Ari McKay's Blog, page 27

When it rains, it pours…

Torquere has just accept our story “Caribbean Blues” for their Color Box Collection. WOW. We’re both stunned and grateful that things are going so fast!!!

Another!!!

We just got notification that Dreamspinner Press has accepted our Christmas story for their Advent Calendar collection!!! We’ll need to change the title, so we can’t say what that will be yet, but we’re very pleased to have yet another title coming out, this time in December!

More to come!

Now that Steam Heat is out, I thought I’d mention our next certain publication.

On November 7th, Torquere will be publishing “Bay Leaves and Bachelors” as part of their Spice It Up series. I won’t say too much about it yet, but anyone who likes how we write romance will probably enjoy it.  And stay tuned… we have 3 other stories out for consideration, and hopefully one or more of them will be accepted!!!

Steam Heat

Our new short story, Steam Heat, is now available! It’s 7700 words and very spicy!

At the Gaslight Bazaar, a Steampunk convention, Trey Lewis is teased and fascinated by glimpses of a man in leather pants. When he sets out to find the wearer, he discovers Joss Stephens, a quiet, reserved coworker from his computer firm. Trey never thought he and Joss had anything in common, but getting to know Joss away from the office ignites an unexpected heat between them, which leads to a steamy encounter and the beginnings of romance.

This story has been added to our Short Story page. You can find the rest of the Charity Sip Blitz works here. Please stop by and take a look! All proceeds from these stories will be donated to NOH8, and Torquere Press will match the authors’ proceeds.

And now for some meta…

Writing this story was an interesting challenge for us, primarily because it had a hard 8,000 word max limit.

When we were writing in fandom, we tended to produce long, multi-chaptered works because we rarely ever had limitations on word count. We didn’t have to worry about cutting large chunks of the story or keeping our plot and dialogue tight. We could just let things flow as we pleased, so for us, editing involved checking for SPAG, and that was about it.

When we got serious about writing original works and began focusing on Calls for Submissions, we were suddenly faced with *GASP!* word count limits. For us, 12,000 words was a chapter, and we had to find a way to tell a whole story in that amount of words.

Not gonna lie: it was tough at first! “Once And Future Love” wasn’t so bad because we had 18,000 words to play with, and our first draft came in under that mark. The second story we wrote (which hasn’t been accepted anywhere yet) had a 12,000 word limit. Our first draft came in at 16,000 words. Ouch.

But we took a deep breath and found a way to cut those 4,000 words, and while we weren’t entirely happy about some of the casualties, we were ruthless.

When we looked at the Charity Sip Blitz, we were both interested in giving it a shot, but we’d thought a 12,000 word limit was bad enough. Could we possibly manage 8,000? We started thinking about what it would take to keep things that brief. Minimal plot, not a lot of talking. It would be tough, since we tend to favor plotty stories with dialogue (okay, I’ll admit it: our characters tend to get talky on us).

It was Ari who came up with the Steampunk angle, because leather and Steampunk go hand in hand, and with some brainstorming, we came up with a solid idea that we thought would work. Leather pants would be the focal point, and the guys would already know each other, which would eliminate the need for any lengthy “getting to know you” conversations.

Our first draft was less than 300 words over the limit. Huzzah! It only took cutting some adverbs, tweaking the wording to make it tighter, and other minor nips and tucks to get it under 8k, and we felt a sense of accomplishment at telling such a tight story.

Writing shorter works has been a valuable learning experience for both of us. It’s taught us to be more ruthless in our editing, taught us to judge what’s necessary and what could be eliminated, and helped us tighten our prose. We both still love the freedom of an unlimited word count, but I think our novel-length works will be better for what we’ve learned with the shorter works this year.

Steam Heat!

Long time, no post! But Ari and I have been busy working on various projects and getting more stories out there. We’ve been fortunate enough to have two stories accepted by Torquere Press in the last few weeks, and one will be coming out this month!

“Steam Heat” is a short story written for Torquere Press’ 2012 Charity Sip Blitz:

For 2012-2013, Torquere’s authors have chosen the theme “Leather Bound” in honor of Torquere’s ninth anniversary. The ninth is traditionally the leather anniversary, what better theme to let GLBTQ writers go wild. The charity which will benefit from this year’s Charity Blitz is NOH8, whose mission is to promote marriage, gender and human equality through education, advocacy, social media, and visual protest. More than twenty five authors have written short fiction pieces and have agreed to donate all proceeds of the sales of these stories to this year’s charitable organization. Torquere Press Inc. will match the authors’ donations completely.

