Cecilia Tan's Blog, page 18

Daron’s Guitar Chronicles Book Seven launches today! Meme contest

Tadaa! Here we are folks, with a new volume of Daron’s Guitar Chronicles finally out in ebook! Volume seven begins in January 1990 (whoaaa…. the nineties…!) with Daron’s international jaunt from Australia to Guitar Craft School to Seville, and ends a few months later after his much anticipated reunion with Ziggy.

I think the first of the “reunion with Ziggy” chapters might be the post with the most single reads in the 24 hours after posting in the history of Daron’s Guitar Chronicles.

Anyway, if you’re collecting the ebooks, here are buy links:

B&N | Amazon | Smashwords

Now, what’s all this about a MEME CONTEST??

Here we go! Various fans of DGC have gotten into making memes or “quote art” — combining photos with quotes from the series. I’ve decided why not make it a contest? Here are the rules:

PRIZE: Grand prize will be a DGC Prize Pack including a Moondog Three tote bag, both paperback omnibus editions of Daron’s Guitar Chronicles, and a $25 Amazon Gift Card. Five runners up will get a prize pack of a tote bag and all seven ebook editions.
Deadline for entry is September 9, 2015.

HOW TO ENTER: All entries must be made by posting to one or more of the following social media networks: Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Pinterest, or Instagram with the tag or hashtag #daronquotes. If you post the same meme/quote art to more than one, you will be entered more times!
VERIFY: To verify your entries and make sure we didn’t miss them, email links to your meme posts to daron.moondog@gmail.com.
REQUIREMENTS: The size of each entry must be a minimum of 640 pixels wide and 360 pixels tall, and a maximum of 1280 pixels wide and 720 pixels tall. (If your art is too big, use a free resizing tool like PicResize.com or ResizeYourImage.com.) To be on the safe side and make sure you’re not infringing on a photographer or artist’s copyright, either get permission from the artist to use their image, or use images that are licensed for re-use, are public domain, or Creative Commons. You can search popular photo sources like Flickr and Google Image search with a filter to only show you CC or non-copyrighted images.
OPTIONAL: You don’t have to add the DGC logo to your meme or quote art, but if you want to, you can grab the images from the bottom of this post: http://daron.ceciliatan.com/archives/3693.

That’s it! I can’t wait to see what you guys come up with!

Reminder: Please join me tonight for book launch chats:

8-9pm Daron and I will be in the new text chatroom on the DGC website! It’s very easy to log in to and chat. Details and instructions here: http://daron.ceciliatan.com/chat-room-how-to but the chat window is accessible on any page on daron.ceciliatan.com

9-10pm I’ll be livestreaming on my Youtube Channel! I’ll take reader questions (send some in advance by commenting here!), read from the new book, and give away some fun stuff.

Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ERP2sOWXqk

Embed:

Chat with Cecilia Tan and Daron this Tuesday!

To celebrate the release of Daron’s Guitar Chronicles Book Seven, I’ll be doing TWO chats this coming Tuesday:

8-9pm Daron and I will be in the new text chatroom on the DGC website! It’s very easy to log in to and chat. Details and instructions here: http://daron.ceciliatan.com/chat-room-how-to but the chat window is accessible on any page on daron.ceciliatan.com

9-10pm I’ll be livestreaming on my Youtube Channel! I’ll take reader questions (send some in advance by commenting here!), read from the new book, and give away some fun stuff.

Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ERP2sOWXqk

Embed:

All times are Eastern US time (EDT).

Pre-order: B&N | Amazon | Smashwords

Top Ten Ways To NOT End a Series: An #RWA15 Workshop

Just came from the panel/class on “How Not to End a [Romance] Series” at RWA 2015 and I am rushing up to my room to see if I can crank out a blog post about it before I go off to a publisher party!

The panelists were Jaci Burton, Marie Force, Jill Shalvis, and Shannon Stacey. All NY Times and USA Today bestselling authors of multiple series. All have sold in the millions.

All of them write series with a central concept of either geography (small town, island, etc) or a brotherhood (firefighters, football or other sports team) that keeps providing them with heroes and characters to be paired up in future books. Each writes the kind of series that has a different romantic pair in each book and since they are character driven, none of them uses large overarching plots to tie things together: they just write whatever character calls to them next.

And each one said, basically, they don’t know how to end a series. All of their series but one are still ongoing (the exception was Shannon Stacy’s Kowalski series, because, as she put it, “I ran out of Kowalskis.”)

They said a lot, all of it excellent advice, but in the interest of time, I’m boiling it down to my top ten takeaways from the panel.

