Emily Cale's Blog, page 11
January 23, 2012
Interviewed Times Two
I've been interviewed today about Public Display of Affection. Twice. Please stop by to keep me company.
Why are manhole covers round and other questions I don't have a good answer to
Who would play my characters in a movie?
Why are manhole covers round and other questions I don't have a good answer to
Who would play my characters in a movie?
January 21, 2012
PDA Gets a Silver Star
I wanted to put up a quick post to thank all my readers for making Public Display of Affection a category bestseller on All Romance ebooks. It bounced around in the top 5 all day yesterday, earning it a silver star and making me very happy. I even managed to catch it when it was in the top position.
Ignore all the other crap. I'm not actually very good at this stuff.The little silver star next to my book always makes me smile a lot!
January 19, 2012
New Release: Public Display of Affection
Yay! It's out! My first 1 Night Stand story, Public Display of Affection, was released today by Decadent Publishing. It's a lesbian erotic romance with a hint of exhibitionism. I'll be hopping around to a bunch of places to talk about the book, starting with a post of Babbling About Books. My post will be up at some point today, and I'll update the link when it goes live.
Okay, so now on to the important stuff:
After a heartbreaking end to her relationship with her girlfriend, Lucy Stark is looking to try something more adventurous. She turns to Madame Eve’s 1Night Stand service to help her find the perfect woman to push her boundaries and introduce her to the more daring side of a sexual encounter.
Samantha Taylor’s helped more than one woman explore her sexuality, but Lucy’s the first to really get to her. Keeping her walls up and the women she dates from getting inside is a skill she’s managed to master. After one night of unbridled passion, she has to decide whether to give up her hard exterior or let the woman of her dreams slip away.
You can read an excerpt here
Buy From:Decadent Publishing * Amazon * All Romance Ebooks * Bookstrand (more links to come)
Okay, so now on to the important stuff:
After a heartbreaking end to her relationship with her girlfriend, Lucy Stark is looking to try something more adventurous. She turns to Madame Eve’s 1Night Stand service to help her find the perfect woman to push her boundaries and introduce her to the more daring side of a sexual encounter.
Samantha Taylor’s helped more than one woman explore her sexuality, but Lucy’s the first to really get to her. Keeping her walls up and the women she dates from getting inside is a skill she’s managed to master. After one night of unbridled passion, she has to decide whether to give up her hard exterior or let the woman of her dreams slip away.
You can read an excerpt here
Buy From:Decadent Publishing * Amazon * All Romance Ebooks * Bookstrand (more links to come)
January 16, 2012
Interview with Piper Trace
I found Piper on Twitter one day and quickly discovered that we share an editor, a love for tiaras, and a dirty sense of humor. So I asked her to stop by to promote her latest release. Be nice. Or not. Whatever.
Hi, Emily! I’m so excited to be here! I brought my good lingerie, matching socks and bail money, so we should be all set to hit the town as soon as we’re done with this interview.
Good, because I need a few drinks to make it through this week. So tell me about your newest release?
So my newest release (my very first release!) is Fueling Her Fire, my debut erotic romance novella from Ellora’s Cave. Fueling Her Fire is about Kip, a former small-town geek, who’s now all grown up and living in Chicago as a successful lawyer. She may have moved on from that small town, but she’s never really gotten over Dylan, the handsome and popular football player who took her virginity and then broke her heart and humiliated her eight years ago.
Kip makes a last-minute decision to return to Dalton Run, her small West Virginia hometown, and spend Christmas alone in her grandmother’s mountain cabin, packing only wine, comfort food and her hot-pink vibrator. Her plan is to hole-up in the woods, reassess her love life and rediscover her sensuality alone.
But a last-minute firewood delivery brings her face-to-face again with Dylan, whom she’d cut out of her life eight years earlier, and they end up snowed in together on Christmas Eve. Neither can deny the passion that still smolders between them, but can they overcome the past and let the flames ignite?
[Aside from Piper: Dylan delivers the wood, but you’ll have to read the book to find out exactly how well Dylan delivers the wood, if you know what I mean.] ;)
I'd say it sounds great, but I've already read it and know that it is AMAZING! Fueling Her Fire is your first release, but it wasn't your first contract. Tell me about getting that first email.
