New novel release: Out of the Frying Pan!

I have been remiss in announcing my latest novel, in collaboration with the divine Teresa Noelle Roberts!

May I present…spicy romantic comedy Out of the Frying Pan:

Take one chef displaced in the wacky world of Hollywood,
Add one hunky pool boy who isn't what he seems,
Mix with a heavy dash of spicy sex.

Then fold in a self-absorbed starlet who’s on a different diet every night,
Blend with her action-hero boyfriend (secret ingredient: closet cross-dresser).

Finally, garnish with a passel of crazy relatives, one lovestruck Welsh corgi, and two peacocks who just want to be left alone.

Serve with a nice fruity Merlot.

Out of the Frying Pan blends hot sex with the spirit of classic romantic comedy—the result is mouthwatering!

Order from Amazon
Order from Bank of Books
Order from Powell's (forthcoming)
Order from Barnes & Noble (forthcoming)

Also available in ebook format:
Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Kobo | Smashwords

"Sophie Mouette… It's pronounced 'Mmm…wet!'"

Excerpt

She’d gotten a distant glimpse of his chest by the pool, but not like this. Not with the unexpected intimacy of him undressing making the already great view even hotter. Sure, her brain knew it was a matter of necessity, but her hormones were getting ready to strip off his jeans along with the shirt, and then get to work on anything he might be wearing underneath.

Either he was taking that tank top off a little more slowly than was strictly necessary or she was so turned on she was altering time. She was registering details a little bit at a time as they were revealed, a glorious tease.

Tight abs, not overly defined, but defined enough to show he took good care of himself. Strong-looking but lean, not cut and bulked up like Ray, and she definitely liked lean better. (Ray looked like an attractive alien—humans just weren’t built like that). He had a light dusting of reddish-brown fuzz, enough to look very male without being furry. Just the right degree of tan, too—not the office pallor she was still used to from growing up in the Northeast, but not baked.

In short, Brand had one of the best bodies she’d ever seen not on a movie screen. A body she could imagine wrapping herself around all too vividly. She could taste the salt of his skin, feel his muscles moving under her exploring hands…

And as she stood there trying desperately not to drool onto the scallops, he finished pulling the shirt off, tossed it aside with a flourish, and winked at her.

Be still my beating heart.

“I thought…the apron…” she said weakly.

He grinned and tied on an apron emblazoned with a bunch of grapes. It said “Pinch Me, Squeeze Me, Make Me Wine.”

Over a shirt, it would have looked adorable. Over bare skin, it was devastating. Pure sex.

“Gotta go!”

“Thanks so much, Brand!” she called as he fled towards his post.

She wasn’t sure if she were more sorry or relieved to see him go. On one hand, his cheerful company had probably saved her sanity.

On the other hand, having him around the kitchen dressed (or undressed) like that would rob her of the sanity he’d saved. Tackling him on the floor would be a poor idea.

Which might not have stopped her if she’d actually had time.

The next she saw of him (when she did a pass through a herd of gorgeously dressed guests to see what might need replenishing—she was gratified to see the clam cakes could use a refill) he’d found a bow tie, which looked extraordinarily rakish against bare skin, and he was being flirted with by three women who, if they hadn’t been in Playboy yet, would be soon.

And she couldn’t blame them one bit. If she had time, she’d be body-checking her way to the front of the line.

Unfortunately, (a) she couldn’t compete with the Playboy types, and (b) she had to make more clam cakes.

Put some Sexy in Your Stocking!

From the naughty minds of three of today’s top erotica authors—Andrea Dale, Sophie Mouette, & Teresa Noelle Roberts—comes a collection filled with winter holiday delights!

• The Queen of Christmas
• Frozen
• On the Twelfth Day
• Let It Snow
• Santa Claus is Comin’
• Mrs. Claus and the Naughty Elf
• Christmas Blizzard
• Happy Krampusnacht
• Running Away From Christmas
• A Bird in the Hand
• Bringing Back the Light
• Hidden Treasure

So curl up in front of a roaring fire, sip some eggnog, and tell Santa that on Christmas morning, you want to find something…Sexy in Your Stocking!

