Woohoo! Captain’s Surrender is back!

I’ve had a little hiatus recently where I only had one book out – False Colors.  But today is the day for Captain’s Surrender to relaunch in its spiffy new ebook version from Samhain.  The one with the fabulous cover 🙂

In addition to the new cover, it’s been extensively edited by Anne Scott, who did a thorough and brilliant job.  Also it has a couple of expanded scenes where I’ve been able to put back some stuff I had to take out to get it under LBR’s tight 60K word limit.  I’ve also been able to take out the embarrassing big historical anachronism in the first paragraph, which is an enormous relief!

So, if you’re in the market for an ebook at all, I can definitely recommend this version.  It’s much improved 🙂

EXCERPT

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Boys of Summer = baseball?

So, apparently, not sleeping well since Friday leads to lowered productivity.  Who’d have thought it?  I tried to get myself to work today by eating kettle chips and a chocolate bar, but that just made me feel literally sick and tired instead of just tired.  Giving up and going to bed sounds like the only thing that might work.

On the plus side, I only have one more chapter of Boys of Summer to edit and then it’s ready to submit.

On the minus side, this last chapter is going to need more of a complete re-write than an edit, and I don’t want to handle it while knackered.  But at any rate, fingers crossed, it’ll be all done by the end of next week.  Which leads me to my question about the title.

I called the book “Boys of Summer” because of the song The Boys of Summer by Don Henley The romance in the book happens over one long August, in which both heroes are on their summer holidays and are escaping from their otherwise horrible lives.  To me this song is just liquid summer in audio form, and it sounds hot and poignant and sweet with a slightly sinister undertone.  And, “I can tell you, my love for you will still be strong/after the boys of summer have gone” is perfect for my holiday romance turns into love of a lifetime story.  So I had thought that in this one instance I had actually come up with the perfect title by myself (a rare thing – titles are not my forte.)

But now two people have said me “you do know that in the USA ‘the boys of summer’ means baseball players, don’t you?”  To which I have to reply “er… no.  I had no idea.”

Does this make a difference?  Will readers in the USA pick up a book called The Boys of Summer and be horribly disappointed and annoyed when one hero is a surfer, the other is a yachtsman and there is no mention of baseball anywhere in the book?

If so, what do you think I should call it instead?

Just for a giggle

Two comic gems I found on my LJ friends’ list:

Passed along from dubious_virtue, a link to Jimhines reading the slush pile in the style of Dr.Seuss

Here’s a tale from D & D!

I do not want your D & D.
I do not like your elf PC.
I can not stand your purple prose.
I want to punch you in the nose!

Would you like a hot sex scene?
I wrote it for my online ‘zine!

I do not like your pervy tale.
Your metaphors make readers pale.
Your paragraphs are pages long.
Your bad sex scene is oh so wrong!
Can people do that with their lips???
I do not like your manuscripts.

And passed along from Lord_whimsy

I’m torn between laughing like a drain and cringing in sympathetic embarrassment.

Elisa Rolle setting up her own Readers’ Rainbow Awards

In reaction to the business with the Lambda Literary Awards, Elisa Rolle has started the process of setting up a separate award (tentatively christened the Rainbow Award) which will be open to all writers regardless of gender or orientation, and judged by a panel of volunteers from amongst the readers of m/m and other GBTL lit.

She’s still in the process of thrashing out the categories and sub-categories, and deciding whether it’s going to be a Romance/Erotica competition only, or whether it’s going to be for all LBGT lit, including non-romance and non-fiction.

If you think this is a good idea, do head over there and offer her some help!

http://elisa-rolle.livejournal.com/799266.html

This is my first stab at a possible structure for the entries. I haven’t filled in anything in some of the columns because I’m too unfamiliar with those genres to know what the sub-sections would be.

Why writing is hard

Why is writing the first draft hard?

Because it’s like trying to spin mist.  You know the perfect book is in here somewhere.  You sometimes have glimpses of it, but it’s like a Platonic Ideal – you can never achieve it in real life.  Plus, the book you want to write is nebulous.  Every sentence, every word, could be something different.  Could be something better, maybe, if you only thought longer and harder about it.  Every time you write a sentence, how do you know you’re not choosing the wrong one?  How do you know the book wouldn’t be better if you did something different at that point?

All the ghosts of other possibilities are there, in the mental fog, waiting to be pulled out, and you get something but you can never be sure you couldn’t have got something better if you’d looked harder.

Why are second drafts hard?

