Room for Dessert

Day four! Blissemas! Go win something! Kris Norris has something for you... I have no idea who Kris Norris is, so I'm interesting in finding out...

I've mentioned that December is really, really freaking busy right now, haven't I?

Good.

Because I have something else for you, isn't that nice of me?

Room for Dessert is available at JMS Books for this week, to be formally released into the wild on December 7th (Amazon, B&N, etc)

From JMS Books (all e-formats)

Short 'blurb

Faced with a choice between the dull, but comfortable, life she's made for herself, and the woman she used to love ... Sharon struggles with who she really is and what she really wants.

Full Blurb

Sharon Gedes hasn't been the person she wanted to be for most of her life. She gave up the life of a writer, actress, and chose to settle in a small, southern town where she pretends to be someone she's not. Married, with four sons, she lives a life of quiet desperation, pretending to be straight, upright, and above all, normal.

When she spends a weekend in New York with her old girlfriend, Pilar, to ostensibly pitch her television script to an executive producer, Sharon discovers everything she's been missing, a sense of purpose, love, adventure ... and the woman she used to be.

Note: This story is included in the author’s anthology, Whetting the Appetite.

If you bought Whetting, you have this story already... if you haven't, and you're not sure you want to buy a book of short stories, you can buy this individually...

People ask me from time to time if I write about myself. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don't...

Room for Dessert is ... the path I didn't travel down.

Don't get me wrong, I love my life, I love my husband, and I adore my kid. (She's really awesome!) But sometimes I think about a girl I loved back in college and wonder what would have happened if we'd been able to work things out. I don't have lots of regrets; I try not to have them. Everything that's happened made me the person I am now, and who knows which thread of back then made which tapestry of now...

I don't remember clearly what she looked like, but I can hear her voice. I think she was taller than me - everybody is taller than me, though. And I remember what her hair smelled like when she would kiss me. The way she would arch up, and the way she both loved and hated it when I stuck my tongue in her navel. (She was terribly ticklish, and I was sometimes mean.)

And to some degree, it's about the person I am now. The one who sometimes has to argue with people about being who I am. "Are you sure you're still bisexual, you haven't had sex with a woman in twenty years..." Our identity is who we ARE, not necessarily what we DO.

A Pair of Earbuds

I've been just on the edge of my seat for this announcement...

Ripped is now available as an audio book!

Among other things to come out of the writer's retreat... Nobilis, Elizabeth and I discussed setting some of our favorite stories from Whetting the Appetite (also now available in PAPERBACK!! Woo woo!) to earphones everywhere...

So, for those fans who want to take a listen, please go over and enjoy. At the end of the podcast is a coupon code for 20% off the ebook. (I'm not sure if this coupon code applies to the paperback or not. Probably not, because I think JM set it up for just the ebook... anyway....)

Whetting contains 40+ short stories across a multitude of genres, a wide variety of sexual partners (m/m to m/m/f/f to male/alien plant... no, I'm not kidding.)

Ripped is one of - in my personal opinion - the best things I've ever written. It's gloriously unrestrained, unapologetic for what it is, and written in an undeniable creepy voice. Which Nobilis captures quite well, I'm impressed.

I'm not the only one who thinks so.

Here, I have Malin James' review of the book and all the wonderful things she has to say about it...

including this final paragraph...

Lynn Townsend's "Ripped" is one of the most effective usages of the Jack the Ripper mythos that I've ever read. It is chilling and brutal and incredibly hot in a gritty, very human way. It is literally worth the price of the collection, and considering how incredibly good the rest of the collection is, that means anyone who buys the book is getting one hell of a ridiculous bargain.

So, listen, buy, read, enjoy....

They Do

Last year, Elizabeth and I did a challenge; the project was to write one ultra-short story per week for six months.

We both missed a few weeks here and there, but eventually we got to our goal, and about a month ago, Whetting the Appetite came out... but before that, there was months and months of writing short stories and very little gratification for it. We wrote and saved, wrote and saved.

