The invitation I almost didn't get...

I sold a story…and everybody knew about it but me!

I’ve been working on the publishing side of my business today, and took a break to check GoogleReader, where I have all my blog feeds. I saw that my friend, frequent coauthor, and stellar author in her own right, Teresa Noelle Roberts, had updated, so I popped over to her blog.

She’d just announced a sale to Cheeky Spanking Stories, edited by Rachel Kramer Bussel.

That’s odd, thought I. I sent Rachel a spanking story… ::checks spreadsheet:: almost a year ago. But Rachel often has calls for submissions before the anthology has a title, so I thought maybe my story was still under consideration for another anthology.

But partway down the TOC that Teresa posted, there was my story title, my name, and a shoutout from Teresa.

Say what??

I went through all my files—spreadsheet, work email account, story folders—and found no contract, no correspondence (other than my initial submission), nothing.

So I pinged Rachel, and sure enough, she’d included my story in the book! Somehow my contract slipped through the cracks. She attached it, I reviewed it and signed it and fired it back to her.

::laughs and laughs::

Without further delay, I’d like to announce that “Invitation to a Spanking” will appear in Cheeky Spanking Stories!

Here’s the TOC, courtesy of Teresa’s blog. Oh, and it’ll be out next month!  *\o/*

The Perfect Dom Lucy Felthouse
Birthday Boy Cecilia Duvalle
Unwrapping Craig J. Sorensen
The Assignment Donna George Storey
A Game of Numbers Kiki DeLovely
Mermaid Teresa Noelle Roberts
Butch Girls Don’t Cry Giselle Renarde
Echo J. Sinclaire
Bitch Elizabeth Silver
The Price of Experience Kate Dominic
The Spanking Salon Elizabeth Coldwell
The Impact of Change Maggie Morton
Writer’s Block Evan Mora
Lessons Learned Jade Melisande
Invitation to a Spanking Andrea Dale
A Timely Correction Dorothy Freed
Spanking the Monkey Cynthia Rayne
Shine Shanna Germain
Papers to Grade Thomas S. Roche
Lean on Me Adele Haze
Proxy Lucy Hughes
Bad Boy Isabelle Gray
Marks Rachel Kramer Bussel

Best Lesbian Erotica 2013!

Squee! My story "Winner Take All," which originally appeared in The Harder She Comes: Butch/Femme Erotica, has been selected to be reprinted in Best Lesbian Erotica 2013!

Here's the full TOC—check out all those nummy authors!

The Invitation  by Maggie Veness

Nothing If It Fades  by Nikki Adams

Cucumbers and Cream  by Helen Sandler

Anonymous  by BD Swain

Woman-Time  by Rebecca Lynne Fullan

Kitty and the Cat  by Amelia Thornton

She Never Wears Perfume  Sid March

Amateur Night  by Maggie Morton

Crave  by Fiona Zedde

Stella Loves Bella  by V.C.

Homecoming  by Anamika

Pool Party  by Zoe Amos

Daffodils  by Sally Bellerose

Winner Take All  by Andrea Dale  ← hey, that's me!

Lessons for Leona  by Tenille Brown

Morning Commute  by Penny Gyokeres

Aftermath  by Valerie Alexander

I Have a Thing for Butches  by Sonya Herzog

La Caída  by Anna Meadows

The Horse and Hounds  by Rachel Charman

Underskirts  by Kirsty Logan

Recommended Reading: The Demon Lover, the Newsflesh trilogy, and Tamsin

The DemonLover, Juliet Dark. Juliet Dark is a pseudonym for literary mystery author Carol Goodman, whose books I’ve raved about here before. By “literary mystery” I really mean rich gothics: stories that involve the heroine’s physical and sometimes emotional isolation, evocatively described settings, a sense of dread or foreboding, and often a past mystery that needs to be solved. Yum. The Dark pseudonym is for her new trilogy (and who knows, maybe more?), which are billed as paranormal romance, but they aren’t, not really. Demon Lover is paranormal, absolutely, but not really a “romance” in the genre sense, in part because it’s a trilogy.

Anyway, I still loved it. It’s got an incubus and a witch and a Victorian house and a slightly creepy college in “upstate New York” (which is in quotes because it’s not really upstate upstate), and a heroine whose “lifelong passion is the intersection of lurid fairy tales and Gothic literature” (back cover copy). Oddly, the book I’ve just started writing has some of those elements. Or maybe not so oddly, because I love those elements, and gothics, and paranormals, and romances. If you do, too, you might very well like this book.