Oh wow, these stories are always fun. I’m never sure if I should admit this, but since one of my defining traits is to just try to be who I am and not apologize for it, I’m going to admit it… (editor Meghan Conrad? I wrote this sentence and then clicked my heels three times but you never came. Now it’s going to live on forever on the internet in this state.) Sorry, I digress. My admission: I started writing because I was SOOO disappointed in the lack of hot vampire sex in the Twilight series! So I decided to take up a cause near and dear to my heart…more good books with lots of hot sex!! [Picture my arm raised in the air, fist clenched, a determined look on my face and some dirty thoughts in my mind.]
About eight months after I’d started writing, I signed up for a conference that had editor pitch appointments available. [It was Lori Foster’s Readers & Writers Get Together in Ohio—awesome conference!]I scored some appointments and made the conference my deadline for finishing my first book Come When Called, a light-BDSM M/M/F ménage novel. That gave me about nine months to get it ready.
From those pitches I had requests for fulls and sent those off. About two weeks after I sent the fulls I got an email from one of the publishers saying they wanted to publish Come When Called! I was sitting in a parking lot reading emails on my phone when the acceptance came through. I screamed and jumped up and down (as much as I could in the front seat of my car) and generally became…I’ll call it, extremely eff-ing exuberant. Had you seen it, you might call it…batshit crazy. But again, I digress.
The acceptance was from a really great publisher with whom I would have been extremely proud to have been published by, but it wasn’t from my “dream” publisher, Ellora’s Cave. Then about a week later I heard from Meghan Conrad (my editor) at Ellora’s Cave that she also wanted to offer me a publishing contract! I think we’d all call my reaction to that email batshit crazy.
Anyway, so contract for Come When Called signed and edits in process, I show Meghan this novella I wrote before Come When Called…a sweet small-town Christmas story with some hot sex…and after she read it, she said EC wanted it too! Since it was a holiday story, we put Come When Called on hold to get Fueling Her Fire out by Christmas. That’s how Fueling Her Fire ended up as the second book I sold but my first book released.
Shortly after these two contracts I heard from Cleis Press that my F/F short story, Born to Ride, had been accepted for a Sacchi Green-edited anthology called Girl Crazy. I began to feel like a real writer at this point. Not someone who just played one on TV.
What was your inspiration for this story? More importantly, have you ever been snowed into a cabin with a hot man?
I don’t really have a particular inspiration. A few things kinda worked together, like stew you make from whatever ingredients you have in the fridge that haven’t gone bad yet. I grew up in a small town and I know all about small town rumors and the havoc they can wreak. I’ve spent a lot of time in back-woods West Virginia. I’ve…been in a cabin before, but never snowed in with a hot hunk, unfortunately. And my mom heats her house with a wood stove. Those are all the ingredients I had in my head that hadn’t gone bad yet, I guess. So I made smut stew. I suppose I really made erotic romance stew, but that’s not as alliterative.
I actually wrote two Christmas stories at the same time—a naughty one and a nice one. Fueling Her Fire was the nice one and the naughty one is a BDSM short story inspired by Dickins’ A Christmas Carol. That one remains in my computer awaiting its proper forum, I suppose.
That was your "nice" story? I hate to think what's in your "naughty" one. Maybe next year :) You've written f/f, m/f, m/m, and m/f/m. What do you like writing best? How about reading?
Oh wow, you’re asking hard questions! You’re gonna really make me think here… I’m not sure I’ve written enough of any of it to have a true favorite yet. I guess I’d say M/F, because when the rubber meets the road (or the cock?) that’s my natural…um…inclination. But I have a soft spot for all of it, and for me the stories and the characters rule the day.
I don’t so much set out to write a particular genre, as much as the genre just comes naturally from my characters. If my character tells me she’s a lesbian, then we’re having F/F sex that day. If my character tells me he’s a bisexual man with a hankering for a little stubble scratch on his chest, and muscular hips, chances are we’re going to start writing some hot male lovin’ any page now.
I think there are so many beautiful and honest and raw ways to express love and sensuality in this world that sometimes the lines blur, if there even are lines. And that’s what is so cool, and I think brave, about the world of erotic romance. All are welcome.
For reading, again, it’s not so much the orientation of the characters as much as it’s about characters I love doing really naughty things to each other. Give me those two ingredients and I’m hooked.
I know you are in the middle of crazy awesome revisions at the moment. What is your favorite part of the editing process?
