Daisy Harris's Blog, page 35

New Review for Lust After Death!

See what Scorching Reviews said:

A dark and sexy read set in a fabulous reality. I enjoyed the variation on the traditional zombie story and I'll happily read more books in this series. I loved Bane and Josie as they are quite possibly the most well suited couple I've ever read about! I don't think I'll ever look at a zombie quite the same again..:)

Yay!

Read the rest of the review here.

Studenstein Giveaway for a Cause!

In support of interracial marriages, romance, and red-hot loving, I'm hosting a giveaway of Studenstein! All you have to do to enter is comment before Friday evening at 6 pm, PST.

The giveaway is inspired by a Wall Street Journal call for discussion about whether or not black women "should" marry white men. Now, I'm not one to discourage discussion. However, I tend to think people should marry whoever they fall in love with.

I support marriage between black and white zombies and hope that one day Royce and Shani will tie the knot! Because if people are still discussing this issue in 2065, I'm going to be really disappointed.

In fact, I support marriage between humans and zombies! *Male* humans and *male* zombies. Evidence—Built4It, Love-Bots 4.

Don't forget to comment below to win!

And when you're done with that, go to Maisey Yates' site and comment there to win her interracial romance, The Highest Price to Pay! That book has living people. In the present. Who aren't the same shade. Getting married.

Excerpt: STUDENSTEIN First Scene

Chapter One

"Get in there, Foxy."

Shani Brown snarled at the voice in her headset. "I told you, you gaming nerd. I'm not using a damn call-sign!" She slowed the ancient camper van to a crawl. San Francisco's SoMa district stretched dark and empty in every direction. A knot of Goths loitered around the entrance of the club as if the lighted doorway was a fireplace and they were trying to keep warm.

She craned her neck to see past the bouncer and into the red-lit interior. "He's gotta come out eventually. Why can't I just wait?" She pulled over and parked along the sidewalk, mulling over her reluctance to enter. It wasn't as if she would be expected to have sex inside.

Q-ter, back at the Zombie Underground in Seattle, cleared his throat. "You know doing this on your own means—"

"Yeah, yeah." Shani stepped one thigh-high boot out of the van. "I know I'm your bitch. But next time I go out on my own, I'm calling the shots." She hung up and slid the smartphone into the pouch on her steampunk corset. She had no idea where her roommate Kuri had found the get-up. The ribbing and stays forced her cleavage up to her neck—made her ass look even bigger. Shani couldn't wait to take off the uncomfortable piece of shit and get back in her baggy track pants.

"ID?" The girl at the door looked her over.

Bitch.

Shani dug her wallet out of a pocket. Utility corset her ass. With a scowl and a hand on her hip, she flashed the card in goth-girl's direction, daring Miss Thang to pluck it from her grip. The hostess waved her through.

The narrow walkway led past a coat check and to an enormous dance floor beyond. Bass shook the walls. In a few cages around the room, half-naked girls and boys writhed in vinyl or latex. Shani fought back a surge of nerves. They didn't look like steins—reanimated humans built as slaves or lab-rats. But they could have been love-bots wearing makeup to cover their scars and brighten their skin. Back when Shani had been a victim of the undead sex trade, her makers had slathered on foundation, put plasters on her stitches. Mostly though, the clients liked when she looked like a monster.

Shani composed a quick message to the Frank inside her mind, asking him to investigate the whole damn club for "love-bots". As she uploaded text into the ZU message center, she scoffed at the politically correct term. Back in Shani's day, there had been no denying she was a sex slave. Sure as shit Shani hadn't been built for "love".

She wound her way through the crowd at the edge of the dance floor. The music changed and the black-clad patrons flocked toward the new song, clearing the way for Shani to get to the stairs. She climbed to the second story and went to the bar. "Scotch, neat," she shouted over a couple heads.

A cry sounded behind her and Shani turned. Standing in the middle of a corded-off area she spotted the stein she'd been sent to rescue. His shoulders spanned beyond the stupid leather vest he wore, but his body narrowed to a slender waist and hips. Skintight pants displayed a bulge so large Shani figured they'd grafted it off a black man.

Even with a few scars, his face was pretty enough to upstage his body. Shaggy black hair fell to his chiseled jaw, giving him an "I may be sensitive inside, if only you can reach me" vibe. A lock fell across his big brown eyes, highlighted cheekbones that could cut glass. His lips—thin and arguably the only non-perfect thing about him—twitched up on one side before he swung his arm in a wide arc and flogged the female strapped to a table.

His client cried out in her bindings. Her forehead scrunched up in pleasure.

Dang. Shani reached past a necking couple to get to her drink. This is some fucked-up lifer shit. She raised her glass for a sip and felt ice against her lip.

Spinning back to the bar, Shani shouted, "I said neat, not on the rocks." She slammed her drink down and glowered at the bartender until he tossed out her beverage and replaced it with the one she'd asked for. When she turned around to watch her mark, he'd disappeared. Some human guy had taken up beating the woman's ass in the play area.

"You'd attract more flies with honey than vinegar."

She smelled him standing too close, and knew before she turned around who it was. "Ya know, I never understood that." Shani swiveled to face the other stein, refusing to let her eyes focus on his too-straight teeth or the sparkle in his eyes that said he was having way more fun than a slave-boy should. "Why the fuck would I want flies?" Shani threw back her drink. She growled at the feel of liquor burning her throat.

The guy's face went slack as if he didn't know what to think. He blinked once, and Shani wondered if maybe he'd only been programmed with a few phrases. Like, "You're so fine, baby" and "Suck it, slut". A lot of steins had sub-human intelligence. The ones built for laboratory studies couldn't even talk.

Shani tried to catch the bartender's eye, hoping for another drink before she had to figure out how to get the guy outside. The bartender pointedly ignored her, so she turned back to her mark.

A shit-eating, I-told-you-so grin spread across his face. He held out a hand, lifted an eyebrow in a way that had to have been programmed it was so choreographed, and said, "I'm Royce Harden. What's your name, gorgeous?"

STUDENSTEIN Romance Trading Cards!!!!

Oh yeah, baby. Wanna see?

A Tale of Two Restaurants

I'm a stickler for customer service. Not because I'm a princess (though I am) and not because I'm demanding (though I am that too,) but mostly because I hate seeing businesses destroy they customer base. I'm no MBA, but I figure—you can't make any money if you don't have any customers. And it's amazing to me how many companies don't seem to understand that concept.

Take two restaurants within a few blocks of my house, for example. I'll call them Restaurant F (the French place) and Restaurant PA (Pan-Asian.) Both serve good food. Both are moderately upscale. The French place is more expensive, but has a few bargains on the menu. Overall they're both probably 3 or 4 star joints.

Now—despite the lagging economy, Restaurant F is full practically every night. The husband and I go there often for a half caraf of wine (a good deal at $10) and to split a cheese plate. In the years we've been going there, we've only eaten what you'd call a "full course meal" once or twice, but still—every time we go in there we get treated great. In fact, Restaurant F is one of my favorite writing spots. The awesome manager lets me order a scotch and sit in the window booth for as long as I want writing on my computer. This, for a customer paying only $6 for her drink. It's because I am a CUSTOMER. And I come there often. And having me sitting there encourages other CUSTOMERS to come in.

In fact, I've mentioned this restaurant in several interviews, on Twitter, and may even have put them in one of my book dedications. That's how good they are at customer service.

And yeah, they can afford to be nice because they're successful. But consider this—ever since the recession, they've been offering more specials. Every night of the week they have a half-price this, or a thrown-in that. They battled the economic downturn by being more generous, more inclusive. More awesome.

Then there's Restaurant PA. When the economy tanked, they cut their menu in half. That alone didn't bother me. I mean, you can't blame them for cutting costs, right? But then they fired or lost all their old waitstaff and replaced them with a string of part-timers. Three years later, I call in a take-out order or come in to eat and no one knows me.

We've been going to Restaurant PA for TEN YEARS! The old staff knew my kids' names. Heck, they knew my kids' friends' names! They knew my order by heart.

But still…perhaps I could forgive them the turnover. However, that's not all… The two most recent times I went there to eat, the table was so dirty I had to ask the server to wipe it (to which said person mumbled something that sounded like "fuck you,") or dampen my napkin and wipe it down myself.

Dude. I don't mind wiping a table at a coffee shop, or McDonalds, or a $5 Pho joint. But at a real restaurant? Give me a break!

Wait, though! It gets better! We went there last week, and I was served a glass of wine in a cracked glass. I'm not talking about a little splinter off the top, either. A huge, honkin' crack. A sliver broke off on my finger. So I poured a little of it out to see if they were going to pour me a whole new glass, or just decant the wine into another glass. And guess what? They poured the wine from the broken glass into another glass! There could have been glass chips in it. I didn't bother drinking the thing, and was unsurprised to find that they hadn't removed the charge from my bill.