Blackout, Mira Grant. I’ve been remiss in keeping up with these posts, so I don’t think I’ve actually recommended Feed and Deadline, the first two books in this trilogy. Let’s just make this about all of them, shall we?

Mira Grant is the pseudonym for Seanan McGuire, whose urban fantasies I’ve rave about there before. (Apparently it’s been my month for pseudonymous author I rave about.) She went with a pseudonym because these are more science fiction/horror. They’re about biologically created zombies.

If you’d told me I’d willingly read a zombie book, much less enjoy it, I’d’ve laughed. I really don’t get the whole zombie phenomenon. (Which is not to say there’s anything wrong with it—I’m simply more partial to ghosts, witches, and fairies than I am zombies, vampires, and werecreatures. If it’s a good book about any of those things, I’ll give it a try.)

These are good books. Give them a try. Grant/McGuire’s magical power is the ability to create characters that really feel like real people. She also creates believable situations—she researched the epidemiology of how the zombie virus works—and talk about page-turning cliffhangers, hoo boy. If you’re up all night reading these books, don’t blame me. But read them.

Tamsin, Peter S. Beagle. I first read Tamsin when we lived in Wales, and I reread it earlier this year in preparation for Phoenix Comicon, where Beagle was a guest. I’d intended to have him autograph it, but instead I caved and bought the deluxe DVD/Blu-Ray edition of The Last Unicorn. (What can I say? I’m weak when I get all fangirly.)

I’d forgotten how good Tamsin is, which was in some ways nice because it felt like I was experiencing all the wonder for the first time. Although the protagonist, Jenny, starts the book at age fourteen, it’s not a YA book (although it could certainly be read by YA readers). Jenny’s perfectly content with her life in NYC with her mother, her cat Mister Cat, her friends, etc. Then her mother has to go and fall in love with a British guy who hauls them off to a farm in Dorset, along with his two sons. When I was growing up, this would have sounded like pure freaking heaven (and it still does, in many ways!), but not so much to Jenny. Jenny’s miserable but not bitchy; she’s unhappy but not unhelpful. She has a fantastic voice, too, and as she teeters on the brink of womanhood, she finds both the wondrous magic and terrible evil the world contains.

Beagle is a master storyteller, and Tamsin is just about perfect. If it weren’t for the tottering piles of books in my To Read bookcase, I’d be likely to pick this back up and reread it right now….

RWA Nationals 2012, Day 1

I’m at the annual Romance Writers of America national conference (aka RWA Nationals or just Nationals), surrounded by smart, creative, savvy, engaging, vibrant, funny, wonderful women. I was hit with some negativity in my life recently, and this is like a refreshing, energizing dive into a woodland pool that’s almost shockingly cold—bringing me back to center, sluicing away the bad stuff, and waking me up to the good.

Over the past couple of days, I found myself resisting coming here. (It was never a question, since I’d already paid for it, committed to sharing a room, etc.) It wasn’t logical; it was emotional. Ken’s going to be gone for most of August, and I just don’t want to be away from him right now. Plus I’ve been in a bit of a writing slump, thanks to the above-mentioned negativity but also, I’m coming to realize, that I really haven’t completely recovered from the emotional battering of the past couple years (the trifecta of my father’s death, my sister’s aneurysm, and Ken’s accident and my attendant primary-caregiver status, along with the added pain and stress of my own hand injury last December). I always think I’m better before I really am, and I’m surprised to discover I’m wrong. I’m much, much better, don’t get me wrong—I just forget that it’s a process, and there are always slides backwards, even if they’re small and the forward motion is bigger.

Anyway. I rode down here with the utterly wonderful Kim—which is, in fact, one of the things I really was looking forward to, because she’s funny and a bundle of positive energy, and I never get the time to just sit and talk with her. We had a blast. Then I hit my room and hugged my awesome friend Christine and met our roomies Sarah and Roz, both of whom I adored within minutes, and Kim and Tanya stopped by, and there was wine and conversation until far too late.

I’ve been to two workshops today, but the third was so crowded that I opted to take a break and do a little work in the room. Next is a luncheon, followed by another workshop, and then I’m taking the rest of the afternoon off. Sarah and I are going to work out, and then a bunch of us will grab dinner, and then who knows what mischief we’ll get into.

