Racheline Maltese's Blog, page 47

Sneak Peek Sunday: Snare

Another Sunday, another week of Sneak Peek Sunday, a romance writer blog hop. Follow the link back to see what other authors are working on this week (please note that participating authors write in all genres and at all heat levels).

We hope you’re enjoying your holiday weekend.  Currently we’re deep in editing two shorts that are about to go out the door before we dive into what’s going to be a long month of editorial work on longer projects.

One of those projects is Snare, which Erin and I originally wrote over the winter holidays in the gap between Starling and Doves because we needed a break.  This is what we do — develop shorts and other projects between drafts of the Love in Los Angeles books (which may help you guess why I’m spending this weekend editing shorts).

As what is currently a 30K m/m/m vampire romance fairytale about New York City’s municipal bureaucracy, Snare is sort of weird and sort of our problem child.  Granted, it’s a problem child that has received some editorial interest, which is great, but we have a lot of revision work to do on it in order to help everyone figure out what’s ultimately going to be the best home and strategy for it.

As we ease into that ordeal (and let’s be real, writing is sometimes hard) we thought we’d share the story’s current first six paragraphs with you.  We have no idea what they’ll look like, or even if they’ll remain, in the final disposition of this odd little passion project.

When Elijah Endicott Iverson — his parents are very cruel — is in the third grade, he learns about life, death, and the various legal statuses in between.  It’s in civics class, sandwiched between the checks and balances inherent in the three main branches of the U.S. federal government and the history of the country’s citizenship laws.

He doesn’t really pay as much attention as he should.  After all, he lives in California, and all the vampires live in New York, ostensibly confined to Manhattan Island by the rivers that surround it.  Mrs. Sanchez tells the class that vampires are very tricky, however, and that’s why hundreds of years ago they gave the city their money to help fund the building of bridges and tunnels that would let them escape. That didn’t really work out of course, because the city just got checkpoints and dogs and is now moving into retinal scanners to make sure only the living can come and go as they please.  But the vampires’ failed plan has still made New York the greatest city in the world.

There are even plenty of humans who, though alive, apply to be declared legally dead so they can live the way the vampires do, Mrs. Sanchez says. They are limited in movement, and may have no legal identity, bank account, or anything that requires a government ID, but they are under absolutely no legal jurisdiction, federal, state, or otherwise. Though the official term for those people is Dead — as distinguished from the dead, who are actually biologically deceased — they’re also called rabbits, and the communities in which they live alongside vampires are called warrens. Eli is not sure why, and Mrs. Sanchez doesn’t say.

She does note, however, that while some say this system fuels New York’s crime and lawlessness, it has also made the city a mecca for artists and non-conformists, the seeking and the strange, contributing to a vibrant culture most only experience on television or at the movies.  Trapped in the vast and boring inland wastes between Los Angeles and San Francisco, Eli decides that one day he is totally going to move there.

At twenty-three, he does. As if foreshadowed by the civics class that set his heart on the city, that residency, for Eli, comes with the world’s most boring job. He is a clerk, in one of the City’s seemingly infinite offices of municipal record keeping. Most days, he works deep underground, where the least useful paperwork imaginable — the records of the Dead — is kept. But it is the days he must rise to the surface he finds most annoying; it means someone has made an error that he must track down and resolve in person. It’s not, after all, like the Dead have cell phones. Those require contracts which require credit cards, and both of those things are at least difficult to obtain without being part of the breathing and banking world.

His colleagues tease him as he hustles out of the Greek-revival building that’s so much prettier on the outside than the inside. They all claim that they stopped caring about their jobs after the first week, but Eli is up to nearly four months and is still armed with an enthusiasm his peers don’t just deem absurd, but unnecessary. Eli flips them off as he goes.

The Roosevelts and the Underwoods (and the Cooks and the Keanes)

Last night I had the super cool opportunity to attend The Roosevelts Meet the Underwoods: A Conversation Between Ken Burns & Beau Willimon at the Paley Center.

