Here’s the preview cover for my new book, Fangsters, that’s being published with Riverdaleave.com books on April 30th. I’ve posted about this here. And I’ll post more info with excerpts as I get it back in coming weeks. Here’s the book description:
When organized crime meets the underworld of the living dead, it creates endless possibilities for intrigue and passion. Combine that with a traditional old vampire clan from Sicily trying to mainstream with humans in northern New Jersey as business people, and it winds up becoming an adventure into darkness of epic proportions.
But when Anton’s dad, the head of their clan, decides it’s time for Anton and his vampire cousin, Digger, to get into the family business, Anton’s not all the excited about it. Until he meets a sweet young human man named Leo on his first night at work. They wind up spending the rest of the night together, and then things get even more complicated when they bring Anton’s secret vampire lover into the picture a few weeks later.
After a bloody battle with werewolves, and the beginning of what Anton predicts will be an all-out war between two vampire clans in New Jersey, Anton and his secret vampire lover decide it’s time to consider turning Leo into a vampire so all three of them can be together for eternity. But thanks to fate, nothing is as simple as it looks, and they wind up doing the one thing they ever wanted to do to Leo as a last resort.
Hannah on Girls Gets a Book Deal
I’ve made no secret of how much I love the TV show, Girls. On reason I love it is because of how it focuses on “new adults” and how I’m a huge fan of the upcoming genre, new adult fiction.
I also like Hannah as a character. She’s annoying and adorable at the same time. She’s also smart, and trying to figure things out like so many young people her age.
In an episode last night, she gets an e-book deal and I thought it was interesting how they treated the subject of e-books on the show. For the mainstream, it’s obviously something so new the writers have to emphasize that it’s an “e-book” deal. When those of us who have been writing and reading e-books for so long now just call them books, not e-books.
It was also interesting…and entertaining…to see Hannah’s reaction when they told her she had a one month deadline for the e-book they wanted her to write. I once had a three week dealine for a 60,000 word novel. Anyone who has ever worked in e-publishing can understand this.Your first instinct is to run. The next is to sit down and start writing, because publishing is NOT the slowest industry in the world anymore. Far from it.
CBS Sunday Morning Barbie Porn
I talked about how CBS Sunday morning was going to do a segment about erotic romance in the mainstream this past weekend. I did DVR it and I did watch.
Of course they did what the mainstream usually does: they made funny haha jokes that aren’t really funny, they use terms like “mommy porn” that make no sense to most of us, and they refer to erotic romance as porn instead of love stories with sex added into the storyline. (I proved, once and for all, an erotic romance can be a book without sex when I released “Chase of a Dream” in abridged and unabridged versions last year…with and without sex…and it didn’t change much about the storyline when the sex was removed.)
But overall, I found the CBS segment about erotic romance entertaining, especially when 76 year old author, Desiree Holt, gave Bill Geist a first hand example of how she uses physical props in order to get sex positions right in the sex scenes she’s writing.
In order to do this, Ms. Holt uses Barbie and Ken dolls. She claims it gives her a first hand account, up close, of the way real people might pose during various sexual acts. And CBS actually blurred out the heads of the dolls during a Holt demonstration. I’m not joking. It was highly amusing. Evidently, Barbie porn isn’t okay on TV, especially on Sunday morning.
I thought Desiree Holt was adorable and I thought she did a great job talking about erotic romance, considering how Bill Geist seemed to have a proverbial stick up his ass, and how he kept rolling his eyes. But he could have been joking around, too. The overall interview and segment wasn’t nearly as bad as I thought it might be. And, of course, they had to mention Fifty Shades of Grey, once again, as the book that started everything and all about erotic romance. What can I say? I guess they honestly don’t know we’ve been writing books in this genre long before E.L. James jumped out of the Twilight fanfic pile. But you take what you can get, with a great big smile.
As a side note, although I did find the use of Barbie dolls as props entertaining, I have never actually used props like that for my own erotic romances. I draw from personal experience, thank you, and I’ve created my own positions many, many times.