In case you haven’t heard, my birthday’s in a week (August 24)!
To celebrate, I’m giving away a copy of Second Skin and Sharing a Pond. This is a tumblr-only giveaway (sorry!).
You can find the Sharing a Pond giveaway here.
You can find the Second Skin giveaway here.
Good luck!
Today I stopped by Delighted Reader and talked about what I learned by being an author going through the Riptide publishing process. Finally, I also visited Scattered Thoughts and Rogue Words and Sinfully Gay Romance. I hope you’ve had fun following me along on this blog tour (and if you’re sick of these posts, you can be happy to know they’re done now!
Fun fact: I ate at an In-N-Out for the first time in my life, tonight in Las Vegas.
I stopped by Love Bytes Reviews to talk about what I’m currently working on and what you can expect to be coming soon, I was interviewed at QUEERcentric Books, and I visited Alpha Book Club and The Jeep Diva.
Fun fact: Although my mom taught me how to crochet, and I can do it, I never really fell in love. However, Amy Lane’s knitting series made me want to knit, and I haven’t stopped since!
Today I talk about the power of names at The Novel Approach stop by Man2Mantastic and Fangirl Moments and My Two Cents, then I share Jay’s RPG character sheet at Wicked Faerie’s Tales and Reviews.
Fun fact: I have two older brothers and am the only child to have inherited my father’s brown hair and brown eyes.
Today I headed to Prism Book Alliance to talk about the math class that Jay took in Second Skin.
Stopped by Erotica for All and Keysmash, then finally Booklover Sue‘s.
Today’s fun fact: My flight landed at 10 pm local time (1 am my time!) and I didn’t get to bed until almost 1 am local time….which is why this post is happening Wednesday morning rather than yesterday!
For your ease of use, I’ll be posting each day with a list of my blog tour’s posts, all of which are included in a chance to win a $25 Riptide gift card. I’ll also be posting little facts about myself–just to keep things interesting!
Fact: The campus and area from Second Skin is heavily influenced by the campus of the university I attended, although the story doesn’t take place in a specific location.
Spring is here (that’s why it’s snowing, right?), and that means it’s Horse Season for me. Right now my main task is grooming ponies to help them shed out their winter coats (and considering how fuzzy some of the ponies get, this can be intense!). I wish I’d taken pictures of the barn floor after I groomed my old retired pony. I could have built a dog out of the amount of hair left. (And I mean a german shepherd, not a miniature poodle.)
But my favorite pony is ready to go! One of the kids who uses him for her 4-H project has been riding him on and off all winter, and since we both started riding again in March, he’s in good shape and not nearly as fuzzy as the others.I can’t quite tell if he’s happy to be back to work or not.
This summer I also have the opportunity to exercise a friend’s mare. I’m not wild about mares, or quarter horses, so this will be an adventure, but it will be nice to have a consistent mount (who is sane and not a pony!). The nice thing is that I still won’t have to feel guilty if I don’t get a chance to get out as often as I should, since I’m a secondary rider 🙂
There’s also an 18-hh Warmblood (that’s 6 feet tall at the whithers) that might need ridden, and if the owner works the kinks out, I may ride him too. Of course, at 5’3, I’m going to look like a pimple. I’ll share pictures if that happens.
If you missed it, Second Skin is now available to order/download at Riptide’s website! It’ll be available at all other vendors on Monday 🙂 So if you just can’t wait, you know where to go.
Also, if you want to follow my blog tour, here’s a list of the stops I’ll be making.
Finally:
I’m going to be at RT Booklovers Convention from Tuesday through Sunday this coming week, If you you’re going to be in Vegas and you want to say hi, just drop me a line! I’ll mostly be gofering for Riptide, but I have a fair amount of flexible time too. Let me know, and I hope to see you there.
Despite the fact that it’s winter and I should have plenty of time to be getting things done, February has been raucous. Fighting depression, plus my usual busy-ness and my old back injury acting up, has kept me very occupied.
This morning, however, I wrote another 1k for my shifter story, so that felt good. And I got in contact with a potential beta reader (…and then later realized I haven’t put the final touches on the one sex scene, but THAT’S beside the point).
