Cleaning out my closet - an update

I hope some of you out there took part in BioB's spring clean event.

I shortlisted ten books that I'd had hanging around from when I first joined the genre. Ten books in a week was probably a little bit optimistic, but it gave me a certain degree of choice. I did try not to think too hard about which book to pick, although I purposely left Dangerous Ground as my last choice because I have the full series now and will be bumping the book up my to read list.

As it happened I didn't get as far as book ten so Dangerous Ground remains unread. However, I cleared five books from my closet of unread books (to be fair I dnf'd one). By far my favourite of the five was Cop Out by KC Burn.

All in all I found the idea of going back to those older books in my stack an interesting one. I got a lot more original fiction read than I would normally get done in a week, even if it was not always as satisfactory in quality as the books I was reading earlier in the year where I cherry picked my titles from 'must reads'. Even the less than satisfactory reads had certain advantages to finally reading them.

Of the remaining five books on the list, as I've said Dangerous Ground will hopefully be bumped on to one of my monthly reading lists, but I will leave it in place and the list in existence since I plan to repeat the whole process in the autumn. Probably October.

I'd be interested to know if any of you managed to clear out some books.

Last day to get 40% off

Last day to get 40% off Waiting for a Spark.

From JMS Books website:

This weekend, we're having a HUGE sale on our site! All e-books, all lengths, all formats, in all genres, are 40% off now through April 20th! If you don't celebrate Easter, no big deal. Save 40% off on our Spring Weekend Sale instead! (See what I did there?) Either way, shop our websites this weekend and save BIG on all our awesome e-book releases!

There are no calories in books. 

Happy Easter!

Cleaning out my closet

How many of us have a huge 'to read' pile? Some books languishing at the bottom of the pile for months, maybe even years, as new, cheaper, more hyped books come along to bury them. I'm ashamed to say that I have.

What's the solution? Read them, obviously, but how to get the drive to read something buried for so long?

Well, the girls over at Boys in our Books have the answer. (taken from their facebook page)



JOIN US! We're having SPRING CLEANING WEEK at BoiB. 

Here's what to do: find the ONE book that's been on your TBR shelf the longest. Commit to FINALLY reading & reviewing it! Our entire review team, along with a bunch of guest reviewers, will be participating.

EVERYONE who joins us will be eligible to win a $25 gift certificate for books. Sign up RIGHT HERE in the comments (tell us the book & the date it was added to your TBR) or comment on ANY of our posts during Spring Cleaning Week, April 21 - 27!

Let's dust off and organize those shelves!

If you don't have a facebook account (or hate the site with a vengence, as I do) look out for their posts on the blog during Spring Cleaning week.

I'll be signing up once that first post goes live, check out my cleaning out my closet shelf at Goodreads to find out what I intend to read. See what I mean, Dangerous Ground is on there, I've been meaning to read that book in forever.

Any books buried at the bottom of your e-reader you've been itching to read?

Therese Takes Over

Hello, everyone! Therese Woodson here and I’m guest posting on Lillian’s blog today to promote my newest novella Clockwork Horizon.

The story follows the life of Malachi Covington, an affluent resident of Aerial City, who lives by the stringent expectations of his wealthy uncle. However, Malachi dreams of airships and adventure. He meets Ian, a charming airship pilot, who agrees to show him the ropes aboard the Mockingbird. With Ian’s encouragement, Malachi breaks out of his shell and embarks on his own adventure.

The fun part about writing this novella was definitely building the steampunk world. Not only is it filled with airships and clockwork trinkets, but it also has a distinctive vocabulary and its own superstitions and lore. Developing the airship culture was my favorite part and writing Ian’s view of the world versus Malachi’s was an interesting dynamic to explore. I feel like these two have many more adventures to tell. One of those is the sequel, Clockwork Bargain, that I just found out is slated for release in November/December!

Official Blurb: As a major airship port, Aerial City welcomes visitors from all over the world. Despite being surrounded by new inventions and colorful people, Malachi Covington partakes of little outside his books and studies. He aches for adventure and excitement but labors under the rules and expectations of his wealthy uncle.

