But It's a Dry Heat

Archive for the ‘Vampires’ Category

Priest

Once thing can be said for the movie Priest. It is 100-percent free of sparkly vampires. Seriously. Unless they’ve been rolled in glitter, vampires shouldn’t sparkle.

The vampires in Priest resemble naked mole rats. Which, for a sun-hating, subterranean species, isn’t a bad bit of creature design. In humans–the vampire familiars–vampirism causes a particularly virulent case of male pattern baldness. So fans of pretty boy vamps should look elsewhere.

The premise of Priest is simple and flawed. Humans and vampires have been (more…)

I Feed My Muse True Blood

The only problem with watching True Blood via Netflix is that it leaves me feeling like the slow kid in class.  Everybody else has moved on to lesson four, while I’m still stuck in lesson three.  That is, I’m still watching season three, with no chance of seeing season four for months.

But I’m still not ponying up the cambio for cable tv, much less the premium channels. Besides, on DVD, I can watch certain scenes over and over. (Nekkid Eric!) Last night, however, it was my husband who was re-watching a scene. Surprisingly it didn’t involve nudie boobies.  It was the scene where Russell Edgington gleefully rips the spine out of an anchorman. (Given the quality of American journalism, it’s really a pity that vampires don’t exist.) Russell goes on a delightful rant about humans–our greedy and self-destructive nature–all while blithely gesturing with the bloody spine. My husband declared it, “The best episode, ever.”

Me, I’m just happy when Eric shows up wearing nothing at all.

Meanwhile, I’m spending a lot of time with my own obnoxious blond vampire, Breas Montrose. I’ve got a stack of edits from my Carina Press editor for The Canvas Thief. Breas describes his role in the story as:

“I’m a Gandalf. I hang around, full of powerful magic I never use, and make vague, important-sounding statements.”

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Amusing side note. A search for Eric Northman in Google images turns up one very ordinary, somewhat pudgy, middle-management white guy. He sticks out like a sore thumb among the many images of smexy, blond vampires. Heh.

Win a Free Copy of The Music of Chaos!

Win a free copy of my quirky urban fantasy, The Music of Chaos.  In addition to a free book, the winner of the contest will also get free “arts” by me (Small Kokopelli or angel wall art).

It’s easy. Just click this link to go my contest page over on Romance Junkies. There, you’ll see the following question:

“What is the name of … ‘the brave soul who had dared the displeasure of my company’?”

The answer can easily be found in Chapter One of The Music of Chaos. (Seriously, you can just skim through the text. He is the only other person in the scene.)

The contest runs through August 31, 2011, so you have time to enter multiple times. While you’re there, check out some of the other authors/books that are participating in this contest.

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“Blind dates are always a train wreck.”
By day, Regan O’Connell is a highly respected project manager. By night, she’s a Wolfe, a paranormal agent working for a vampire syndicate.

Her two worlds collide when a co-worker sets her up with tall, dark and sexy Jason Lake. Jason is a Holder, a member of an ancient, all-human organization dedicated to policing the activities of things that go bump in the night. Things like half-vampire Regan.

Falling for the wrong guy is the least of Regan’s problems. There’s a murderer on the loose, and his favorite weapon is chaotic magic, an erratic force with the power to rip holes in the fabric of the universe. And the best way to catch the killer is to get close to Jason, the man who is not only her enemy, but her prime suspect.

The Music of Chaos, Now in Print!

Buy a book or the cute greyhound will have to go back to a miserable life of racing, stuck in a tiny crate all day, fed horrible food, abused.  You wouldn’t want that to happen, would you?

Then buy a book, save a puppy dog.

Shorter sales pitch: The dead tree version of The Music of Chaos is now available!

There they are. Some of my author copies of The Music of Chaos, my debut novel.  I tried to enlist the Wonder Horse‘s help in selling, but his version of marketing involved chomping his big, yellow teeth on the books. (Everybody’s a critic.)

My author’s copies arrived yesterday.  Prompting the immediate response of, “Oh, crap. Now I’ve got to sell my book in two formats!”

I love the idea of an ebook. But there’s something about holding your book in your hands, the smell of ink and glue, that makes any writer all … giggly.  Like a schoolgirl. Titter.

Here’s the short version of the book blurb:

“Blind dates are always a train wreck.”

By day, Regan O’Connell is a highly respected project manager.  By night, she’s a Wolfe, a paranormal agent working for a vampire syndicate.

