Guest Post and Promo, Elizabeth L. Brooks with her novel, Foxfur

Betas Make It Better

The relationship that Lynn and I have encompasses many things. We've been best friends for more than twenty years. We were roommates for two. We've been writing partners for probably fifteen. I've been her editor for almost everything she's published with Torquere Press over the last couple of years. We've gone on vacation together, joined forces for holidays, and commiserated with each other over our crazy families, broken hearts, and screaming frustrations.

We're also frequently each other's beta readers. And I will say that Lynn is, hands-down, the best beta reader I've ever had. And I'm not just saying that because this is her blog!

(Note from your author: She totally is...)

I had written this book, see. It was pretty bad. The main character was wishy-washy and passive to the point that he didn't even react to things in his own head. The mystery plot was overblown, unlikely, and excessively predictable. The romance was weak. The sex scenes either went too far or not far enough. The resolution was infuriatingly deus ex machina, and the epilogue didn't actually provide any satisfaction -- it left the characters' futures clouded by a huge question mark.

I am often a harsh judge of my own writing (most authors are) but this was just Bad. Bad bad bad. (Lynn, having read it, didn't think it was quite as bad as I did, but she agreed that it was Not Great. And also that its noncon sex scenes made it unpublishable.)

After leaving it in a drawer for, oh, five or so years, I had an idea about how to fix it. It involved a new plot. And a new romantic interest. And a new supporting cast. Also, my main character got a major personality overhaul.

It was, in fact, a brand new story, only linked to the original by the name and profession of the main character and a single simile that I loved so much I couldn't bring myself to get rid of it.

Being the length of either a really long novella or a really short novel, it took me about six months to write. (NaNoWriMo material I am not.)

When I'd finished it, I wasn't very happy with it. And so I did what any reasonable author would do. I sent it to my favorite beta reader (that would be Lynn) and I said, "This sucks, and I can't figure out why. Please tell me, so I can try to fix it."

Lynn messaged me the next morning and said, "I opened it up just to make sure the file wasn't corrupted, and promptly stayed up until two in the morning so I could finish reading it. Now I'm tired and it's all your fault." (One day, Lynn will not be snarky with me and I'll know she's been taken over by bodysnatchers.)

(Never. Gonna. Happen.)

She sent me a more detailed email later in the week, pointing out a few things that did, actually, need some polish, and a couple of contradictions and timeline issues. Which are things that any good beta reader will tell you.

But Lynn is the best, because if it wasn't for her, Foxfur would still be in a drawer, gathering dust while I tried to figure out what was wrong with it. She always gives me the best writing advice. And in this case, that advice was: "Just submit the damn thing, okay?"

If you'd like to check out the book that kept Lynn up until 2 am, you can find it at
Torquere and Amazon


Blurb:

Pleasure-slave Cheng took no particular note of the red-haired woman when she purchased his services, but the morning after her departure, Cheng is taken into custody by the Emperor's own guards, a custody they tell him is for his own protection. Frightened and confused, things go from bad to worse when the investigator is revealed to be one of the rare and terrifying Chained Mages, who explains to Cheng that the red-haired woman was not what she had seemed to be, and that not only Cheng's life, but the lives of everyone around him, depend on their finding her as soon as possible.

The Chained Mage Jin does not like traveling to the country of his birth, where he is at best feared, and at worst, despised. But he can't allow his personal feelings to interfere with his mission without risking the lives of innocents. The lissa (a fox-demon) has placed a spell in Cheng, a spell designed to turn his sexual energy to murderous ends, making Jin's own growing admiration for the slave a greater risk than he's willing to admit. And worst of all, they're not the only hunters on the lissa's trail!

Bio:

Masquerading by day as an uptight corporate cog, Elizabeth spends her nights concocting gleefully smutty stories. She writes erotic romances for a wide span of worlds, genres, and orientations, and is also a senior editor for Torquere Press. When she's not writing or editing, she loves a wide range of generally nerdy hobbies, including reading, photography, tabletop games, geeky yarncraft, and silly smartphone games. You can find her online at http://EveryWorldNeedsLove.blogspot.com or on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/EveryWorldNeedsLove

And in Other News

Sometimes my days are a little too full.

This isn't exactly a complaint, just sometimes I feel like things are happening so fast that I don't really get time to enjoy them before I'm on to the next thing.

Also, I'm slightly worried about the "hedonistic treadmill" which is one of my favorite themes from The Happiness Project. (tl;dr human beings always want moremoremore to be happy. we suck.) The idea's not unique to Rubin, but that's where I first came across the idea that while I might suck, I suck about the same as everyone else, which is something, I guess...

