Lynn Flewelling's Blog, page 52

Exhausted

I have spent the weekend helping son #2 set up his first solo apartment. He's got a good job, found a nice place in the former carriage house of the most ornate pink mansion I have ever seen, but he's never had a place on his own, without roommates. It's the first place that's solely his, a home of his own making. I remember my first solo place. There's the most amazing sense of autonomy and coziness, with occassional bouts of loneliness.

Anyhoo, it's been a family project, moving his stuff to the new place, trips to Ikea, Target and the like to furnish the new place. I love doing that sort of thing, making a nest, turning an empty, alien space into a home. So I've had to really rein myself in, and let this be Tim's project. I'm just along to give advice when asked. Which, it turns out, was fairly often.

This project isn't over, but it's getting there, enough that he's having a dinner guest tomorrow night, a friend from work. At the moment the only things in his larder are two bottles of wine and a 12 pack of Red Stripe. He's got his work cut out for him.

The young fellow who cuts my hair is a new dad and said something about the responsibility of
"the next 18 years." My response: "Oh honey, it's a life sentence." But a good one, if not always easy.

Casket of Souls delayed

Please don't throw anything sharp. Due to mid book plot knots, CoS will be published in Spring, 2012.

Glimpses News

I just checked. Over 500 copies of GLIMPSES have sold-- this month! 8-)

And did I mention that I'm working on Glimpses 2, to come out this fall?

Glimpses Nominated. Come vote!

I've just been informed that Glimpses is nominated for Best Fantasy Book of 2010 at Love Romance's Cafe:

http://lovesbooksandmore.blogspot.com/search?updated-max=2011-01-22T06%3A30%3A00-05%3A00&max-results=7

Votes appreciated. ;-)

Great, now there's coffee all over my keyboard

Check out jimhines "Reality Check" regarding writers and public reaction.

Poor Emma

Emma had her teeth cleaned under sedation yesterday afternoon and she's still not quite right. At the moment she's perched on the back of the leather armchair, ever so sloooooowly slumping forward into a doze, then catching herself and sitting up, then ever so sloooooowly slumping . . .

It's pretty funny. Sort of like a little brown cheagle lava lamp.

"Stop laughing at me . . . zzzzzzzzz"

Book winners

It took forever to get more copies of Glimpses. If you are holiday book contest winner and have NOT received your signed book yet, please reply to this thread.

Thanks!

Lynn

Guest Blogger: Marie Sexton!

I am proud to claim Marie Sexton as one of my students; we met because she came on the first Writing on the Waves workshop cruise last May. (More about that later) We hit it off as friends, too, and I have since enjoyed her books very much. I cannot, however, take any credit for them, as they were all written before the cruise. I hope I still had something left to teach her! She was also a member of the inaugural Soon-To-Be-Annual Midnight Black Tie Drunken Shuffleboard Tournament on the final night of the cruise. (I hope she'll forgive me for this next photo, but it's one of my favorites from the cruise. And she did it all in heels, too!)




Marie, first tell us a bit about yourself. Who is the woman behind these scrumptious books??

I'm a child of the west. I was born in Wyoming and raised in Colorado, and I get a bit twitchy when the mountains aren't in sight. I'm a graduate of Colorado State University. I hate earwigs. I'm a fan of the Denver Broncos (even though this season was particularly painful). I've been married to my fabulous husband for nearly fifteen years. I have a six year old daughter who challenges me each and every day. And I've never met a cheese I didn't like.


Now, here is my current roster of deep and probing questions a la James Lipton:

1. First, the important bits: (Answer as shortly or longly as you likely.)

a. Coffee or tea? Coffee! Morning, afternoon, and evening. Preferably with cream, but I can drink it black in a pinch.

b. Cats or dogs? I currently have one of each. I used to be a dog person all the way, but since having my daughter six years ago, I'm becoming more of a cat person (they're so much less work).

c. Leather or denim? On me, or on him? ;-)

d. Boxers or briefs? Briefs.

e. Whips or whipped cream? Whips. Whipped cream leads to sticky, and I don't care what anybody says, sticky is not sexy.

f. Plotter or pantser? 100% pantser.

g. Ravens or writing desks? Cheese.

2. Please tell my readers a little about your latest publications, and where they can find them.

I have one short story with Silver Publishing called "One More Soldier" and I mention that one first because it's the one that's always forgotten. :-)

Everything else that is currently available is part of what has been dubbed The Coda Series, which is published by Dreamspinner Press. Don't let that "series" thing fool you though, because most of them work as stand-alones too.

The first book is Promises. There is a short story sequel available for free download on my website, and another short story featuring these characters will be published on February 14th. It's called "Putting Out Fires," and it's just a fun little tale for Valentine's Day.

Next is A to Z, and its sequel The Letter Z. The third and final story for this couple, Paris A to Z, will be published by Dreamspinner on April 6th.