I am not a huge fan of the editing process, honestly. Not because I can’t handle criticism or someone asking me to change “my vision”, but because I’m such an OCD control freak about my writing that edits make me very nervous. It’s an unnatural process for me to look at only a portion of a book at a time, but sometimes because of the schedule of the edits, that’s all you have time to do.
I can’t tell you how OFTEN when I sit down to do edits that I start on page one and go from there. It’s a terrible habit. The only way I make progress is by how far I can get before I have to stop reading and start rewriting. Then when I’ve rewritten that new part, I go back to the beginning and start again to make sure it all flows naturally together. That’s why I take so long to write! By the time I’m finished with a book, I think I practically have all the words in it memorized.
But really the best part for me is my editor Meghan Conrad. I got so lucky to find an editor who totally gets me and is smart as a whip to boot!
Yes, Meghan is pretty awesome. If you were to give one piece of advice to your sixteen year old self, what would it be?
Don’t get that perm! And then it would be, “Don’t waste your youth with that guy!” To illustrate my point, I give you a recap of a conversation I had with my friend the other day:
Me, having a rare cigarette: “Ah, my gosh. You know how some things take you right back? Well smoking this cigarette takes me right back to high school.” (Which I later realized was odd because I smoked in college but never in high school.)
My friend: “Oh, I know what you mean! Certain things take me right back to high school too! Like a certain movie, or a song… “
Me: “Or a mediocre cock attached to a redneck…”
Oh wait, I’m guessing you meant professional advice, or advice about reaching my potential.
Okay, I would have told my sixteen year old self to follow her dreams and do what she *really* wanted to do with her life. I didn’t seriously pick up writing until I was thirty-seven and I should have done it much earlier. But I had some strange, societal, peer-pressure idea in my head that since I was a smart girl, if I didn’t go and stretch the intellectual potential I had for law school or med school or graduate school, I would be “wasting” my brains and letting myself down.
Knowing what I do now, I would have told my sixteen year old self that letting myself down is more like investing years of time and effort into something that suffocates you instead of believing in your dreams. And then I’d tell her/me that it’s NEVER a waste to do something you love, enjoy, and for which you have passion. And finally I would have told her to wear all the belly shirts she can get away with, because there would come a day when she couldn’t…um, “get away” with wearing them anymore. So max out the belly-shirt-wearing while you still can. You know—all the important stuff.
[Emily's note to Piper: NO MORE SMOKING!] Okay, last question: What are the odds of you bringing your cover model to me as a gift at Romanticon 2012?
How HOT is that guy?? But Emily, honestly, if I could give him to you as a gift, I totally WOULD. Because I’m that kind of friend. Only…by the time I gave him to you, he would be in heavily used condition. Because I’m also THAT kind of friend. ;D
Is this interview over? Now put your black lace bra on, Emily, and let’s hit the town!
Fine, but only after we tell people where to buy your book.
FUELING HER FIRE is available from Ellora's Cave, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, All Romance ebooks, and other ebook retailers.
You can stalk Piper (like me) on her website, Twitter, Facebook, and Goodreads.
Hi, Emily! I’m so excited to be here! I brought my good lingerie, matching socks and bail money, so we should be all set to hit the town as soon as we’re done with this interview.
Good, because I need a few drinks to make it through this week. So tell me about your newest release?
So my newest release (my very first release!) is Fueling Her Fire, my debut erotic romance novella from Ellora’s Cave. Fueling Her Fire is about Kip, a former small-town geek, who’s now all grown up and living in Chicago as a successful lawyer. She may have moved on from that small town, but she’s never really gotten over Dylan, the handsome and popular football player who took her virginity and then broke her heart and humiliated her eight years ago.
Kip makes a last-minute decision to return to Dalton Run, her small West Virginia hometown, and spend Christmas alone in her grandmother’s mountain cabin, packing only wine, comfort food and her hot-pink vibrator. Her plan is to hole-up in the woods, reassess her love life and rediscover her sensuality alone.
But a last-minute firewood delivery brings her face-to-face again with Dylan, whom she’d cut out of her life eight years earlier, and they end up snowed in together on Christmas Eve. Neither can deny the passion that still smolders between them, but can they overcome the past and let the flames ignite?
[Aside from Piper: Dylan delivers the wood, but you’ll have to read the book to find out exactly how well Dylan delivers the wood, if you know what I mean.] ;)
I'd say it sounds great, but I've already read it and know that it is AMAZING! Fueling Her Fire is your first release, but it wasn't your first contract. Tell me about getting that first email.