Order from Amazon

Order from Powell’s (coming soon!)

Order from Barnes & Noble (coming soon!)

Also available in ebook format:

Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Kobo | Smashwords

Projects update #18,624

I’m starting to feel a little wheee! again about all the projects on my plate right now, so what better than a blog post to get them all straight in my head?

• erotica story—finishing this one up for my non-public pen name; hopefully done tonight or tomorrow
• Ghosted (novel-in-progress)—doing a read-through and taking notes so I can finish the damn thing
• anthology story—I’ve been invited to pitch an idea for an anthology of stories set in a big-name author’s world. The pitch is due by December 1, so I’m currently re-reading some of the books to re-familiarize myself with the world. (I own, um, 13 books in the series. I don’t have time to re-read all of them…)
• Sexy in Your Stocking (holiday erotica collection of stories by me as Andrea Dale, my coauthor Teresa Noelle Roberts, and our joint author Sophie Mouette)—ebook is designed, cover is designed, need to design POD interior
• “Dyeing For Her” (Sophie Mouette short story)—cover is designed, ebook is designed, need to convert ebook and upload to various sites
• copyediting job—in progress; it’s short so I should have it finished tomorrow
• proofreading job—will start after the copyediting job is done; thankfully also short

There’s also the work I’m doing for Lucky Bat Books, which obviously I can’t discuss in detail here. Right now I have two potential clients, and I’m still reading through all the information I need to do the job and familiarizing myself with the way they do things. They are being very patient with me as I ask a million questions.

And let’s not talk about the two other novels I need to finish, the one I need to redraft, and the three novellas I want to write…ideally by the end of the year….

Wheeee!

Guest Blog: Teresa Noelle Roberts and Cougar's Courage

I’m in love with Jack Long-Claw, my shapeshifting cougar shaman hero in Cougar’s Courage (Duals and Donovans: The Different, Book 3). He’s sexy and brave and clever, quick with a quip as well as a spell. And poor Cara, my heroine, how could I not love her? She has to come to terms with a lot over the course of this book—and falling for someone who isn’t human is easy compared to most of it.

But I’m just as in love with two of the secondary characters, Grand-mère and Sam Many-Winters, aka Gramps. Grand-mère is old. How old? At one point she condenses the history of white people in Canada to about three sentences, because from her ancient perspective, that’s about as long as their puny little history deserves. She’s not actually a goddess, but people have worshipped her. And she just loves interfering in the lives of her descendants, especially their love lives.

Gramps is a less formidable character. He may be a powerful human shaman, but no one’s ever mistaken him for a deity. For one thing, deities aren’t prone to wearing Bugs Bunny boxer shorts over their jeans instead of under them. On the other hand, he’s good friends with Coyote, the Coyote. They watch Warner Brothers cartoons together on a TV that doesn’t actually plug into anything. When the book starts, he’s fallen into depression after the death of his only child, Cara’s mother, has stopped practicing magic, and may die as a result. Luckily Cara and his good friend Coyote pull him out of his funk.

Because when things get tough, Cara and Jack need the wisdom and experience of Gramps and Grand-mère to save the day.

Here’s a brief introduction to Gramps in action:

“The green button means go, right?” He began to dial. “What do you think? 1-800-COYOTE sounds promising.”

“I was kidding, Gramps. The phone doesn’t work anyway.”

Gramps cackled so loudly they could probably hear him above the Arctic Circle. “It doesn’t matter if the phone works, Cara. I’m calling Coyote. If he wants to take the call, he will.”

He held the small red-and-silver device out a little gingerly and dialed.

Despite a dead battery and no signal, she could hear it ringing.

She froze when she heard a voice.

