"Give in" to this new collection from Andrea Dale!

GIVE IN is a scintillating collection of BDSM stories by prolific erotic scribe Andrea Dale. Prepare to be both aroused and charmed by these fifteen luscious tales of dark desire and power exchange, which appeared is such notable anthologies as Playing With Fire, Bound by Lust, and Do Not Disturb (a 2010 Independent Publisher Book Awards winner). In GIVE IN you’ll find out why Violet Blue calls Andrea Dale a “legendary erotica heavy hitter”!

Contains the following kinky stories:

• Guarding Her Body
• A Few Things to Pick Up On Your Way Home
• Stuffing the Ballot Box
• All She Wanted
• Breakfast in Bed
• Party Favor
• Return to Wildwood
• Mirror, Mirror
• How the Little Mermaid Got Her Tail Back
• Santa Claus is Comin’
• On the Twelfth Day…
• When the Rancher Needs a Loan
• Darlene’s Dilemma
• College Reunion
• The Queen of Christmas

Available in print and in a variety of electronic formats:

Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Smashwords | Kobo

Office update: writing side, pictures

Hm, I thought it might be fun to post work-in-progress pics every day—I’m having so much fun setting up the office, and later this week we’ll start stripping the paint from the downstairs office, and I know I want to document that as we go.

Here’s what the writing side of the office looks like right now:

Items of note, from left to right:

• On the desk, proof copies of Written on the Coast (fantasy collection) and Give In (BDSM erotica collection), which arrived today! Can’t wait to dive into them and clean up the final errors so I can put these lovely books on sale!
• Next to those, my desktop labyrinth, a Yule gift from Morgana and Brian. I’ve been wanting one for ages, and it’ll be a perfect meditative tool when I need to focus. (Hey, focus, one of my words for the year!)
• On the bulletin board, the top sheet is my production schedule (broken out by weeks) and the bottom is the list of erotica stories published through Soul’s Road Press, noting which ones I have to re-do the covers for and which ones need to be uploaded to Kobo.
• Llyfr (“book” in Welsh), my laptop, with my current WIP on screen in Scrivener.
• New 27-inch monitor for book design (not yet hooked up)!
• Pre-Raphaelite “Soul of the Rose” mousepad. (By comparison, on the home side of the room, I use a Torchwood mousepad.)

Meanwhile, I hung this Goddess picture over my writing chair today, and re-hung another one piece of art with the same gold cord. Above that (only half-visible) is a fishing globe I bought during my very first Oregon Writers Network workshop almost 13 years ago.

I want to buy a small (ideally antique) round wooden table for between the chair and the door, for my cuppa tea when I’m working.

Ideally I’d like to move the yearbooks and photo albums at the top of the bookshelf somewhere else, but that’s the only place they currently fit. The bottom two and a half shelves are children’s and YA books; not sure what’s going to go on the remaining shelf and a half. Maybe mysteries, because I don’t actually have many of those.

That’s it for today!

This is why I should not be allowed on the Internet

As I’ve mentioned, this month (since we’re home the entire month) our big project is to swap offices. My sweet little study downstairs, full of fiction books and an original built-in desk, just isn’t big enough when I add the publishing portion of my job into the mix. Upstairs, half of the large office was Ken’s office and half was our home office—which was really my home office, since I deal with the bills and paperwork and whatnot.

The project is going well so far. Ken’s completely cleaned out of the upstairs office (with things he doesn’t need immediately, and all the history and travel books, packed up and stored in the sewing room), and I’ve moved the home office stuff to his former side and moved all my writing stuff to the former home office side. I haven’t moved all the fiction books up yet because the shelves upstairs have open sides, which are fine for big books, but paperbacks fall through. Ken’s going to get some thin plywood, cut it up, and stain it. I’ve gone through most of the fiction and weeded out a fair amount, which will make it easier to fit everything in upstairs.

writing books, ego shelves, and magazines to be moved

Then we’ll tackle the downstairs office: strip the wood and stain it, paint the walls a dark red called Luscious, and hang the medieval-tapestry Roman blinds I found at a charity shop for $7 each (there were three, and Morgana grabbed the third). It’ll be the study I always wanted…but I’m glad we’re getting it done. It’ll really change the energy of the first floor and inspire us to work on more!

Meanwhile, I’m slowly arranging things upstairs. It’s slow because I want to get things right the first time, and I want to find a mix between efficiency and a good workspace, and the details and things I love to make the space inspiring and beautiful. Unfortunately, we don’t have the time/energy/money to have taken everything out (the desk is an enormous U-shaped one), stripped wood, painted, etc. And as much as I love this wallpaper, it wouldn’t work as a border above the picture rail (the sizing and half drop simply don’t fit). So I have to be creative with the rest of the décor.

It doesn’t help that I’ve been going through the archives of the Catty-Corner Cottage blog…. The woman decorates almost exactly how I’d like to, but she’s so utterly and immensely artistic that I don’t know if I could ever do a fraction of what she does. It’s inspiring, yes, but also frustrating!

What’s been happening is this: Ken will come upstairs to find me sitting in one of the two office chairs (because the comfy writing chair will have been taken over by a cat*), staring around the room. Thinking. Plotting. Pondering. Dreaming.

Just now, I found myself staring at the big filing cabinet. The house files are in the top two drawers, and they’ll be moving over to the smaller two-drawer filing cabinet next to me, so I can take over the full four-drawer cabinet for writing stuff (the two bottom drawers are bursting at the seams). It’s simply an ugly grey filing cabinet. Atop it are boxes of manuscript files, atop those are my bodhrán and a mask of my face, and in front of the boxes are a water dispenser and pretty metal tree tea light holder from which is dangling an Amy Brown faerie my friend Thomasina gave me for Yule. The bodhrán will probably have to move, because I don’t think it’ll say in place when open and close the filing cabinet. But anyway. My point sit that it’s an ugly grey filing cabinet, and I’m sitting here thinking, Hey, maybe I can spray paint it! But what color?** And then maybe I could stencil it! Or take all those magnets I’ve collected and finally cover them with something pretty, and…***

And when, exactly, am I suppose to be getting writing done?  ;-)

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*Although right now Grimoire has crawled into my writing office chair and fallen asleep, which is probably good because I need to write, so I can just grab my laptop and move over to the comfy chair once I finish this.

**The bulletin board that’s part of the desk next to it is a teal color, but I don’t want that as the primary color in here. So it’ll have to be something that doesn’t clash. Maybe the plummy purple from the comfy writing chair? Do they make spray paint in plummy purple? This is why I should not be allowed on the Internet!!!

***And get prettier handles for it, natch. 

The Focus and the Joy

My friend, the divine Shanna Germain, picks a word for each year. Something to focus on, to embrace, to work towards, to center around. (Follow the link on her name to read her explanation, which is much better than mine. Go on. I’ll wait.)

So she asked her friends and readers what their words were, and this year, I can’t decide between two. They’re different, but yet they’re both internal.

Joy. Focus.

These words, along with Temperance, the Tarot card I pulled on Samhain (to illuminate the Celtic year ahead), are what I’m meditating on right now. No definitive answers yet. But I know I want to focus on joy, and find joy in focus. I want to recognize and experience joy when I’m in the middle of it—I want to be mindful of it—and I want to rediscover the joy of doing the things I love, the things that are good for me. Writing, eating healthy, running, dancing, laughing, loving, singing, being.

It looks like the beginning of the year will also be about learning, gaining knowledge—which I know will help me with focus.

In February, I’ll be taking a couple of writing workshops in Oregon. In March, I’ll be attending the first-ever California Dreamin’ conference, a joint effort by the Los Angeles, Orange County, and East Valley RWA chapters. In March and April, I’ve got a 6-week online course booked on Pitches and Blurbs, and I may do some other online courses through the Oregon Writers Network later in the year.

Overall, I need to look at my production schedule and make some plans for the beginning of the year, writing- and publishing-wise. I started thinking about it last night, to let it soak into my subconscious. Dean Wesley Smith’s blog posts on the topic are a huge boon for me.

Starting next week, Morgana and I are taking a 6-week online course called Align Your Life! Magic, Purpose, & Living the Way You Really Want, taught by my acquaintance, the splendidly lovely T. Thorn Coyle. I’d only recently heard about it, and shot an email to Morgana, and when I didn’t hear back, I kinda forgot. Then last night around 10 pm she called me to tell me she wanted to do it, but registration was about to close! So I fired off an email and our deposits, and we’re in. Whew!

I feel I’ve lost touch with my spirituality over the past few years, and I need to make it a priority again. Morgana’s expressed similar feelings, although I can’t speak directly for her. I think this will be a good first step.

Meanwhile, Ken and I have been discussing our goals re: health and fitness. We’re hoping to both do the three-week nutritional cleanse that I did a couple of years ago (our chiropractor’s father is a nutritionist). It’s a fantastic jump-start, focused on detoxing certain organs, and a good way to get back to basics. Bad habits have crept in again. After I did the cleanse last time, I felt so much better—to the point that my night vision actually improved.

Beyond all this? We’ve talked about taking a photography course so we can learn how to use our camera to its full capabilities, and I’d like to take piano lessons again. (Ken wants to take guitar lessons, but my suggestion is that he take piano lessons with me to learn how to read music, plus we already have a keyboard.) But nothing’s hard-scheduled past March, except for the 2013 Iron Butt Rally (end of June into the beginning of July) and another OWN workshop for me in July. There will be cross-country trips to visit my sister, of course, and no doubt trips north to see my other sister, and trips south to see Ken’s family. There will be friends. There will be joy. There will be focus.

There will be life, as best as we can do it. I’m looking forward to it.

The slow progress back towards the light

I started this blog post about a month ago, which tells you how difficult it’s been for me to write. But despite how hard it is to look back at the bad, it’s also proving cathartic, because it’s making me celebrate the good and look forward to the…um, gooder. More goodness. Better goodness.

So, here goes:

Roughly a year ago, I…

• was still recovering from the death of my father in January 2010
• was continuing to deal with my oldest sister’s severe aneurysm in December 2010 and the resultant cross-country travel (four times in seven months, and counting…)
• was reeling from Ken’s near-fatal motorcycle accident, major surgery, and recovery (which necessitated my being his primary caregiver for several months)
• assumed I was just dealing with stress, and didn’t know that my perimenopause had turned into menopause and that my hormones were, quite frankly, FUBAR
• was so wound up in perfectionism that when I tore a tendon in my left hand and it hurt to do dishes and my acupuncturist suggested I use paper plates and disposable tableware, I almost levitated off the table in horror
• not to mention that I’d just torn a tendon in my left hand and had been told not to type for four months, meaning I couldn’t do much of anything work-wise
• continued to do the jobs I’d volunteered for because I didn't want to let anyone down, fully convinced I could do them despite the energy I was putting into taking care of my loved ones (and not putting into taking care of myself)
• wondered why some people I’d long called friends had seemingly abandoned me
• was seriously wondering if I’d ever write again, given that I couldn’t find the enthusiasm for even stupid only-I-would-ever-read-it fun stuff—which then made me wonder WTH I was going to do with the rest of my life and, honestly, who I was if I wasn’t a writer, which I’d identified myself as and worked towards since I was 12 years old

There was probably more, but you get the picture.

I’ve been pondering, over the past month or two, how different my life is now. How much better it is. How I didn’t realize how fucking awful it was a year ago, how depressed and anxious and screwed up and lost I was.

The irony is that in public—on my blog, on FB/Twitter, even to anyone except close friends/family—I put on a good face. (As good a face I could, anyway. I know my stress manifested in less-than-positive ways.) I asked for help, and when I didn’t get it, I shrugged and soldiered on, because that’s what one does.

My goal here isn’t to garner sympathy (in fact, responses to that end would probably make me feel bad at this point). It’s more to chronicle the changes for myself, to be able to look back and say “Yes, it was horrible, but I got through it, and if/when things get horrible again, this will remind me that I can and will get through it again.” (Although I’m putting the positive out there that it’s not going to get that horrible again.)

Things are so, so, so much better. My health isn’t perfect, but it feels like a 180 in some areas. December’s month-long cold notwithstanding, I have energy, I have strength. I ran my first full 5K a month ago. I can do double suspension exercises in the TRX bands. I go up and down the stairs without thinking about it (as opposed to when my back was so bad, if I forgot something on one floor, I simply went on without it).

I have my brain back, and I have some of my creativity back, and it’s coming back more and more, and I know that eventually I’ll get my focus back (I see that as something to work on, not wait for, at any rate).

I’m excited about moving my business into the upstairs office, where I’ll have more room to both write and publish, and I’m excited about doing some more fun work on the house in the process (e.g., the downstairs office).

I’ve let go of the so-called friends who had already let go of me, and found great joy in the amazing friends who stood by me through the worst of times. I’ve spent quality time with family, and rejoiced in my sister’s slow but steady successes.

I was reminded, time and again, how music heals me, how it reaches into my soul and helps me find the light. It’s my sacred circle, my way of connecting with the divine.

All of this spirals down into the tattoo I got in the middle of all the darkness: The Good Catches Up. Sometimes it takes a little while, but in the end, it does.

I’m going to keep putting the good out there into the world, and tomorrow I’ll talk about my plans for the beginning of 2013 and beyond.

A magickal New Year’s Eve to you all. Leave the bad behind in 2012, and embrace the good!

Listening to: “New Year’s Eve,” Taylor Mills