Here at Avian30 we are huge, huge fans of House of Cards.  I think it’s one of the best romances on television, and it fills me with constant delight in a way I’m supposed to think is naughty, but actually totally don’t.  So I was beyond tickled when Willimon said that one of his goals with the show has been to create a drama about a successful marriage.

Because that’s both exactly one of the things that turns my crank about House of Cards and one of the things Erin and I try to bring to our stories — that ongoing HEA narratives are the result drama, often external to the relationship, successfully navigated.

Willimon also kept noting that he doesn’t view House of Cards as a political drama.  It is, he said, about power, not politics.

Which means this is where I confess that Starling and the rest of the Love in Los Angeles books aren’t about romance.  They are romances — this isn’t us eschewing or feeling ashamed of their genre.

But at core their stories are not about romance or fame but about translucence/opacity and about permeability.  How much can another person really know you? Do you have a self when your job is to sell someone else’s fantasy? And how much in an overtly constructed life are you able to let someone else in — not just romantically and sexually, but intellectually, spiritually, familially, and physically?

These questions are constant in Starling and its sequels.  And they drive the plot forward not just along the axis of Alex and Paul, but for all the characters in their myriad and complex relationships.  Liam, Carly, and Victor, among others, are deeply involved with these issues (suddenly, I’m realizing one day we’ll have to make a chart).

These ideas also extend not just to the interpersonal relationships in the books, but the locational ones.  How much can Alex let Paragon, Indiana live inside him? To what degree is it reasonable for Paul to feel haunted by the land he grew up on? And can New York always keep Liam safe, simply because he knows its systems?

So while we still have several months still until Starling comes out, in my (not remotely) copious free time, I clearly need to catch up on my non-fiction reading regarding the Roosevelts. You all, meanwhile, need to catch up on House of Cards.  (And, by the way, just because I’m recommending the romance of a power-hungry opposite sex couple, doesn’t mean they’re straight).

Your mom read your teen lesbian romance and thinks it could be steamier… awkward or awesome?

Perhaps fortunately, Erin and I are starting to run out of Your mom! stories (although her mom totally just emailed her to ask about the BDSM project and implied it was like when Erin was really interested in elves, so maybe not).

Other authors, however, have tons of Your mom! stories, and from time to time, we’re going to feature them here for our amusement and yours, and to help promote other folks in the field.  If you’re the author of LGBTQ fiction and would like to share a Your mom! story about one of your projects, you can email us at erin.and.racheline@gmail.com.

Meanwhile, we’d like to introduce you to J.L. Douglas, author of the upcoming YA novel Lunaside, due out from Prizm (that’s Torquere’s YA imprint) on January 7, 2015.

Moira, the main character, has been out to her family and co-workers at Lunaside summer camp for about a year when the story starts. Her family seems supportive at first, but then she meets Andrea, her first girlfriend, and invites her home for a dinner date. After that, her mother starts blaming her “gay crisis” on the fact that she’s shown no interest in courting universities during her senior year of high-school.

So Moira starts her summer as Lunaside’s lone art counselor trying to prove her mother wrong by doing the best job she can. That quickly gets complicated when Andrea gets hired for Lunaside’s new film camp.

When Millie, Lunaside’s new drama camp counselor, expresses an bluntly immediate interest in Moira–a feeling she admits might be mutual–her plans to keep it all together just fall apart entirely.

And that’s before the camp owner conscripts her into starring in Lunaside’s new web series!

J.L. tells us:

Lunaside is a lesbian romance, but there’s nothing graphic in it so you could probably assume that there would be no Mom-shocking moments in it.

You would be right. However, that is not how I felt when my mom read it. In the unedited draft, there are love scenes. Not graphic ones, but it’s also not entirely G-rated. And it’s written in first-person POV.

And yet, my mom offered to read the manuscript anyway. She’s a great barometer for how interesting a story is. She has a short attention span for books, and will not read anything that lags for even a second.

That led to:

Me: “So?”

Mom: “I liked it a lot! It kept me turning pages.”