“Coyote’s not home right now,” it said. It was raspy, whisky-and tobacco-laced, prankish and intimate, yet doing its best to sound like a machine. “Or he is, but he’s eating or fucking or napping and doesn’t feel like being interrupted. Please leave a message at the sound of the…”

Then the tone changed, no longer pretending to be a recording. “Sam, where have you been? Your time’s almost up. Expiration date quickly approaching. But I don’t think earth’s quite done with you yet.”

Cara didn’t think her grandfather, with his weathered bronze skin, could turn pale. She was wrong. Then again, she didn’t think a cartoon sledgehammer could pop out of her phone and bop her grandfather on the head. “I never left you, Sam Many-Winters. You’re a moron. I’ve. Been. Right. Here. All. Along.” The last six words were punctuated by more bops on the head with the impossible hammer. The blows didn’t seem to hurt. If anything, each one left Gramps looking more focused and determined. “All you had to do was ask properly, and by properly I don’t mean one more snore of a ritual, but in your own way. Now that you finally did, yes, I’ll take you up on that steak—with a side of whoop-ass for sorcerers.”

And a little taste of Grand-mère:

The visitor wore a pale buckskin dress ornamented with beads and porcupine quills, not a fashion statement but traditional Native clothing, and no coat despite the frigid February weather. Her silvery braids were fastened with rawhide strips. Not something you saw every day in Toronto. Maybe the old lady figured serious business like a visit to the police station merited her version of a weddings-and-funerals suit or dress uniform.

“May I help you, ma’am?” The unusual visitor had roused her curiosity, which could only be good.

“No, but I can help you, Cara.”

How did she know Cara’s first name? Her name plate just said Mackenzie.

The elderly woman extended a small, bony hand, and Cara instinctively took it. She expected it to be icy. Instead, it was hot. As soon as they touched, Cara felt like she was focusing properly on the other woman for the first time. She blinked and recognized her visitor at last. “Grand-mère? Is that you?”

It couldn’t be. Cara had been ten the last time she’d seen the elder of her mother’s village, and the old lady must have been over eighty then. But the woman nodded and smiled. It was an odd smile, like a tree smiling, serene in a way that you didn’t normally see on a human face. “Of course it is, silly. Who else would I be? It’s time to come home, Cara. Come to Couguar-Caché before it’s too late.”

Couguar-Caché—“hidden cougar” in French—her mother’s ancestral village. A place so remote Cara had never been able to find it on a map, even though she knew she’d been there as a little girl. Yeah, just where she wanted to visit in the depths of winter.

As the old woman spoke, the room closed in, leaving only Cara and Grand-mère. The rest of the squad room was still out there—Cara could hear voices, a ringing cell phone—but they were hidden somehow, masked by a fog. Grand-mère had been seated, but suddenly, with no transition Cara noticed, she was standing in an archway made of snow-weighted evergreen boughs. Behind her, where Cara should have seen Dalhousie’s chaotic desk and the captain’s neat one, was forest and snow, woodland twilight and the corner of a log cabin. A cold, bracing wind blew through the archway, smelling of snow and pine and wood smoke. Somewhere in the background, she could make out a tall man with long dark hair. He turned and looked through the weird portal straight at her with intense amber eyes. He was movie-star gorgeous.

Series blurb: Welcome to an America where the non-human Different and magically gifted humans live among ordinary people. Witches are both feared and honored, but shape-shifting Duals are treated as second-class citizens. The Agency, a government agency that’s supposed to monitor illegal uses of magic and Different abilities, has developed its own dangerous agenda. But when Duals and witches join forces, the Agency and other bad guys aren’t going to know what hit them.

And neither are the witches and Duals. Witch magic grows from the positive energy of love and sex–and the only thing better than one Dual is two of them! And then there are shamans, who work their chaotic magic to comfort the afflicted and shake up the comfortable. Once shamans get involved, everything gets weirder…and sexier.

Novel Blurb: Toronto cop Cara Many-Winters Mackenzie is still reeling from her fiancé’s murder when her orderly life takes a turn toward the weird, complete with voices in her head and phantom bleeding wounds.

