Racheline Maltese's Blog, page 40

The Awesome Women of Love in Los Angeles, Part 5: Laura Cook

And the last in this series — at least for book 1! We’ll be back with more of the fabulous women in this world as we get closer to the release of Doves in January.

Alex didn’t come out to his mom until three weeks after high school graduation, when he hugged her right before he got in his car to drive to L.A. and leave Paragon, Indiana forever.

They’ve never really talked about that moment since, but Laura was not particularly shocked. And as far as she was concerned, it was just one more reason for Alex to get the hell out of there.

Laura’s a single mom, and she raised Alex and his half-sister, Delilah, on wages from a job that she could never get enough hours at. For a lot of years, they were on welfare. The economy was tanking everywhere, and Paragon, Indiana had never been a good place.

Alex never really understands why his mom doesn’t want to leave Indiana too. To him, after all, it’s the worst place in the world. But to Laura, Indiana is the land she loves, endless corn fields, and sunsets over the hill. It’s hard work, always, but it’s the only kind of hard work she’s ever known.

When Alex was in high school, on the evenings neither of them had work, they’d sit on the porch and have a beer together while another day ended. In another family, it might have been the time when she told stories about their family and her own history. But she never did, and it’s been up to Alex to go elsewhere and make his own story.

Do the Thing! – “I’m Good Enough, I’m Smart Enough, and Doggone It, People Like Me!”

“I’m Good Enough, I’m Smart Enough, and Doggone It, People Like Me!”

Those of you who are younger than me may not remember the ridiculous Stuart Smalley performed by Al Franken on Saturday Night Live in the ’90s.  That’s probably a good thing, because it was humor that was tied to its moment and included awkward jokes about ambiguous sexuality in the midst of its constant send-up of the self-help book craze of the time.

Stuart Smalley, however, kind of had a point.  Actually, he had several.  You have to believe in yourself.  Even if it seems absurd to other people. You have to assume other people’s intentions are good (i.e., that they like you) — even if they aren’t.  And you can’t do either of those things without work.

Now, look, I’m pretty cynical (I am the most cynical optimist you will ever meet), and the last thing I’m going to tell you to do is stare in the mirror and tell yourself you’re awesome. Because really, who even has time or stomach for that?

But I also know that I have, at times, been at my most powerful when things have been screwed up, when I’ve had to retreat to a bathroom at my office, at an event, at a bar, and when I’ve leaned my hands on the sink and stared into the mirror and told myself I will fucking beat whatever bullshit was coming my way.

So you know, Stuart Smalley has a point.  He just curses less than me and has really dubious fashion sense.

Every week, I email Erin going “what are we going to post for Do the Thing!” and every week, we try to come up with something we haven’t talked about before.

But the reality is that all these posts are always about the same thing.  You have to choose yourself.  You cannot wait for someone else to do something that you feel makes you worthy, because that is a crapshoot and you deserve better.

Give yourself that.  Even if it feels ridiculous.

Starling: 30 Days

Don’t worry, there’s not going to be a daily countdown. We’ll be puttering along at this blog more or less per usual — with posts about the book, about our other projects, about friends’ books, and about the creative life. But we did want to acknowledge the milestone and note some of the things that are coming up as we get closer to release day.

1. We’re going to be on the radio. We’ll be on Hummingbird Place, the live romance radio talk show, on August 18.

2. We’ll be creating and posting more promo cards that will give you a look at Starling‘s locations and key moments.

3. We’re doing a blog tour that will include new excerpts from the book, new behind the scenes details, and chances to win free stuff, including Alex’s iconic beanie (knitted by Erin), that serves a major function in the plot.

These things will get individual posts with all the details as they approach.

New Novelette Coming: Room 1024

Remember that snippet we posted that had the working title of Conference? Where the guy awkwardly runs into his ex while at a BDSM leather conference? And then Erin’s mother sent her a weird email about whether she was in BDSM the way she used to be into elves?

