How ILLUMINATION is going

Illumination is now officially the longest book in the Dominance series. I refused to knock off work this morning till I'd passed 15,000 words. I have the structure all laid out, and most of the major scenes, but I have to go back and fill in. Ordinarily my writing habit is to write the story more or less from the beginning to the end, editing as I go along, and then edit and edit and edit some more. But with this one, I got a minor block on a love scene (a sex scene in a romance has to have an emotional component, or it isn't worth writing, and I couldn't figure out quite what I wanted the emotional facet of this one to be), so I skipped ahead, and then I found myself skipping still further ahead to the end.

So I have two or three more scenes to fill in, and a few other things to address that were raised elsewhere in the series, as well as a whole lot of editing. By the time I'm done filling in and editing, I'm reasonably certain it will be at least 20,000 words (but the price will still be $1.99-- it's not my readers' fault I'm wordy!). I'll keep whacking away at it, and hopefully I can get up another excerpt by tomorrow. Thanks for your patience!

My books are starting to go up on iTunes

I asked Smashwords last week why a long list of my books hadn't gone up on iTunes, and yesterday they told me they'd look into it. Today my books are starting to go up-- Touch Me and Teaching Dallas are up already. I'm grateful to Smash for getting the problem fixed, though I do wish they would have looked into it four weeks ago, when I first asked about it. But apparently their policy is "wait eight weeks before checking with iTunes." In any event, two of the missing titles are up already, and hopefully more will be forthcoming. Look for me there!

Charlotte, NC

A good deal of Illumination is set in Charlotte, NC (which is not actually the city in the background of the cover-- Charlotte's big, but it's not that big), mostly because I thought the boys could use a road trip together after everything they've been through. I chose Charlotte because as a young adult, I lived there. It was a nice city. Today, while surfing the web, I came across an article on The Fastest-Growing Big Cities in America, and there was Charlotte, at #5. There are over two million people in Charlotte's metro area now-- far bigger than when I was there. (The article says Charlotte has grown by almost 33% since 2000, and I left long before that.) There's a nice picture of the city's skyscrapers gleaming in the sunlight at the linked article.

Writing like a crazy person

I really got rolling on Illumination today, and wrote most of the day. (It helped that I didn't take Dad anywhere, though he was frankly kind of ticked off about it-- he believes I should take two hours out of the middle of every day and drive him around. He doesn't seem to understand that full-time writing needs to be, you know, full time.) I've managed to weave in small plot strands from both Angelic and Innocent, which makes me glad I wrote the prequels-- they really do help me understand and flesh out my characters better. I also got to the first sex scene... this story has a good deal of setup first, but once we get to the sex, I hope it'll be really hot. I had to stop in the middle of the sexytimes, which annoys me, but at least it's an interesting place to pick up again tomorrow!

Excerpts!

Read an excerpt of Illumination (Dominance, Book Six) here.

Read an excerpt of Gambit (The Billionaire's Pawn, Book Two) here.

Pretty new cover

Added to my excessive stock of pre-bought covers that I haven't yet written stories for (but will eventually!), here's a pretty by Cover Shot Creations:

Alas, some things are beyond my control

I came across the following very nice review of Teaching Dallas on Goodreads: Everything about this novella was perfect, except the cover. Neither of the cover models looked anything like either Dallas or Adrian. 

 First of all, thanks to the reviewer. "Perfect" is high praise, and gives me a big head that will last the rest of the afternoon:-). I will agree that the Dallas guy isn't quite as Dallas-y as I would have liked (though his cute grin did make me think of Dallas). I think the Adrian guy looks a lot like Adrian as I envisioned him (the cover artist changed his hair color a bit), but obviously the reader got a slightly different picture in his or her head, and that's fine.  I imagine that ten different readers reading a single book would have ten different pictures of the main characters in their heads.