TOP TEN TAKEAWAYS ON HOW TO WRITE AN ONGOING SERIES:

1. Have a series ‘bible’–a spreadsheet of every character and all relevant things about them, their age, description, job, what book they appear in, birthday, anything that is ever mentioned about them. All four of them use this tool, and three of the four mentioned that they hire Lily’s Literary Services to create their series bibles for them. “Don’t wait until you’re on book 6 of your series,” said Jill Shalvis, “or you’ll be miserable.” Shannon Stacey also pointed out, “It’s good to have someone who is not you do your bible because they will catch stuff that you would miss.”

2. Have a timeline. Whether it’s by day, week, month, year, or generations, you have to keep track of what happened when, how many days or months went by, etc. Shannon again, “And I use iCal to keep track within a book not only what’s going on but if any major holidays are coming up. I realized one book was going to cross over Christmas and that’ll have a major effect on a romance.”

3. Have a style guide. Marie Force, “I have some regional things in my books like dialect. In DC the term townhouse is one word, not two. I want it to be one word because that’s how it’s done to be accurate to the region. Every editor wants to change it: now it’s in the style guide so they know not to.” Include anything that is unique to the books, place names, spelling of places, etc.

4. Plant sequel-bait. Jill Shalvis: “My trick for never writing myself into a corner is sequel bait. Always keep some characters mysterious and don’t tell their whole story until it’s their time.” Marie: “Have a lot of good secondary characters. Readers love a sense of community.” Shannon: “You have to resolve the main couple but you seed in other character’s conflicts.”

5. Your setting should be a character. At least if you’re going to write things like Lucky Harbor or the Gansett Island series. (I write mostly big city settings like New York City, London, Boston–for me New York in particular is less of a character than a milieu, almost a genre unto itself…but having heard them say this I am considering how that setting affects my Tor series which is all set in NYC.)

6. Read successful series. Marie: “Read some successful series, and I don’t just mean ours, to see how all these elements are managed, how characters are introduced, etc.”

7. Re-read your own books, obsessively if necessary. Marie: “I always re-read at least the book before the current book before I’ll let it be published and that has saved me a million times. I just re-read books 7 through 12 before writing book 13 of the Gansett Island series because it had been a year since I wrote book 12. I need to know it intimately because your readers will read it ten times!”

8. Subplots, lots of subplots, keep forward momentum for the reader. Jill: “We all have subplots going on. If it’s abut nothing but the hero and heroine, that’s category romance. We want a rich, thick book.” Sometimes subplots don’t get resolved. Marie: “Nine books into one of my series we still don’t know who shot Sam’s dad and it’s a thorn in my heroine’s side. I have no plans to resolve that anytime soon. Likewise there’s an infertility subplot. She won’t be having a baby anytime soon, either!”

9. Be hero-driven and keep those connections and bromances from one hero to the next strong. Shannon: “They don’t have to be brothers, they just have to be bonded. Whether because they’re firefighters or college buddies or what.”

10. Naming your series and the books in it. All three trad-only authors said it was a collaboration between them and the publisher to come up with the titles and the series names. Shannon: “I didn’t know the Kowalskis was going to turn into a series so we didn’t have a catchy series name and by the time we needed one it was just ‘The Kowalski Series’ or ‘A Kowalski Novel.'” Jill: “I make my suggestions on series titles to my publisher. Sometimes I win, sometimes I lose.” Marie: “I thought I had a really clever naming convention using the titles of Beatles songs for the titles of the books but then my U.K. publisher told me the rules there are different, so that created some problems with the titles and we had to change them!”

Basically everyone’s advice on the panel was even if you’re only contracting for one book, or for three, act as if the popularity could take off and plan for it to be a series. Don’t wait to start a bible or timeline, plant your sequel fodder, and make sure it’s all in place so if your book does grow into a giant series, you’ll be ready!

Magic U characters took the Myers Briggs test: the results were startlingly accurate

So, Spellbinding launched yesterday. This is a collection of short stories in the Magic University universe–seven of them by me and ten by other writers playing in my sandbox. They’re all erotic except for one and they all explore more deeply into the characters and backgrounds.

I wrote a lot about Frost for this one. The novels are so much from Kyle’s point of view that as readers we are left guessing about a lot of what is going on in Frost’s head and what he is “really” like. I finally get the chance to let him speak for himself in these stories.

You might have seen yesterday’s “Characters on the Couch” post on author Cecilia Dominic’s blog about what a visit from Frost to a psychologist would have been like. Thinking about delving into Frost and Kyle a little more, I decided to try something other than Tarot cards this time. Just for fun I decided to take a free online version of the Myers Briggs Personality Test, first as Frost, then as Kyle.