Well, we’re happy to announce that we’ve signed a contract for that story with Torquere. It’s an M/M HEA with a M/M/M/M HFN possible future HEA. (Hi, Erin’s mom!).

For added hilarity, the story contains a fisting scene, which is relevant right now because of the recent drama in the romance writing community over a Vice article that claims romance writers don’t know what fisting is.

Really?

Really.

More concerning than that false assertion, honestly, is the Vice author who doesn’t grok that words have multiple meanings and that fists can be used for multiple purposes.

Anyway, thanks for your enthusiasm when we first posted about this story. We’ll announce the release date when we have it, and do a cover reveal when the time comes.

Some real talk about signing the contract, releasing the book, and taking over the world

While waiting for the go to tell you some new, exciting news, I’m currently staring down the invitation to my 20th college reunion. It’s less than a week after Starling‘s release date, and, since my co-author lives in the D.C. metro area and I went to GWU, it’s convenient.

But I probably won’t go.  I’ve never gone to any of my college reunions.  Because college was a hot mess for me — I was pretty crazy and my school at the time was deeply homophobic (among other things).  My friends and I experienced violence and threats, the administration at the time was unresponsive, and I have no idea how the hell I managed to graduate in four years.

So going would be kind of weird.

The reason I am telling you this, is because Starling comes out in a little over 30 days, and while it’s my first novel release, it is not my first time at the book rodeo.  Having done this before, there’s some stuff I’ve learned from it, and if Erin and I are always telling you to Do the Thing! it is also only fair if I tell you some hard truths about your (and my) upcoming book release.

It will not fix your brain.  Have depression?  Guess what?  You’ll still have depression after your book comes out.  Anxiety?  Maybe you’ll have even more!  An external achievement, no matter how much work, talent, and passion you’ve put into it, cannot rewrite your brain chemistry.  That’s okay!  It would be kind of weird if it did.

Your Amazon ranking will make you crazy. It’s fun for the first 48 hours. Then it’s a time sink.  Eventually it will make you nuts. Stop looking at it. If something amazing happens with it, someone will let you know (three random friends emailed me when my first book hit the top 1,000 (that’s three digits, y’all) in the overall Amazon rankings), and it will all happen whether you’re there to see it or not.

People who have wronged you will not suddenly realize the error of their ways. Parents that said no one would ever care about your stories?  High school teacher who failed you when you started sentences with and? That person in your critique group who just loathed your narrative themes and was really petty about it?  They’re probably not going to come around.  If they do, they’re probably not going to tell you about it. And, if somehow I’m wrong, you’ll be satisfied for all of five minutes, because you’ve been sitting on that wound for years while they’ve been worried about their own crap. I know the fantasy is satisfying, but trust me when I tell you that reality is just not going to measure up.

High school reunions will probably still suck. Or not. I actually have had a pretty good time at my high school reunions, despite, or perhaps because I haven’t stayed in close contact with the people I grew up with. But the fact is, what’s going to make your reunion awesome is trading ancient in-jokes with people you haven’t seen in a decade… or three. People care about your book as much as you care about their baby pictures.  Own it.

It’s never enough. Book releases are a high.  And then they are over.  Like the crash that happens after a conference, play, movie shoot, or other highly intense, ego-driven endeavor where you get to do what you love and people say nice things to you, books are the same way.  It’s okay.  Just know it’s coming and keep working.  Because the only way to get through it is to love the stories you’re creating.  Because the next book? The next contract?  Also not enough.  And if you’re only writing to fill that hole of praise and excitement, you’re going to burn out quickly and badly.  If you’re writing to breathe your imagination into the world, and are in love with what you are doing, the crash is a lot easier to weather. Additionally, the real change in your circumstances and the world often comes from being more than a one hit wonder.

The Internet is still made of dicks. Not the fun kind, if you’re into that.  I mean the random strangers who send you hate mail, that weird ex- of an ex- who has been stalking you on Facebook forever, and the detractors you didn’t know you had until it’s really important to them to tell you you’re not a real writer because you’re not writing in their genre of choice or your story didn’t end the way they wanted it to. Congratulations. Now don’t read the comments.