Some time after the glass debacle, I told my kids we'd never eat there again, to which my children started crying. They see this restaurant as "ours," a part of our neighborhood and their childhoods. I wanted to agree, but during this same meal, I was informed that only "part" of our meal could be charged at Happy Hour prices, because some of it had been prepared after 7 pm. And they can only allow the Happy Hour discount for things that get entered into the computer before 7. Apparently, it doesn't matter what time the customer arrives.

I'd like to say I'll never go back to Restaurant PA. But that would be a lie. It's close and convenient. And the food has always been good. However, I'm pretty sure I won't have to ponder the decision much longer. It's always empty when I go in, and has been for the past year or so. Apparently other people have gotten sick of being nickle and dimed too. If they've practically lost me as a customer, It can't be much longer until they put themselves out of business entirely.

Oh, and at Starbucks today—I had to stand to allow someone to open a window next to my seat. The barista gave me a free drink card for my troubles. Now that's a business who knows how to do business. It's no wonder that in a failing economic landscape, the coffee giant ain't goin' nowhere.

STUDENSTEIN Cover!

It's arrived! It's arrived! Now I can plaster the new cover all over the place to herald my next release!

Studenstein comes out September 16th from Ellora's Cave! Read more here: http://www.jasminejade.com/p-9585-studenstein.aspx

Like it?

Random Studenstein Excerpt

What do you guys think…PG-13 enough for other sites? Alluring? Or just confusing and weird out of context?

* * * * *

Royce wasn't hard or rough, he neither struggled nor pushed. Instead, he brushed his lips across hers. His mouth felt soft, and moved slow and sweet as molasses on her lips.

"I'm okay." She pulled back a fraction, trying to catch her breath.

Royce wove his fingers with hers. "Yeah…" Shani could have sworn he was blushing. "This area's infamous for drugs, and I wouldn't put it past anyone around here to turn a blind eye on certain things. But the Department of Heath scared the bejeezus out of those lifers—telling them unregistered steins carried syphilis." His lip twitched. "And corpse-herpes."

She snorted, a damp laugh she couldn't control shooting out her nose. The syphilis part was true. The 2042 outbreak alone had been enough to scare most people off having sex with illegal love-bots. "Yeah, I know I wouldn't want to catch corpse-herpes." Not that steins could catch herpes, or anything else. The problem wasn't the steins, it was the lifers. Steins didn't get sick unless they were programmed to, but they could pass diseases between humans.

"Corpse-herpes is almost as bad as corpse-cooties." Royce was grinning now, though she saw the lines of tension around his mouth.

She did her best to smile back. "Well, as long as you don't give me your corpse-cooties…" Shani unlocked her door. "Let's get you taken care of."

He hopped out his side of the van. Shani reached for her door, but found him opening it, a pale hand lifted to catch her dark one. She felt like a princess descending her throne. A zombie princess, getting ready to fuck a guy in the ass in the kingdom of a crappy motel room. Oh well, Shani thought, she'd take what she could get.

Writer, Know Thyself!

There's a lot of great advice to be had if you're a new writer wanting to get words on paper. Plenty of teachers and blogs and fellow authors have fantastic methods to share for how to plot, plan, brainstorm, draft and revise. I've followed some suggestions and not followed others. More often I've tried out different recommendations and seen what seems to fit best. And in my humble opinion, the most essential piece of advice I've ever read or heard (or possibly made up, because I can't remember who told me this) is: writer, know thyself.

I'm also a big fan of the big-picture mantra "play to your strengths."

But it all comes down to this: figure out what works for you and run with it. And don't be scared if you think something is going to work for you, and later decide it doesn't really. I'm working on my seventh stand-alone story right now and I'm still figuring out my sweet-spot for turning out words. I've tried to plot, tried to pants. I committed to 1K a day, then 2K, then tried out sprinting at 3K a day. I've always revised—that hasn't changed. But my revision methods have been honed over time. And then I tried to discard them only to realize I was right the first time.

My critique partner, Danica Avet, can turn out 20K words in a day. She can half-draft a novel, decide she doesn't like it, and write the whole thing over in a weekend. She directed me to a bunch of great websites for plotting, yet she doesn't plot at all personally. For her, writing IS thinking. There's no point in doing them in two distinct steps.

Then there are the died in the wool plotters. They think, and think, and think. They write out all the details of their story ahead of time. And they can draft like the wind. These folks can run a bit towards perfectionism and often are huge fans of the "fast draft." In some cases, they can be scared of making mistakes and choosing wrong words. Only you can tell if you are this kind of person. I'm not. This much I know.

Lately, I have a method that I've been enjoying. My natural state of behavior is to think, think, think in circles for a while then WRITEWRITEWRITE, then *collapse.* It's a spring-loaded method of writing that compliments my Tigger-esque personality.

First I brainstorm a litte, until I can't contain myself.

Then I write about 2K of the story and see how it felt. If I'm jazzed I continue, if I'm not I ask a critique partner what they think and usually discard.

Then I do the *real* brainstorming. Pages and pages…and pages of mind-maps. I connect ideas in bubbles over reams of paper, draw maps, color code. Don't get me wrong—there's no "organization" at this stage of the game, at least not in the most normal sense of the word. This lasts about a week.

I write a simple outline—one sentence per scene. I mostly discard the outline as I go, but I like the safety net.

And then I write. Usually at a breakneck pace until the black moment.

At which point I pause, re-read, re-think, and decide if the plot resolution and ending I planned are going to work. I adjust as necessary.

Think, think, think until I can't take it any more…maybe 2–3 days.

WRITEWRITEWRITE like the wind till done!!

Then starts the revision thingy…which is the topic of a whole 'nother blog post.

But this is still a work in progress. Even after another year or two years or three, I'm not sure I'd be able to say definitively what works. So there's no reason that a new writer should get attached to pantsing or plotting or any other label until they're good and ready. There's as many ways to write a book as there are books.

Have fun finding your favorite method!

Six Sentence Sunday: STUDENSTEIN!!

I can not wait for this story to come out! It's the sequel to LUST AFTER DEATH, and tons of fun. Hope you enjoy the snippet!

* * * * *

Shani rushed forward and grabbed Royce's upper arm before dragging him into the night.

Shaniqua! You stop thinking about that boy's butt right this second! Shani didn't know where that voice in her head came from, since she'd never had a mother in her undead life. But yeah, that voice in her head, her "superego" Frank called it, always called her by her full name.

So as she led Royce around the outside of the building, Shani focused on the quiet ticks of birds, the rustle of leaves, anything to take her mind of those little dimples that had shown right below his hipbones, or his deep and intriguing groan.

Apple's War on Readers

Fuck you, Steve Jobs. I went to download a new book last night from my Kindle app, and found that it no longer contained a buy link. No. Now Apple is charging apps like Kindle and Nook 30% to include a buy link that goes directly to their store. So…what? Now I'm supposed to buy from iBooks because it's more convenient. Right?

Um, wrong. Because iBooks doesn't have a deal with my publisher. As far as my quickie search shows, Ellora's Cave's books are not on iBooks. So many of the books I would like to read are not available through that store. Now I have to go through Safari to buy a book and send it to my Kindle app. LAME!

I have over 200 books in my Kindle library and three years worth of search history. Sure, Amazon gives me crap recommendations most of the time. But what's Apple going to tell me to read? Uh…let me guess… The Help? Gee, thanks! I *totally* want generic book recommendations!

Yes, I know I'm whining. It's only one more click to go through Safari to the Amazon store. But, here's the thing—I'm often places with crappy 3G and wifi. That extra click can often be the difference between buying a book and instead deciding to check my Twitter feed. Or watch a movie. Or make a phone call. When reading becomes inconvenient, we're less likely to to do it. Even me, a die-hard reader.

Furthermore, in those moments of crappy signals and fighting with the interwebs, what if I search for a book and iBooks says it doesn't have it? Do I believe iBooks or second guess whether I got the title wrong? Or the author's name? The whole thing makes me want to go out and just buy a Kindle again. I used to have one, but gave it to a friend when I noticed I read books almost exclusively on my cell phone. I let Apple infiltrate my life through a series of shiny-looking devices. And now Steve Jobs thinks he can steal my very soul! What once was a benevolent wizard has become an evil mastermind destroying the lovely wireless world he helped to create.

I may be being a tad melodramatic. But really, Apple, must you own *everything?* What are you doing to make reading better? Brighter? How will you make reading more enjoyable, personalized, awesome? Or are you just going to squeeze the last drops of cash you can out of the sad saps who still deign to read books? Are you going to snatch away the army of e-readers Amazon worked to create?

I know corporations exist to make money, and I don't expect Apple to be some kind of selfless entity. But I'm sick of businesses f*cking over consumers. I buy books. I contribute money to the publishing industry. Without people like me, Apple, you have no one to sell books too.

And Steve my dear, you have totally pissed me off.