What d’you mean, it’s March?

Sorry guys, I know I have been sorely lacking in keeping this blog up to date since the start of the year. March is probably too late to be expounding on my good intentions and New Year’s resolutions—although, too be fair I don’t do NY resolutions because I feel you are only setting yourself up to fail—especially as one of my good intentions was to blog more regularly. *has déjà vu moment from 2015/14/13*

An update post is probably a good idea though.

I’m ashamed to say that New Lease of Life arrived in this world on 25^th December with very little in the way of fanfare. I pushed it here and had a spot on the Dreamspinner blog a couple of days after release, but apart from that I did no blog tour or promo. In spite of that, New Lease of Life spent several weeks in the Dreamspinner Best Seller list and has garnered some favourable reviews. Some of which I still need to post here. Dreamspinner have a 25% off across the board sale until tomorrow so you could pick NLOL up at a reduced price until then.

RL has been somewhat hectic and of course the first thing to suffer is my writing in whatever form, but I am attempting to put pen to paper in some form at least a couple of times a week.

The sequel to Resonance (currently free at Are), tentatively titled ‘Resistance’, has been thoroughly betaed and I’ve just put the finishing touches to the third and, hopefully, final draft. It’s a sweet, low angst story looking at how Rick and Mal cope with life after their cutemeet. I'm currently looking for some pre-readers including some from Sussex. In the next few weeks I need to make a decision about whether to send it out to publishers, of which there are fewer by the day, or if I can justify the cost of self-publishing with my limited fanbase.

Next up in the pipeline is a story dealing with Smudge, another resident of Slopy Bottom. He plays quite a pivotal role in Resistance and demanded his own HEA. In fact there are a slew of characters in Slopy Bottom that want to tell you their stories so I may have to spend some time there. I have signed up for Camp NaNoWriMo in April and plan to use this focus to work on Smudge’s story. More on that later this month.

At some point this year I need to organise getting Lesson Learned re-released. Ellora’s Cave returned the rights to me in December and I intend to self-publish this novel with very little changes (apart from swapping back to the UK English it was written in). It’s been a long time since I’ve read this book and l’m looking forward to revisiting Drew and Nathan. I’ve been trawling the premade covers over at Meredith Russell and Garrett Leigh’s cover art sites in case anything strikes me as suitable but I’m yet to find anything. I should check out Lou Harper and some other cover artists, I suppose. Any suggestions? Failing that it looks like I’ll be subjecting one of my go-to cover artists to my own form of torture. Ask Meredith what I mean, she’ll be happy to enlighten you.

Also planned for this year: reworking of my WW2 submarine story, Under the Radar.  I’ve been working on this on and off for years. Maybe 2016 will be the year I finally get it finished and submitted.

And I’ve had several questions about writing a sequel to Theory Unproven. Hopefully I’ll be able to start something later this year. Although whether it will be set at the elephant reserve with Eric and Tyaan—Andrew really needs his story told—or back in England with Benedict and his (unrequited?) love for his boss, or maybe even in some other part of the world where animals are in danger, I couldn’t rightly say just yet.

Are there any stories that you want to see from me?

Still more radio silence...

Since I haven't been blogging, what have I been up to?

Well, I've been reading, but more about that tomorrow.

Mostly I've finished up the WIP 'New Lease of Life', prepped synopsis and blurbs, and sent it off for submission. After all the additions and tweeking that MS is out of my hands at least for now. I'm not quite ready to say goodbye to Pip and Colby just yet. While the publisher decides yay or nay, I've had an idea for a promo piece which I might as well get written now because I'll forget all about it come release time.

As a mini celebration of sorts (because any finished MS is a victory) give me three numbers, one less than 10, one less than 20, and one less than 100, and I'll give you a snippet from one of my stories. If you want to you can specify published or WIP (because there are many started MS on my desktop), or even a particular book title.

So, bombard me with your requests.

FYI: It doesn't have to be on this blog, I'll check each of the other platforms I've posted this on for responses (Twitter/FB/Goodreads/Dreamwidth/LJ).

Yay! News.

Theory Unproven has a home.

I'm pleased to confirm that I have signed a contract with Love Lane Books for the release of Theory Unproven. I've been working on this book for well over a year and I'm thrilled that it is almost here. Release date and blurb are still to be finalised but I do have a beautiful cover. Designed by Meredith Russell, the cover is exactly as I envisioned it and the models are just perfect.

In fact, I'm so happy with this cover that I'm displaying here in its largest format.



*sigh*

First draft in the bag

I have finally finished the first draft of New Lease of Life. This story started life with the intention of being a short for a dreamspinner anthology submission. I missed both the deadline and the maximum word count by a mile because it somehow morphed into just under 60K.

I was going to post this tomorrow as a Christmas present to you all but I remembered that I'm blogging over at Guys Like Romance Too and nobody would expect two posts from me in a day :)

So to celebrate the end of the first draft I decided to do one of those 7 from 7 things but instead I'm doing 12 from 23 (the date, see).