And the latest title in the "series" is Strawberries for Dessert. You'll see it referred to as book 4 of the series, but you absolutely do not have to read any of the others first. This book won second place for Contemporary Gay Romance in the 2010 Rainbow Awards, and was also the only m/m book chosen by Smart Bitches, Trashy Books for their Best Romance of 2010 list.

You can find all of them here: http://www.dreamspinnerpress.com/store/index.php?cPath=55_212
Or on Amazon here: http://www.amazon.com/Marie-Sexton/e/B003Z673CO/ref=sr_ntt_srch_lnk_1?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1295370354&sr=8-1

And if you'd like to wade through my overly-wordy explanation of how the series all fits together and what order to read them in, you can see that here: http://mariesexton.net/book-list-and-timeline
And feel free to come and browse my blog at any time! http://MarieSexton.net

3. Tell me, what's the hardest thing about writing m/m sex scenes?

I write in first person a lot, so the hardest thing is making sure it doesn't end up sounding like a letter in Penthouse Forum (minus the breasts). But the last novel and the one I'm working on now are in third, in which case the hardest part is the damn pronouns! He, his, him, his, his, his, his. At some point you're either using character names over and over, or you have a scene where nobody knows exactly who's on top or who's on bottom or whose elbow is in whose ear.

4. What's the easiest thing about writing m/m sex scenes?

The easiest, or the best? The easiest part honestly is the basic mechanics. I've had a hysterical number of men ask me, "How would you know what sex with a man is like?" And I have to say, "I may be female, but I'm not a nun!" Obviously there are some differences (specifically, my lack of a penis), but really, the mechanics aren't that different. Tab A goes in slot B, and yes people, I have a slot B too!

That's the easy part, but that's also the boring part. What I really hope to capture is something beyond the mechanics - that feeling of being lost in another person, overwhelmed by their essence, having no idea where they end and you begin, losing all sense of space and time, knowing only skin and sensation and taste and smell...

That's the FUN part. :-)

5. Are you hard or easy?

Ha! Hard. Definitely. If I tried to say otherwise, my husband would either smack me upside the head or fall over dead laughing.

6. What is your writing space like? What do you need around you, or not around you? One thing I'm often asked is what kind of music I listen to while I write.

We just moved into a new house last month, so I'm still sort of finding my groove here. I have a tiny little office in the basement with pictures all over the walls - everything from pictures my daughter drew for me to the lovely prints I bought at YaoiCon. Sometimes I sit there on my therapy ball with my ergonomic keyboard (all so my massage therapist won't lecture me), but most days I find myself upstairs in the living room, sitting in front of the fireplace with my dog on one side, my cat on the other, and my computer in my lap. (It may screw with my shoulder and my back and a few other things, but I might as well make my massage therapist earn her money, right?)

Sometimes I listen to music and sometimes I just have silence. The things that definitely interfere with my process are the TV, and my chatterbox of a child.

7. If you had to choose another career, what would it be?

I'd like to be the person who oils up Aden Jaric before his photo shoots.
Is that an option? Seriously though? I guess I always pictured myself working in some tiny little hole-in-the-wall used book store. Unfortunately, those are a dying breed.

8. Please solve the following equation (scrap paper allowed but no calculators): A + B = C , where A = first pet's name and B = mother's maiden name, and C = your porn name.

Penny Bollschweiler Yeah, I don't think I'm getting far in the porn biz with that moniker.

9. Please tell us a bit about your development as a writer.

I haven't actually been writing for very long. Yes, I wrote a couple of really bad short stories and some angst-heavy poetry as a teenager. Didn't we all? One of my angst-poems even won first place in a poetry contest. But after high school, I never even thought about trying to be a writer. I just didn't have any stories worth telling.

Through college and the years that followed I may not have been writing, but I was definitely reading. A lot! I've been a voracious reader my whole life. Starting around junior high, I primarily read fantasy. But a few years ago, I started to notice something odd: no matter what book I was reading, I found myself hating the female lead. Now, I'm sure it's not actually the case that every single female character in fantasy is poorly-written. I can readily admit that the issue is my own. Regardless of the reason, the fact is, they drove me nuts. So I started specifically buying books that had male protagonists. Of course, then those fabulous male leads were always falling in love with the some silly girl, and I never understood why, so if I managed to find a book that didn't even mention a woman in the blurb, I was thrilled. Which is of course how I discovered the Nighrunner series (thanks Lynn!!).

Honestly, I still remember the night that I finished Stalking Darkness. I was lying in bed, and I read the ending over and over and over again, and I swear I could feel the giant light bulb going on inside my head. I could hear the "ta-da!" music. I got up the next day, and I started scouring Amazon for fantasy books with gay male leads.