For those unfamiliar with Myers Briggs, it’s a rubric of personality types where you try to figure out where you are on a few scales: introverted or extroverted? thinking or feeling? judging or perceiving? intuitive or fact-seeking? The combination is often expressed as four letters. For example, I’m an INTJ: introverted, intuitive, thinking, judgment.

To take the test as a character, I answered the questions as if I were them, though, and the results were startlingly spot-on. So if you ever wanted to know more about Kyle and Frost’s psychology, here you go! Under the cut:

KYLE: ENFP (Extraversion, Intuition, Feeling, Perception)

Our hero is depicted in the Magic University books as both a poet and a crusading knight, an artist’s soul striving to express himself while his quest is for nothing short of True Love.

So how fitting is it that the site where I took the test (16personalities.com) begins the ENFP description with this quote?

“I want to know what you ache for – and if you dare to dream of meeting your heart’s longing. It doesn’t interest me how old you are. I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool – for love – for your dreams…”

Spot on! Wikipedia even says this type is called “the Champion” and is part of the group of Idealists. That is Kyle through and through!

So is this from 16Personalities: “If they’ve found a cause that sparks their imagination, ENFPs will bring an energy that oftentimes thrusts them into the spotlight, held up by their peers as a leader and a guru – but this isn’t always where independence-loving ENFPs want to be.” Right on target! When Kyle rewrote the prophecy for his junior project in The Incubus and the Angel (book 3), it quickly turns him into a kind of cult figure, but Kyle wants to stay hidden from the strangers who come to Veritas seeking his advice.

And how about all those nights Kyle lies awake thinking about Frost? “It’s not uncommon for ENFPs to lose a bit of sleep asking themselves why someone did what they did, what it might mean, and what to do about it.” (16Personalities)

Also this from 16Personalities: “ENFPs will spend a lot of time exploring social relationships, feelings and ideas before they find something that really rings true. But when they finally do find their place in the world, their imagination, empathy and courage are likely to produce incredible results.” That pretty much sums up the plot of the Magic University books, doesn’t it? Kyle searching for true love and his place in the world, and when he finds it, he’ll fight for a spectacular happily ever after.

Now, what about Frost? Dear complicated, twisty-minded, wounded soul Frost. Kyle would dearly love to know him better, so what happened when I gave Frost the test?

I tried this one at the site (PersonalityPathways.com/) and came up with INFJ. I was surprised by this–I didn’t think Frost and I would come out so close in type. I checked it with a couple of other questionnaires, though, and it came up the same. According to Wikipedia “INFJs are the rarest type, and make up only 1% or less of the population.”

Frost has been shaped by a very hard life, yet under it all he remains true to his convictions. Kyle isn’t the only one who wants to save the world: Frost does, too. He just has his own secret agenda for how to go about doing it. As 16 Personalities says: “INFJs indeed share a very unique combination of traits: though soft-spoken, they have very strong opinions and will fight tirelessly for an idea they believe in.”

This sounds, in fact, a lot like the Frost we come to know through his actions on books 2 and 3: “The passion of [the INFJ’s] convictions is perfectly capable of carrying them past their breaking point and if their zeal gets out of hand, they can find themselves exhausted, unhealthy and stressed. This becomes especially apparent when INFJs find themselves up against conflict and criticism – their sensitivity forces them to do everything they can to evade these seemingly personal attacks, but when the circumstances are unavoidable, they can fight back in highly irrational, unhelpful ways.”

Another site (PersonalityPage.com) describes INFJs this way: “Most INFJs are protective of their inner selves, sharing only what they choose to share when they choose to share it. They are deep, complex individuals, who are quite private and typically difficult to understand. INFJs hold back part of themselves, and can be secretive.”

That is Frost to a T!

That site also says some things that speak to the conflict and relationship between Kyle and Frost:

“INFJs hold a special place in the heart of people who they are close to, who are able to see their special gifts and depth of caring.”

That is certainly how Kyle feels about it.

“[INFJs] are very sensitive to conflict, and cannot tolerate it very well. Situations which are charged with conflict may drive the normally peaceful INFJ into a state of agitation or charged anger. They may tend to internalize conflict into their bodies, and experience health problems when under a lot of stress.”

Yes, just ask Kyle about how Frost reacts to him, with angry outbursts and attacks–and Frost’s body is the ultimate manifestation of the conflicts he has internalized.

Lastly, I know some sites talk about which personality types fit well in relationships with other types, so I did one last search to see what the experts say — can Kyle and Frost ever be truly happy together?