Five airships arrive in port, keeping his uncle busy and, as Malachi’s best friend Millie reminds him, they’re carrying parties full of crew members. Excitement finds him in the form of Ian, a charming airship pilot who invites him to tour his ship, the Mockingbird. With Ian at his side, Malachi discovers a world beyond his books and takes daring steps to become his own man.

Excerpt:

An electric tension rose in the air, a heady sense of attraction building in the scant inches between them. Malachi wanted to reach out and touch, trail his fingers over the soft-looking skin at Ian’s collar, trace the shell of his ear, interlock their fingers. Malachi’s body hummed with it, his skin tingling in the slight breeze, his face flushing with warmth.

“You….” Ian licked his lips. “You really are a sight for a man who has had nothing to look at but his crewmates and the sky for the past three months.”

Malachi straightened from his slouch against the pub. It put him in Ian’s space, something he hadn’t planned but wasn’t sorry for.

“I knew you worked on an airship!”

Ian raised an eyebrow. “I thought it was obvious.”

Malachi winced. “Well, I don’t… I’ve never… I’m not allowed….” He stuttered, curled his hands into fists, and blew out a breath. “I don’t get a chance to meet many people.”

“Really? What do you do, then?”

Malachi nervously licked his lips, and Ian’s steady gaze dropped to his mouth. “I study,” Malachi said. “I read.”

“Books like on the merchant cart? The adventure ones?”

Malachi blushed. “I don’t have much adventure in my life.”

Ian reached out and brushed his fingertips along Malachi’s wrist, and Malachi’s fingers instantly slackened from their defensive curl. He took Malachi’s hand in his, and Malachi snapped his mouth shut. He stared at the sight of Ian’s fingers wrapped around his own, the contrast of tan and calloused against pale and soft. Malachi met Ian’s gaze, and Ian stared at him, amused but fond.

“You don’t have to explain anything to me, Mac,” he said. “But I get the feeling you might like to come see the ship.”

Malachi nodded, giddy with excitement, heart in his throat. “I’d love to.”

Ian twined their fingers. “Good.”

Author Bio: Therese Woodson is a wife, mother of two, and writer of stories, who lives in the Blue Ridge mountains. She is an avid reader of all literature. She holds two degrees—one in Psychology and one in English Literature and hopes to pursue an MFA in Creative Writing in the near future. She is a fan of watching bad television shows, superhero movies, and anything sci-fi. She loves creating interesting characters, universes, and plots with happy endings.

Purchase Links: Dreamspinner

Social Media Links:

Twitter: @writer_reese
Blog: http://theresewritesthings.wordpress.com/

Writing Process Blog Tour

Thanks to Katherine Halle for tagging me in this blog tour. Check out the post about her own writing process here.

I haven’t tagged anyone of my own but if you are a writer and you wish to take the baton and run with it, be my guest. I’d love a mention (and a link back to this post) on your blog if you do. Or not, the choice is yours. 

1) What am I working on?

Normally I like to just work on one project at a time; it helps me keep characters and storylines straight in my head. If I have an issue with a particular part of a story I tend to pass over it and go on to a part that is flowing. I’d never jump to another story to avoid writer’s block.

That being said, what am I working on? 

I’ve just sent Under the Radar, a WW2 spy story set on a submarine, off for submission. A story of traitors, heroes, new beginnings and, of course, love beneath the waves.

I’ve been adding some chapters to Theory Unproven, my contemporary story set in a South African elephant reserve, for a Revise and Resubmit.

A plot bunny for a short contemporary wormed its way into my brain while I was attempting to work on something else and I had to write that before anything else. It’s now finished and out with crit partners. 

I’ve outlined a 1920s master and valet style mystery which will hopefully be light in tone but I'm thinking about deferring that (and all the research it would entail) for a contemporary about miscommunication and language barriers.

2) How does my work differ from others of its genre?

I don’t know that it does. Ultimately, for all the different styles (historical, contemporary, paranormal) and settings (South Africa, London, Boston, the ocean), my stories are about two guys falling in love. It isn’t always easy (readers who have followed me since pre publication days will tell you I never make things easy for my characters) but they get there in the end.

