I’ve received a couple of inquiries this morning about Burning Up, because it’s apparently not available on Kindle, at Borders, or All Romance Ebooks.

It is available at BN.com, the Sony ebook store, Diesel, Books on Board, and iBooks.

I’m not sure why it’s not showing up in the other catalogs, but I imagine it’s an issue that will be resolved soon. If I hear otherwise, I’ll update you here.

UPDATE: It was a problem with the files, and they are being resent to bookstores. BURNING UP should be available soon at your favorite ebook retailer.

Will you please send it again? My server went down, and they used a restore point from Friday night at midnight, which means that I’ve lost everything sent to me from Friday night to about 5:30pm Saturday.

If you won a copy of Demon Blood over at Odd Shots, you might have to send me your address again.

I currently have the addresses for these winners:

Mireyah Wolfe
Stacy S
BarbaritaV
Margaret
Laria
Pam P.

Thanks, and sorry about this!

When you meow at the door, wanting to be let in, then PLEASE COME IN instead of standing there, sniffing the doorframe, and deciding whether you REALLY want to enter the abode where your fricking food is. I swear to God, I’m going to shut the door in your cute little face next time!

kthxbai,
Meljean

P.S. *sob sob* Okay, I wouldn’t shut it in your cute wittle face. It’s true: I’m totally pussy-whipped.

I’m trying to finish Demon Blood, so I’ve missed a lot of the blog discussions/craziness going on, and it’s okay. I’m sure I’ll catch up next time

My e-mail meljean at meljeanbrook.com has become progressively worse and worse. Some are still coming through, but others just aren’t — and they aren’t on my server, either. If you have recently sent me an e-mail, were expecting a response, but haven’t gotten one, my apologies, and could you please re-send it? I’m also available at meljean.brook at gmail dot com (no spaces). The contact form seems to be working okay, too (at least, as far as I’m aware, all of the e-mails are going through (even those listing an e-mail address that ISN’T going through normal channels.)

***

Okay, so what apparently happened was that my domain name expired. I’ve purchased it again, but if you are having trouble viewing my site, you might need to clear your cache. (Yeah, yeah, I know — if you can’t see my site, then how can you see this post? I’m hoping you’ll see it in Google Reader or your RSS feed reader.)

How can you *not* recognize an e-mail like this as spam? Especially after I have marked it as spam five hundred million thousand times? (Click to view the glory that is my e-mail program.)

Seriously. That’s SO awesome.

First, business: Thanks to the power of random.org, the winner of Laura Kinsale’s SHADOWHEART is:

Random Integer Generator

Here are your random numbers:

7

#7 — RachieG!

Congratulations!

***

So.

Remember when I said a while back that “Thicker Than Blood” is a RITA finalist? Well, apparently, you have to turn in a picture to RWA. And I have an author picture, but when I got it, it was a quick, OMG I need a pic! situation, so I ran down to my parents’ house and had my sister take about 700,000 pics of me at the park.

Well, that picture doesn’t work, because although it’s fine for the web, it’s not high-resolution or anything. So, I said to my sister: Echo, I need you to take another pic, but this one has to be printable. And so we decided I’d do it when I got a chance (at the time, I was chained to my laptop, and Echo lives an hour away, so there was no pic.)

But yesterday, I had to go to my parents’ house anyway, so I took my ‘business’ jacket (the one that’s supposed to make me look all professional and shit.)

The problem is, of course, that my face doesn’t cooperate with the ‘professional and shit.’ Seriously, it is SO hard not to laugh. In practically every single picture, I’m either trying not to laugh (which, at 300 pixels/inch, manages to show every single wrinkle I’ve developed in the past couple of years (but I’ve shrunkened the pic here so that they don’t show so much, hahah) *sob*)

Or, the sun is shining in my eyes in the perfect way to cast a shadow over half of them and make it look like I’m going to kill her. I won’t post those, because I don’t want to scare anyone.

Then I had help (my favorite pics out of all that we took). First, she sneaks up behind me (I was sitting on a log that jammed a broken-off branch half up my ass):

Then attacks:

And I’m smiling, but in reality she’s choking me half to death. But, aw, she’s so cute.

Anyway, this is the best out of all of them, and I have crazy-eyes (and it was getting windy and starting to rain, and my hair* was going all over the place):

Because I have a really hard time keeping my eyes open when I’m taking pictures (they narrow down into tiny little things) simply because of the trying-not-to-laugh problem (and my cheeks bunch way up), so I make an effort to OPEN my eyes WIDE and it gives me the spacey look.

So, I dunno. I might head out to a real place where they do magic stuff with eyeballs and lights.

*Also — next time I’m not going to cut my own hair with my daughter’s safety scissors about three weeks before I get my picture taken. So maybe, hair stylist first, then professional pictures. Sigh. I hate that. Nothing was worse than picture day when I was a kid.

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.

The problem with living on the west coast is that when you set a story on the east coast, you kind of forget that you can drive across four or more states in the same amount of time it takes to get from the Oregon coast to the Idaho state line.

And so it doesn’t really take very long to drive from Manhattan to North Carolina. And so, I must adjust a time frame and/or the setting.

Please contact me through the contact form, or check your bulk mail/spam folder. I think my e-mails are getting lost in the Yahoo and Gmail spam filters.

I’m rewriting the beginning of the hellhound novella again. Remember when I figured out that my conflict sucked? Well, it did, and I fixed it … but then I didn’t change much else. I decided to just change how the information is given out.

Big mistake. I could barely write it, because it was awful. It was the right change to make, but I hadn’t yet realized that I needed to change more than that.

So, starting again with a new opening scene (remember that tidbit posted earlier? gone now). The good thing is, the bulk part of the romance and conflict between my characters is the same, so I can just move stuff around and rewrite conversations into new settings — it’s just the external conflict getting an overhaul. So it’s going fast. And I like this much, much better.

Then it’s on to my short story, which is all ready to go in my head (and I’m totally happy with it), then back to my next Guardian book, which is screaming at me to get out.

One thing about the novella is that I haven’t had any outside focus stuff — like my usual collage, soundtrack, inspirational piece. For DEMON BOUND, it was music like CCR’s “Fortunate Son,” Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried” (one of Jake’s scenes is pretty much a homage to that story, only I don’t like to call it a homage, because it can’t do the original justice — so maybe I’ll just call it a very, very grateful nod), Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” and probably far too many readings of “The Madwoman in the Attic.”

For the next Guardian book, I’ve got things like a portion of Sylvia Plath’s “Lady Lazarus” taped over my desk. Not even the whole poem — just the final lines:

Ash, ash–
You poke and stir.
Flesh, bone, there is nothing there—–

A cake of soap,
A wedding ring,
A gold filling.

Herr God, Herr Lucifer
Beware
Beware.

Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air.

Because even though the subject of the poem has nothing to do with my heroine, the emotion does. And it keeps me centered on the character.

The short story, it’s “The Taming of the Shrew.” Not a rewrite of it — just inspired by it.

But this novella? Argh, it’s like I’ve been without an anchor for a while.  And I still don’t have a thing … but the story itself, I think I’ve got it pinned now. Finally.

So, writing and writing, and by god I’ll have this out soon.  Here’s one thing I’m certain of: writing novellas is, for me, the hardest thing in the world. (Which means that I’m going to keep on writing them until they aren’t — that might be never.)