Personality Page pretty much pegged it, and had some advice for Kyle as the ENFP trying to love an INFJ: “Your partner has some very definite ideas about what is right for them and what is not. Sometimes it seems as if you have met an invisible wall with them, where no matter how you push they seem to slide about but cannot be made to move further.” Very accurate description of what Kyle finds with Frost.

But are they meant for each other? My eyeballs bugged out of my head when I read this opening to a Thought Catalog article entitled 7 Things You Should Know Before You Date an ENFP:

“ENFPs are all-or-nothing people in their lives and in love. They take romantic relationships seriously, yet approach them with enthusiasm and warmth. ENFPs crave meaningful connections with their partners and are likely to leave a relationship early on if that connection is absent. This type is best matched with an INFJ or INTJ.” (Emphasis mine.)

See?? Kyle and Frost could really be good together if Frost will just give Kyle a chance!

It’ll all come to a head in the final book in the series, The Poet and the Prophecy, which comes out September 15th!

(Get Spellbinding now Amazon, All Romance eBooks, and Smashwords.)

Web Serial Toolbox: everything you need to start a fiction serial

This is the handout for my Web Serial Toolbox workshop, which I’m teaching today at Readercon at 6pm. I’m posting it here as a reference document for those who don’t pick up the physical handout, or who lose the piece of paper, or in case I didn’t bring enough copies, or if a paper-eating nanotech experiment escaped from a nearby office park and destroyed them all while I was on my way to the con.

This is the bare bones reference document, not a full “how to,” since that’s what I give in my workshop, but some of the rest of you might find it a somewhat useful checklist of things to do if you’re starting, or already running a web fiction serial. I might write individual blog posts at a later date on individual topics if I have time and inclination.

Web Serial Toolbox Reference Sheet

by Cecilia Tan, author of award-winning web serial Daron’s Guitar Chronicles

Web serial/web fiction: “(Also known as “Webfiction” or the “Online novel”) is the prose equivalent of webcomics such as Sluggy Freelance or Girl Genius (among many others) which… have distinct Story Arcs. An author, usually an amateur, publishes a Novel in many short installments (often daily or weekly) on a website.”

(Definition from TV Tropes: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WebSerialNovel)

Another definition (mine): “The online text-fiction equivalent of serial storytelling forms such as television shows, comic books, or soap operas.”

Setting up your serial:

Planning/Artistic concerns:

-how often to post? 1x/week? every day? 2-3x/week?

-length of posts/episodes/chapters? (1000-1500 words people believe to be a sweet spot)

-do you know total length?

-write complete first or as you go “tightrope” method?

-define your genre at the start: genre defines the winning condition for the endgame

(high fantasy: good defeats evil, romance: love wins, mystery: justice prevails, science fiction: the entire world/universe changes, etc.)

Hosting your serial:

-Blogspot

-Wordpress.com

-Livejournal

-Wattpad

-Juke Pop Serials

-Digital Novelists (may be defunct?)

-self-hosting (your own machine or using Bluehost, GoDaddy, or other 3rd party platform hosting: check TOS first! Watch out for rights grabs, obscenity clauses, etc)

-OR SOME COMBINATION THEREOF

Elements a serial website must have:

-your copyright notice

-a way to post chapters and easily navigate forward and backward through them (Next/Previous buttons or links, clickable table of contents)

-about the author info

-“about your serial” landing page or start page: like the back of a book, it tells what it is

-donate button or way for fans to contribute and/or contact you

-ability for readers to comment (some consider this optional: I consider it crucial!)

Optional elements:

-digital product shopping cart (like WP-Estore for Word Press or ZenCart)

-ability to place advertisements on the site

-social networking for readers (i.e. they can “friend” each other, WP has plugins for this)

Promoting your serial:

Listings & directories:

-TuesdaySerial.com – add new listing every week & also promo news, book tie ins, arcs ending etc

-Web Fiction Guide (http://webfictionguide.com/) – list once in this directory

-Top Web Fiction (http://topwebfiction.com/) – list once, fans vote every week

-Muses Success (http://muses-success.info/) – list once in this directory

-EpiGuide (http://www.epiguide.com/forums/) – online forums for all web entertainment

EpiGuide hosts WeSeWriMo every August, hosts a podcast, takes paid advertising, has resources page

Advertising:

Project Wonderful — as cheap as you want them to be

Facebook ads — as cheap as you want them to be

Social Media:

IF YOU DON’T SEND OUT NOTIFICATION EACH CHAPTER, YOU WON’T GET AS MUCH TRAFFIC

-Automate your social media announcements of new content:

• use IF This THEN That (IFTTT.com) to configure triggers/actions

• WordPress plugins and crossposters to Twitter/FB/etc

Twitter – Facebook (personal page and pro page) – Tumblr – LJ – Instagram/Pinterest(if visual?) – G+ – Ello? Tsu? – whatever social media network comes next

– build up a network of followers, make sure you have links on your site that direct people to your social media — this network will grown slowly but be crucial to success

– engagement on social media: “Text Art” memes, copypasta, fan retweets, character accounts

• Nonfiction blog separate from the fiction itself (which will RSS To:)

– Goodreads author page

– Amazon author page

• Email List: MailChimp (free), Aweber ($10 per month), Constant Contact

-Very important to have a way to reach readers that YOU own, not Facebook/Twitter, etc

Other ways to spread the word:

-Blog tours and exchanges with other web serial writers

-Wattpad — use Wattpad like a social media site for most effect

-Goodreads forums (like https://www.goodreads.com/group/show/...)

-Free ebook at Amazon & Smashwords (highly recommended!) “permafree”

• free ebook newsletters and ad sites (BookBub is the 900 lb gorilla, many smaller, free, cheap) List of promo newsletters: http://www.rachelleayala.com/p/promo-sites.html, Another:

https://ruthnestvold.wordpress.com/2015/02/10/starting-out-as-an-indie-author-where-to-promote-permafree-books/

Revenue Streams:

-Paypal donate button

-Patreon – subscription payments, kind of like an ongoing Kickstarter

-Merch on your site: T-shirts, stickers, automatic downloads

-Merch on 3rd party site: ongoing: Zazzle, CafePress | limited time: TeeSpring, Booster

-Subsidiary products sold elsewhere: i.e. ebooks sold on Amazon, audiobooks sold on Audible

-Periodic Kickstarter or crowdfund (IndieGogo, etc) campaigns (like NPR’s annual fundraiser)

-Advertising: Google AdWords, Project Wonderful, LinkAds, BlogAds, etc. (ADS TRADITIONALLY DON’T GET MUCH UNTIL YR TRAFFIC IS HUGE)

-Juke Pop Serials supposedly pays creators for traffic – I haven’t verified how/if it works yet, though

Reader Engagement:

-CALL TO ACTION AT THE BOTTOM OF EVERY POST (or once a week?)

-comments (as yourself? as a character? both?)

-rewards (offer bonus content for various forms of engagement: donations, comments, help, linking)

-polls

-fanfic or fanart bounty or contests

-other contests

-reader forum/chat room

-convention appearances

That’s it so far!

Spellbinding is launched! Write a poem, win an autographed copy!

It’s launch day for Spellbinding: Tales from the Magic University! This collection of short stories include seven by me–two never before published and new for this edition–and ten by other writers exploring the world of Magic University!

POEM CONTEST!

To celebrate the new book, which is in paperback for the first time, I’m holding a contest to win an autographed copy of the book. To enter the contest write me a poem about sex, magic, or love and post it in the comments on my blog*! Haiku, limerick, sonnet, free verse: the form is up to you. I’ll accept entries until July 17th at midnight Eastern U.S. time!

Contest is open to people anywhere in the world. I’ll spring for the mailing cost if you’re somewhere distant.

If you’re wondering “why a poetry contest?” for a book of erotic fantasy stories, it’s because in my universe poetry itself is a powerful form of magic. The hero of the Magic University series, Kyle, has prodigious powers as a sex magician, but ultimately his ability as a poet is what shapes his destiny and the fate of those around him.

Poetry is magic. Creativity is magic. Love is magic. That’s pretty much what these books are about!

If you’d prefer to just purchase a copy instead of entering the contest, please do, at your favorite retail outlet–it should be going live everywhere today–including Amazon, All Romance eBooks, and Smashwords. If you’re on Goodreads please add it to your shelf!

*If you’re on Livejournal/Dreamwidth, please hop over to the original post to leave your contest entry so they’ll all be in one place? Here: http://blog.ceciliatan.com/archives/2427

Title: Spellbinding

Subtitle: Tales from the Magic University

Author: Cecilia Tan

With contributions from Deb Atwood, Lauren P. Burka, Julie Cox, Rian Darcy, Sarah Ellis, Elisabeth Hurst, D.K. Jernigan, BriAnne Searles, and Frances K. Selkirk

Page count: 218

Word count: 72,808

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-62601-204-2

Print ISBN: 978-1-62601-205-9

Categories: LGBT new adult, new adult paranormal, paranormal romance, erotic fantasy, short stories

Description:

When lovers meet, it’s magic–literally–when your characters are studying at the Magic University and erotic magic is the most powerful of all. In these 17 short stories featuring characters from Cecilia Tan’s Magic University LGBT new adult romance series, erotic energy heals wounds, lifts curses, bonds some people together, and tears some people apart. Tan and a merry crew of nine writers explore the intriguing secondary characters, unanswered mysteries, and background stories of Veritas.

