Jordan Castillo Price's Blog, page 59

What Viewers are Saying about Magic Mansion

Are you reading my serialized m/m story Magic Mansion yet? Why not? It's free - and there's VOTING!

liamgrey says: "I'd avoided reading Magic Mansion because I'm not a fan of reality tv, and I like to sit and spend huge chunks of time reading, and thought I would get frustrated with the stop-and-go nature of the story.

I was wrong. I'm hooked. All of the characters are 3-dimensional and vibrant, and I don't want any of them to leave."

kriscat says: "You would be a great reality show producer. The challenges and the twists and turns are awesome. I wish Magic Mansion was a real show. I would watch it."

Intrigued? Then step into the Mansion....

Chapters 16-19 available now! Voting closes 7am CST on November 23.

Names in Scrivener

I should probably start this post by mentioning that Scrivener for Windows is out now! I worked with some beta copies of the program and found them very good, though I haven't purchased it yet, since I've rearranged my working space and am writing exclusively on Macs at the moment.

One of the features available in both Win/Mac is the Name Generator. When I'm writing along, nothing stops me faster than needing a character and not knowing what their name is. There are various parameters in the Name Generator you can adjust for: ethnicity, gender, obscurity, etc. But what I didn't know until today is that you can import your own lists as .csvs and have them come up.

So, theoretically, you could make a spreadsheet of Klingon names and import them as a category if you were writing a Star Trek story!

I have a penchant for traditional names, so I loved the ability to import historical US Census names. Scrivener Windows already has a USA category, but if you have Scrivener for Mac and you dig this feature, you may want to download some of the name databases from the site below. I did so, and I found I needed to open them and alter them in Excel before I imported them to remove the gender and year category. YMMV.

To import lists in Scrivener App, simply open the Name Generator, go to the "gear" icon, and beneath the existing list of name list types, add the .csv you've prepared by clicking the "+" symbol.

Here's a blog with tons of US names from censuses and other sources.

Romantic Mansion

I've never much thought of myself as a romance writer, though of course my books are marketed to a romance-reading crowd because there are relationships and sex in them. I think for the most part it's a good enough fit, although once in a while I'll take a plot somewhere that sideswipes hardcore romance readers because they expect a book to do something a romance novel would do, rather than what a thriller, for instance, would do.

I think the crux of the matter is that pure romance-genre work must contain the main plot of "will they or won't they get together?" which, of course, they will...but the point of reading the book is to see how that get-together unfolds.

My books aren't usually about that. (There are some notable exceptions like Petit Morts, where the coming together of the new relationship is the whole point, or maybe Hemovore, where a disease kept the would-be lovers from touching.) But for the most part, I'm interested in the dynamic of how a relationship functions rather than contriving to keep two people apart as the sole source of tension.

And so, as I'm working on Magic Mansion, it occurs to me that the setup of the whole thing has a profoundly romance-genre-esque vibe, where John wants Ricardo and Ricardo wants John, but they've got to keep their hands to themselves because they're on a reality show and the cameras are rolling, and exposing their gay relationship to a prime-time crowd will be a sure way to get them booted out of a competition they each need to win.

One thing I've noticed about this setup is that it really does make for some delicious "I'm dying to be with you but I can't" tension. Another, though, is that the enforced separation is giving my characters some time to reflect that I wouldn't normally give them. This occurred to me as I had John wondering about what it might mean if Ricardo actually won the competition, and whether or not that would prevent them from being together once the show wrapped. I'm finding this reflection to be good fodder for the future culmination of the story, with all the conflicting purposes and desires, because I can only plan ahead so much. Since there's audience-participation voting involved, even I can't say exactly how things will end. I just need to make sure I've scattered enough strands to be able to braid them all into a satisfying conclusion.

Catch up on Magic Mansion here before the next installment comes out 11/15!

Rain and hail

It poured all night and now it's hailing. It's garbage day/recycle day, and I think I will just hold on to the wad of cardboard I've been dying to get rid of rather than attempting to somehow wrap it up, putting it out, and having it turn to mush. Or chasing the recycle guy down the street with it. Man, I'm betting he really doesn't care for his job on days like today.


When he touched the wall, it collapsed in to reveal a cavernous room beyond, with vaulted brick ceilings and a rosette stained glass window at the far end letting in light. My friend slid down the rubble, kind of like  a big slide since the floor was twenty feet down, and at the bottom he found all these dwarf fruit trees in half-barrel pots. He brought me up a pear. I (somehow) got down to the bottom and started going through the strange things there. Lots of stationery and cards along the edges, as if the place had been some sort of shop, and we found a handwritten record that we presumed to be of the previous owner's death, in the mid-eighties. I found it somewhat of a relief because I took it as a sign my friend owned the space free and clear if the previous owner was dead.

