Seriously. Don’t you just love my puns?

The book’s been let loose on the world, for better or worse, and I have taken a dive into the deep end over it (those of you who know me will undoubtedly be thinking, “well hell, she was already off the deep end anyway–this is different how?”). But I mean the deep end of what we all call “promo.”

I’m consistently amazed at the idea that other people want to talk about my book. Amazed and a little nervous (a lot nervous when those other people are my mother). I’m always afraid I’ll launch off into a complete n3rdgirl tangent about theme, genre, industry, or other stuff that people who don’t live and breathe writing couldn’t care less about. I also have lived for several years by the rule, “every time you pimp a fic, a kitten dies. Someone please think of the kittens!” One of the things I dread somewhat is being labeled as one of those authors who does nothing but promo her own stuff. In other words, a kitten-killer.

So far, my policy has grown out of a suggestion from my mother in law, a very dear, very pragmatic lady who reads voraciously and who, for years, fed my monkey for romance (my mother hooked me–my own mom!–on romances back when I was about ten, but the drive to devour them didn’t hit until I met my mother in law and could actually talk to another person about romance novels). MIL says, “Just be yourself. You’re good at it.”

So I will be being myself several places over the next few weeks. Yesterday, I had a load of fun blogging the Morning After segment of Liquid Silver’s Silver EXpressions blog (aka the SEx blog, and the blog with the most eye candy per capita). I’ll be doing that again April 22.

Then on April 27, I’ll be taking my first foray into chatting over at the Pink Posse chat room with the other Liquid Silver authors. My timeslot’s scheduled to be from 9-11 AM, EDT, but I’ll be popping in and out of the room all day, as time and rugrats permit.

I’m totally scoring on these suggestive post titles, aren’t I?

Well, the big news is that “Alien Communion,” my release (there I go again!) from Liquid Silver Books, will be out and on the virtual shelves April 17. That’s right–a week away. I’ve been on tenterhooks since first starting the whole publication process, and now I’ve loaded the cannon, so to speak. I just found out a few hours ago, so I expect that tomorrow morning, I’ll hit panic mode and suddenly wonder if I’ve left some glaring errors somewhere in the manuscript, or if I’m really just a two-bit hack and now everybody will know it, instead of just my critique partners.

Then, of course, the wonderful and supportive Mr. Xandra will tell me to get my two-bit hack head out of my two-bit hack ass and settle down. And my wonderful and supportive friends in various places will tell me the same thing, because they’re wonderful and supportive, and have good heads on their shoulders.

So to celebrate my impending freak-out, I’m getting freaky with the previews. Stop back in here during the week and meet some of the main players in the story, learn a little about the Alcaini, and maybe even catch a glimpse of some out-of-this-world eye candy!

In case you dropped by sometime yesterday or today and noticed the place was a little snarly, I had to tinker with some stuff under the hood. Not to bore you with uber-g33k stuff, but I upgraded the WordPress engine that runs my little G-spot here (yes, that was a pun–flog me with a wet noodle, ’cause I’m all about flogging the blog), and put up a static splash page, so the site has room to grow.

Anyway, things should be shaking down just fine again from now on. The upgrade went smoothly and I learned that my HTML skillz, while not so mad anymore, are still adequate enough for simple stuff. This from a former hard-code head who believed that using anything other than notepad to code the page diluted the purity of the code, man.

Of course, I make no promises about the blog skin. I’m still playing around with blog couture. If I’d had a WordPress blog when I was nine, Barbie wouldn’t have gotten nearly as much of my parents’ money as she did. I’d much rather play dress-up with my blog than with my Barbies any day.  And your pervy little brother can’t put your blog in compromising positions with GI Joes.  There’s always a downside.

Already, I expect you all are flocking to xandragregory.com to see what new and exciting tidbits I post every week. Or at least, you’re showing up to see what my blog looks like this week, and maybe find out what the story was with the lemon, or why Neptune was up on the masthead for awhile (and maybe make a crack or two about Uranus).

Well, if you’re pressed for time, and can’t spend the entire day hitting the Reload button on your browser, you now have the option to have a slice of the Xandraverse served up to you, direct to your Inbox, in the form of a yahoo newsgroup. Why join the newsletter when this wonderful blog is present? Because you get the info quicker. You get the “DVD extras” first, the excerpts, and the news right there in your email. You’ll get word of Xandra-sightings and other X-files, and maybe even get my French toast recipe. All without having to lift a finger. All you have to do is put your email in the box below, and click. Or you could go to my brand spankin’ new Newsletter page, which will always be in the list of pages in the sidebar.