This violent awakening is the rise of her Different gift—a chaotic, Bugs-Bunny-on-crack magic that she must learn to control before it destroys her. There’s only one place to get help: her mother’s ancestral village, and a mentor who seems to have stepped straight out of the smoke of her erotic dreams.

Cougar Dual Jack Long-Claw reluctantly agrees to take Cara under his wing, though he’d much rather take the beautiful city girl into his bed. As he guides her through a crash course in shamanic magic, sparks fly—some sexy, some snarky. But when an ancient enemy attacks the village, they must work together to hone a magical weapon against certain destruction.

Common sense tells them it’s a terrible time to fall in love. Their spirit guides have other ideas. And shamans who don’t listen to their spirit guides are dead shamans…

Warning: Hot shape-shifting feline hero. Strong but shell-shocked heroine. Snarky, meddling spirit guides. And lots and lots of sex: angry sex, crazy sex, magical sex, and just plain sexy sex.

Amazon US/Amazon UK/Kobo /Barnes & Noble Nook/Samhain

Like the sound of this? I’m running a contest on my own website for a chance to win this book and the first book in the series, Lions’ Pride. Commenting here or at my site enters you. Comment here and there, get two entries.

Traveling and writing and editing, oh my!

I got home last night from a stressful week away (which I prefer not to discuss publicly, as it involves people whom I care about who have not consented to be blogged about). I came down with a cold halfway through the trip, which didn’t help my stress levels one bit. You know you miss normalcy when you’re thrilled to have a few hours in the airport to work undisturbed. (I got no work done on the trip, nor did I have time for popping onto FB/Twitter/Reddit/whatever, so if anything important happened, please let me know!)

I have lots and lots of good and exciting work things happening, some of which I can’t quite talk about yet, but here’s a few items of note:

• Teresa and I have been hard at work finishing up two manuscripts to publish. As I went over them yesterday to make final tweaks, I was reminded again how much I love these fun books (both funny, sexy romances, one a contemporary and one a light paranormal) and how much I love writing with Teresa. We’ll also have an erotic holiday collection of short stories out before Christmas, called Sexy in Your Stocking. Keep an eye out here or at SophieMouette.com for updates.
• I received the proofs for my urban fantasy story “The Sound of My Own Voice,” to appear in the anthology Hex in the City. I’m blown away by my name in the table of contents with some real luminaries of fantasy fiction. This news will have its own blog post soon, but let me just say that this story, about a pissed-off woman who discovers, drunkenly, that she’s a siren, was one of the most fun I’ve ever written.
• I’m gearing up to teach an e-publishing workshop to some local writers. It’s a whole new challenge, and if it goes well (which I think it will!), I may see about offering it again.
• I’ve been freelancing as an editor (copy editor and developmental editor) at Lucky Bat Books, and now I’m moving up in the world to a project editor position. (Or maybe Project Manager; I’m not sure of the exact title they use, but it’s similar to what I did at a scholarly publisher as a Production Editor). Lucky Bat offers à la carte services for the modern writer to help you get your book out in the world as the best book it can be.

I’m sure there’s more, but I need to hit the ground running workwise today, because I’ve been off for a week and I’m taking Friday through Sunday off for a re-enactment event. (We’re planning to go to the site tomorrow on the bike to help set up the encampment, but I may not go if I’m still fighting off this cold. Also, the bike is still at the dealer so the insurance guy can look it over, and Ken may not have time to put on a new right foot peg for me. [The previous foot peg went kablooey thanks to his accident during this year’s IBR.])

And, of course, having been away means I want to spend time with Ken. It was pure joy to get off the plane yesterday and get thoroughly smooched. We stopped at our favorite Thai place near the airport on the way home (leftovers!), and then we were home and I got to snuggle with the kittays before curling up with Ken and a glass of wine to keep the DVR from exploding.

I leave you with a picture of my great-niece and I after she gave me a "makeover." I'm pretty sure I'm destined to be the Bride of Frankenstein for Halloween...!

