Hurray for And Is Never Shaken!

Well, And is Never Shaken has been available for one day, and it is already showing up on the little 'Bestsellers' carousel on the left of the Dreamspinner Press website. Obviously 'Bestseller' here just means that it's sold a few copies quite quickly, but it's the first time I've ever seen bestseller linked to any of my work in any way, so I'm happy.

In other news, I'm giving away a few copies of this novella on Reviews by Jessewave. You need to post a romantic playlist in the comment trail to get your name in the hat. There have been some awesome entries, which are likely to swell my musical collection before long. There's only a few hours left in this giveaway, so if you haven't been there yet, please visit.

Finally, thanks to everyone for their votes in the What Should I Write next poll. Again, there are only a few hours left to vote, so if anyone else has an opinion, please let me know!

And Is Never Shaken Playlist

With And Is Never Shaken coming out from Dreamspinner on Wednesday, I thought I'd post my playlist for it. The novella was heavily influenced by music - I had a dream about being reincarnated, during which I heard the classical piece Gnossienne no. 1. and that was the original inspiration for writing Cassian and Andy's story. Not only that, but music is very important to the characters and in the development of the plot.

This playlist is made up of both the songs I was listening to while writing it and the music that features in the story.

1) Cry by Rihanna
2) My Hands by Leona Lewis
3) Meditation from 'Thais' Performed by Joshua Bell
4) Midnight on the Water Performed by Waterson: Carthy
5) The Lark Ascending by Vaughn Williams
6) Gnossienne No. 1 Performed by Johannes Cernota
7) Let's Get It On by Marvin Gaye
8) The Heart Asks Pleasure First/The Promise by Michael Nyman
9) Rhapsody on a theme by Paganini Performed by Daniel Petrov and the Russian State Orchestra
10) Awake by Secondhand Serenade
11) This Moment by Melissa Etheridge
12) Run by Snow Patrol
13) Lost by Anouk

I put this list of songs on repeat and shuffle and listened to them constantly, even while out of the house on my iPod. Listening to them might give readers a special insight into the story - or not. I guess it'll depend on how people feel about random mish-mashes of classical, pop, Indie, Motown and R&B!

And is Never Shaken Taster

Hi guys. It looks like the release date for And is Never Shaken is pretty solid, so it will be out next Wednesday from Dreamspinner Press. There's an excerpt on the website, but in celebration I'm going to post a different, work-safe snippet under the cut. Enjoy!

Possible Release Date for And Is Never Shaken

And Is Never Shaken has turned up on the Forthcoming page at Dreamspinner Press with a publication date of the 5th of May. You can see it and even pre-order it here.

I say 'possible date' just because they haven't emailed me to let me know this date yet, and I've noticed that they play about with the Forthcoming page quite a lot. Things jump on and off there all the time. So it might have disappeared by tomorrow, and come back with with a different release date the day after.

I suspect it's just one of the ways that the sneaky folks there at DSP keep us on our toes.

UPDATE: The book is also on Goodreads now, and people have already started adding it to their 'To Be Read' and 'Potential Buy' shelves! Woohoo!

Rejection and Bitch-Slapping

Short post because I am, in a word, knackered.

Having allowed Wave to lure me into turning my five-minute rant on pen-names into an editorial post for her blog, I then got bitch-slapped by...oh, let's see...everyone. Pretty much. I've been replying to comments non stop and post of them are not of the 'Right On, Sista' variety. That'll teach me to have opinions. Or, at least, not to think about them a bit more carefully before sharing them.

I just heard back from TQ Press that 'Precious Possession' is not right for them either. This would be more depressing if it was a form rejection, like the one from DSP, but the lovely Michelle gave me feedback which let me pinpoint what was wrong. Basically I tried to tell the story in the style of a fairytale, with a sarcastic narrator voice. Michelle said that it basically felt like the first eight pages were info-dumping. So that didn't work, then. She also invited me to re-write and submit, which I fully intend to do once I get a spare five minutes. I know they're still looking for Halloween sips and I think PP could work really well for that.

The lesson I have learned this week: People (and by people I mean me) make mistakes. It's okay. The only unforgivable sin is not to learn from them. No more ranting on Wave's blog (I can rant here all I like, since no one reads it) and no more sarcastic narrator voice for me.

