-domme varieties? And both blood magic and sex magic?
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They’re Doing It Everywhere!

by Myla Jackson

Okay, so other authors, even my sister Delilah Devlin, are doing it. They’re doing it on their blogs, in their newsletters, on Smashwords, in the closet, under the bed… Oops, I digress. My mind hits the gutter way too easily when I’m anywhere near Delilah. Ah the joy of the older sister rubbing off on me.

And what, might you ask, are they doing?

Free Reads!

Good grief. Who wants free reads? Don’t we all want to read books we paid for—spent our hard-earned dollars on to seek a few minutes of escapism? Spew…choke…snort!

Free Reads? Who wants ’em?

We do! We do!

I see your hands up, and finally I’m convinced. So where do I start? What makes a good free read? What does the audience want from a Myla Jackson story? I have to say, I’m stumped and in need of a little help.

Should I write a western with sexy cowboys and strong women, willing to hog-tie their men if that’s what it takes? Or should I craft a contemporary comedy sure to tickle a funny bone here and there. Or maybe a dark paranormal story with shady shifters, vicious vampires or ravenous beasts of all shapes and sizes?

The selections are endless, the time is limited and I’m still on the fence about what to write. It’s not for lack of an idea, it’s drinking from the fire hose of ideas. Sigh…

Such is the nature of the writer’s life. So many stories, so little time. So help me please… Help me by choosing a premise that pleases you, a genre that gets you going, characters that you can’t let go. Step on over to my web of intrigue (my website and my blog ) and let me know your choice of suggestions and you’ll be entered in a drawing for a $20 gift card from Amazon.com. Then join my newsletter to read the installments of the free read you’re going to help me build…

And check out my newest western ménage in the Bound and Tied Series: Duty Bound. Also check out the other contests I have going for a chance to win more gift cards and free books!

Between a 14-hour power outage and another day of NO INTERNET, I’m behind on email, blogs, etc. Will be back today with updates. Sorry if you were trying to get hold of me, but we had bigger worries here—like keeping pipes from bursting, staying warm, hooking up generators and getting pets to do their business in the snow! Later! DD

Real quick! You can still vote for Breaking Leather—see yesterday’s post just under this one!

First, thanks to everyone who bought True Heart and pushed it to #1 on the MBaM site! Woohoo!

And thanks to everyone who helped me get the word out about Ravished by a Viking. More than one person told me they’ve seen the book “everywhere”—let’s hope that translated to sales.

In the meantime, I’m working. Not as focused as I should be. Working on promoting those two books all week ate my lunch. I only accomplished about half of my goals for the week. But I wasn’t idle. When I got bored with one thing, I opened something else.

* I wrote three chapters of a cowboy story.
* I completed a synopsis for the follow-up to True Heart and sent it to my editor for approval.
* I resurrected a story I wrote and sold in 2005 to a publisher no one found. I’m hoping to resell the story, but first I want to do a little revising to make it more “me”.
* I pulled out two other half-written projects from under the bed, looking for quick wins.

Not a stellar week, but not a complete bust either. This next week, I will get in as much writing as I can, then on Friday, Sis and I are heading to Jackson, Mississippi to teach a plotting bootcamp, Friday through Sunday. Those are always fun and intense.

The red-headed hellion is no longer working nights, and is in fact looking for a job. In the meantime, we’ve been enjoying our evenings. We love to watch movies together—scary ones especially. She finds me endlessly entertaining because I grope the pillow and jump at the scary parts. This week we watched:

M.Knight Shaymalan’s Devil—too predictable for one of his films. I just love his Ah-Ha! moments, and this one didn’t have one you couldn’t see from a mile away.

Smoke Signals—my second time seeing this Native American, coming of age story. Still every bit as funny and poignant as I remembered.

Dark City—yeah, did anyone see that one when it came out? I found it in the $5 bucket at Walmart. I loved it. It was dark, and very, very different. Think, 1940’s Hitchcock crossed with Buffy’s “Hush” episode crossed again with a mass alien abduction. Yeah, very different.

DVD on Iceland from the Icelandic Tourist Board—did I mention that dd and I want to head there this August?

If you want to, that is. I’m not there twisting your arm. 😉

The Long and Short of It review site, which is associated with Whipped Cream reviews, is hosting their weekly Best Book Honor, and I’m nominated! Head to this webpage to place your vote: Vote for Best Book

A snippet from the review:
“WARNING: Do not attempt to read this book without fire resistance gloves!!!!… Delilah Devlin just makes this type of story such an adventure as well as a hot ride… You will never go wrong with a Delilah Devlin story and you will never be disappointed.”

