I blogged a few months ago about my new fantastic coffeemaker. I’d like to now report that said coffeemaker has developed a lovely, aged film around the inside of the reservoir that flavors the coffee with a deep, rich aftertaste, especially in a dark roast. I am content. I have become One with the Machine, able to now empty out yesterday’s grounds, dump the drizzle left from yesterday’s pot(s), rinse the basket, reassemble the basket with fresh coffee, and fill the water tank, all in a semi-conscious state. Life is good.

Except when it’s not. Yesterday, my semiconsciousness proved to outsmart me (or maybe it was just the universe laughing at me). I filled the basket with two scoops of hi-test and ran back upstairs to comfort the baby who’d woken up with her brother’s heel up her nose.

After rearranging sleeping limbs of toddler and preschooler and prompting Other Half into the shower, I came back downstairs to my stainless-steel Giver of Lifeblood to continue the process of pouring in sweet, clear water and beginning its transformation into the black gold of coffee.

At first sip of the fresh brew, I assumed I’d just lost my depth perception for the few moments it took for me to pour half and half into my bottomless mug. But sip after sip, my discontent grew, as did the monkey on my back clamoring for the caffeine and taste it has come to expect, nay demand, of me. I opened the basket, wondering what had gone wrong…why my dark-roast love had betrayed me so badly. I mean, I couldn’t be pregnant again, and I wasn’t feeling sick. Had the kids finally succeeded in driving their mother completely over the edge?

I cursed. I cursed out loud. In a very quiet voice, I turned the air in my immediate vicinity a lovely shade of turquoise. If I had somehow managed to break my Deliverer of Joy and Caffeine, discovered it wasn’t the caliber of machine tough enough to take on my Joe Habit–

I calmed myself a little and peeked under the hood to peer into the basket, and it came to me in a blinding flash of clarity stunning in its presence in spite of the lack of caffeine to fuel it. I’d put the two scoops of hi-test in the basket, but never put in the other two scoops!

Le Tragedie!

Le Horror!

Le Drama!

So I went weak-kneed with relief, embraced my Cuisinart, and we both promised to Never Fight Again. But I was a wreck the whole damn day.

There’s nothing quite like the thrill I get from building a world and populating it with people, customs, situations, and a history. I know we’re supposed to focus on character, and how plot is character and all that, but I just get this pumped-up thrill at coming up with a world for the people in my head to live in. Because the people in my head, to me at least, seem like everyday, average joes. But the worlds in which they live their “just trying to get by” lives are…special. Maybe it’s the armchair anthropologist in me, but I love seeing and imagining disparate cultures encounter one another.

I hate going to the grocery store. I’m there every week (sometimes twice a week), and it’s the same thing–buy food, yadda yadda. So I play this game when I’m there. It’s basically an imaginary game. “If I were shopping for provisions in ___, this would be like ____.” Sometimes I’m an Ancient Egyptian going to the bazaar. Sometimes I’m a Greek or Roman. Lots of time, I’m shopping in an outpost planet, far from the glittering center of my galaxy, and marveling at the lack of technology. Yeah, I’m a geek…so what?

What my little exercise encourages me to do is to step outside the boundaries of reference.  By viewing common activities through a foreign frame of reference, I end up distilling the essence of the experience, and understanding the underlying commonalities that lie therein.  The exchange of items of worth for goods and services on a (somewhat) equal value.  The fact that a little slip of paper can be worth nothing (my grocery list on the back of an envelope) or save me anywhere from one to five bucks (yay double coupon days).

It also highlights the effect that setting can have on a person.  My local grocery is laid out differently than the one a few exits down on the interstate.  In my imagination, the bazaar in Thebes is a vastly different place than the provisions shop and junk spacecraft flea-mart at the waystation just outside the jumpgate to the Perflaxian system.

Setting itself can have such a significant impact on a story that it creates a whole different experience, even with the same essential characters.  I’ve been working on an SF romantic adventure (yes, with hawt secks in it, too) that has gone through several iterations in the “noodling” stage (the stage after fleshing out characters where I “audition” them in several different plot scenarios likely to show up at some point in the story).  Recently, I ripped apart the setting and placed them in their current setting.  The entire story has changed, although the characters are the same folks.  They’re reacting differently, and the relationships between them are generating different conflict.

