Jamaica Layne, The Blog!

Pet Peeves

2012-01-03T12:11:00.001-08:00

I haven't posted on here in quite awhile, I've just been too busy with, well, actual writing work for which I am paid. Priorities, dontchya know. I microblog on Facebook because it doesn't involve much time, and I'd rather expend my very limited free time doing something other than writing, since writing is my job, and when was the last time you did your job as a vacation? But I digress. I thought I'd kick off the New Year with a list of my pet peeves. Some of them are writing-related, others are just general pet peeves. But, since a lot of people go out of their way to annoy me in a manner directly related to my profession, a lot of my pet peeves are directly related to writing. (People really do seem to become unintelligent and socially inept where the writing biz is concerned. I wonder what would happen to our economy if people behaved the same way about the stock market. Oh, snap. . .)

My Top Ten Pet Peeves, in descending order:

10) People who come up to me at parties and ask if I will participate in some half-baked get-rich-quick writing scheme of theirs for free. I have been dealing with this for years, and you'd think people would buy a clue by now, but they never do. Some dude came up to me at a Christmas party last month and asked if I would be interested in ghostwriting a memoir for some Z-list pseudo-celebrity he allegedly goes bar-hopping with. "What would he have to do to hire you?" the dude asked. "He can write me a very large check," I replied. "In advance. The going rate is about $50,000, minimum." The dude was surprised by this. "But, wouldn't you get paid AFTER the book is published?" I was like, "You mean, work for free? I don't think so."

9) People who email me on Facebook asking if I will please use my "connections" to help them track down and hire internationally bestselling authors to work for their half-baked venture-capital computer software scheme, FOR FREE. Uh huh. Because I'm sure people like Terry Brooks, Orson Scott Card and Stephen King would absolutely love it if I showed up on their doorstep asking them to do me a favor for someone I'm not even friends with, and they don't even know me personally in the first place, and somehow I don't think they'd be interested in writing content and characters for your 10th-generation copycat of World of Warcraft for zero compensation when they make more money for a two-hour speaking engagement than I make in a year. Yeah. Right. Please go take a long walk off a short pier. Thank you very much.

8) Flaky people. You know, I am so sick of people asking me to help them with shit, who want me to take time out of my busy schedules to teach them a craft, do them a favor, make them something, whatever, and I offer to do it, and set up a time, yadayadayada, and then they flake out on me and cancel, multiple times, and then wonder why I don't want to help them with anything anymore. Seriously? Go to hell.

7) Flaky people, Part Deux. Ya know, if I've already helped you with something, and all you have to do to complete the task to get what you want is stick it in an envelope and lick a stamp, and you don't even do that, for like a YEAR, and then wonder why you haven't gotten what you want, well, you need help. (And the best way to accomplish something, however small, is to DO IT, and stop BSing about it. This rule is widely applicable. Give it a try sometime.)

6) Childless people who lecture me on how to be a parent. This requires no further explanation.

5) Single and/or multiply divorced people who lecture me about how to have a healthy long-term relationship. Again, this requires no further explanation.

4) People who interrupt me when I'm teaching a class every five seconds. If you're taking my class (or any class, for that matter), you'll find you learn a lot more if you actually LISTEN to the instructor instead of interrupting her ALL THE TIME. I have been known to kick students out of my classes who do this too much. And raising your hand first BEFORE blurting out your questions also helps.

3) Gun nuts. I really have no use for firearms, and even less use for people who continuously espouse how wonderful things that are used to kill people by means of explosion violence are, especially when they ignore all the scientific/public health evidence to the contrary. Seriously, these people piss me off. Stay out of my state. Better yet, go form your own country somewhere in the Arctic and don't come back, ever, and hopefully you will all just shoot each other to death and do the rest of us a favor. Bye.

2) People who don't appreciate the favors you do for them. A simple "thank you" will suffice. Biting the hand that feeds you is usually not a good way to go through life. Nor is it a way to win friends or influence people.

1) Mean, nasty, self-important haters who have nothing better to do than to attack/belittle everything I do, believe, and say. I've run into a lot of them over the past year. Granted, I'm responsible for that to some extent, because I'm tolerant to a fault. But no more. There's a new sheriff in town, and if you act like an asshole, and/or act like an asshole to people I care about, please do not expect me to keep talking to you. I don't care how long we've known each other, or how important you think you are, that rule applies to everyone.

(Oh, and then there's the random no-name people who email me asking if I will write their incredibly fascinating life story for them at no charge, sign over the copyright, and let them keep all the millions of dollars it will surely make for themselves. Gotta love them. NOT.)

Peace.

NaNoWriMo Tips

2011-10-30T15:36:00.001-07:00

November is National Novel Writing Month (and National Play Writing Month too). Since I've written almost 20 novels (most of which are published, though I've still got a couple of failures in the drawer too), not to mention a buttload of plays, this time of year I always get hounded by people who want to know how they can write a novel or a full-length play in a month. Mind you, these are people who are not writers----in fact, they often can't even claim to be wannabe writers.

Nine times out of ten, those same people are not even remotely serious about getting started in the novel-writing process, and the ones that do start often do not finish. (And we're not even getting into their success rates on publication, which are even lower.) So, suffice to say that I am generally pretty cynical when these Johnny-come-latelies interrupt my very limited free time asking for writing advice.

To bypass that, I've come up with a list of 10 tips. So, read these tips, and don't bug me for free advice. TYVM.

1) Write every day for at least 2 hours. Bare minimum. No excuses. And that means EVERY SINGLE DAY, including holidays and weekends. You need to get down at least 1700 words per day for 30 days to have a 50,000 word manuscript (which might be a piece of crap, but at least it's something). Ditto for a play. So get cracking.

2) Don't bother with a bunch of writing "exercises" like outlines or brainstorms or character profiles. That kind of garbage is just stupid busy-work invented by bad writing teachers. Just write the damn novel (or play, or whatever). You can always go back and revise a first draft, but without an actual first draft, you've got jack nada.

3) Don't quit your day job. Unless you already write for a living (and I highly doubt it), do not expect your as-yet-unfinished novel or play to start paying your bills for you.

4) Don't expect to get published. It is very, very, very hard to get published. (Self-publishing and vanity publishing don't count). The brutal truth is, the vast majority of first novels do not get published. Your first completed novel is really more of a training exercise that helps you learn how to write a novel. (Mine was.) Oftentimes, the "first" novels of published authors were in fact the third or fourth (or more) novels they actually finished. (The same goes for plays----don't expect your first play to get produced.) Mind you, I've had dozens of my plays produced and published, and I've still got a ton that I can't even give away---and just FYI, the new play market is worse than the novel market, and it's getting worse every year.

5) Be prepared to give up most of your leisure activities. That means turn off the TV, stop playing World of Warcraft, stop screwing around online, stop going to parties, stop gossiping on the phone, and sign out of Facebook. All of it. That book isn't gonna write itself. If you're not willing to do all of that, then you should probably quit right now.

6) Don't bother me. I am a full-time professional freelance writer with bills to pay and deadlines to meet, I don't have time to answer a bazillion stupid writing questions from strangers (or even friends that I know aren't serious about writing). If I choose out of the kindness of my heart to give you some of my time and expertise, please appreciate it.

7) You are not God's gift to literature. If you've never written a book or play before, then this should be obvious, but you'd be surprised how many people think the exact opposite.

8) No publisher is going to show any interest in an unfinished novel manuscript. So stop reading my blog and finish it! And the market for unfinished (or even finished) plays is approximately equal to the market for used belly lint, so keep your expectations well in line with that.

9) Do not ask me to introduce you to my agent and/or publisher, because I won't. This would be in line with Tip No. 7, but given how many audacious people have asked me to do this, it merits its own tip. (And the one time I did it, I got totally burned, so I will never do it again).

10) Don't say that you "don't have time" to write. I am sick to death of hearing from people with half-finished manuscripts who complain that they would like to finish them, but they "don't have time." Bullshit. You have the same number of hours in the day as allotted to Ghandi, Voltaire, Gore Vidal, J.K. Rowling, and Jesus Christ, and look what they managed to do with it. So, stop making a bunch of bullshit lazy excuses and go write.

Peace.

Pasteups, Part Deux

2011-09-10T07:41:00.000-07:00

These days the closest thing I get to doing a pasteup is linking my latest articles to my portfolio page on my professional website. I always put it off because it's a pain in the ass, but it's a necessary pain in the ass since as a freelance journalist, you're only as good as your latest article. I have a bunch more articles to post this weekend, it's on my list of (~~procrastination~~) things to do this weekend, along with some PR copywriting work I'm not in the mood to do right now.

Since I'm waxing philosophical anyway, allow me to continue my post from yesterday about writing for yourself versus writing for an audience. We've already established that amateurs write for themselves and pros write for others. But what happens when a pro gets stuck in a self-involved rut and can't see the forest for the trees? Well, I've got an anecdote to share.

A former coworker and acquaintance of mine wrote and published about 30 pulp sword-and-sorcery fantasy novels (think Conan the Barbarian type stuff) in the 70s and early/mid 80s. Although he never made enough money to give up his editing day job entirely, he did quite well and had an international readership for those books. At one point, he even had the same agent as Stephen King. (No joke). Then, in the late 80s the market changed and nobody wanted to read those kinds of books anymore. Readers' tastes' changed, and the market changed with it.

But instead of exploring new things to write about (which is how any writer grows professionally), my acquaintance just kept writing the same damn book over and over again. Small wonder his novel-writing career was dead in the water. His agent dropped him, his publisher killed the rest of his contract, and he couldn't even give his work away.

And so it went for him for about 25 years. He stopped writing altogether because he was bitter. Then he started writing again, but he was still covering all the same old ground. He went the self-publishing route, at great expense to himself and his family. He reached out and mentored younger writers like me (and since he'd been tutored himself by the great Leigh Brackett, I appreciated that---for a while anyway), but his own career still went---you guessed it, nowhere.

Still, I liked the guy. He was smart and funny and knew a lot about books and movies, so he was fun to chat with, and his much-younger wife had a child about my son's age. We would hang out sometimes. Then we got the idea to have a monthly writers' group meeting, where he, I, and one of his hanger-on friends who also wrote on the side would discuss our work.

I went to a few of those meetings, but pretty soon figured out they were a waste of time. First of all, this guy's writer friend was completely self-absorbed, not to mention kind of creepy (he once threatened bodily harm on me for disagreeing with him on something), and second of all, we didn't really talk about writing or discuss each other's work. Mostly the two men talked about old movies, with smatterings of sex and booze and assorted other misogynistic topics, and then they'd switch gears to talking about all the self-publishing projects they had going. They were "investing" thousands of dollars of their own money into vanity-press contracts, not to mention slick, expensively produced book trailers, going so far as to hire professional actors to appear in them. (And neither of them could really afford to be doing that, either).

They would insist doing this was the "wave of the future" of publishing, and neither of them wanted to hear much about how I had managed to land multiple book contracts that paid ME advances and royalties instead of the other way around. Not to mention that I earned a steady full-time living as a journalist. No, neither of them wanted to hear anything about how I'd accomplished that. No, they just wanted to talk about how cool they thought their new characters and plots were and how much fun they were having writing them. But there was still plenty of complaining from the both of them about how they weren't making a living as writers and how they thought the whole publishing system was bogus, and people were stupid not to want to buy pulp sword and sorcery books anymore.

The one time I brought up to them that they were not succeeding as writers because they were thinking too much about themselves and not about readers, well, I didn't get a good reaction.

So, suffice to say I ended that friendship. But I learned a great deal from it nonetheless. And I'll leave you with this. Yesterday I got copyedits back from my editor on two articles I wrote about mental illness in the United States. My editor said,"Wow, these were great pieces! Really made me think, and even made me outraged. I can tell you're really passionate about this topic."

And it's true, I am very passionate about it. I have multiple family members who struggle with mental illness so it's a topic close to my heart. I told her that, and also said that I try to do my part as a journalist to keep people informed about it. She replied, "Wow, that's great. By the way, my grandfather committed suicide, I wish we could have gotten him some help. It's nice to see journalists like you take that topic on."

And that, my friends, is what makes my job worth doing. I don't write for myself, you see. I write for others.Peace.

Paste-ups

2011-09-09T08:22:00.001-07:00

I don't blog these days as much as I "micro-blog" on Facebook, but I try to post longer, more thought-out posts here. Still, today I'm sort of cheating since this post is more of a compilation of some recent Facebook conversations.

I've been working some long hours writing-wise, with lots of deadlines and competing projects. I just landed a new long-term freelance client, just upped my monthly article load, and also spent about a month and a half on an intensive edit of my latest novel release, which was especially arduous. (But in a good way, since I made that editor very happy and she's made it clear she wants to buy more of my books so she can keep working with me. Always a bonus.)

One thing that a lot of aspiring writers (and even some writing teachers) will tell you is that you should always write "for yourself first." Which has got to be the worst piece of writing advice ever, especially from a career perspective. If you really want to make writing your full-time paying career, you have to learn to write chiefly for OTHER PEOPLE. (In other words, readers.) If you want to get paid for writing, you have to be able to write something other people are willing to pay for. Unless, of course, you're planning on just paying yourself all the time, and that's not a good career strategy unless you're a billionaire.

If you want other people to pay you for the privilege of reading your work, then it helps if you actually have some idea what other people want to read. How do you do that? Well, you could probably start by reading everything you can get your hands on. Newspapers (online or print), magazines (online or print), books (print or digital). Go to the bookstore, or the book section of WalMart or Target and see what's on the shelves. Go to your library and ask the librarians what books are most popular with patrons. Read, read, read. Think about what you yourself like to read and what kinds of writing you plunk down your own hard-earned money to purchase. Then apply that to your writing. Always write with an audience in mind.

There is a certain amount of selflessness involved in writing for a living. Only amateurs write "for themselves." (If you write only for yourself, you'll likely have an audience consisting only of yourself.) Pros write for others.

An old friend of mine and I had a Facebook conversation the other day about when she used to work for a print magazine in the old days of paste-ups and column typesetters. She said, "We had a group of heavyset older ladies who would typeset out and paste up everything into columns [ahead of printing.] Boy, you did NOT want to piss off those ladies with last-minute changes!"

Publishing used to be a lot more labor-intensive than it is now. The digital age has removed a lot of the barriers to writing for an audience by taking a lot of the physical work of publishing out of the equation. But that's not necessarily a good thing. As my old friend pointed out, in the old days you thought a lot more about how what you did affected other people in the publishing queue. Maybe we need to go back to that a little, because too many people these days think only about themselves when it comes to their writing, and not about others. And they wonder why they don't have an audience.

More on this topic tomorrow. Peace.

Recession? What recession?

2011-08-19T07:47:00.001-07:00

I've been plugging away at this self-employed freelance writer thing for a few years now, and I'm proud to say that I'm now very, very successful at it. Almost too successful, in fact. Because I now have so much good-paying work being offered to me by many different clients that I've spent the past 2 weeks working 12-18 hour days. Not to mention proofing galleys and audiobooks for my published novels on tight deadlines for my book editors. It's grueling, but rewarding. And not just financially. Having people come out of the woodwork completely unsolicited offering you good money to write for them sure is a confidence booster.

It's odd, though. Even though I'm thankful for the success, in today's troubled economic times I can't help but feel a little guilty to be doing so well. (Especially when I was struggling myself not that long ago.) I know lots of unemployed writers, many of them former newspaper reporters and magazine/book editors who've lost their jobs in publishing, some of whom had been working as professional writers for 30 years or more and now don't know where their next meals are coming from. Plus there are tons more writers who struggle to write on the side while working day jobs they hate (if they're lucky enough to have day jobs at all), and they seldom make more than the price of a Chinese dinner for their writing---if even that much. But for me, this year has been a banquet, and it keeps getting better and better.

But then again, it kind of follows my longstanding pattern of going against the grain in life. In the late 90s, when the economy was on a tear and people all around me were making money hand over fist, I was barely getting by. I worked staff writer/editor jobs that paid a pittance when I was lucky, and waited tables/worked in retail when I wasn't so lucky (staff writer/editor jobs are the last hired and first fired even in good times). I did freelance writing on the side, contributing articles to the Chicago Tribune, Chicago Reader, and numerous magazines, but the pay for that was low and intermittent, though it helped me build a nice portfolio of clips. Plus I was living in a big expensive city, I was single, I had massive student loan debt (now mostly paid off) and a low/mostly unstable income. I had friends from grad school who had originally aspired to be writers choose different careers because they didn't want to live hand to mouth; they made more money than I did but weren't necessarily happier. But I wanted to be a writer, dammit, and I swore I'd never give up the dream. Seventeen years later, I still haven't, and now I'm the envy of many of those friends.

But I'm still not satisfied. I won't be until I have a book on the New York Times Bestseller list. Then two. Then four. Then all of them made into films. Then, I want my ultimate childhood fantasy fulfilled----I want one of my plays to get a successful run on Broadway, preferably to include a Tony (maybe even a Pulitzer, but one thing at a time).

Okay, okay, maybe I'm getting carried away now. But the thing is, even though this recession and job market are brutal for a lot of people, I'm doing better professionally now than I've ever done in my entire life. I'm thankful for it, I appreciate it. And I'll keep right on working my ass off. I've only been doing it for seventeen years now.

Gotta go, deadlines await.

Peace.

A Grownup's Guide to Inner Peace

2011-08-15T15:38:00.000-07:00

Lately I've been reflecting a lot on my own life choices, as well as the life choices of some of my friends and family. The old saying "the grass is always greener" is true---to a point. While I have single friends and family who have zero responsibilities and the freedom to gallivant all over the country and world at a moment's notice doing all sorts of crazy, glamorous things (and sometimes, I have to admit, I find myself envious of them even though I lead a very full life myself), I honestly would not trade places with them. Why?

Because in most cases, these are people who are older than me (sometimes MUCH older) but still don't have their "real" lives together yet. As in, no stable relationships (and/or multiple broken ones/divorces), blah-blah careers, no family or dependents, sometimes even no real financial stability. They spend their time jumping from one glamorous "adventure" to the next, jam-packing their schedules with every thrill-seeking activity they can possibly think of, without ever once stopping to notice what they're really doing is hiding from themselves. I can certainly understand the need to stay busy, since keeping busy is something that I do to address my tendency to get depressed if I don't. But there's a very big difference between finding productive things to do and running around like a chicken with your head cut off.

One thing I've learned as a Buddhist is to place a lot of value in keeping still. We all lead crazy lives, but at some point, we all have to slow down, sit down, and listen to ourselves, or we'll lose touch of who and what we really are. Not only that, a big part of being truly happy is serving something (and someone) other than yourself. Part of what it means to be a grownup is to consider yourself part of something larger than just your own needs and wants---whether that's a long-term relationship, a family, or even just your community. That can be hard to do when all you're doing is chasing the next thrill.

I can understand the appeal of the thrill-seeking life, since I spent the better part of my 20s pursuing it myself. But I also spent the better part of my 20s as a miserable emotional wreck who was full of anger and self-loathing. It wasn't until I slowed down and spent some serious time doing nothing but the basics of existence that I really figured myself out. All those years I spent travelling (I still travel, I just do it for the right reasons), jumping from one project/interest to the next, bed-hopping with umpteen-million boyfriends and casual one-night-stands did nothing for my self-esteem or for my character. Sure, they've given me some good stories to tell at cocktail parties, but that didn't make me me.

People often justify their crazy, impermanent, never-stop-to-smell-the-roses lives as "ways to find themselves." But that's not it at all. Really, what they're doing is running away from themselves. I know, because I've done it. All it got me was a major crash-and-burn in which every aspect of my life----personal, financial, spiritual, emotional----literally fell apart around me, and I was left with nothing.

How did I right my ship when that happened? (It happened about 10 years ago). I just stopped. I totally rebuilt my life from the ground up, and I did it by chucking all extraneous activities (other than work, exercise, and sleep) in favor of meditation. Seriously, I did that for almost an entire year. It worked. Within a year of doing that, I found myself married, with a good job, owning a home, and with a career that was going places.

Do yourself a favor. This week, get out your crazy-busy schedule, look it over, and then DELETE everything on it for at least one day. Or even a half-day if that's all you can do. Go out and sit on your porch or in the park or in a field and do nothing but just think, and breathe, and meditate (or pray, if that's your thing). Really take a hard look at yourself and your life, but don't attach any feeling or judgment to what you find. You might find yourself a little freaked out by what pops into your head while you do this. Be prepared to get upset, angry, maybe even cry a little. But it's worth it in the long run. When you're forced to look hard at yourself, you learn two things. One, that your own life really isn't all that important in the big context of the world, and two, that it's the people around you that really matter most. That doesn't mean you have to start sacrificing your own happiness, though. What you'll often find is, if you're where you should be, your happiness will just be there regardless of what you're doing or who you're with.

Easier said than done, I know. But you can start by inquiring within. And it sometimes it takes a major slowdown in order to speed yourself up for good.

Peace.

The Writer's Conundrum

2011-08-10T10:46:00.001-07:00

You know what's great about being a successful writer/artist? You see and feel things that others don't, and when you express what you see and feel, people pay attention.

But you know what's also really bad about being a successful writer/artist? You see and feel things that others don't, and when you express what you see and feel, people pay attention.

Peace.

Confessions of a Straight Talker

2011-08-01T19:04:00.000-07:00

Facebook is great for a lot of things, including stimulating political debate. But one thing it can also do is piss people off. Especially when you're an outspoken, straight-talking Irish tomboy lass like me who grew up to be a professional writer. I've pissed some people off online with my straightforward, open, no-nonsense style of late. They weren't people who were necessarily important to my real life, though in some cases they were old friends I hadn't seen in years but had renewed correspondence with. Others were people I didn't really know well personally (though I'd met them, at least) but whom I'd grown fond of online. Then, one day I make one of my trademark blunt-as-a-dull razor statements (which they should have grown accustomed to by that point---indeed, many people actually become friends with me in the first place because they like this personal trait of mine) and poof! Gone.

I got all hot and bothered and anxious by that over the weekend, since in one case in particular the people in question really went after me personally (one thing I always try to make a point not to do whenever/wherever possible, even when I'm at my bluntest). But after the edge wore off, I decided that I just can't continue to let that sort of thing bother me. Here's some reasons why.

1) I am not going to censor myself just to please you. While this doesn't mean I'm going to go around spewing obscenities like a Tourette's victim, don't expect me to "shut up and behave like a lady," as one person choicely put it to me last week. I've always been more comfortable talking with men than women because I don't do the whole passive-aggressive/overly emotional thing very well. This is who I am. Get used to it.

2) And pursuant to No. 1, people who spew overemotional hot air with no rhetorical substance (usually women, though I've seen men do it too) do not tend to get along with me, so be forewarned.

3) I am hard-wired this way. I have been an upfront, straightforward, straight-talking broad since I was at least 2 years old, or so my parents tell me. I don't have the "off" switch in my brain that most people do. Some might say that's a psychological defect of some kind, but even if it is, I've managed to make a pretty lucrative profession out it. If I think something needs to be said, sooner or later it is going to fall out of my mouth (or my pen). So telling me that I need to learn tact is not usually a good piece of advice for me to follow. You might as well tell a blind person to get glasses.

4) I always think honesty is the best policy. Again, I'm hard-wired this way. Lies make me physically ill, unless I'm writing fiction. I think the whole reason I became a writer was because it was the only way my brain could process the natural human tendency for lying. (This is probably because I was always severely punished for "making up stories" as a young child, as young children are often wont to do.) So if you want to know if that dress makes you look fat, but you are really just looking for an ego boost, you should probably ask someone else.