Well, it turns out that list is depressingly short (at least, it was back then), but I found myself sliding down this slippery slope of books -- first fantasy with a bit of gay romance thrown in, and then gay romance with a bit of fantasy thrown in, and then before I knew it, the fantasy was gone and there were just men falling in love. I'd never in my life been a reader of romance books, but once I discovered m/m, I was hooked.

Now through all of this, I still wasn't writing. At all. Unless you count office memos and emails. A few months into my m/m discovery was when I left my job of eleven years at the OB/Gyn clinic.

I don't really know how to describe what came next, except to say that my job had filled my head with static. Not that I knew it at the time, but all day, every day, I was thinking about doctors and patients and electronic medical records and phone calls and who was on call at which hospital and who had surgery block and whether or not they had an assist, and…. on and on and on. But once I'd been home for a few months, the static faded. It died away. And then one morning, I woke up with an image in my head: two men in a hallway. I knew exactly how they felt and what they were doing and the exact dynamics between them.

I sat down, and I started writing. And the truth is, I felt like an idiot. I felt like an absolute fraud. I wasn't a writer. Who was I kidding? I wasn't even starting at the beginning, for crying out loud! I was writing about a hand job! But I kept going, and over the next week or two the story just seemed to fall into place. Before I knew it, I was forgetting to pick my daughter up from ice skating lessons because I was busy pounding away at my keyboard.

That hand-job-in-a-hallway scene turned into Promises. The first publisher I sent it to rejected it, but the second one, Dreamspinner Press, accepted it. By that time, I was wrapping up A to Z, but the truth is, I still didn't feel like a writer. Promises came out in January 2010, and I'm only now getting to the point where I can call myself a writer without backpedaling in my very next breath.

10. Do you/have you participate/d in writing groups? If so, what do you think makes for a successful group, besides bad coffee in flimsy cups?

After Promises and A to Z were accepted, but before they were published, I went to a writing group for the first time. I didn't really think of myself as a writer, and I thought maybe I would find some magical sense of self there. In the end though, it didn't really work for me. I'm very reluctant to share things in a public setting like that, and I'm terrible at critiquing other people's work, so it wasn't a very good fit.

11. Name that tune and the artist, and answer the question. Extra points if you answer in "a b a b" rhyme structure.

"Was it something I didn't say
When I didn't say, "I love you"?
Was it words that you never heard
All those words I should have told you
All those times, all those nights
When I had the chance to?
Was it something I didn't say?

Ummm…. Wow. I have no idea. Is this a trick question? Am I going to lose my license if I fail? Can I google it?
I think I'll go with "cheese" again.

Would you mind sharing a bit of your experience with the Writing on the Waves workshop?

If anybody had told me two years ago that I would not only be on a first name basis with Lynn, but that she would be interviewing me on her blog, I would have told that person they were high! And yet here I am!

Just over a year ago, a friend and I were debating whether or not we could go on Lynn's Writing on the Waves workshop. We'd been waffling back and forth for a while, but as soon as I found out my first novel had been accepted by a publisher, she said, "That's it! We're definitely going now!" In the end, she wasn't able to attend and I took my husband and child along instead. I didn't really know what to expect, but I can honestly say that the workshop exceeded my expectations in every way. First of all, there was Lynn, who's the most amazing, genuine, and personable woman you could ever ask to meet. Second, there were the workshops themselves, which were fun and really informative. And then, best of all, were the people! We had such a fabulous group of people there -- people I still talk to now, and who I expect I'll still be talking to in years to come. I'm quite sure we were the most fabulous people on the ship! :-)

It was truly an amazing experience, and I hope very much to be able to do it again this year!

(More information on the upcoming Writing On the Waves IIworkshop, Oct 15, 2011.)

Finally, where do you find those hottie photos you tease us with on Twitter?

Haha! I seem to be developing a reputation based on my photo tweets! The truth is, every morning I get up, get my cup of coffee and sit down with my laptop, and while I'm waiting for the coffee to kick in and my brain to turn on, I check my favorite photo blogs. And when I find one that's particularly inspiring, I figure the least I can do is share. :-)

My favorites are:
http://artistryofmale.blogspot.com/
http://addmire.blogspot.com/
And after being encouraged by some of my Twitter buddies, I have finally made my own Tumblr. It's still small, but it's rather yummy.
http://mariesexton.tumblr.com/

Thanks Marie. Now if you'll excuse me, I think I'll go check out some of those links!

Music Therapy

I'm finding learning the ukulele to be very theraputic for the writing, which is rather stressful right now. When I get stuck I go strum for a while, do some scales, work on a new song, and then right back to work.


I'm working on this one right now but having the most trouble with harmonizing and keeping that damn sailor hat on!

More Cute

I can't decided what delights me more: the otter pup, the fact the Kevin the kitten looks a little like Skit, or the lady's wonderful Scottish accent.

h


Otter Chaos from Nat. Geo:




And the King of Norway runs out of people to knight: