Racheline Maltese's Blog, page 36

NaNoWriMo: Day 3

8,793 words. With luck, we’ll hit 10K by the end of today, although we’re also now working on publisher edits for Evergreen, so if we don’t make that, we’re fine.

We continue to wonder at what the hell point it was we started writing so much more romancey. It’s certainly not something we decided to do consciously. It’s also a hell of a lot of fun.

We also had our first-ever “Is this a fade to black sex scene?” conversation. If you’ve read Starling you know we sometimes skip sex scenes if they’re not necessary for the plot or would relieve too much tension, but fade-to-black swing-the-bedroom-door-closed for the first time characters are actually in bed together, is not a thing we usually even have to think about. We are now, which is just interesting.

Do the Thing! NaNoWriMo

We are, as you can probably tell, in the thick of NaNo ourselves, and having an absolute blast so far. Sure, it’s only day 3, but a successful NaNo is about making every day a little bit successful, in whatever way it’s possible to make it.

The last few months have been full of revisions and edits on various projects. Once we get in the headspace of make-every-word-and-comma-perfect, it can be hard to get out of that and just put words down on the page.

Which is, of course, what NaNo is great for. It’s a sprint, not a marathon. (Well,  it’s a marathon where you have to sprint for 30 days, which is its own kind of exhaustion). It’s about getting all the words out and worrying about flow and exposition and wait can we have divine right of kings in an atheistic nature-based society? Like how does that work? later.

It’s also great for collective encouragement. Twitter and Tumblr and basically every social media platform on the Internet that I’m watching is chock full of people posting their own status updates. And even if I don’t engage with those updates as much as I might like (too many words to make!) it’s good to know they’re there.

Because Doing the Thing is hard. Writing a novel in 30 days is hard. Life gets in the way. Ideas run dry. Other deadlines pop up. The kids or the cat or you get sick. But NaNo is all about seeing just how much we can fuck with those obstacles. Knowing other people are in the same boat can be the best kind of encouragement — after all, writing is hell in a vaccuum.

In a way, it’s no different than what we do every day. (After all, we write 365 days a year with each other). But NaNo is about everyone levelling up their game, seeing what it’s possible to do, and high fiving everyone who makes a damn fine effort.

So what’s your Thing this month? Tackling NaNoWriMo? NaBloPoMo? Maybe unfucking your room or your desk or some other aspect of your life? Let us know what it is, and we’ll send along a high five.

NaNoWriMo: Day 2

3,036 words today, for a total of 7,369. Our NaNo tracker says at this rate we’ll finish on November 14; we’ll see.

We decided to do Court Quadrille as a NaNo because the worldbuilding is a little bit weird and it seemed a good candidate for self-publishing, because then we wouldn’t have to worry about publisher reactions to some of the weird. Somehow, though, this is turning into our most traditionally romancey of romance stories yet. We are completely mystified and very amused.

NaNoWriMo: Day 1

Racheline has a horrific cold. I had a lot of wine with dinner. Still, we cranked out 4,333 words today, rediscovered why we hate writing story intros, why exposition can be really fucking hard, and that complex worldbuilding cannot be conveyed in two sentences (we totally did it in three).

But now with the intro out of the way, we’re excited to dive more into the meat of the story tomorrow (pun very much not intended.) We won’t always have word counts like that  — we’re going to get publisher edits back on a piece any day now, and still have dayjobs and other projects that continue to need our attention, but damn does it feel good to start with.

To everyone else out there who survived the first day of NaNo and are now on to day 2: Congrats! You’re Doing the Thing!

Did the Thing! – October edition

It’s the end of the month, which means it’s time for Did the Thing! and the thing we really did this month was patience.

It wasn’t graceful patience. It wasn’t peaceful patience. It wasn’t meditative patience we now want to lecture you about. No, it was nail-biting patience. And frustrated patience. And scared patience. And too busy to freak out about the things we wanted to freak out about patience. And 98% of that madness was of our own making. because a do-or-die attitude is great for getting stuff done. It’s a little less great for staying sane while doing it.

But at the end of all of that was a string of yesses we had originally hoped to have earlier (hence the patience), the paperback edition of Starling, some cool appearances on other people’s blogs, a couple of meetings about things that we can’t talk about yet, and a whole lot of edits to work on (we’re finishing up a round on Doves right now, and are expecting the edits on Evergreen at any moment) as we slide into NaNoWriMo.

There’s no real lesson here. I can’t tell you to go for peaceful, virtuous patience as you pursue your goals.  I can only tell you that you will survive that pursuit.  And I don’t know about you, but for me, sometimes that is all I need to know.

So what did you get done, or successfully wait to have happen, this month? Inquiring minds want to know!

Guest Author Profile: Honey Dover

Honey Dover writes short erotica in a range of combinations (F/F, M/M, M/F, and menage) and settings (contemporary, historical, paranormal). We’re big fans here of writers who write lots of different styles and pairings, because we’re not big fans of how the romance (and other genres) segment into such incredibly narrow verticals.

To celebrate her 13th release in this spooky month, here’s a peak at her work, which is hot, clever, fun, and very much for adults only.

F/F anthologies & bundles:

F/F stand-alone stories:

M/M stand-alone and series stories:

Menage series:

M/F stories:

You can click on the covers to go to Amazon.com to learn more (and buy). Honey’s work is also available on All Romance, Kobo, B&N, and more.

New Sale: Evergreen to Torquere Press

Evergreen is an 11,000+ word novelette that will be out as part of Torquere’s Santa’s Little Kinksters anthology, coming on December 17, 2014. You’ll be able to buy it on its own or with the other stories in the anthology. Currently digital-only for the story and for the whole antho, but that may change in the future.

