erastes

Things that we've learned from gaming. 

My favourite: "bad guys enjoy carrying around the types of bullets you use, even if they themselves are unarmed." 

SO TRUE!!

Don't forget to check the Advent Calendar. Something new each day, and there will be competitions at least twice in the month.

Jessewave has reviewed Standish, and she absolutely loved it. She says :This is definitely not a book for the faint hearted and I don't know that I can classify it merely as a romance partly because it's so complex a story, and also some of the horrific scenes are very detailed especially the rape, but I have to admire the author's superb writing and her desire to produce a story which she thought was truly representative of the era.



Full Review here. Thank you Jessewave.
 

I had an email from my editor at Perseus yesterday. She'd bought, read, and really loved Hard and Fast. This makes me hugely happy.

Also, I had an email from a man who had read Standish. It really made me tear up (soppy Erastes!) because he reinforced everything that I believed when I started out writing gay historical fiction.  My thought was that a few people had written it - but not many - and SURELY gay men must  want the costumes, and the romance, and the adventure, and the alpha males and the duels.  All the things that I loved about period drama - why should they be any different?  It's been wonderful to find out that I was right, and that gay men are looking for all the same things that anyone else is - why should they be different After all?  Part of what he said:

A really blushmaking review of Standish (five stars from The Romance Studio)

and

thoughts on posts I've seen around the net recently about whether women "should" write m/m

Happy Birthday treva2007! I don't think i've ever actually heard from you, but hope you have a good day anyway!

I just received "Maurice & Alec in America" which I'd really been looking forward to reading, and was puzzled why it was self published. I think I know now, Despite the writing (from a quick flick through) being really good, it's A.U. (Alternative Universe) and the author blatently admits this. ( hmmmm.... )

Good grief. Beowulf? Why the smeg isn't that going straight to DVD? Ray Winstone???? Who's deluded sense of imagination thought that he would be at all good in that part? "Oi've cum ter kill yer Monsta" *ashamed*

Character meme - gacked from evremonde

1. Choose a few of your own characters (five at the most).
2. Make them answer the following questions.
3. Then tag three people.
4. Feel free to go ahead and add some questions yourself.

Ambrose (from Standish)
Michael (from Transgressions)
Valerie (from Junction X)
( Read more... )

Thanks to evremonde for pointing the nominations out to me today.

Standish has been nominated for "Best Gay Romance"

Best Gay Erotica 2007 in which I have a short story has been nominated for Best Gay Erotica

rwday's A Strong & Sudden Thaw has been nominated for two categories - Best Gay Sci-fi and Debut

Other nominees I know - Josh Lanyon, Lawrence Schimel, Lee Rowan, Greg Herren. Steve Berman!   Good luck everyone! 

Full List Here

I shouldn't bang on about LJ reviews, but matociquala does, and she's a lot bigger seller than me, so I will too.

The nicest reviews aren't the ones from places where you've sent the book for reviewing (although they are nice, don't get me wrong) but are from complete and utter strangers who have just bought the book because they liked the look of it, and then were kind enough to spend time writing about it.

This one, in particular, from zehavit_lamasu was completely unexpected (found by google-alerts!!) and made me happy in a lot of ways.  ( Read more... )

I ordered some postcards from Vistaprint the other day - and if you are an author and haven't tried their free postcards, then do. They are beautiful - glossy and showing the artwork of the cover - and they only cost the cost of postage (and in my case, I ordered some stickers with my website address on) Well worth next to nothing and they offer 100 free postcards every so often.

Happy Birthday stormheller!  May this year be full of sales!

As promised - some Kitten Spam.( image heavy )

Standish was at number two on amazon.co.uk yesterday. slipped to 9 today.  There are benefits to being miscatagorised as Gay History.It's also still on the bestseller list for literature, which is pleasing.  I only realised recently (how dim am I) that, unlike records and films - a book's popularity can be improved by time and hard work. 

I had applied to Customised Erotica as it looked like the sort of thing I could do - write to order - fandom is good training for that.  But now I've had time to think about it, I withdrew my application.  The thing is that "erastes" is a m/m writer, and if I were to write Het, I wouldn't like to do it as erastes, I'd have to use another name, and what would be the  point of that?