5) I have more self-awareness than a lot of people, and that's not necessarily a good thing. If I censor myself (or even show restraint), my conscience often makes me feel guilty for being dishonest. Not only that, I spend a lot of time evaluating my faults and looking for ways to improve upon them, though I don't always succeed. (In other words, I beat myself up a lot, I set very high standards for myself, and I'm never satisfied.) As if that weren't hard enough, I also expect other people to adhere to my high standards, and of course they usually don't, so I'm frequently disappointed, and I frequently say so. Loudly.

6) Aren't you glad you aren't me? The neurotic writer who lives alone in a garrett is a cliche. But the scary part is, it's also true. I'm a neurotic writer who spends 10-12 hours a day working in an attic and not talking to anyone. You'd be a little "off" in the head if you were me, too.

Peace.

Patience

2011-06-21T08:14:00.001-07:00

So much about writing for a living involves patience. Lots of it. First off, it takes a great deal of mental discipline, concentration, and self-control in order to write. You have to shut out all distractions (not easy these days!), stay focused on a narrative throughline (in the case of fiction) or a topic (in the case of nonfiction or journalism). You even have to be "on" when you aren't writing, filtering through all the random thoughts and ideas that pop into your brain when you're housecleaning, or out jogging, or driving your car---and then keep track of which ideas are usable and which are not, and which can be filed away for possible future use. And if you're a features journalist like I am, you also have to "keep your finger on the pulse of America," as my editors like to say, so I can pitch them my monthly story topics that are timely and of interest to my publications' readership. Not an easy task, for sure.

But that's just the tip of the iceberg. Even when your writing is complete, you often spend a lot of time just waiting around. Waiting for interview subjects to return calls or to approve their quotes. Waiting for your editor to reply to your latest email. Waiting for your agent to get back to you on all those submissions she made to big publishing houses in the positively glacial world of New York publishing. Waiting for that quarterly royalty check. Waiting, waiting, waiting. And then more waiting.

I think the main reason most people who aspire to be professional writers simply don't have what it takes is a lack of patience. It often takes years and years of work, study, and self-defeating rejection just to get published, after all. And even after you've "made it," the waiting and the need for humility and reams of patience never really stops---if anything, it just gets worse. That's why when random half-committed (if that) people waltz up to me and say they want to do what I do for a living, I tell them, "No you don't. Go out and sell real estate, or get a job as a secretary or something. Don't do this." They usually give me a dirty look and walk away. But they always seem to take my advice, at least when it comes to getting a job.

Peace.

Falling In

2011-06-07T09:40:00.001-07:00

Last night I took one of my now-rare forays into the city of Chicago (where I spent the better part of my 20s and early 30s living) for a theater benefit performance gala that also included a rare Chicago performance of my most-frequently produced stage play, "The Devil Is In The Details." (Because of some of the odd peculiarities of the Chicago theater world, which I won't discuss here but I've blogged about in the past, I long ago stopped pursuing productions in Chicago in favor of more high-profile---and paying---play productions in New York City, Los Angeles, and nationally). I don't do this often for a whole host of reasons, let alone on a weeknight, but I did it not only to see my play on its feet, but also because I'm a longtime member of the producing organization, Chicago Writers Bloc, a playwrights' collective.

One of the great things about Chicago Writers Bloc versus some of the other playwrights' organizations in town (who shall remain nameless, ahem), is that most of the members actually make their living solely by writing (me included). We have several current and former (retired) Chicago Tribune and Sun-Times reporters/editors, people who've written/published upwards of 30 books, people who make/write successful documentary films and TV shows, people who've had their plays produced all over the country. The one thing we all seem to have in common is the Chicago theater "establishment," which tends to be very actor-driven, wants nothing to do with us. (Which doesn't seem to hurt our careers as writers, but whatever.) There were several very respected Chicago-area journalists and columnists there last night, and I got to shoot the breeze with them and "talk shop" about what it means to make a living as a writer in this town.

One of the cool things that happened was, I got to talk to one of my fellow Chicago Writers Bloc playwrights, Kenan Heise, at length about his life as a reporter, then editor, at the Tribune during the 60s, 70s, and 80s, as well as his time in the trenches of the 1960s civil rights movement. I knew of course that he'd done all of those things (he's retired from journalism now, though he still writes/publishes books and is now moving into playwriting), but I had never really talked to him about it. He shared some wonderful anecdotes of his old days at the Trib, but he also shared this interesting tidbit----he had absolutely no formal training or education as a journalist. As a matter of fact, he'd spent the better part of his 20s and early 30s as a Franciscan monk under solemn vows, living in a monastery not far from where I grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio!

Wow! You could have knocked me over with a feather when he told me that. He said that due to his epilepsy and a disagreement with his father superior, he'd been made to leave his order. He got involved in the civil rights movement in the 60s, then eventually "fell into" news reporting at the Tribune. I told him about how I'd also just sort of "fallen in" to being a freelancer lifestyle reporter in the 90s for the Tribune's then-new online Metromix section, also with no formal journalism training, only a useless graduate degree in media studies/critical theory from University of Chicago and an undergraduate degree in literature. And yet, I make a full-time living as a journalist now, something that has become next-to-impossible to achieve, if all the out-of-work reporters I know are any example.

Kenan replied, "Of course you did. All the best reporters out there 'fall into' journalism. Journalism school is a waste of time." He went on to tell me that he has frequently been called in to address students at Northwestern's prestigious Medill School of Journalism, and he always told them, "If you want to make it in this business, break the rules."

Well, from a guy who got kicked out of the Franciscan Order, rode freedom buses and got beat up in the 60s, then went on to have a rich journalism career after doing graduate studies in Latin, I think he knows there's a lot of truth to that. So do I.

Peace.

Deadlines

2011-05-23T09:16:00.001-07:00

One of the realities of being a professional writer is deadlines. When you're a full-time freelancer like me, your ability to get paid centers on your ability to deliver usable quality work by a deadline. I am self-employed, providing clients with a valuable service (i.e., my writing). I am assigned article topics to deliver (I also pitch my own topics to editors) by a set deadline. If I don't do it, I don't get paid. It's that simple.

One reason that many people like to work a cushy job with a regular salary is they get paid whether their work gets done or not. I know this from experience. When I worked in the corporate world, oftentimes my own work was dependent on a whole bunch of other people who seemed to have trouble with deadlines. If they didn't get their work to me, I couldn't make my own deadlines. (Funny thing, a lot of the people who didn't make deadlines and also seemed to do no work in general often outranked me in both job title and salary; that kind of bullshit is one major reason why I prefer to be a sole proprietor).

I have tried to explain to people (i.e., aspiring writers, my three-year-old son, my mom, my husband, ad nauseum) that when I am on deadline, PEOPLE CANNOT BOTHER ME. My mother is especially talented about calling me up and wanting to chat for hours when I'm on multiple article deadlines. Her usual response when I tell her I'm too busy to talk is, "But you work at home! You can do whatever you want!" I have long since tired of explaining to her why I can't talk to her when I'm on deadline, and use caller ID just to screen my calls and not answer them.

People, if I don't make deadline, I DON'T GET PAID. Period. It's that simple. This is why I get irritated with people who think that just because I'm a freelancer who works out of my house that I can just screw around and do whatever I want all day. Some days when I'm not on deadline I do have a lot of freedom and control over my own time (which is one reason I'm self-employed) but not when I'm on deadline.

Also, I do self-impose a lot of my own deadlines, such as when I'm writing fiction. I tell myself that I have to finish that novel by Day X, and I do it. Self-discipline is necessary in this business. That's why I call bullshit whenever people tell me that they "don't have time" to finish that novel they've had sitting in a drawer for five years. They DO have the time---but they don't have the self-discipline to set themselves a deadline and meet it. We all have the same number of hours in the day everybody else does, it's all about how we choose to use them.

I think that we might solve a lot of the world's problems by forcing everyone to work the way I do. If you don't do your job, you don't get paid. What a concept. How many people out there would be totally screwed if that's how the world worked? I can name several hundred right off the top of my head.

Peace.

Fantasy Island, Part Deux

2011-05-15T09:22:00.001-07:00

You probably remember my last post about people having the strange notion that writers/editors can and should work for free. I'd like to add another post about the strange fantasy world people seem to live in regarding my line of work.

Case in point: a week or so ago a friend of a friend whom I hadn't previously met came to my home to pick up some silk I had purchased for her friend when I was in China recently. (The person I actually bought it for couldn't pick it up herself, so she sent this friend of hers to do it since her friend was in the neighborhood.) She was a nice older lady who knew a lot about fabric and sewing, and had at one time worked in the fabric retail industry, so we struck up an interesting conversation about sewing, which was kind of fun. She also helped me with the formidable task of dividing up 40 yards of silk into 4 equal 10-yard pieces.

While we were visiting, she asked me about what it was like to write for a living. (our mutual friend had filled her in on my profession). I gave her a 2-minute rundown of what I do and how I do it. She then asked, "Do you need to hire a proofreader? Because I do that."

I just shrugged and said, "Well, I do that too." I don't generally proofread professionally anymore because the pay is too low to make it worthwhile when I can make more money writing, but I have done it for pay. But I do proof my own work religiously, and then once I've handed over a clean copy of it to my clients and/or publishers, they all have their own in-house editors/proofers who do the same before publishing it. When I explained this to her, she frowned. "Wow, that's not how it was back when I worked in publishing at all."

I pressed her for details, and it turned out she had spent some time working in the magazine industry about 35 years ago, back in the days when everything was done by hand on paper (and "cut and paste" literally meant get scissors and glue). She had worked as a manual proofreader and typesetter in those days. I politely explained that neither of those things are done manually anymore.

"So it's all done on computers now?" she asked. I nodded. "I remember when computers first came out in the 80s," she said. "I didn't want anything to do with them then, and I don't want anything to do with them now. But my husband died recently and I need a job, do you know where I can get work as a proofreader? I do everything the old-fashioned way, with a pen and paper. I take my time, too."

"Uh huh," I said. "Well, if you actually need to make a living, I would highly recommend you take some computer classes and then look in the online job classifieds for something."

She just stared at me. "Oh, I don't want to do that," she said. "I thought that if maybe I can't find a job as a proofreader, I'll go into business reading people's auras." (Seriously, no joke. She said this. With a straight face.)

I wished her luck and sent her on her merry way.

Peace.

Fantasy Island

2011-05-04T11:44:00.001-07:00

I had a Facebook exchange about this today, thought it might make sense to blog about it.

It never ceases to amaze me how many people think that professional writers/editors should just work for free (or next to free). (I'm not alone in that sentiment, even big-name pros like Harlan Ellison frequently gripe about repeatedly being asked to work for free: check out this video to see what I mean). Just this morning I opened six different emails asking me to write stuff and/or edit stuff FOR NOTHING, and/or were complaints that rates I had quoted them for my professional services were too high.

Well, excuse me for fucking living, but I'm a professional writer, with a helluva lot of serious publishing creds, not to mention almost 20 years' experience being paid to write, either as a freelancer or an editorial staffer. I did not just fall off a turnip truck yesterday and hang out a shingle asking people to pay me to type and/or spew hot air. I have been published in major newspapers (Chicago Tribune, Washington Post, I could go on), have hobnobbed with high-level government bureaucrats, have published multiple books, have written speeches for CEOs, ad nauseum. If you want me to work for you, PAY ME.

Just because there are a bunch of clueless amateurs out there willing to give away their very questionable writing "services" for free does not mean that I should too. Just because you can hire some flunky in a Pakistani word-churning/plagiarism mill three cents an hour to fuck up your already unpublishable work (and make it even more unpublishable and/or illegal) doesn't mean that I should also charge only three cents an hour to do an actual professional, quality job. You wouldn't expect the guy ringing up your groceries or the nurse taking care of you in the hospital to work for free, so why should I?

And while I'm on the subject, before you decide that it's cool to criticize me for my choice of publisher/agent/tax accountant/level of writing income, perhaps it would be somewhat intelligent of you to first have some idea what you are talking about. (i.e., like maybe being able to claim you are a full-time writer earning at least $75,000 a year from writing, like I do). Just saying.

I am a professional freelancer who owns/runs a small business. I contribute to the American economy. I'm lucky to do so, and most (i.e., 95%) of the people who try to do what I do professionally will fail. But that's really not my problem. I'm a businesswoman, and I'm not running a bleeping charity. So don't ask me to work for free. And while you're at it, why don't you get off Fantasy Island and join the rest of us in the real world?

That is all.

Peace.

Housekeeping

2011-05-03T11:27:00.001-07:00

Okay, so I've been away for a while. Sue me. The month of March was insane work-wise (I wrote 20-plus freelance articles for four different publications, including the Washington Post), then the first two weeks of April were equally insane as I tried to pack a full month's worth of writing work into half the time, since I was travelling overseas for the second half of April. On top of all of that, I finished writing a novel and sent it to my agent, as well as cared for a sick child and hubby, packed for a trip to SE Asia, did housework, yadayadayada.

The writer's life is never easy, but when you're doing it for a living (which is basically running a small business) and also running a household/parenting, little things like blog posts tend to fall by the wayside. Those of you who follow me on Facebook know I do some microblogging there, but it can't replace a longer, well-thought-out post. Which is not really what this is, but I digress.

Whenever you get back from an extended trip overseas, there's always lots of housekeeping to do when you get back. Like mowing the lawn, going through all the mail that's piled up, returning phone calls, etc. Except when you're self-employed like I am, it goes double. Plus there's that pesky little thing called jet lag, which is brutal when you're coming back from Asia. So I'm just now getting back on my feet, having caught up on my accumulated list of chores---such as updating my website, returning emails to my editors, alerting interviewees that the articles I wrote about them are live, cleaning up my dark pit of a house, unpacking 16 suitcases (okay, I'm exaggerating a bit, it was only 5 suitcases, it just seems like 16), catching up on bills, trying to figure out where some of my royalty payments went, etc.

It's very nice earning a full-time living as a journalist now, but it is sending the fiction writing (which I still get paid for, just not as much) to the back burner a bit.

Just before I left, I got my authors' copies of my latest novel release in the mail. It's slowly trickling into bookstores, and one of these days when I get a free minute I need to book some signings at my local Barnes & Noble locations. Two of them have already agreed to let me do signings at their respective stores, I just haven't found the time to call the store managers back to get on their event calendar. I'll do it eventually. I just need to remember where the phone is. (I think it's under a giant pile of laundry.)

Interesting week

2011-03-26T07:51:00.001-07:00

It's been a cool week in some ways, and weird in others. First off, I got over being sick only to have hubby and kiddo get sick. We went from balmy springlike temperatures to a second winter. The USA invaded Libya. And just when I thought I had finished my freelance assignments for the month (all 18 of them) I got offered my 19th assignment----a chance to write a piece for the Washington Post.

Before you start picturing me as a future Pulitzer winner in All the President's Men, take heart---it was basically a puff piece for the Washington edition's (not the venerable national edition, alas) real estate section. The content aggregator that is providing me with most of my work these days actually sells content to the Post (among other respectable outlets) and offered me the job. After taking over multiple last-minute assignments for other freelancers who couldn't meet their deadlines, I guess this content aggregator now views me as the go-to person to save their ass and deliver good content on short notice. Since I've never once had to revise a single story that I've delivered to these folks (for multiple clients), I figured I had this one in the bag.

The story was basically a profile of how various Washington-area property-management companies are contributing to Japan disaster relief efforts. Pulitzer Prize material it definitely was not, but at least I was writing about charity work instead of say, Brangelina. The Post editors even gave me all my sources, so I didn't have to do any legwork or digging to find my own sources like I usually do for my other clients.

However, this assignment wasn't without a learning curve. All the sources were basically PR people, which meant they had canned responses and didn't respond well to probing questions. I had to conduct a second interview of one of them----which I never do, and journalists always say is a sign of a bad interviewer----in order to get the angle my editor was looking for. I also had to go through several drafts on the deadline wire until my editor was satisfied. Which was definitely new territory for me. But then again, this type of article was a bit outside my usual subject area, and as I told her, sometimes it's good to stretch your chops a bit. Multiple rewrites and a hat-in-hand second interview can be a good way to do that.

Besides, it's the Washington Post. I'd walk backwards naked through a receiving line of blowtorches to get a Post assignment. What journalist wouldn't? Sure, my piece will be running in a tabloid Sunday-only print insert that is mostly full of apartment advertising, but hey, it's a start.

Peace.

Busy Bee, and Thoughts On Japan

2011-03-19T07:34:00.001-07:00

My son has been in child care full time for about 3 weeks now, and I've been more productive in those three weeks than I have in three years. I've picked up another freelance journalism client, and when combined with my main client, I will have filed 18 different feature stories for the two of them in the month of March alone. I'll be filing the last two stories on Monday morning, which means I'll have completed all 18 March article assignments with a week to spare!

I'll be dedicating that week to catching up on some other things I've been neglecting, like some website development and fiction writing, and some other miscellanous administrative tasks (like preparing and filing my quarterly taxes, a must now that I'm a full-time freelancer). I've been working on my current novel for about a year now, and I'm really hoping it will be my "breakout" book that launches me mainstream into a wider audience. Of course, I've been hoping for a breakout novel for a while now, but I've really been working on this one with that explicit goal in mind. If I can finally finish the draft by early April and get it off to my agent, I'll feel really good about my fiction-writing career this year. I have another completed manuscript that's been percolating at my agent's office for a while now (she's finally going to pitch it to editors at a conference next week; the main editor my agent thinks will be interested has been on maternity leave, and she wanted to wait until that editor returned to work before shopping the book.) Plus I've got another book sitting in front of an editor at a major NYC publisher that's been there a while now, and I'm hoping they'll make a decision soon.

I've decided once I'm done with my "breakout" manuscript that will be the end of my fiction writing for the year. I'll need to focus more on being a journalist for a while, since that's by far the most stable income-producing line of writing in my life right now. I've put playwriting on the back burner entirely (no money, total pain in the ass, though I do still get productions of my published plays).

I also have decided I want to dedicate some time to looking for a "real" journalism staff job, instead of just being a freelancer. I'd like a salary and benefits, and everyone knows the staff writers get the best assignments, anyway. The recent events in Japan have really reminded me of just how important journalism and journalists are, and having traveled to Japan myself (it's a beautiful country and an ancient culture, and I follow Zen Buddhism, which is part of that culture), I am very saddened by the state of things there. Journalists can and do make a difference in the world, and I'd like to be part of that----at least more so than I already am.

Peace.

Productivity

2011-03-07T10:32:00.001-08:00

My 3-year-old son has been in preschool for one week now. It's been a difficult transition for both of us, especially since he has never spent any time in daycare until now and I've been his full-time caregiver (often while also working from home) that whole time. But it's been good for him----I am already seeing him grow by leaps and bounds learning-wise in just a few days, and his behavior is much, much better---and good for me.

Good for me in that I'm so much more productive now. My work output has gone up by a factor of about 400%. Plus I'm getting to do things I haven't been able to do in a long time, like listen to whatever music I want while I'm working (instead of, say, The Wiggles), take long walks at noon, have CNN or NPR on while I'm having lunch, et cetera.

I have always been a high-productivity person, even when I was in high school (in fact, I even managed to stay productive when I was depressed.) And yet I continue to run into people who don't have even one-tenth of the amount of responsibility as I do----people who are single, childless, working part-time if working at all, etc.----who just can't seem to do even the bare minimum. I don't understand that at all. Lying around the house doing nothing is not a good way to pay your bills, for one thing. And productivity breeds productivity, for another. I've found that the more I keep myself busy, the more I get done overall---even if I'm just keeping busy with housework or childcare. Plus keeping busy is good for your health, mentally and physically.

Somebody told me the other week that I'm the strongest woman she knows. Which was a nice complement to get, but I didn't really feel like I deserved it. I know plenty of women who are much stronger and more productive than I am (Hillary Clinton, anyone? Michelle Obama? Nora Roberts? Jodi Picoult? Jacqueline Mitchard? Sara Gruen? I could go on.) I view myself as just an ordinary middle-class working stiff who does the best she can, which often still isn't good enough. But you'll never see me hibernating in my house doing nothing. (At least, not for more than an hour or two). I've got bills to pay, and a child to raise. Slacking is not a verb in my vocabulary.

Peace.

Author Chat at the Romance Studio tonight

2011-03-02T15:44:00.001-08:00

I'll be participating in an author chat at The Romance Studio this evening starting at 8 pm Eastern, as part of a cadre of Decadent Publishing authors. Hope you can stop by.

How Not To Win Friends and Influence People in the Facebook Age

2011-02-25T13:55:00.000-08:00

The other day I blogged about a complete and total jackass ex-classmate of mine who contacted me out of the blue on Facebook looking for a favor (which I granted----several favors, actually), only to have her throw it in my face. I'm still reeling from the sheer audacity of this person, but having chatted with some other people about this very issue, combined with some other rude and/or disrespectful behavior that I've dealt with online lately, I thought I'd do another post about it.

The Internet and Facebook in particular are great for keeping people connected (especially people who've been out of touch for a while----Facebook has helped me rekindle several wonderful old friendships over the past couple of years), for spreading news (personal, national, and otherwise), for marketing (I've got 4000 Facebook friends and 2500 Twitter followers, most of whom read my books), and even for engaging in friendly political debates. Like anything, though, Facebook and the Internet in general are just tools. They shouldn't be used as weapons (but unfortunately, they often are). And they're also easy tools to abuse.

Over the past year or so (and the past couple months in particular) I have seen far too many people use Facebook chiefly as a means for using and taking whatever they can get (including people), without ever once thinking about the consequences of that behavior. It's just "me, me, me" all the time----and fuck everybody else, basically (sorry, but I think the F-bomb is appropriate here). If I get one more out-of-the-blue request for a favor/gift/advice/whatever from another ex-coworker who treated me like crap in the office when we actually worked together, or barely-remembered classmate who was one of the "cool kids" back in school (here's a clue: I wasn't one of the "cool kids"), or complete and total strangers who email me demanding that I drop everything and give them my full, undivided, and completely uncompensated attention (and then harrass me when I don't), I am going to scream.

Here's the thing, people. I'm a very busy woman. I work an average of 50 hours a week these days (my freelance writing business has really taken off). Plus I've got a toddler (and no child care, natch---though that's finally changing starting next week). And I've got a husband, and a marriage, and bills to pay, and a house to take care of , yadayadayada. Time is the absolute most precious thing I have. If you want some of it, be prepared to pay handsomely for it. And on the off chance I decide to give you some of my priceless time and/or expertise for free (and I'm known to do both on occasion), you sure as hell better appreciate it.

Furthermore, I'd like to talk a little bit about the true meaning of friendship and camaradarie. One of the things Facebook is great for is keeping you in close touch with your friends----new and old. As I've said, I've rekindled many wonderful friendships that way over the past year. On the other hand, some of those same friendships abruptly ended when people "defriended" me for no reason---at least no reason I could see. I've guessed it may have had to do with my strong opinions, left-wing politics, Buddhist/agnostic religious beliefs, tendency towards dry humor, whatever----but these are people who have known me long enough to understand that's a part of who I am. I certainly don't defriend people just for their politics (as leftie as I am, I count several right-wing Republicans as my friends), or their religion, or their occasional tendency to fly off the handle sometimes (after all, I'm occasionally known to do the same.). These same people wrote to me seeking advice, asking questions about things I'm an expert in (like writing)---which I freely gave, seeking nothing in return but their friendship----and I didn't even get that.

Then there's the people who ask if I can help them with something, which I agree to do (also for no pay). We agree on a time, which I set aside from my uber-busy schedule, and then they either don't show up or reschedule at the last minute. And reschedule again. And again. Ad nauseum. After a certain point, I am no longer interested in helping them (for obvious reasons) but yet, they still ask. Ask, ask ask, take take take----and they give nothing back.