Evergreen takes place between Starling and Doves and features Liam and his best friend Charles (who we met briefly in Starling) in New York trying to sort their deal out in light of Liam’s decisions at the end of Starling. The situation is challenging, and Liam wants advice, but every time he goes to one of his inner circle for that advice, they’re… er… tied up (or tying up) with their own stuff.

Featuring Liam, Charles, Carly, Alex, and Victor. (Yes, Paul is in it too, but he’s a little busy).

You don’t have to read this to be ready for Doves, but we think it’s a ton of fun!

P.S., Carly has a girlfriend.

Do the thing… adequately

Recently, we mentioned that sometimes Erin will get one of our mutual tasks done, email me for my thoughts on how it was done, and I’ll write back with just gloriously adequate.

If you don’t know me, it’s the sort of story that may make you never, ever want to meet me, but I think it’s important to explain what I mean here, not to defend Erin’s and my honor, but because being gloriously adequate is critical to getting stuff done and getting to the next thing in your busy, world domination-oriented life.

What does gloriously adequate mean?  It means you got the thing done to all required specifications. The thing is not late. The thing does not have to be reformatted. The thing is not going to embarrass you. The thing is not going to waste anyone’s time. The thing is not going to disappoint anyone. The thing is done — competently and correctly — and now you can move on to things that may require more artistry and exceptionalism.

Gloriously adequate isn’t phoning it in. Gloriously adequate is letting yourself use a sewing machine for a Regency-era dress if you’re making a Halloween costume as opposed to a museum-quality reproduction. Gloriously adequate is saving your dazzling prose for a query letter and just writing something short, sweet, and polite to follow up on a professional issue where a reply is overdue.  Gloriously adequate is the awesome sandwich you made in 5 minutes or less.  Sure it’s not the 5-course meal you’re planning for the holidays, but it doesn’t mean that sandwich isn’t fantastic.

You may be a working artist. You may always want to deliver 110%. But sometimes, you just gotta look at the requirements, meet the requirements, and save the flourishes for where they’re going to do you — and your audience — the most good.

Gloriously adequate is about having an awareness and a sense of humor about this. It’s about knowing you’re your own harshest critic and surviving yourself. And it’s about making due with the tragically small number of hours in every day.

There are a lot of components in success.  But one of them really is knowing when all you need to do is get your card punched.

Want a Sneak Peek at Chapter 1 of Doves?

Did you read Starling? Do you want to talk about it? Was that preview in the back of the book for Doves not enough to tide you over until January? For the next week, if you leave a review on Starling, we’ll give you an exclusive look at the full first chapter of Doves, including some rock climbing, a flight to South Carolina, and what happens the first night Paul and Alex spend together under Paul’s mother’s roof.

All you have to do is leave an honest review on Amazon and send us the link to it (at erin.and.racheline@gmail.com) — and we’ll send you Doves Chapter 1 (Note: we’re still in the final editorial process there, so all mistakes are ours).

If you’ve already left a review and want a peek, no problem, just send us the link to that!

NaNoWriMo, Avian30 Style

For those of you who may be unfamiliar, National Novel Writing Month (Often abreviated to NaNoWriMo or just NaNo) is a challenge wherein people commit themselves to writing, well, a novel in a month. It’s a fun way to challenge yourself to Do the Thing and get words some words down on paper. (If you’re interested, you can get more information and sign up at the link above)

Here at Avian30, we’re doing things a little differently, both for us, and for NaNo. We’ve got a new story idea (rather, we’ve picked one story off the list of about 40 new ideas we have) and we want to see what we can do in a month as we juggle working on LiLA Book 4 and edits on Doves and all of the other things we have going.

We also want to show some of our process. We talk a lot about process here on the blog, and we just finished teaching a class through RWA about collaboration. So what we’re going to do in November is give you all a peek behind the scenes. We’ll post daily word counts (even when they’re miserable! Because there will be days when they’re miserable), screenshots of the Google Docs with our terrible stuck-in-the-weeds drafts and all-caps notes shouting back and forth, and maybe even some of our crazy emails back and forth, because man do we send a lot of emails. And, if all goes well, you’ll see the magic, too.

We’re not overly concerned with hitting the 50,000 word mark that’s the general NaNo goal (we’re pretty sure the story idea we have isn’t even a 50K word story), but like Alex, we love challenges, and this is a new one for us. Once the month is over, we’ll finish up whatever needs finishing, send it through our usual editing process, and then sometime this spring (our plan now is March, though as other things get added to our 2015 release schedule that may change too) we’re going to self-publish it.

Being a hybrid self- and traditional-published author is a big part of authorial success these days, and, aside from the whole NaNo challenge, we want to give ourselves the experience of self-publishing as we look at expanding the types of stories we tell, and the places in which we tell them.

So, what are we actually writing? Our (very) working title is currently The Court Quadrille. (That’s gonna change, probably this week). It’s a queer paranormal romance political thiller:

In the remote and provincial faerie Kingdom of Normarach, a wedding is not what Ivo Frederick Myles Dierderich (Myles, for short), had in mind for his coming-of-age party. But he and his twin sister, Hildireth Wilhelmina Otylia Aust (Wil, to her friends), are heirs to the throne, and are betrothed to Etienne, Sovereign of Semailles, to secure an alliance to protect their homeland from another destructive war. They decide to make the best of it despite being unprepared for a palace full of court intrigue and delicious and dangerous new temptations. While Wil sets her mind to being as pleasing and politically savvy as possible, Myles takes advantage of Etienne’s relative disinterest to take a lover. Too bad his heart is set on the disgraced brother of a man executed for treason.