Erica Lindquist's Blog, page 3

The Inattentive Boyfriend/Girlfriend

Okay, now that we’re actual romance/erotica writers, I feel like I can say this. I love sex and romance. I love it even in books that aren’t shelved under romance. Any book without a strong romantic plot always loses some of my interest. I’m a gigantic sap.

BUT.

You knew there was a “but” in there. With me, there is always a butt.

Reblog: 11 ways to be a better roleplayer

Obviously, Aron and I go on at length about how to run a role-playing game, but being a good player is just as important. Grant Howitt of LOOK, ROBOT wrote this awesome article about being a good player three years ago. That’s like… eons in internet time, but it’s still well worth a read.

ONE. Do stuff.

Job One for you as a player is to do stuff; you should be thinking, at all times – “What are my goals? And what can I do to achieve them?” You are the stars of a very personal universe, and you are not going to get anywhere by sitting on your arse and waiting for adventure to come and knock on your door.

Investigate stuff. Ask questions. Follow leads. No-one needs you to point out that this is an obvious plot thread while you do it. Mix up scenes, talk to people, get up in their grill. If you’re not playing the sort of character that would do such a thing, find something you can affect, and affect it.

If you keep finding yourself pushed to the back of scenes and twiddling your thumbs – why is such a boring character hanging around with the sort of people that Get Shit Done?

Be active, not passive. If you learn nothing else from this article, bloody learn this.

Read the whole thing here.

Reblog: 11 Ways to be a better roleplayer

Obviously, Aron and I go on at length about how to run a role-playing game, but being a good player is just as important. Grant Howitt of LOOK, ROBOT wrote this awesome article about being a good player three years ago. That’s like… eons in internet time, but it’s still well worth a read.

ONE. Do stuff.

Job One for you as a player is to do stuff; you should be thinking, at all times – “What are my goals? And what can I do to achieve them?” You are the stars of a very personal universe, and you are not going to get anywhere by sitting on your arse and waiting for adventure to come and knock on your door.

Investigate stuff. Ask questions. Follow leads. No-one needs you to point out that this is an obvious plot thread while you do it. Mix up scenes, talk to people, get up in their grill. If you’re not playing the sort of character that would do such a thing, find something you can affect, and affect it.

If you keep finding yourself pushed to the back of scenes and twiddling your thumbs – why is such a boring character hanging around with the sort of people that Get Shit Done?

Be active, not passive. If you learn nothing else from this article, bloody learn this.

Read the whole thing here.

The Girl With All the Gifts

This isn’t a full review or anything. I don’t really do those, but I had to write something about The Girl With All the Gifts.

I’m more than a little leery of books with THE GIRL in the title. There seem to be a shit-ton of them and I had skipped over The Girl With All the Gifts several times as a result. But just about every author I talk to or follow online would not stop talking about how good it was, so I finally picked it up.

I really liked it. But I said this wasn’t a full review, and it isn’t. I want to talk about one specific character. And there will be spoilers.

Ready?

Alright, let’s go.

Eddie Parks. Jeezus, I wanted to punch that scar-faced bastard right in the nuts. I wanted him to be the first one to die. Junkers or hungries (zombies), I didn’t care as long as he died. Preferably on-screen. But then he got away and I was stuck with him for the rest of the book. *Grumble.*

But by the end, I was sobbing like a little girl when Melanie shot him. I was begging the book to let him live and felt gut-punched when he didn’t. I don’t know when I went form hating Parks to loving him, but it happened. He was an ass and he was deeply flawed, but every time I watched the character struggle and keep on, or listened a little more to the things happening inside his head… I fell in love a little, despite all of Parks’ many, many failings.

There are some things in The Girl With All the Gifts that were a little less than perfect, but I think I will remember it with pleasure and pain for a while.

And I want to see the movie, damn it!

IT IS DONE!

Today, we finished Lily Quinn. After eighteen months of outlining, writing, editing, layout and cupcakes, it… is… done. With help, I’ve double- and triple-checked all of the files for Sealed With a Kiss, uploaded them to retailers and put together the print version for volume 3. Barring any error messages from our booksellers, Lily Quinn is done.

I almost can’t believe it. And to be honest, life isn’t leaving me a lot of time to reflect. There’s a lot of non-writing-related shit going down and I’m exhausted. But I have had enough brain power for a couple of ending thoughts.

First: LILY QUINN WAS SO MUCH FUN TO WRITE!

Seriously, guys. I love writing. It’s been my passion for years now, enough to get us through 26 (!) books now. But Lily Quinn may be the most fun I’ve ever had writing a series. Yes, I know it’s porn and that will always limit the series’ audience, but I love the story and the characters. I’ve quite literally skipped around the house after working on some scene that I particularly adored, giggling and recounting to Aron everything that happened in it. Which, of course, he knows – he wrote the first draft.

