Leta Blake's Blog, page 33
January 13, 2015
Ganymede Quartet News! Goals/plans for 2015 | @Darrah_Glass @mmromance
It looks like those of us crazy about the Ganymede Quartet series have a LOT to look forward too! Eeeeeee!!!!
“Finish Ganymede Quartet series. This means the main books plus their accompanying Martin stories. GQ Book 3+Martin story will be out in March 2015. Book 4 will be out in June 2015. I don���t have a schedule for finishing the side stories that will either extend the series timeline or tell side characters��� stories, but I currently have over 20��(!!!) stories extensively outlined (and one basically finished), so I fully expect I���ll complete some of those��by the end of the year.
read more about Darrah’s writing plans via Goals/plans for 2015 | Darrah Glass.
January 12, 2015
That HILARIOUS time someone made Gatlinburg look awesome! #LOL #gatlinburg #lies
This, ladies and gentlemen, is one of the most hilarious videos I watched while looking for ways to show readers Gatlinburg in order to add to their experience of reading Smoky Mountain Dreams. Someone made a very lovely video of only the very choicest shopping centers in this tacky little town and put it up like it was a walk in Gatlinburg at night. Hahahaha! No, my sweet readers, this is a walk through one rather quaint shopping center. The rest of Gatlinburg is a hilarious, tacky, flapjack fueled mess. :D (That I happen to love very much.)
LIES! This video is LIES. But cute lies.
January 11, 2015
Upcoming Releases Babble and Waffling On Release Dates
Imma go home and read my book set in the middle of summer in the South. That’ll take the chill outta my bones!
So I had a great email correspondence today that puts another book on my plate for 2015. I’m pretty excited about that and hopefully all will progress smoothly there. This all led to me getting out my Spreadsheet of Doom (nipped from Aleksander Voinov’s spreadsheet he shared once), which lists out all of my Works In Progress and most of my story ideas. This was helpful because now I know what order I need to be working on things (again).
First, and most importantly, I have to finish the Training Season sequel. Despite still being utterly terrified of it, I’m seeing it as an exercise in bravery and giddily diving into the fear, so I feel pretty okay about the chances of me actually getting it done this spring as promised. Secondly, I’m going to work on a joint writing project with Indra Vaughn starting in March. And thirdly I must begin the first draft of the fourth and final book in the upcoming ’90s Coming of Age series. And it’s that series that I’d like to talk about now.
So, when Smoky Mountain Dreams came out, I got a lot of surprised feedback from readers who said they had no idea I had a new book in the hopper, much less being released. I suppose I am publicly rather quiet about my books when I’m working on them. That comes from that veil of terror I was speaking of before. I am so absorbed in trying to keep the car on the road despite the fog before me and the demons of self-doubt flinging themselves at my windshield constantly that I get a bit superstitious about discussing the stories in public.
[By the way, as a long and winding aside, Aleksander Voinov wrote a great blog post recently about limiting beliefs and I think that it really helped me get a grip on some of my own. I’m not sure they aren’t still utterly terrifying, but naming them is interesting and has helped. For example, one of my limiting beliefs is that each book must be better than the last. You can imagine how completely that can paralyze a person, right? Especially when you have people telling you, “Oh, I liked this one, but it wasn’t as good as the other one you wrote.” And especially when that sentiment is expressed about completely different books, so it’s not even consistently the same one whose bar I feel compelled to exceed! LOL! Oh, what a maddening and limiting belief to have. So I vow to just write each book to be the best I can give it and not try to make it as good as some other book I’ve already written. Because I wrote that book already. And this new book will be as good as it is and that’s that. ]
Um, back to the ’90s Coming of Age story. So, I started this series 10 years ago now. I wrote a big, long, huge, and very flawed book. I realized when trying to fix those flaws that it would work better as a series of books, one bleeding right into the next. There are no cliff-hangers, but nothing is ultimately and finally resolved until the end of the fourth book. The series follows a��boy named Peter (oh, Peter! my heart! I love you so much!) over the course of his senior year in high school and his freshman year in college. It trails��him through very bad choices, very good choices, into the path of lies and out of it, and through the highs and lows of first love, and first hurt, and loss, and recovery. It’s with him while he grows up into a man. Not a perfect man, but a man. It’s a Coming of Age series with heavy romance in it because, well, he mainly grows up through the choices he makes around love and sex and romance. And yes, it’s set in Knoxville during the 1990s.