Me: “And..?”

Mom: “And what?”

Me: “The love scenes? They weren’t…you know, too much?”

Mom: “Wait, what love scenes?”

Me: “You know, where Moira and …”

Mom: “Oh. That was not a love scene. That was more of a…very lightly romantic scene.”

 And then she laughed and said she’s used to much more heat (and would read that story, if ever I wanted to go in that direction).

Proof that sometimes we’re not the ones being shocking and we should trust the awesome women that raised us!

You can visit J.L. on the web at Eye of the Goat.

Romance @ Random: Penny Dreadful Episode 2 Recap

This week’s recap is up!

Ethan drinks a lot, thus winning himself a new love interest; Vanessa is super creepy, but not nearly as creepy as Sir Malcolm; the ancient Egyptian apocalypse is coming; Frankenstein’s creature is still breaking my heart; and in the surprise of the century to no one, it turns out Dorian Grey is very pretty.

Do the thing! Bite-sized pieces edition

As has been mentioned, I’ve been traveling a lot lately. Thankfully, I’ll be home Tuesday morning.

Traveling is one of those things I am both very good at — I do it a lot and I haven’t gotten stranded or detained by authorities yet — and something I am very bad at. To be frank, despite the cool opportunities and experiences, it stresses me the hell out.

One of the problems with travel for me is that there are so many steps. For example, I recently had to get from Pretoria to Las Vegas. Which was really getting from Pretoria to the Johannesburg airport and going through immigration; then flying to Heathrow, retrieving my luggage, and going through immigration; before hopping a bus to Gatwick, rechecking my bags and going through immigration; before arriving  in Las Vegas and going through immigration again before retrieving my bags.

This was all further complicated by my not having a hotel in Las Vegas when I left Pretoria, never having done the bus from Heathrow to Gatwick, and bonus, not having a working mobile phone until I hit the U.S! I also knew I was landing in Vegas without a plane ticket back to New York and had decided to try to juggle a dinner in L.A. into that picture.

In short — too much stuff! A lot of people got a lot of really freaked out emails from me along that route. Thank god for the free wi-fi in Heathrow. Everyone wrote back telling me just to do the next thing on the list and not worry about the whole chain. Except my partner, Patty; she also told me I was good and acknowledged my pain.

Pursuing an ambition — or writing a book — is a lot like all of this. You have 1,000 things to do, and they are all interconnected. You know where you’re supposed to end up, but aren’t 100% sure of how you’ll get there and you don’t always have the level of control you want. Also, you’re totally freaked out.

But all you have to do is the next tiny thing on the list. And then the next, and then the next.

Along the way, it helps to have sensible people you can freak out to. And sympathetic people who can validate your emotional state. Sometimes, you have to reorder or delay stuff (like that dinner in L.A. — that was not in the available flight cards ultimately; or like a scene that Erin and I first thought was in Starling, later cut from Doves and now is the perfectly positioned near opener of the third book in the Love in Los Angeles series).

So today’s Do the thing! is all about breaking stuff into little pieces (in some ways it always is). What can we help you chop up or give you a place to freak out about? Because to do the thing, you’ve got to do the things.

Sneak Peek: (BDSM) Conference

With the manuscript of novel #3 out with first readers, Racheline in South Africa for two weeks (and currently in Las Vegas, also for her day job), and me moving from one side of DC to another, we decided to have some fun and write something unrelated to any of our current and ongoing projects.

What we ended up with was what we have working-titled “Conference,” a short story set at a leather conference in San Francisco — because it was that or “BDSM” and I for one didn’t need that among my open browser tabs at my day job.

Because it’s us, “Conference” is about negotiating shifts in relationship structures, and building systems to accommodate all the vagaries of the human heart. In the midst of the chaos of the last two weeks, and the hard (emotional and writing) work the novel demanded, a story about structure and order was the perfect break.

