But I did figure that the six of you who might be looking for an update of what life’s been like on Planet X(andra).

It’s been hot and muggy, and overscheduled with activities to stave off school-age boredom, spliced between moments of ten-minute writing sprints, stolen from the jaws of inactivity and enervation. Now, in between this, I have been attempting to follow the progress of the ebook/epublishing world, along with traditional publishing’s almost-certainly-imminent demise (you know, the same one that’s been predicted for almost a century, video killed the radio star and all that), and I’ve come up with some interesting observations:

• Writers are still worried about the effect of ebook/digital edition piracy.
• Publishers are more worried, but less inclined to look at the underlying cause, or solutions that don’t involve going head to head with end-users.
• Readers are still irritated that they can’t get their reading material at the price they want to pay for it, when they want it, and in the format in which they want to read it.
• It’s still a hell of a lot of work to write a book.
• It’s still a hell of a lot of work to get anyone to care that you’ve written a book.
• It’s still a hell of a lot of work to do anything in 140 characters or less.

Coming soon, I’ll be making an announcement about where my career is going (not that you care) and where I’m taking my writing (that, you might care a little bit more about). In the meantime, I’m writing, I’m creating, and I’m kinda melting a little. Wear your sunscreen when you go out, and always remember to keep drinking water. Much like plot points, it keeps the wheels turning.

Now the meat of this post.  There’s a reason I haven’t been posting much on this site.  This is my Author Presence(TM), or at least, I’ve been considering it so.  And in the wake of the crapload of weekly episodes of Authors Behaving Badly that one can see just by swinging a dead LOLcat in the general direction of Romance Bloglandia, I’ve been ever-so-conscious of what comes out of my mouth (or off my keyboard) in public from the get-go.  I’m naturally a somewhat measured person in editorialization, and having seen the serious embarrassment some authors have gone through after dining on toejam sandwich, I’m terrified that I’m going to inadvertently do something similar, and to be perfectly frank, I’m such small potatoes that any blog deciding that I’m teh_batsh!t and my reputation gets transferred to the bottom-feeder’s tank with the busted aquarium light.  So I’m careful.  And careful is dead boring for the most part.  Sorry about that…just trying to keep my crazy in the asylum where it belongs.

There’s another matter, too, of the fact that I’ve been working really hard on an M/M I was trying to finish before summer started.  Because having little kids means Endless Summer Fun Is Endless and computer time (hells bells, brain time) comes at a premium, and between trying to fulfill my obligations to Star-crossed and get my M/M written means that this blog came up short and again, I’m sorry for it.

I’m currently re-thinking some things about my presence on the Internet.  I won’t leave it, and in my non-authorial life I’m in places you might not expect (or maybe you would, if you know me).   I’m just thinking about relaxing things up a little, or maybe picking a better theme for this blog.  And I’m open to suggestions, if the six or so of you who actually read this blog are up for something.

Just taught me a little more about plotting than…oh, everything.

I also want that killer song list. But one question–how long before the RIAA demands a piece of the action so they can remotely shock you for ripping mp3s from your CDs?

Edited to add: The only drawback is if you load “Electric Slide”… IT shocks YOU!

Springtime Greetings to you and yours. May your chocolate bunnies not come to life and attempt to eat you before you bite their little heads off. May your peeps become appropriately and deliciously stale with a modest passage of time

Normally, the last thing I want to do is give up on my lovely website graphic design (devised for me by a dear friend with an incredible eye for design and an awesome sense of humor), but I’m working on a WIP right now and I have determined that I need some immersive therapy for getting into the universe I’m developing. Contrary to the appearance and first impression of my new layout, it’s not an historical. I’d call it feudal punk space opera.

I adore using WordPress as my CMS, and I adore the flexibility in both design and functionality. But much of it makes my damn head hurt, and as a result of me not being a full time web designer/developer, I spent a good week and a half on this when I only wanted to spend about three days.

Figuring out where a story is going wrong is one of the hardest parts of a writer’s life. You’re too close to the story to really have a good idea where it’s going pear-shaped, but you’re also the one who knows it best, and oftentimes the only one who knows how far to back out of it and which new direction to push.

I think it comes back to my beginnings. I have to have a good beginning, or if not a completely good beginning, a decent starting point. If I don’t have that, I’m just farting around with characters. Right now, that’s exactly what I’m doing.  My heroine hasn’t yet found a point where she’s willing to give the hero a chance (or consider him to be more than something to be scraped off the bottom of a shoe), and my hero hasn’t yet given me the real reason he isn’t trying to get as far away from her as possible, as fast as possible.  I know it will come, somehow.  The Girls In The Basement will send up the material I need to figure it out.  It’s just a question of when and in what form it will be.

So here’s to hoping that this blog post will be the expunging of a particularly full-bodied whine and its associated cheese, thus clearing the way for some quality writing time in the near future.

Alien Communion is consistently getting great reviews – thanks to everyone who’s mentioned that they enjoyed the book! I write to be read, and if I’ve swept somebody away for a few hours, it’s the greatest of compliments.

Doing a short entry today, because I’m drafting a longer one on an actual subject – my own personal definition of erotic romance.  I’m sure every ero-rom writer has either blogged or posted about this at one time or another, and I’m probably not revealing anything earth-shattering–so call it peer pressure.