Happy Valentine's Day!

Look at this Valentine’s bear that Abbie’s boyfriend Anthony gave her.

Grr… He’s showing me up.

Happy Ballantyne...

As it happens, this morning I listened to an interview with Sarah Ballantyne on the (back-episode of the) Livin’ La Vida Low Carb Show podcast (from last July).

Sarah lost 120 pounds and eased a host of food-intolerance issues by giving up grains, eggs, and other foods, and sticking with a strict autoimmune-protocol Paleo diet. She talks about her story and some of the science behind her experiences with inflammation.

Will This Get Me Laid?

Some Random Photos

Because I didn’t pull out an entertaining and interesting image for any of the other blurbs in this post. (Sorry.)

The job sounded simple enough; locate a space miner’s missing wives. Quick. Easy. Painless. This was not supposed to have anything to do with the damned Legends. This was supposed to have been a milk run, a simple job of locating two women who’d extended their vacation without notice and getting them back home to their worried, waiting husband…

After the hectic of the holidays, I settled down with Warpaint, the second installment of Holly Lisle’s Cadence Drake series, which was released last month to much personal fanfare— The Little One (who’s not so little any more) and I had been waiting for it for a long time. See, the first title in the series, Hunting the Corrigan’s Blood, came out in 1997, hit the Locus best-seller list, and sold out its first printing, at which point the publisher promptly canceled the series. (Corporate reorgs are a bitch.)

The Little One and I have been waiting not-quite-since-1997 for the sequel, but we have been waiting, and hoping. HCTB was one of those stories whose characters have staying power, that having read it, I felt a profound loss at having finished it. I so wanted to continue on with Cadence Drake that (for a time) I had trouble getting excited over reading anything else.

Then Holly got fed up with the publishing industry, went indie, personally republished a bunch of titles from her backlist, and began working on the sequel to HCTB (which was originally supposed to be the first of, like, 10 titles). Warpaint went up on Amazon, B&N, Kobo, and other sites last month.

So I figured, with the new year now fully in flow, I would start on Warpaint (planning to go back and read it again with my daughter) and post a teaser. Unfortunately, I couldn’t put it down, and now I’ve already finished it, even before the first Tuesday post. Hrm.

No matter, I’m still posting a teaser today. (Hope to work on a fuller review, for my ebook-reviews site, later today.)

Today’s extended teaser, from Kindle Locations 165-171, 174-179 of Warpaint:

The Little One is finishing up Midnight Rain (or at least that’s the plan), this week at camp.

It’s been some time since I read it, but I remember it as incredibly suspenseful and creepy, like the early X-Files episodes (which is a different post). (And I mean “creepy” in a good way.)

Phoebe Rain’s violent ex-husband lies in a coma a thousand miles away. Yet Phoebe knows the voice on the other end of the phone, the voice of that twisted man, who vowed he’d never let her get away. Panicked, she turns to her neighbor, Dr. Alan MacKerrie, who finds the story hard to believe. But now he too is receiving chilling warnings of danger from beyond. Caught between icy terror and mounting passion, is there no escape?

Today’s teaser, from page 147 (randomly selected by Amazon.com) of Midnight Rain:

Last night, the Little One begged me to read with her. Since she’s become a teenager, it’s been a while. She highly recommended Minerva Wakes, by Holly Lisle, which she had read before but which she wanted to read again.

(Our copy is falling apart, and I should probably find another to replace it.)

I wasn’t planning on starting another book right now, as I’m in the middle of several others. But looking for a story we could share… This was probably the best option.

It’s a story about a tired housewife, Minerva, and her husband, Darryl, who are having problems. Or at least they think they’re having problems, until a blue wraith kidnaps their three children. Then they really start having problems.

I wanted to post this on Tuesday, but I was distracted by the recent holiday. Naturally, I’m referring to National Guys in the Floral Department Day.

