New story!

Ack! Almost forgot to remind everyone that my story "Santa Claus is Comin'" is up at Circlet Press today!

Fairy Tale Lust

Wow...it's beautiful!

And check out this magical TOC:

Foreword by Angela Knight
Introduction: Once Upon a Time…
The Obedient Wife by Delilah Devlin
How the Little Mermaid Got Her Tail Back by Andrea Dale
Ducking by Craig Sorensen
Three Times by Justine Elyot
Ellie and the Shoemaker by Louisa Harte
The Pub Owner’s Daughter by Alegra Verde
Sleep Tight by Janine Ashbless
Her Hair is a Net, Woven by Shanna Germain
Mind Your Peas and Qs by Allison Wonderland
In the Dark Woods by Kristina Wright
Gildi and the Unwieldy, Ineffectual Committee of Bears by Jeremy Edwards
Frosted Glass by Aurelia T. Evans
Gingerbread Man by Carol Hassler
All In a Day’s Work by Saskia Walker
Big Bad Wolf (An Excerpt) by Alana Noël Voth
The Kiss by Michelle Augello-Page
The Return by Charlotte Stein
The Stone Room by A.D.R. Forte

I'm humbled to be in this group of authors and I can't wait to read all the stories!

Merry

Blessed Solstice

Wishing everyone warmth, peace, and health on this longest night of the year. I am so grateful the light is returning..

The most wonderful…

…you thought I was going to say “most wonderful time of the year,” but I sing that song at Halloween. Christmas is a close second, but it’s still not where I was going.

Nope. The most wonderful husband in the world, and I have him.

I’ve gone back and forth about how much I want to say here. As I said in October, my dad’s cancer is terminal. Since then, the local medical community has essentially failed my mother as she’s tried to keep him comfortable and safe at home. He went back in the hospital with the beginnings of pneumonia, had a dose of chemo (to ease his pain), and is now back home. But there’s still not enough help and support while he’s there.

Ken left early this morning for upstate NY, for no other reason than to take care of my father and my overwhelmed mother. We’d been back and forth about who was going to go when—we knew we were going back over or near the holidays, and that one of my sisters would be there between Xmas and New Year’s. We thought we’d tag team, maybe with me going out first, or both of us and me staying longer. In the end, it worked best for him to go out now, and me to fly out Xmas Day (I’m getting in about an hour after my sister does, and he can pick us both us). He was going to fly back when she did, but we had to use every scrap of frequent flier miles we had to swing this, so we’re both flying home a week later. That’s three weeks for him, two for me. We left for the airport at 5:30 a.m. and he arrived at 11 p.m.—18 hours later.

To take care of my parents.

Yeah. He’s awesome. Awesomest. Don’t you dare argue with me about this.

~ ~ ~

Oh, and his talk went smashingly. He so rocks.

Wherever you go, there you are

I have a gmail account that I don’t use much except to set up Google Alerts for my various pseudonyms. This is largely to catch pirate sites that are illegally publishing my work, but it also occasionally catches reviews I’ve missed or a mention on someone’s blog. Today, I clicked through to find that the reference to me (as Dayle A. Dermatis) was in a description of The Trouble With Heroes on a library website. I have no idea where the Brazoria County Library System is (although Brazoria is a pretty cool name for a county), but I’m utterly chuffed by the fact that they’re carrying The Trouble With Heroes!

Best best best!

Wowsa! The inestimable Violet Blue just released her “Best Sex Books 2009” list, and I have stories in three of the anthologies!

(Note: The above link is to SF Gate, the online version of The San Francisco Chronicle, so it’s safe for work in terms of no nudity, etc.. But this is still a list of fiction and nonfiction about sex.)

1. Playing With Fire: Taboo Erotica

2. Sweetest Kiss: Ravishing Vampire Erotica

4. Do Not Disturb: Hotel Sex Stories

And a big "rock on!" shout out to the fabulous editors who saw fit to buy my stories: Alison Tyler, DL King, and Rachel Kramer Bussel!

Sheer cussedness

Today, despite my emotional/psychological state, I managed to (a) finish and mail the requested short story I started yesterday and (b) wrote and mailed a very short (500 words) story for a contest. Granted, these things took me nearly all day to write, but the bottom line is that I was stubborn and finished the bastards.

Tomorrow I’m going to focus on submissions (one or two stories that need to go back out, as well as some novel subs), minor tweaking of an older story, and the gazillion other things on my plate. (Yes, I know I owe you an e-mail. And you, too. And you…)

Meanwhile, from an earlier entry I never got around to posting:

Sale! Fantasy story “The Devil Went Down to the Sunset Strip” to the anthology Retro Spec: Tales of Fantasy and Nostalgia. I haven't sold a lot of spec fic stories recently so this is especially exciting! The story’s about a hair metal groupie who saves her favorite band.

[They] were four talented guys. (They really were. I wasn’t just some starry-eyed groupie; I knew decent music and I knew stage presence.) Talented, yes, and awfully pretty, all of them.

And every last one of them was dumber than a post.

Hee.

Meanwhile, check out Circlet Press’s annual erotic advent! Every day, they’re posting a new short erotic SFF story—but the catch is each story is up for one day only (posted at about 1 a.m. Eastern).

My own story will be up on Christmas Eve, but I encourage you all to check them out every day! A great way to start or end your day this month. :-)

Baby steps