You know what I call people who do shit like that? Users. Users and takers. Superficial, one-dimensional, self-absorbed people. The same types we all see on reality TV shows and laugh at/despise. They're not just on reality TV, folks. They're everywhere. (And if you don't see it, it might be because you're too busy staring at your navel.)

We've become too polarized as a society these days largely because people seem to have lost the ability to see things from anyone's point of view but their own. Both sides of the political spectrum spend a lot of time demonizing the other side, without ever once trying to understand where the other side is coming from or finding any common middle ground. I even have friends who refuse to associate with people who are not carbon-copies of their own political/religious/whatever selves (they're all lefties like I am---except ironically, I'm usually further left politically than they are). Which I think is a real shame. They're missing out on meeting some great people that way.

I don't expect everybody I know or am acquainted with to agree with me all the time. Hell, I don't even expect my husband to agree with me all the time (if I did, we'd have divorced years ago). I think I have a much richer life as a result of that attitude. People of diametrically opposed viewpoints and belief systems can be great friends---even lovers or spouses. (I know this well, trust me). And yet, there are people with whom I've had friendly online debates with (I wouldn't even call them arguments---and people who know me well know that I love a good argument, provided it's done respectfully) drop off the face of the earth, defriend me, block me, pretend like they never met me, without one drop of explanation----even if they wrote to me seeking advice/help/whatever just a week earlier. I've also noticed that these same people often seem completely unwilling to compromise on anything, ever (I think it's no coincidence that many of them are still single and/or divorced well into their 40s and 50s, natch)

People, can we not do this? Can we all at least make an effort to do better? I try to do better every day. I don't always succeed, but at least I try. And before you judge me or cry foul that I'm even bringing this topic up, know this. Anyone who has known me personally for any length of time knows that I am very generous with my friends and colleagues. I am thoughtful, I am loyal (almost to a fault), I respect people (including their differences), and I treat them with dignity. I go out of my way to do it, in fact. Is it too much for me to expect other people to do the same?

Think about it.

Peace.

Seriously. Don't Do This.

2011-02-23T07:04:00.001-08:00

Okay, so those of you who follow my blogs know that I like to post from time to time about writers behaving badly (or as I affectionately call it, Stupid Writer Tricks). Well, I have got the ultimate be-all end-all in Stupid Writer Tricks to tell you about. And in all fairness, I'm included as one of the stupid in this story, because it wouldn't have happened at all if I hadn't been such a sucker.

I get random emails and Facebook IMs from random people wanting me to help them get their books published, help them get agents, write their books for them, donate my organs to them (well, maybe not that one, it just feels like it) EVERY SINGLE DAY. Usually I just delete those messages, unless I actually know the person and have reason to believe said person actually has a chance in hell of knowing what he/she is doing. So when I got a Facebook IM from a high school classmate I hadn't heard from in 20 years asking me for erotica writing help, you can understand why I was tempted to delete it along with all the others.

But this message was different. It was very well-written, it showed the person had done a lot of background research into my work before contacting me (indeed, another high school classmate of ours suggested to her that she get in touch with me), and showed she had already done considerable research into the erotica publishing market. She asked politely for some publishing advice if I was able to offer it. Since this was someone I remembered as being pretty nice in high school, I thought I'd do the world a good turn and respond to her. We ended up striking up an interesting conversation, and I eventually agreed (against my better judgment, but more on that later) to take a look at a sample of her work.

She sent me some sample chapters to read, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that her writing was nothing short of excellent, as good as any of the best erotic writing anywhere. Having been an erotica editor myself, I know how rare that is, and (again trying to do the world a good turn) I offered to hook this person up with my agent. This was a very generous thing to do on my part, mind you, because a) my agent is currently closed to submissions, except by referral by one of her existing clients; and b) I do not refer people to my agents and/or editors unless I think their worth is top-notch, since it can reflect poorly on me if I refer amateurs or people who are not quite ready for prime time.

Needless to say, my old classmate was very appreciative of this---or so she seemed at first. She gushed about how wonderful I was, and how grateful she was, and she was practically in tears with gratitude. Which is nice and everything, but as I cautioned her, I just made the referral---there was no guarantee my agent would offer representation, of course. So after getting my agent's permission to pass along her contact information, I told my classmate to do the query submission, and I alerted my agent to look for it.

A couple of weeks passed. My classmate's submission was sitting in my agent's review queue (she's very busy). Then, out of the blue (again) I got a Facebook IM from my classmate, which went something like this:

"Hi, I've been doing some research and I've determined that literary agents are completely unnecessary. I don't want to give up 15% of my income to somebody else, and besides, I'm a lawyer [with zero publishing experience or creds, natch], so I can just do all of that work myself. [and other arrogant, idiotic misconceptions to that effect, yadayadayada]. So I wanted to let you know I'll be withdrawing my submission from your agent's consideration. Okay, bye!" Edited to add: this is my very watered-down paraphrasing of her email. The actual email was absolutely hair-curling in its arrogance and rudeness.

WTF????

After I picked my jaw up off the floor, I typed a very polite yet firm response, in which I informed her of all the various and sundry reasons why her "research" (which I'm sure included a combination of disgruntled writers' message boards and scam publishers) into literary agents was incorrect. I also informed her that the decision to have an agent or not was hers alone (hey, it's her career, if she wants to throw it into the toilet, that's her business), and signed off. After I did that, I immediately fired off an email to my agent, informing her of this exchange, how rude this person acted, and to expect her submission (which she couldn't have made without my generous referral, natch) to be withdrawn.

Oh, and it gets better.

So about 10 minutes later, I get a very neurotic response from my classmate (NOT my friend, let's just be clear on this) in which she says "Oh, you must think I'm a total flake now." (Really? Ya think?) She blathered on about "this publishing business is so intimidating, I'm getting conflicting advice, but yours has been the most frank and informative" (maybe you should have followed it then, hmm?), "I'm such a doofus" (yes you are), blah blah blah. Then she basically said, "Maybe it's not too late to salvage this, I haven't actually emailed your agent yet."

To which I replied, "Oh, it's defintitely too late to salvage it, hon. Because maybe YOU haven't emailed my agent yet---but I have. I told her you were extremely rude, and arrogant, and all manner of other adjectives, and if she has half a brain on her shoulders (here's a clue: she does) she will not waste a single solitary minute more of her time with you. And neither will I. And by the way, don't email people at random for the first time in 20 years seeking advice and favors, then turn around and throw both in said favor-giver's face. Goodbye, have a nice life, and by the way, don't contact me ever again."

The moral of the story is twofold. One, there is a reason why most established authors don't go around granting favors to every random yahoo who emails them asking for one. (because the one time you do it, you can have THIS happen to you). And two, in the extremely rare event an established author goes out of his/her way (i.e., exchanging emails, giving publishing advice, taking hours out of her busy schedule to read your manuscript for no pay, making a very generous agent referral), it would generally behoove you not to behave like a complete idiot asshole.

Seriously, people. Don't do this.

Peace.

More Blog Tour stops

2011-02-22T11:16:00.001-08:00

Today I'm interviewed at Seriously Interviewed, and Part Two of my interview at Boxing the Octopus is up today as well. Enjoy!

Peace.

Blog Tour stop at Boxing the Octopus

2011-02-19T09:35:00.001-08:00

I'm blogging today (as Jill Elaine Hughes; the first of 2 parts) on writing and ebooks at Boxing the Octopus: www.boxocto.com

Peace.

Blog tour in progress

2011-02-18T07:04:00.000-08:00

I'm spending the next month or so making "appearances" at various writer- and book-related blogs. I made my first appearance last week at Dusk to Dawn Romance, and I'll be doing several more. I'll be blogging about such things as the romance genre in general, what it's like to be a full-time freelance writer, how I choose my novel storylines, and more. I'll try to remember to post links to each blog appearance here, but for the latest news watch my Facebook and Twitter feeds.

In honor of the blog tour, TENDER IS THE KNIGHT is only 99 cents at Amazon Kindle, & FREE @ AllRomanceEbooks.com. For a limited time only, so take advantage!

Peace.

Weird week

2011-02-10T19:17:00.001-08:00

It's like something you'd see on TV----a frozen pizza sent me to the emergency room.
(Actually, it wasn't even the frozen pizza, it was a tiny piece of cheese the size of my fingertip that fell onto my kitchen counter after I put the damn thing in the oven that sent me to the emergency room, but I digress.)

I'm a good work-at-home/fulltime writer/housewife, and as such I cook dinner at home for my family most nights. Many nights it's a multi-course affair, and I frequently cook from scratch, but not every night. Some nights (like when I'm on deadline) I just pop a frozen pizza in the oven and make a side salad. Such it was last Wednesday, when I popped a locally-made Gino's frozen pizza in the oven, and like I've done so many times, popped one of the stray pieces of cheese that fell off the pizza onto the counter into my mouth. I did it without even thinking, like I've done hundreds of times before. (and I keep my countertops fastidiously clean, as anyone who's been to my house can tell you).

Almost immediately, I started feeling very strange. First off, the cheese didn't taste at all like cheese. It tasted more like Comet Kitchen Cleanser. Odd, since I know the company that made the pizza (a family-owned company in Crystal Lake,IL, just about 15 miles from my house) makes its own real cheese using milk from Wisconsin cows----one of the reasons I bought the pizza in the first place. Cheese isn't supposed to taste like Comet Kitchen Cleanser, that's for damn sure. Not only did it not taste right, I started feeling really weird. Like sick to my stomach. And dizzy, and then I began to gag, and even feel my throat swelling shut like it does when I go into anaphylactic shock after being stung by a bee. (I already carry an epinephrine shot everywhere I go because of that).

It immediately struck me that I might have been poisoned somehow----like the pizza I got was laced with cyanide or something. I called my husband's cell phone to see where he was on his commute (he was already late getting home by that point). Turns out he was still on the train, and the train was stuck in a snowdrift, so God only knew when he'd be getting home. So I bit the bullet and called 911, and told the dispatcher that I suspected chemical poisoning. For a little while I was worried I was going to die. (Death By Frozen Pizza---crazy, I know.)

So the ambulance and the fire truck show up at my house, followed by several curious neighbors (I live in a very quiet neighborhood). The EMTs say I need to go to the ER, and my next-door neighbor offered to watch my son until my husband got home. I get to the ER, and the ER doc tells me that I haven't actually been poisoned, but I have had an anaphylactic allergic food reaction, likely to the preservatives in the tiny crumb of frozen pizza cheese I ate. (Imagine what would have happened if I'd eaten a whole slice!) I got treated with prednisone and eventually left with instructions to go see an allergist.

I went to the allergist yesterday, and I'd say her job title would more accurately be described as Master Torturer. I got 48 different allergen scratch tests (24 on each arm), plus 13 (yes, 13!) subcutaneous shots (which hurt like a BITCH, by the way---this is coming from the lady who had 30+ hours of unmedicated labor with my son, mind you). After all of those tests, I discovered that I am not only allergic to multiple food additives and preservatives, but also chicken, soy, coffee, and peanuts. Who knew???

So now, I'm on an elimination "detox" diet, where I can basically eat only fresh foods that I prepare myself from scratch, with very little added to them. Chinese food is out due to the MSG (try that when you're married to a Chinese person), as is pretty much all frozen, canned, or otherwise processed food. I have to go back next week for more tests, and possibly even a year or more of allergy shots. Not only that, I've suddenly become hypersensitive to all sorts of foods and food additives---things are tasting different and strange, and making me have odd reactions (like today when I tasted a small amount of my son's Lofthouse sugar cookie and thought I'd eaten a mouthful of Drano).

I've never had a food allergy in my life, at least not until last week. How on earth did this happen? The allergist explains that as we age, we can acquire new allergies spontaneously, and that our bodies also can become hypersensitive following any anaphylactic event. Hence the elimination diet---I need to "reboot" my system so that I'll eventually not be allergic to everything I touch.

The bottom line is, this sucks. I love good food, and I love variety, and I also love the convenience some prepared foods offer me as a busy mom. But for the time being, I'll be eating nothing but unseasoned pork loin and plain white rice because that's all my body can tolerate. Le sigh.

Oh well. At least I'm not dead.

Peace.

TENDER IS THE KNIGHT, as advertised in RENAISSANCE magazine!

2011-02-07T17:56:00.000-08:00

Just got copies of RENAISSANCE magazine in the mail today. My publisher Decadent Publishing paid for a full-page ad in the February issue for TENDER IS THE KNIGHT. There's an article on the Society for Creative Anachronism (where the novel is set) on the next page. Nice placement!

Stand back, folks. I'm a professional.

2011-02-03T12:50:00.000-08:00

This week I've been weathering the Blizzard of 2011, an epic storm even by our tough Chicago winter standards. All in all I only lost about a half-day of productivity as hubby and I worked to clear the 2 feet of snow from our driveway and walk, but then it was back to business as usual. Not that we had much of a break---my husband was still expected to put in a full day's work from home for his corporate banking job, and I also put in a full day's work as a freelance writer-slash-mom.

Lately my freelance writing income has really picked up, to the point it is now roughly equal to what I earned working full-time in the corporate world. (This notwithstanding the fact that on a strict hours-worked basis, I am still only working part-time). People ask me how I do it. I tell them it's my livelihood, and since I have bills to pay, somehow I manage to muddle through. Which is not always easy when you're also caring for a busy three-year-old boy, mind you.

A while back a local playwright friend of mine marveled at the fact that I don't keep my "creative" writing and my "business" writing separate. In the theater world, it is pretty much de rigeur for people to have "day jobs" that they work their theatre lives around, and that's also true for many playwrights. But I'm a writer by trade and profession, and as such I consider playwriting to just be another kind of writing that I do for my livelihood, so I don't see any need to keep it "separate." (It's not as if I'm doing a lot of playwriting these days anyway, since I prefer to devote my attention to writing for a living, as opposed to for fun. I do get paid for my playwriting, mind you, but it's a drop in the bucket compared to what my other writing pays). This same playwright also doesn't have any children to worry about feeding, so I guess that probably plays into her decision to compartmentalize her writing life.

Some people in my playwrights' collective have been wondering where I've been lately since I don't make it to meetings much anymore, and I just tell them I've been busy working. "Doing what?" they ask. "Writing," I reply. Which is usually met with a puzzled look, then silence.

To me, either you write for a living or you don't. Plenty of people wax on about how they would love to write for a living, and yet they don't treat it like a job. If writing is your job, you get up every morning, and show up for work. (And if work is your laptop in your living room instead of an office, you still show up.) A typical day for me will include setting up interviews for the articles I'm required to file as a freelance journalist, writing an article or two and filing with an editor, then maybe plugging away at my current novel-in-progress. There might be an email or two into my literary agents or my editors, plus general housekeeping, keeping track of earnings and taxes, whatever. If I'm lucky I'll also have some time to read for pleasure (which I also consider part of my job as a writer, since reading other writers is the best way to keep your writing chops up). And remember, on top of all of this, I'm caring for a three-year-old, with no child care help.

So let's just say I really have no patience anymore for people who say, "Oh, well, I've been meaning to write, but I have writer's block," or "I really want to finish that novel I started, but I don't have time," blahblahblah.

Well, I've got the perfect cure for writer's block. It's called the mortgage payment. Deal, folks. And if you can't, leave this writing stuff to the professionals. I've already got enough competition as it is.

Peace.

Creativity

2011-01-25T14:48:00.001-08:00

I've been neglecting the blog of late since I've been devoting a lot of my free time to some hobbies. Call it "refilling the tank," if you will. I'm a very creative person and always have been. And since my profession (writing) is also creative, it was a great career choice for me. But sometimes my writing saps my energy and drains the creative tank, as it were, and I get stuck. I need to change things up a bit in order to get the writing juices flowing again. Plus I have some neurotic tendencies (well, to say "some" would be a gross understatement) that tend to smooth themselves out when I'm working on making something from scratch----be it cooking a dish, baking a cake, sewing a dress, painting a picture, whatever. I really get into the "zone" when I make things by hand, and the whole world and my troubles just dissolve.

Some people take Prozac. I do crafts.

I was very into arts and crafts as a teenager, and my original college major was in the nationally ranked design and art college of the university where I would eventually pursue an English degree. I spent pretty much all of my free time in high school in one of two places: the art department and the theatre/music department. I took four years of studio art in high school as well as music/theatre/performing arts, and even got professional (paying!) art commissions and singing gigs as a teenager. I kept up with the music and theater throughout college and my adult life (doing both professionally, as well as writing professionally) but my studio arts interests kind of fell by the wayside after my freshman year of college. (I did eventually write art reviews and cover the Chicago art scene as a journalist, but that's not the same.)

I had originally planned to be a fine arts major in college, but my parents were terrified I'd end up starving to death, so I compromised and became an architecture major instead. I could draw, but I also was good at math and science and I thought buildings were cool, so I thought this was a reasonable compromise. Plus I'd actually stand a chance of getting a job when I graduated. I got admitted to the No. 1 architecture program in the country at the time (University of Cincinnati, which US News and World Report still ranks as No. 1) on a full scholarship. To say that the program was rigorous would be a gross understatement, too. Not only did I have to shell out literally thousands of dollars in drafting supplies my first quarter, I also pretty much had to give up eating and sleeping and spend my entire life "in studio." The program was hard to get into to begin with, but the first year was designed to weed out 60% of the incoming freshmen class. It was so very, very hard that I often I sat up nights at my drafting table and sobbed. Being one of very few women in a male-dominated major was also not easy to deal with. I also had bad experiences with professors and fellow students (and one other woman in particular, who harrassed me and destroyed my architecture models because she secretly liked the guy I was dating at the time).

After trying to stick it out for a while, I knew that architecture was not for me. I considered switching majors over to fine arts, but the fine arts studio was right next to the architecture department, and I wanted to get the hell out of that entire end of campus. So I followed my love of reading and writing across the quad to became an English major instead. To keep my parents happy I told them it was really since I planned to go to law school, but that was pretty much a lie. I just wanted to read and write and be left alone. And the rest, as they say, is history.

Speaking of history, I've always been a huge history buff, and one of my hobbies is historical reinactment. I'm especially fascinated with the history of writing, books, and publishing, especially old illuminated manuscripts. I had done some calligraphy and illumination as a kid but stopped doing it after the architecture-major fiasco. But lately I've been getting back into it, and I'm surprised how good I am at it after taking an almost 20-year hiatus. Spending an hour or two working on long-obsolete writing and publishing techniques has done wonders for my psyche, not to mention give me a newfound appreciation for just how easy it is for us to communicate in writing here in the 21st century. It wasn't always that way----reading and writing used to be a luxury enjoyed by very few, and books were luxury items that cost lots of money and also were a means to show off the great wealth of their owners.

I've been back into my artsy-crafty stuff for about a year now, and it's actually boosted my productivity as a writer tremendously. Whenever I get stuck on a writing project, I go paint something, or maybe do some sewing or leathercraft, which I also like. Eventually I want to put all three skills together and make a leather-bound medieval manuscript codex, but I think I'll have to wait until kiddo is a little older before I attempt something that ambitious. In the meantime, here's some samples of my work.

New Year's Discoveries

2011-01-01T20:00:00.001-08:00

In celebration of a new year (and new beginning), I thought I'd share the following few lovely tidbits I've discovered recently. Hope they brighten your life as much as they have mine.

1) If you want to go shopping for some new stuff, but you can't because you're broke, go root around in your closets, cabinets and attics through the boxes and bags of crap you forgot you had in the first place. Chances are you'll find some great stuff.

2) Hotel shampoo makes great (and cheap) bubble bath.

3) The smell of lavender will make you happy.

4) Just because you disagree with someone's political/personal/religious/whatever beliefs, doesn't mean you can't be very good friends with that person.

5) When people make harsh judgments about other peoples' relationships, it usually means they have a history of bad ones.

6) What happened back in high school doesn't matter anymore. Except, of course, when you rekindle a beloved old friendship.

7) Sometimes crying can be a good thing.

8) Never underestimate the power of tea.

9) No one can judge you until they've walked two hundred miles in your shoes (and gone through labor, too).

10) Silence is indeed golden.

11) Most stuff that is labeled "As Seen On TV" sucks.

12) It's never too late to make things right.

13) Sometimes you just gotta spend a day in the house doing nothing but watching bad Japanime cartoons.

14) You're never too old to enjoy a good comic book.

15) If it sounds too good to be true, you should probably quit drinking and go to bed.

16) No matter how old you get, you'll never be as old as Dick Clark.

17) Nothing is quite as magical as the smell of gingersnaps baking during a snowstorm.

18) Snow angels are the best angels.

19) There's always someone worse off than you. Just look at Lindsay Lohan.

20) Remember that cute boy you had a huge crush on in junior high who wouldn't give you the time of day and called you mean names? Well, now he weighs 300 pounds and is unemployed and miserable. Karma, baby.

First-person, present tense.

2011-01-01T09:17:00.001-08:00

Today on New Year's Day, I'm blogging about the challenge of writing in first-person, present tense at the Decadent Publishing blog. Check it out here:

Peace.

Banned In The SCA

2010-12-08T11:12:00.000-08:00

Added for clarity: It's not my book itself that's been banned, it's just any advertising for it. (Just in case any lawyers are reading this). Draw your own conclusions as to what that really means.

Once upon a time, book publishers would splash "BANNED IN BOSTON" across book covers as a selling point. The same thing was done by Broadway show producers, when it was common to pre-screen new plays in Boston before opening them on the Great White Way---it was also common for the Watch And Ward Society, a powerful group made up of a few of the most powerful of those strait-laced Irish-Catholic Bostonians, to object to books', movies', and stage shows' "immoral" content, and to subsequently have the offending material banned (for more information about the history behind this, check out this book).

Yep, banned. As in, shut down the shows, burn the books, close the bookstores that sold the books. (Of course, all this accomplished was making the books/movies/plays that much more popular everywhere else.)

What sorts of things got Banned In Boston, you ask? Here's a few examples of such notorious smut that posed a dangerously subversive moral risk to the Boston community:

The Sun Also Rises, by Ernest Hemingway
Oil!, by Upton Sinclair (recently made into the film There Will Be Blood)
Elmer Gantry, by Sinclair Lewis (made into an Oscar-winning film in the 1950s)
Most of the works of William Faulkner (seriously)
The Atlantic Monthly magazine and the entire Alfred Knopf publishing house were also frequent targets of the Watch and Ward Society. (Because everybody knows what kind of immoral smut they put out, right?)
Also burlesque stage shows and even straight dramatic plays, like the works of Eugene O'Neill (!)

You might wonder what Banned In Boston has to do with me. Well, it seems that I've managed to get one of my own books banned. My novel TENDER IS THE KNIGHT, a sweet, Cinderella-story/comic romance novel set in the SCA, recently spurred the creation of a Draconian (or dare I say, Orwellian) across-the-board SCA corporate policy banning the advertising of any work of fiction from appearing in any official SCA publication----from Tournaments Illuminated all the way down to one-page local shire newsletters.

This policy was instituted in direct response to my publisher's requests to purchase display advertising in several SCA publications. Rather than accept the ad dollars for my apparently very controversial book, the SCA banned these types of ads from appearing altogether. Even better, SCA turned those ad dollars away at the same time that they're jacking up SCA membership dues due to "difficult financial circumstances." (Huh?)

The reason given for the policy? "Because advertising works of fiction is contrary to the SCA's educational mission."

Again, I say, Huh? (Oh, right, I forgot. Reading works of fiction is in no way educational. Can I get an amen?)