It’s an amazing thing, this writing gig.  I’m lucky I get to do it so much.

…too bad it seems to be on my head half the time. :/

So this past weekend, I attended Lori Foster’s Readers and Authors Get-Together and had a great time at this relaxed and informal event. Around 45 authors were in attendance and almost 3000 USD was raised for our local battered womens’ shelter. I got to meet and chat with readers and other authors, some of whom I met for the first time, and others who I’ve known for years through various channels. As soon as I found out I could attend, I began anticipating it, because I knew I’d be in the company of readers and writers…and I could have some adult conversation that didn’t center around my kids.

I don’t think anyone can adequately imagine the helpless horror I felt when I finally arrived at the event on Saturday…and not five minutes into my first conversation the talk turned to…my kids.

Back in the BC era (before children), I used to chuckle at my coworkers who came in with kid stories. Oh, sure, they were entertaining, because what’s not funny about flushing a peanut butter sandwich down a toilet, or finding silly putty stuffed in the toes of your dress shoes? Especially as these things weren’t currently happening to me. But I always wondered why people talked so much about their kids.

The joke is on me now…because now I know. I sort of sat back in fascinated horror and watched myself tell people kid stories all day long. Instead of discussing the trends in publishing, or the exciting life I lead as a writer of sexy love stories (shyeeah), or even the e-published versus print published perpetual debate, I’m talking about finding Legos in my underwear drawer and my constant battle to keep the sand in the sandbox on the patio versus having it tracked into my house. And on the drive home, I worry that I no longer have much in common with people who cannot recite the release date of the latest talking animals movie off the tops of their heads or have intimate knowledge of the entire cast of Spongebob. So if you’re reading this blog and I bored you with kid stories, please accept my heartfelt apologies. If you were by some miracle enchanted by my children, then bless your heart, I’m glad I’m not completely socially inept.

I get asked all the time, “Why erotic romance?” by both writer and non-writer friends (I also get asked with the same frequency questions like, “What’s up with the hair?” and “When are you getting furniture in that house?” but that’s an entirely different saga). My answer, which I thought was simple, isn’t. In fact, I had to sit down and think about it.

To me, erotic romance is a tale told through sex. Characters develop and relationships grow through encounters of a sexual nature (although not solely from sexual encounters). All my erotic romance stories seem to have a theme to them of either a character’s development of his or her sexuality, or a character’s discovery of their full personality via expression of their sexuality.  If I took out the sex, there would still be a story.  It would be thin, and would probably suck to read (if not be outright boring and ignorant), but it would have the bare basics of story requirements.
Straight erotica is a different ball of well…sticky substance. :P  If I’m writing something that’s erotica, the story is the sex. The premise is sexual in nature, and the goals of the characters relate directly to sex.  The plot is directly related to the sexual encounters. If I took out the sex, there would not only be no story, but what is there wouldn’t even make much sense.
One of the enduring themes I love to tackle in writing is the idea of emerging self-awareness. What else is life, on one level, besides discovering who you are and all the many facets of your own personal Human Condition? Some of us who call ourselves writers just do it with other people. And, of course, a huge part of me is doing its part to envision an existence where people aren’t so damn hung up about sex.

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 see, and am bowled over.  Will Kramer is the artist, and let me tell ya…from the baffling stuff I wrote in my art  questionnaire, the man nailed it, which is nothing short of amazing, since I used words like “luscious,” and “sensual” instead of “red” or “put two people on the cover.”

Speaking of red…later tonight, I’ll be posting a tantalizing tidbit about the red-hot lover on the cover…his name is Tai’en, and he’s twice the man as any man found on Planet Earth.  Stay tuned…

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!

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.

…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

So I’m trying out attaching my tagline to my title.  The current theme I’m using doesn’t display the tagline, and I feel that’s rather a shame.  Taglines are important.  They can be used to remind us of who we are.  They can also remind us that we should not be blog h0rz and get back to writing.