Not lesbian slayers who kill vampires; the vampires are lesbians.

And this is definitely on my short list of Movies To See this year.

Wild Thing releases today in mass-market format!

New York Times bestselling authors Maggie Shayne and Marjorie M. Liu, and sizzling newcomers Meljean Brook and Alyssa Day discover the wild instinct in everyone with four stories of feral heat…

WILD THING

“Paradise”

Lucas Marsden has faced nosferatu before and survived, but he doesn’t know how to defeat the demon who hunts the vampires in his community… But he knows exactly what he wants from the beautiful Guardian sent to protect them.

This is the third story in the Guardian series. 

$7.99 Berkley Sensation ISBN 0425225445
Amazon.com ~ Borders.com ~ Powells.com

“Once again, Brook plays with the notion of free will on multiple levels, adding hope to her dark world of demons and nosferatu, and substance to a genre that is too often dismissed as fluff.” — Nicola, Alpha Heroes

Thanks to random.org, we have the winning comment numbers:

#18 - cyclops8

#118 - Marcy Strahan

#92 - Hesper F

Congratulations! Please contact me (see link above) with your mailing address, and I’ll send the anthology ASAP.

Thank you so much to everyone who entered.

The Wild Thing giveaway ends tonight. Scroll down and enter for your chance to win.

I was thinking about eyelash curling today, and I wondered: do people actually do that as part of their daily routine? Or is it just something that models do?

I wear make-up pretty much every day, but I’ve never curled my eyelashes. (To be honest, there isn’t much there to curl; I wasn’t born with naturally thick lashes that a romance hero would kill for.) And it also seems like it’d take WAY too much time. But is it pretty common? Am I totally missing out on an easy step to ultimate, sultry-eye hawtness?

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I went to bed about four-thirty last night after finishing a scene that I really liked (even if it was also very rough), woke up late for 1st day back to school, somehow got daughter/husband there on time, drove sister to work…and was stopped because my brake light was out.

While stopped, I learned that my license has been suspended for the past year. (Because last year, I’d been pulled over for having a missing headlight, and found out that my license had expired when I turned 30. Then I forgot about the court date, and sent in the money, but apparently even though you get a receipt/clear from the courts, you’re supposed to take that in to the DMV so that they can reinstate your license. Whoops.)

Went to DMV, was reinstated as a legal driver.

Now, 9:30, I’m back home and about to start writing again.

I make a little soundtrack for each book, but this one … well, I haven’t been in the car as much (I can’t write while listening to music, so the soundtrack is for when I’m doing other stuff (usually driving)) and the one I did make at the beginning of the book has disappeared (and when I look at the playlist, it’s not Quite Right anyway (it resembled my DEMON ANGEL playlist almost too much).

But today, as I was heading to the grocery store, I stuck in Fiona Apple’s WHEN THE PAWN, and realized the first track was perfect. (Apple ends up on pretty much all of my playlists, just because her voice/music carries angst/anger like crazy, and her lyrics are amazing.)

So this book might just have a one-track soundtrack.

(No actual video, just the album art — this is something I think a fan put up. Click through to listen.)

My 2008 releases Demon Night, “Thicker Than Blood,” and Demon Bound have been showing up on “Best of…” lists — and I just want to take this opportunity to say Thank you! to everyone who has tried the series. This is the best job in the world, but I couldn’t be doing it if readers didn’t grab an unknown author’s book and open to that first page.

And in 2009, I’ll keep doing my best to make them worth reading.

(but not the last words I’ll be writing, because I’m hoping to get another couple of pages in before I hit the hay)

I just ran across something that made me realize that I’m not bothered when generalizations are used to criticize the romance (or other) genres. For example, “So many alpha men!” We all have our preferences, and not all of them run the same way, and we all seek out books that we think we will like according to our individual tastes.

I am bothered when generalizations are used to criticize a specific book/relationship. “This romance sucks! Yet another alpha man! Why couldn’t she be with a beta hero?”