Aron and I set out to write something that was pure fun. Our own particular variety of fun, yes, but 100% fun. And that’s what we did. We wrote exactly what we wanted to. Why not? It was already porn. It was already objectionable as fuck and a pure passion project. We knew damned well that we might never make back the cost of covers and editing, but we loved every minute of Lily Quinn so hard that it didn’t really matter.

Not every book can be this balls-to-the-wall crazy. Sometimes, we’ll have to make smart, market-driven decisions. But DAMN, it was fun.

Second: DEADLINES. HOLY SHIT.

We’ve always been self-published, so we haven’t had to deal with very many deadlines. There was one for Sword of Dreams and then Hammer of Time just to make sure I finished them. (This was back before Aron and I had refined our process much.) And there was a little while where The Dead Beat was being published by eFiction… but that was a long time ago and didn’t last very long.

But this was thirteen books, all published on a monthly schedule. We started with five months lead timed ended with about a week. Ideally, we were supposed to finish one book a month, which would have meant completing Sealed With a Kiss back in May. That… didn’t happen. At all.

I’m not one to sit and wait for the muse to strike. I write and work on our books every day, on a more or less set schedule. But that still means we went 20 weeks over budget. And even then, I’m exhausted. I felt those deadlines every day, looming over me with promises of failure if I missed one. (We didn’t, though it was close a few times!)

Traditionally published authors deal with this all the time. The first book in a series or a stand-alone novel might be done when they sell it to a publisher, but then there’s the rest of the series or books purchased on proposition. Those all have deadlines. I’m in utter awe of anyone who does this for every book. You guys are fucking rockstars.

Okay, that’s it. I’m done for today. Have a badass weekend, everyone. I’m gonna get off the damned computer.

…

…

…

OH MY GOD, WE FINISHED LILY QUINN!

Okay, logging off for realsies now.

Podcasts I listen to

At some point, I’m going to try to gear some of this blog toward readers and genre fans who aren’t also writers, but… That day is not this day! Today, I’m going to tell you which podcasts I listen to every week in my mad scramble to keep up with writing stuff:

Writing Excuses: A craft-centered podcast by Brandon Sanderson, Mary Robinette Kowal, Howard Tayler and Dan Wells. Writing Excuses runs only about 15-20 minutes and is packed with great writing advice. If you don’t have much time for podcasts but want to improve your writing, this is the show for you.

The Self-Publishing Podcast (SPP): SPP is maybe 25% craft, 75% publishing, and 100% hijinks. These guys –  Johnny B. Truant, David Wright and Sean Platt – are nuts. SPP has recently been cut down to 1 hour, but they produce it every week, in addition to a huge and growing collection of other podcasts. SPP and the other Sterling & Stone podcasts are informative and funny, with lots of swearing.

The Creative Penn: Hosted by the eponymous Joanna Penn, The Creative Penn is classy and clean. Or maybe it’s just Joanna’s beautiful English accent… Regardless, this one is mostly a business podcast. Sometimes Joanna even reads my tweets during the show intro. This may be my closest brush with fame!

Ditch Diggers: This podcast is a pure craft- and trash-talk. It’s hosted by Mur Lafferty and Matt Wallace. It’s crass, it’s mean and it’s a blast. They pull no punches (from Morgan Freeman’s Fight Club basement) when talking about writing. And the traditional publishing industry, I guess. Okay, there is a business element to Ditch Diggers, but it’s directed at those who want agents and publishers. If that’s you, listen to Ditch Diggers!

I Should Be Writing: Mur’s other podcast. ISBW is much gentler and introspective than Ditch Diggers. Mur uses it to talk listeners and herself through the sometimes soul-crushing slog of writing and publishing a book. It really helps on my bad days to know that a “real” writer struggles with all of the same things that I do. Warning, though – within 2 episodes, you’ll really want to give Mur a hug.

Grammar Girl: Not a writing podcast per se, but weekly quick and dirty tips on grammar and word usage. Grammar Girl is short, fun and won’t eat a lot of your day. Like Writing Excuses, if you’re short on time but really want to learn something, add Grammar Girl to your podcast feed or channel.

The Writership Podcast: Writership isn’t quite like anything else on this list. It’s hosted by Leslie Watts and Clark Chamberlain. It’s an editing podcast! Each week, Leslie and Clark read out five pages of a submitted manuscript and edit it on the air. The website includes copy edits (spelling, grammar, etc.) but the podcasts addresses about broader issues like pacing, characterization and setting. I forget if I heard Leslie talk on The Creative Penn or SPP, but I’ve been listening to Writership ever since and trying to get my nerve up to submit a few pages.