The events of the story are less soothing to our characters, at least at first. Cameron’s only at the conference because Noah, his boyfriend and sub, thinks it’s an awesome opportunity for them to get closer to each other and get more involved in the BDSM community. The conference hasn’t even started yet, though, when Cam runs into an old familiar face, and the week turns into something much more complicated than a vacation.

Cameron’s trying to maneuver through the conference level of the hotel as efficiently as possible so that he can get back to Noah.  Now that he’s picked up their registrations, he feels more than a little bad leaving him with all the unpacking. Sure, it’s his job, and one he’s eager for because of what it means in his head, but it’s a damn boring task, and they both know it.

The hallway, however, is filled with too many people having reunions and showing off their leathers before the event has — other than a few workshops — really even started. Cameron’s still in jeans and a t-shirt from traveling and frankly has no plans to change any time soon.  He just wants people to stop being in his way.

“Cameron Evan Beck, get your perfect ass in here!”

Cameron turns to follow the voice, so familiar and fond coming from one of the workshop rooms, before he even thinks about it. It’s only as Lou, totally dressed in leathers and holding a bullwhip in his hand, pulls him into a hug in front of what’s clearly a single tail and whip workshop, that he starts to realize just how fucked he is.

“This,” Lou says, introducing him to the room before Cameron can even manage to make a sound, “is Dr. Cameron Beck, professor of queer studies at [University].”  There’s only the slightest of dramatic pauses before he adds, “Cameron used to be my boy.”

With that, Lou gives him a wet, smacking kiss on the cheek.

As always, check out what other authors are working on this week at Sneak Peek Sunday! (participating authors write in all genres and at all heat levels))

Hop Against Homophobia & Transphobia — Show your favorite LGBTQ organizations some love

So Erin & I are participating in the Hop Against Homophobia and Transphobia, in honor of the International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia. Say that three times fast.

The blog hop is specifically for those who write, publish, review or are otherwise involved in the world of LGBTQ fiction. When it comes to the romance space, I think there’s a lot of discussion to be had (and that is being had) about the perception that LGBTQ romance is really m/m romance and that it’s really being written for straight women. The thing is, just like human sexuality, it’s almost always more complicated than that. So while those are important/awesome/difficult discussions, we’re not going to do that here today.

Instead we just want to remind people that hey these things still exist, and that they are global issues, that even from within the community are not always addressed as comprehensively as they should.

To that end, we’d like people reading this who support specific organizations that aim to advocate for or help LGBTQ people in any sort of need, to comment here, with the names of and links to those organizations.

On May 25, the day after the hop ends. Erin and I will dump all the commentors into a random number generator, and choose a winner.

We’ll then make two donations on behalf of the winner (or a person the winner names or anonymously, etc. as appropriate). One will be $25 to Lambda Legal. The other will be $25 to the LGBTQ organization of their choice.

So tell us about organizations you support and what they do — no matter how big, no matter how small, no matter where they are located. Hopefully that can help drum up support above and beyond the small donation this blog will make.

Meanwhile, be sure to click on the icon for this hop to visit the other over 100 blogs participating.

Meeting the heroine when you’ve got two heroes

RWA’s NYC chapter is featuring interviews with members’ novel’s heroines on the blog this month. Next month, they’ll be interviewing the heroes.

This, as you might imagine, causes a strange dilemma when you’re writing same-sex romance. Not that the chapter isn’t welcoming (they’re pretty spectacular, frankly). But the fact remains that LGBT romance, while a fast growing segment, is still a small part of the market.

So the heroine questions exist, and they compliment the hero questions, and Erin and I have two heroes. Now, we could have waited until June and had both of Starling‘s heroes, Paul and Alex, interviewed separately, but that wouldn’t have quite done the exercise justice. Besides, Alex stumbles into his life of fame by yelling at someone for calling him a twink. His appropriate outrage at misgendering in this RWA exercise and his general distaste for the media, made it seem worthwhile to us to have him answer the heroine questions as is.

So that’s what’s going on there: Alex reacting to the world’s unreasonable and inappropriate expectation that in a same-sex relationship someone is always the “girl” and someone else is always the “boy.”