Especially when it ignores a) the heroine’s character, b) the success/failure of the romance and the chemistry (or lack thereof) as described in the book. (If it ignores that particular heroine would walk all over a hero who wasn’t alpha, for example.) The problem is, of course, separating a dislike for alpha heroes and that the book didn’t work according to personal taste — and recognizing that the book just doesn’t work. Sometimes, an asshole alpha and a TSTL doormat have a romance that does work, because they are made for each other — but that doesn’t mean the book is good, because…well, asshole and TSTL.

I do have a soft spot for betas, but I find myself wishing less for certain trends in romance than just finding the individual book that works on its own terms, no matter what category the characters fall in to.

Taste and technique. Here’s to hoping that in 2009, all of the books we read (and write) will hit our sweet spots in both categories (or if not, that one aspect of it will hit your sweet spot so hard, that you don’t mind so much about the other).

(I haven’t read the book in question, but it reminded me of something from my last batch of copy-edits.)

In the original draft of DEMON BOUND, Jake has this line (talking to Drifter about Alice’s husband):

Husband? More like a cocksucking crybaby.

Copy edits came back and it looked like this:

Husband? More like a cocksucking big crybaby.

With a note that said: Might be read as homophobic.

And I was like, what? Because to me, it’s always been a stronger version of “asshole” or “bitch” (and gender-unspecific). So I thought about changing it back … then decided, okay, I won’t. Anyone who has followed Jake’s character probably knows he’s not homophobic, but if it can be read that way, why introduce the issue?*

But “big” was not going to work. It wasn’t angry enough. So it became:

Husband? More like a cocksucking big fucking crybaby.

*If Jake was saying this directly to Alice’s husband, and Jake knew that Alice’s husband would be additionally insulted by the suggestion that he is gay (Alice’s husband would have been), then it’d probably have stayed as originally written. (Of course, that is only after I learned it could be read as homophobic; before then, this option would never have occurred to me, either.)

It all comes down to character and context for me. In this case, “cocksucking” didn’t do anything that “fucking” couldn’t, and might have suggested more than I intended. But if the circumstances were right, there is no word I wouldn’t let my characters use.

After all that, I read SALVATION IN DEATH and noticed Roarke calling someone a cocksucker (or it was used as an adjective; I can’t remember exactly — I just remember laughing when I read it.) But again — I can’t see Roarke as homophobic, so I’ve never read it from him that way, either. I still don’t, but I understand that someone with a different experience might, and think of Roarke differently because of it.

That, of course, is out of anyone but the reader’s hands. I wouldn’t expect Robb to write Roarke differently now that I am more aware of it, any more than I’d expect a book called COCKSUCKER IN DEATH.

…I’d still buy it.

CONTEST!

 
WILD THING, which includes my novella “Paradise” and stories by Maggie Shayne, Marjorie Liu, and Alyssa Day is releasing next Tuesday. So, so, so! of course I’m giving some away.

Leave a comment below (easy enough, hmm?) and on Monday, Jan 5 at midnight, I’ll randomly choose three winners.

You don’t have to leave anything more than an “Enter me!” but to make it fun, let’s name either our favorite book of the year, favorite movie of the year, or the YouTube video that you watched the most this year (or that made you laugh the hardest).

Mine was probably this one (totally NSFW)

Also — if you follow my blog, don’t forget to update the RSS feed — the link is on the sidebar under “META”

I updated Wordpress, then messed around with the theme a little bit … and broke it all. My Lazy Meljean theme files were just gone, the main site was gone (eek!) and it was a big mess.

So I finally did what I’ve been intending to do for a while (although I had wanted to put it off until after DEMON FORGED was done.) I’ve transferred all of the pages from my main site over to Wordpress pretty much by copy/paste, so that means a lot of links (especially in the primer) are out of date. This blog will also have many of the images missing until I figure out how to redirect all of the uploads in one fell swoop. 

I think that most of the links to my book pages should still be active; I’m not sure about the blog (it’s in another directory now). If you have come here on a link to an archive page, if you take the /blog out of the address, I imagine it will work.  

I’ll probably take fifteen minutes or so a day updating the links, but it’s not a priority, because the guts are there and the site is navigable. However — if you do find something that is a horrible, horrible problem, please contact me (via the handy-dandy CONTACT tab in the above menu.)

ETA: You will need to update your feed settings! Gah! The RSS link is on the META sidebar.

ETA2: I think I fixed the permalink problem.