What I love about this story is that because it was born and killed so many times, I actually plotted everything out. And so while sometimes the blahs keep me from writing, when I do sit down to write, I at least know where I’m going. And so far things have been doing okay like that. They don’t always unfold quite the way I planned, but I’m not off-track (yet).
I spent the rest of the day getting a massage (because my old back injury was waking me up in the middle of the night in pain, boo-hiss) and making peppermint fudge.
Because my friends and I have started having themed gatherings. We don’t see each other often (we’re a motley crew and don’t live terrible close for frequent visiting and are all in very different parts of our lives). The first party started as a pumpkin spice party, because someone kept posting delicious pumpkin spice recipes and we ALL wanted the food. So we decided to each make something, get together, and gorge!…I mean hang out!
It was a blast, and so we made plans to do it again, and this time the theme was peppermint (which most people aren’t doing because there aren’t a ton of peppermint recipes and 99.9% are super sweet desserts). But I made peppermint fudge. My first attempt at fudge, and it’s not half bad. But it’s chocolate, so I think I’d have to work super hard to screw it up!
After my massage, I swung by the barn to visit my riding instructor/the horses (and to drop off some fudge). My instructor wasn’t there, so I just hung out with my main man, Hoover.
I love this pony so much. He did nothing but tear at the grass like a starving man and beg for treats…but he’s a horse, so I sort of expect that from him. I also suspect the kid who’s riding him his spoiling him. A little.
I grazed him and groomed him (and didn’t give him a treat, the little bugger…but mostly because I didn’t have any, because I’ll admit I spoil him a little bit myself). It was a gorgeous day (in the fifties!) and it was fantastic to get out of the house and down to the barn. Hopefully the weather keeps being this gorgeous (or at least NICE) and I can start wiggling in some pony time. Um, once the ring unfreezes and dries. Or else my pony is going to need ice skates/galoshes, depending.
Well, it’s time to head to my peppermint party. Hope you enjoy your evening!
Oh! I’m going to be doing a blog tour when Second Skin comes out, so if you have topics you want me to talk about, or questions you want me to answer, feel free to drop them in below.
AND the cover for Second Skin is revealed now. Go drool over it!
I’m so excited to announce that Second Skin is now available to pre-order on Riptide’s page! There you can find the blurb and a teaser cover.
I hope you all survived the holidays. I’ve been having a very busy year (and yes, it’s only 10 days in)!
So in November I mentioned the short story I was writing for fun. Well, I sat on it a week, then returned to it…and felt a little conflicted. One, it was sorta similar to Second Skin. Two, the conflict felt…unfocused. Like, the conflict was definitely there, but I was avoiding actually showing it. Three, there was just something wrong.
I spoke to my friend about it, just giving her the general outline, and she agreed it sounded similar (in summary) to Second Skin, but that it obviously wasn’t in other ways. And then she offered some possible solutions, one of which was to make it more romantic comedy.
At which point I glared, because I don’t DO romantic comedy. My humor is not like other people’s and it’s just not something I’ve done a lot of. At least not on purpose. But we talked a little, and I tucked the ideas in my hat and thought on it.
One, I realized if I wanted this to feel very different from SS, I needed to change POV (AGAIN). Two, I needed to actually have the conflict on screen (which is, like, no duh). Three, I think the only way I’d survive this conflict is if I aimed to make it more rom-com. Give myself the leeway to not be aiming to rip people’s hearts out, but rather to make them smack their foreheads in frustration. I have NO IDEA how that’s going to go, but that’s the plan. I’m allowing myself to be a little goofy with descriptions, going more in depth in the sex (or the lead up), and just kind of playing with the scenes as I work them.
I have the plot written down in a notebook, so I don’t need to focus on how I’m getting to the next plot point. I’m already over 6K, so this is probably going to break out of the short story length (theory: I’ve lost the ability to write really short stories). I’m okay with that, since the deadline for the prompt has passed. But I’m also excited to see where this story goes.
when no one's looking 