My friend is also a full-time writer...not sure if that has anything to do with anything.

Webby stuff I figured out today

As a side-job I mind the website of a nearby township, and their clerk asked me to post some budget spreadsheets today, which created an interesting challenge.

The site is a Wordpress site and the designer hasn't given either of us admin privileges, so I can only do HTML stuff in the body...I can't dig into the CSS or the stuff in the page's head. The pages have a narrow central column that's maybe 5-600 pixels. The spreadsheets were very wide.

First, I found a way to convert Excel data to HTML tables, yay! The Tableizer This was very cool, and who knows, I may need to use it again someday.

When I plunked the wide table into the narrow column, it spilled over the right hand side and over the search box. Very ugly. Then with some research I found I could create a [div] that would put a scrollbar at the bottom for me. In case you ever need a scrollbar, here are the instructions.

happy photoshop accident

I was just using this random photo from my computer to follow along a tutorial on Lynda.com about selecting hair...but I ended up giving the picture a bunch more depth. Accidentally, kind of.

When I first selected the hair, it had whiteish edges, because the original background of the model was white, and I wanted to place it on a red background. So I thought, well, what if I just darken the edges of the pixels once I select it.

But I don't have my tablet hooked up to this computer yet (long story, but I swapped the computers in my house a couple weeks ago when one started acting funny and I couldn't afford a meltdown) and so I was just burning in the edges with big strokes of my mouse...and I realized I'd really improved the midtones in the model's complexion! The original was so small and low-res, it was kind of hard for me to miss any parts of his face with my broad mouse-strokes.

So hit the whites of his eyes with a little dodging, softened the skin a bit, and now I kind of like him. I was trying to get better at selecting hair...and I ended up getting better at making a washed-out model have more midtone depth.

(I got sloppy selecting the hair down around the collar, I know. This is just a quickie practice.)

Pool Standoff

Thank you so much for the Halloween goodies, andy_slayde , ali_wilde , and cinnatart ! I'm still debating about whether or not I want to give out candy on Halloween night in RL. Usually I just have a small handful of trick-or-treaters, and I don't much feel like sitting in the living room waiting for them to show up. Grumpy, I know.

Last night at water aerobics, the motel where we work out had some kind of promotion going, because the pool was full of other people (which never happens) and they were all irritated with us for coming in and exercising, because I guess the front desk failed to mention that the pool got used for an exercise class 2 hours every week. (There were other things for them to do while we were in the pool: a hot tub, a wading pool, some water slides. But everyone got all territorial.)

So our teacher was hell-bent on proving we needed every inch of that damn pool...and she kicked our asses from here to next week doing it. I usually stand near her, and as the level of intensity got ridiculous, I started groaning, "Joan...you're killing me."

"Well, I know."

She's my mother's age and has a bunch of pins in her thigh where she shattered her thighbone last winter, and she's tough as nails and can totally kick my butt. (And she's awesome, that goes without saying.)

Anyway. Today I feel it. In fact, I felt it at 3am. Very intensely! Owie.

Back cover question

I'm curious: what kinds of stuff do you like to see on the back of a book you have already bought online? In other words, you don't see the back ’til the book is in your hands, so it's not like browsing in a store where you might read a blurb or review tidbit that encouraged you to flip through. What about extra graphics, like the image on the back of GhosTV? I guess I see that as a "special treat" for the book buyer.

I'm trying to lay out a book cover and going through the "blahs" today.

Kennedy, Lanyon, London & Price Chatting with Joyfully Reviewed

Petit Morts, starring Chance the mysterious chocolatier, is a multi-author M/M series by Jordan Castillo Price, Josh Lanyon, Sean Kennedy, and Clare London. There are 17 novelettes in all, and stories 11-17 are coming out October 25!


Join Jordan, Josh, Sean and Clare for a chat: about the series, about
their writing—about chocolate!—from Noon to 6 PM Eastern US, on October 26 at Chatting with Joyfully Reviewed. See you there!

(This should be an interesting day for me as I'm also doing a reading at Frugal Muse West in Madison at 7pm!)

Magic Mansion voting closes tomorrow

Just a quickie reminder - Magic Mansion voting closes in the morning. (I think most of the voters have weighed in, but you never know, there might be readers thinking, "Oh yeah! I meant to do that!")

I called to activate a debit card today and it didn't work, so I needed to call my bank and talk to someone in person, and he asked how long I'd had it. I said, "Oh, like a couple of weeks."

"Because if it's more than a month, you won't be able to use the automated system."

Then I thought back and realized, it was probably more like TWO MONTHS! HAHAHA! But I just said, "Yeah, that's probably the reason." Cos I'm so calm, cool and collected.

What's my point?? Oh yeah, I know how time flies, but don't let the voting slip away.....

Read and vote here!