Her two worlds collide when a co-worker sets her up with tall, dark and sexy Jason Lake.  Jason is a Holder, a member of an ancient, all-human organization dedicated to policing the activities of things that go bump in the night. Things like half-vampire Regan.

Falling for the wrong guy is the least of Regan’s problems. There’s a murderer on the loose, and his favorite weapon is chaotic magic, an erratic force with the power to rip holes in the fabric of the universe. And the best way to catch the killer is to get close to Jason, the man who is not only her enemy, but her prime suspect.

Buy it now (please) at Decadent Publishing or Amazon.

For those who want instant gratification, you can download the ebook version: Decadent Publishing, Amazon/Kindle, and B&N/Nook.

Or you can sample a chapter–FREE.

 

The Music of Chaos, Casting Call

Every once in while, I get the feeling something is missing in my life. I look around, find my dog; the horse is where he should be; nothing’s on fire; nobody’s exploded; all’s well.  Now what has got my spidey-senses all a-tingle?

*Palm to forehead slap.* Oh, yeah, I know.  I should promote my frickin’ book.  Then somebody says something funny on Twitter, or a fight breaks out at my favorite blog and I forget about the matter entirely.

So I’ve got a little interview over at Kathleen’s Place to Reflect.  Kathleen Anne Gallagher is a fellow Decadent author, and a super nice person for letting my stop by and babble at her blog.

One of the questions was who would I cast if The Music of Chaos were a movie.  Typically, my character’s physical appearance starts out as a rough sketch in my head and sometimes on paper.  Once, in a while, as with Benjamin Black (The Canvas Thief), physical appearance comes first. (He’s not an elf, but he was inspired by this artist’s illustrations of Maehdros the elf [LOTR].) But when developing characters, I don’t think of them in terms of any particular actor.  It’s only after the character has been around a while, that I’ll sometimes stumble on an actor who makes me think: “He could totally be [insert character name].”

Breas the vampire is a blond-haired pretty boy.  But Hollywood’s crop of blond hunks are a little too All American, maybe too Nordic, for Breas.  Anyway, one morning I’m channel surfing, clicking past the Today Show, Good Morning America and other Infortainment with its vapid segments on “Things that can kill your child,” or “Foods that will keep you young.”  I settle on a Spanish soap opera (novela). It’s the usual plotline, fraught with inane misunderstandings, secret babies and whatnot. The hero is played by Puerto Rican actor Carlos Ponce, who is the perfect Breas.  Well, in the novela he’s the hero and too nice to be Breas, but physically he’s perfect.

So there you have it–Breas’s actor doppleganger. Stick a beer in his hand, plunk his ass down on the couch, put on ESPN (preferably a game with his beloved Seahawks) and you’ve got Breas.

Blood: The Last Vampire

As a rule, “live-action film inspired by anime” is synonymous with the kind of suck that can give you a full-body hickie.  Blood: The Last Vampire obediently follows that rule.

Saya (Gianna Jun) is a half-human, half-vampire vampire slayer who works for a covert agency known as The Council.  The Council being your run-of-the-mill secret society dedicated to making vampires extinct, a la the Council in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and others. (I can’t really diss the trope, as it’s one I employ in my stories.)  Like Buffy, Saya has a handler, Michael (Liam Cunningham).  But where [Buffy’s]Giles put in a bit of effort trying to school Buffy in the intricacies of supernatural lore, Michael’s primary job is to bring Saya little bottles of blood, wrapped discretely in brown paper bags and placed in her little, dorm-room style fridge.

There are indications that (more…)

Editing, Tweeting and Drawing

I have a whole pile of partially written blog posts sitting on my desktop.

But I’ve spent the past week and change working through the print galley for The Music of Chaos.  In the interest of actually getting something done, I’ve resist the urge to fiddle around on the web.  Well, sort of …. there’s my recent fascination with Twitter.

Ah, Facebook, how quickly I fell out of love.  Actually, I never really was in love; it was just a fling, bought out of boredom and “everybody else is doing it.”

I’m a lurker. Twitter, unlike Facebook, is a lurker’s paradise.  With Facebook, since everyone has their profile locked out of privacy concerns (self included), there’s no skulking around on the edges, watching someone’s interactions to determine if they’re worth knowing.

With Twitter you can follow almost anybody. And it’s full of obnoxiously funny people, the kind of folks who like to slay sacred cows and turn ’em into steaks.

Technically, I’m doing Twitter all wrong.  As a good little author type, I’m supposed to be following people in the publishing industry and sucking up to interacting with them.  Ass kissing. Networking.