One of the workshops this morning made the conference worth the price of admission. It was about how productivity isn’t a matter of time management, but of energy management. So much of it resonated with me, like this simple exercise: Close your eyes, focus on your body, and think five times, “I have to write.” Did you tense up? Now do the same thing, except think “I get to write!” You’ll have an entirely different physical, emotional, and spiritual reaction. Duh. (I’m saying “duh” to me, because, well, that should’ve been obvious…)

[Hm…it’s now after the conference and I don’t remember what else I was going to write here, so I think I’ll just post this and move on!  :-)  ]

Euphoric

I’ve signed the contract, so now I can announce the very, very exciting news!

I’ve had a short story accepted for a Mercedes Lackey-edited anthology of stories based in her awesome Elemental Masters universe!

::runs around in small circles, hands flapping::

I’ve been reading Misty’s work since…well, let’s just say math would be involved in figuring it out. A long time. And I love the Elemental Masters series. It’s mostly set in Britain (although our stories didn’t have to be), pre-WWII, and the premise is that there are people who have elemental magic, the ability to work magic based on the four elements and to interact with the attendant elemental creatures (water magicians commune with sylphs and naiads, etc.). Additionally, each book is based loosely on a fairy tale or legend.

I set my story in and around Castle Coch in south Wales, a place I’ve been to several times. It’s truly a fairy tale/fantasy castle, with conical-roofed towers and incredible decorations. Unsurprisingly, my underlying fairy tale is Rapunzel. (See also below.)

I love writing romance and erotica (obviously), but fantasy was my first love, and any opportunity I get to write fantasy makes me happy. To be a part of this project makes me insanely joyous.

I have to thank a few people for helping me on this journey:

• Ken, for putting up with me every time I thought I couldn’t do it, thought the idea was stupid. I haven’t had much faith in my writing ability lately, and he’s done nothing but prop me up and say all the right things I needed to hear.
• Kris & Dean and the Oregon Writers Network, for not only holding so many workshops that have helped me grow as a writer, but for making it possible for me to be in the right place at the right time for this opportunity.
• Lee Rebennack, for immediately saying “Rapunzel” when I asked those in our hotel room at Phoenix Comicon what their favorite fairy tale was. That smashed into the idea of using Castle Coch and my brain did that wonderful writerly “OoooOOOoooh!” that happens when the right ideas come together.

I’m probably overreacting to this—I mean, hell, I’ve sold more than a hundred short stories—but given how hard it’s been to even finish a short story lately, much less how I’ve questioned whether I should be even doing this, I’m going to go with the euphoria.

When life hands you Cleveland...

This past Tuesday, I got up at 2:30 am (ow.) to catch a 6 am flight to Buffalo (via O’Hare), where I met my friend Barbara and her friend (who is now my friend) Jenn, at which point we collected a rental car (not without hilarity ensuing) and drove to Niagara Falls, Canadian side.

The trip wasn’t exactly how I’d originally planned it. Gowan (aka Lawrence Gowan, keyboardist of Styx) was playing three solo shows, and I had tickets to all three. But then my original travel partner backed out, leaving me with (a) no one to share a rental car with (and the attendant problem of appalling night vision) and (b) no one to share a hotel room with. In other words, twice the cost right there. Barbara and I had talked about sharing a room, but she had to leave Friday because she had somewhere to be on Saturday. I have to give her credit for suggesting I come out for just the two shows, because I honestly never thought of it. After initial internal resistance, I reminded myself that two shows were better than none, and booked that godawfully early flight so I’d arrive at about the same time as Barbara and Jenn. (Minor perk: I was able to use miles to go first class in that direction.) It still all wasn’t going to be cheap (B&J also wanted to stay at a hotel that was twice as much as what I’d budgeted), but it was going to be worth it.

Leaving on Friday gutted me. I’d had such a blast, and the second concert was better than the first, and I knew the third would be even better than that. Band members had expressed their sadness that we were leaving. I found out Jenn might have stayed…but I’d already sold my Friday ticket (plus my original travel buddy’s ticket).

We said our sad farewells at the airport and parted ways. It was a short hop to Cleveland, where I’d catch my flight to LAX.

But that was not to be.

I got to Cleveland only to learn my flight had been cancelled, and they couldn’t book me on another flight until the following afternoon. It was all I could do not to sit down wearing my Moonlight Desires T-shirt, put on my Gowan concert playlist, and cry.

After standing in line for an hour and a half to get booked on a direct flight leaving at 5 pm Saturday (rather than the original 2:30 pm flight that would go to Dulles first and get me in later than the 5 pm flight, WTF?), I pulled my shit together, booked a hotel (they gave me a voucher for a discount on a hotel*, but I was put on hold and my phone was dying so I said fuck that), and off I went.

And you know, the more I thought about it, the more grateful I was. The delay sucked mightily, there’s no two ways about that. But there are far worse things, and I found myself reflecting on how lucky I really am.

• The two shows were fabulous. I never thought I’d see Gowan solo live, and now I’ve done it four times (eight shows total) in three years (he squeezes them in between 100+ Styx shows a year).
• I got to hang out with some of the band members and a couple of the crew, all of whom are genuinely nice people who are fun to get to know.
• I made a new friend (Jennifer) and got to spend time with old friends I don’t see nearly enough (Barbara, Jo, Andrea, Marci) (I know I’m forgetting people. I’m sorry. I really do love you all; I just killed those brain cells with alcohol.)
• Although I tried to keep the cost of the trip down, I have a credit card, and the hotel and extra meals, etc., aren’t going to break the bank.
• The hotel had a spa. I sat in it. The bed was excellent. I slept hard and long, and lo, it was good.
• The airport had free wifi so I was able to get a solid couple hours of copyediting work in.
• I got an exit row on the flight, plus there’s nobody in the middle seat, so I don’t feel cramped and can stretch out and work.
• For that matter, I have a fantastically wonderful laptop that has great battery life and is light so lugging it around airports isn’t awful.
• I didn’t have anything major scheduled today. I lost a workout with my trainer, which was pre-paid, but another couple was trying to get home for her mother’s 90^th birthday….
• Ken will pick me up at the airport, and there will be smooching; and then we’ll have dinner at our go-to Thai place on the way home; and then there will probably be more smooching.

When life hands you Cleveland, make lemonade. Or something like that.

I’m writing this one the plane, so you’ll read this after I’ve returned home. Right now, though, I just realized I have a short story due tomorrow that I forgot about until right now. I’ve started it, and I had to turn in a proposal for it, so I mostly know how it’s going to go. But I’ve got to write it now. Right fucking now.

Which, I suppose, means I’m also grateful for all those Oregon Writers Network workshops that taught me I can write a kickass story overnight…!

---

*Because it was weather related, they don’t have to do anything. So yeah, I had to pay for a hotel and meals, as well as eat the cost of a booked training session at home. Thanks, United. Never again.

And then Bigfoot drop-kicked Alice Cooper....

“If you can spend a  perfectly useless afternoon in a perfectly useless manner, you have learned how to live.”  —Lin Yutang

Anyone following my Twitter/FB/G+ feeds Ssaturday knows that we abandoned any and all plans to do anything useful that day once I discovered SyFy was running a marathon of their cheesy movies. We grabbed our computers (because you don’t really have to watch the movies constantly) and settled ourselves onto the sofa.

More importantly, it was the one-year anniversary of Ken’s accident. Although we’d talked about doing something to celebrate his being alive (and healthier than he was before the accident!), we never nailed down what to do. What could be better than this?

We started our day with the tail end of Rage of the Yeti, which was just about as awfully good (or wonderfully bad) as the title suggests. We really didn’t have to see the first five-sixths of the movie to follow the plot.

Then it was on to The Lost Tribe, which apparently originally starred Jewel Staite, but then they rewrote/reshot it w/o her, which explains why the movie made little sense. I got a lot of email and online stuff during this one. Near the end, we never bothered unmuting it after a commercial break. Guess you also don’t need to hear these things, either….

The Lost Future appropriately came next. The DVR description promised Intense Sexual Situations (or something like that), but there were NONE, and I was PEEVED. It did have Sean Bean, though, and some other eye candy. During this one, I did some online publishing work.

Partway through Abominable, we mutually agreed that our brains were dribbling out of our ears and it was time to take a break. We made a batch of healthy popsicles (buttermilk, banana, raspberry, and honey), shoved those in the freezer, got out the ground beef and ground turkey to defrost for tonight’s meatloaf, acquired snacks, tidied the kitchen, and resumed our sprawl on the sofa. Ken burned some CDs we’d recently acquired (Amanda Palmer’s Several Attempts to Cover Songs by The Velvet Underground & Lou Reed* for Neil Gaiman as his Birthday Approaches [*and Other Stuff], Sun Domingo’s Songs for End Times [they opened for Marillion and we loved them], and Playing Away, a compilation of songs by members of Marillion with other projects), and then we returned to our orgy of visual media.

Our palate cleanser was The Young Victoria, our latest Netflix disc. Partway through the extras, we paused to make the meatloaf (meatslab, actually, because we had extra meat, so we flattened the whole thing so it would cook in the same amount of time), steamed Brussels sprouts, and salad. We watched an episode of Once Upon a Time with dinner (we’re still catching up on a few series—two more to go to finish out the season on this one).

Then it was on to Bigfoot. Danny Bonaduce! Sherilyn Fenn! Howard Hesseman! Barry Williams! This movie was made of cheesy win even before Bigfoot drop-kicked Alice Cooper. Special effects were awful, acting was dodgy, plot made no sense. But Bigfoot drop-kicked Alice Cooper…!

Wine was involved.

Finally, we also recorded Mega Python Vs. Gateroid, starring Debbie Gibson and Tiffany. I missed this one the first time around and was very sad. As yet, we haven’t had time to watch it, though.

So that was our Saturday. How was yours?

Wrap't

I just got home from a trip to Atlanta, with one sister and my mom and I visiting my other sister (more on that later), and I’m leaving tomorrow for two Marillion concerts in Hollywood (they haven’t toured the US in 15 years, and I think we got to see them only once when we lived in Wales), so I don’t have time for a proper journal entry.

But!

I’ve lost about 10 lbs and about 4% body fat in the last couple of months, and long story short, several people have asked me about salads and wraps. I love me some salad, boy howdy. Real Salad, not some namby-pamby wilted iceberg lettuce excuse for a salad. Salad with lots of interesting textures and explosions of taste and a tempting variety of colors. Crunchy veggies, a smattering of cheese, healthy fat in the form of avocado, filling protein.

(The word salad now officially is looking weird to me.)

So here you have them.

Salad #1

Good for a small dinner salad or a big entrée salad, the latter depending on how much protein you need.

• mixed greens of choice
• spinach
• fresh herbs if you’ve got them (I love basil)
• broccoli slaw
• tomatoes – I love little grape tomatoes, and I cut them in half so it’s easier to stab ‘em with my fork
• yellow pepper (or if you like green or red or orange, go for it)
• Persian (Trader Joe’s has them) or English cucumber (why do regular cucumbers have no taste?)
• thinly sliced red onion
• half an avocado
• garbanzo beans, drained and rinsed
• bleu cheese (I like TJ’s crumbled Salem Bleu)
• balsamic vinaigrette (see below) 

Salad #2

Good for a big entrée salad because it has more protein. I have this for lunch a lot.

• same veggies as above
• delete bleu cheese
• add feta cheese
• add Kalamata/Greek olives if you so desire
• add single-serving packet of tuna
• delete vinaigrette
• add a drizzle of extra-virgin olive oil
• add red wine vinegar to taste

Balsamic Vinaigrette à la Dayle

• 1 part extra-virgin olive oil to 2 parts balsamic vinegar – I usually do ½ cup oil and 1 cup vinegar, because that fits nicely in the bottle I use. Do what works best for you.
• some sort of mixed seasoning of your choice. I like Trader Joe’s Italian seasoning mix because it has no added salt and is tasty.
• dried mustard
• finely chopped garlic if you want (I don’t because it’s hard to clean out of the bottle)

• pour oil and vinegar into a measuring cup
• sprinkle seasoning until it covers the surface of the liquid
• sprinkle mustard to taste
• whisk like a mad whisking person
• decant into a nice bottle for serving

Wrap #1, aka Greek Wrap

• Trader Joe’s organic whole wheat olive oil wrap
• hummus (I love Trader Joe’s Mediterranean)
• spinach
• fresh basil if you’ve got it
• thinly sliced red onion
• sliced grape tomatoes
• thinly sliced Persian cucumbers
• Kalamata/Greek olives, roughly chopped
• crumbled feta
• sprinkle of red wine vinegar if you remember (I usually forget, dammit)

• schmear wrap with two tbsp hummus
• add veggies and feta
• I like to add the spinach last and pile on as much as I can
• wrap the wrap, baybee
• eat up 

Wrap #2, aka Sandwich in a Wrap

• Trader Joe’s organic whole wheat olive oil wrap
• stoneground mustard
• good thin-sliced deli turkey that isn’t full of preservatives and additives and crap
• veggies of your choice (spinach unless you can’t keep it refrigerated, cucumbers, tomatoes, onion, etc.)
• half an avocado