Oh wow, these stories are always fun. I’m never sure if I should admit this, but since one of my defining traits is to just try to be who I am and not apologize for it, I’m going to admit it… (editor Meghan Conrad? I wrote this sentence and then clicked my heels three times but you never came. Now it’s going to live on forever on the internet in this state.) Sorry, I digress. My admission: I started writing because I was SOOO disappointed in the lack of hot vampire sex in the Twilight series! So I decided to take up a cause near and dear to my heart…more good books with lots of hot sex!! [Picture my arm raised in the air, fist clenched, a determined look on my face and some dirty thoughts in my mind.]
About eight months after I’d started writing, I signed up for a conference that had editor pitch appointments available. [It was Lori Foster’s Readers & Writers Get Together in Ohio—awesome conference!]I scored some appointments and made the conference my deadline for finishing my first book Come When Called, a light-BDSM M/M/F ménage novel. That gave me about nine months to get it ready.
From those pitches I had requests for fulls and sent those off. About two weeks after I sent the fulls I got an email from one of the publishers saying they wanted to publish Come When Called! I was sitting in a parking lot reading emails on my phone when the acceptance came through. I screamed and jumped up and down (as much as I could in the front seat of my car) and generally became…I’ll call it, extremely eff-ing exuberant. Had you seen it, you might call it…batshit crazy. But again, I digress.
The acceptance was from a really great publisher with whom I would have been extremely proud to have been published by, but it wasn’t from my “dream” publisher, Ellora’s Cave. Then about a week later I heard from Meghan Conrad (my editor) at Ellora’s Cave that she also wanted to offer me a publishing contract! I think we’d all call my reaction to that email batshit crazy.
Anyway, so contract for Come When Called signed and edits in process, I show Meghan this novella I wrote before Come When Called…a sweet small-town Christmas story with some hot sex…and after she read it, she said EC wanted it too! Since it was a holiday story, we put Come When Called on hold to get Fueling Her Fire out by Christmas. That’s how Fueling Her Fire ended up as the second book I sold but my first book released.
Shortly after these two contracts I heard from Cleis Press that my F/F short story, Born to Ride, had been accepted for a Sacchi Green-edited anthology called Girl Crazy. I began to feel like a real writer at this point. Not someone who just played one on TV.
What was your inspiration for this story? More importantly, have you ever been snowed into a cabin with a hot man?
I don’t really have a particular inspiration. A few things kinda worked together, like stew you make from whatever ingredients you have in the fridge that haven’t gone bad yet. I grew up in a small town and I know all about small town rumors and the havoc they can wreak. I’ve spent a lot of time in back-woods West Virginia. I’ve…been in a cabin before, but never snowed in with a hot hunk, unfortunately. And my mom heats her house with a wood stove. Those are all the ingredients I had in my head that hadn’t gone bad yet, I guess. So I made smut stew. I suppose I really made erotic romance stew, but that’s not as alliterative.
I actually wrote two Christmas stories at the same time—a naughty one and a nice one. Fueling Her Fire was the nice one and the naughty one is a BDSM short story inspired by Dickins’ A Christmas Carol. That one remains in my computer awaiting its proper forum, I suppose.
That was your "nice" story? I hate to think what's in your "naughty" one. Maybe next year :) You've written f/f, m/f, m/m, and m/f/m. What do you like writing best? How about reading?
Oh wow, you’re asking hard questions! You’re gonna really make me think here… I’m not sure I’ve written enough of any of it to have a true favorite yet. I guess I’d say M/F, because when the rubber meets the road (or the cock?) that’s my natural…um…inclination. But I have a soft spot for all of it, and for me the stories and the characters rule the day.
I don’t so much set out to write a particular genre, as much as the genre just comes naturally from my characters. If my character tells me she’s a lesbian, then we’re having F/F sex that day. If my character tells me he’s a bisexual man with a hankering for a little stubble scratch on his chest, and muscular hips, chances are we’re going to start writing some hot male lovin’ any page now.
I think there are so many beautiful and honest and raw ways to express love and sensuality in this world that sometimes the lines blur, if there even are lines. And that’s what is so cool, and I think brave, about the world of erotic romance. All are welcome.
For reading, again, it’s not so much the orientation of the characters as much as it’s about characters I love doing really naughty things to each other. Give me those two ingredients and I’m hooked.