I haven’t really written songs into any of my work. The one blatant exception is my free read, a serialized story that my readers help me plot. Early on, when they selected their heroine, they let me base the character on…me! This opening scene is exactly like something that would happen to me, and exactly how I would have handled it. Enjoy the snippet!

On a whim, romance author DiDi Devereaux decides to travel to remote Louisiana bayou country to take possession of a house she inherited from a reclusive relative. But before she reaches her destination, she drives her car into a ditch to avoid a large animal that leaps into her path. Rescue comes in the form of a sexy sheriff, whose gruff demeanor seems to hide a feral attraction. As DiDi settles into her new home she finds herself torn between her attraction to the sheriff and the raw, handsome bad boy whose offer to help her renovate her home is a little too convenient and tempting.

Nothing in Bayou Noir is what it seems. When strange things begin to happen, her natural curiosity leads her into danger…

“Wah-ah-ah-ah!”

DiDi Devereaux bounced her head to David Draiman’s gorilla-like chant. She’d popped her Disturbed CD in the player after she’d turned onto the small county road. She liked listening to hard rock when she wrote a fight scene or needed a little courage. Raucous, masculine music rarely failed to rev her engines.

Unfortunately, the music wasn’t working its magic now.

Her headlights barely cut through the thick fog, forcing DiDi to slow her car as she peered over the steering wheel at the narrow donkey trail of a road. She’d left the highway twenty minutes ago and knew she’d entered bayou country by the thick forest pressing against the road from both sides and the muggy quality of the air. She’d rolled down her windows because her AC fogged up the windshield, but still had to swipe her palms against the glass to clear it enough to continue.

Why she’d decided to finish the journey at night, she didn’t know. But she never questioned an impulse, and never really regretted any of the mishaps she’d fallen into as a result of ignoring good advice. Many of her stories came from those misadventures—and inspiration, of late, was getting pretty thin.

A road trip was just what she needed to “fill the well”.

On a whim, she’d removed the deed to the Gauthier House from her safe deposit box on Monday after she’d moved her furniture into storage and let her apartment go. Originally, she’d been torn between seeking a summer rental in the Yukon and heading Down Under.

Then she’d remembered the property she’d inherited three years earlier. A dilapidated house in a section of boggy bayou with a dock that led into the swamps. The lawyer who’d handed her the deed and the keys had told her to sell it—or let it return to the land. No use fighting the age of the place because it would be a money pit.

She’d been satisfied to let the document lay at the bottom of her safety deposit box, beneath her passport and a CD that stored every page of every book she’d ever written, just in case catastrophe hit and she had to start all over again. Nothing was more valuable to her than the dreams she’d created on paper, nothing was more meaningful. She’d sacrificed a lot to be where she was, edging toward the top of the bestsellers’ lists and finally getting those contracts that fed her gypsy soul.

Now, she had money to sink into the old plantation house. Enough to pay someone else to do the work while she plunked away at a keyboard with an iPod in her ears as workers sawed and hammered around her.

She could make this work—if she ever found the damn place.
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I woke up to a very nice review on Amazon for True Heart: “…I found True Heart to be full of characterization and complete with an emotionally driven plot….I was unprepared for the empathy that I felt towards Honey, and the tears that came to my eyes when she makes love to True for the first time. Her anxiety was heartfelt and Trues’ reaction made me fall a bit in love with him myself.”

That was nice enough to give a bounce to my step as I headed to the coffee pot for my first cup.

Did I mention I’m making two trips this month? Next weekend, Sis and I are heading to Jackson, Mississippi to lead a weekend plotting bootcamp for the local RWA chapter. And then January 19, I’ll head to Miami to board a cruise ship headed to Key West and Cozumel! It’s a conference, so it’s really work (wink-wink, Mr. Tax-man). I don’t know about you, but when it gets cold, I want to get the hell out of Dodge. Last year, I took a long cruise to the Caribbean and found it therapeutic for my writing.

Had a dream about Ryan Reynolds last night—you know, the guy in the The Proposal? Anyway, he was my boyfriend, and I don’t remember much, except he turned my desk chair around because I wouldn’t stop typing. He squatted in front of me, grabbed my hands and gave me that pretty, soulful look of his. Then he asked me what it would take to convince me to come away with him. I remember thinking, “Am I stupid? Ask for sex!” Instead, I pulled my hands away from his and whined, “But I’ve got a deadline, Ryan.” WTF? But I’ve got a deadline? Yeah, a completely wasted opportunity for dream sex.