LQ#12 is back from the editor

This isn’t the final Lily Quinn update, but we’re not far from it. The final book just came back from the editor… And it was GOOD! The words “stunning” and “outdone yourselves” and “outstanding” were used. Not that there weren’t changes to be made, but the ending of Lily Quinn has largely met with beta readers’ and editor’s approval.

I can’t tell you how relieved I am. Any series is only as strong as its ending. We had the entire story outlines in pretty close detail and Aron even wrote all of the first drafts before the first Lily Quinn book was ever released. But things change – including a lot of the story details. By the time we got to the end, we had a lot of work to do to make it all fit just so.

In the editing and rewrites, I always worried that we missed something. And we did – beta readers came back with some points of confusion that we had to go back and forth with them a number of times to get ironed out. After that was when the manuscript went to our editor, and he didn’t seem to have any of the same confusion. Success! We can’t thank our beta readers enough for going through that with us.

So… this is almost done. I’ve got a few more notes left by me, Aron, Amber and John to go through. Then every book gets a pre-release panic-pass. When that’s done, we’re finished! We’re that close to the end.

Sealed With a Kiss is already available for pre-order, as well as volume 3 of the series, which includes the final four books. We’ll get a print version wrangled just as soon as we finalize the text for book #12. Soon!

SOOOOOOOOOON!

LQ#12 back from the editor

This isn’t the final Lily Quinn update, but we’re not far from it. The final book just came back from the editor… And it was GOOD! The words “stunning” and “outdone yourselves” and “outstanding” were used. Not that there weren’t changes to be made, but the ending of Lily Quinn has largely met with beta readers’ and editor’s approval.

I can’t tell you how relieved I am. Any series is only as strong as its ending. We had the entire story outlines in pretty close detail and Aron even wrote all of the first drafts before the first Lily Quinn book was ever released. But things change – including a lot of the story details. By the time we got to the end, we had a lot of work to do to make it all fit just so.

In the editing and rewrites, I always worried that we missed something. And we did – beta readers came back with some points of confusion that we had to go back and forth with them a number of times to get ironed out. After that was when the manuscript went to our editor, and he didn’t seem to have any of the same confusion. Success! We can’t thank our beta readers enough for going through that with us.

So… this is almost done. I’ve got a few more notes left by me, Aron, Amber and John to go through. Then every book gets a pre-release panic-pass. When that’s done, we’re finished! We’re that close to the end.

Sealed With a Kiss is already available for pre-order, as well as volume 3 of the series, which includes the final four books. We’ll get a print version wrangled just as soon as we finalize the text for book #12. Soon!

SOOOOOOOOOON!

Reblog: Yes, Virginia, Writing is Too a Job

As you may or may not be aware, there was a recently a fairly high-profile article saying that writing isn’t a job. It’s an opinion I encounter a lot, but not as much as I expected to when I first began announcing that I was a writer. For the most part, people I speak to treat this job title with a great deal of respect and are genuinely interested in what I do.

While it’s true that quitting your day job after one or two books isn’t usually a viable move – we’ll be publishing book #26 next month and Aron still works full-time – the idea that writing isn’t a real job still gets my feathers all fluffed. And as usual, Chuck Wendig said it better than I could hope to, and with even more swearing:

Writing is a job. And to suggest it’s anything other than that gives in to the persistent myth that writing is some kind of joy-fueled reward factory, where the writing alone is enough to feed itself. Where we pretend that starvation and sadness are implicit to the role, and that getting paid is so rare and so strange we can’t even call it a job or a career anymore. That’s dangerous. Starvation is not a requirement. Starvation is not sexy.

That’s not to say every writer must aspire to also make it their profession. It’s totally fine to do it as a hobby. No harm no foul if you do it just to do it, just as there’s no harm no foul if you inseminate bears just to do it.

*is handed a note*

Correction: you should not randomly inseminate bears. That is, according to my lawyer, “illegal.”

Read the full post >>

Final cover reveals!

 

Here they are! The final three Lily Quinn covers!

I know we’ve been pretty quiet for the last few weeks – we’ve had our heads down trying to finish Lily Quinn before the Halloween deadline. We started with a 5-month lead time on finished books, but have eaten through nearly the whole thing. And what do we have to show for it? A 12-book series!

It’s been a long, tiring road, but we’re nearly done now. Today, I finished the Lily Quinn #12 cover, uploaded the finished book 11 files and put together the volume 3 cover. There’s still editing and finalizing to do on Lily Quinn #12, but that’s it!

I can’t believe how far we’ve come. And when we finally totter over the finish line, I’m sure I’ll have some stuff to say about the process. For now, back to work!