Every year around this time, if you go into any store with a floral department, you are likely to see a dozen or so men wondering aimlessly in the vicinity, browsing from flower arrangement to flower arrangement, obviously lost but unable to ask for directions.

Why do they do this? Well, it’s the law. And if any man in a relationship of any sort fails at this task, the consequences are serious indeed, let me tell you.

Stores plans for this day, and every year they stock up on pretty young attendants to help out the guys who don’t know what they’re doing. Except for the store that I went to, which had a fat dude telling a pimple-faced guy with a scooter—and this actually happened—that they didn’t have bouquets of roses half red and half pink. Meanwhile, I thought, if he wanted a mixture of red and pink roses for his one true love, he should have gone to a real flower shop and paid more than 20 lousy bucks on an arrangement. Then he could have swept her away on his scooter, fading with her into the horizon and the setting sun.

As for me, I chose a bouquet of a dozen roses for my Beloved, pink blossoms just beginning to brown around the edges.

She loved them, especially the brown spots. Apparently, I have her well-trained to expect almost no attention from me whatsoever. Congratulate me.

(I was just kidding about that last part, in case you couldn’t tell.)

When I opened my birthday present, aside from the gift itself, out fell two twenties and a ten. And the first thing I thought was, Now I can buy more groceries.

As you know, sometimes the life of a writer sucks. But I do have a summer software contract lined up, which should fund this year’s big book giveaway. As we say: I’m just writing to make money until my software-development career takes off.

Nonetheless, I did manage to stop by the Used Book Superstore yesterday, on a lark. I told myself I’d only check for Holly Lisle titles that I didn’t have. Didn’t find any. (No surprise.) And then I happened through the foreign-language section and the advertising-and-marketing section and the religion section.

Holly Lisle in her writing tips newsletter today wrote about plagiarism and being a “real writer.”

I put “real writer” in quotes not for sarcastic effect. I put those words in quotes because those are the words Holly herself used, and I agree with them completely. She talks about some would-be aspiring authors, as it were, looking for an easy way to rip off 100,000 words of others’ work, run it through an automated computer program, and come out with a supposedly original story. These are not “real writers.”

Then Holly said, “People who live their lives always looking for ways to get their hands on things they have not earned never do anything worthwhile. Never create anything worthwhile.”

Phoebe Rain’s violent ex-husband lies in a coma a thousand miles away. Yet Phoebe knows the voice on the other end of the phone, the voice of that twisted man, who vowed he’d never let her get away. Panicked, she turns to her neighbor, Dr. Alan MacKerrie, who finds the story hard to believe… But now he too is receiving chilling warnings of danger from beyond. Caught between icy terror and mounting passion, is there no escape?

On the way to my goal to read every book Holly Lisle has ever written… Well, not yet close to that goal, but at least heading in the right direction. And like her other romantic suspenses, Midnight Rain comes with about equal parts evil suspense, paranormal terror, and passionate romance, all weaved through a compelling story driven by deep characters, proof that stories that grab you do not also need to be shallow.

Today’s teaser, from page 84 (randomly selected by Random.org) of Midnight Rain:

In How To Write Page-Turning Scenes, Holly Lisle tells the story of a writer who lived SF. He decided to write a fantasy-comedy, just because he thought he could sell it. And sell it he did. And then he sold another one, and then again and again and again… ten titles. Except it made him miserable.

As Holly tells the story, “he hated the book, hated the readers for being so stupid that they liked that crap (his words, not mine), hated the fact that fantasy comedy was the thing that had done well for him, because he hated fantasy, he hated comedy, and he’d just done it because Robert Asprin and Piers Anthony were at the time raking in the dough with fantasy comedies… When I talked to him at a con one year, he was one miserable dude. He’s doing work-for-hire now.”

I’ve never forgotten that story.

Holly has filled Page-Turning Scenes with excellent advice about how to, uh, write page-turning scenes. Ironic, that in the midst of it all, this sidebar story has glued itself to my memory.

Then today, R.A. Evans told his story, with a flip-side theme: