A convention, some holiday begging, and a writing update…

I'm going to be out of town this weekend for Lucca Comics and games, which as usual will be held in Lucca. Pisa was in talks to steal the con, but Lucca made a very convincing argument that the name sounded better in their city. Yes, I'm totally making this up. But the part I'm not making up? I'm going for free. And, did I mention women walking around dressed in skimpy cosplay costumes? The only things this place is missing to be heaven are fog banks of pot smoke and angel wings.

Obviously, I LOVE attending Lucca Comics and Games, and last year, I was able to live tweet from the con thanks to my Blackberry. Sadly, I killed my beloved smartphone, and while it was an accidental killing, I've been making do with my older Nokia as penance for my heinous crime. This means I have no app to tweet, or to blog, or to check in with anyone. So this next weekend's silence is not depression. I'm just going to a con to eat heavily and paw through manga and anime DVDs. And hentai porn. But you coulda guessed that last one.

Becka, ever a source of good promotional ideas, has suggested that for Halloween I should try to promote some of my more accessible stories for some holiday themed reading. So I thought, why not point y'all to a couple stories with a playful theme on "Things that go bump in the night"? For zombie fans, I'd like to direct your attention to Zombie Punter and the sequel, Confessions of a Zombie Lover. Both Zombie Era novellas are fast reads, and both have been given good reviews. So if you want an apocalypse with a slightly…saltier flavor, this should prove entertaining.

For vampire fans, I've got a number of stories to offer you, some of them even free. And while you're paying for bags of candy to give out, a little free reading for the holiday might not suck…if we weren't talking about vampire books.

I'd love to offer you some of my stories about Vicky the vampire, a long-running character in my Mystical World Wars series. Each of Vicky's episodes tends to be self-contained, so you don't need to worry about where you're at in the timeline. So whether you read A Phone Man Visits the Vampires, Job Interview With a Vampire, or my free story (which isn't supposed to still be free, but I'm lazy) Stark Raving Bonkers, you should find something in Vicky's world to keep you smiling. Or if you'd prefer a vampire to nibble a little deeper and tickle your funny bone more, there's always my free novel, My Gay Sparkly Vampire Romance: A Twilight Parody. This has now been reviewed by an almost equal number of Twilight fans and haters, and both sides agree, what I've done with this "fan-fiction" is a whole new vision of Meyer's world, told in the Bronx instead of Forks, and with a wickedly queer take on the relationship between Bella, her vampire paramour and her werecat rival.

Of course, I have longer works featuring Vicky the vampire such as Touched, Blood Relations, and Redemption Lost. But those could all take longer than a night to read unless you're a fast reader, and before you read Redemption Lost, you might want to try the first two books in the trilogy, The Lesser of Two Evils and Trail of Madness. (I've got glowing reviews on those too.)

Hard to believe, but despite all those titles I just dropped, that's not even half of what I've published. As sampler packs go, it's not bad. But I should go ahead and mention my one offering for folks in the YA market with Sandy Morrison and the Pack of Pussies, and for people worried about whether the series will go on, I offer promises that I'm already working on Sandy Morrison and the Pixie Prohibition. In the new book, Sandy's new connection to fairy godmother Danie Dragontamer leads to her being recruited by the FBI. (Fairy Bureau of Instigation) But her first assignment through "impression" leads her to a clan of bootlegging pixies who are sworn enemies of FBI because the fairy godmothers have declared a prohibition on certain potent pixie potions. So…should be good.

I'm offering something darker and more disturbing for those of you in the IA crowd, what I'm calling the Immature Adult market, (I promise I'll explain that term in a future post, someday) with Peter the Wolf, my dark fantasy story about a former child porn star who is coming to terms with his past and with his cursed blood. It is not a book for sensitive readers and deals with subjects of abuse's side effects and molest. So, if you can consider all of the other titles listed above to be more accessible to one degree or another, consider this book "highly challenging." This is not my first controversial book, but it is the one that resulted in animosity toward me for what "I did" to a fictitious minor. So, I hope you'll consider that fair warning.

Shifting mental gears, if any of you were reading All Maid Up and thought I'd stopped writing it, I didn't. I just stopped posting update copy-pastas now that the story has a dedicated home. I've got a link in the sidebar listed among my links, but you could also use some RSS reader to keep up to date or bookmark the other site.

I've been doing episodes pretty fast, sometimes even turning out daily episodes. But there is obviously going to be some slow down during the holidays. I have to put away the writing to make time for what's important: food and cuddles. Anywho, I guess I'm about halfway through the series now, so those of you worried about this stretching out to infinity and beyond, don't. At most, All Maid Up will cover two years of Ginger's life in high school. While the serial won't end in a happily ever after, I hope the outcome leaves readers with a satisfying sense of closure.

Random Brain fart about All Maid Up 1: I would love to promote the soap to more folks as the "show" nears the spring season with two trials and with Ginger now "owning" one of her worst enemies, but I still don't really know who I'd promote it to. I'm tempted to say it might work for readers of Shimmer, since they're both trans serials. But while the story of a trans cheerleader's hectic life is a little fantastic at times, I can promise Ginger will never dress in tights or display super powers. It's not that kind of soap opera. So I don't want to suggest that All Maid Up is quite as cool as superheroes.

Random Brain fart about All Maid Up 2: Man, some of my WebLit friends are so going to bust my chops about Ginger owning someone. It's a theme in their work that makes my guts so jumpy I can't read their stuff. Their writing is good, but the topic is too triggery for me. Which is what Ginger is feeling about it too, and even if the bully had been a jerk to her for years, having the chance to turn the tables on him isn't sitting well with her.

Random Brain fart about All Maid Up 3: I wanted to promote on Twitter through the #TuesdaySerial tag, and when they read the first episode, they asked, "Hey, is this erotica? Because we don't work with erotica." And we sorted out that while there was some making out here and there, the story wasn't really erotica, even if certain scenes were erotic. I also said that eventually I plan for Ginger to "go all the way." Folks who read the spin the bottle episode tweeted to the #TuesdaySerial folks to agree that, yes, that episode was erotic. So, not wanting to be a drama queen (for once), I asked, "Is some sex okay, or should I walk on?" And they decided that if it was not all sex, all the time, then sure, a little sex now and again in a soap opera wouldn't be so bad.

Which would be GREAT for Ginger, if she could convince ANY of her romantic partners to take that first ride. Sadly, in Ginger's soap opera world, her noble pursuits of happiness and hawt sex often end in disasters and plot twists. Or bullies. Which are often both disasters and plot twists.

Also note my oh-so-subtle teen drinking lecture by way of allegory in this last season: "Kids, drinking heavily means you bleed out faster if you're stabbed at a drinking party. Drink responsibly to keep thicker blood…er, wait, don't drink at all, is what I meant to say. Fuck, I need a drink." *hic*

So, that's a writing update and what I hope was a polite amount of pleading and begging for sales. (Or, just readers for the free stories.) If I don't have the chance to say it later in the week in another post, have a good Halloween, and try not to eat so much candy corn that you hurl. (Yes, I'll be able to follow that advice…*haughty sniff*…because I only eat chocolate till I puke on Halloween. So there.)

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