The Dynamic Trio - Blog

…by WarCraft III! I’m a woman who looks at a frickin’ computer screen all day, so the last thing I want to do when I get home is pull out my laptop. Sometimes I have to in order to get word count done towards whatever manuscript I’m working on. But other than that, I don’t wanna check mail, send IM’s or anything else.

Until WarCraft came along.

It’s a frickin video game where Night Elves, Orcs, Undead, Men, and all manner of creatures duke it out. It is also a game that I am now addicted to, thanks to my son. The upside is that I can play WITH my kid to take out the bad guys. And sometimes we play against each other and I threaten to ground him if he takes me out *snark* with his magical mojo.

Well, last night I decided to play against the computer. What the hell was I thinking? More importantly, how does the computer create so many more ‘heroes’ and ‘characters’ and ‘troops’ so fast? I created those damned things as fast as possible…and the computer still came by my camp with a gazillion fighters and even a few dragons, and wiped me out in an amount of time that should have been impossible.

BUT I MUST ADMIT…it was a great stress reliever. This time of year we’re all running around trying to get things ready for our families to enjoy a wonderful time together called “the holidays.” But this ‘wonderful time’ requires shopping, cooking, cleaning, running around town like a chicken with its head on fire. Add the day job on top of that and it’s a blasted nightmare. So instead of giving in to the temptation to run around my house yelling at the top of my lungs about how badly the refrigerator needs cleaning to fit all the food in it…I just sit back with my son, play WarCraft and enjoy getting my ass kicked. Who’da thought?

Relaxing and stress relief is even more important once you hit (and pass) thirty. So, what do you do to relieve stress? If you don’t have a stress reliever…try WarCraft. Trust me, it works - even if you’re like me and don’t particularly like video games…

(Crossposted from my LD blog)

So I was having a discussion with, who else, Megan, and we were talking about promotion and the pressure to promote and how some authors have taken that pressure and just gone crazy with it and it’s backfiring onto all of us.

Promotion is a wily beast with sharp teeth who lives in some mythical place and you can only find the keys to get out of its lair on like the third Tuesday of the fourth month on a full moon when the planets are aligned just so. When you first start out the key is in figuring out what works and what’s a waste of time. It’s not the same for everyone I don’t think, because people have different approaches to their career.

But I will say right now, unless you’re Nora Roberts, promotion on some level is important (and she does signings and she gets out there too, because even Nora Roberts has to sell books). I know, I know there are authors out there who’ll say, “all you need to do is write a great book.” I disagree. Because on any given day many “great books” are released but how do people know your great book is out? In truth, your spectacular book isn’t going to fall from the sky with fanfare and set off some internal alarm to let readers know. And it’s really not going to happen for newbies and mid listers who are really thinking about position in the market.

This is a long one so I’ll put the rest behind a jump…

Read the rest of this entry �

I’ve had a busy couple of days with not a book or writing relating article in sight. On Thursday I visited the Ellerslie Flower show and yesterday I spent the day with a woman’s adventure group, kayaking up the Puhoi river, north of Auckland. I’m glad the weekend has come so I can rest by working on my edits! It rained while we were kayaking but I figured the odds were good I was going to get wet anyway and a little rain didn’t matter! Today my shoulders are a bit sore but I had so much fun I can’t wait for next month’s adventure.

Below is a little about my flower show visit…

1. Scored free car parking. Left our umbrellas and coats in the car since there wasn’t a rain cloud in sight. Woohoo! A great start to the day.

2. Checked out all the scarecrows designed by local school children.

3. Visited the palm garden. It was amazing since they’d planted dozens of fully grown palm trees in their temporary garden.

4. Walked through the Floral display tent. The floral artists are really talented and would most likely cringe if they saw the way I jam flowers into vases.

5. Had a free cup of tea - Chai tea. Delicious and my favorite since first drinking it in India.

6. Watched some Thai ladies making butterflies out of flowers and carving flowers out of vegetables. Amazing.

7. Ambled through the dark nocturnal gardens with their pretty lights and water features. I can walk, talk and snap photos all at once. Why can’t everyone else???? Quite a few traffic jams in this exhibition.