Spellbinding includes 7 stories by Cecilia Tan–including two never before published!–and 10 by authors and fans she invited to come “play in her sandbox.” The stories range from fanciful “what ifs” to explorations of the backgrounds of characters we don’t fully learn in the course of the main novels. Through these tales we see Frost’s rescue as a child, the tumultuous relationship of Dean Bell and Master Brandish, what Kyle did on his summer vacation, and much more. Representing a range of sexualities, the stories include lesbian, gay, bi, and heterosexual pairings.

The Riverdale Avenue Books edition of Spellbinding will be the first in paperback and contains two never-before-published stories by Cecilia Tan. Any lover of magical erotic fiction will find much to enjoy, and any fan of Magic University will find these stories revealing.

Author Bio: Cecilia Tan is the recipient of the 2014 Pioneer Award and the Career Achievement Award in Erotica/Erotic Romance given by RT Magazine. She is not only the author of the Magic University series, but also Slow Surrender, The Prince’s Boy, Daron’s Guitar Chronicles, The Hot Streak, Mind Games, and many other books and stories. Susie Bright called her “simply one of the most important writers, editors, and innovators in contemporary American erotic literature.” Tan was inducted into the Hall of Fame for GLBT writers at the Saints & Sinners Literary Festival in 2010. She and her partner corwin (and their three cats) live in Cambridge.

Win a copy of Spellbinding: Tales from the Magic University from Cecilia Tan!

Only four days left on this Goodreads giveaway! The book launches on July 9 and we’ll be drawing the winners then!

Click HERE to go directly to Goodreads to enter if the widget below doesn’t show.

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Goodreads Book Giveaway







Spellbinding



by Cecilia Tan

Giveaway ends July 09, 2015.

See the giveaway details

at Goodreads.

Enter Giveaway

Now Live: Golden Flogger Award Finalists List

I just got word from Doctor Charley with the books that made the finalist list in the Golden Flogger Awards and am excited to share them here! I see several of my favorite authors (Tiffany Reisz, Annabel Joseph, D.L. King, Cherise Sinclair, Raven Kaldera!) have made the list and I am betting the ones I don’t know will make an excellent reading list!

The winners will be announced at BDSM Writers Con in New York City, in a ceremony on Thursday August 20th. The convention runs from August 19 through Sunday, August 23 (when there will be a BDSM Book Fair from noon to 4pm open to the public).

The Golden Flogger Awards are looking for books with excellence in BDSM published in 2014. They received 181 books for consideration. Finalists are listed alphabetically by author in each category:

BDSM Light

Sierra Cartwright — Crave

Jenna Jacobs — Saving my submission

Anne Lange – Hers to own

Roz Lee — Spring Training – Mustangs Baseball #5

Jillian Verne – Masterpiece

BDSM Advanced

Cris Anson — Redemption & Glory

Lexi Blake — A View to thrill

Lexi Blake — Dungeon Royale

R.E. Hargrave — Surreal

Annabel Joseph — Bound in Blue

Stacey Kennedy — Bared: A Sin Club novel

Trista Ann Michael — Master Delacroix

Cherise Sinclair — Edge of the Enforcer

BDSM Dark Erotica

Alaska Angelini — Unbearable

Tara Crescent — The Audition

Claire Thompson — Beyond the Compound

Novella

Corinne Alexander — Brush of Violet

R.G. Alexander — The Cowboy’s Kink

Alaska Angelini — Dom Up, Devlin Black

Cris Anson — Aaron’s Jewel

Elizabeth SaFleur — Holiday Ties

Cherise Sinclair — 1001 Nights: Show Me, Baby

Dominant Women & submissive Men

Lynda Aicher — Bonds of Courage

Joey W. Hill & Desiree Holt — Nightfall

Drury Jamison — Safe Words

Lori King — Mistress Hedonism

LGBT

Sean Michael — Underground: Special Teams

Josephine Myers — How To Train Your Dom in Five Easy Steps

Tiffany Reisz — The King

L.M. Somerton — Rasputin’s Kiss

Claire Thompson — The Contract



Ménage

Rhiannon Ayers — Saints United

Kira Barker — Caught in the Middle

Shayla Black — Theirs to Cherish

Avery Gale — Punishing for Pleasure

Jennifer Kacey — Jenna’s Consent

Paranormal

Riley Bancroft — Tempest in Disguise

Joey W. Hill — The Scientific Method

Selena Illyria – Making Dragons Purr

Non-Fiction

Raven Kaldera & Del Tashlin — Broken Toys: Submissives With Mental Illness and Neurological Dysfunction

Mike Makai — The Warrior Princess Submissive

Jolynn Raymond — Taken In Hand

Anthology

Edited by D.L. King — Slave Girls

Edited by D.L. King — She who must be obeyed

Edited by Alison Tyler – Twisted Bondage with an Edge

Edited by Lori Perkins — First Annual BDSM Writers Con Anthology

Congrats to all the finalists and I look forward to seeing lots of you in August!