Except, I’ve never been much good at networking. Not now; not back in the days of a grownup job. If I thought someone was interesting, I’d pursue friendship. If not, I didn’t bother.  Yeah.  I know.  “Who you know” is how things get done, but I bailed on a 8-to-5 career expressly because I couldn’t shovel the requisite bullshit.

Not about to start now.

In the meantime, here’s a doodle of Talis, my emo, dark elf  in The Music of Chaos and its sequel. I haven’t done much drawing lately and I’m afraid any progress I made in learning to draw people has been lost.  So I’m going to try and get a least one little drawing, even a scribble done, once a week.

Have a great weekend.

The Canvas Thief

So I stopped procrastinating and put the contract for The Canvas Thief in the envelope.  It’s now crossing the continent, destination Canada.  Actually, the fact that Harlequin/Carina Press–yes, as in Romance novels–is in Canada is news to me.  Shows how much I know about what has (sort of) become my genre.  (There’s a long blog posting about my weird relationship with romance sitting on my hard drive. I keep fiddling with it, trying to explain my is-shoes with romance tropes in a way that doesn’t alienate every romance reader/writer out there.)

The Canvas Thief (which, I hope will get a new title because I suck at titles) is a hybrid of romance, urban fantasy and suspense. Set in Santa Fe, New Mexico, it’s the story of an artist who accidentally brings two of her graphic novel characters to life.  It’s set in the same “universe” as The Music of Chaos and Breas the vampire is a secondary character.

Since I set out to write romantic fantasy, not a romance, it doesn’t adhere to some romance novel requirements.  Like that the hero and heroine meet in the first chapter, if not first page.  In The Canvas Thief, they meet in Chapter Four.

That could, I guess, change during editing. I’m pretty malleable, editorially, but I’m rather adamant that this story not have the usual forced, first page/first chapter meeting of H/h seen in many romance novels.  It just doesn’t work. Not for this story.

Of Aliens, Site Updates and Paper Books

The couple that’s in pain together …

So my beloved and I awoke this morning with the same kink our neck.  Neither one of us can turn our head to the left.

My husband, hearing that I had the same ailment, said, “I bet we were both kidnapped by aliens.”

“Kidnapped by aliens?” I said. “And all we got were stiff necks?  No sexual stuff?”

“No cheap thrills for us,” he said.

“I got kidnapped by aliens and all I got was a sore neck.”

And an excuse for lack of creativity on this blog.  I did, however, post Chapter Two of The Music of Chaos, and I made some minor changes to the site.  My plan is to post a few “*unpublishable” stories and some cut scenes from The Music of Chaos. I”ll get the new page(s) up sometime next week.

Speaking of The Music of Chaos, it looks a print version may be in the woyks. More details to come.

*Unpublishable meaning that they were fun to write, are fun to read, but don’t have much in the way of theme or anything that takes them beyond a backstory exercise.

A Taste of the Chaos

Once upon a time, for a short while, The Music of Chaos was a webcomic. Because nobody (not even Edward of Twilight) does moping and angst like I do, I decided I would never, evah get the manuscript published.  In a fit of pathos, I turned it into a graphic novel.

About 90 pages in, I came to my senses and went back to trying to sell the story to publishers.

Over at Romance Writer’s Revenge blog, I was asked to tell my story of the Call with The Music of Chaos.  This is where most authors get to describe the giddy excitement, the celebration, that came with signing the contract and publishing their book.

My version of the story, at least with the final acceptance that led to publication, could be summed up as “a shrug.” The Music of Chaos has had a total of four acceptances. (Plus a NY editor who loved the early chapters. Story for ‘nother time.)

Two of the publishers, I turned down.  One because the publisher had (and to this day still has), butt-ugly Poser-generated covers. Another, because the publisher had the contract from hell.  Secondary rights were mis-identified as primary rights; it was riddled with contradictions; and it took all rights including a merchandising clause that gave them rights to the webcomic.  Actually, it even gave them rights to artwork (not created by me) in an illustrated anthology.

Did I mention this was a little known, epublisher who has about as much chance of selling TMOC merchandise as I have for winning American Idol? Yeah.  Ridiculous.

Anyway, poor Decadent Publishing got TMOC when my enthusiasm for publishing was running on fumes.  But they’ve proven, so far, to be a good home for the story that wouldn’t give up (even if its author did).  My book was edited, edited, and just when I thought it was safe to open my email– “It’s back!” –edited some more. Which is, as Martha Stewart would say, “…a good thing.”

Wanna read a sample?  Chapter One can be read in its entirety, here.