3) Why do I write what I do?

I’d been trying to write a book for years, there are still pages of handwritten notes and research from before the days when everyone owned at least one computer in the home. But the words wouldn’t flow right, they never sat comfortably on the page for me and I couldn’t work out why. The novel got shelved, along with my dreams of being a writer, and I got on with normal life. 

Then I discovered fan fiction. Slash fan fiction, except my slash couple soon became canon. Reading fan fiction, watching the show, inspired me to write again. Seeing what a friggin mess the official writers made of my OTP, forced me to continue writing. I (and thousands like me) had to put things right.

But soon I found myself restricted by the confines of the show, I started placing those characters in settings and time periods that they would never be in (not without a TARDIS, anyway). And as my settings got further removed from the show, so did the actions of the characters until I found I was having to force them to act like their show counterparts. I’d always prided myself on making the characters recognisable whatever the setting, so the first time I found myself making apologies to readers for OOC behaviour I decided it was time to branch out on my own, without the benefit of a guaranteed readership, and let my characters go where they wanted.

I appear to have gone off at a tangent there, but why do I write what I write? Because they are the stories that inspire me to put pen to paper. Because a tv show lit the touch paper and then shuffled back to let me take to the skies of my own imagination. And, while the show in question ultimately broke my heart, I have to thank it for reviving my dream.

4) How does your writing process work? 

Badly. 

I am so disorganised. When the muse strikes I have a tendency to grab the nearest thing and start writing; consequently my house is filled with notebooks, ideas and scenes scribbled willy-nilly amongst their pages. It is commonplace for me to find ideas of scenes or lines of dialogue for stories long since written.

When it comes to the actual writing itself, I’m generally a fly by the seat of my pants kind of writer. I rarely outline (the story I mentioned above was slightly different in that I had several scenes already partially scribbled in my notebooks and I wanted to get them typed up and into some sort of order), but work off several key scenes that are already alive on paper and let the story and characters grow around them. 

My characters are never fully formed before I start. It’s unlikely I will even know their names when I first sit down to write (they regularly start life as X and Y!). Some traits might be in my head for each character but often I see how they react to a given situation, assessing whether that fits with their behaviour previously. I’ll make more notes as I go, confirming eye colour, number of siblings, scars etc as I mention them to ensure continuity.

If I’m writing a historical or something that requires more knowledge than I possess, then I leave comment boxes with facts I want to check out, so as not to break the flow of the scene, and then I go back to them at a later date. Although not too much later. There’s nothing worse than getting to the end of a manuscript only to discover one integral part of the plot isn’t actually feasible.

With a semblance of a story, I go back to the start, rereading reactions with my new knowledge of the characters and their motivations and behaviour. Or armed with more facts about, I dunno, the Franco Prussian war. This is when I add and reshape, polish the manuscript into something worth reading before it goes off to my crit partners.

I’m a slow writer, favouring novels that push at the top limits of the word count for most publishing houses in our genre, and this is reflected in the frequency of my new releases. 

I'm aware I have only a handful of dedicated readers out there, but never fear, even though you might not see anything new from me every couple of months (the industry recommendation for a successful author’s releases), I am still writing.

Sometimes I just get hung up in the details.

Guest post - Jo Myles

Guess who's hanging out at my blog today?


Yep, it's my chum, Jo Myles and she's here to chat about Tailor Made, art, sewing and a sequel.

Hi Lillian, thanks for having me over to answer some questions today. Always a pleasure to hang out with you!

There is no mistaking you as a British author, it is reflected in every word that you write, whether it be in language, attitude or the area. In Tailor Made, much like Merry Gentlemen, Bath is a real and interesting backdrop to the story. Do you ever worry that your wholly British style might alienate some readers?