I went chasing the aurora… and caught it!

Last night we went seeking the wonders of the world. And we found them.

I had read on Twitter early in the evening that a “geomagnetic storm” was going on and that there would likely be amazing auroras to be seen, but corwin and I both had to work until 9pm and I didn’t even think of going hunting for it. But after we’d finished dinner, around 11 o’clock at night, I saw a photo on Twitter taken from the bay in Salem, Massachusetts that looked spectacular. Sure it was a long exposure photo, but Salem does not exactly have dark sky conditions and is very far south of where one normally thinks of seeing auroras.

I showed it to corwin.

“Want to go?” he asked.

“I’ll put on pants,” I replied.

By 11:30pm we were driving due north on I-93, not quite sure where we were headed other than “somewhere dark, somewhere north.” We looked at aurora prediction websites. On the scale from 1 to 9 used to measure aurora activity, it was then around 6.5 with predictions to hit 7 within an hour.

To the west, the moon was setting. At about 40% full, it looked huge as it neared the horizon, dipping into a sea of misty clouds, resembling the ragged billowing sail of a ghost ship on fire.

We blew past the first rest area in New Hampshire, a spot where we’d previous taken in the view of a wonder in the sky: the annular eclipse back in 1994. That time we’d ridden motorcycles from corwin’s house in the suburbs. We didn’t even live together yet, that’s how long ago that was.

This time we made our first stop at the next rest area further on, past Manchester. A lot of cloud cover was coming and going, but it looked like to the north it was clearer. Where could we go that was dark enough and where we could get a view of the horizon, without trees?

One thought that occurred to me was the Margate Resort, on the shores of large lake Winnipesaukee, which I knew of because it’s where MISTI-Con was just last month. But I wasn’t sure how well we could get away from lights there. “What’s the ski mountain in Laconia?” I asked corwin, who asked Google.

Gunstock. As soon as he said it I knew that’s where I wanted to go. We set the GPS for Gunstock Mountain and off we went again. And it was on a dark back road toward the ski resort that I suddenly pulled off the road and said, “That. What is making those trees backlit?”

“Isn’t that the glow from some city?” corwin asked.

“There’s no city that direction.” We jumped out of the car and looked a bit longer, but a house and lots of trees were in our way. All we could see was that the sky to the north was bright.

He was skeptical. We got back in the car. We drove not even a quarter mile when I again pulled off with no warning. “That’s it! That’s it!”

We were in front of a house with a cleared yard between it and a freestanding two-car garage. Between the house and the garage we could see in the distant sky what looked like a shimmering white curtain of light.

That was most certainly not the glow of a city. One large tree was blocking the view somewhat but there was no mistaking what we were seeing for city glow or anything else, the way the light moved, like a sheet of gossamer rippling. Then it turned more steadily bright. The aurora meter on the web said it was hitting close to 8. It was 1:30 in the morning at that point.

We decided to try to get away from the tree. Just a little further up the road we came to a genuine pull-off with gravel and what might have been a boggy area or a pond, judging by the loud croaks of bullfrogs and the mosquitos attacking me. From there we had a fairly good view due north above the tree line, but as we looked toward the glow, the clouds overhear thickened in. In just a few minutes we went from seeing a good many stars to completely none, and any view of the aurora utterly blocked.

Still, we considered it a completely successful trip. We’d gone with the intent of seeing the Northern Lights with the naked eye, and we’d succeeded, even if it was a brief view! (The one other time we’d seen them was from an airplane, on a red eye flight from Los Angeles to Boston, and they’d looked like giant green search lights glowing in the sky. We didn’t sleep, just watched the green glow for hours.)

Given that we’d gone that far, and that the aurora prediction was that it was going to go up even more in the next hour, we decided it made sense to stay out a bit longer and see if we could either figure out a clearer place to drive to, or wait to see if it might clear where we were. By that point we both had to answer the call of nature, though, so we drove back down the mountain to the Margate, which feels like home away from home by now. We used the lobby restrooms and had a nice chat with the overnight desk clerk, an elderly man from the area who suggested we might try Liberty Hill for a nearby spot where it’s very dark.

