The Dynamic Trio - Blog

basket with loads of cool stuff in it. So come on over and say hello!

Here’s a list of the participating authors (times shown are eastern):

10:00 – 11:00: Patrice Michelle

11:00 - 12:00: Alexandra Ivy

12:00 - 1:00: Gena Showalter

1:00 - 2:00: JJ Massa

2:00 - 3:00 Lauren Dane

3:00-4:00 HelenKay Dimon

4:00-5:00 Lara Adrian

5:00-6:00: Cynthia Eden

6:00-7:00: TBA

7:00-8:00: Meljean Brook

8:00-9:00: Shelly Laurenston

9:00 - 10:00: Yasmine Galenorn

basket with loads of cool stuff in it. So come on over and say hello!

Here’s a list of the participating authors (times shown are eastern):

10:00 – 11:00: Patrice Michelle

11:00 - 12:00: Alexandra Ivy

12:00 - 1:00: Gena Showalter

1:00 - 2:00: JJ Massa

2:00 - 3:00 Lauren Dane

3:00-4:00 HelenKay Dimon

4:00-5:00 Lara Adrian

5:00-6:00: Cynthia Eden

6:00-7:00: TBA

7:00-8:00: Meljean Brook

8:00-9:00: Shelly Laurenston

9:00 - 10:00: Yasmine Galenorn

CHASE BROTHERS: MAKING CHASE BY LAUREN DANE
Copyright 2007, Lauren Dane
All Rights Reserved, Samhain Publishing
Now Available in Trade Paper!

Tate Murphy sat in the comfy chair at her station, sipping coffee and looking out the window. It was a Saturday in the very beginning of February. Winter had been cold but spring was beginning to imagine itself. The trees carried buds, heavy with leaves and the air wasn’t quite as chilly as it’d been even a week before.

All in all, a lovely day. Soon to be even lovelier. One leg crossed over the other, foot slowly kicking back and forth, she waited for her morning visual donut. Matt Chase.

Ah, there he was. Hot damn, her body lit up when he pulled his truck into the lot adjacent to the salon. Hopping out, he hefted a duffel bag over one shoulder and loped across the street.

“Good Lord the man looks good enough to eat,” Tate murmured as she took a drink of her coffee. Faded jeans showed off long legs and a nice, trim booty. A hoodie sweatshirt fended off the cold but didn’t stop her from seeing the work-hard body beneath. He was in dire need of a haircut and she had no trouble admitting she’d love to get her fingers in it. A bit shaggy, it curled up just around his ears and touched the back of his collar. A color like burnt sugar.

Although he had on cool-looking sunglasses, she knew the eyes beneath were a light green, fringed with chocolate lashes. Mmm. Mmmm. Mmmm.

“Ah, I see his hotness has arrived.” Anne, co-owner and her next youngest sister, stood next to her, leaning into the chair.

“Kinda makes me want to set a fire,” Tate said, one corner of her mouth lifting.

“Um, I smell something burning already. Your panties perhaps?”

Blushing furiously, she spun, laughing at Anne’s outrageous comment. “I’m gonna light a candle for you. Three.”

Anne joined her in laughter. “You just about raised me, I expect I need all the help I can get.”

“Hey, divas, did I miss him?” Beth, the last owner and next youngest sister after Anne approached to refill everyone’s coffee cup.

“Yeah, he just went inside. But there’s always lunchtime.” Sated for the morning, Tate stood and began to get all her tools in order, making sure her station was stocked and ready for the day.

Four years before, Tate and Anne had decided to buy the rundown old house at the far end of Main Street and renovate it into a hair salon. They’d scrimped, saved, worked multiple jobs and got the down-payment together and then had spent months doing the renovation work themselves. Luckily, they had a large, and free, workforce. With eight Murphy kids and two spouses to help, they’d been able to paint, knock out walls, drywall, replace the plumbing, landscape, and apply for all the proper permits and licenses. Hell, they’d even put up a new roof. A few months after Anne graduated from beauty school, Tate left her old salon in Riverton and they opened the doors to Murphy’s Cuts and Curls.

Two years after that, Beth came in as part owner and ran the business end of things. The salon was a family affair. Beth had been helping out with the books when she’d offered to buy in at a smaller share. The place would wither and die without her to, well, do everything that needed doing. Not only did she handle the books and deal with ordering supplies but if someone needed a shampoo she could do that too.

Truthfully, Tate had wanted a fancier name but their youngest sister, Jill, who was getting her degree in marketing, told them that if they kept the name folksy but not too cutesy, it’d make people more comfortable.

Jill must have had something, because from the moment they’d opened, they’d done a brisk business. Women stopped leaving town to get their hair done. Tate and Anne offered everything from the giant hairspray helmet the women like Polly Chase preferred to the stylish razor cuts her daughter-in-law Liv currently sported. It made Petal seem a friendlier place to Tate, who always had felt an outsider there.

Tate made a decent living. Enough that she’d been able to help Tim and her other siblings pay tuition at the University of Georgia for their two youngest siblings. Before that, she worked to pay for her younger brother Nathan’s college and master’s in teaching. They’d all worked together to help out when the others had needed it and that’s what counted.

“Anne, your first client of the day is a color, I’ll send her over to Tate for the cut,” Beth announced as she made another pot of coffee.

Tate looked at the place she and her sisters had built from the ground up and pride swelled her heart.

FIRST - TODAY IS RELEASE DAY FOR MAKING CHASE!!!! Wheeee! Those of you who’ve been waiting for the paperback release can now finish the series with Tate and Matt and their HEA.

You can get Making Chase at Amazon (although it’s saying it’s temporarily not available but I think it’s a glitch), and My Bookstore and More as well as your local Borders and Barnes and Noble.

And secondly - I’m going to be chatting at Jacquelyn Frank’s place this coming Saturday from 2 - eastern/11- 12 pacific. There will be huge prizes given out all day by all her guests as well as from Jackie herself so come by and say hello. I’ll be giving away a Vegas themed bag with a copy of What Happens In Vegas. A list of all the authors attending is here.

44,517 / 90,000 (49.5%)

Relentless - I’m at the halfway point.

I spent most of yesterday, from about 3 am on, dealing with a puking three year old. Man was she miserable and I hate when they’re so sick and you can’t help them other than to wipe faces and rub backs. Poor sweetie pie. She’s better now, thank goodness. On Wednesday my middle kiddo woke up at 4 am with this same thing. He was so sick he missed the kindergarten field trip to the zoo.

I’m still exhausted from next to no sleep. You know I got like tiny bits of mother sleep, not quite deep enough because I was attuned to her every sound. We had the barf bucket in bed with us even. So glamorous.

All I know is I’m hella relieved I’m not sick and it seems to have bypassed my oldest but my husband got his share, only he’s away from home so it’s worse for him.

I missed Battlestar Galactica last night. I’ll have to catch it on the web at Sci Fi. I actually have a good excuse, I was writing.

I’ve been over at Novelspot this week talking about my personal journey from two lines in the window until right now.  It’s funny, writing it all out over the week, bit by bit only makes me feel luckier about where I am and what I do.

If you’re interested it starts with:

Two Lines in the Window
Building My House Brick By Brick
With a Little Bit of Fairy Dust
But Sometimes Your Bag of Fairy Dust Gets Low
Patience Perseverance and Planning
Okay The House Is Built, what’s Next

Tomorrow I’ll finish up with a little primer on navigating the authorial waters but these entries above are my journey from there to here.

Because I’ve gotten used to windows movie maker through doing video blogging, I thought I’d try to make a book video for a few of my upcoming books. The problem is, like video blogging, I look up and an hour has passed without my knowing it. It’s fun to think about how to present your book through visual media instead of through words. It’s a whole new way to think about your work and as long as you use the stock photo sites and the stock music sites (hey, I know what it’s like to be pirated!), you can make something fun for around the same price as you’d spend on some cover ads at a website (aside from what a huge time suck it is, but that’s just me loving to learn something new - blame Anya Bast, she started me on this road!)

To tell the truth, I’m not overly convinced book videos make a difference in book buying patterns. Shrug. Hell, lots of things I do I’m not sure if they make a difference. And having them done professionally is far more expense than I’m personally willing to go to (although certainly after having done one now, I know the time and energy it takes!).

However, I’m never opposed to learning how to do things for myself. It appeals to the control freak living inside me, making lists and using color coded 3×5 cards and stuff. I don’t think it can *hurt* to try book videos, most certainly. And I like doing the multi media stuff even if I’m not perfect at it. It’s fun even if it’s time porn in a major way.

I’ve got several books coming out in print the remainder of this year - Making Chase, Reading Between the Lines and Undercover (and Taking Care of Business in the UK) so why not give it a whirl? So without further ado - here’s my very first book video for my summer trade paper release, Reading Between the Lines. Go easy on me, it’s my first time…

10,500 / 90,000 (11.7%)

RELENTLESS!

Whoo! Hit 10K last night and the story and my characters are opening up for me. Originally I’d envisioned a certain kind of push and pull between H/H but as I write, that’s not how it’s working. Certainly they’re from two different worlds, but I can’t make them not like each other so I’m not going to force it. The meta story is the same, the conflicts are the same, but their chemistry is a bit different.

IMO, you can’t outline chemistry. It’s organic on the page and it develops as you write. At least for me. I know other folks write with very detailed, broken down by scene outlines. I wouldn’t outline at all if I didn’t have to to sell to NY and on proposal because I tend to like to let the story unfold on its own. However, an outline is helpful when you’re starting something you sold on a few pages of an idea in November, LOL.

Don’t get me wrong, selling on proposal and synopsis is awesome. It means editors trust me and my record enough to complete a book, a good book, to buy on spec. I appreciate having come this far. And I’m fortunate to have editors who haven’t complained when I veer a bit off from the original synopsis when I turn in the final. Now, if I was really veering off, like it had been proposed as a post apoc love story between one man and one woman and I turned in a contemporary menage romance, that’s gonna be a problem! But so far, *knocks wood* it’s been smallish things - almost always because as I write, my characters real motivations come to me and I write to reflect that.