I know you are in the middle of crazy awesome revisions at the moment. What is your favorite part of the editing process?
I am not a huge fan of the editing process, honestly. Not because I can’t handle criticism or someone asking me to change “my vision”, but because I’m such an OCD control freak about my writing that edits make me very nervous. It’s an unnatural process for me to look at only a portion of a book at a time, but sometimes because of the schedule of the edits, that’s all you have time to do.
I can’t tell you how OFTEN when I sit down to do edits that I start on page one and go from there. It’s a terrible habit. The only way I make progress is by how far I can get before I have to stop reading and start rewriting. Then when I’ve rewritten that new part, I go back to the beginning and start again to make sure it all flows naturally together. That’s why I take so long to write! By the time I’m finished with a book, I think I practically have all the words in it memorized.
But really the best part for me is my editor Meghan Conrad. I got so lucky to find an editor who totally gets me and is smart as a whip to boot!
Yes, Meghan is pretty awesome. If you were to give one piece of advice to your sixteen year old self, what would it be?
Don’t get that perm! And then it would be, “Don’t waste your youth with that guy!” To illustrate my point, I give you a recap of a conversation I had with my friend the other day:
Me, having a rare cigarette: “Ah, my gosh. You know how some things take you right back? Well smoking this cigarette takes me right back to high school.” (Which I later realized was odd because I smoked in college but never in high school.)
My friend: “Oh, I know what you mean! Certain things take me right back to high school too! Like a certain movie, or a song… “
Me: “Or a mediocre cock attached to a redneck…”
Oh wait, I’m guessing you meant professional advice, or advice about reaching my potential.
Okay, I would have told my sixteen year old self to follow her dreams and do what she *really* wanted to do with her life. I didn’t seriously pick up writing until I was thirty-seven and I should have done it much earlier. But I had some strange, societal, peer-pressure idea in my head that since I was a smart girl, if I didn’t go and stretch the intellectual potential I had for law school or med school or graduate school, I would be “wasting” my brains and letting myself down.
Knowing what I do now, I would have told my sixteen year old self that letting myself down is more like investing years of time and effort into something that suffocates you instead of believing in your dreams. And then I’d tell her/me that it’s NEVER a waste to do something you love, enjoy, and for which you have passion. And finally I would have told her to wear all the belly shirts she can get away with, because there would come a day when she couldn’t…um, “get away” with wearing them anymore. So max out the belly-shirt-wearing while you still can. You know—all the important stuff.
[Emily's note to Piper: NO MORE SMOKING!] Okay, last question: What are the odds of you bringing your cover model to me as a gift at Romanticon 2012?
How HOT is that guy?? But Emily, honestly, if I could give him to you as a gift, I totally WOULD. Because I’m that kind of friend. Only…by the time I gave him to you, he would be in heavily used condition. Because I’m also THAT kind of friend. ;DIs this interview over? Now put your black lace bra on, Emily, and let’s hit the town!
Fine, but only after we tell people where to buy your book.
FUELING HER FIRE is available from Ellora's Cave, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, All Romance ebooks, and other ebook retailers.
You can stalk Piper (like me) on her website, Twitter, Facebook, and Goodreads.
January 5, 2012
New Year's Blog Hop Winners
Carrie Ann Ryan (the organizer of this amazing hop) has already picked and emailed the winners of the two grand prizes. Congrats if you are one of those people. I had two prizes I was going to give away on my blog, so here are those winners:
Winner of Best Comment (choice of books from my backlist)
You all made picking this extremely difficult. So hard that I actually picked 2 winners. DBookWhore and Reading Mind. I'll be emailing you today to see which book you want.
Random Winner ($10 gift card to e-book seller of choice)
PattieP is the winner. I'll be emailing you today to find out where you want your money too.
You all have such amazing things going on this year! For those of you who said you want to write a book, the best advice I have is to sit down and do it. Remember that you can always edit after you get the words on the page.
Winner of Best Comment (choice of books from my backlist)
You all made picking this extremely difficult. So hard that I actually picked 2 winners. DBookWhore and Reading Mind. I'll be emailing you today to see which book you want.
Random Winner ($10 gift card to e-book seller of choice)
PattieP is the winner. I'll be emailing you today to find out where you want your money too.
You all have such amazing things going on this year! For those of you who said you want to write a book, the best advice I have is to sit down and do it. Remember that you can always edit after you get the words on the page.
