Meljean Brook

…except my stupid internet. 2007 shall be remembered by me as the Year of the Shitty Connection! (the exclamation is important.) My computer would connect everywhere but at my house (where I resorted to using dial-up from my old university account (26.4 kbps!! WTF? Do they still make them that slow?) that couldn’t actually send OUT any e-mails or download (my SMTP server mocked that connection) and even bypassing wireless and plugging the DSL modem directly into my computer didn’t work. And I have no idea what my Wordpress password is, so I couldn’t access my blog from my husband’s computer. But I have fixed it, by god. I sent an e-mail to my agent, and it went through.

Everyone has probably already seen this at Dear Author, (and that’s how I found out about it), but DEMON ANGEL was in a The Courier Mail’s “Best of the Year” list.

Demon Angel, from new author Meljean Brooks, is the kind of novel you are lucky if you manage to come across maybe once a year: a thick, meaty, dig your feet in and hold on tight kind of novel with adventure, sex and an epic quality that’s rarely seen in this genre. Demon Angel is an astonishing debut, and a harbinger of great things to come. If you read one romance this year, make it this one.

As an aside, maybe I should have made my pseudonym “Brooks” instead of “Brook” (which is the last syllable of my maiden name.) It seems to flow off fingers more easily when people are typing it.

Anyway, I’m writing writing like mad, so I can’t promise daily updates, but I’ll be around a bit more now. And I can check my e-mail in a timely manner, too.

I’m having massive huge problems with my e-mail lately. Not just because I’m slow answering them due to me being offline for two weeks, but stuff being delayed way too much when I do send them out — and as of this evening I can’t even log on.

So, temporarily, I’ll be at meljean.brook at gmail.com (and I’ll try to remember to check it, since I usually only use it for storing my backup copies of WIPs)

Okay, I can’t keep up with all of the people on message boards who are hotlinking to Capt Kirk and He-Man, so I had to block all outside access to my image files. Which unfortunately means some legitimate hotlinks (mine, and those who are linking to my covers and stuff) will get blocked, too.

If you end up with a message that says, “Oops! hotlinked, blah blah,” let me know and I’ll send you the link to the pic in imageshack, or just e-mail the picture to you.

While looking for something in an old file today, I ran across some stuff I wrote while I was trying to determine exactly how I would a) get Colin’s backstory across, b) share some worldbuilding information, and c) show what had happened in Caelum, and in the months between the end of Demon Angel and the opening of Demon Moon.

I ended up doing something different than this — but I had originally thought of opening each chapter with an e-mail exchange. Because Savi, she is v. curious, and her constant questions could have been an easy way to explain certain rules. So that’s how these started out … but then I ended up entertaining myself way too much, and these little exchanges would have disrupted the narrative flow of the rest of the novel.

So, as far as I’m concerned, these are in continuity — and they aren’t really spoilers for Demon Moon, because they take place in the in-between time. There are slight spoilers for Demon Angel, however. It’s not much, but…yeah. The title of it should probably be: Savitri Has A Question; or, How Savitri’s Curiosity Slowly Drives Colin Insane.

There are also some early reviews coming in — from loonigrrl (whose reviews I’ve been reading at Amazon for some time, so I’m glad she’s got a blog) and Holly (at The Book Binge, the new-and-improved SF). These may include spoilers. I’ll be putting all of the Demon Moon reviews on their own page pretty soon, along with a place for readers to enter comments and links to their reviews, or to ask me questions about the series/book in a way that’s out there in the open. I’ll link to that as soon as I get it up.

I’m also going to be signing at the Beaverton Powell’s on July 2nd. It will be my first signing, eek! I will have more info as the date approaches, but if you’re related to me, mark your calendars now, because I totally expect you to show up and pretend you aren’t related, and buy lots of copies and say how great my hair looks.

Don’t forget to play for a free copy of WILD THING! The scavenger hunt is up until Friday night.

Except it might cause a few problems in the early days.

If you have an image from me that has suddenly been replaced by this:

let me know, and I’ll see what I can do to fix it. It should only be blocking from myspace (where quite a few strangers like to hotlink to He-Man), and a couple of message boards (like a Nissan auto board … wtf?) that I’ve noticed have been sucking up bandwidth like crazy** At this point, I don’t want to block all off-site links (because it’s handy for me to use it, and I honestly don’t care if someone hotlinks to one of my covers or something (although I do hope they link to the smaller ones)) but I might if it all goes bad.

And I suppose it’s nicer than the pointed one I made for someone else a couple of days ago (although the real crime might be that he actually wanted a Boobah pic. Those things freak me out):

Of course, there will be some errors before everything gets sorted out (I’m sure a few pics that I’ve posted will be blocked on myspace) but do let me know if you’re having any problems downloading images if you want one.

