Racheline Maltese's Blog, page 43

Totally Bound’s New Imprint & Vegas Hustle

While Erin & I continue to recover from the Great Editing Adventure of July 2014 (and various holiday activities), it’s time to talk about other people’s books again.  I think the blurb alone will tell anyone who knows us, exactly why we’re sharing this book from Ethan Stone with you (Hint: Comic Books).

Additionally Totally Bound has just launched a new imprint, What’s His Passion? focusing on M/M books.  To celebrate, their having a contest and giving away lots of prizes, which you can enter to win on their site.

Vegas Hustle

A business trip to Las Vegas becomes a life or death situation for a comic book fan.

Comic book geek Adam Brand is young, good-looking and wealthy. He’s also a virgin because he’s not skilled at picking up guys. While in Vegas with his friend Dean to finalize a real estate deal, he throws caution to the wind and hires a professional. Hustler Javier Campos is just Adam’s type and his first time is perfect.

If you want to read an excerpt and pick up Vegas Hustle, follow the link (and let us know how it is, we are desperately dreaming of leisure reading right now!)

Meanwhile we’ll be back with some more of our own content soon, including a super fun project we’re participating in with Snarkology and TV Tropes!

 

Romance @ Random: Begin Again review & True Blood recap (7.2)

This week I have two pieces up at Romance @ Random, both of which are a little more relevant to what Erin and I write than usual.

The first is a review of Begin Again, a quasi-romantic comedy from the creator of Once, featuring Keira Knightly and Mark Ruffalo. Everything you need to know is in the review, but the TL;DR version is that it’s deeply flawed, not what you are expecting, and charming anyway. The relevant to this blog version is that the film is entirely about collaboration and the toxicity of fame. For all its flaws, I was excited just by the movie existing and delineating these types of relationships and the impact of their context.

The second is this week’s True Blood recap, which features Jason Stackhouse having a sex dream about Eric Northman that is both hot and a highlight of just how terrible at everything Jason is. Other features include a long sequence that can most kindly be called an homage to 28 Days Later and a former primary school teacher melting into a puddle of goo between Arlene’s legs in the worst possible way.

More summer reading from Hachette authors

As many of you know, the drama between Amazon and Hachette (among others) continues. We don’t want to tell people to buy or not buy at Amazon. There are pluses and minuses for authors, Amazon employees, and consumers. Just because a book is listed here and from Hachette, doesn’t mean it’s not available on Amazon, just that the Hachette/Amazon spat has put it at potential risk and we want to give those authors a little extra boost.

But after our last little featurette on Hachette authors, we heard from a few others, and we thought we’d share those books with you.  These are M/F romances, and while we write mainly LGBTQ romance here, we know readers are omnivorous and we’re not interested in isolating LGBTQ romance from the larger genre.

This time we’re starting with Kennedy Ryan’s When You Are Mine, which is launching a new series.

Forever is a heartbeat away . . .

Kerris Moreton knows how to make things work. Bounced from foster home to foster home as a kid, she adapted; when opportunity arose, she thrived. Now, about to open her own business and accept a marriage proposal, Kerris is ready to build the life she’s always wanted. The only thing missing? A passionate connection with her would-be fiancé, Cam. Kerris wants to believe that sparks are overrated-until Walsh Bennett lights her up like the Fourth of July.

. . . but what about love?

As one of the East Coast’s most eligible bachelors, Walsh enjoys financial independence, fulfilling work with his family’s nonprofit, and plenty of female attention. But lately he’s been distracted by the one woman he can’t have. Lovely to look at and even sweeter to know, Kerris is the soul mate Walsh never thought he would find. The problem is, his best friend found her first.

You can order  When You Are Mine  in paperback or e-book from Barnes & Nobles and other major retailers.

Meanwhile, this blog has been somewhat low on the supernatural, despite some works in progress involving vampires and demons and our ongoing hints about magical realism. But next up we have Angie Sandro, and she’s here to change that with Dark Paradise.

DARK LEGACY

Mala LaCroix has spent her whole life trying to escape her destiny. As the last in a long line of “witch women,” she rejects the notion of spirits and hoodoo and instead does her best to blend in. But when she finds a dead body floating in the bayou behind her house, Mala taps into powers she never knew she had. She’s haunted by visions of the dead girl, demanding justice and vengeance.

DEADLY SECRETS

Landry Prince has always had a crush on Mala, but when Mala discovers his sister, murdered and marked in some sort of Satanic ritual, he wonders if all the rumors about the LaCroix family are true. Yet after Mala uses her connection to the spirit world to identify his sister’s killer, he starts to form his own bond to her . . . a very physical one. As they move closer to each other and closer to the truth, Mala and Landry must risk everything—their families, their love, and even their lives.