8. Talked to a man about gutter stop - mesh stuff to stop leaves from blocking the guttering. My sister reckons it’s worth the cost since she hates climbing onto the roof to clean the gutters every few months. The photo below is nothing to do with gutters but I liked the cacti so decided to put it here :)

9. A lady from Visique cleaned my sunglasses for me and gave me a free polishing cloth. Score!

10. Purchased a garden stake in the shape of a kiwi. My sister purchased a cat one.

11. A lady cleaned one shoe for me with this special polish stuff. I asked her very nicely to clean the other since I looked like something out of a before and after commercial. My sister purchased some of this stuff since it works on leather furniture and saddles as well as my shoes.

12. Ate lots of free samples in lieu of lunch. Toasted seeds, biscuits, chocolate, yoghurt, fruit juice, pesto to name a few. Tried out testers of hand lotions. The tomato one was quite nice. Purchased some lavender soap since I love the smell. My wardrobe will smell beautiful.

13. Lots of elderly people pushed me around but I refrained from pushing back even though I was armed with garden stakes. My sister and I decided we’d looked enough and left the garden show. Hitched a ride back to the carpark in a golf cart. My sister and the driver discussed banking. After a quiet coffee in the Botanic Garden cafe (the flower show ones were packed) we went home. I’m currently resting with a glass of wine and mentally preparing for my day of kayaking tomorrow.

How was your week?

Yesterday we had a FERAL FASCINATION list mom day on the Ellora’s Cave reader’s loop, and I had a WHAT’S COOKIN’ list mom day on the Samhain Cafe where we shared LOTs of recipes just in time for the beginning of the holiday season. It was so much FUN!

If you want some good recipes and you’re a member of the Samhain Cafe Yahoo group, run over to the loop and get them. They’re all fabulously delicious.

We also announced the beginning of the HOLIDAY HOTTIE contest hosted right here by the Dynamic Trio. We’ve got almost TWENTY, yes twenty, authors playing along with us, so be sure to check the blog for details on Sunday, November 18th. Or get a sneak peek of some of the details on both the Ellora’s Cave and Samhain Yahoo groups *hint hint*

Well, since I posted a hint to the group readers, I should probably post one here, too…but all I’ll say is that you’ll need to check the Dynamic Trio’s blog page for author wish hints when we tell ya to, then post your guesses to the HOLIDAY HOTTITE e-mail address at hh@tjmichaels.com telling us what you think the author wants for the holidays.

All the rest of the details, rules and stuff will be posted both here and in the newsletter coming up.

Oh, and TJ On A Tangent newsletter subscribers get the details early *wink*

Have a fabulous Thursday!

TJ

50K on Standoff! Yay!

Also, in yay news - Witches Knot: Thrice United is now available in print from Ellora’s Cave’s new print store!

To celebrate the recent release of Feral Fascination, the anthology containing Reluctant, in print, several of the anthology authors will be at the EC Reader Chat tomorrow afternoon so pop over to say hello, read fun excerpts and have a good time!

I’m caught up in writing today so I don’t have much else to say! Oh, other than if you write a disgruntled letter to the RWR and pretend to be just a reader but you’re really an author in competition with the books you’re complaining about? Naughty. And not the fun kind of naughty either.

But on to the good kind of naughty - I hear it’s Gerard’s birthday. My goodness, I think someone needs some birthday spankings!

oh and

after looking at those it feels more like it’s my birthday!

I have a new cover for my upcoming January release from Cerridwen Press. Here’s the blurb:

Professional rugby player, Lane Gerrard is used to women throwing themselves at him, but a scurrilous tabloid article naming him as father of a child sends his temper soaring. The woman he confronts doesn’t fit the blackmailer profile. Kate Alexander is attractive with an enchanting innocence, enticing. A total stranger. Her feistiness draws his unwilling admiration, but the child…he is the image of Lane.

Kate can’t deny her son’s similarity to the sexy man at her door but no way will she hand him over without a fight. Kate doesn’t possess money but she can shower her son with love. With public speculation rife, Kate reluctantly works with Lane to discover the truth. They grow closer as distrust slowly turns to mutual fascination, but the tabloid articles bring out a stalker. Mild pranks escalate into danger, and suddenly Lane realizes Kate is a woman he could love. With Kate and her son, he could have a family. Now, with his heart on the line, this is one game he’s playing to win…

Playing to Win is due out on 17 Jan 2008.

And this week I’ve sold another book to Ellora’s Cave. Yay!! Assassin is the fourth book in the Middlemarch series and features Leo and a mysterious blonde. I’m not sure of the release date yet but it will be out in 2008.

I hope everyone has a wonderful week. I’m going to a flower show and spending a day kayaking so somehow I don’t think I’ll be doing much writing!

We all know the American Thanksgiving holiday is coming up. Those of us who enjoy turkey should be forewarned of the dangers of eating turkey while out on a date. Those who do not eat poultry…well, you can just sit back and laugh at those of us who do.

So according to the one minute video below, all turkey eaters should beware…but before the video, I must first give a disclaimer: Okay, this is SO totally not my fault! I take absolutely no responsibility for this post *snicker* nor for any snarfing of liquids through the nose while watching this video. I also hold myself harmless for any choking or spewing on computer screens.

Last night the dude and I watched Rise - a vampire flick starring Lucy Liu. I love vampire movies and this one was unusual and in the end I enjoyed it. I did think the timeline issues - flashback sequences threaded with current time sequences - were jarring and IMO, took away from the fluidity of the story. It was confusing AND, as my husband pointed out, kept calling attention to how she apparently had time to stop in at Gene Juarez for a color and makeup session in between killing evil undead. She did look very stylish, by the way. I think the wardrobe people did a great job.

It got me thinking about how technical issues in how we choose to tell a story can either enhance or take away from the overall experience for the reader/viewer. On one hand, it’s a bold move to do the flashback sequences the way the director did. An info dump slows down the story but with a story like Rise, it’s necessary. It could have moved more traditionally from the moment she was changed to the end, but he went another way. Interesting choice, it opens with girl kissing which well, let’s face it, keeps the dudes happy and it’s not like Lucy Liu is hard to look at by any stretch of the imagination, but it sort of fed into a quick buck sort of feel and then you’re jerked backward in time and then forward again.

Anyway, I’m rambling, but it made me think of Outlander (a book I love, love, love) and essentially, you do have some folding back and forth in time but it’s judicious and in Gabaldon’s case, it totally works because it’s judicious.

What do you guys think? What are some unusual technical things that worked for you and didn’t work? Memento comes to mind as a really brilliant story told unconventionally and just works well. Pulp Fiction too because it’s circular and you don’t quite realize it until the end and you’re like, “Oh!” In books though, I think messing with timelines is far more tricky than in a movie because the thread is mental and not visual. It takes longer to track back to the main story.

As for squee - on Thursday I learned I’d sold two books to Berkley Heat! The first of which, Battlefront, is a futuristic, menage with bdsm flavor and the second, well I have some ideas but I haven’t decided where I’ll go with it just yet.

Sven is going well, thank goodness! I’m cooking and I’ve hit over 55K total words in the challenge so I’ll be done with the last Cascadia Wolves book, Standoff, most likely by this time next week.

First, let me get the promo out of the way - my first print book was released from Ellora’s Cave on Tuesday. Sorry I didn’t mention it sooner, but I didn’t know until after it released (aacckk!) It’s called FERAL FASCINATION and both Lauren and I have stories in it.

Second, the HOLIDAY HOTTIES contest is coming up. Author wish lists are pouring in, so stay tuned. It kicks off the week before Thanksgiving and it’s gonna be good! If you’re not sure what I’m talking about, scroll down and check out the “HOLIDAYS…ALREADY” post.

I’ll be talking about this contest during my List Mom days at Ellora’s Cave and Samhain Publishing reader groups next week. Okay, done with that. Now on to my problem.

God, I’m so tired I just don’t know what to do. Life is good, though busy. And the busy part has led to a bit of insomnia - basically I can’t quiet my mind down enough to go to sleep.

When I was a kid I used to remember all of my grandma’s home remedies for such things, but, here we are almost, er, let’s see, thirty years later…and I can’t remember a single one!

So help me out here, will ya? Do you have any home remedies that might help one sleep…or get teens to do the dishes? ;D

TJ

I’m guest blogging over at The Romance Studio today. Come over to visit, leave a comment and go into the draw to win a download of Unforgettable.

See you there!

Shelley