This year, we’re also pleased to announce that our distribution partner, Rainbow eBooks, has agreed to once again be the title sponsor of our Sip collection, and will be our sole distributor outside of the Torquere Books website. Please support our sponsor by visiting them at www.rainbowebooks.com

We’re very pleased and proud to participate in this event and support NOH8, and we’ll be sharing more details about our contribution over the next few days!

It’s here!

Our first original story is out today! “The Once and Future Love” is now available for sale at Dreamspinner Press! It’s $2.99, and you get it in .epub, .prc, .prc, .html, and .pdf formats. We’ve updated our Short Stories page with the new individual sale info.

Author chat!

To celebrate the completion of the Time is Eternity Daily Dose and their 5th anniversary, Dreamspinner Press is hosting a chat this Saturday, May 5, at the Literary Nymphs Yahoo Group. They’ve invited all the Dreamspinner authors to come by to chat about their work, and one lucky participant will win a Kindle Fire! I’m not sure what time the chat is going to start, but I’ll update with that info once I have it.

Unfortunately, I’m going to be AFK over the weekend, so I won’t be able to attend, but Ari said she’d be there if she could.

“The Once and Future Love”

“The Once and Future Love”, appearing in the Time Is Eternity Daily Dose anthology by Dreamspinner Press:

Anthony Davis, A-list Hollywood star, is adored by millions for his talent and striking good looks. Approaching fifty and feeling the pressure of competing with younger stars, he realizes that despite all he’s achieved, he’s alone and lonely. Then Anthony encounters Rob Harrison, who tutored him in college, at a fundraiser. Despite the chemistry between them back then, Anthony chose his career over love, and he recognizes the mistake he made at last. As he leaves the fundraiser, he glimpses a shooting star and makes a hopeless wish… asking for another chance with Rob.

The Daily Dose package is now on sale! The full package is available here for $39.99 in April. The price will increase to $49.99 in May.

We’ve added this info to our Short Stories page, and we’ll update again in June, when the stories will go on sale individually.

Progress!

This weekend, we finished prepping the second short story we wrote for a specific call for submissions. This one had a limit of 12,000 words, which was a huge challenge. We decided to write a rough draft without obsessively checking the word count and pare down as needed when we were finished. As it turns out, we had to trim about 4000 words. Ouch…

But we were ruthless, and we did it, and the result is a tight story with a good pace. We’re both learning a lot about tightening up our prose by writing for these shorter calls, and I think it’s been good for us, overall.

Anyway, it’s finished and submitted, so now we have to wait until the deadline passes, which means we have a couple of months to wait and keep our fingers crossed.

For now, we’re taking a break before starting something new in order to tackle some revisions. We have a rough draft of a novel to revise and polish; it’ll probably be between 60-65,000 words by the time we’re finished revising. We also have another short story that we need to finish and pare down. Given we have rough drafts of two different works, one of which is novel-length, we figured we ought to hold off on starting anything new until we get what we have cleaned up. And we’ll definitely be running the novel past another set of eyes before we start prepping it for submission.

Coming up with ideas and getting them written quickly is definitely not our problem! Having enough time in the day is our problem. We’ve been writing together on a regular basis since 2004, so we’re pretty well-synced; it doesn’t take us long to generate ideas, characters, and plots, and once we start writing, the draft goes quickly. As a result, we’ve managed to complete two stories and a novel and have a third story almost finished since getting our first rejection letter back in January.

I found this image shortly after we received that letter, and it motivated me to stop angsting and get back to work. I think it’s still rather appropriate.

Time Is Eternity anthology

Our first sale was a submission to the Time Is Eternity anthology that Dreamspinner Press will be publishing in June, and since we’ve signed the contract and gotten the “new author” info, it’s official!

Assuming we get to keep the title we chose on submission, our story is called “Once and Future Love”, and it was written for an anthology that focuses on time travel. Unfortunately, we don’t have an official blurb yet, and the anthology isn’t listed in the Dreamspinner store yet, but I’ll update with all that info when we get it.

The anthology is going to be released in June, and there will be two ways to purchase our story. The anthology is being released as a month-long Daily Dose package, so if you purchase the package, you’ll get a new, original m/m romance every day from June 1-June 30.

However, if you don’t want to commit to the full package, all the stories in the package will be released for individual sale on June 1 as well! Ours is about 14,000 words, so it falls in the “Nap-size dream” category, and it’ll cost $2.99 for the digital download.

That’s all we know so far! We still have to go through an editing process, but we’ll keep everyone updated once the blurb and purchase links are available!