My concern comes up that eventually I'll take for granted my publishing and the people I work with and the squee of new cover art...

That eventually I'll believe that I deserve all this.

Which is going to turn me into a giant asshole. And believe me, I don't want to be that way. (I've met a particularly famous person, who I won't name here, who is a giant asshat... because he's used to being treated a certain way... )

So, today (well, yesterday, now that you're reading this...) I got my new cover art.

Pistols & Guns is a short story, a western erotic romance... I got to have fun giving my heroine a truly horrible name (that might be a theme with me. Having a horrible name myself, I have a tendency to distribute them. It's a weird compulsion, like "this milk is going bad, here, SMELL THIS!")

Anyway, I recently sold Pistols & Guns to Hot Ink... and I'm looking forward to sharing it with you.

(Of course, now I also need to write a 'blurb for it... oh yay!)

And I got another acceptance in my email box. It's a pre-official acceptance (the publishing house could still nix me at the last minute, which has happened to me before...) so I can't say more about it than that... or, I could, the publishing house could nix me, and then I'd feel like an idiot. But ya know, that happens...

Today I did a little over 2,300 words on my NaNoWriMo project... so after taking two days off to cough my lungs out, I'm getting back to work...

Cough, Hack

First off, there's This:

Release day for my best friend, Elizabeth L. Brooks, and her first full-length novel, Foxfur.

She's going to be guest posting with me here in a few days (Friday, I think. I've already set up the post and pre-dated it... )

The book should be up at Amazon in a few days... I'll let you know as soon as I know...

This story has hella history, which I'll let you catch up with on Friday, since Liz talked about it.

And in the meanwhile, I'll let you know that this story takes place in the same world as her older novella, Safe Harbor which remains to date one of my favorite stories. (Not my favorite Elizabeth L. Brooks' story, but it is, but one of my favorite ALL TIME stories ever.)

###

So, I took two days off to be completely, horribly ill. (Because OF COURSE I get sick during NaNoWriMo!!) On the plus side, I've been doing the front loading stuff and I'm way ahead of the technical NaNo goal... (Just over 29,000 words at present, and it's only the 13th)

Of course, now I'm "behind" in the reverse NaNo by about 4,000 words... my "plan" is to go ahead and write like I didn't miss those two days. I'm not going to push the hell out of myself and try to "make up" the words and I'm not going to skip ahead in my word goals... today should be 1,953 words, but I'm going to do Monday's word goal instead, 2,183... If I don't go over at all for the next few weeks, it'll mean that my last few days of NaNo are 364 and 231 instead of 116 and 1... Since I'm almost positive that once I start getting into the low 1,000s, I'll probably go waaay over... this shouldn't be a problem.

The only other problem I see coming up is Thanksgiving, that we're spending with my dad and stepmom and my stepmom's extended family, including my stepmom's cousin who works for one of the Big Six publishing houses as a submissions editor. I've never met this cousin, but my stepmom's been trying to introduce us for a while. I'm a little nervous; one because I've read so many articles from the Big Six sneering down at small and indie publishers. And two, because it's quite possible that she's one of those "ew, erotica" people. I dunno, haven't met her. But I am not about to let someone sneer at my publishing houses or the kind of work that I do, since I love my job and the people I work with...

On the other hand, my stepmom says that she is specifically looking for Steampunk writers, and I do have the outline for Wormwood Trade hanging about, so... yeah, like what I need to do is have a third novel to write in 2014.... sure. Good plan.

Also, I'm working with the lovely and talented Author Rue Volley for my cover-art for Pistols & Guns, which will be coming out at the end of the month, so lots of excitement there...

Once Upon a NaNo

Still plodding along, making progress. I've been posting little bits of my story to my Facebook page, so if you want, you can go over there and see what I'm up to...

(Rough draft is rough.)

Today's writing was pretty emotional for me. I love my characters. Beau and Vin have been busy and active parts of my day-to-day life for eight months now. By the time I'm finished writing Blues (probably mid-December or thereabouts) I will have lived with them for nine months. If that's not all symbolic and shit, I don't know what is.

Anyway, obviously, since Roll hasn't been published yet (It will be in our hands at the end of February, 2014) most of you don't know what's happened thus far, so a shocker of a revelation that happens in the first third of Blues won't mean anything to you.

