Historical and Contemporary Romance Author
Mayor of Simpleton by Andy Partridge, Copyright 1989 Never been near a university, Never took a paper or a learned degree, And some of your friends think that’s stupid of me, But its nothing that I care about. Well I don’t know how to tell the weight of the sun, And of mathematics, well I want none, And I may…
This week’s Music Monday comes to us courtesy of my favorite Canadian band, Barenaked Ladies. This one is off their 2006 album, Barenaked Ladies Are Me. I’ll let it speak for itself. Bull in China Shop by Ed Robertson and Steven Page, copyright 2005 I’m a kid in a candy store I’m a bull in a china shop I’m a…
The other day, several folks on Twitter (Jane Litte of Dear Author, Angela James of Carina Press, and a few others) were discussing how long ago a book has to be set before it can reasonably be considered a “historical” romance. Some said the 1920s, others the 1950s, and there may have been other responses I didn’t see. One thing…
So this is an installment in my ongoing (and sporadic) series on the reasons I’ve chosen to self-publish–and the reasons I haven’t. This one falls into the haven’t category. So, there’s a certain “I’ll self-publish and show you mean publishers (aka “The Man”) how wrong you are about me/my writing/my book!” mentality out there. I can understand the appeal of…
After I wrapped up the cover art design for Wrong Side of the Grave, Stephanie Draven mentioned on Twitter that my experiences were making her wonder if packaging shouldn’t come before writing the book. Or, put more bluntly, whether I was foolish to be spending time and money on cover art for books I haven’t written yet and could, in…
A few years ago, I briefly did a feature I called “Lyric Thursday” where I’d post the lyrics to a song that I found interesting, inspirational, or just plain fun. I got lazy and stopped doing it, but lately, I’ve been listening to music much more (mainly because I’ve been spending so much more time in the car!), and I…
No one is allowed to find anything else I need to change ;)! Things I did change/settle on for the final version: 1) I’m using a shadow instead of beveling to get my name to stand out. I didn’t like the way the beveling seemed to pixellate in smaller sizes. 2) I changed the color of the text on the…
Stephanie Draven posted a few suggestions in the previous thread for improving the cover art for Wrong Side of the Grave, most of them having to do with font choice/colors. I still kind of like the Papyrus font for the title, but I did a couple of versions using different fonts (for one, I chose Perpetua because a headstone engravers’…
Last week, I decided that I wanted to put out a short story as a prequel to INCARNATE. The heroine of the series, Elodie Capshaw, has a pretty interesting backstory and I thought it would be fun to explore her history a little more fully. I also thought a free short might spur interest in the series when the first…
I get the joke. No, I really do. It goes like this: There’s this video of a chimp raping a frog. It’s had over 11 million hits on YouTube. So Joe Konrath and Barry Eisler riffed on this viral video when they put out a free book called “Be the Monkey,” subtitled “A Conversation about the New World of Publishing.”…