Cat Scratch Fever by Sophie Mouette

It's finally available! Cat Scratch Fever, my first-ever published novel, written with my very wonderful friend Teresa Noelle Roberts as Sophie Mouette, is back in print! Thank you, Little Kisses Press!

Here are the deets:

What development coordinator Felicia DuBois at the Southern California Cat Sanctuary needs: Sex with something other than her vibrator. Gender and number of participants optional.

What Felicia doesn’t need: Someone sabotaging the make-or-break benefit that could mean the future of the sanctuary. She especially doesn’t need ultra-sexy Gabe Sullivan from the Zoological Association sniffing around, wielding the authority to close the cash-strapped exotic cat breeding facility.

But damn his smoking hotness!

Felicia’s in a race against time to find both sexual fulfillment and the saboteur before the Sanctuary’s future becomes as endangered as the felines it houses.

Available in print and a variety of electronic formats:
Kindle | Nook | Smashwords | Kobo

State of the projects, end of May edition

People seem amused by these, so here's another. Plus it helps keep me focused.

Here's what I'd like to get done by the end of May (or, since my Production Schedule starts on Mondays, by June 3):

Writing

• "Clap Your Hands" (dark mystery) due 5/31 to Fearful Symmetries
• untitled fantasy story for second Elemental Masters anthology due 7/1 – my proposal was accepted, so all that’s left is to write the story. I’d like to get it off my plate early; I know the editor would appreciate it!
• untitled SFF story for Penumbra – Revolution due 5/31 – if I have time—but I’m also waiting to hear if another story I’ve written will come free in time edit: The story came free, but I realized I'd be better off sending it to better-known, higher paying markets first. It would be nice if I had an idea for the anthology theme...!
• humorous SFF story for Unidentified Funny Objects 2 due 5/31 – they passed on the first story I sent but liked my writing, but at this point I have no ideas…
• direct-to-epub erotica – no due date; I’d just like to get more of these up
• two untitled erotica stories for anthology calls due 6/1 – I love the editors and would love to send them something, but these fall down the priority list for various reasons edit: Realized I could tweak an existing story for one of them, so that's tweaked and mailed!

Getting those written would mean I would have June for novels:

• Ghosted (urban fantasy as Dayle A. Dermatis) – This is a stalled, almost-finished project. It would be groovy to finish it in the first week of June. edit: in the process of printing it out.
• Possessed, Undressed, and in a Mess (spicy romance as Sophie Mouette) – This one’s more than half finished; Teresa and I started it eons ago, before our lives both went insane with other projects. Ideally, I’d love to get this done in June, but I'm waiting to hear about Teresa's schedule. edit: We've scheduled a phone confab after she gets back from vacation, with a rough draft due date of mid-July.

Design

• added: "Under a Double Rainbow" (Sophie Mouette) – Teresa and I decided to get another long-ish (8K) short story out before we published Cat Scratch Fever. Edited, ebook designed, need to upload. Next month I'll put this and "Catalyst" out as cute little PODs as well.
• Cat Scratch Fever (Sophie Mouette) – Proof copy of the POD is in hand. I need to input all changes into the POD and ebook, publish the ebook, and then publish the ebook
• What Beck’ning Ghost – finish interior design, write the back cover blurb/finish designing the back cover, upload ebook, upload files for proof

Copyediting

• freelance job, fantasy – finishing it up today
• freelance job, mystery – received, would like to finish by first week of June edit: In progress and on track!

Editing

• Possessed, Undressed, and in a Mess (see above) – I’ve got 4-5 more chapters to read through before Teresa and I can have a plotting/planning session.
• Blackwood House, gothic romance as Dayle Ivy – doing a final readthrough to add a small element throughout. It’s been copyedited, so after this, it’ll be ready for design.

Other

• Out of the Frying Pan – ping copyeditor re: schedule, contact the artist of the potential cover art
• A Little Night Music – ping cover designer with ideas and artwork; write letter for artwork permission
• A variety of fiddly website and online stuff