Basically, this one book won’t really change your life. Really.  Even if you become a best-seller and make scads of cash — and statistically most of us don’t.  Sure, you might have an easier time paying your bills, or get to do some interviews, or have moments where you too get to do celebrity things (sign autographs? make public appearances? have an assistant? bring it on!), but the reality is that the only person who can change your life is you.  If that’s in response to the circumstances or success of your book, that’s fantastic, but the external hand of success isn’t how it happens.  It’s how you respond to it, should it show up.

Believe it or not, this is all more or less good news. Books have a huge amount of power.  Things I’ve read have saved my life, encouraged me to create, and motivated me to make change when I’ve needed to. Writing often helps me salve my wounds and understand the world I navigate better.  But if every time we released a book our wounds vanished entirely, our obstacles receded, and we discovered psychic powers by which to move our Amazon rankings, the universe would be pretty damn chaotic and a lot of us would lose our impetus to write.

I’m not saying suffering is good, or that you need it to be an artist.  That’s crap.  Artists know how much their suffering gets in the way. But we do need our history to be artists and the unique lenses through which we see the world. So we shouldn’t be surprised or disappointed when the books we write don’t change our backstories and neuroses even if they help adjust our perspectives.

If you want to be, you are changing your life. Your book, your publisher, and your readers are helping that happen. But always remember you’re the one driving.

The Awesome Women of Love in Los Angeles: Part 4, Kathleen Campbell

One Saturday when Liam was sixteen, he came down to breakfast with two girls. Kathleen gave Liam an epic eyebrow, made everybody pancakes, and then once the girls had left, sat down with Liam to have a conversation about safe sex and taking care of people’s hearts, including his own.

It was not by any means the first Talk she’d given Liam, but it was the first following so vivid an encounter with the way Liam actually does sex and relationships.

Afterwards, when Liam had gone out to hang out with his best friend, Charles — who Kathleen knew, because Liam had told her after it first happened, that Liam had also slept with — Kathleen laughed until she nearly cried. Liam was a good kid. He’d be okay. And so would whoever he chose to be with.

Of the many people who make up the various networks and systems in Liam’s life, his mom is right there in the center of it all. She may be in New York City, still happily married to and living with Liam’s father in the Brooklyn brownstone Liam grew up in, while Liam lives on the West Coast, but she’s still safety and security to him, an easy-going and hilarious presence that rolls with pretty much anything Liam and his life can throw at either of them.

There’s not as much of Kathleen in Starling as we wish there could be, but she’s definitely there for the moment that becomes one of what we think is the funniest running jokes in the series — a moment that exists, in large part, because of the way Kathleen nurtured Liam and taught him to respect and adore the people he loves, no matter how unconventional or atypical that love or relationship is.

New Release: “Bad Idea Alligators”

Erin & I have short story out today in the Love in Los Angeles universe.  It’s actually set between Starling and Doves, it’s arguably a spoiler, especially if you want to feel uncertainty regarding Starling‘s end-game and mid-game relationships.  That said, it can also be read in a totally out of context way.

After all, Torquere said, “Hey, want to write a 500 – 1,000 word story for a free anthology?” and we said “Hey, we haven’t managed to write trailer sex in this series yet.”

In addition to our story (in which the previously mentioned Victor plays the role of alligator, btw), the anthology contains 20 other short stories.  You can download it for free at Torquere Books.

Please Don’t Feed the Alligators

What happens when a bunch of authors at a convention see a sign on the pier in Savannah that reads, “Please Don’t Feed the Alligators?”

Well, we found out at Authors After Dark in 2013 that such a sign can evoke strong images for a lot of people. BA Tortuga, Kiernan Kelly and I wanted to do an anthology, but we just didn’t have the time to write long stories. So we asked the great authors at Torquere Press Inc. to write us some flash fiction so we could use the theme.

Everyone came up with something wonderful, and I personally want to thank all the amazing authors who donated their time to this free read!

We hope you love the stories, too, but be careful around that pier in Savannah.

XXOO

Julia Talbot

P.S. I believe this anthology will also be available for free on All Romance soon, and there’s a coupon code in the back of the book to use on a future purchase.  You might be into that, what with Starling coming out soon and all that.

Guest Post: Shira Glassman on Climbing the Date Palm and The Second Mango

Another guest post today, this time from Shira Glassman, focusing on some of the bisexual characters in her latest novel, Climbing the Date Palm, the sequel to her book The Second Mango. Both are YA romances that cover the full LGBTQ spectrum and are available from Prizm Books (the YA imprint of Torquere Press) as well as major retailers online and off.

Also, I must note, that in addition to the many other forms of representation present in these books, one of the main characters has celiac disease (just like me!).

 Shira Glassman writes:

I’ve never understood why it’s so hard for some people to believe in the existence of bisexuality.

After all, my ravenousness when I see a salad bar doesn’t negate my special relationship with rotisserie chicken or lambchops. People are allowed to like more than one type of food, and if I sit down and order a chicken, that doesn’t mean I no longer have a taste for lamb.

As a violinist, I’m adept at both classical and old-timey styles. When I sit down to play a concert with my local orchestra, I’ve not lost my fiddle accolades. Everyone accepts that I listen to classical, old-timey, and electronic stuff without wondering how those genres conflict with each other. Or how I could possibly like both Wagner if I’m listening to Bach right now.

Obviously, there are differences between a monogamous marriage and whatever’s on your iPod or your dinner plate. I certainly hope my relationship is more permanent than a roast chicken and can last beyond even the longest Wagner opera. But bisexuality isn’t just about who you’re sleeping with (or with whom you’re paying your bills) – it’s about what’s going on inside your head, and what you’ve experienced in your history.

Otherwise, single straight people would be asexual. And single gay people would never be victims of homophobia.

Wanting to write a character who could be unmistakably bisexual was one of the driving factors behind Climbing the Date Palm. Prince Kaveh would have been content to marry the beautiful Azar, his arranged match, while still checking out the muscles on his father’s palace guards. Yet it was still painful for him to hear his father spout homophobia at the dinner table. This is what so-called “straight-passing” bisexual people go through.

They also face rejection from their straight partners, as Kaveh eventually experiences. He comes out to Azar and she freaks out and dumps him. Now what?

Fortunately for him, “now what” appears in the form of a childhood friend, the brilliant, kindhearted, and fiercely idealistic engineer Farzin. Farzin is unafraid to be gay, spouts self-deprecating remarks about his own fatness with a twist of confident irony, and showers Kaveh with unconditional patience and love. He educates him about human rights issues that the prince, though not a mean person, never had on his radar as long as he was living under his father’s right-wing roof.

Farzin and the king quickly wind up in direct opposition, due to the king’s refusal to pay Farzin’s men the wages he had promised. When Farzin winds up in prison scheduled for execution, Kaveh flees to the kingdom next door to beg for help from powerful queer people he knows live there.

While he’s in Perach, he befriends Aviva, the queen’s girlfriend. She’s also bisexual, and the two of them bond over the similarities and differences in their experiences. As a bisexual man, Kaveh is treated with revulsion, whereas Aviva, as she puts it, is liked “for the wrong reasons.”

The bisexual characters in Date Palm don’t get off scot-free; Aviva and Kaveh both have to be gently corrected by Queen Shulamit, who’s a lesbian, that no, not everyone falls in love “with people” and the idea that it “shouldn’t matter” is its own kind of oppressive thought (or maybe just annoying.) But Perach, and the world of my stories in general, is the type of place where people who experience same-sex attraction, whether exclusively or otherwise, can all come together to protect each other – collecting a few “safe” straight people along the way, as well.

If you’ve ever wanted to read a book where characters who are attracted to more than one gender are actually described as a separate (but obviously related) phenomenon from characters who are only attracted to the same gender, or a book where women rescue men instead of vice versa, or a book where dragons and warriors roughhouse and play together instead of killing each other, come to Perach.

This is the second book in a series, but I did my best to make it completely comprehensible without reading The Second Mango.

Do the Thing! – Say what you want

Sometimes, it’s important to start at the very beginning. Before you can Do the thing! you have to want the thing, and once you want the thing, you have to be able to admit it to yourself and other people.

Why?  You gotta know your own goals in order to pursue them.  And it’s murder to network in an effective way if you don’t feel comfortable and confident in being able to articulate what your ask is and what you bring to the table in response to it.

There are all sorts of reasons saying what we want is hard.  When I was a child, and my parents asked me what I wanted for holidays gifts, I would answer, only to be told I didn’t really want those things.  After all, they were so trendy, or aesthetically displeasing, surely I knew better than to have desires like that.  In high school, if I expressed attraction to someone, the response was always, but don’t you know they’re out of your league?

Over time, the message was simple.  I didn’t know how to make good choices, and the things I wanted were unreasonable and should not be expressed.  Chances are, you got messages like this too, along with messages that if you express a goal that you don’t achieve, then you look like a failure and that’s embarrassing, as opposed to a brave, ambitious person who is going after their goals.

But saying what we want is important.  It’s powerful.  It tells us we can pursue our own destiny.  It tells us we don’t need permission.  It tells us we are worthy of ambition. It tells us what we want is possible. It tells us desire is not a sin.  It tells us we can make stuff happen.

And when we’re women, or queer, or otherwise marginalized (and the vast majority of the readers of this blog are at least one of those things), we need to hear that.  For ourselves, and to help other people get the courage to say I want.

So here are my easy I want statements: I want the contracts I am currently waiting on to show up in my email.  I want yes on the other things I have out for submission.  I want a yes on the things going out soon for submission.  And I want a glorious team of rivals with which to make shit happen.

Here’s my hard to say out loud, even though it’s no secret, I want statement: I want to write for TV.

What do you want?  Say it right now.  Get used to that desire, enjoy that desire, and use that desire.  Need a place to say it?  Comments are open.  Do the thing.

Catch up: Romance @ Random, a 20% off sale, Starling teasers, and some new story news

There aren’t really words for how busy things are right now.  We’re in various stages of edits for three different novels, and we’ve started a fourth.  And of course, we’re deep, deep into the planning for Starling‘s release next month.

Since there’s a lot going on, here’s a round up on some things you may have missed, or things we missed telling you.

Item the first:

Torquere Press is having a 20% off sale on everything in the store now through Monday with the code  hapaug2014. Haven’t grabbed “Lake Effect” yet?  Now’s a good time!

Item the second:

You may have noticed a new cover on the banner for this site.  Torquere Press’s Please Don’t Feed the Alligators anthology will be available for FREE download from Torquere and All Romance on August 4.  It contains over twenty 500 – 1,000 word stories, including one from us featuring the two main protagonists of Starling.

“Bad Idea Alligators” is, however, technically a spoiler, as it’s set between Starling (available September 10, 2014) and Doves (available January 21, 2015).  We’ll post detailed download links when it’s live and give you some more information to help you decide whether to read the story now or later.

Item the third:

Racheline has Photoshop and she’s not afraid to use it.

Actually, she has an awesome Photoshop clone called Pixelmator, and she’s been making these promo cards for Starling featuring quotes from the novel.

These ones feature her photographs of L.A. Erin hasn’t been there yet, so the last time she was out there, she systematically documented locations in the series.

Future promo cards (keep an eye out) feature the book’s other locales: Washington DC (with photos from Erin) and New York City.

Item the fourth:

Racheline is still recapping True Blood for Romance@Random.  You can get her latest recap here.

Item the fifth:

We have several thing in the hopper of great news we can’t share with you yet as we wait on paperwork, but we expect to have a least one new announcement for you as soon as later today.  It’s about a story we first promo’ed on this blog, so stay tuned!