Because they’re like chiseling a marble statue.  This time you’ve got something, and it’s solid and it has the weight of something that’s real.  So now you’re worried that if you remove that bit, or try to add something there, you’ll ruin what you’ve already got.  The shape looks inevitable.  The words are already there, and if you knock some of them away, or change them, are you going to leave a scar?  Or worse, are you going to crack the whole thing open beyond the possibility of repair?

I wonder how long it’s going to take me to realize that words are neither mist nor stone?  They’re infinitely malleable.  I really ought to be less scared of them by now.

Not dead yet

Well, we seem to be on the mend.  My willpower still doesn’t seem to be connected to anything – I keep thinking that I must answer emails and then not doing it, but at least Rose is lots better and thinking about going to school later this week.

Meanwhile I’ve been reading – and enjoying – “Sense and Sensibility and Sea-monsters”.  I haven’t tried P&P & Zombies, partially because I don’t like zombies and partially because I know P&P so well that even with zombies added I don’t want to read it again for a while.  But the sea-monsters are very much my thing.  I would say this wasn’t fanfic per se.  It’s more like a parody in a more affectionate and understanding vein than, for example, the Bored of the Rings parodies are of LotR.

“Is there a felicity in the world superior to this?” asked Marianne with a grin.  “Margaret, we will walk here at least two hours, and if we are set upon by any sort of man-beast with giant lobster claws, I shall swiftly butcher it with this pickaxe I brought for that purpose.”

It’s cracktastic and it’s making me laugh.

On the other hand, “The Quiet Gentleman” by Georgette Heyer is making me want to throw it across the room.  Are all her heroes such complete and total arses?  Dear God, he’s horrible – hello, let me walk into my step family’s life after ignoring them completely for a year and immediately start laying down the law, patronising them with my smart city ways, scorning my young half-brother, humiliating him and stealing his girl and being all suspicious that he’s trying to murder me even though it was me who deliberately goaded him into losing his temper.  Horrible, horrible man!  And the worst thing is that the author is quite clearly expecting me to like him for all of this.  Not to mention she keeps telling us what an obliging man he is and then showing him being a domineering prick.

I flicked to the end to find out whether anyone actually was trying to murder him or not.  So now I know, I don’t feel that I want to suffer any more time in his company.  Bastard!

Any one want a half read copy of this book?  In pristine condition.  Will send it to the first person to say yes, in exchange for the postage.  (Which probably means it’s only worth it for people in the UK.)

Paint a red cross on the door

As we have suspected swine flu in the house.  At least, Rose is shivery, achy, has a high temperature and is (thanks to the advice of the swine flu hotline) on Tamiflu.  I’m not feeling too wonderful myself, so editing and anything else have taken a back seat to getting her to drink enough, and surfing through fanvids on YouTube.

Swingeing review of False Colors

I feel like a real author now 🙂  I was looking on Amazon for the cover of Ursula LeGuin’s “The Left Hand of Darkness” and thought I would just check how False Colors was doing.  Not so bad, thankfully.  However, I did find that since I looked at it last I’d received my first ever 1 star review.

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I Do Two!

After the huge success of I DO, an anthology in support of Marriage Equality, we’re delighted to announce that there’ll be a second volume, I DO TWO, with a planned publication date of 14^th February 2010.

The project has an editorial team – Alex Beecroft, Charlie Cochrane, Sophia Deri-Bowen, Lee Rowan – and not forgetting Kris Jacen at MLR who have kindly agreed to be the publishers again.

What we now need are stories; heart warming, thought provoking, life affirming, most importantly top quality stories. The deadline for submissions is December 1^st 2009, with decisions announced on 1^st January 2010. (Please adhere to the submissions guidelines given below.)

Feel free to pass this on.

The I DO TWO Team.

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New Cover art comm

OK, so with both children ill at home I won’t be doing editing today.  However, I have started up that cover art comm I mentioned yesterday, imaginatively called  Cover_artists You can find it here

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There seem to be lots of comms out there to talk about writing, but I couldn’t find any in which cover artists could talk about their work.  I did find a couple of very interesting comms in which people talk about cover art on published books:

judging_covers and book_design

but that’s from the perspective of a reader who is choosing which book to read.  Vital information for a cover artist to know, but not quite the same as having somewhere to hang out together and network.

So that’s why I started this community.  If you’re at all interested in cover art, whether as a cover artist, an artist or photographer who might be interested in seeing their work on covers, or just as someone who likes book covers and has an opinion about them, please join up and ask your friends!

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How to occupy the rest of the day while not checking up on children?  I think I’ll mop the house, clean the bathroom, and make Rose a waistcoat.  But lunch first.