Do check out the other heroine interviews. They’ll give you a sense of the amazing diversity in the field. (Check out Falguni Kothari’s Booty and the Beast as just one example).

We also do want to note that while the primary romance in Starling is m/m, that the book has several fantastic female characters, including Alex’s best friend, Gemma, and Liam’s girlfriend, Carly. They are both, absolutely, the heroes of their own stories, and when they aren’t respected accordingly, speak up strongly. Additionally, hang on for Darcy, who you won’t meet until Doves. She’s responsible for some of the funniest lines I’ve ever been involved in writing.

But meanwhile, back to Alex and those heroine questions: That picture? Totally not Alex. Who is ginger, freckled, and arguably delicate (arguably, because he was on the high school wrestling team; he may not look like it at first glance, but he can do a lot of damage).

Class announcement: Collaborative Writing

As we’ve mentioned before, Erin and I get a lot of questions about how this co-writing thing works. If you’re interested in the logistical and creative process of doing the co-author thing in the romance novel space, we’ll be teaching an online workshop October 13 – 20, 2014. We’ll cover everything from evaluating your own readiness to collaborate to finding other writers who are a good fit for your interests and goals. We’ll also look at creative process strategies, protecting your business interests, and the unique logistical and marketing challenges that can come with co-authored works.

The workshop costs $10 if you’re a member of RWA’s Contemporary Romance chapter and $20 for non-members. You can register for the workshop (and other cool learning opportunities) at the chapter’s website.

We hope you’ll join us!

Writing without Shame: WRWDC

As mentioned in the Do the Thing! post on Monday, while I do organization, because Racheline can’t, she does a lot of our marketing, because it’s still weird for me and talking to people is scary. Of course, that lovely division of labor isn’t always practical or possible; such was this past Saturday, when I went to my first meeting of the Washington, DC chapter of Romance Writers of America (You can read Racheline’s post about her experience at the NYC Chapter’s April meeting here.)

Because I am twelve, I had a horrifically stupid problem the morning of the meeting: I had a hickey on my neck. Appearing in public with a bruise on one’s neck isn’t generally a thing one does in any sort of mixed company, but May in DC means disgustingly hot and humid and I so did not want to wear a scarf. But then, I thought to myself (and in email conversation with Racheline, who thought my predicament was absolutely hilarious) that if there is a group of people in the world comfortable with the various workings of sex, it is going to be a room full of romance writers.

So I did my best to put the weirdness of doing a public event and little bit of embarrassment aside, skipped the scarf, and went,

The writers of the WRWDC group are completely welcoming and lovely, and the key speaker for the day, Mindy Klasky, gave two excellent talks on various parts of the businesses. And, occupied with thoughts of series-building, and marketing plans, and the intricacies of self-publishing, I completely forgot to think about the damn hickey.

Women are taught to be full of shame about all sorts of things — including our desires, whether that’s sexual or career-related or anything else. We’re shamed by others for the books we write and read, romance novels included. But the WRWDC room was full of people, all of them women, who are serious about their craft, proud of their business, and capable advocates of their work without any sort of shame or apology.

It can be a little agonizing to say to a friend on a street, “I write romance novels,” and I’ve been met with eyerolls and assumptions that my writing is somehow less worthy or lesser quality than a sci-fi book or something involving dragons. This is of course bullshit, but there are some days when I feel like I’m shouting I AM HERE AND I AM GOOD into a void that keeps telling me I’m anything but.

Having a network of other writers focused on doing the work, not justifying it to themselves or anyone else, is more than encouraging — it’s empowering. When the topic of the day isn’t “no really, romance has value! (and it does, and is a massive enough market that it doesn’t need mine or anyone else’s justification) but “What tools keep you on track when you are juggling writing, and editing, and marketing on multiple projects simultaneously?” it does a massive service to everyone in the room, skipping over all the useless shame and leaving the way clear (or at least clearer) to doing all the things.

So skip the scarf. And do the thing.