I’ve always known that could be an issue as so many other writers told me I had to Americanise if I wanted to get anywhere in m/m. However, I decided to make my Britishness a selling point, as at the time it was something so unusual in our genre, with most of the other British writers setting their stories in the States. I don’t really worry about it anymore, even though I know from occasionally browsing Amazon reviews of my titles that some readers are indeed put off. The thing is, I’m just not willing to compromise and Americanise my spelling and vocabulary. I do try to make sure any puzzling words can be understood in the context, but I don’t agree that my Britishness should be dumbed down so that people in other countries aren’t exposed to the unfamiliar.

I also know that there are readers who adore my British voice and plead with me to never give in and change it!

Modern conceptual art takes a battering in Tailor Made. Is this a case of author’s opinion creeping into the story or are you a fan of the ‘pile of bricks’ style of artistic expression?

Guilty of the former! I had to spend time studying conceptual art at college, and visited many Turner Prize exhibitions. Most of it leaves me cold, although it is often fascinating. Give me a more traditional painting, any day. I’m a big fan of Van Gogh, Emil Nolde, Marc Chagall, etc. Colour is my thing.

Felix is, well, let’s face it, he’s a tart. He’s quite blatant about the fact that he is willing to use sex to get what he wants. Is it a risk to use a character that at first glance might come across as unsympathetic, especially since readers apparently make up their mind about a book within the first twenty percent?

It probably is a risk, but I’d soon get bored with writing romance if I didn’t take some risks. That’s me, a compulsive risk taker. I’ve written both a hoarder and a man on dialysis as romantic heroes before. People told me I shouldn’t and that people wouldn’t want to read about them, but what do you know? Those books sold very well indeed ;)

And anyway, I LIKE unrepentant tarts. I’m not a fan of the idea that monogamy is the only way. Human sexuality is too varied and free to be crammed into little boxes like that.

You are quite an accomplished seamstress. I vaguely recall talk of a steampunk style corset and skirt combo. What is your favourite item of clothing that you have made?

Ooh, tough call! The corset is probably the item of clothing I’m most proud of as I learnt so many new skills while making it, but I also have a real fondness for my purple hairpin lace crocheted dress and my red, 50s style halter dress. I favour making quite complex vintage-style patterns and enjoy getting garments to fit me perfectly.

Crocheting and knitting too? I understand there are some crocheted cocks knocking about somewhere. I’m hoping for a display of your handiwork at the UK Meet if you still have them.

The crocheted cocks are all Anne Tenino’s doing, but I do plan on making some kind of textile cock for the Cockwalk at GRL this year. I might go for a patchwork one, though...

And I’ll be wearing some of my handmade frocks at the Meet, I promise!

The dedication in this book had me grinning like a loon for days. You have no idea how happy it made me. I’m overwhelmed that my fangirling you via email got me a dedication rather than a restraining order. Not only that, but it got me that sequel that I’d been begging for. Can you tell us a little of what we can expect in the sequel? And when I we can get our grabby paws on it?

The sequel, Custom Fit, will pick up a couple of months after Tailor Made ends. Andrew and Felix have just moved into their own flat, and Felix has taken on a summer job roaming the streets dressed as a Roman Soldier, advertising a city centre business. He discovers he’s rather fond of wearing a skirt... but daring to wear women’s clothing in public is a line he’s very scared to cross.

Andrew, meanwhile, is mostly happy with their life together, and is busy making Felix a glamorous dress all of his own. The only problem in his life is figuring out how to get over his embarrassment over asking Felix if they can switch things up in bed.

It should be a fun, sexy novella, and I’m really looking forward to finding the time to write it next month. It should be out at the beginning of July, but I will be getting it professionally content edited so if there are significant issues, it might end up taking longer.

Thanks for having me round to chat, and I hope that isn’t too long for you to wait for more Andrew and Felix!

Jo x

Should I be concerned about attending the UK Meet in June?

This breaking story on msn news implies that I should be.

Crocodile run free: mystery as creature 'on the loose' in Bristol

I'm particularly impressed by the advice of  Avon and Somerset Police's chief constable, advising people to 'think twice before you go water-skiing'.

The same story was covered in the Western Daily Press where it was confirmed that the police had established that Bristol Zoo 'had not lost a crocodile'.

Tempted to pack a giant butterfly net, just to be on the safe side.