Twelve lines from page twenty-three.
(this is first draft and unbetaed)

“You have a website,” Colby said, the phrasing making the words a statement not a question despite his hesitancy. 
“Of course. I work online. It would be poor business practise not to have a website.”
“Uh-huh.” Colby shook his head and made a show of chewing.
Obviously, he had more to say on the subject and Pip tried to avoid staring, casting his gaze back to his lunch rather than watching and waiting for the undulation of Colby’s throat when he swallowed. Or the way he licked his lips to catch the oil from the semi-sundried tomatoes.
“The blog. Tweedle’s about. Nice play on words by the way.”
Fuck. The brioche seemed to expand to clog his throat. “I-I don’t know what you’re talking about.” 
“I found it. Your blog. I was researching tweed and you came up.”

Enjoy.

And it's your last chance to enter the giveaway for When Love Flue In. 

December and what I hope to achieve

To be fair the answer to that is very little. By its very nature December is a slow writing month for me at the best of times. There is just too much family stuff going on to actually make any plans. But this year has the added chaos that is a new release.

For anyone who hasn’t been to this blog in a while ‘When Love Flue In’ will be released this coming Friday, 5th December. Many blog posts will ensue where I wax lyrical about chimney sweeps or all things Christmas related. I’ll also be giving away a couple of copies at various places, the first of which is currently going on at Stumblingoverchaos.

I fully intend to finish the first draft of New Lease of Life. I know I said this last month but I was struck down by a chest infection that laid me low for a fortnight leaving me with little energy and even less inclination to write. During this period the few words that could be pulled from my brain were utter tosh. I did manage to break the 50K mark though and as far as my vague plotting goes I think I’m only about four scenes from the end. Of course, one of those is the sex scene which will slow me down considerably.

The rest of the month I’m leaving free. I get the feeling that some beta work will be coming my way in the near future (thanks to a little bird called Twitter) and I always make the time to get that back as soon as reasonably possible. I’m almost certainly expecting some edits (more about that in a later post, probably early January) and some cover art discussions/decisions will be required. Maybe I'll get some research done on what could possibly be the main subject of my next story.

As for the rest of my free time (hah!) I intend to do lots of reading. Anyone that saw December’s planned reading post will know I have a huge pile (metaphorically speaking) of holiday themed stories to get through. Hopefully these will provide a sweet, fluffy sugar rush without any of the resulting calories and keep me happy and smiling well into the New Year.

November plans and a notification

In an endeavour to be more visible I've decided to do a post toward the beginning of the month (yes I know we're already a week in but I only decided to so this two days ago) laying out my objectives for the month.

As many of you know, I'm a snail pace slow writer (made even slower at the moment by the fact that I'm trying to cram Arrow Season 2 before Season 3 gets too far ahead and I get spoiled) so many of these posts will just read

Continue working on *insert working title of current manuscript here*.

Hopefully, I will be able to come up with something more exciting than that on a monthly basis but if not at least you'll know I'm still writing.

So, on to my plans for November.

Continue working on my novella tentatively titled New Lease of Life. It currently stands at 43K, so I think it has passed the realms of novella and is firmly burrowed into novel territory. With at least four more key scenes and a possible epilogue to write I can see that heading up to 70K quite easily which puts finishing the first draft deep into December.

Write at least five blog posts for blog stops to get the word out about When Love Flue In. I have four blogs already agreed for stops, three with dates attached.

Get some reading in.

Contact Chris at Stumbling over Chaos to do a giveaway.

If by a miracle the first draft of NLoL gets finished; start research into Astrochelys yniphora. Sounds impressive, hey?

Next month I'll let you know how I got on :)

Oh, and I nearly forgot the notification.

When Love Flue In is available for early download from today.

My plans to bore you shitless & an update

Earlier in the week, I hinted that I intended to blog more. That is my plan, whether I will manage to stick to it is another matter. My idea is to blog once a week, either on a Friday, cleverly titled Fiction Friday--and shamelessly stolen from my best friend, Katherine Halle--or on a Tuesday, Tangent Tuesday to be precise.

Pretty self explanatory titles. Fiction Friday will be about books and writing, m/m naturally, but I'm going to try not to focus on my own work and what's happening, or not (I write very slowly) with me. Instead I plan to talk about other fiction based things. And Tangent Tuesday, well, that could be about anything, even a rant about pancakes.

I'm impressed that I have 'a plan' but how long I'll manage to keep to it for is anyone's guess. Right now, between projects, I'm eager to do this and do it well, but I have a tendancy to get buried in a new book and forget about life outside the page I'm writing on.

We'll see.

So, today is Friday, which means I'm talking about Fiction. Having said earlier that I'm not going to talk about my own work too often I'm going to break that rule straight away and today's post will be a quick update.

Having been working on it for months--seriously, I not kidding. The short story this novel developed from was written back in April last year--I have finally finished Theory Unproven. It's been read, pre-read, corrected, re-written, re-read, summarised for the synopsis, bundled up in a tidy bow and sent out to publishers. One publisher actually, set my sights high and if they fail, then flood the market at a later date. There is another publisher I'm considering sending it to as well, but it's finding the time to change the formating.

Next I intend to return to the WW2 story I had proposed to submit for Riptide's submission call but epically failed in reading the submission dates correctly. *facepalm* Probably start working on that again sometime next week.

I'll leave you with the tag line for Theory Unproven. (I'd give you a blurb but I haven't got that far!)

Unless you give it a chance, love will always be a theory unproven.