**Other random things that my site stats tell me:

A lot of people think that my last name is Brooks.

A lot of people search for the phrase “your ego’s writing checks your body can’t cash”

A lot of people like Boobah (why? why?)

A lot more like He-Man, and of those, many many want to see him in action with Teela, She-ra, and Man-at-Arms.

Like me, some people think that Catra is sexy.

Someone was looking for Rogue and Gambit fanfiction by Valerie Jones (she’s an excellent writer, and I recommend her X-Men/X-Files crossover.)

I’m getting lots of spam for cartoon and comic porn. I wonder if it’s because of the content of my site? I’ve also gotten a lot of publishing spam (it says it’s about publishing, but the links are for Cialis or something.)

Backdated posts are starting to (slowly) show up on the sidebar. The first ones I’m transferring from the old blog are those with hundreds (600-900) spam comments. Unfortunately, it means that I lose some of the great comments everyone made when I delete the post, but it freaks me out to see all of the spam there.

My bandwidth usage also jumped almost seven times its usual number in the last two months, so much so that I’m at 86% of my monthly allowance now (last month I exceeded it by about 20%) even though my visitors to the blog have remained steady. There’s been slightly more traffic to the main site (I assume it’s post-release traffic) but I couldn’t account for all of it … hence the deletions and such. Then I realized the culprit: MySpace. All of the images I used there were hosted at my meljeanbrook domain, so I moved them to imageshack.

In other news, I still remain a JR Ward virgin (except for the couple of pages I read before realizing that her voice was too strong for me to read while I’m writing my own stuff) and thanks to DARK LOVER being stored down at my sister’s house (I won’t read them out of order, so I’ve been safe buying them as they come out). But my youngest sister, who lives with me, had nothing to read, so she broke down and pulled out LOVER ETERNAL last night right before she went to bed … and when I went into her room at 3am, she was still curled up on her bed and reading it even though she had to get up early this morning.

And I laughed and laughed and laughed. And then I said, “Bella and Z’s story is next” and she was like “AGHHHHHH!!! I NEED IT NOW!!!!”

But I’ve hidden it. I wonder what she’ll do to get it from me?

I may have a clean house soon.

I’ve finally updated my Myspace page and added a link to the sidebar. I’ve been fiddling around with it for a couple of months, but never quite finding a layout or anything that I liked … and I’ll admit that I’m resistant to it, because the interaction is so odd. And I haven’t been a good commenter/adder (people have managed to find me, though) although I think I’ll have to be more proactive about that.

I’m also mad that I can’t figure out why my picture of Nathan Fillion and my picture of the Thundercats won’t show up under my “People I’d Like to Meet” section. I haven’t figured out why my style code keeps messing up my pic html, but I guess I’ll eventually get it. I just can’t spend much more time on it today.

In other news, my Amazon plog thing didn’t show up on the product page, so I think I have to re-do it. So if you get a double post from me in your Amazon plog … whoops.

Tomorrow I’m heading off to the coast for two days, because two of my sisters have birthdays; I’m guessing that the hotel has wireless Internet service, but if it doesn’t, I’ll be back Monday. I’m hoping it doesn’t keep raining like this, but if it does that’s okay, cuz I need to do some writing while I’m there instead of walking along the beach.

I was frustrated by the limitations of Photoshop when I was making some new ad banners for DEMON MOON (can’t animate stuff as I’d like — I had WAY too many layers going on) and I was thinking ahead to trailers and stuff like that … so I downloaded a trial version of Flash software, then ran through the quick tutorial, and started putting in covers and pictures and laying out a trailer.

Oh my garsh, this is way too addicting and fun. It’s a good thing that I have a month or two to play around with it and learn all of the techniques to making it all pretty before I have to produce something, and I can’t let myself spend too much time on it (gotta write) but, yikes, if a bunch of crazy animated covers and naked people start showing up around my blog, forgive me. I cannot help myself.

In other news, as we were driving past the construction that closed down Scholls Ferry Road over the weekend and looking at all of the heavy equipment, Bobby and I decided that when the Constructicons transformed into Devastator, that would be one mothereffing big-ass robot.

And I’ve also lost my cell phone. Again.

Sigh.

Finished the Extras page, and the Demon Angel behind-the-story. There’s more that I can and will add, with more time and if questions start to come in — but not yet. ‘Cause I’m tired, and not sure yet what people are interested in.

Demon Angel has been showing up at bookstores — I’ve received several reports of it at B&N and Borders. I sincerely hope that everyone enjoys it. I’ve got two days left in the Seven Sins contest, so if you haven’t picked it up yet or it isn’t yet available at a store near you, have still have a chance to win one of seven copies.