You might remember my post of a couple weeks ago about the hate mail my book TENDER IS THE KNIGHT has generated. Well, suffice to say, I think it's pretty obvious these two incidents are directly related.

In response to this, I've decided not to renew my SCA member dues until further notice (which will also entail me resigning my local herald's office). Sorry, but I can't send my hard-earned dollars to any organization that institutes authoritarian, across-the-board Orwellian book-suppression policies that smack of hysterical censorship. If you're an SCA member I suggest you do the same. Even better, write a letter to the SCA Board of Directors protesting this decision. They won't listen to me (I've already been told as much by Those In Power) but they might listen to you.

In the meantime, buy my book. It's Banned In The SCA, after all---so it has to be good.
Peace.

Why You Need an Epub Agent

2010-12-05T12:07:00.000-08:00

I get asked all the time why I have an agent when so many of my books are published by epublishers. Because you can still land ebook deals without an agent (and because epublishers often pay very small advances, or none at all), many people think you shouldn't bother getting an agent.

Based upon my experience, I would disagree. Saritza Hernandez, a staffer at the L.Perkins Agency where I'm a client, specializes in the ebook market, and she recently wrote this blog post about why you might need an ePub agent. Thought I'd share.

Peace.

I'm Really A Playwright

2010-12-02T16:22:00.001-08:00

In my other, non-novelist life, I'm really a playwright. I created this little ditty on Xtranormal after I saw some similar ones posted on the topics of "So You Wanna Write A Novel" and "So You Wanna Get A PhD in the Humanities". Since I'm not only a novelist/graduate of an expensive graduate degree program in the humanities, but also a playwright, I thought I'd be ideal to comment on the fabulous world of playwriting for the American theater.

Because if you can go $50,000 into debt to complete an advanced arts degree at an elite university and then fritter away 15 years of your life trying to get your plays produced, you too can enjoy the fabulous life of the American playwright, which features such perks as rampant classism, the proverbial casting couch, Midwest bias, rampant substance abuse, and early death by suicide (or perhaps if you're lucky, a grand old age spent living in flophouses and eating Alpo):

Peace.

Great review for A CAPITOL AFFAIR!

2010-11-30T10:13:00.001-08:00

My novel A CAPITOL AFFAIR (Ravenous Romance, 2009) got a nice review today at Ramsey's Book Reviews. Check it out here. I especially like this review because the reviewer appreciated the book's allegory of BDSM as power-play in the politically charged world of Washington, DC.

More hilarious Wannabe Writer posts coming soon!

Peace.

Wannabe Writer Week, Part Deux

2010-11-29T21:16:00.000-08:00

In keeping with this week's theme of wannabe writers, I'm going to share a sobering statistic I got today from my agent Saritza Hernandez, a staffer at the L. Perkins Agency who handles my books for the epublishing market. (I am repped by multiple agents there, each specializing in different markets).

Some people think (erroneously) that epublishing is subpar in terms of quality and is essentially the same as self-publishing. (Hint: It's not). Granted, unlike print publishing, it is possible to get an epub book deal without an agent (for the time being, anyway), but as the digital market continues to grow by leaps and bounds, more agents are getting directly involved in digital dealmaking----and as such, more and more authors targeting the epub market are seeking out agent representation.

To wit, Ms. Hernandez recently announced she was temporarily closed to new query submissions so she can get through her current backlog of over 500 unsolicited author queries. When I asked her what her query acceptance rate was, she shared the following:

"Last month, I got through 131 queries in my inbox. Of those, I requested 4 partial manuscripts and 1 full manuscript." (Which she has yet to read and/or accept/reject, mind you). In other words, she expressed interest in less than 2% of the authors who queried her. (Saritza currently reps 21 clients and has sold 10 books so far this year. Full disclosure---two of those books were mine).

And mind you, Saritza is only agenting in the epublisher market, which remains a very small portion of the overall publishing market. (I should also add that Saritza is an AWESOME and very efficient, effective agent; she once sold a book of mine in less than a week.)

So those of you who think this whole publishing thing is easy, chew on those stats for a while. Then go have a beer.

Peace.

So you wanna be a writer

2010-11-28T14:14:00.001-08:00

Had to share this little gem. Any novelist (published or aspiring, assuming you've actually completed a manuscript) has run into somebody like this. I'm reminded of several wannabe writers who've put their foots in their mouths telling me about how their not-even-written-yet books will be bestsellers. I'll share some of those amusing stories later this week.

Fan mail versus hate mail

2010-11-19T14:28:00.001-08:00

One of the definite perks of being a published author is getting fan mail. It's always cool to open your email account (or the good-old-fashioned mailbox) and find a letter from someone you've never met or even heard of who gushes about what a wonderful writer you are and thanks you for telling such a wonderful story that entertained them and spoke to their heart. It's even cooler when they ask you when your next book is coming out, and also promise to buy everything on your backlist, just because they enjoyed INSERT BOOK TITLE HERE soooo much. It's one of the reasons I keep writing. (God knows I don't do it for the money!)

But of course, the flip side of that is, the hate mail. Yes, the hate mail. For every twenty or so fan letters I get, I get one completely scathing, rage-filled letter/email/Facebook IM/whatever that says I cannot write, that I should cease and desist thrusting my "garbage" upon the world, that calls me a sex-crazed evil lunatic bitch, or even accuses me of Satan-worshipping witchcraft (seriously, true story.) More often than not, hate mail is sent anonymously. (Gee, I wonder why?)

Hate mail comes with the territory of being published. There are a lot of wackjobs out there, after all, and many of them like to read. Plus there's a huge contingent of hate-mailers who are frustrated writers who can't get published, and they take their anger out on people who are published. (They also probably need to be on medication, but I digress.)

I fully realize that dealing with the occasional wackjob is one of the prices you pay for having your writing available to the general public. But this week, I've received the King Cobra of hate mail. Not only did I receive this scathing anonymous letter, but so did the Board of Directors of an organization I'm a member of, along with Amazon.com and several book review sites. I mean, everybody's entitled to their opinion and all, but I think that's just a little over the top. Especially considering the book that the writer hated so much is a lighthearted comic romance novel. It's not as if I authored some controversial investigative journalism expose or an explicit sex manual or something. I wrote a sappy, funny, light-reading romance novel, and not even an erotic one. Romance novels are about as non-controversial as you can get outside of cereal-box copy.

I guess every published author out there has a story like this. I have to admit, after the initial shock wore off, I find this situation absolutely hilarious. Not to mention sad. I guess some people just don't have enough to do with their time.

Of course, I now reserve the right to base a nutjob character in my next book on this little incident. Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction.

Peace.

Stop By The Decadent Blog for a TENDER IS THE KNIGHT Contest

2010-11-08T06:32:00.001-08:00

I'm profiled today at the Decadent Publishing blog. Learn a little more about me and why I wrote my latest release, TENDER IS THE KNIGHT. Leave a comment for a chance to win some great custom Ren Faire artwork from Robert Quill!

TENDER IS THE KNIGHT releases today!

2010-10-29T09:00:00.000-07:00

Hi Readers!

My latest novel, TENDER IS THE KNIGHT, releases today at Decadent Publishing! (http://www.decadentpublishing.com.) It's available in ebook format now and a trade paperback edition will follow in a few months.

This book began its life over 25 years ago, when I joined the Society for Creative Anachronism (www.sca.org). Or rather, when I was forcibly dragged to my first SCA event, Pennsic War 13, by my father who had just recently joined SCA via his new girlfriend. For those of you who don't know, SCA is a historical reinactment organization that specializes in the Middle Ages. It has chapters worldwide and over 100,000 worldwide participants. It's on a par with other historical reinactment groups that focus not just on daily life but also military/war in history, like those groups that specialize in the American Civil War, for instance. So in addition to getting dressed up in medieval clothes, eating medieval food, and dancing medieval dances (seriously!), one of the SCA's chief attractions is its tournaments and wars, which feature swordplay, jousting, even large-scale battles involving hundreds (sometimes even thousands) of armored fighters.

One of the SCA's other guiding principles is the recreation of the "ideals" of the Middle Ages----including romance, courtesy, and courtly love. After spending most of my life active in SCA in one form or another, I learned a great deal not just about medieval history (which led to my love of history in general, as well as my future career as a historical fiction writer), but about you guessed it, ROMANCE. And a few years ago, when I was just getting my romance writing career in full swing, a thought occurred to me----what if I set a romance novel in the romantic world of the Society for Creative Anachronism?

When I first joined SCA back in the 1980s, the historical reinactment world was very tiny---and also regarded as "weird" by most people, since many participants in both SCA and other historical societies like it were also into offbeat things like Dungeons and Dragons, science fiction novels (indeed, science fiction writers like Marion Zimmer Bradley and Robert Aspirin were among SCA's founding members), sword-and-sorcery comics, computer games, and other realms of geekdom. But as time went on, living history groups began to enter the mainstream. Renaissance faires began springing up all over the country and became quite popular with the masses. Dungeons and Dragons and computer gaming, once the denizen of nerdy geeks with no social lives, was replaced by massive-multiplayer online roleplaying games like World of Warcraft, which is played by everyone from teenagers to Hollywood celebrities. Movies set in and around the Middle Ages, like Ridley Scott's KINGDOM OF HEAVEN and ROBIN HOOD to fantasy films like the Lord of the Rings trilogy, made the romance of the Middle Ages front-and-center in popular culture. Would a book set in a fictional version of the SCA---with all its oddball characters, historical foibles, modern-day knights in shining armor, and medieval romance---be a big seller?

My literary agent thought so. But when she shopped it to the major NYC publishing houses, they all turned it down. While they liked the book, they didn't think it would find an audience. So, enter Decadent Publishing. Decadent saw the huge potential market for TENDER IS THE KNIGHT among both the living-history/recreation set and mainstream history buffs, and agreed to publish it---first as an ebook, then in print. Since I'm already a veteran of the ebook romance marketplace, I jumped at the chance. And I've been very impressed with the professionalism of all of Decadent's staff, including its editors, who have provided some of the most thorough editorial support and feedback I've ever received in my career.

TENDER IS THE KNIGHT features a modern-day heroine, Lisa Smith, who is bored with her dull workaday life as a factory forewoman in Dayton, Ohio. When her best friend Pegeen introduces her to her new hobby (the SCA) Lisa is skeptical at first. But soon Lisa meets Sir Philip Reginald of Whitestar, a sexy SCA Knight and the local favorite to become the local SCA "kingdom's" next King. Lisa soon gets caught up in the swashbuckling romance of it all----but soon finds herself in way over her head. Will she reach her fairy-tale ending? Buy the book at www.decadentpublishing.com and find out! It's also available at Amazon (Kindle edition), BN.com, and all the major ebook distributor sites.

THE FORBIDDEN is now available, and an interview

2010-07-28T05:36:00.000-07:00

THE FORBIDDEN, my alter ego Jay Hughes' much-anticipated Gay Amish Romance sequel to THE SHUNNED, is now available for sale at Ravenous Romance. Be sure to check it out.

I was also interviewed yesterday about my writing career at WhoHub. Here's a link.

Lots more exciting news to come in the upcoming weeks!

Peace.

What's New and Coming Attractions

2010-07-14T11:02:00.000-07:00

Now that I'm recovered from my mega-illness, I'm back to work at writing. I've got a big (potentially HUGE, actually) freelance medical writing gig that I'm working on, plus the novel-writing career remains in full swing. I can't talk about the new freelance gig yet (other than to say it involves a pretty famous TV personality) but I can talk about some great developments in my novel-writing career.

First of all, my erotic novel KNIGHT MOVES (written as "Jamaica Layne"), originally released as an ebook with Ravenous Romance, has just been picked up for worldwide trade paperback distribution by Red Wheel-Weiser's Red Silk Editions. KNIGHT MOVES is one of my bestselling ebook titles and now it will be available on bookstore shelves all over the world! Further details and release date to come.

Second, Vol. 3 in my popular Vital Signs medical romance series (title: Prescription fo r P assion) is now available. While the first two volumes in the series are published by Ravenous Romance, this volume is published and distributed by Silver Publishing. (they will likely publish any further volumes in the series as well). All of the books in the series stand alone, so you can read them out of order, but I encourage you to read all of them, in chronological order if you can. I really enjoy writing this series since I've spent so much of my professional writing career working around doctors and hospitals.

And last but not least----my alter-ego Jay Hughes has a new novel coming out soon, THE FORBIDDEN. This is another Gay Amish Romance----the sequel to "Jay's" very popular debut, THE SHUNNED. I don't have a release date yet, but I will soon. So, more red-hot Gay Amish Romance is heading your way this summer. And just look at that cover. Yowza.

Peace.

Sorry I haven't written. . .

2010-07-10T08:14:00.000-07:00

Okay, so I haven't blogged for almost 2 months. Here's why:

Yeah, that collection of prescription drugs (and that's not even all of it) represents an almost 6-week illness that required 2 hospitalizations and almost $15,000 in medical bills. It started out innocently enough----as a nasty summer cold-slash-allergy attack. Then it turned into a drug-resistant bacterial infection (aka a "superbug") that was the single worst illness of my life. Fevers of 104 degrees for weeks, extreme dehydration, trouble breathing, hallucinations---the whole bit. Seriously, there were a few days I actually thought I was going to die. The superbug stumped my doctors----I saw five of them, plus the hospital docs and even two infectious disease specialists---and none of them could figure out why none of the antibiotics were working. Finally, after three separate rounds of antibiotics, two hospitalizations, and a lot of good-old-fashioned praying, I finally began to get better. In the meantime, I really had to re-order my life. I cut out a bunch of extra stuff, shut down a side business, pushed back all my writing deadlines, and just generally changed my world outlook. Life is short and precious, and you just never know when it might end.

In the meantime, I have a new book coming out today. It's Vol. 3 in my popular VITAL SIGNS medical romance series---this time with a new publisher, Silver Publishing. (You can still get Vols. 1 and 2 from Ravenous Romance.) Check it out.

Back to normal

2010-05-21T08:40:00.001-07:00

Well, I finally got my computer back to normal. I lost a good day and a half of productivity last week thanks to that malware/spyware attack, and I'm still not totally back where I was. Though my computer is now virus-free (or so my MacAffee program says), and even though I didn't lose any actual files, I did lose my entire RSS feed. Which is a total bummer. (I had to completely disable it/delete it because that's where the spyware decided to attach itself to my computer).

For those of you who aren't familiar with RSS technology, it's basically a way for you to keep track of any new content that shows up on sites that you visit frequently. It first appeared in connection with blogs, and allowed you to track when your favorite bloggers posted new entries without actually having to go visit their sites over and over again. Then news/commentary sites got in on the bandwagon and added RSS feeds, then social networking sites, and so on.

I only had about 15 feeds set up in my desktop RSS widget (I know people who have hundreds), but I accumulated those feeds over a couple of years and now they would take me a long time to redo manually. I followed a few of my friends' blogs and those were in there, plus some publishing industry blogs, some Huffington Post commentators that I like, and a few custom online news feeds that I set up around certain keywords. Plus I had the Playbill.com news blog, which helps me keep up with Broadway and off-Broadway theater news.

The RSS feed really made my blog and news reading more convenient. Once or twice a day I'd look at the feed widget and see if any of my favorite sites had new content. If they did and it looked interesting (you'd get the blog/article heading and the first sentence) I'd click on it to go to the full site to read. It really saved me a lot of browsing time and also helped me be a little more choosy about what I read.

Of course, when the spyware made my computer blow up, the RSS feed went haywire. The spyware was probably running contantly, scanning every site I had linked in my feed looking for site traffic data. Popups kept appearing all over my screen, and eventually my computer shut down. I had no choice but to get rid of the whole thing. Which sucks, because now I either have to spend hours manually re-entering all my old feeds, or spend hours actually going directly to all those sites every day looking for new content. Neither of which I have time to do right now. So, I guess I just won't be reading online as much.

I think maybe this whole thing was a divine message from the universe sent to tell me that I waste too much time screwing around online when I should be working on my book.

Peace.

Facebook users, beware

2010-05-13T08:27:00.000-07:00

I love Facebook. You could probably say I'm addicted to it. I've found it can be a great networking/marketing tool (I have a bunch of romance novel fans who follow me on Facebook and that's helped beef up my book sales, for example). Plus it's a great way to keep up with friends and family that you rarely see in person. Not to mention get into interesting random discussions about random topics.

But Facebook has a dark side, too. It's a free site (for now), but the people who run it have to pay for things somehow, so they use advertising. And Facebook has been getting criticized lately for continually changing it's "privacy" (I use the term loosely) policies so it can have more leeway when it comes to tracking what Facebook users do online (so they can then sell that data to marketers/advertisers). And as such, there are a lot of "applications" floating around on Facebook that pretend to be fun little games and quizzes, but are really spyware apps designed to track and monitor all your Web browsing. (Surprisingly enough, despite the fact that marketing spyware usually acts like a virus on your computer, it's usually perfectly legal to spread, unlike hacker viruses).

The other day I made the mistake of taking one of those innocuous-looking Facebook "quizzes" and my computer has been behaving strangely ever since. First my Gmail and Google Calendar accounts started behaving strangely, with emails and email attachments getting corrupted, and appointments mysteriously disappearing off my Google calendar. Then my Internet Explorer browser window would shut itself down and restart itself right when I was in the middle of doing something. And then yesterday, the RSS feed widget on my desktop I use to track new content on some of my favorite blogs and news sites kept rebooting itself and sending me a popup message "You have new content" several times an hour, even when there was nothing new in my feed. And then when I closed the popup for the bazillionth time, my computer shut itself down.

That's when I figured out something was really wrong (and not just some random annoying Windows Vista system bugs). I ran a McAfee scan, and found some spyware/malware embedded in Internet Explorer and my RSS feed functionality---probably some kind of marketing spyware designed to track what kinds of sites I browse and then target advertising to me accordingly.

These online marketing types think that what they're doing is innocent enough (and they work hard to convince Congress of that fact) but the truth is, they're really doing a lot of damage. I wasted three hours trying to fix this late last night. And that's three hours I'll never get back.

I wish I could afford a Mac so I wouldn't have to deal with this at all.

Peace.

The Irish Psyche

2010-05-03T18:47:00.000-07:00

"This is one race of people for whom psychoanalysis is of no use whatsoever." -------Sigmund Freud (about the Irish).

Yeah, as someone who's about 90% Irish, I will say that this is definitely true.

I'm Irish on both sides of my family. Dad's family is working-class Irish-Catholic ("Black Irish," from Counties Derry and Donegal in Northern Ireland, no less, though they've been in this country for almost 200 years) and Mom's family is backwoods Appalachian "Scots-Irish" (otherwise known as Irish Protestants; in Ireland they're scathingly called "Orangemen" after their backing of William of Orange for the throne of England four hundred-odd years ago). "Black Irish" Catholics and Scots-Irish Protestants are separately two of the most stubborn, explosive, moody, bad-tempered and hardassed ethnic groups out there. Mix them together, and you get---well, me. So, you've been warned.

Here's a basic primer for dealing with a wild Irishwoman like me.

1) Don't ever lie to me. Seriously. Don't. Don't even do it out of politeness to save my feelings. Nothing ever infuriates me faster than catching someone in a lie, no matter how trivial. I'll respect you a lot more if you can always tell the truth, even when it hurts. (And I will always catch you in a lie sooner or later, and when I do, I'll be pissed).

2) Be a straight shooter. Don't play passive-aggressive mind games with me. The Irish in me does not like that one bit. Put all your cards on the table, don't hide anything behind your back. And most of all, don't say/do one thing and mean another, and then expect me to somehow be able to read your mind (and then complain about why I didn't get your hidden meaning somewhere down the road). Back when I was single I broke up with a lot of boyfriends over this very issue, and it's still something I have a lot of trouble with. Deal with me straight, or don't deal with me at all. (This would be a big reason why the Japanese and the Irish do not tend to get along. The same goes for the Irish and the British. 'Nuff said).

3) If you are a phony, I will tell you so. (And I'll tell everyone else, too.) My favorite fairy tale is "The Emperor's New Clothes." If you're walking around naked---literally or figuratively---you can be sure I'll be the first person to point it out.

4) Don't ever assume that I give a shit what you think. We Irish have based our very survival on thumbing our noses at all the people in power for hundreds of years now, so don't assume I'm going to change anything about myself or what I do just because somebody doesn't like it. And if you're powerful or important (or think that you are), that goes double.

5) Get to the heart of the matter. Whether it's relationships, art, or politics, the Irish in me wants your heart. All of it. If you aren't passionate about everything you do, you're wasting your own time and mine, too.

6) Have integrity. Be fair, be just, be compassionate when it counts, and don't tolerate evil, cruelty, bigotry, or general bullshit. And don't be a bully, either. We Irish hate bullies. (See our centuries of fighting the British for more information on that one.) If you are a bully, we will stand up to you, get in your face, and show the world just how much of a douchebag you are until you back down. And we don't give up easily, either. (See our centuries of fighting the British for that one, too).

7) Always have good beer and music available. I think that one's pretty much self-explanatory. (But if you need any clues, Guinness, U2, and the Chieftains are a good start.)

8) Oh and by the way, we Irish have most of the good writers. Joyce. Beckett. Wilde. Yeats. I could go on and on. . .

Peace.

Willpower, Part Deux

2010-04-19T11:18:00.000-07:00

I still have a lot of venting to do about lazy "aspiring" writers that I didn't cover in my last post, so I'm picking up right where I left off.

About once or twice a year, I get a random email out of the blue from a "friend" I usually haven't seen or spoken to in years. These "friends" inevitably get in touch with me only when they want something. Usually, they email me asking for writing advice, because they've decided to write the Great American Novel. (Not only that, they ask if I can hook them up with my agents and/or publisher for the Great American Novel that they haven't even written yet----annoying and arrogant to say the least.)

I'm always happy to give advice when people ask for it (though I'm not a fan of either giving or receiving unsolicited advice). But when I do give advice, I speak frankly, and sometimes rather harshly, because when it comes to the publishing business I don't think it does anybody any good to sugarcoat things.

Whenever someone emails or calls me saying that they plan to write the Great American Novel, they usually also talk at length about how they plan to write said novel. I've heard all kinds of things about their plans, which have included everything from taking vacations to the exotic places where their novels will supposedly be set, to signing up for a bunch of expensive writing classes, to trying to figure out how much time they should spend writing "character studies" and "plot analyses" (which are useless wastes of time dreamed up by unpublished creative writing teachers, but I digress).

To which I reply, "Uh-huh. But when are you actually going to WRITE the novel?"

At this, I usually get a response that goes something like---"Well, umm, but----uhhhhh----"

This is where my usual advice kicks in. I sum it up basically as follows:

1) If you want to write a novel, you have to actually WRITE. Sitting around bullshitting about it or engaging in useless (and often expensive) procrastination activities such as overpriced "creative writing" classes and "character studies" do nothing for your actual novel. The only thing you need to start writing your manuscript is a basic outline, which you can usually put together in one page or less in about an hour. (And if you write organically like I do, you don't even need to do that. Just sit down at your keyboard and begin.)

2) Write every day. Novels are indeed written one page at a time, but unless you want to spend the rest of your life writing this book, you need to write-----at absolute bare minimum----a page a day. (That's about 250 words). Most serious writers write far more than this. When I'm in full swing of writing a novel, I average about 1500 words a day (that's about 7 pages). Sometimes more, sometimes less---but it's a pretty consistent average. If you write a page a day, it will take you a year to finish the first draft of a 350-page novel. If you write more per day, it will take less time, if you write less, it will take longer (or you won't finish it at all).