Our searches of Internet weather sites did not turn up anything helpful in the way of a cloud cover map. Far as I could tell ClearDarkSky is only useful for telling what the cloud cover is like where you *are* but not where to *go*, and is also nearly impossible to read on a mobile phone. And I swear radar weather maps used to have a cloud cover option, but nothing that we could find on our phones, it seemed.

So we went up Liberty Hill just to see, and although it was good and dark, and probably excellent for looking at meteor showers (for example), there were too many trees to get a good view of the horizon. So we drove back to the good pull off on the road to Gunstock and decided to just give it an hour to see if the clouds would clear. A small clear patch was visible in the west, and over the course of the hour it gradually moved eastward overhead, revealing the Milky Way, Arcturus setting in the west, and due north framed by the Big Dipper and Cassiopeia. But all we could really see was just a brightness, a glow, nothing distinct like it had been before.

Rainbow as seen from the car.

At 3:30 am we decided we were probably starting to see the pre-dawn glow — after all, it was just the shortest night of the year mere days ago! — and we packed it in. We Googled up a 24-hour diner on the route home, and talked about cognitive science and epistemology and baseball — the things essential to the human condition — all the way there.

By the time we left the diner, dawn was imminent, and with all the odd cloud cover around the region, were treated to an intensely colorful and three-dimensional sun rise. And then, as if the universe wasn’t done showing us the wonders of the sky, we saw a rainbow.

All in all a very successful endeavor in looking up.

Food porn: Strawberry basil balsamic pie recipe

A delicious summer pie: strawberry basil pie with balsamic vinegar!

It’s farm share season again, and so it’s time once again here in New England to grab all the best of the seasonal fruits and vegetables as they come. corwin recently called to say he was coming home with several quarts of the first strawberries of the year and so he thought I should make a pie. (It was my night to cook.) So before he got home I whipped up a batch of pie crust (I used the all-butter, food-processor variation of Flaky Pastry Dough from the 1990s edition of The Joy of Cooking and I added a bunch of fresh grated nutmeg to the dough) and then started looking at recipes.

The “problem” with plain strawberry pie is that it can actually come out too sweet and too homogenous. Some solve this by doing strawberry rhubarb, but we didn’t have rhubarb. Some suggest upping the acid content with more lemon juice, but you still have relentless strawberry, then. The nutmeg in the crust was going to help a little, as was the fact that I was going to do a lattice top, which gives the pie a little more toothsome bite, but how to add complexity and body to the flavor?

And then I realized I was staring at a small basil plant that has been growing on the kitchen counter for about two months now…. I’d picked it up on a whim in April and amazingly it’s still alive and still giving really delicious basil leaves. There’s an Italian dessert I’ve had that is basically chopped strawberries and basil tossed in balsamic vinegar. Sometimes it is served on vanilla ice cream, but sometimes it’s just in a bowl all by itself.

My basil plant, strawberries whole and then cut, and the label of the syrupy balsamic vinegar I used.

So here’s what I ended up with:

PIE FILLING:

5 cups hulled, halved strawberries

1/4 cup balsamic vinegar

3/4 cup sugar (cut down from the 1 cup in most fruit pie recipes)

1/4 cup corn starch

1 tsp salt

20 large basil leaves, chopped

Mix all the ingredients in a bowl and let them sit for a while. (20 minutes? Half hour?) I used a really sweet, almost syrupy balsamic vinegar and I think I could have probably put in more than I did. Basically I would say taste the strawberry mixture and if it tastes good, the pie will taste good. If the strawberries aren’t as ripe, maybe add sugar or cut back vinegar until it seems right.

I made half of the Flaky Pastry Dough recipe into the bottom crust, patted it into a glass pie pan, poured the strawberry mixture in, and then made lattice strips for the top. To make the lattice strips I rolled out the remaining dough on a lightly floured surface, then used a pizza cutter to make the strips. I didn’t try overly hard to “weave” the strips, just laid them down in alternating directions and crimped them to the bottom crust.

Bake at 425 for 30 minutes, then reduce heat to 350 for another 25 to 30 minutes. The recipe said to put a baking sheet underneath in the 350 stage to catch any bubble over, but I didn’t actually have any bubble over.

We served it with homemade vanilla ice cream but honestly I think it was great all by itself, too. corwin says if I make it again I should double the amount of basil and I think I could increase the amount of balsamic vinegar if I keep using the really sweet kind.

The crust filled, the lattice top applied, after baking it browned nicely and crisp, served with ice cream.