So, here’s the thing. I’m putting the first book in the series out in September. It is set September through May of Peter’s senior year in high school. The second book is set in the summer, June – August, and if I go with my current release plan, it would come out in November. And that? Bugs me. And that’s my question. Would it bug anyone else? Because THEN if I continue with the plan, a book that is set September – Christmas would come out in February, which just seems all kinds of wrong. And then at the end we’d catch up again, kinda, and release a book set Jan – May in April or so, which seems okay.
But…am I the only one totally weirded out by releasing a book in the “wrong” season? For example, Smoky Mountain Dreams. I couldn’t have released it in June! That would’ve been so weird!
And yet because these books don’t have hard endings to them, but rather soft pauses, I feel like making a reader wait six months to find out what happens next isn’t a great idea either.
Help me Obi Wan Readership, you’re my own hope! :) But seriously, what should I do? Thoughts? Opinions?
“The hype is correct! This book was so amazing!” | Leigh’s review of A Forbidden Rumspringa #gay #amish
“The hype is correct! This book was so amazing!”
via Goodreads | Leigh’s review of A Forbidden Rumspringa.
January 10, 2015
Southern Accent and Halloween Snow and Gatlinburg Views. LOVE. #extras #smokymountaindreams
I lost so many hours the other day watching random stranger’s vidoes of Gatlinburg on YouTube. I don’t even know why. Heh. I mean, I am doing it to make these blog posts but I know no one is even gonna watch these videos. Still, here’s a favorite. See, we don’t get snow in this area and this is considered insane–snow on Halloween! Highlights of this video: THE ACCENT. I don’t speak like this, but these are examples of how many people in this area sound, including Gareth and others in the book. And the views. Love it.
Sometimes holding on means letting go
Christopher Ryder and Jesse Birch are two men hanging on to the past. While Christopher has let go of his failure as a country singer in Nashville, he’s still trying to please his narrow-minded, non-accepting family. His beloved Gran loves him the way he is, but Christopher feels painfully invisible to everyone else. He���s happy enough performing at the Smoky Mountain Dreams theme park in Tennessee, but even when Christopher is center stage he aches for someone to see the real him.
There’s more than meets the eye when it comes to bisexual Jesse. He’s raising two kids and fighting with family after a tragic accident took his children���s mother. There’s no room in his life for dating, his kids are his priority, and he doesn’t want more than an occasional hook-up. He sure as hell doesn’t want to fall hard for his favorite local singer, but when Christopher walks into his jewelry studio, Jesse hears a new song in his heart.
Smoky Mountain Dreams is available now at:
AMAZON
B&N
SMASHWORDS
iTUNES
SCRIBD
OYSTER
And now at��KOBO.
January 9, 2015
How He Became A PROPER LOVER–Review and Get Your Free Book
Love this series, too!
Originally posted on V's Reads...:
Hi there! Today I���m sharing a review for a newer series I have gone crazy for: The Ganymede Quartet books by Darrah Glass. I reviewed the first book, A MOST PERSONAL PROPERTY, before and it���s a really interesting, fun, sexy read. A PROPER LOVER is the second in a series of alt history/historical books where slavery still exists in the year 1900, and wealthy people purchase same-sex slaves for their adolescent children, so-called ���companion��� slaves, to allow for disgorgement of sexual tension in a ���healthy manner.��� The protagonists are teen boys, but this is an ADULT book. There is boatloads of graphic gay sex, which doesn���t trouble me a whit. You are hereby warned.
About the book:
What does it mean to belong to someone?
Henry Blackwell is the happiest he���s ever been, and it���s all because of his companion slave Martin. Every experience, whether it be mundane or���
View original 733 more words
Night Owl Reviews TOP PICK Book: Smoky Mountain Dreams “What an excellent book this was!” #gay #reading
So thrilled that Night Owl Reviews chose Smoky Mountain Dreams at a Top Pick! :D And the review is absolutely wonderful, too! Thank you!