Now, back to my new YA novel. I need to hit 5000 words before I shut down tonight.

Cover Squee! And Ipad Competition...

Look! Look! I got the final version of the cover for And is Never Shaken! And it's beee-ooo-tiful!

I loved the black and white version and kind of worried about how it would look 'painted' but this is such high quality work, I'm completely on Team Colour now. I'm just really crossing my fingers that my book can live up to this!

In other news (while I try to stop squeeing) DSP are running a competition which makes me drool, so I thought I'd share. If you, like me, are a techie-geek and adore gadgets and gismos, you might have been looking wistfully at your Sony E-Reader, Kindle or BeBook and thinking, 'Yeah, but it's not an iPad'. So a chance to get your hands on one for free should make both us happy. Here's the press release thingy (because I haven't finished my first cup of coffee yet and I'm not feeling creative enough to re-write it):

To celebrate the release of Dreamspinner’s eBooks being added to the iBookstore this summer, Dreamspinner Press is giving away an iPad in a random drawing. Every $10 you spend at Dreamspinner’s web site between April 15 and May 15 automatically enters your name in the drawing. The more you spend, the more times you’ll be entered. A winner will be drawn at random and announced on May 24.
 
Good stuff, right? Definitely worth a try.

A Blurbing Birthday Continued

Okay, so readers who tuned into this bat-channel yesterday will have been witness to my epic snit-fit over the blurb that the good professionals of DSP came up with for my novella And Is Never Shaken. 

Not because the blurb wasn't well-written, correct and factual, but because despite this, it also had many of the problems that readers of Reviews by Jessewave had raved about here. If you'd like to read the blurb, you can go back to yesterday's post here and see for yourself what I mean.
 
We ended yesterday's thrilling installment with my decision to risk not only my own sanity, but also annoying the people of DSP, by attempting to completely re-write the blurb and asking them to use my version instead.

The first thing I did was to throw out both the short synopsis which I had submitted to DSP originally and the blurb that DSP had sent me. I tend to think that the first mistake most people make when writing blurbs for readers is to confuse what a prospective buyer needs to make their decision, with what an editor needs to make theirs. The editor needs to know the shape of the story and the factual details of how it starts and ends. They need to know you're not going to have aliens appear in chapter two and turn everyone to jelly. Once they're assured of that they open the file and begin to read, which requires a commitment of time, but no money. If they have questions about tone or language, they answer them by reading the story. It's right there.

But your potential buyers are looking at a professional entry on a publisher's website. They know this book has been accepted for publication and edited, so they already know that aliens don't appear and turn everyone to jelly (unless the story actually calls for that). What they want to know is what they can expect to experience as a reader if they invest their hard earned cash in your story. Why buy your story and not the three others that came out from the publisher at the same time, or the twenty others that came out from different publishers that day? They need to know the world they're about to step into if they buy your book.

Bearing all this - and the comments from the erudite readers of Jessewave's blog - in mind, this is my blurb-writing check-list.

1) Characters. This is romance we're writing here - the characters are everything. Introduce both the main characters with a couple of key facts that allow readers to visualize them. I don't mean their appearance, unless the way they look is what defines them in some way (if one of them has a disability, or is astonishingly good-looking for example) . In the case of And Is Never Shaken, both protagonists have jobs that they love and which define them, so those go in the blurb. 

2) Relationship. Again, this is romance. The relationship is what we're reading for. We need to know the 'hook' of the relationship - love at first sight, hate at first sight, the odd couple, gay for you, May to December, whatever. My characters have little in common and have a large age gap, yet they keep bumping into each other, and this makes one of them think the other is a stalker. Not a great start for them, but a great 'hook' for the book.

3) What Happens Next? One or two sentences about how their beginning eases into a middle. Do they fight like cats and dogs, get separated but struggle to keep their love alive, find themselves swept away in a fairytale passion? This is the meat of the story. This is where you tell readers if they have humour or angst or outdoor sex or naked swimming in a vat of custard to look forward to.Try to express the tone of the story. It's pointless to write a funny blurb if the story isn't comedic, pointless to write an angsty one if the story is light and sweet. If there are squink factors in the story which you haven't already mentioned, put them here. If you added a threesome to spice things up (I hope you didn't, by the way) you should be hinting at the characters journey of sexual discovery so that it doesn't come as a complete shock to the reader.

4) The Big No-No. Or - what goes wrong. Not too much detail, because that's the point of reading the book, but at the same time don't be coy. Blog readers said they hate, hate, hated it when authors tried to convince them that there would be a sad ending because, let's face it, this is m/m romance and that doesn't happen very often. So unless you actually wrote a down-ending (which was brave of you) it's better to focus on the conflict here. What goes wrong? Put a question in the reader's mind so that they picture the pain or difficulty the characters might face to get their HEA or HFN. However, another huge Red Button was the use of rhetorical questions, so don't try to put a question into the reader's mind by saying 'Will Tim and Fred fight through their parent's expectations to be together?' Because the reader knows the answer must be yes, and this just annoys them and makes them think snarky thoughts.

Putting all this into practise: 

(One paragraph) Cassian Ford is a successful writer in his forties, established at the local university (hello, character number one!). Andy Havers is a book restorer in his early twenties who just moved to town (Hello character number two and May to December relationship!) They have nothing in common, and yet somehow everywhere they go they seem to run into each other. Despite a bumpy beginning - an exasperated Cassian accuses Andy of being a stalker - (there's the hook, and a hint of humour) the gap in age and their many other differences, a passionate romance develops between them. But just when Andy is convinced he's found true love (these last two lines are the What Happens Next - they tell us that things are passionate and loving) secrets from Cassian's past erupt into the present (word choice hopefully suggests angst and drama) and Andy realizes it might not be him Cassian wants at all...(Yowch, that sounds kind of painful for Andy, I wonder how he gets over that?)

Without the commentary:
 
Cassian Ford is a successful writer in his forties, established at the local university. Andy Havers is a book restorer in his early twenties who just moved to town. They have nothing in common, and yet somehow everywhere they go they seem to run into each other. Despite a bumpy beginning - an exasperated Cassian accuses Andy of being a stalker - the gap in age and their many other differences, a passionate romance develops between them. But just when Andy is convinced he's found true love, secrets from Cassian's past erupt into the present and Andy realizes it might not be him Cassian wants at all... 

Mission accomplished. Now I had to submit this to DSP and hope they liked it.

Now, let's get something straight here before we go any further: I'm a seasoned publishing professional. I've been dealing with editors, marketing directors and Big Cheeses (otherwise known as Commissioning Editors) for...Jeez, seven years now. But no matter how many times you've had playful banter with an editor, no matter how confident you are as a professional, no matter how sure you are that you're right, EVERYTIME that you have to disagree with an editor, you will be reduced to quivering jelly. What if they get really upset and don't want to work with you anymore?

Luckily, despite that big build-up, DSP did like my version of the blurb, and said they'll use it. And they didn't even cuss me out for being an awkward b*tch either. (Sigh of contentment).

A Blurbing Birthday

The fateful day has dawned, and I am a year older and definitely wiser. My first birthday present? A blurb from DSP for my novella And Is Never Shaken.

Very recently there was a blog post about blurbs on Reviews by Jessewave. You can find this revealing article (and what's even more revealing, the comment trail following it) here.

What this made clear to me is that for a lot of people the blurb is all they read - it makes the decision on whether they buy or not. People ignore covers because often they're terrible or cliched; even if they're pretty they usually say very little about the story itself. And it seems most people don't have time to read the excepts either - there are just too many books to get through, and they don't think the excerpt really tells them much.

The blurb is the number one selling tool that an author can have, other than a well-respected name.

Unfortunately, a lot of readers feel that the blurbs they're offered are letting them down. And readers place the blame for this squarely on the shoulders of the author. Yes, they acknowledge that editors and other publishing professionals are partly responsible for this too, but most readers seemed to feel that since the author is the one who knows the story inside out they should be the one who makes sure the blurb reflects what their work is really about.

All of which resulted in this reaction when I saw the blurb which DSP had written for And Is Never Shaken: AAAAAARRRGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Yes, it's safe to say that I was a tad upset. The blurb I read - though technically correct and not terrible in any way - held basically ALL the elements that the readers of the Jessewave blog had isolated as problems for them. Let me illustrate:

The first time Andreas Havers meets Cassian Ford, Cassian stops him in the street and then walks away. The second time is when Andy signs up for a creative writing course—a course Cassian is teaching. The third time, they bump into each other in the hallway of Andy’s new apartment building and realize they’re neighbors. After being accused of being a stalker, Andy finally loses his temper and tells Cassian where to get off.

Strangely, instead of letting the acquaintance die there, Cassian pursues Andy and apologizes. Explaining away his odd behavior, Cassian asks Andy out on a date, a date that will turn into a passionate affair threatened by secrets from the past.

First of all, this is two paragraphs long. Now, I personally have no problem with two paragraph blurbs. In fact, I like a lot of details. But the vast majority of e-book buyers do not appear to agree with me. They want one paragraph only - they were very emphatic about this.

They also felt that many blurbs missed out pertinent details of the story which might either make them want to buy it, or warn them to steer clear. In this case, the romance is a May to December relationship, with eighteen years between the protagonists. This is a selling point for me (which is why I wrote the story) and might be for a lot of others too, but for those who are squinked out by May to December, there's no warning here.

Finally, they felt that blurbs didn't give them any idea of the tone of the story, and in some cases that blurbs were actively misleading. Well, this blurb has no tone, really. It's just business-like and straightforward, which would be fine if the novella were business-like and straightforward. But it isn't. And Is Never Shaken has a lot of poetic language and also some humour. I don't think there's any way that anyone could label this blurb misleading, but it doesn't give much of a flavour of the story either.

So, after much gnashing of teeth, stressing and hair-pulling, I decided to completely re-write this blurb and ask my DSP editor to consider a new version.

Since this post is getting rather long, tune in tomorrow to see how I incorporated the blog reader's comments into a new version of the blurb, and hear about DSP's reaction to an uppity author re-writing their blurbs wholesale.

Captain Space Bunny

So I'm writing a new story - one of those stories that presents itself to you in a flash of brilliance and makes you jump up and go running for a pen. Actually in this case it was a character who presented himself to me. A character the likes of which I have never written before.

I was looking at the Open Calls page on Dreamspinner's website and found a request for stories for a new anthology called 'Making Contact'. As you might expect with that title, the anthology is space themed:

Give us galaxy soldiers, space pirates, traveling aliens, intrepid explorers, and more.

Somehow, reading this, my back-brain did a little left turn and I found myself imagining, not macho space pirates or a muscle-bound galaxy soldier, but someone a little more vulnerable. Someone whose past is a little darker.

We're always reading stories and seeing films about genetically modified super soldiers, but in a future where cloning and genetic manipulation become common-place, worse things are bound to happen. Someone's going to start using the technology to create people - pets - to order. I could see a picture in my head of one of these tragic people, created to be hurt and used by others, brought up to belong to the last people in the universe who should ever be responsible for another person.

And thus Captain Space Bunny was born.

That's not his name, by the way. It's just the way I think of him. Captain Space Bunny is a human who was created, was genetically modified, to be someone's idea of a perfect sex slave. He's tiny and fragile looking, with ivory skin and pink hair and massive pink eyes. He also has bunny ears and a tail. He was made to be extremely strong and have accelerated healing so that if his owner got a bit carried away, he wouldn't be permanently broken (wouldn't want to throw that much money away, after all). Captain Space Bunny spent his 'childhood' moving between a lab where he was treated like a science project and a brothel where his owner did unspeakable things to him.

And then one day he managed to escape. He got out, got away from his owner and creators and found freedom. He taught himself how to act like a normal person and get on in the world, found a job on a ship, worked his way up. He taught himself to fight and use his strength. He cultivated a tough, cocky, Johnny Depp persona. Eventually he got his own ship. But at the end of the day, no matter how strong and capable he is, he's still pink and white and cute, with bunny ears and tail. He still has to deal with the way that people react to that, and the fact that anyone who looks at him can probably guess why he was created and what his past involves.

How could a person like that ever manage to fall in love? How would they ever learn to trust someone - even if someone was able to see past their sex-bunny exterior to the damaged soul inside? That was the story I wanted to write.

The problem with flashes of brilliance like this is that they often fall apart when you start work on the hard graft. Forcing your own, purely intuitive understanding of a character onto the page, making that character jump through hoops in your story, can rob them of their magic. That's what I'm struggling with at the moment. But I'm desperate to give my little space bunny his chance at love. Lord knows he deserves it.