I had so much fun SEx Blogging Saturday over at Silver Expressions!  It was actually a pretty remarkable thing, since my laptop (aka, my outside-brain) was on the fritz and well, being Frankensteined by Mr. Xandra at the time.  But since I did sorta plan ahead, I had drafts of posts prepared, and used the BFGaming Computer to post my posts and read/respond to comments.  If you actually come to this blog to read, thank you for reading!  And if you commented over at SEx, thank you, too!

But I’m now proud to say that I’m back on Ol’ Sparky, live and Open Source.  I’ve discovered a freedom to Linux that I don’t think I had with Windows since the days of 3.11.  Customization, lean and fast operation, FREE.  Secure.  I’m so diggin’ this.

I love starting out on something new. The “in potentia” stage of developing a story always seems to fill me with this excitement. Like the first day of school, when all your pencils were new, all your paper was smooth and blank, and your notebooks hadn’t yet been chewed up or had the spiral rings squished in your backpack. Anything could happen.

And so far, it has. Most of my ideas start out with a single element, around which I craft the rest of the story. Back when I was writing romantic comedies, they’d often start out with a wacky event. A punchy opener along with a “cute meet” (cut me a break here, I was targeting a Certain Publisher, and I honed my ability to pique their interests. Unfortunately–or fortunately, as I’m coming to think in retrospect–I never could abandon the quirkiness that made me essentially not worth the risk for them). Sometimes, it’s a strong character, who, like Athena, springs fully formed from the head of her creator, complete with backstory, GMC, flaws, and character arc. Other times, I’ll get a sense of scene–a scene between the main characters that isn’t the beginning scene, but nevertheless contains all the qualities that grab me by the throat and make me burn to find out more about these people and why they’re in the situation they’re in, and what they’re going to do to get out of it.

This particular throat-ornament sprung from a writing challenge. It was a sex scene, and likely suggested as a joke, since the challenge was not in a community where ero-rom writers are exactly thick on the ground. Well, I took it up, thinking it’d be a hoot to see if I could do it, and the idea came to me at a weird moment. I wrote the scene, and it ended up being a 12,000-word novella. All sex, but enough story to be intriguing. And boy, was I intrigued!

After the challenge, I put it on the backburner, because I’d just gotten word from Liquid Silver that they wanted “Alien Communion,” and I completely had to squee about that. Well, while the squee still hasn’t completely worn off, it’s been mitigated by the “omgwtf is next” reality that says, “Okay, hotshot. Now you’ve sold one…what are you gonna do about two?”

My first thought was, “hey, I liked this challenge piece–maybe I can expand it a little and make a true short story out of it.”  The e-markets have a place for shorts, and I’d have an advantage if I could get something else in the pipeline right away.  Plus, I could actually turn my “Books” page into something that truly merited a plural.

So, I started working on this thing.  Or rather, I opened myself to the ideas.  And boy, did they come.  I found myself plotting a “ten years later” scenario for the characters and realized that this little world they lived in was an entire universe.  And things were happening there.  Lots of things.  So my project turned into “a trio of interconnected novellas.”  But in the middle of plotting out my novella featuring the first two characters, I’m coming to wonder if they aren’t going to miss the novella mark and turn into full-blown novels.

That’s something I love about the writing process.  The potential there.  The feeling that I’ve peeled back a strip of wallpaper and am staring into a whole ‘nother universe.  And the incredibly fiddly urge to peel back another strip.

…but it got eaten by stupid Windows security updates that oh-so-helpfully restart your computer when you’re not looking. This is the third time this has happened to me. Fortunately, this time, I’d saved the truly important stuff–my writing–so I didn’t lose much. Still, I had a really interesting post that went into my first experience with the editing process, and how familiar-yet-strange it seems. But it’s like messing up the punch line to a joke and then trying to retell it. It just doesn’t work the second time around.

So…long story short, I was amazingly surprised at how easy the edits for Alien Communion went. And exceedingly grateful that my own efforts led to it being a very clean story before being initially submitted. I was able to make my corrections, and even continue tightening in the vein suggested by the editor, and send them back to her in a week. Which, considering what my home life has been like, is kind of a feat.