Very early in the process, I wrote a little short called Home Inspection; I'd recently had a discussion with a friend about Grindr - he cruises a lot, you understand. But he also has a lot of complaints about the elitist attitude of the app-users. Much like any sort of dating app/situation/bar, there are people who seem to think that if they're very specific with their requirements, they'll get exactly what they want. (I have a girlfriend who had a list of 27 things that a man had to have, had to be, or had to Not Do in order to get a second date... ) In any case, I'd found the concept sort of intriguing... fiddled with the idea of writing a story about it, and never did. Until this short-story marathon came up.

(As a note, Elizabeth, I'm still waiting for you to write your hook-up story... ::cough cough ahem!:: )

So I wrote a short story about a very unlikely couple; a professional black man and a blue collar white guy.

It's one of my favorites in the collection.

And since I wrote it so early in the year, I had to live with it sitting there, doing nothing, for quite a while. I saw a number of writing calls where I could take the story out, lengthen it up a bit, and send it out. I kept not doing it. Which was, perhaps, harder than it should have been.

My reasoning was, if Elizabeth and I took out the best stories to send in to other collections, we'd be left with a collection of mediocre stories and who'd want to read that? In the end, I'm glad we didn't cherry pick through the collection, because I think we've got some great stories to offer, and I really like the flow of the collection. (Go buy it! Sheesh!)

Eric and Temple, however, have never quite left my mind, even after the deal was sealed. I always wanted to do more with them.

Elizabeth and I teased a bit with the idea of writing a second book, Satisfying the Appetite (maybe?) where we took some of the shorts from Whetting and fleshed them out. I've been out and out yelled at by a couple of readers who want to know what the HELL happened in the end of BoyMart, and I personally want to throttle Elizabeth for the ending of Woman with the Blue Tattoo. There are several stories in there that could become novels or novellas of their own, worlds to explore and universes to expand upon.

I've been mostly working on novels... Blues is finished, I'm waiting for one last set of beta read opinions, and I'll start edits probably around mid-May for submission in June/July... I'll probably start writing Classic in November, and then the two side-stories, All that Jazz and Punked Up...

I'm currently in the middle of writing Howling Bitch - it's going quite well, and I'm enjoying it.

And novels are all good and well; I enjoy writing novels.

But there's something quick and dirty about a short. No matter how much I tell myself "this is the year of working on longer projects," I find myself considering little ideas. I've actually stepped up and started collecting submissions for an anthology project of my own. (This is because I have lost my fucking mind... but still, should be interesting!)

Also, I really like the thrill of getting acceptances back; for a little project, for a big project, for a charity project. All of these things are wonderful, wonderful feelings. But with novels, they're really spread out. I can only write about 2 novels in a year...

So, I give in to temptation. Sometimes.

And I'll put together a short story for this antho or that collection.

Eric and Temple had more to say. I saw the opportunity to let them say it.

Building Us will be available June 15th.

Building Us

Sometimes there are characters that I write who just don't want to leave after their story is done.

Eric and Temple are two of them. I wrote their story fairly early last year in the January to June short story writing spurts that Liz and I were doing. I think I wrote it around the beginning of February; it was one of the first, at any rate.

And then I spent the rest of the year not plucking that story out of the collection and taking my boys to bed - so to speak. The story ends with them deciding to give dating a shot, and no one ever gets naked. They don't even kiss, although Eric spends a while fantasizing...

Torquere, one of my publishers, does a collection of short stories every month, on different themes... and one of them is "They Do" which is LGBT wedding stories... groomzillas and wedding disasters and the like. I went a slightly different route - because I always do! - and wrote about Eric and Temple's proposal scene.

I just signed the contract for that short the other day.

So if you read and enjoyed Whetting the Appetite, you're going to want to pick this collection up; or just the individual story, because that's how Torquere is running that show these days; the stories are released as a whole antho, or you can just buy the story you're interested in. Which is pretty cool...

I believe that collection's going to be out in June, so that will probably be my next purchasable title, since everything else has been pushed back and off til at least late summer. I'm not sure. Let you know when I know.

Early Release: Whetting the Appetite

We were expecting this tomorrow, but it showed up early....

Available now, Whetting the Appetite! (which you will be happy to learn, I've finally managed to spell correctly on the first try... swear to god, I don't know how I existed before spellcheck.)

To answer all the questions I'm sure you have:

- JMS Books, LLC has this book in all e-publishing formats, from kindles to nook to html to .pdf. 