The other problem is that I don't think I'm going to manage to bring the story in under the word limit for the anthology. So I'll just have to hope that someone will want to publish it as a novella. But in any case, I can't stop now. Captain Space Bunny has things to do.

Editing...Fun?

Well, my nerve-wracking wait has come to an end. I received the edited file for my novella And Is Never Shaken from DSP, all marked up and ready for me to revise.

I had been biting my nails about this for a while because I've never worked with an editor before who I haven't met face to face, and I've never worked with an American editor without their comments being filtered though a British one (and British editors like to make their authors quiver with tales of how incredibly harsh American editors are). I was also a little nervous because this is my first m/m story, and what if the editor, being very experienced at working in m/m, finds loads of amateur mistakes? What if they want more sex scenes? What if they want to change loads of things and I don't agree? Argh!

I actually really enjoy revising - and yes, I know this makes me an unnatural freak, shunned by other writers. But I do. There are times when I've been in tears because an editor completely misunderstood a character or kept asking for explanations of stuff I thought was perfectly self-explanatory, but usually once I calm down the value of the comments sinks in and then it's all fun. I'm effectively trying to beat myself at my own game, and I do love a challenge like that.

But it's also exhausting, because once I start revising that's all I want to do. Eat? Nah. Sleep? No way. Talk to other human beings? Not a chance. I go into Revision Mode and it's like Terminator Mode only more terrifying. My last book was 120,000 words long. By the time finished everyone I knew thought I'd died and been eaten by Alsatians.

Bearing this in mind, it seems silly that I was so stressed out by the idea of working on a fairly short story, especially since m/m writing is supposed to be a lovely hobby. But I'm a naturally pessimistic and anal retentive type. I always expect the worst.

What a pleasant surprise then, to find that instead of wanting to rip the novella apart and rewrite it with dinosaurs fighting vampires, my Dreamspinner Press editor basically just wanted to fix all my stupid English Grammar mistakes (I thought I'd done quite well with my American Grammar, but...well, that was a beautiful dream), point out a couple of typos and spelling errors, tell me that I'd got a fact about Andrea Botcelli incorrect, and clarify whose hand was sliding up whose arm and whose leg went where.

There was no misinterpreting of the characters, wild requests for changes in the plot, mocking laughter or nit-picking. Frankly, if my print editor did this kind of job, I'd marry her. I managed to turn the ms around in about an hour, and it was pure pleasure. Phew.

I can only hope and pray that revising my other m/m stories will go as smoothly. Even though I actually got my first m/m contract with Torquere (for novelette Love Bites) a week before And Is Never Shaken was accepted by DSP, I haven't heard anything from TQ about editing yet. I assume this is because TQ puts out two or three times as many titles as DSP, so their queue is longer. Patience, Alexi, patience...

And Is Never Shaken Cover!

OMG!

(Yes, I know I'm too old for OMG, but sometimes you just gotta).

Props to the geniuses of the Dreamspinner Press art department, for coming up with something that made me squee like a Twihard meeting a Robert Pattinson lookalike in the local grocery store. I really love this; it captures the mood of the story and characters perfectly. I've had a half dozen print covers designed for my work now, but not one of them felt *right* like this one does. They even put the coffee cups on there!

Made my day. Made my weekend.

I'm still waiting to get to the top of the editing pile at DSP, and begin work on revisions of this story. I'm a tiny bit nervous because I don't know how 'hard' the editing will be. I've worked with American editors before, but usually in collaboration with my British one - and British editors tend to make jokes about how harsh American editors are, and how American authors quiver in fear of them.

But at the same time I'm really psyched about getting this story out there, and can't wait to begin. Fingers crossed it'll be soon, before the anxiety gets to me and I start chewing my own hair or barking like a dog.

The Bitter Sting of Rejection

Woe! Woe! Darkness has come upon me!

Well, it's not quite as bad as all that. My short story, Precious Possession, which I wrote for the Dreamspinner Press Midsummer's Nightmare anthology, has been rejected. It's my first rejection as an m/m author.

I'm a little sad, because I actually really love the story and think it's unusual and deserves to be published. But that's the reason why anthologies are prestigious and gain so much attention, of course - there are big, well known names in there which draw in a lot of readers, and that means that the editors can be super discriminating. There's no feedback, so I don't know if the problem was length, or my interpretation of the theme or just the fact that the hero gets possessed by a female ghost during sex (I have a sneaking feeling it might be that last one - there's a certain squink factor to it).

So my run of acceptances has now come to an end. Despite the fact that I knew it had to happen eventually, and despite being very used to rejection, it still always knocks your confidence a little. You find yourself looking at your WIP and wondering 'Will this one get rejected too?'. It makes you a little more cautious, perhaps, and that's not always a good thing where writing is concerned. But maybe it makes you a little bit more of a perfectionist too, which is always good for your work.

This rejection means my progress now stands at: One novella placed with Dreamspinner Press, awaiting editing. One novelette and one novella with Torquere Press, both awaiting editing. One completed short story needing a home.

There was a notice on the Torquere author's noticeboard the other day that they're up to date on their sip submissions and are looking for new stuff, so I think I might reformat the file (one of the hardest things about submitting for epublishers is how they all have their own quirky requirements on format - DSP like double spaced with line indents, TQ like single spaced with carriage breaks after paragraphs) and send it to them. Can't hurt.

In the meantime, though I'm going to London next week to talk to my print publisher about my new book for them, I'm still avoiding working on it. Instead I'm playing with a new m/m novella with a futuristic theme. What can I say? A character presented himself to me, and I could not resist. He's...unique.

More about that one later.

Status Check

Okay. I'm a newbie m/m author - so new that I'd never tried to write an m/m story (not even slash fic) until January this year. So it's nearly the end of February now and I'm just going to do a little status check

M/m novelette Love Bites (about a man who has long suppressed his bisexuality and what happens when he 'comes out' to his best friend) was completed and submitted to Torquere Press 26/1/2010.

M/m novella And is Never Shaken (concerning immortal love, classical music and reincarnation) was completed and submitted to Dreamspinner Press 08/02/2010.

Love Bites was accepted by Torquere Press as a Single Shot on 15/02/2010. Contact now signed.

And is Never Shaken was accepted by Dreamspinner Press 19/02/2010. Contract now signed.

So far, so good.

Stuff I'm waiting to hear about:

M/m novella Ruby Slippers (featuring Ethan and Jamie from Love Bites as secondary characters and telling the story of a police officer and a drag queen) completed and submitted to Dreamspinner Press 21/02/2010.

Stuff I haven't submitted yet:

Short m/m story Precious Possession (about a relationship that goes wrong and how some ghostly intervention saves it) which I intend to send for Dreamspinner's 'A Midsummer Night's Nightmare' anthology, but haven't yet because I don't want to flood them.

Stuff I'm still working on:

Another m/m story (which may turn out to be a novelette, but feels more like a novella) called Red Sky at Night which is actually set in the UK (my first!) and concerns...I dunno, maybe ghosts or something, possibly fate. Lots of sea imagery. Not sure yet.

Huh. Looking pretty good there. Slightly concerned that I need to perhaps look at other publishers through, or else Torquere and Dreamspinner are going to be getting sick of me, at the rate I'm putting stuff out. I'll make a decision on that when I finish Red Sky.

And is Never Shaken...

Well, I got up this morning to find an email from Dreamspinner Press with a contract attached to it! These e-publishers really do work incredibly fast. So this means that my second m/m story, And is Never Shaken, now has a publisher too. Exciting!

Here's my own little synopsis of the story, which is novella length (22,000 words) although of course that might go up or down if we do any editorial work.

And is Never Shaken is the story of Cassian Ford, a successful writer and English Professor in his forties, who lost the boy he believed to be the love of his life as a teenager. When he sees that boy - apparently reborn - walking past him one day on the street, he attempts to pursue him.

But Andy, the twenty-two year old man in question, doesn't believe in reincarnation. He feels a deep connection to Cassian, but he wants to be loved for himself, not resemblance to a dead man, and Cassian has to prove that it's Andy he really wants before they can have a hope of a relationship.

I need to print the contract, sign it and get it back to them, which is where living in a different country is kind of annoying, but hopefully airmail will get it there fairly quickly.

Now I just need to finish my third m/m story and decide who to submit it to...