I'm trying to be a bit realistic with this novel - which is unusual for me. I'm usually a zombie/steampunk/urban supernatural sort of girl (and if that's your thing, the first in my urban supernatural series, Blood Sight, will be released in March) But you know, this one's a coming-of-age sort of thing. New Adult. A genre that some people have decried, but I'm really happy to see coming into its own. So to speak.

College and young adulthood is a crazy time that's not really covered, especially in the romance genre. Admittedly, that's because we all act like complete assholes, break ups, hook ups, screw ups, throw ups. We drunk-text old boyfriends, we sleep with our roommate's high school sweetheart. We fall into swimming pools and wake up all Goldilocks (who's been sleeping in my bed.) If we're really, really lucky, we come out at the end with a degree and a small mountain of debt.

I came out of college with divorce papers.

A few days back (really, it's not even been a WEEK yet since NaNo started) I wrote about one of the couples I established in Roll breaking up. (My editor was a bit distressed about this - but I liked <character>! she complains.) I like her, too. She's not a bad person, just not ready to cope with the realities of grad school and balancing a long-distance relationship with someone who's still an undergrad. Long distance relationships suck. Today, one of my real life friends told me she and her SO had broken up. Because of a long distance relationship. Yeah, so... that happens.

I stumble over myself a bit, in this story. Beau's a misfit from a redneck town. Someone who's smart, smart enough to know that he has to pretend to be normal in high school. I wasn't that smart, but I wish I had been. Still, he feels alienated and alone, and even now, in college where people accept him for who he is, he's still uncertain. He keeps waiting to wake up and have it all taken away.

Vin's a little more like I am now, outgoing, obnoxious, says what he thinks and sometimes thinks not at all before opening his mouth. He doesn't try to fit in so much as he adapts his environment around him; he surrounds himself with like-minded individuals and delights in being the center of attention. And just recently, he's come face to face with the possibility of rejection. He's never really dealt with it before, and his anger and pain are very familiar to me.

Today, it took a while to get my words out. I was just finishing up when my daughter got home from school.

I've been sitting here all day, staring at my pages.

Because I love these two boys, these shadows of the me I used to be. And I know that I have to hurt them, in order to have story.

But I really don't want to.

Row row row Wri Mo

Busy, busy weekend.

I did not manage to get my word goal on Saturday, but I made up for it by writing over 4,000 words on Sunday.

I am exhausted.

I feel like I'm not doing anything else, just writing and sleeping. Which isn't quite true; on Saturday I spent some time with friends watching movies and we had dinner.

On the plus side, the number goals are sliding down every single day. Tomorrow's word goal is only 2,872.

(Only, she says!)

Which is good because I have a ton on my docket for tomorrow.

I have to go vote, I need to make a grocery list, get the shopping done, stop at the Post Office (for those of you waiting for your rafflecoptor prizes, I'm sorry. We only have the one car and I usually only have the car for one day a week, and on that day, some idiot decided to try to rob our local post office. And when he didn't succeed, he claimed the box he brought in contained a bomb. So our post office was closed all day, and most of the surrounding roads were blocked off as the police chased the guy down and then brought in the bomb squad.) That totally happened, even if it sounds like the worst's most ridiculous excuse. We have a social engagement with the husband's friend for lunch. And of course, with the local elections being housed at our high school, the daughter has the day off. And she's got a project to assemble that's due on Thursday.

So... if I get anything done at all tomorrow, I'll be happy.

(No, no I won't.)

Anyway, I'm more than 12,000 words into the novel already, so it's moving along well, and I'm pretty happy with it, so far.

So So WriMo

First of all, I'm going to try this method of NaNoWriMo'ing this year.

If you don't want to go read it, it's basically a front-loading way of going about the project, to take all the energy and motivation you have at the beginning and turn it into process.

It also allows you to write a little less each day, until the final two weeks where you're writing substantially less than most "competitors." Which gives me some wiggle room in case I bork up, have real life, or whatnot.

Honestly, I'm jazzed about this novel. Not about NaNoWriMo. I already know I can write a novel. You already know I can write a novel. That being said, I did put aside 2013 as the Year of the Longer Pieces. And while I already wrote, edited, submitted, and got accepted a Novel this year, what's the harm in doing another one, right?

I'm not a very competitive sort - or, more, I am, but I'd rather not be. I don't like the person I become when I start comparing myself to other people. I don't like feeling bad about myself if I'm behind (as if anyone in the world can actually be the best at anything...) or how I feel about myself when I'm doing "better" than someone else (as if I'm actually improved as a person by beating someone else...) Bleh bleh bleh. Just... personality issues, no! I don't want to go there. I try really, really hard not to. Obviously, sometimes I fail. I see my friends who write 18 pages in a day, or over 2,000 words every day of their regular lives (not even for NaNo, just NORMAL...) and I feel like a fake. Like a poseur. I wonder if I'll ever feel like a "real" writer.