Nothing else to report, been to Dad's - he's had the wills sent to him and he's put them "somewhere safe"  It's just about the worst thing an Alzheimers sufferer can do.  Because now we can't find them. Gah. It's very frustrating.  It's not that it precludes probate, but it makes things more complicated - and with dad's memory, more complicated is something I wanted to avoid.

Another lovely review for Standish! This time at Romance Reviews Today. Whee!

Highly recommended, she says, but she found the ending too ambiguious. I knew some people wouldn't like it, but that is how it has to be - specially when you are writing about male love in 1820! It's not like they could get married and live happily ever after!

But whee! I'm very pleased.

Wheee!

Standish gets over at Two Lips Reviews!

Thanks to kay_derwydd for the heads up!

This is my first trailer, and I'm really rather pleased with it.  The music fitted almost exactly without me fiddling with it.

Well it's finally here!

STANDISH is finally on Amazon although only from associated companies at the moment - but can be ordered from your local bookstore too. The Amazon page is incomplete, e.g no cover and no order information, but will be done in the next couple of days, I've been told.  Bung it on your wish lists!

The Publishers page is HERE - but the other links to amazon canada, amazon uk, barnes and noble and star crossed productions aren't active yet.

I'll let you know when the pages have been brought up to date.

Exciting, innit?

Of course now I have to hide in a corner terrified, while you all hate it.

Guess what's off to the printer tomorrow?

( Click here for the front and back cover! )

Sad when you can't even think of a name for your blog. Other brains more full with imagination than I call their blog entries things like "Chasing the Mackerel Sky" or "My toilet and I" but my brain is entirely to M.A.S.H. Suiicide is painless. la la la la la.

Yes, I've cracked up. It's official. I've been spending every second of the last three or four days editing and I'm getting edit crazy. I haven't had time to check my flist or play a game or watch a film (well, that's not entirely true, I've had Howard's End on loop for days but I can't say I've taken any of it in IN.) BUT the good news is that it's nearly finished. Or at least the first run of the second full edit is nearly finished. I've got completely through it and have accepted all the deletions of commas and additions of commas, changes in line breaks, etc etc - the mechanical stuff in other words. I've just got about 20 sections or so where she says "show don't tell and I need to consider every single one of them by their merit and see if it actually needs changing. Some of them will some of them won't. Then what happens is that I send it back to her, and she comments on my comments and on we dance until we've agreed on all we can agree on. When we finally can't compromise any more then she sends it on to the publisher and the FINAL and THIRD edit begins and off we go all over again.

However, the publisher are now very keen to get this onto the shelves, so perhaps we can compromise and they can let me have all my telling. *G*

Lost! Night tonight. To those of you who have only seen the Channel Four version and NOT the E4 version I say... EEEK!!!

I was sure I started writing this for a purpose.... Oh! Puppy news. Went to parents last week and D4 is (as they say over here ) "Half way there and all the way back" which means he's a bright as a button, and then some. I taught him to say please in about 20 seconds. e.g. the second (and everytime thereafter) i asked him to speak for a toy, he did it. He was housetrained in three days, sleeps all night in his dog basket (no screaming at all) he retrieves every single time. And he's only just 9 weeks. Amazing. He's also terribly naughty, and has the biggest opening of a dog's mouth I've ever seen, he can hold full sized balls (cricket/baseball size in his mouth) He chews EVERYTHING.

I read that if you want to teach a puppy to stop biting you, you squeal, because that's what their mothers do. This worked fine for about five minutes - until the Biggest Brain in Dogdom (sorry, Pongo) worked out that IF he bit you, THEN you squeaked, and therefore were more interactive and a lot more fun.

Mother is beginning to wish she had called him B4. B for Beelzebub. Pictures will be forthcoming.

CGI Rec. Alexander & Hephaestion - Not work safe. Very beautiful and touching, and the lighting is gorgeous

I've finally heard from my publisher. The 2nd editor has gone AWOL and whilst I hope she's OK and not had a major health crisis or something I'm a bit miffed, and worried that she might have buggered off to Japan and sold Standish over there. Mine wasn't the only manuscript she had, either. *panic* I heard about it happening to someone on ecademy, a friend of theirs went to another country, think it was Africa and saw his friends book on sale there. Of course that's worst case scenario, but I do tend to waver in that direction when I panic.

So, because I'm nice like that, have a snippet of the latest adventures of Teless and Kyrian, my space-gai boys.

( Gays in Spaaaaaaaaaace! )