Losing a blog post isn’t as narsty as losing a day and a half’s worth of writing–and yes I know, save early, save often is a mantra worth chanting. But having anklebiters underfoot means a lot of the time, that silence between the crash and the scream has to be spent running to the scene rather than clicking “save.” But you know, it’s not the saving or not that gets me. It’s the fact that random updates will seize control of my computer and either nag me until I bow to their will, or sabotage my authority. All because their software/platform is highly exploitable.

So that’s it…I’ve made the decision and I’ve had enough. I’m gonna make the jump! I’m moving to Linux

Rita Rudner once said, “I know a woman who was in labor for thirty-six hours. I don’t even want to do anything that feels good for thirty-six hours.” I sympathize with her. And while I have some war stories about childbirth that would make your hair curl, I’ll spare you the gory details and instead talk about another kind of birth - the birth of a story.

As any midwife will tell you, labor should be productive. All that moaning and groaning and pushing ought to be doing work for you–work in birthing a baby. The same can be said for the labor a writer goes through when she’s giving life to her story. How much of your “story labor” seems to be unproductive? How much time do you spend avoiding writing when you’ve got prime time to do it? If you’re like me, when you get an uninterrupted stretch of two hours of writing-alone time, why do you suddenly recognize an all-consuming urge to reorganize the linen closet, or do you develop a sudden and powerful love for ironing clothes?

Rita Rudner had it right. Long stretches of doing anything will gradually reduce your productivity. And when it’s something as labor-intensive as crafting story, burnout comes quick.

Pacing is just as important in your writing habits as it is in your writing. While nothing thrills me more than the idea of a muse-driven all-nighter of furious, fast-paced writing, waking up the next morning hung-over from the adrenaline rush of writing twenty thousand words in a single session does not come without its price. Sooner or later, the time to push will come, and if you’ve already spent your energy reserves, what have you got left for the rest of the ride?

The answer is found in nature. In labor, contractions are intense, but controlled bursts of activity followed by short periods of rest, and get the work done with maximum efficiency. Try applying the same thing to your writing time. Choose a short amount of time - somewhere between ten and thirty minutes. Focus and write for that amount of time, and when the time’s up, lean back, get up, walk it off, go clean the oven, or whatever other pressing need emerged when you first sat down to write.

Short, controlled bursts of ten to thirty minutes of focused writing time will give you enough time to get into a single scene, move from one plot point to the next, or create a meaningful exchange of dialogue between two characters. After which, your inner five-year-old is free to bounce around, get her snack, or steam-clean the curtains. Accumulate enough of these “quickies” and you’ll be delighted to discover you’ve made real progress.

Then you can go do something that feels good for thirty six hours.

…and it’s “Queen of the Universe.”

No…really.

Okay, yeah, not so much. But hey, a girl’s gotta have ambitions. Liquid Silver has given the go ahead for the title of my upcoming book. “Alien Communion.”

And because I’m proud of the way I banged my head against the wall to come up with a half-decent blurb, here it is:

How far would a woman go to fulfill her deepest desires?

For researcher Dr. Rayne Warren, an illicit “experiment” with alien simulation technology opens the door. Then she discovers her “simulation” is a real-live Alcaini warrior with an out-of-this-world hunger of his own, who will stop at nothing to keep his human lover–even if it means interplanetary war.

I did a LOT of worldbuilding for this book when I sat down and started writing way back in 2003. One of the things I so loved about writing it was not just the incredibly liberating sense that I could feature really hot sex as a prominent plot thread in a cultural sense, but the development of the Alcaini, the race of aliens with whom a select few earthlings, among them my heroine, Rayne, are engaging in a cultural and scientific exchange. As I wrote, I peeled back the layers of what the Alcaini culture and people were like, and fell in love with them right along with my heroine. That’s part of the magic of writing that keeps me doing it.

since I’ve blogged…but in playing with the fun new shiny, I kinda got sidetracked into loading XAMPP on my laptop and faking an apache server and MySQL database so that I could test-drive the bazillion wordpress themes I’ve been teasing and tweaking and trying to emulate without looking like a schizophrenic with serious colorblind issues. And depending on how I like what I do on my laptop, I might just end up junking the wordpress install and redoing it in its own directory. If I can find the tutorial. And understand it.

Some days I feel like I’ve got two brain cells, only one of them’s dying and the other bravely went for help.