You can order  Dark Paradise  from in e-book from Barnes & Noble and other major retailers.

Lia Riley also has a new release starting a new series.  Upside Down is in the New Adult category and takes place in Australia.  For those who don’t know, I studied in Sydney for a little bit, so this tickles me!

If You Never Get Lost, You’ll Never Be Found

Twenty-one-year-old Natalia Stolfi is saying good-bye to the past-and turning her life upside down with a trip to the land down under. For the next six months, she’ll act like a carefree exchange student, not a girl sinking under the weight of painful memories. Everything is going according to plan until she meets a brooding surfer with hypnotic green eyes and the troubling ability to see straight through her act.

Bran Lockhart is having the worst year on record. After the girl of his dreams turned into a nightmare, he moved back home to Melbourne to piece his life together. Yet no amount of disappointment could blind him to the pretty California girl who gets past all his defenses. He’s never wanted anyone the way he wants Talia. But when Bran gets a stark reminder of why he stopped believing in love, he and Talia must decide if what they have is once in a lifetime . . . of if they were meant to live a world apart.

You can order Upside Down from Barnes & Noble and other major retailers.

Do The Thing! Everyone Wants To Be Me or Do Me

Writing novels deconstructing the fantasy of celebrity means spending time on websites devoted to the fashion of and gossip about actual celebrities. It’s primary-source research into the way people treat and view movie stars, musicians, and everyone else famous.

One of those sites is Tom & Lorenzo who wrote a post (and a book) about what “normal” people can learn from celebrities’ self-confidence:

“If you must look up to [celebrities],  then at least look up to them for their self-confidence, and the ways in which they use it to craft a seemingly invulnerable persona and then force the world around them to accept it.”

They go on to offer this advice:

“Darling, every day before you leave the house, look in the mirror and tell yourself, everybody wants to do me or be me.”

Given that so much of the Love in Los Angeles series is about the construction of persona, that post really jumped out at us.

It’s Monday. I haven’t slept more than five hours a night for the last week. I’ve got a ton of editing work to do on Starling — as soon as I’m done with my day job.

So when I got dressed this morning, I put on one of my sharper dresses. Once I got to work, I got coffee because a cup of coffee, even just from the pot in the back of the office, makes me feel like a professional.

It’s Monday morning. Of course it’s already empty.

Some days, all of that works better than others. Today, for the most part, it’s being effective. At least, I’m plowing through the pretty epic list of things that absolutely need to get done.

How’s your persona work going? Are you giving yourself permission to think highly of yourself? To know that you are awesome in order to be awesome?

What do you struggle with faking? Or what are you really fucking high-achieving at faking and how do you do it?

We’re always here to offer a boost and assure you that yo, we totally would love to be/do you.

Story Process Sunday: Dubious italics, and why not looking at your novel for nine months is a really good idea

No Sneak Peek this week, because we don’t have anything currently going that we can talk about in detail that we haven’t already shared with you. But we are going to do a Story Process Sunday instead, so we can talk a little more about our process, motivate ourselves to get stuff done, and pass along some of what works for us.

This week we’ve been in the deep weeds of edits on Starling. We did the bigger changes our editor asked for, and now we’re going through the manuscript with a fine-tooth comb. We’ve written several books since we wrote Starling together, and we’ve learned a lot about writing since then. A lot of the work is going back and applying what we know now to the work we did then.

One of our biggest sins is what Racheline has started to call “dubious italics,” which I really think we should make a drinking game out of, except that if we did, there are so many words we’re de-italicizing that I would be phenomenally drunk by the third page of the manuscript.

We’re leaving in a few, for emphasis in dialogue when someone’s being particularly catty or whiny. For the most part, though, they’re coming out.

Putting the italics in to note emphasis is, for the most part, directing from the page, which is not good. We can give the reader these characters, but we have to leave room for the reader to bring them to life too.

When a screenwriter finishes a script, it eventually goes from his hands into the hands of the actors and the director, who add their own interpretation to the words on the page. It’s their job, like it’s the scriptwriter’s job to give them words and setting in the first place. And if the writer has written well, it should be either evident where the emphasis falls and what the emotional options are from the dialogue alone, or there should be a range of amazing possibilities present that is the job of these other professionals to figure out and choose between.

It’s the same with books. If we’re writing well, we don’t need to hit the readers over the head with what words are important. The readers should be able to tell from the words themselves.

This whole exercise, as miserable and headache inducing as it is, is also a really good example of why, once you finish a piece, you really should stick it in a drawer and leave it there for a good long while before you come back to it.

We submitted Starling to Torquere last October. I’d looked at it a few times since then, to check continuity details for subsequent books. Racheline hadn’t looked at it at all until last Saturday when we opened the document from our editor.

When you go back to a piece after so long away, you see stuff you’d missed the first two or eight or thirty times you’d edited it before. And yes, this is the advice you get everywhere, but just today we found a sentence and had a horrified email exchange because WAIT THIS SENTENCE THAT WE’VE READ EIGHTEEN TIMES IS NOT ACTUALLY TRUE OH GOD.

Stuff slips through the cracks. Your eyes glaze over rereading that scene about the thing for the sixth time. Stepping away and coming back fresh goes a long way to finding things you hadn’t even realized needed fixing.

 

Sometimes we talk about…Skulls

At dinner in Philadelphia.

Given that we live in different cities and only meet face to face twice a month to do work, most of Racheline’s and my communication is done via e-mail. We have efficient systems and it works really well, and what you can do with technology these days is amazing, etc.

But twice a month we do get together in the same physical space to work in our office in Philadelphia. And while our email exchanges can get hilarious and odd, our in-person experiences can get bizarre and also pretty magical.

This past Saturday, after an epic marathon session of edits on the Starling manuscript, we went out to get some fresh air, eat food that wasn’t cheese, and talk about something other than verb tenses, we ended up at a place that had amazing tacos and the strongest margaritas I have ever encountered. And they were served with paper straws!

We talked about Midsummer, the novella we’re working on about a summer stock company doing Shakespeare deep in the woods of Virginia. We were struggling with the b-plot, our major problem being that we didn’t have one.  And man did we toss around a lot of terrible ideas.

“What if there’s a skull?” Racheline eventually asked.

“What?”

“I don’t know, a skull.”

“Yeahhhh, but what does it do? Like, for the plot? Or at all?”

“Well, let’s figure it out.”

So we started talking skulls.

Also, that weekend, unbeknownst to me until I got to Philly that morning and was trying to find parking, Wizard World Comic Con was on. So we were having very strong margaritas and were talking very loudly about skulls while cosplaying people were strolling down the streets.

Soon we’d found out what the skull’s purpose was, but not hadn’t entirely figured out how to execute on it.

Every time one of us asked, “But what is the skull process?” the other would interrupt with “Oh my god look at that adorable lesbian couple cosplaying Steve and Bucky!”

You can do a lot with technology, and working the timezones is one of the best weapons in our arsenal. Sometimes, though, the in person stuff works better, with or without the magic of a world filled with other people’s narratives.

Did the Thing!

It’s time to celebrate what you got done this month!  Right now, I’m freaking out because of just how much more I have to get done this month, including answering some great Do the Thing comments here and on Tumblr, but it will get done, because I say so, because Erin says so, and because you’re all going to encourage me with your own achievement right now.

Yes?

Yes.

Ready. Set…. BRAG!

Marriage equality, queer fiction, and Starling

The federal court in Indiana overturned that state’s ban on same-sex marriage today.  Some counties are already issuing licenses, and weddings have taken place.  In other, they are waiting to see if a stay is put in place in the next few days.

Alex, from Starling, is from Indiana, and the plot of the book begins in August 2014.  We know a tremendous amount about Alex’s life before that opening.  A lot of that is stuff you’ll learn about.  You’ll meet his mom in Starling, and his best friend, Gemma, that he found on the Internet and moved to L.A. with, although they never met in person until they both arrived there.  Alex also has a sister, and a lot of secrets.

But what we didn’t know until today, is when this moment would happen for him.  We worked hard, because of the rapidly shifting political landscape, not to talk about just where marriage stood on the national level at the time of the book.  With most of the action taking place in jurisdictions with marriage equality, it was easy for us to navigate around.

What to do about marriage equality in LGBTQ romance is a huge issue right now.  Does the march of marriage equality mean that people will expect a wedding at the end of our novels like they often do of many M/F novels?  Will addressing the issue date our work? Or place a veneer of heteronormativity over it that will make it unappealing to LGBTQ readers?  Is marriage part of our culture?  Will it be destructive of our culture? Can we really ignore politics when they are, so brutally, our landscape?

While I don’t believe my writing gay romance is going to change the world, or even any one individual’s mind, it isn’t apolitical, because nothing is apolitical.

I am 41 years old.  I have been involved with marriage equality activism since the early 1990s.  In the last several years things have happened I thought I would never live to see (that is both political pessimism and the result of growing up queer in the 1980s). I think marriage and military service are in some ways our least important issues, but ones that offer excellent legal and rhetorical gateways to getting the really critical stuff around housing and employment discrimination done.  And I’m both someone who loves a wedding, and has romantic feelings about the institution of marriage, but also worries about its impact on queer culture.

So I pay attention to what happens with marriage in every state.  Every state matters.  On a personal level, some states matter more than others.  I used to live in D.C., so I liked that one a lot.  New York, where I live and right before Pride a few years ago, was a biggie.  I didn’t realize Indiana was going to feel quite the way it has today.

Two months before Jasper Alexander Cook’s life changes forever, marriage equality apparently comes to Indiana.  His mother calls him to offer her congratulations.  But he doesn’t live in Indiana anymore and hopes he never does again.  He’s also not dating anyone. And other than the moment he whispered, “I’m gay,” in her ear before he got in his car and drove to Los Angeles three days after graduating high school, he and his mother have never spoken of this topic.

The whole conversation makes him a little miserable.  He works 14-hour days, doesn’t know what he’s supposed to be celebrating, and doesn’t know how to do this.  He doesn’t, in a lot of ways, know how to do anything.

Marriage equality, every time it happens, is thousands of tiny stories, not just of couples in love, but of individuals, trying to deal with the very weird experience of a world that doesn’t know them talking about them like collective nouns instead of individual people.

One day, this battle will be won, here, and hopefully, eventually, around the world.  Along the way, we might even figure out what it means to us as individuals and as a queer culture and the way in which we tell our stories, fictional and non.

For today, it’s just a big, big congratulations to Indiana, and Utah, which also got good news, and all the states governed by the 10th Circuit, which may also have marriage equality now in the wake of today’s Utah decision.

It’s not just the coasts anymore.  And it hasn’t been for a long time.

Interview with Starling’s hero, Paul Marion Keane

RWA-NYC‘s heroes and heroines of summer blog series continues.  Last month, they included an interview with the star of Starling, J. Alex Cook.  This month, the interview is with with the book’s hero, Paul Marion Keane.

Choosing to call Paul the book’s hero is complicated, and not just in the “that’s like asking which chopstick is the fork” sense that LGBT romance brings to the table.  The thing is, Paul is sort of a mess, although Paul’s awareness of that can be highly variable.  He’s not always exactly hero material.  When Alex faces peril, Paul’s ability to come to the rescue can, at times, be dubious.

When I go to events with authors of heterosexual romance, a big topic of conversation is always alpha heroes.  They’re really in right now.  Betas are so last year.  On some level, I totally understand what this means — I do watch, and write about, True Blood, after all.  On another level, I just don’t get it.  I’ve spent a lot of time making faces at Erin going “Is Paul an alpha?  Is anyone an alpha?”

We’re in edits for Starling right now.  We’ve done the bigger stuff requested by our publisher, and I’m now doing some incredibly fine-tooth comb stuff that’s largely about the fact that we’ve written several books since we wrote Starling and we know more now, and I want us to get everything right.

One of the more interesting things this has produced is that Paul, while still a complete mess, feels a lot more alpha on the page.  Alex, for the record, feels as strong and masculine as he always has, but a bit more mysterious and a lot more buffeted by the randomness of his circumstances.

So no one’s a fork (or everyone is), Paul’s totally alpha but still a mess, and, oh yeah, his boyfriend took his dog.  We hope you enjoy meeting him.

Torquere Twitter takeover tonight (and other news)

Tuesday night (June 24, 2014) from 8 – 10pm EST, Erin and I are taking over Torquere’s twitter account.  While you can always bother us at our individual Twitters (@erincmcrae & @racheline_m), please come play with us.  We’ll be tagging tweets with #rm or #em so it’s not just creepy hive-mind action. We’ll be talking “Lake Effect,” Starling, and our process, and we want your questions!

Meanwhile, there is still time to enter the contest to . Please remember that the combined group of writers have been published at at least 5 different presses in the genre, so we may not want to include any reference to specific presses in the name.  I know, that makes it harder, because all the presses have great names to work with!  And yes, you can enter more than once.  Unless you’re Erin’s dad.  Because if you’re Erin’s dad you can’t win; blah blah blah demon porn.

Additionally, remember when we had that interview with Alex from Starling at the RWA-NYC blog?  An interview with Starling‘s other hero, Paul, should be up tomorrow!

We’ll also be announcing the winner of the Summer Lovin’ blog hop tour prize in the next couple of days, and this Friday the June Did the Thing! post will go up, so be sure to stop by and celebrate your accomplishments.

Finally, in non-romance news, Racheline has new pop-culture anthology news over of LettersFromTitan.com.