Meljean Brook

Romancelandia Gift Exchange at Carolyn Jean’s blog. 

Too, too funny.

…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.

Thank you to everyone who participated in the DEMON ANGEL contest! According to random.org, the numbers are 7, 19, and 31.

Whuh? Three winners?

Well, here’s the thing: turnout was a lot better than I expected, and it seemed kind of sucky that only one person out of 41 might win, so I picked up the remainder of the copies they were carrying at my local B&N. Three out of 41 is a little better.

So congratulations to Dynamic Uno, Stacy~, and Nicole Nowlin! I’ll be sending you an e-mail!

Here’s all you have to do: tell me in the comments how you originally found this site (or use the contact form if you don’t want to de-lurk).

Because I’m assuming that a lot of people here already have a copy, remember that you can also:

1) Give it as a gift to someone you think would like it,

2) Give it as punishment to someone you think would hate it,

3) Ask me to send it as an anonymous package to someone that you love,

4) Ask me to send it as an anonymous package to someone that you don’t,

5) Ask me to sign it “[Insert Your Name Here] wants you to repent! –Meljean Brook” and send it to a politician of your choice,

6) Ask me to send it to you, but have me personalize it to your boss, put some raw egg white on a couple of pages to make them sticky (the lurrrve pages, of course, but also the page where Lilith threatens to make a demon the meat in a Hugh-and-Sir Pup sandwich) then leave it around the break room with, “[Boss’s name], I really appreciate all of the “help” you gave me with certain scenes. Your experience is an inspiration! See you around the chat rooms! –Meljean Brook, aka backdoorgrrl6969″,

7) Ask me to donate it to a library, charity, or someone who hasn’t had sex in a long, long, long time and needs a thrill in any way possible.

Come up with your own, and I’ll do anything that won’t land me in jail (because I’ve got a deadline in a couple of months, and although jail time might actually serve as really great research for the WIP, it won’t be conducive to producing 2K words a day, so, yeah, no.)

I’ll leave this open until Sunday night, April 15, at midnight. Then I’ll pick a name by random drawing.

Remember that game where you have a line of people and you say something into the first person’s ear and they whisper it to the next person, on down the line, and then the last person says it out loud and usually the sentence has been completely changed? I was reminded of that when I picked up the newest RT magazine, and at the back saw that Demon Moon was mentioned as an upcoming June release, and it said something like (the magazine is down in my car, so I’m just doing this from memory):

Under a Demon Moon, a vampire and his lover battle a horde of nosferatu.

I should probably say that’s not exactly right, even though I can see how the copy for the book was condensed down into that little blurb. And it’s not exactly right because if Colin and Savi did battle a horde of nosferatu, even as smart as she is and as beautiful as Colin is … they’d be totally dead. So I’m just sayin’, I hope you don’t expect a great big Colin/Savi/nosferatu fight.

On the copy: I think this might be one of the most difficult parts of the process, trying to give a good sense of what the book is about without a) giving away any massive spoilers, b) catching the reader with a hook that sounds interesting enough to read, and c) fitting it all on the back of the book. And then you have a book like Demon Moon, in which the plot is organic and really isn’t about one thing (there’s a lot going on, it’s not just the creatures from Chaos coming to Earth … that’s more of a catalyst than a primary plot thread, because the romance is the main plot thread). But, anyway, this was how it worked: (more…)

(Note: This was a Q&A that I did in January for the Berkley/Jove Newsletter. I’m posting it now so that it is available through my main site’s Extras page, and because I don’t have a link to the real newsletter. If you got here from the main site … welcome to my blog.)

(more…)

Robin, who won an ARC in my “name that series!” contest, posted her review today.

Rosario posted hers today.

Billie Jo at Romance Junkies has hers up.

I’d have more to say, like how freaking overwhelmed I am, but I’ve got to get back to work and keep making the next one the best it can be.

Congratulations to Cherie, Julia and Holly! Cherie and Julia won a copy of Demon Angel, and I’ll be sending Holly the ARC of Demon Moon as soon as they land in my lap. Thanks to everyone who participated!

If you missed it, this is what we did:

Missy gave some advice to authors.

I gave a sample of the Demon Angel soundtrack with (sometimes frightening) YouTube videos.

I confessed that I have no idea what I’m doing (and followed up here at the blog).

I exposed my inner fangirl (like that doesn’t happen every day, hmm?)

I offered an extended look at Demon Moon — a four chapter sneak peek (be warned! it contains spoilers for Demon Angel!).

In my THE BLIND LEADING THE BLIND post about “pantsing” at The Good, The Bad, and the Unread, romblogreader had this question:

As you progress through writing and revising your second and third novels, have you remained as much of a “pantser” as you were for the first? Has the preliminary stage of writing changed much now that you have the writing/editing/completion of two novels under your belt? If so, how?

I like to think that I’ve changed and learned from the process — I’ve written two novellas and two novels in this series, and gotten helpful and critical feedback on each. Now that I’m writing the third full-length novel, I am keeping my problem areas in mind (like pacing) and making an extra effort to fix it.

But here’s the thing: when I started DEMON MOON, I’d just finished DEMON ANGEL and was freaking out that I’d written a 140K+ novel (for comparison, the average single title for Berkley is around 90-100K, and my contract stated that it should be about 100K) and was determined not to do that again, not to go over 100K, or 120K at the most. And some of my freak-out was because I knew that the extra word count created an additional financial burden for Berkley, because it meant they were editing, proofing, typesetting, printing a book and a half … and I’m a debut author who really shouldn’t piss off her publisher.

But aside from that concern, there was just the feeling that I’d let it get out of control — that it wasn’t tight enough, that I could have cut more out. And when I’d proposed DEMON ANGEL, the entire Part One didn’t exist … it was all backstory. The book started with a prologue, and that was the scene in 1991 Seattle.

So I thought myself pretty much a failure technically, though I really loved the story.

(Okay, this is my writing style in action — the long roundabout way of explaining how I wrote DEMON ANGEL, in order to get to how I started DEMON MOON, and what I did/did not learn from it.) (more…)

For Demon Angel, and several other great titles.

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Also, I’m staying the night over at Sybil’s — because I was a bit late getting stuff for her to post, we’re extending the Guest Author Day … and the contest until Midnight tonight (Tuesday, January 9th). You still have a chance to win a copy of Demon Angel, or an ARC of Demon Moon (will be sent April/May). Come on over! We’re listening to Nirvana, Robert Miles and Guns ‘N Roses all night long, baby!