“My first time reading this author was a huge success. What an excellent book this was.”
read more of the review at Night Owl Reviews via Smoky Mountain Dreams.
BUY AT AMAZON:��Smoky Mountain Dreams
January 8, 2015
Q&A With Indra Vaughn – ARe Cafe #fated #mmromance
Indra Vaughn is at ARe Cafe talking about her new book, Fated, and our upcoming joint writing endeavor.
“I SHOULD be working on the third Shadow Mountain book (*hides from editors*) but I���ve actually been tinkering on a series of three novellas that all take place in the same hospital but with individual storylines. A certain someone (*squints at Leta Blake*) threw a plot bunny my way the other day which revolves around a priest and a rockstar and now I am finding myself doing research on American Catholicism while she gets to do the rockstar research��� And then that same certain someone recently read Dust of Snow, my Christmas novel, and talked me into giving one of the characters a sequel. So yes, the well hasn���t run dry just yet.”
via Q&A With Indra Vaughn – ARe CafeARe Cafe.
A Realistic Look at Gatlinburg — Pancakes, Flapjacks, and Tacky Shops OH MY! #gatlinburg #extras
A decent YouTube video that accurately portrays the Gatlinburg experience. Bonus! It’s clearly filmed in November or December, the same months Smoky Mountain Dreams is set, so you can see what the characters experienced. I don’t know that you need to watch it second by second, but if you skip through it then you’ll see a lot.
Sometimes holding on means letting go
Christopher Ryder and Jesse Birch are two men hanging on to the past. While Christopher has let go of his failure as a country singer in Nashville, he’s still trying to please his narrow-minded, non-accepting family. His beloved Gran loves him the way he is, but Christopher feels painfully invisible to everyone else. He���s happy enough performing at the Smoky Mountain Dreams theme park in Tennessee, but even when Christopher is center stage he aches for someone to see the real him.
There’s more than meets the eye when it comes to bisexual Jesse. He’s raising two kids and fighting with family after a tragic accident took his children���s mother. There’s no room in his life for dating, his kids are his priority, and he doesn’t want more than an occasional hook-up. He sure as hell doesn’t want to fall hard for his favorite local singer, but when Christopher walks into his jewelry studio, Jesse hears a new song in his heart.
Smoky Mountain Dreams is available now at:
AMAZON
B&N
SMASHWORDS
iTUNES
SCRIBD
OYSTER
And now at��KOBO.
January 7, 2015
“I will definitely be searching out and reading Ms. Blake���s other books! Excellent job!” Dan Reviews: Smoky Mountain Dreams by Leta Blake | Love Bytes #gay
“I am so glad I asked to review this book. Not only was it a proper length book at 425 pages���what���you think that is long? Incorrect.�� It was a perfect length and it was good from beginning to end. The book was well written, expertly edited and contained a host of very believable characters. Be prepared though, I started it first thing this morning and read it all in one sitting. It wasn’t a book I wanted to put down.”
Read more of Dan’s review over here: Book Review: Smoky Mountain Dreams by Leta Blake | Love Bytes.
Sometimes holding on means letting go
Christopher Ryder and Jesse Birch are two men hanging on to the past. While Christopher has let go of his failure as a country singer in Nashville, he’s still trying to please his narrow-minded, non-accepting family. His beloved Gran loves him the way he is, but Christopher feels painfully invisible to everyone else. He���s happy enough performing at the Smoky Mountain Dreams theme park in Tennessee, but even when Christopher is center stage he aches for someone to see the real him.
There’s more than meets the eye when it comes to bisexual Jesse. He’s raising two kids and fighting with family after a tragic accident took his children���s mother. There’s no room in his life for dating, his kids are his priority, and he doesn’t want more than an occasional hook-up. He sure as hell doesn’t want to fall hard for his favorite local singer, but when Christopher walks into his jewelry studio, Jesse hears a new song in his heart.
Smoky Mountain Dreams is available now at:
AMAZON
B&N
SMASHWORDS
iTUNES
SCRIBD
OYSTER
And now at��KOBO.