I wonder if people with real jobs ever feel like that. I mean, do librarians feel like "fake librarians"? Do accountants worry if they've got enough street cred with other accountants? What kind of fucked up brain do I have to be able to look at my bookshelf of pretty pretty paperbacks and wonder if I'm just not good enough? Seriously!

Anyway, sorry. I'm awesome! Really!

I do get a little overwhelmed sometimes; not with the realities of my life, but with thinking about those realities. I know I can write a novel. I've written three - two accepted and one still floating about in the ether looking for a home - that I consider worthy of publication and a couple of others that I wouldn't use to paper the litter box. On the other hand, knowing I have to write two novels for 2014 to be published in 2015 (or sooner!) is a little crazy-making. I mean, I know I can do it. The question is, can I do it?

No, don't try to boggle that out. You'll only get as crazy as I already am.

I like NaNoWriMo because it's pushy and crazy and eliminates all the dithering time when I spend thirty minutes looking at and rewriting the same sentence.

I hate it because the editing process afterward is So Much Worse than when I'm able to write/edit/write/edit.

I love it because I am a crazy extrovert in a field of people who are all crazy hermits. I like writing with others. As a social activity. Comparing notes. Wailing at each other when we have no ideas. It's like tag team jello wrestling. Crazy, silly, messy, frustrating, and somehow intensely sexy.

I hate it because I watch a bunch of my friends feel like they're losing at life, somehow. See this article for more thoughts on that. He's already said what I think, so I'll just let him say it, okay? Okay.

Real writers write. I'm still not positive they write every day, under every circumstance. (Hell, I don't write every day, and I've still got two novels coming out next year! So... yeah...)

I'm not sure NaNoWriMo makes any more real writers than there were. Sometimes people need a push to get going, and some people hit the bottom of the cliff and swear no more, never.

The trick always comes down to, what works for you!

I follow the 7th Sea 2nd Edition GameMaster rule in all things.

You don't need any rules. Cheat anyway.

(That being said, I wrote 3,512 words today.... so, I can't even follow my own rules...)

Before I Leave

So... I'm doing NaNoWriMo again this year.

I was having this conversation quite a while ago with one of my editors, in which I was laying out my to-write list.

This year I've written Roll, revised it, and sent it in. Got it accepted, it's the first of three (maybe five... both Hector and Ann-Marie, who are side characters, are clamoring for their own stories...) novels expected out of the series, with the second being Blues, and the third being Classic.

I've also revised and finished Blood Sight, my NaNo project from 2011... and it's also been accepted. Aaaand it's the first in a series of four novels; Howling Bitch, Demon Halo, and Ghost Magic rounding out THAT series...

(Both of these novels have been accepted and will be available in early 2014, end of February for Roll and sometime mid-march for Blood Sight...)

To which my editor said to me, in all seriousness, "You realize you've committed yourself to writing two novels a year for the next two to three years, right?"

Um.... well.

Yes.

Except while I knew that math, I didn't really add it all up. Just what I'd soft-committed to. (There's some sort of unwritten rule that, as a novelist with a series title, you have to put out one book in the series every year... it's not written in stone, but it may as well be, loud as some people scream - me included! - when they don't get their annual Harry Dresden fix; or Game of Thrones, or WHATEVER... )

On the other hand, I wrote a novel, a longish short story (Synchronous Rotations), edited two novels (Marked Man is still out there floating around... ), 25 short stories for the Promptly collection, and a handful of other short stories (My Girlfriend's Gun, Tanked, Blood Cries Up, Pistols & Guns, aaand I'm sure I'm forgetting something....) this year.

(Wow, that was parenthetical...)

So. I can do this. I really can.

But I do know it's going to be challenging.

It took me from April until mid-July to write the 60,000 words that became Roll. (and while I was doing that, I wrote at least one short story every week) And it took me November 2012, and most of September to write the 60,000 words that became Blood Sight.

We'll see if I complete the NaNoWriMo challenge again this year. But even if I don't, it'll give me a headstart on those two novels I need to write....

I probably won't be here on my blog much in the meanwhile. But I do post regularly to Facebook so if you want to see what I have to say, pop over there and take a peek. Also, I'll probably be posting daily word counts to Twitter for November.