- this book will be available on Amazon and at Barnes & Nobles next week. For the first week, it's exclusively available on JMS's site. 

- This book is ON SALE for this week only, 20% off. Once the book "goes live" on Amazon, it will no longer be on sale at JMS. 

- According to JMS's publishing contract, we have to sell a certain number of books before the book will go to a print copy. I would really, really like to see this happen; both because I like adding books to my dead tree shelf, and because really, this is a lovely, lovely cover. 

- this book is an extremely eclectic collection. Liz and I wrote it last year as an exercise in consistent writing habits. There's really almost nothing the stories have in common with each other, not genre, not sexual pairings, they're not even all erotica stories. Some of them are not love stories at all, although most of them are. 

- we are having a book release party tomorrow and we'd love to see you there.

Whetting the Appetite blurb and cover art

So, this exists...

Romance and erotica authors Lynn Townsend and Elizabeth L. Brooks have joined forces to assemble this collection of "flash-fiction" ultra-shorts (most under 2000 words), generated in response to prompts offered by our fans and friends and touching on dozens of aspects of lust, love, and desire.

Subgenres in the collection span contemporary, historial, steampunk, fantasy, sci-fi, and horror, taking you from a modern living room, to the high seas, to Victorian London, to planets and times at the edge of imagination. These stories explore relationships all along the romantic and erotic spectrums, including the thrill of a one-night stand, the fierce burn of rivalry, the heady flush of new romance, the intense trust of BDSM, and all the pros and cons of long-term partnerships. The characters defy conventional gender boundaries, including a preoperative transmale, several aliens, and a few characters whose genders are left open to reader interpretation. Sexual orientations on display vary nearly as widely, with groupings that include m/f, m/m, f/f, and f/f/m -- not to mention those aliens!

With forty-six stories to choose from, there's something here for every moment and mood, something to whet any appetite.

Whetting the Appetite

Not the actual cover

As you probably know, Elizabeth L. Brooks and I started a short story project last year. It was a double challenge; the first part of the challenge was "could we write a short story, consistently, every week?" The second part of the challenge was "could I get my words under control enough to write SHORT SHORT stories?"

We were... mostly successful. There were a few weeks that she skipped; a few weeks that I skipped. Life happens. And while I do have... three... stories in the collection that capped out over 2,000 words, most of them are in the under 2k limit. (We originally set a 1,500 word limit, but that I was almost completely incapable of...)

We ended with 46 usable stories. We each had one that got trashed immediately for being depressing as all shit. (Both Liz and I sometimes have some serious self-esteem issues, and independently of each other, we wrote some hideous "I hate myself" pieces...) Around June or so, we got stuck; it didn't seem how much we wrote, we weren't getting any closer to our goal... we wanted at least 40,000 words so the collection could go to print. And then we realized there were some errors in the spreadsheet. Once those were fixed, we had about 56,000 words. Yay us!

We let it sit for a while, then back in October, I started editing Liz's stories. I wanted them off my plate for NaNoWriMo, so they were all done by Nov 1. Liz took a little longer (this is not a complaint, since like I said, Liz works as a professional editor for not one, but two different publishing companies, and she ends up with a crapton of work.) Finally, around the end of December, we got everything edited, back to each other, and did our corrections. We let it sit for another week, then did final edits.

Oddly enough, a few weeks ago, we changed the title. If you might recall, I've been referring to the project as Promptly, or sometimes Promptly Hot, for quite a while... I was doing final read-throughs and while we do have a number of extremely hot sex scenes, we also have a number of stories that stop just outside the bedroom door, leaving you wondering just what's going to happen now. (Although, in the end, I did take my shapeshifters to bed. They were quite insistent... and now THAT story is a bit long for the collection. Oh well... ) So, now it's Whetting the Appetite.

And submitted.

I've only once had a story picked up faster; Pistols & Guns was only "out" for about four hours before I got my acceptance.

Whetting the Appetite was out for less than 24 hours before JMS Books, LLC picked it up.

And, just to make my life fun and interesting; it's going to be released.... in March.

Thanks to everyone who provided writing prompts; we've thanked you officially in the collection as well. (First name, last initial, but you know who you are... I hope. Because if you don't know who you are... well, the IRS is probably mad at you.)