3) Be disciplined. Your book isn't going to write itself, and writing is hard work that takes time and commitment. Part of being a novelist is being willing to give up some of your other favorite pastimes (in fact, most of them) in favor of writing. I don't know how many times I've heard "aspiring" writers say things like, "well, I really want to write a novel, but it's the middle of Gilmore Girls/Dancing With The Stars/LOST/whatever season and I don't want to miss any episodes." Yeah, well, boo fucking hoo. If you really want to write that novel, you will make the time to do it. Otherwise, you don't actually want to do it at all.

4) Read. This is another one I get a lot of complaints about. When I tell aspiring novelists that in order to be good writers, they first must also read other good (i.e., published) writers, I often get a shrug and an eye-roll. "But I don't have TIME to read," people often whine. Either that, or they make up some lame excuse like "But if I read other writers, it will detract from my own voice." To which I reply, "If you don't read, you won't even know what 'voice' is in the first place."

5) Check your ego at the door. Believe it or not, the mere feat of finishing a novel manuscript----and an impressive feat it is----does not make you at all special. There are thousands upon thousands of other aspiring novelists out there who have done the exact same thing, and chances are, the vast majority of them will never be published----and neither will you. Be humble and learn to accept defeat early and often. Be prepared to write several complete novel manuscripts before getting even one of them published. There's an old saying in this business---"a professional writer is just an amateur who didn't quit."

6) Don't ever expect to make any money. For all those starry-eyed aspiring writers out there who think writing the Great American Novel will lead to easy riches, I have news for you. 99% of completed novel manuscripts will never see the light of commercial publication. Of the 1% that do see commerical publication, the majority will not earn out their very modest (i.e., $5,000 or less) advances. Of the tiny percentage of published books that sell more than 5,000 copies, an even tiner percentage end up on the New York Times bestseller list----and that doesn't necessarily mean that those books are making millions, either. If you aspire to be the next Stephen King or J.K. Rowling, good for you----but you have a better chance of being struck by lightning or being elected to the U.S. Senate.

After I hand out this advice, 99% of the people who came to me seeking help just stare at me gape-mouthed. They usually never even write a single page, let alone complete a manuscript.

But occasionally I do run into aspiring writers who do manage to finish writing their books, then manage to land an agent and get a book deal. And most of the time, these people did it entirely on their own, and didn't need my advice to begin with.

Peace.

Willpower

2010-04-13T19:17:00.000-07:00

One of my writer friends shared this blog entry by literary agent Nathan Bransford with me today. In it, Bransford asserts that a writer's greatest asset isn't talent, or skill, or even a good literary agent. It's willpower.

Writers that succeed at any level, whether it's completing a full-length manuscript, getting an agent, getting published, or becoming super-successful bestselling authors, have one thing in common----writing isn't a do-it-when-you-feel-like-it hobby to them. It's work. Work that they've committed to at a deep level, work that they treat like a full-time job (even if they already have one doing something else). Writers work harder, and longer, (and for less money, natch) than just about anybody.

Every time I go to a cocktail party, or a wedding reception, or a children's play date, people ask me what I do for a living. I tell them I'm a writer. They usually raise their eyebrows at me and say, "No, really. What do you do?"

To which I reply, "I'm a writer. It's what I do for money. It's my job."

I then go on to explain that I write journalism pieces for magazines and newspapers. And I do healthcare writing for universities and healthcare companies. And I'm a playwright (produced AND published, thank you). And I'm a novelist (published, too). I even do some freelance editing on the side from time to time.

I'm always amused by some of the replies I get when I tell people what I do. Like most freelance writers, I explain that I'm self-employed, earning a modest living that I've cobbled together writing for multiple markets. I've written several books, and even have had some of them (a lot of them, actually) published. Sometimes I get these corny, naive replies like, "But doesn't everybody get their books published after they write them?"

Um, no. (I always have to roll my eyes at that one.) Only about 5% of completed novel manuscripts actually see commercial publication. The numbers are slightly higher for nonfiction, but not by much. And that doesn't even include all of the unfinished manuscripts floating around out there.

I also get really annoyed with all the people who think just because I've had a few novels published, I must be as rich as Stephen King. (Um, no.) According to the Author's Guild (which by the way, sets strict publication criteria for its members before admitting them), the average annual income of the American freelance writer is $10,000. Yeah. As in, below the federal poverty line.

But the people who annoy me the most are the people who say, "You know, I've always wanted to be a writer, but---", or "You know, I have this great idea for a book, but I just don't have time to write," or my personal favorite, "You know, I really think I should write my life story, but I'm not really a writer, so will you write it for me? And then after you write it, will you let me put my own name on it and also let me keep all the $$ it makes when it hits the New York Times bestseller list?" (You'd be surprised how often I've heard that one. And not from celebrities offering big ghostwriting bucks, either.)

I'm also annoyed by people I like to call halfassed writers. These are people who have actually managed to finish writing the first draft of a manuscript or two, but then they don't have the balls to sit down and do the hard work of revisions, researching the publication markets, querying agents and publishers, etc. These are people who will leave their first drafts sitting in drawers for years, lamenting why no one will give them a book deal (or a play production, or a newspaper contract, whatever). Any working professional writer will tell you that the actual writing is only about 20% of the equation. The other 80% is hustling yourself and your work to the businesspeople (publishers, producers, etc) who will pay you for it. And that part of the biz is just brutal.

But here's the thing I hate the most---"writers' block." I really hate it when the reason people give for not writing is "writers' block." I have one friend in particular who is a halfassed member of a couple writers' groups I participate in. For the past two years, this person has been flaking out of attending our meetings because he has supposedly had writers' block for that entire time.

People, THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS WRITERS' BLOCK. Do you know what writers' block really is? It's called being lazy.

As Bransford says in his blog post, real writers are the people who force themselves to write even when they don't want to. Real writers write even when there are eight hundred other things they'd rather be doing instead. Real writers sit down at the computer (or typewriter, or longhand journal, whatever) and write laundry lists if nothing else will come out.

In other words, real writers have willpower. Lots of it.

Peace.

We Give A Damn contest winner

2010-04-11T07:46:00.000-07:00

Congrats to Saranna deWylde for her wonderful entry to the We Give A Damn contest. She'll be receiving a care package of romance novels from my personal collection. Thanks to everyone who entered! (Saranna, I'll be in touch with you to get you your prize.)

I do plan on doing some more of these contests in the future, so keep your eyes here for further info.

Peace.

Web 3.0

2010-04-06T14:53:00.000-07:00

(Just a reminder, my We Give A Damn writing contest is still open; I don't have any entries yet, but I'd still really like to see some. And I do have several prizes to give away).

Here in 2010, we're now in what I like to call Web 3.0. The Web 1.0 era took up the entire second half of the 90s and lasted up until about 2005 or so, upon the launch of the first "smart phones" and the early social-media sites like Myspace (oh, so passe now). Suddenly the World Wide Web unleashed itself from desktop computers and laptops and made its way out and about onto streets, buses, airports, and just about everywhere else. People stopped buying CDs and became dependent on their iPods instead (except me, of course). Then in the past couple of years, with the launch of the iPhone, the Kindle and other digital readers (for ebooks), and sites like Twitter and Facebook, it has become de rigeur for us to do literally everything online, no matter where we are-----read books, listen to music, talk, chat, journal, keep up on the news, follow the stock market, ad nauseum. Via Facebook and Twitter, we constantly update everyone we know (and in my case, even sometimes thousands of people we don't know) of virtually every thought that enters our heads. Social media has revolutionized everything from popular music to book sales to politics. (Most political analysts agree that Obama won the 2008 election in part because he understood these new electronic media better than his stodgy Baby Boomer competition).

With the launch of Apple's iPad, we're now into Web 3.0, only a couple of years after Web 2.0 (which took close to 15 years to happen, natch). The ever-shortening timeslots between updates just illustrate the exponential power of written communications technology to upend societal norms. What's going on now hasn't really happened on this scale since Gutenberg invented the printing press circa 1400. What's next on the horizon? Who knows?

But here's something I do know. With the advancement of all of this rapid-fire technology, there is one thing we're definitely losing track of. And that's common decency and manners. When you put a flatscreen monitor or an iPhone touchscreen between yourself and whoever is on the other end of the conversation, it's easy to just forget all rules of common courtesy and act like a complete asshat. We saw this on a smaller scale with the Internet and it's now-quaint chat rooms and message boards, but in the age of Facebook it's getting even worse.

I'm a pretty thick-skinned person in general (and I'm a straight-talking, bogtrotting Irish pottymouth sometimes, too), but I also believe in good old-fashioned respect and manners. And yet, in addition to the usual mix of anonymous online-asshat behavior I've come to expect over the years, I've also seen some people I have known and respected for years blow atrocious, obnoxious shit out of their asses (I mean, mouths) on Facebook lately.

To be fair, I'll admit that I'm just as guilty of this as anybody else. When you're typing alone in your attic, sending your words out into the ether, it's easy to forget that there are real people out there reading it. And not just anybody. People you actually know, and occasionally even see and socialize with in person. (Wait, does anybody actually DO that anymore?) Sometimes I wonder.

Somebody recently told me that the way people behave on Facebook is actually the way they are deep down. Maybe that's true, maybe it isn't. But if it is, it can be both a good thing (in terms of fostering creativity and communication along with mutual understanding across cultures), or a bad thing (i.e., people acting like asshats).

I'm a casual member of a historical recreation society that specializes in the Middle Ages. Every couple of months, I decamp from my busy, overworked suburban-mom life, disconnect myself from the Internet and Facebook and my cell phone, dress up in a costume, and pretend to be someone from the 16th century. It's fun and it's educational. But most of all, it gives me a chance to unplug from this world that is moving entirely too fast, and to get back in touch with what it means to have real human communication of the kind that just doesn't exist anymore. Like handwritten letters on vellum, long slow conversations over homebrewed beer somebody spent months making in his cellar, and the kind of ceremonial politeness and courtesy that is basically extinct now.

I write ebooks for a living, so my very existence is dependent on Web 3.0. But I still think there can be way too much of a good thing sometimes.

Peace.

We Give A Damn Writing Contest

2010-04-02T19:40:00.001-07:00

Well, my Spring Has Sprung writing contest was a success, and I still have a lot of stuff I need to give away, so I've come up with another writing contest.

In honor of the We Give A Damn campaign for GLBT equality, I'm putting a call out for 1-paragraph writing entries relating in some way to GLBT (that's gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered) equality). You do not need to be GLBT to write an entry, because chances are, you know (and love) at least one GLBT person, or has at least had someone from the GLBT community make an impact on your life. Write a 1-paragraph entry around this theme, and submit it as a blog comment no later than April 10. I'll be giving away more free books (and maybe some other goodies) as prizes. Make sure you include your name (a pen name is fine) and an email address so I can get in touch with you if you win.

Below is a paragraph of my own that you can use as an example (though you're by no means limited to something like this.)

"I'm straight, but I have always been a big supporter of GLBT rights and community, even before it was popular. One time about fifteen years ago, right after college, I was running the Chicago's Proud to Run 5K race, which is sponsored in part by the Howard Brown Health Center, a Chicago-based nonprofit that provides low-cost healthcare to the GLBT community. (This race is traditionally held in Chicago on the day before the annual Gay Pride Parade.) One part of participating in the Proud to Run race is taking sponsorship dollars to support local AIDS charities. I posted a little thing about it on the bulletin board at work and was surprised when someone I had never spoken to before came and gave me a large donation. She then proceeded to flirt with me a bit. That's when I figured out she batted for the other team. (She was not too discreetly hitting on me, and though I was flattered, I politely turned her down.) But privately I admired her a lot for her guts, since we were both working for a very buttoned-down, very Republican, very anti-gay investment bank. Nobody at work knew about her lifestyle and I kept quiet about it until I left the company. She still works there to this day and as far as I know, is still closeted, because she could lose her job if she came out. The fact she has to hide who she is to stay employed is wrong, and it's one reason I continue to speak out as a straight person who supports GLBT rights."

---Jamaica Layne

Spring Has Sprung Contest Winners!

2010-04-01T07:51:00.000-07:00

Hey everyone! I'm pleased to announce the contest winners for the Spring Has Sprung contest---one for each of my blogs:

Jill Elaine Hughes, The Blog Winner: Ryan Field

Jamaica Layne, The Blog Winner: Stacey

Ryan and Stacey will win care packages of romance novels from my own personal collection! Congrats!

Also, HONORABLE MENTION goes out to all entrants. Everyone who entered the contest will receive a FREE Gift Card to Ravenous Romance!

I will get in touch with everyone today to get your snail-mailing addresses. Or to save time, just email it to jamaicalayne@yahoo.com.

Peace.

Spring Has Sprung Contest!

2010-03-23T15:03:00.000-07:00

Hey everybody!

Spring is here, the snow is melting, the fog is lifting, and even the economy is getting better! And health reform just passed (yay!) so things are certainly shaping up to be a good year!

In celebration of Spring, I'm going to have a contest, which I'm also cross posting on my other blog. I'm offering a gift basket of paperback romance novels (not books I've written, just some paperbacks from my own personal collection that I'm downsizing, along with some other nice goodies) to the winners.

To enter:
Using the "Post a Comment" function on my blog, submit a 1-paragraph long piece written on the topic of Spring and Romance. Those are the only criteria----so run with it. And have fun.

My blogs do not allow anonymous comments, so you'll need to identify yourself (a pen name is OK.) Make sure you include an email address at minimum, so I can get in touch with you in case you win. I'll post the top two winning entries (one from each blog) and both winners will get a nice basket of free books and other goodies.

Looking forward to reading your submissions!

Peace.

Edited to add: Submit your entry (via blog comment) no later than March 31. And spread the word!

Hubby Tales

2010-03-21T07:46:00.001-07:00

I'm married to an uber-practical, super-frugal Chinese immigrant. There's a reason why the Chinese own more than 60% of the US national debt----these people are the most tight-fisted people on Earth. And they have no use for anything that doesn't generate money. A LOT of money.

My husband has been very suspicious of my writing career from the start. In his view, if you aren't making as much money as Stephen King from writing, it's a waste of time. Far better to get into the banking, widget, or restaurant business instead.

And yet, he's tolerated my writing aspirations for over seven years of marriage now. As recently as two months ago, he was telling me to give it up, that it was a waste of time, energy, and talent, that I'd never make a real living at it, etc., etc. But when my lastest book became a big hit (by ebook standards, anyway), he had a change of heart.

"You've got to stick with this," he said. "You've tapped into a niche market. You need to exploit that. You might not make a whole lot of money per book, but you can make it up on volume. So get busy."

Spoken like a true Chinese businessman.

Peace.

Public Service Announcement

2010-03-20T07:20:00.001-07:00

Dear Shadow Readers:

I am well aware that there is a certain contingient of people who read my blog only because they hate my writing, hate my work, hate my literary agent, hate one or more of my publishers, and hate my choice of genre. These same people also have a very unhealthy fascination with me in general that borders on psychotic obsession.

To them I say:

Please go get professional help. You are in serious need of heavy medication. And stop reading my blog.

You know who you are.

That is all.

And now, back to our regularly scheduled program.

Peace.

Writing and Money

2010-03-18T10:53:00.000-07:00

When I was working full-time as a writer/editor in the corporate world, I spent several years in the trenches, working long hours for relatively low pay. But after about a decade or so, I built on that experience, as well as my several years' of doing freelance journalism and creative writing for publication on the side, I was able to pull down impressive salaries (by staff writer standards, anyway). By the time I was pregnant with my first child, I was earning nearly $75,000 a year. Not super-great money when you live in an expensive city like Chicago and also still have huge student loans from the University of Chicago, but still pretty damn good.

Of course, my employer at the time wasn't too keen on working mothers, so I basically got forced out of my position after my son was born. I took a couple years off, just doing some small writing projects, but by the time my son was two, I was back working about 25 hours a week or so as a freelance writer. I did creative writing (novels, mostly) for publication, as well as freelance technical and medical writing for corporate clients. With a huge recession and massive professional-writer unemployment driving sales and wages down, the money was very bad, and the projects few and far between---at first. But now after plugging away at it for about a year and a half, I'm finally seeing some real financial success. My freelance client base is growing, and paying me rather well. And my book sales are up---way up, in fact---and the resulting royalty checks are rising steadily, too.

According to the Authors Guild (of which I am a member; not everyone is qualified to join, mind you), the average professional working published book author and/or freelance journalist in the U.S. earns $10,000 a year. Not exactly a real living. It goes without saying that most authors and freelance journalists have to keep their day jobs. Since my full-time "day job" is raising a two-year-old, I'm a part-timer too, but it looks like this year at least, I'll be well above the Authors Guild national average for writing earnings. And all the writing that has earned me that $$ so far is published, and paid---either as hourly for-hire work or in advances/royalties.So it may not be equivalent to what I earned in the corporate world---yet. But it's a goal I'm definitely working toward.

I'll close with a favorite quote from one of my favorite authors:
"If you wrote something for which someone sent you a check, if you cashed the check and it didn't bounce, and if you then paid the light bill with the money, I consider you talented." ----Stephen King, in his memoir On Writing

Peace.

Writers, Agents, Arrogance, and Entitlement

2010-03-15T13:51:00.000-07:00

My literary agent (full disclosure: for my Ravenous Romance titles, she acts as my editor, not my agent) Lori Perkins runs a well-trafficked blog called Agent In The Middle. She is also the author of the bestselling how-to book THE INSIDER'S GUIDE TO GETTING AN AGENT (Writers Digest Books, 1999; still in print), which gives aspiring authors an industry insider's view on how literary agents work, and what they want in potential clients. I've read it, it's a great book. And it was one of the reasons I originally queried Ms. Perkins when I was seeking new literary representation.

Last week, my agent posted an entry called "Writers Behaving Badly" on her blog, in which she gave an example of a writer bugging the crap out of one of her junior agents by sending a long string of emails asking where his submission was in the agency review queue. That author went so far as to go over the junior agent's head and go to her boss (Lori Perkins) with a complaint that the junior agent was taking too long to review his submission. (Oh, so not cool).

My agent and her subordinates receive in excess of 30,000 queries from potential clients every year. So you can imagine it might take a while for them to respond to anyone. (If you got 30,000 pieces of unsolicited junk mail on top of all the other more urgent business and mail you have to deal with in daily life, I trust you would feel the same way.) It is also considered extremely bad professional form to bug the crap out of an agent who isn't even representing you yet. Without revealing the author's identity, my agent reposted some of the offending emails with thoughtful explanations as to why it is totally inappropriate behavior for a writer seeking an agent to engage in.

Most working writers I know (many of whom are unagented) would find this kind of information helpful. But on Ms. Perkins' own blog and on some message boards, hoards of aspiring authors (mostly unpublished and unagented, natch) are shrieking that Ms. Perkins somehow acted unprofessionally by making an example of one anonymous author's cringe-inducingly bad behavior. People are attacking Ms. Perkins on her blog and elsewhere, calling her "unprofessional," "rude," and all manner of other adjectives. Some are even questioning the legitimacy of her agency (this despite the fact that she's been in business for 22 years and has numerous New York Times bestsellers on her sales roster)

At this, I just have to throw up my hands in disbelief. I've been a professional working writer for almost 20 years now (I first started writing for pay while still in college), and in all that time, one thing I've learned---besides the fact that the publishing biz is cutthroat, harsh, and often as competitive as the Olympics----is that any time a top-level publishing professional with decades of experience gives advice, you should LISTEN. Not scream and moan and complain and call them all sorts of bad names. Not to mention whine and moan about why nobody wants to read your manuscript, or is taking too long to read your unsolicited agent query, yadayadayada.

Aspiring writers of all stripes, I have news for you. The world does not owe you something just because you wrote a manuscript. The world does not owe you shit. These days, anybody can sit down at a computer and bang out a manuscript. It doesn't mean that manuscript is publishable. (and 99.5% of the time, it isn't.) You are not entitled to attention, or money, or butt-kissing just because you've written something. Top agents and editors are bombarded by hundreds, if not thousands of unsolicited queries every week. You have LOTS of competition. Acting like an asshole isn't going to help you. Remember that, and plan your career accordingly.

Another thing that has been bugging me for the past year or so is the appalling lack of respect many authors (even published ones) have for their peers, especially in the romance genre. Many romance writers complain that despite the fact that the romance genre makes up almost 55% of all new book sales in English, romance authors get no respect from the public or the industry. And yet, I have witnessed (indeed, have been a victim of) terrible behavior among romance authors, including harrassment, petty backbiting, intimidation, and name-calling of new romance authors and some newer romance publishers, especially erotic romance. Not to mention flame wars on numerous romance blogs that have sometimes degenerated into threats of physical violence. (I'm serious; I've even received death threats) The kind of childish, petty behavior I've seen in the professional romance community is something I thought that most people outgrew by the time they were twelve years old. It was even enough for me to permanently withdraw my membership from the Romance Writers of America (where I was a member of their Published Authors Network).

Romance authors---if you want respect from the public and the publishing industry at large, first you must learn to respect one another. Acting like a bunch of drunken sorority sisters during Rush Week isn't helping the genre or its image.

That is all. Stepping down from my soapbox now.

Peace.

THE SHUNNED is here!

2010-03-10T06:40:00.000-08:00

My "cousin" Jay Hughes' first novel is here----THE SHUNNED.

It's essentially a gay version of WITNESS, only with a happy ending.

Gay. Amish. Romance.

Buy your copy today at http://www.ravenousromance.com/

Jamaica Layne fans, meet Jay Hughes!

2010-02-24T18:55:00.000-08:00

Dear Jamaica Layne Fans:

I'd like to introduce all of you to my long-lost gay cousin, Jay Hughes. Jay is the author of the forthcoming novel THE SHUNNED, coming soon from Ravenous Romance. THE SHUNNED is best described as "the gay version of WITNESS." That's right.

Gay. Amish. Romance.

THE SHUNNED releases very soon at Ravenous Romance. (release date TBA). Meanwhile, drop by Jay's site to learn more about him.

Gay. Amish. Romance.

(I love saying that.)

Peace.

Rave Review for THE MERCENARY BRIDE

2010-02-23T06:42:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I was having the day from hell. But just before I went to bed I got some good news. There's nothing like a great review of your latest book to pick a romance author up when you're having a bad day.

Literary Nymphs just gave my book THE MERCENARY BRIDE the best review I've received in my entire writing career, saying "THE MERCENARY BRIDE is one of the most enchanting, beautifully written romances I’ve ever read," giving it 5 Nymphs and also naming it a Golden Blush Recommended Read, a rare accolade on that site. You can read the review here.

I have some more exciting news to report. I recently "met" my long-lost cousin, Jay Hughes, who has just written a gay romance novel set among the Amish. That's right. Gay. Amish. Romance. Seriously.

Details to come.

Peace.

Disillusioned

2010-01-29T21:25:00.000-08:00

So I haven't been blogging much. I really haven't felt like it. I've become too disillusioned with writing and publishing lately to feel much like doing any "extra" writing that I'm not getting paid to do. (And the writing I actually do get paid for pays so little and is so menial and tedious that it's draining the life out of me).

This week I'm reminded of the line spoken by William Holden, portraying struggling screenwriter Joe Gillis in Sunset Boulevard, the scene at the beginning of the movie where he's trying desperately to sell a script to Paramount Studios.

The studio boss' secretary says, "You're Joe Gillis? Hey, I thought you had talent."

To which Joe replies, "That was last week. This week I'm trying to make a living."

I'd really like to make a living, too. A real one.

I hear they have some openings right now at Wal-Mart.

Peace.

It's All B.S. Until You Sign On The Dotted Line. . .

2010-01-29T17:21:00.000-08:00

Remember the old Richard Marx song from the 80s called "Don't Mean Nuthin'?" As in, "It Don't Mean Nuthin' Until You Sign On The Dotted Line?" It was Marx's send up of the B.S. of record-company dealmaking. The same applies to the publishing industry and professional writing in general, especially these days.

Here's a hypothetical situation:

You're a working, published midlist author with literary agent representation. Your agent called yesterday, and said she had a nice book deal inked for you. It was a work-for-hire type deal, though a decent one. You went over the details with your agent, and it seemed like a good opportunity that fit your skills and career path, so you agreed to do it. She promised to take care of the paperwork and get the ball rolling right away. You hang up and think you're a few grand richer, and are getting the new year off to a good start.

Then, this morning, this article runs in the L.A. Times about how freelance writers are seeing their incomes completely evaporate in the current recession as newspapers and magazines go belly-up, while the few outlets that are still publishing articles are paying one-tenth of their old (already miniscule) pay rate----if they pay at all. In today's Web 2.0 world, it seems the powers that be think that writers should either be content with just publication----for no pay at all----or even pay for the privilege of being published themselves. (i.e., vanity publishing)

Today, the supposedly done book deal your agent called you about yesterday has evaporated. When your agent asked for the publishing contract based on yesterday's agreed-upon negotiations, it doesn't come. Instead, the deal is revised to a tiny fraction of the agreed-upon price, along with the complete elimination of covered expenses (which now restricts the gig only to writers who live in a certain city---I'll let you guess which one). The dealmakers also indicate they are no longer looking for a "professional." So much for the old days of publishing, where deals are negotiated on good faith and a handshake.

The lesson is this: Publishing dealmakers have discovered that they can get books written a lot cheaper. As in, for free. As in, "why should we hire and pay a professional to do something when we can just post an ad on Craigslist and find a bazillion wannabe writers who will do a crap job for nothing?"

In the words of Godfather II: "This is the business we've chosen."

Don't ever become a writer. Seriously. Don't. Because these days, this is the kind of shit hand you will be dealt.

Peace.

As Seen On TV

2009-12-13T06:40:00.001-08:00

This year, it seems the hottest holiday gifts are the ones advertised on television in those "Call Now! Operators are Standing By!" commercials.

Like the Snuggie. And the Obama Chia Head, which apparently is being sold as a serious homage to our current President, and not a gag gift. And Bendaroos, which my six-year-old niece, who after she saw the commercial fifty-seven times on Cartoon Network, requested as the only thing she wanted for Christmas.

And in keeping with that, Ravenous Romance is pleased to announce that its Escape With Romance segment will be back on HSN this coming Friday, December 18. My books THE MERCENARY BRIDE and VITAL SIGNS, along with the books of other Ravenous authors, will be featured on this national TV spot on Friday, 12/18 at 8 am Eastern and 2 pm Eastern (7 am and 1 pm Central, an so on, this is LIVE TV). Check your local listings for the HSN channel in your area. There will be special holiday pricing, and guaranteed Christmas delivery. This was a great success when our books first appeared on HSN in October, and it looks like this will be a regular ongoing featured HSN product.

Get your Ravenous Romance books now! As Seen On TV!

Peace.

It was one year ago today. . .

2009-12-01T07:47:00.001-08:00

. . .that Ravenous Romance opened its doors. Many people in the romance community said that like so many erotica/romance epublishers before it, Ravenous Romance would never survive, let alone thrive. And there was good reason for those harsh judgments----many epublishers do not manage to stay open for a full year (indeed some, which shall remain nameless here, make a huge splash in the publishing media, then never even manage to open their doors for business in the first place.) After its first full year in business, Ravenous is going strong, and it staff and authors are raking in accomplishments and accolades, not to mention sales.

In the fall of 2008 I was invited to be published with a new startup epublisher whose staff had decades of experience in traditional publishing, and I jumped at the chance. Over the past year, I've written several novels and short stories for Ravenous, all of which has sold well, received great reviews, entertained readers, and put dollars in my pocket. And in less than a year, Ravenous managed to get my work (and that of several other RR authors) featured on national television, they have sold reprint rights on RR books to St. Martins Press, Alyson Books, Cleis Press, and others, RR books have been Top 10 bestsellers at AllRomanceEbooks.com, Audible.com, and Fictionwise.com, and there is even more exciting news to come. The editors and staff at Ravenous are wonderful, professional, and supportive. I look forward to working with them in 2010 and beyond!

In celebration of today's one-year anniversary, Ravenous is offering ALL its ebooks for only 99 cents each! It's Ravenous' way of saying thanks. Now is the time to stock up on all your favorite RR authors!

Peace.

Music and Memories

2009-11-09T20:50:00.000-08:00

Have you ever heard a song on the radio that you hadn't heard in a long time, and it triggered a long-forgotten (or rather, repressed) memory? That happened to me tonight on my drive home from a business meeting. It happened twice in ten minutes, in fact.

I switched to a radio station I don't usually listen to so I could skip over an annoying commercial. That radio station was doing a music respective of seldom-heard hits from the late 80s. I was a teenager during that period, and very into pop music. The first song the DJ played was Guns-n-Roses' "Sweet Child O' Mine," which I actually hear a lot on the radio these days, but for some reason hearing it tonight triggered a memory of a particular pair of acid-washed jeans I liked to wear in 1989, ones I had decorated with pseudo-anarchy symbols, peace signs, and other goofy teenage angst crap with ballpoint pens and Sharpie markers. That was the closest I got to rebellion as a 14-year-old, wearing graffiti-covered clothes. That, and hanging out with older kids who would pile 13 people into their crummy, beat-up Chevettes and go joyriding that way on the winding country roads surrounding the small Ohio town where I grew up. And for some other crazy reason I pictured the exact look, feel, and design of the cheap denim purse I carried around at the time, too. (also decorated with Magic Marker teenage grafitti).

Here's the other weird memory trigger. The techopop song "Rock Me Amadeus" (with the original German lyrics, not the later English version that became popular in the US in '85). Hearing this song momentarily made me think of the nights I spent in my bedroom listening for that song on the nightly Top 10 list on Cincinnati's Q102 FM station, but then my mind switched to another time and place entirely. I was reminded of the time in the late 90s that I spent in a dingy, smelly basement death-metal bar in Vienna, getting dumped by my Austrian boyfriend (who flew me all the way to Vienna for the sole purpose of dumping me in an Austrian death-metal bar). Austrian death-metal is a helluva long way from Falco (and 1999 is a long way from 1985), but for whatever reason, that was the memory the song triggered.

My debacle with the Austrian boyfriend was one for the record books, a textbook example of a stupid romantic relationship with the absolute worst possible person at the worst possible time, and a memory I don't usually care to revisit. But tonight, driving in the car, listening to Falco and remembering every detail of that smelly, filthy death-metal bar buried in an 18th-century Austrian cheese cellar, I finally realized one thing:

Vienna is a pretty damn nice place to get dumped.

Peace.

KNIGHT MOVES is half-price today only!

2009-11-06T08:01:00.000-08:00

My bestselling ebook KNIGHT MOVES is half-price at Ravenous Romance today only as part of 5-Star Friday (in honor of RR books that have received multiple 5-star reviews from critics). This bawdy satire is funny, filthy, and a wild ride. Check it out.

Jamaica Layne Interview and Chat

2009-11-03T19:55:00.001-08:00

I'm interviewed today (as Jamaica Layne) at Whipped Cream: http://tinyurl.com/yz3eovp

I'll also be chatting online on the Whipped Cream Yahoo group tomorrow (Wed. Nov 4) at Whipped Cream Yahoo group. (you have to join the group to chat):

3rd quarter royalties

2009-10-30T17:45:00.000-07:00

Got my third-quarter royalty statement today from my main epublisher. I'm pleased to report that most of my titles with them have now earned out their advances. Which is good, but still not a whole lot of money (actually, a tiny amount of money, but it shows continued sales growth for a relatively new epublisher, which is promising in the current environment). A couple of my books are doing way, way better than the others (and not at all the ones I expected to do so well), which goes to show that some types of books will sell better than others for reasons that nobody can really fathom, even if they're by the same author.

What was really great news was the numbers that came in on my two books that were featured on HSN. I basically sold 5,000 copies of my books in less than one hour of airtime. Which is absolutely stupendous. A lot of debut authors in midlist print can only expect to sell 5,000 copies for the length of the life of the book, which might be two or three years in bookstores. I did that in less than an hour. That's like, 83 books a minute. And the books are continuing to sell online via HSN's website. Ravenous Romance is going to be featured again on HSN (details TBA) in what will very likely be a monthly and/or bimonthly feature, so it looks like I could keep pulling those numbers in. I just wish those numbers would spill over into other books on my backlist.

In other news, I'm working on beefing up my freelance medical writing business. My specialities are healthcare policy, nursing, surgery, general academic medical writing, and pharmaceuticals. I also dabble in legal/business/technical writing. I'll be redesigning my personal website this fall, and I plan to include a section on that. Would appreciate any suggestions.

Peace.

A much-needed break

2009-10-17T12:02:00.000-07:00

Well, I finally dashed off a proposal and sample chapters for my latest project and got it off to my agent this past week. Earlier in the week, I also finished my latest under-contract novel a full week ahead of my (albeit extended) deadline. So now I have a bit of a lull. I'll still have articles due for my freelance writing "day job", but without anything creative taking up my extra time, I'll finally have some time to do some chores and also some "fun" stuff.

Such as:
1) Clean out my closet (and my son's closet---it is truly amazing how quickly he outgrows his clothes) and donate a ton of castoff stuff to the YWCA;

2) Try to organize the ever-more-chaotic place that passes for my home;

3) Appear as an actor (yes, an actor---sometimes I dust the mothballs off my old acting chops and perform) in a staged reading of a friend's play. There will be another blog post about this soon, because it's shaping up to be a very odd experience.)

4) Catch up on some reading.In other news, I have a good feeling about my latest book project. I'm not spilling any beans on what it is yet, since I don't want anyone copying my idea and getting a deal on their version of it before I do. But my agent is actually having dinner with Gore Vidal (yes, THE Gore Vidal) next week, and she and I both think he might be of particular help on this project if we can get him to do a jacket blurb for it. And that's all I'm gonna say right now.

Stay tuned.

Peace.

2009-10-09T19:03:00.000-07:00

I can now truthfully say that one of my former neighbors is now a Nobel Laureate.

When I was in graduate school at the University of Chicago in the mid-90s, a young law professor and community organizer named Barack Obama lived three blocks north of my crummy student housing building. He and his wife occupied a tiny two-bedroom condo, saddled with massive law-school debts that his community-service oriented job couldn't pay. While other Harvard Law grads raked in piles of money doing corporate law, Barack and Michelle Obama did low-paying work on such legal issues as civil rights and health care for the indigent. They lived small so their work could live large.

I saw Mr. Obama speak at a small community rally a block away from campus when he was running for state senator representing the working-class college neighborhood where I lived, Hyde Park. I was impressed with him. So impressed I voted for him that first time he ran for office (a tiny, inconsequential office in state government) in 1996. And followed his career ever since.

To all of those who don't think that Obama deserves the Nobel Peace Prize, because he's too early in his presidential term, or he hasn't achieved world peace yet (or whatever other petty nay-saying reason you come up with) I say this.

The Nobel Peace Prize is not awarded to recognize efforts for peace, human rights and democracy only after they have proven successful. That was never Alfred Nobel's aim. More often, the prize is awarded to encourage those who receive it to see their efforts towards peace through, sometimes at critical moments. That's the whole reason there's a large sum of money attached----not to personally enrich the fortunes of the winner, but to help support and sustain the causes the winners champion. This is the part that a whole lot of people are missing right now----including a lot of top media people.Dr. Martin Luther King actually won his Peace Prize before his civil rights movement had actually garnered any real legislative action or had even quelled racial violence. (indeed, the worst of the 60s race riots occurred after Dr. King was assassinated.) Instead, Dr. King essentially won the Peace Prize for his "I Have A Dream" speech, which inspired the national call to action on civil rights. Inspired. Sound familiar? King's speech was a "promise" that inspired millions----not at all unlike what Obama has done, in both the United States and around the world. Plus, Dr. King's movement was local, and didn't aim to bring peace between nations---only between citizens of the same country. King's winning of the prize is now widely considered the tipping point in the civil rights movement, along with the "I Have A Dream" speech itself, which the prize recognized. And I don't think anybody today would argue that Dr. King didn't deserve the Nobel Peace Prize just because his movement hadn't "succeeded" yet when he won it.

Chew on that, Republicans. The more you guys deride this, the more you look like you're on the wrong side of history.

Peace.

Whoa, two daily blog posts in a row. . .

2009-10-08T21:09:00.001-07:00

Okay, I have actually managed to write a blog post for two consecutive days. Can't remember the last time that happened. It's amazing how life can get in the way of something so simple as making a simple diary entry. Then again, my blog isn't a diary so much as it is a public rant about the insane demands of my ever-more-busy-and-frustrating life.

Today was a very interesting day. My son took a three-hour afternoon nap for the first time in months, which meant I actually got something productive done before 8 pm. I managed to catch up on a bunch of administrative stuff for the freelance gig I'm doing (healthcare-related writing for a major university), and also do some household stuff. I'm stuck in a rut on the current novel, though (which, incidentially, is due in to the editor next week). But the end is in sight. I've done a thorough copyedit of what I've already written, and I only need about two more chapters before I can call the thing finished.

I told my agent and editors the other week that I needed to take a break from my Jamaica Layne sexy writing for a while. I have cranked out 9 books in less than a year, which is just plain insane. The well is dry. I got nothin' left. At least, not for a while. I need to refuel the tank.

But it seems I will have plenty to keep me busy in the meantime. The freelance gig seems like it can go on to infinity. I got an email today from a writer friend asking I come out of retirement from performing onstage and act in his play later this month. And I just signed a contract to have one of my plays included in the annual Best American Short Plays for the third year in a row. Lots of other interesting accomplishments and opportunities abound, too.

But what I'd really like more than anything else at this point is a steady paycheck. Well, scratch that---I've got a steady paycheck, but it's small. I need a BIG steady paycheck. Big enough to buy myself a goddamn nanny. I've been a full-time mom for two years now and I am starting to forget how to be an adult.

Peace.

Okay. . .

2009-10-07T17:23:00.000-07:00

. . .so I haven't been good about blogging lately. I admit it. But there's only so much of me to go around these days. I'm trying to meet novel deadlines, and I'm coming up with new book proposals for my agent to pitch, plus I've taken on some corporate freelance work. AND I've got a two-year-old. AND I was busy with rewrites/rehearsals for one of my plays (just finished). AND I seem to be coming down with the flu.

So, cut me a break here, folks. More posts to come.

(Note to the FTC: No gifts were exchanged/received/promoted via my blog in the past year. So keep those $11,000 fines to yourself, please. And please take your Nanny State and shove it up your ass. )

Peace.

JAMAICA LAYNE AND RAVENOUS ROMANCE ON NATIONAL TELEVISION!!!!!

2009-09-13T08:22:00.000-07:00

Okay, folks, here's the news you've all been waiting for. Jamaica Layne and the authors of Ravenous Romance are hitting the airwaves of NATIONAL TELEVISION tomorrow, September 14, 2009!

Ravenous Romance has partnered with HSN , a home-shopping channel that averages 90 million daily viewers, to present "Escape To Romance," an exclusive collection of 18 romance novels, grouped into three categories----Contemporary, Historical, and Paranormal. I've got titles in the Historical and Contemporary groups----The Mercenary Bride and a "PG-13" version of my medical-romance novel Vital Signs.

The "Escape to Romance" segment airs tomorrow, September 14, 2009. See below for airtimes, and check your local listings for the exact channel location. HSN is available on all basic cable services, and is also broadcast free over the air in many areas. Even if you can't tune in, you can order the collections RIGHT NOW at HSN.com---here's a link. It's very likely this could become a regular ongoing segment on the network.

Airtimes: Monday, September 14, 2009 at 8:35 AM (7:35 am Central), 4:35 PM (3:35 pm Central) and Tuesday, September 15, 2009 at 3:00 AM (2:00 am Central). Note: This is LIVE TV broadcast from the East Coast, so if you're out on the West Coast check HSN.com for local airtimes.

A full press release is available at the Ravenous Romance blog.

Romance novels on national television! Who'd have thunk it?

Tomorrow will be a very important day for the publishing industry---maybe even a game-changer.

Peace.

Thoughts For The Day

2009-09-11T06:32:00.001-07:00

Here's a few quotes and platitudes in light of some recent events:

----Pressure creates diamonds. And diamonds are indestructible. Charcoal leaves a brief dark mark, then falls apart.

----Be kind to others on your way to the top. You'll meet them on your way back down.

-----"Small people will criticize, naysay, and tell you you can't do it. The truly great will encourage, support, and help you become great alongside themselves." ---attributed to Mark Twain

----Oceans form one drop at a time.

----Quitters quit, doers do.

----Little pitchers have big ears.

-----Sometimes the nerdy new kid that nobody likes grows up to be Bill Gates.

Stay tuned for a news release posted here this coming Sunday that will be a very, very big deal. (Hint: National television is involved.)

Peace.

On Manners, Professionalism, and Karma

2009-09-09T19:53:00.000-07:00

I don't blog about the publishing industry at large on here much, since my blogs are mostly focused on my own writing life. And I've learned the hard way not to get sucked in to online flame wars. But I just couldn't resist commenting on the Quartet Press debacle.

Those of you who follow my writing career know that I write for Ravenous Romance, a relatively new epress that was founded by several people with literally decades of experience in traditional NYC print publishing (my venerable literary agent Lori Perkins among them). The relatively new world of epublishing has never mixed well with the old-school, big-time NYC print publishing industry (most of the people who run independent epublishers started those epublishers with no prior publishing experience of any kind)----indeed, it's been kind of a "Wild West" for many years. So when Ravenous was founded in late 2007, it created quite a stir in the very tiny epublishing community, mostly due to the fact that Ravenous had big-time print publishing connections and business experience---and wasn't afraid to show it.

The relatively small, close-knit (and dare I say, snarky and emotionally immature) epublishing blogosphere pounced on Ravenous and its authors, claws drawn. The attacks, flame wars---even out-and-out harrassment---of Ravenous Romance's staff and authors by a small group of epublishing bloggers and (mostly) unpublished authors was like something out of Dante. It was like the meanest sorority-girl-slash-junior-high-school prank turned into an online horror movie. Worst of all, even some editors and staffers at some of Ravenous' competitors got in on the "fun," in appalling public acts of unprofessionalism. One blogger in particular (who shall remain nameless here) became a ringleader of sorts, dragging on the vicious mean-girl hazing (I can think of no better term for it) for several months.

And today, lo and behold, Quartet Press, which had been praised and cheerleaded to the high heavens for months by the very same bloggers that had viciously derided Ravenous Romance and its authors (not to mention had hired one of the aforementioned editors who had joined in the hazing, and had even publicly announced it would publish the ringleader blogger's debut novel) collapsed and shut down today before it published a single book.

Meanwhile, Ravenous Romance (and its authors, myself included) is going strong, has just signed an 18-book print deal in partnership with major media, and will be making a MAJOR national media splash on September 14 (stay tuned).

Poetic justice, perhaps? Karma? Something else?

I'll leave that for you to decide.

Edited 9/11/09 to add: The above-referenced blogger has categorically denied having a book deal with the defunct publisher, despite making prior Twitter posts, comments, etc. to the contrary (which may have been a practical joke on her part, who knows). Whatever the truth is, it seems there may be a gag order in place on the publisher participants, so it seems we'll never know. In any case, there was certainly a strong relationship of some kind, financial or otherwise, between the above-referenced blogger and Quartet Press' staff, which likely contributed to the chummy PR relationship between the two.

Moral of the story: Don't believe hype without actual dollars and results behind it, no matter who is dishing it out.

Peace.

The Wee Small Hours of the Morning

2009-09-07T22:32:00.001-07:00

I've never been much of a night person. I'm not really a morning person either. I've always been more of a middle-of-the day person. Or perhaps just a stick-to-a-regular-schedule person. I'm definitely an eight-hours-of-sleep-a-night person. None of which bode well for being a writer/mom.

Anyone who has small children can tell you that you absolutely, positively cannot get anything productive done at the same time you are watching/feeding/bathing/otherwise taking care of said children. Which basically leaves you no time to do anything besides Take Care Of Your Kid. Forget about doing (or folding, or ironing) laundry. Forget about cleaning the bathroom. And certainly forget about Writing The Great American Novel---let alone 10 of them, like I've done in the two years since my kid was born.

How did I do it, you may ask? By not sleeping. Ever.

The only time I can get anything productive done is when my kid is sleeping. I reserve my child's morning and midday naptimes (which can range anywhere from fifteen minutes to three hours, totally unpredictable) for doing dishes, checking email, cooking, and other must-do chores. Any real writing (or anything else that requires time and concentration, like paying bills, or reading a book, or doing my taxes) has to be done after my son is in bed for the night. And since getting his needy little toddler self to bed each night has become a long, drawn-out, two-hour chore in and of itself, that means my prime work times are between the hours of 10:30 pm and 3:00 am. Working this late several nights a week is the only way I can meet my contract deadlines, balance my checkbook, or do basically anything else that involves being an adult.

I still have to get up by 6 am every day, mind you. My son still wakes up at 6 am on the dot every day, and does not understand that Mommy Is Still Very, Very Tired. I still have to cook his meals, clean the house, bathe him (and myself) and basically run a 24-7 nursery school every single day on less than 5 hours' sleep. My body runs on a combo of Cheerios and Diet Coke.

Don't let anyone tell you that stay-at-home moms don't actually work. Come spend a day on my schedule sometime. I'll show you work.

Peace.

Microblogging

2009-08-31T11:29:00.001-07:00

In today's world of ever-shortening attention spans, it seems that even blogging is beginning to suffer. (Hence, I haven't been posting here as much, as I'm sure you've noticed.) I've gotten away from traditional blogging in favor of microblogging on my Twitter and Facebook pages.

For those of you still living under rocks, Twitter and Facebook allow users to "microblog" via short sentences in their status updates. Twitter even goes so far as to limit how many characters you can use (140). Facebook is more user-friendly, with a lot more features (and a vast improvement over its clunkier, now-passe competitor, Myspace), and real-time updating that is completely addictive.

I've been using my Twitter account mostly to promote my Jamaica Layne-branded writing. I use Facebook the same way, but also take advantage of its other many features to not only promote my writing work and sales business, but also to microblog about my day-to-day life as a stay-at-home-slash-working mother. Being a full-time writer and mom to a rambunctious two-year-old definitely has plenty of not-so-glamorous moments, and I've built up quite a following of friends who wait with baited breath to hear what shenanigans my son has gotten into lately. Here's a sampling of my recent Facebook updates:

"Looked in the mirror today and was stunned at how thin I've gotten. Haven't looked like this since my mid-20s. I highly recommend breastfeeding as a means of weight loss."

"Kiddo hits me, kicks me, bites me, pulls my hair, destroys everything I own, misbehaves wildly, has no respect for "time out." But I love him anyway."

"Add my brand-new trendy wraparound sunglasses to the list of things kiddo broke today. sigh."

"My son's capacity for destruction knows no bounds. He destroys jewelry, calculators, remote controls, toilet seats, carpeting, computer cables, books, and clothes. All in 24 hours."

All this Facebooking and Twittering instead of doing what I really should be doing (like writing, or exercising, or reading a damn book) really makes me wonder. If even novelists get distracted by Facebook (huge time-sucker that it is) what kind of future do novelists really have?

Peace.

THE MERCENARY BRIDE releases today!

2009-08-11T06:37:00.000-07:00

My latest novel, THE MERCENARY BRIDE, releases today at Ravenous Romance. This book is a bit of a departure from my usual style----it's a "sweet" (i.e., non-erotic) historical romance set in 12th-century England. Fans of my bestselling book KNIGHT MOVES will find a lot of familiar settings and themes, though, and lovers of traditional historical romance will enjoy it, too. The ebook is out now; the print version will release nationally (details to come, stay tuned!) on September 14.

Here's more info:

The Mercenary Bride:

Synopsis

It’s the year 1101, and England is still reeling from the Norman conquest a generation earlier. Lady Sabina of Angwyld is the eldest daughter of the Duke of Angwyld, a Saxon nobleman with estates near the Welsh border. The Norman invaders want to take the Duke’s land and title by force, and the only hope the he has for saving Angwyld is to marry his eldest daughter off to a ruthless, evil Norman nobleman, Lord Reginald de Guillaume. Sabina will have none of it, however. She thinks her only alternative is to take the veil and enter a convent. So she runs away.

Sabina is fleeing Angwyld on horseback on her way to the Abbey at Glastonbury when she meets Robert de Tyre, a swashbuckling Norman mercenary who serves as a cavalry officer in Lord Reginald’s army. Though Robert de Tyre has been sent by Lord Reginald to capture his intended bride and bring her back in time for her forced marriage, the sparks soon fly between them, and their worlds are turned upside down. Will Sabina overcome her hatred for all things Norman as her romantic feelings for Robert grow? And can Robert protect Sabina from the pursuing armies of his ruthless, jealous employer and make her his own? Only time will tell...

I'm in WRITERS DIGEST!

2009-08-04T15:20:00.000-07:00

Some of you might recall last year when I (or rather, when my non-sexy, boring alter ego Jill Elaine Hughes) had to go through the rather unpleasant process of firing a literary agent. It's never a pleasant task, but it's something most writers have to do at some point in their careers. Firing an agent can be especially terrifying because industry etiquette requires that you fire your current agent before seeking a new one----and there's no guarantee you'll find another agent willing to represent you, either!

Fortunately for me, the process was a relatively easy one because I understood the importance of crafting a very graceful and carefully worded query letter that explained why I was seeking new representation. That query letter landed me a new agent less than a week after firing the old one. And this month's issue of Writers Digest magazine thought enough of it to do a special online feature on that very letter, along with commentary from the new agent I landed, the legendary Lori Perkins of the L. Perkins Agency.

Here's a link to the WD article. Enjoy!

Sneak preview of things to come. . .

2009-07-30T17:38:00.000-07:00

Here's an exclusive sneak preview of the cover of my latest book, THE MERCENARY BRIDE. This is a straight (non-erotic) historical romance, set in 12th-century England. The ebook version releases at RavenousRomance.com in mid-August. There will also be a print edition which will make a very big splash in a very big way come September. Details to come. . .

Stay tuned!

Playing Catch-Up

2009-07-27T10:17:00.000-07:00

It never ceases to amaze me how much of the job of a full-time freelance writer has nothing at all to do with writing. I'm a pretty business-savvy person in general, which has been key to my success as a freelance writer. I've known several formerly successful authors (including one guy who published more than 20 science-fiction novels in the 80s, only to see his deals dry up and his agent drop him when the market changed in the 90s) who saw their careers fall apart in the early 90s for no other reason than the fact they weren't interested in the "business" side of the writing and publishing business. They just wanted to hide in their attics and write, and never deal with agents, or editors, or marketing, or the general public. And that, my friends, was their downfall.

I probably spend more time on marketing, fanbase development, publicity, and contracts (in partnership with my agent) than I do on actual writing. Which frankly bothers even me. But I know that it's a necessity, especially in the early stages of my career as I build up my reader base. I maintain author websites, a heavily trafficked Facebook account (I have 1600 friends and counting), two blogs, a newsletter. I keep my author pages on Amazon updated, and I even write the people at Amazon to update the categories under which my books are listed to make sure they are reaching the most potential buyers. I have a Twitter account (1300 followers and counting). I go to conferences. I research potential markets, and try to keep up with what other authors in my genre (i.e., my competition) are writing, and how they are selling. I query magazines to take my freelance articles. I query editors of book-review publications and websites. I do online interviews. I do radio interviews. I go to writing groups. And on and on and on.

And when I'm not doing all of that (not to mention running my other side business, or raising my kid)---I'm writing. A lot. I just spent the past three weeks holed up in my writing suite for 8-12 hours a day, cranking out a historical romance novel on an impossibly tight deadline----which just made me fall behind on all my business-side stuff. The next couple weeks I'm taking a break from writing to catch up on all of that----and also to catch up on life a little bit. I haven't had much of a personal life this summer at all, and I'd like to have a chance to enjoy the nice weather a bit before yet another brutal Chicago winter sets in.

I'll never forget the time a former co-worker of mine (the aforementioned sci-fi author who published 20 novels in the 80s only to see his career fall apart) complaining that the publishing business "just wasn't about the writing anymore." He'd always hated the "business" side of the writing business, and the fact he never did anything---zip, zero-zilch, nada---to promote himself, to learn about the importance of favorable contracts and a good agent, or to grow his reader base was what ended his career. He blamed everyone for his career's demise but himself, and said that "real" writers just didn't make it anymore.

When he was finished with his bitter tirade, I smiled and nodded my head politely, but made a mental note not to make the same career mistakes he had. And so far, that decision has paid off in spades.

Back to work.

VITAL SIGNS Vol. 1 I'VE BEEN A NAUGHTY NURSE is HALF PRICE today only!

2009-07-24T07:00:00.000-07:00

It's Five Star Friday at RavenousRomance.com, and my critically acclaimed and bestselling novel VITAL SIGNS Vol. 1: I'VE BEEN A NAUGHTY NURSE is half-price (ebook AND audiobook) today only!

Here's what critics have had to say about this book:

"Layne sucks you in and doesn’t let go until the last page." ---LoveRomancePassion.com

"Jamaica Layne keeps the reader enthralled and wanting to see where these two characters will get together next." ---Coffee Time Romance

"Vital Signs is erotic romance at its finest! Vital Signs is a five-star romance that sizzles in all the right places. Make no mistake about it, Ms. Layne is a true master of her craft." ---Crave More Romance

And don't forget VITAL SIGNS Vol. 2: SEX IS A SOUTHERN CITY. Coffee Time Romance says "This spicy hot book will have you panting for more."

Peace.

Ten Things You Didn't Know About Me

2009-07-07T20:30:00.001-07:00

10. I am my mother's youngest of two kids, but my father's second of five kids.

9. I taught myself to read by age 3. Nobody knows how I managed to do it, but I did. I read a book to my mother at 3 (that's how she found out).

8. My husband is Chinese, a native of Hong Kong.

7. I was in labor with my son for 28 hours, 27 of which was with no form of pain medication whatsoever.

6. I hung out in the Chicago theater scene for many years, and met many famous people. I once attended a party where David Schwimmer from "Friends" got horribly stinking drunk, then spilled his Remy Martin martini all over me. He didn't even apologize----just swore at me like it was my fault.

5. Many of my past boyfriends were foreigners (from countries like Germany, Austria, Japan, India). My husband was also a foreigner (he is now a US citizen).

4. I have visited more than 20 countries.

3. I used to speak fluent French, but I've forgotten most of it. I also studied Latin and German.

2. I first read erotica when I was 14 years old, and I stole it from my parents' bedroom.

1. I used to live three blocks away from Barack Obama. (In Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood, when I was a grad student at the University of Chicago, where Obama taught law school at the time). I also voted for him the very first time he ran for public office (for state senator in the Hyde Park district, in 1996).

Why being a successful writer is hard.

2009-07-05T20:26:00.001-07:00

For all of you aspiring novelists out there, who would like nothing more than to write full-time and make a living at it, be careful what you wish for. You might get it.

To wit, I am currently writing a full-length historical romance on a flat-out CRAZY deadline. As in, one of my editors called me up a week or so ago and asked me to write a historical medieval romance (a straight "sweet" romance, not my usual porno-erotica type stuff). The money was there, the contract was there, and it was exactly the kind of book I've been wanting to do for a while. The only catch----she needed it completed in a very short time frame. Like less than a month.

I have to admit it----I balked. All of you aspiring writers out there would probably scream, WHY??? I had an editor begging ME to produce something that she really needed, which is a 180-degree turn from what most early-career writers usually deal with (i.e., a pile of manuscripts nobody wants to pay the price of a Chinese dinner for). Well, here's why. I already had multiple contracts with multiple deadlines to fulfil. I have a kid (a busy toddler who monopolizes most of my free time), and I run a household and a side business on top of being a full-time writer. I was already having trouble meeting some of those deadlines and had even asked for an extension. Even if you consider how prolific (and disciplined) I already am when it comes to my writing output, writing a full-length historical novel (complete with all the historical research that goes with it) in less than a month is INSANE. But the opportunity my editor presented me was just too good to pass up, so after a long conversation with the hubby, I decided I had to just bite the bullet and do it.

So far, I have written 25,000 words (roughly half of the novel's length) in a week. A WEEK. That's nuts, even for me. The only reason I've been able to do it is because the hubby has taken a week off of work so he can watch my son and manage the household in my stead, giving me free reign to write and do research for eight, ten, twelve hours a day if need be. It's hard. My back and neck are hurting, I've got migraine headaches from eyestrain, and my carpal-tunnel is acting up. Meanwhile, the household is falling apart without my usual supervision---the house is a pit, plus my hubby destroyed an entire bed of my precious phlox perennial flowers when I asked him to do some work in the garden for me. My son is eating a diet consisting of nothing but instant Ramen noodles and brownies, and my ironing basket overfloweth. My son's diaper rash from hell is back, too.

And yet despite all that, I'm having more fun writing this book than I have writing any book I've ever written before. I'm writing 3,000, 4,000, sometimes even 5,000 words in a single sitting, all the while excited about where the story and characters are going to go and do next. And who knows---maybe this will end up being the book deal to end all book deals, the one that enables me to hire a full-time nanny, gardener, and housekeeper so I can do nothing all day, every day but write, write write.

I recently met New York Times-bestselling author (and one of my favorite writers) Lora Leigh at a conference. We got to chatting, and she asked me about my books. I mentioned a few, compared myself to authors I thought she'd probably read so she'd have a better idea of what I write. Ms. Leigh just smiled and said, "Honey, don't even talk to me about reading. I haven't had time to read a book for pleasure in over three years. I'm at my computer twelve, thirteen, fourteen hours a day, writing. I never get a day off. Deadlines, ya know." This coming from a lady who usually has four or five books on the NYT list at a time and makes millions of dollars in royalties.

Ah, to be successful. It seems the more successful you are, the more you have to work your ass off. So much for authors supposedly living a life of leisure.

Peace.

Blog Party Cancelled. Goodbye, Jacko

2009-06-27T07:01:00.001-07:00

I wanted everyone to know that the Jennifer's Random Musings Summer Blog Party (where I was scheduled to appear today) has been cancelled due to the blog administrator's illness. Hopefully it will be rescheduled later in the summer.

I wanted to take a moment to comment on the death of Michael Jackson. Although I hadn't really listened to his music in years (other than what came on the radio), I was a fan of his, especially as a kid. My favorite MJ music (and period) was his early years with the Jackson 5, when his child's voice was pure and beautiful, yet had the depth, range and passion of someone well beyond his years. To quote Motown founder Berry Gordy, Michael Jackson was a "fifty year old man in a child's body" who could bring emotion and passion to the blues and soul that no child of his age ever should have been able to do. In other words, he was a genius, the likes of which will never be seen again.

How ironic that when he grew up, Jackson became a child in a man's body. This is why I frankly never believed the pedophile allegations against him. Several forensic psychiatrists all diagnosed him as having the mental state of a "psychologically regressed 10-year-old", which doesn't at all fit the profile of a child molester. I think the families that made the allegations did it because they saw a frail, deluded, and very frightened man (who also happened to be mega-rich) and decided to see how much they could take him for. It was that same kind of thinking that allowed Jackson to be surrounded by "vampires and leeches" (to quote his ex-wife Lisa Marie Presley) who enabled his mental illnesses and drug addiction. It was most likely the drugs (along with the pressure to make a comeback) that killed him.

It seems even he knew that this fate would be his. So sad that nobody could save Michael Jackson from himself.

We have lost so many of our most gifted Americans----national treasures, really----to drug abuse, the terrible pressures of fame, and the manipulative, degenerate people who latch themselves onto the famous for their own benefit. At what point will our society say enough?

RIP.

Blog Tours, Et Cetera

2009-06-20T13:50:00.000-07:00

Hi all--

Happy Summer! I wanted to let everyone know that in the coming week, I'll be participating in two blog tours along with several other Ravenous Romance authors.

Here's the scoop:
We've got a great contest! Some of my fellow Ravenous authors have teamed up with Night Owl Romance for a web hunt that will last through the entire month of June and offers great prizes. For details, visit here: http://www.nightowlromance.com/nightowlromance/hunt/ravenous1.asp
Details: Join us at Night Owl Romance on the following dates to meet Ravenous Romance authors and win free stuff. Date: Monday, June 22 (All of their chats are on Mondays) Time: 8 EST, 7 CST, 5 PST Location: http://www.nightowlromance.com/nightowlromance/chat/chat.aspx Authors Included: EM Lenley, Inara Lavey, Elle Amery, Jamaica Layne, Savannah Chase, Angela Cameron

Summer Blog Party at Jennifer's Random Musings
I'll also be participating in the Jennifer's Random Musings Summer Blog Party next week. There will be online games, sneak previews of upcoming books, and lots of fun at that blog. Watch both the Jennifer's Random Musings site and my blog for further details.

Last but not least, some very shameless self promotion. I recently became an Avon represe ntativ e, mostly because I've been addictied to Avon Anew, perfume, and Skin So Soft for half my life and I wanted to get it at a discount (but also because I needed some extra cash between royalty payments.) Most of you who know me personally already know that I'm a makeup and fashion junkie, so this was an easy career move for me to make. So if you're on the market for some very high-quality, value-priced makeup, bug spray, skincare, clothes, jewelry, shoes, whatever----drop by my site and browse.

Peace. And Happy Summer!

Miscellany

2009-06-17T06:55:00.000-07:00

Okay, so I haven't been posting here much. Sue me. I'm a busy gal. Here's a quick sum-up of what I've been working on lately.

Two weeks ago I headed off to the Lori Foster Readers and Writers Get-Together for the weekend. NYT Bestselling author Lori Foster (who also just so happens to hail from my hometown of Cincinnati) runs this great romance conference to help readers meet their favorite romance authors in a relaxed, laid-back atmosphere. No nonstop panel discussions, no hard-core promotion, no dressing to the nines (unless you want to). Just a great way for readers and authors to meet on a level playing field, along with great business and networking opportunities. Probably the best writers' (and readers') conference I've ever attended. I shared a room with my literary agent Lori Perkins and had a grand old time. Plus, Lori Foster uses the event to help raise money for some great charities. I wish more romance novel conferences were like this (are you listening, RWA?). And since it's in my old digs of Cincinnati, I got to visit with family and also get my Skyline Chili and Graeter's Ice Cream fix. I'll definitely be back next year.

I've started writing comedy sketches for Democracy Burlesque, a sketch-comedy troupe here in Chicago that satirizes all things American and political, with a sexy-dirty twist. Which is right up my alley, let me tell you. Plus, all the proceeds from DB's shows go to charity. So if you live in Chicago and want a rare chance to see my stage writing actually produced in town (instead of in NYC or L.A. or Seattle, like it usually is), be sure to stop by one of Democracy Burlesque's performances in late July or early August. Here's a sneak preview---in my tried-and-true dirty-book-author fashion, one of my contributed sketches uses am old-style burlesque striptease to lampoon unethical labor unions. Yep, that's right. Naked boobs, political satire---what's not to love?

Last but not least, I recently made an appearance on Mominatrix Radio in my Jamaica Layne persona, talking about how being a parent affects my life as an erotic romance author, and vice versa. You can listen to a recording of the show here. The Mominatrix folks also put out a very cool weekly sex advice column for busy moms and dads. Awesome!

I'll be doing some blog tours in the next couple weeks, so i'll be sure to keep everyone posted on that as well.

Peace.

Appearing LIVE On The Mominatrix Podcast!

2009-06-10T18:21:00.001-07:00

I'm just back from the Lori Foster conference, and will have a report posted in the next couple days. But in the meantime, here's some information about how to hear me on the radio! (Well, web radio, but it's still radio).

Tomorrow (Thursday) 6/11 I will be appearing LIVE as Jamaica Layne on the Mominatrix Podcast! Info is below. Hope to "see" you there!

http://www.imperfectparent.com/mominatrix/radio.php

Peace.

VITAL SIGNS: Vol 2 is NOW AVAILABLE!!

2009-06-01T18:11:00.000-07:00

The highly anticipated sequel to my bestselling erotic romance Vital Signs Vol. 1: I've Been A Naughty Nurse is now available at Ravenous Romance!

Vital Signs Vol. 2: Sex In A Southern City, picks up where Vol. 1 left off, and this time, supporting character Shirley Daniels is the star of the show as she moves from small-town Statesville, North Carolina to big-city Raleigh, and finds plenty of intrigue and romance working in a big-city research hospital.

The VITAL SIGNS series is like Grey's Anatomy, except with the sex left in! Check it out!

KNIGHT MOVES is half-price today at Ravenous Romance!

2009-05-29T10:19:00.000-07:00

My bestselling erotic time-travel romance KNIGHT MOVES is HALF PRICE TODAY ONLY at Ravenous Romance! Here's your chance to check out this book (as ebook or audiobook) at half off the cover price! Enjoy!

Interviewed Today at Book Talk

2009-05-23T06:35:00.001-07:00

I'm interviewed today at the Book Talk Blog. Drop by and comment for your chance to win a free copy of MARKET FOR LOVE!

What's New in Jamaica Layne-Land

2009-05-20T18:00:00.000-07:00

Hi all--

Just a few updates on the latest happenings in Jamaica Layne-Land:

First, I will have a short story included in the upcoming Black Lace anthology Best Women's Erotica Vol 1: Sexy Little Numbers. My short story "The Fantasy," which features an imaginary (or is it?) sexual relationship between a British college professor and his student, is featured alongside stories by bestselling authors Portia Da Costa, Rachel Kramer Bussell, and Janine Ashbless, among others. Sexy Little Numbers will be in bookstores this August. And check out that hot cover!

Meanwhile, my books have been getting rave reviews all over the place lately. Here's a sampling:

Crave More Romance's review of A CAPITOL AFFAIR: "Once again the fabulous Ms. Layne has written a novel that proves she is a five star author."

Crave More Romance's review of KNIGHT MOVES: "Layne’s setting is perfect, her use of magic unique, her plotline full of surprises. Oh, and did I mention KNIGHT MOVES is packed with sensuality? KNIGHT MOVES is everything I love about erotic romance! "

Jennifer's Random Romance Review's take on my anthologies EXPERIMENTAL and POWER PLAYS: "This entertaining and steamy anthology of erotica short stories has a little bit of everything. "

Coffee Time Romance's rave of VITAL SIGNS VOL 1: I'VE BEEN A NAUGHTY NURSE: "The love scenes in this book are flaming hot and occur everywhere. The passion between Joanna and Harlan is one of the hottest I have ever read. . . .Jamaica Layne keeps the reader enthralled"

There's even more than I can post here, but suffice to say that it is great to see my work getting such raves. And I think that can only mean one thing----more exciting news to come.

Last but not least, I'll be appearing at the upcoming Lori Foster Readers/Authors Get Together in Cincinnati, June 5-7. I'll be hanging around the conference and also doing the book signing. I'd love to connect with any readers who might be attending!

Peace.

Welcome Guest Blogger Ava James!

2009-05-19T14:12:00.000-07:00

Today we welcome to the blog Ava James, erotica author for publishers like Freya's Bower, eXcessica, Wild Child Publishing, and Ravenous Romance. I sat down with Ava for an interview recently and here's the exciting result! Take it away, Ava!

What got you started writing erotic romance?
I cannot say for certian when my romance writing took a turn for the hot side, but all of a sudden there I was with explicit sex scenes between my hero and heroine. Mainstream writers like Julie Garwood initially piqued my interest in romance, and once I started reading I couldn't stop. The writing started after I had read a particulary terrible book. I was complaining to a friend about it, and she said, "If you think you can do better, why don't you?" With the gauntlet thrown down, I pulled open a blank word document and started writing.

What makes your writing unique?
I think that my writing is unique in the mixture of humor and passion. I try to convery that emotional connection that most readers crave while showing that life is life, and sometimes you just have to deal with what comes--the good, the hot, and the ugly. Since I write in several genres, I like to blur the traditional roles to meet whatever interesting mix of elements I have in my stories.

Tell me a little bit about yourself.
I am a product of the 80's, live in the midwest, married my highschool sweetheart in a castle, and am the mother of three adopted furry children. Right now, I have a mother bird right outside my window nesting in my clematis flowers. Besides all of that I am a nanny and substitute teacher by day and an author by night. Let's see, what else can I say? There is always the shameless plug of my links: http://avajamesromance.blogspot.com/ and http://www.twitter.com/AuthorAvaJames

Do you write in other genres? If so, what?
As an author, I consider myself a genre whore. I cannot seem to stay faithful to one area, so I write whatever comes out. From Freya's Bower Publishing (http://www.freyasbower.com/) I have four releases--Royal Cargo is a futuristic Sci-Fi romance with a paranormal twist. The Eagle at Midnight has a modern girl falling for a Welsh god while she is on holiday. A Christmas Cat brings together a sheriff's deputy and a newcomer to town on Christmas Eve. One Touch, One Glance: A Sweet Romance Anthology contains my story entitled "Waking Up." From Wild Child Publishing (http://www.wildchildpublishing.com/) I only have one release, A Crone's Query tells the tale of two men named Tristan (historical).

Here's a blurb for Royal Cargo:

ROYAL CARGO: Kidnapped on her wedding day, Princess Priya of Caethern has more to worry about than her unwanted groom. The fact that she is taken by a disgusting creature, stripped of her formal attire and caged doesn’t sit well either. When she is rescued by a rugged marauder, who is everything her world is not (and all that she wishes she could have), Priya is faced with more danger than any enemy could present.

Hector gets more than he bargains for when he steals one too many freighters from the enemy. The last thing he expected to find was a stolen princess. Traversing through the universe, fleeing multiple enemies, new dangers meet them at every turn. And in the end, the greatest peril may be letting go. Buy it here.

What's next for you?
Currently, I am working to complete a western novel set in 1899 Alaska, entitled Juniper Sky. In September, my historical novel For One Dark Knight is set to release with Siren/Bookstrand Publishing. I also have a story in an upcoming Ravenous Romance Anthology and a law enforcement erotic short with eXcessica. I am a busy girl, so if you would like to hear more, be sure to visit my blog and twitter! Thank you to for having me!

Coming Attractions. . .

2009-05-18T19:31:00.000-07:00

Hey Folks---

Yes, I've fallen a bit behind on blogging. My busy home life is to blame, along with deadlines. But never fear----new posts are coming soon, beginning with a guest blogger tomorrow!

Tomorrow we'll welcome erotica author Ava James to the blog with an in-depth interview. Later this week you'll get a few posts from yours truly updating everyone out in Jamaica Layne land what's up with my latest reviews, releases, and conference/signing appearances!

Peace.

A CAPITOL AFFAIR is Ravenous' Book Of The Day!

2009-04-22T06:26:00.000-07:00

Hey folks--

My erotic BDSM novel A CAPITOL AFFAIR is today's Book of the Day at Ravenous. Check it out if you haven't already. Bookwenches.com recently called it "an imaginative, sexually adventurous book."

Why Write?

2009-04-19T19:16:00.000-07:00

I was recently a guest blogger at the Writer Beware blog (I blogged about exploitive practices in the American theater targeted at playwrights), and in the comments section somebody asked me why I continue to write plays when the chances of success are so exceedingly slim (and even successful playwrights have to deal with exploitive practices and miserable contract terms).

Here was my reply to that commenter, verbatim:
"I think my motivation to write plays in spite of the odds is the same as my motivation to write fiction----because I have to. If I didn't write, I would go insane. I honestly think that the only people who should pursue writing as a career are the people who have no alternative but to write in order to maintain their sanity. If you have any other possible means of making your living, don't become a writer. There are far easier ways to make a living, believe me. I wouldn't advise anyone to pursue a career in writing, simply because it's a career with a 99% failure rate."

I've been thinking about that response for several days now. Why do I write creatively full-time? I could make a lot more money doing what I used to do in the corporate world (which was still writing---it just wasn't writing what I'd otherwise choose to write). Even with top agent representation and multiple book contracts, it's not exactly what I'd call a comfortable living. I work long hours, meet tight deadlines, and wait forever for my royalty checks. I get beat up in the press. My neighbors look down their noses at me when I tell them what kind of novels I write. Other (less successful) writers ask me point-blank when I'm going to give up this whole erotic/romance fiction thing and write something "serious." I get insulted by my fellow Chicago playwrights---I was even kicked to the curb by Chicago's foremost playwriting organization, who told me my work was no good. (And yet, I get lots of play productions in New York City, theater capital of the world---which I don't get to see since I can't afford the days of child care or expensive hotel stays required to leave my suburban home behind for three or four days to see my work up on its feet in NYC). All of this for a paycheck that's a tiny fraction of what I used to earn. Why do I put myself through this?

Quite simply, because if I didn't write, I would go insane. Or perhaps more accurately, I'm already insane. Because only an insane person would choose to write novels and plays full-time. Sure, lots of people like to talk about how they'd like to chuck their cushy jobs so they can write the Great American Novel. But people who do that have no idea what the writing life is really like. If they did, they'd never dream about doing it full time. Being a full-time writer is a real bitch sometimes. It's the hardest work you'll ever do, for the least amount of money. Sure, the Stephen Kings and John Grishams of the world are sitting pretty with their millions of dollars and fleets of private jets. But most of us are just getting by, hoping our current release will sell enough copies for our editors to pick up our next option book, hoping to get a tiny increase in the next advance, hoping that this time around, I'll actually get paid something for that play production in NYC. And all the while, we just smile and nod when one of our relatives walks up to us at a barbecue and says "Oh, so you're a writer, huh? How's that working out for you? (chuckle) When are you gonna give that up and get a real job?"

I already have a real job. It's just a job that sucks sometimes. The old chestnut that all writers are crazy is true. Because only a crazy person would take a job that pays less per hour than most people in the Third World make in a month, has a 99% failure rate, and means public scrutiny and journalistic insult for the 1% of us that do succeed.

Just check me in to the loony bin, folks. Because I love every minute of it.

I'm Profiled Today at Pop Syndicate, and Why The People at Amazon.com Are A Bunch of Stupid Un-American Asshats

2009-04-16T18:52:00.000-07:00

First off, the good news. I'm profiled today at the PopSyndicate blog. This is my most high-profile blog tour appearance yet, so it's pretty cool. Check it out by clicking here.

Second, here's the bad news. I've been meaning to blog about this all week, but I kept having to deal with a bunch of stupid mommy-and-housewife crap and kept putting it off. But now I have a whole hour to myself to rant about the completely asshat censorship bullshit Amazon.com pulled over Easter weekend.

For those of you who haven't heard about it by now, over Easter weekend nearly 58,000 books (including several of mine) where rendered unsearchable on Amazon.com due to their supposed "adult content." In an apparent effort to become more "family friendly", Amazon.com started removing the sales rankings of books that supposedly contained "adult" content. By removing the sales rankings from the books, Amazon essentially made the titles nearly impossible to locate on its site, since only books with sales ranks will come up on bestseller lists, or even come up on topic, title, or authors searches. In many cases, without a sales ranking attached, the only way you can find a deranked title is by searching by ISBN---and who the hell memorizes ISBNs? (I certainly don't, and I used to be a book-acquisitions librarian.)

Once a book is "deranked" from Amazon, it basically becomes impossible to find---and buy. With many small-press and out-of-print titles available only on Amazon.com (what with Amazon putting small independent booksellers out of business, but I digress), Amazon.com essentially made thousands upon thousands of books impossible for Americans to read. Can you say CENSORSHIP?

Big Brother, anyone?

What kinds of books got "deranked" on Amazon? Gay and lesbian books were deranked, for one. At one point, there wasn't a single GLBT-positive book searchable on Amazon (if you typed "homosexuality" into the search field, the only books that came up were homophobic titles like How Not To Be Gay). Erotica titles (heterosexual and gay) as well as many romance novels were deranked (mine included----grrr!), and even nonfiction and medical books on the topic of human sexuality were deranked. Feminist books got deranked. Books on the occult, left-wing politics, and even great works of literature were deranked. Amazon.com apparently decided that the American public does not need to read the works of E.M. Forster, D.H. Lawrence, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Helen Gurley Brown, Annie Proulx, or Augusten Burroughs due to their "adult" content. National Book Award-winning books were deranked; even New York Times bestselling authors were deranked. (Even the children's book Heather Has Two Mommies, which explains lesbianism to gradeschoolers, was deemed "adult.") Yet books like the annual Playboy Centerfolds anthologies, books on how to run a successful (and illegal) dogfighting business, and even The Anarchists' Cookbook (contains recipes for making bombs and napalm in your own kitchen) were deemed perfectly acceptable for general public consumption.

In other words, if you wrote a book that a) has something to do with sex-positive and/or gay-positive content and/or anything too "lefty", Amazon didn't want anyone to buy your book. Amazon later said this targeted deranking was due to a "cataloging error," but authors who contacted Amazon.com to inquire why their books were no longer searchable were told in writing by Amazon's own staff that it was due to Amazon's new family-friendly "policy."

The public backlash against this stunning act of censorship was swift and far-reaching, thanks to social-media sites like Twitter getting the word out quickly. (Big-name celebrities like Demi Moore got involved in the online #amazonfail protest on Twitter; so did former child star and Internet celebrity Wil Wheaton.) The Wall Street Journal and the Christian Science Monitor (two papers not at all known for their liberal ideologies, natch) published scathing editorials attacking Jeff Bezos and Amazon for daring to attempt something so inherently un-American as outright censorship of an entire class of books and writers.

Amazon immediately went into damage-control mode, saying that the whole thing was just a "glitch." Even a few hackers tried to take credit for doing it from the outside without Amazon's knowledge, but those claims have been discredited. But with evidence of Amazon's deranking of gay-themed books going back several months at least, along with plenty of evidence that Amazon's own staff said in writing multiple times that the deranking was "policy," (not to mention how specifically targeted the censored books were) I don't believe for a minute that this was a "glitch." This was a sinister attempt by a major corporation that now controls a huge chunk of the world book trade to control and censor what Americans read.

Motherfuckers.

The public backlash and massive PR gaffe Amazon now finds itself mired in rivals what Coca-Cola dealt with back in 1985 when they tried to impose New Coke on the masses. I think that for decades to come, business schools across the world will use the "amazonfail" debacle as a textbook example (along with New Coke) of a major corporation completely misjudging its customer base. In fact,"amazonfail" is worse than New Coke----New Coke was just stupid. But censorship of any kind, let alone on such a massive scale, is evil. And the public knows it. Amazon tried to pull a fast one on us, but obviously Amazon underestimated just how smart its customers (avid readers and book buyers) really are.

Americans of all political stripes, from the far left to the far right, detest censorship. The First Amendment is sacred in this country. Hundreds of thousands of American soldiers have died over the past 230 years to protect our right to free speech, which includes the right to read whatever we want without fear of reprisal. It goes without saying that censorship is un-American. And if anyone should have understood that, it should have been the world's biggest bookseller.

My books remain deranked and unsearchable on Amazon, and I have been unable to get a straight answer on when the sales ranks will be restored (Amazon says "soon" but it hasn't happened yet).

Now would be a very good time to buy your books from one of Amazon's online competitors:
Powells.com
BooksAMillion.com
BN.com (Barnes & Noble)
Fictionwise.com
AllRomanceEbooks.com

Never forget that this has happened. Never. And vote with your feet, folks. Take your dollars elsewhere.

Peace.

Happy Tax Day! Read sexy books.

2009-04-15T12:29:00.000-07:00

Hey folks! Today at Ravenous Romance, check out my short story "Hot Sticks, LLC", which is included in Ravenous Romance's SEX AND TAXES anthology. SEX AND TAXES is chock full of hot stories that will forever change the way you look at the IRS. Happy April 15!

Also today at Ravenous, they're running a special on short stories. Only fifty cents apiece! (regular price is $1.99). At this price, you can order ten stories for five bucks, and create your own anthology. You can even write back to Ravenous, tell them which ten stories you chose and why, and they might publish them together as an anthology based on your suggestions. Here's your chance to be an erotica anthology editor! Check it out.

Guest Blogger today at Writer Beware blog

2009-04-14T11:06:00.001-07:00

I'm a guest blogger today at the popular Writer Beware blog, writing on the topic of exploitive practices in the theatre world targeted at playwrights. Check it out.

Stay tuned tomorrow for my rant about the recent Amazon.com anti-gay, anti-sex, anti-feminist (pretty much anti-everything remotely controversial) censorship debacle. (Yep, my smutty books were among the 58,000 deranked/censored titles).

Peace.

Guest Blogger, Sephera Giron----Author of the Sexstrology Series

2009-04-12T05:55:00.001-07:00

Today we welcome astrologer and erotic romance author Sephera Giron to the blog. This is a very long post, but I'm happy to post it in its entirety. Enjoy!

-----------

Love, Erotica, and Astrology
Sèphera Girón peers into her crystal ball and sees many erotic romance books....

Is spring here yet? We’re waiting oh, so patiently here for it just outside of Toronto! While we’re waiting for the weather to break in the northern climates, lots of writing gets done! The best thing about living in Ontario and being a person that finds no joy in snow related activities means that I do a lot of writing in the winter.

This past winter, I was especially prolific, even for me. I delivered six books to Ravenous Romance.

Admittedly, I edited one of the books, The Sexstrology Anthology, but it’s related to the other books. Twelve authors wrote erotic romance astrology stories set in my fictional town of Hermana.

The Sexstrology series was created for Ravenous Romance’s Lovestrology line. These are books that can be read alone or as a series. You don’t have to read the other books to enjoy any of these erotic romance books. For the series, I combined several of my interests and talents. These include: astrology, ghosts, vampires, werewolves, witchcraft, tarot cards, and sex
I’ve been reading tarot professionally and casting horoscopes for years. At Ravenous, I’m the one who casts the daily horoscopes.

To draw together my many interests to create a base to weave my tales, I created the mythical town of Hermana which was founded by witch sisters escaping the Salem prosecutions. A couple of centuries later, the town is thriving and draws a lot of tourists. Many of the residents of Hermana are psychics and witches of some sort and my Sexstrology series concentrates on twelve main women, each single and a different sign of the zodiac. They form a coven under the guidance of eighty year old Lucy and every month, they meet to celebrate one of the ladies’ birthdays and to cast a love spell.

The first book is about a Sagittarius tarot reader, Maggie. It’s great fun to write about a different woman each month and to follow her adventures in love. Maggie is a hedonist, and sleeps with pretty much every sign of the zodiac in her book while trying to figure out how she feels about a Virgo that has captured her attention.

The Capricorn woman is a vampire and medium. She sees ghosts (is haunted by some of her victims in fact), plays the violin and is discriminating in her sleeping partners and her prey. She meets a gorgeous Gemini on New Year’s Eve and the book follows her rather dark adventures in trying to find him again.

For Aquarius, I created a journalist who has a bit of psychic ability and can see ghosts. She’s a natural skeptic but many weird experiences in Hermana have convinced her that ghosts do exist. She explores a haunted asylum in California with a hunky Scorpio man she met through the internet on her paranormal group.

My Pisces lady is an aura reader and teaches art class. Her new, much younger student, a Taurus, has many talents that make her drool. Their lust sends them through a painting where they must discover what evil is leaking into Hermana.

Exploring the signs of the zodiac and their different attitudes towards sex has been interesting. I use the most basic popular views of the sun sign to create my characters. Sagittarians as a rule are very enthusiastic and adventurous people (Walt Disney, Ludwig Van Beethoven, Woody Allen). Capricorns are dark and mysterious (Edgar Allan Poe, David Bowie, Marilyn Manson). Aquarians are analytical (Lewis Caroll, Oprah, Abraham Lincoln) and Pisces are passionate (Elizabeth Taylor, Jean Harlow, Tammie Faye Baker). At least, those of the traits I chose to focus on for the purpose of my stories. The different degrees of lust have been interesting to play with. Some characters, like my Sagittarian, view sex as a necessary pastime while other signs are pickier about it.

People who follow astrology may complain that sometimes I match lovers in signs that are noted to be incompatible. Since none of us know the characters’ full charts, we can’t judge them on their sun signs. And as we know, humans tend to do what their loins tell them to do no matter what their sign!

As an example, in my own life, in my twenties, I married a Sagittarian whom I should have been totally compatible with and intellectually, we are. It was fun and adventurous and a whirlwind romance. We met at our summer jobs and discovered we attended the same university and actually had good friends in common. We were married by Valentine’s Day while still in school. After graduation, we decided to start a family and had two boys. Then around the ten year mark, we parted ways because in the big picture, we married before we actually knew each other very well and it was the day to day lifestyle stuff that was dragging us down. Impulse is typical for Sag and Aquarius. In fact, we are still friends, but just not good marriage partners.
My second husband is a passionate, clingy, emotional Pisces who is supposed to not be compatible with an impatient, analytical, detached Aquarius like me. We met when he came to me for a tarot reading at a flea market. Sparks flew (literally, when our hands accidently touched, a jolt surged through me, not a carpet shock!) though I didn’t know what I would do with him, he was so not the type I was “used to” but I told myself “open heart, open mind” (since what I was “used to” obviously wasn’t working for me!) and after a few dates, I was hooked on my fish man. He proposed a few months after we met but I had cold feet from the first time around. We lived together for six years before getting married in 2008 since we both had impulsive city hall first marriages with people we didn’t know. His first marriage didn’t even last five years but it was with a Gemini (who became pregnant in the first month or so of their dating, so there’s that air sign impulse thing again on her end and of course he’s the clingy water sign with romantic notions) and I can’t imagine how they even survived that long with all the mind changing and flip flopping from both of them! My second husband and I share Virgo moons and that is where our own compatibility lies. It also means that we both enjoy experimental sex and are open to adventures...He was a willing participant in helping me research which 64 positions of the Kama Sutra to use in “Kama Sutra Seductions Deck,” which I call “flashcards for lovers.”

So I approach my lovers in my astrology books with an Open Heart, Open Mind, which incidentally is the name of the first Sexstrology book (Sagittarius) and the concept is used in the monthly love spell, because, hey, it works for me!

The love spell that the women perform every month consists of three parts. There’s the actual ritual or spell that they all gather together to perform. There’s the required feng shui of their home by Cancer Ellie and astrology charts prepared by Gemini Gwen. If the lucky lady follows all the advice, she may wind up with Mr. Compatible.

The idea of each woman having a specialty such as tarot reading or aura painting is exciting to me, for I’m curious about so many things. This gives me a chance to explore subjects that I enjoy while writing about love and sex.

People who have read my other work (such as Hungarian Rhapsody, Mistress of the Dark, Borrowed Flesh, The Birds and the Bees) know that I deliver when it comes to the racy bits. This is because I enjoy writing about sex and like to explore different ways to experience pleasure. (My Virgo moon is showing again!) My characters sometimes have more balls than I do when it comes to the bedroom. It’s a fun way to express myself and I hope you enjoy reading the “naughty bits” as much as I enjoy writing them.

So that’s a bit of what I’ve been trying to do with my new series. I hope readers enjoy the erotica, the occult aspects and the stories.

Thank you, Jamaica, for letting me crash your blog.

Now, everyone, go read your free daily horoscopes at Ravenousromance.com and let me know what you think!

Here are links to trailers I made for Open Heart, Open Mind and Cursed. Bear in mind, these are the first trailers I’ve ever made but they give the idea.

Sagittarius: Open Heart, Open Mind
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ch1Vy_HiuwI
Capricorn: Cursed
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98GnU9fV8yk&feature=related

Sephera Giron
I’m on Facebook, My Space and Twitter. Come on by and say hi. You can join my newsletter through my website.
http://www.sepheragiron.com/
http://www.ravenousromance.com/component/option,com_author/Itemid,70/id,12/lang,en/task,view/

Guest Blogger Courtney Sheets, author of KONA WARRIOR

2009-04-09T13:57:00.000-07:00

Today we welcome Courtney Sheets, author of the paranormal erotic romance novel KONA WARRIOR to the blog. Take it away, Courtney!

-----

First off, I’m really excited to be here today! Thanks to the talented Jamaica Layne for having me. Second how great is it that I get to blog about Hawaiian Mythology, sex, and that elusive first novel.

I’m a newbie to the world of romance writing. Not in the sense that I just started writing but in the sense that my first book, Kona Warrior, was published recently by Ravenous Romance. I have a stack of rejection letters a couple inches thick. I could probably wallpaper my den with them if I was so inclined.

For every fifty no’s you get a yes. Or so a wise college professor once told me. It doesn’t matter I was taking a musical theatre class at the time, I think the adage holds true for the writing world as well as the theatrical one.

The written word has held me captive from an early age. You all know what I mean. I’m talking the "bad poetry in the kitchen" phrase. We’ve all been there. I didn’t seriously start to write in the “I want to make this my career” sense until about my mid-twenties. While tolling away as a salesgirl in a department store, I bought a book called Write and Sell Your First Novel and a copy of The Writer’s Market. I was ready. I was prepared. I was going to write the next bestseller. I would be the next Stephen King or Tom Clancy. Boy was I in for a wake-up call.
I wrote and submitted, submitted and wrote, off and on for the next year and a half. The rejection letters kept piling up until I realized a very important thing---my writing was dull. I don’t mean dull in the style, simply the genre I had thrust myself into was not conducive to who I am. I was not being true to myself or my craft. This is when I discovered paranormal romance.
I devoured paranormal from the minute I picked up my first Christine Feehan book. Until one scorching hot summer’s day---I live in Las Vegas, it’s like living on the sun---I was standing in Borders and looked up to see vampire romances as far as the eye can see. Row and upon row of Tortured Gothic Vamps and the slayers who love them, and not a single Greek God or Aztec princess among them. I was annoyed. Ms. Feehan, while in my opinion a good storyteller, had started to get a little redundant. I wanted something new. With some many amazing cultures in this world you'd think publishing would branch out. So I decided I would write my own paranormal. And I did write one, a tremendously bad Banshee story that is now locked in a vault safe from human eyes lest readers be turned into stone. That book cratered around the time I took a trip with my family to the Big Island of Hawaii. There I found what I need to kick start my true writing path. Two helpful items in particular come to mind, the beauty of our fiftieth state and Hawaiian Mythology by Martha Warren Beckwith.

Beckwith’s book is the definitive collection of Hawaiian myth. For a long time it was the only written record of many of the tales of Pele, Lono, and the other gods. With good old Martha by my side and a view of Kilauea, came the idea for Kona Warrior.

As I wrote about the ancient Hawaiian tradition, I came to respect Hawaii and it culture heritage more and more each day. Hawaii myth is an oral tradition passed down by generation to generation. However much of that was done in secret as the Christian Missionaries who first came to the islands forbade the telling of pagan stories. Also the hula was outlawed. Hula was one way the native Hawaiians told stories.

I submitted the completed novel to several big publishing houses and luckily some nice intern had slipped a note onto the usual form letter rejections. My problem you see was not my manuscript, but my synopsis and query letter. You see I was dull again. From this I learned that not only does your novel need to sing, but your query letter and synopsis need to suck the reader in as well. Without that powerful first glimpse into your world, you will never get out of the gate. I sat down and revamped everything. Made it punchy, gave it more zip, put in more sparkle, okay I’m done with the clichés now. What I’m trying to say is look at your submission package as a whole product, not as three individual pieces. That package represents you.
Double and triple check everything before you submit to publishers or agents. Like an actor, the product you are selling is you.

The best advice I can give to someone trying to break into writing comes from a paperweight my mother gave me after another rejection letter hit me. It says “You haven’t failed until you give up.” Find your niche, be true to your art, and keep trying.
For more information on Kona Warrior, go to http://www.ravenousromance.com/fantastica/kona-warrior.php?flypage=0

While you there take a look around at all the great stories Ravenous has to offer.

Jamaica Layne, The Blog!

Pet Peeves

NaNoWriMo Tips

Pasteups, Part Deux

Paste-ups

Recession? What recession?

A Grownup's Guide to Inner Peace

The Writer's Conundrum

Confessions of a Straight Talker

Patience

Falling In

Deadlines

Fantasy Island, Part Deux

Fantasy Island

Housekeeping

Interesting week

Busy Bee, and Thoughts On Japan

Productivity

Author Chat at the Romance Studio tonight

How Not To Win Friends and Influence People in the Facebook Age

Seriously. Don't Do This.

More Blog Tour stops

Blog Tour stop at Boxing the Octopus

Blog tour in progress

Weird week

TENDER IS THE KNIGHT, as advertised in RENAISSANCE magazine!

Stand back, folks. I'm a professional.

Creativity

New Year's Discoveries

First-person, present tense.

Banned In The SCA

Why You Need an Epub Agent

I'm Really A Playwright

More Funny Wannabe Writer Stories

Great review for A CAPITOL AFFAIR!

Wannabe Writer Week, Part Deux

So you wanna be a writer

Fan mail versus hate mail

Stop By The Decadent Blog for a TENDER IS THE KNIGHT Contest

TENDER IS THE KNIGHT releases today!

THE FORBIDDEN is now available, and an interview

What's New and Coming Attractions

Sorry I haven't written. . .

Back to normal

Facebook users, beware

The Irish Psyche

Willpower, Part Deux

Willpower

We Give A Damn contest winner

Web 3.0

We Give A Damn Writing Contest

Spring Has Sprung Contest Winners!

Spring Has Sprung Contest!

Hubby Tales

Public Service Announcement

Writing and Money

Writers, Agents, Arrogance, and Entitlement

THE SHUNNED is here!

Jamaica Layne fans, meet Jay Hughes!

Rave Review for THE MERCENARY BRIDE

Disillusioned

It's All B.S. Until You Sign On The Dotted Line. . .

As Seen On TV

It was one year ago today. . .

Music and Memories

KNIGHT MOVES is half-price today only!

Jamaica Layne Interview and Chat

3rd quarter royalties

A much-needed break

Whoa, two daily blog posts in a row. . .

Okay. . .

JAMAICA LAYNE AND RAVENOUS ROMANCE ON NATIONAL TELEVISION!!!!!

Thoughts For The Day

On Manners, Professionalism, and Karma

The Wee Small Hours of the Morning

Microblogging

THE MERCENARY BRIDE releases today!

I'm in WRITERS DIGEST!

Sneak preview of things to come. . .

Playing Catch-Up