But here's the problem. There is a really shocking lack of sexy m/m pictures on the stock photo sites (which is where I, and 99% of indie authors, get images, since most of us don't have handsome hunks hanging around for us to photograph). You can always go the route I used with the Dominance series, of using two separate guys and having a digital artist meld them together into one picture. Or you can do as I did in Innocence, and just use one guy. But if you want two guys lounging around in bed, your options are severely limited. I hope that some enterprising photographer will realize this gap and fill it, but for now, there's only so much one can do, and so many photos to choose from.

That being said, the best thing about being an indie is that I have control over my own covers. I can pick out the pictures and choose the artists I want to use. This means that my covers, even if not perfect, nevertheless make me a lot happier than most covers I've had through publishers. It's nice to have total control over the image I present to the world. It also means that if a cover sucks, it's my fault-- and I've re-covered quite a few books over the past three years because I wasn't happy with the original cover (most of the ones I've tossed were created by yours truly and have been replaced by more solid professional work). That's always an option, but for now, I'm happy with the Teaching Dallas cover. If I get a lot of feedback about it, though, I may eventually consider finding new stock photos.

Working hard on Illumination

I'm zooming along on Illumination now that I've turned my full attention to it. I have the first chapter almost polished enough to be put up as an excerpt for public consumption (I'm much further along in the story than that, but the first part has been the most heavily edited so far). I'd like to go over it a few more times today, so I'll put up the excerpt tomorrow. Again, I thank you all for your patience-- I'll try to make this story worth waiting for!

What a difference two weeks make

We dropped by Dad's former house today to see how it was coming along. This is how it looked before:

This is how it looks now:

You'd hardly know it was the same house. It has new siding, roofing and windows already, as well as painted brick and a nice new door, and the handicapped ramp has been removed. On the inside it has a new back door (apparently in the 1950s they didn't do back doors as much) with posts outside for a deck. The kitchen has been gutted and new cabinets are sitting in it, waiting to go in. The hardwood floors have been sanded and are awaiting staining. The walls have been patched, sanded and painted. And that's just all I noticed in the quick glimpse I got as I snuck in and out again.

House flippers work really fast!

Flawless (Innocence 3) cover

Copyright 2013 by the awesome Erin Lark.

Innocent is up...

Get it free on Smashwords and All Romance eBooks.

Also, Our First Christmas is now available for 99 cents on Barnes and Noble.

My thanks to my daughter, who's worked hard to get these books formatted!

Castaway's cover

I love Sara Fawkes' new cover from Anything He Wants 6: Castaway, here. I admit to having a preference for "element" covers (which focus on a single item, like the tie on Fifty Shades of Grey or the cufflinks on Bared to You) over clinch covers or wow-check-out-the-sexy-chest covers. Unfortunately, my own books generally seem to sell better with half-naked guys on the cover. But I still really like element covers, and this is a really nice one!

I actually agree with this review

Angelic was reviewed here by a blogger, who gave it two, uh, doohickeys. (I think they're spades.) Two stars, anyway. She liked my writing style, but added, "Gabriel was so beautiful, so pure, so perfect... that I expected some sort of a twist, that he had been sent to Dom's company to ferret out his secrets, anything to shatter his breathtaking flawlessness. But that didn't happen, and so the story just felt too... purple." 

This in a nutshell has been my problem with writing the Innocence series. I wrote it basically for people who'd already read Dominance. People, in other words, who already liked the characters and wanted to know how they got to this point. I also wrote it for myself, to get to the bottom of Dom's psyche, which I really needed to do before I could complete Shattered. Angelic is more of a character study of Dom and his perceptions of Gabriel (and those perceptions are not necessarily accurate) than it is a fully realized story. Gabriel's flawlessness is "shattered" (as the blogger so perceptively puts it!) in Shattered, but Angelic is merely setup for that eventual fall, as is the rest of Innocence.

So these are not really standalone books, but rather "bonus stories," and yes, by itself Angelic is not really much of a story-- the point in it was to show that Gabriel really was pure and innocent when he first met Dom, and the overarching point of Innocence is to show Gabriel's slow evolution into the man we meet in Dominance. The point is also to show us Dom's perceptions of Gabriel, which as I said above may be somewhat on the idealized side. But Innocence is not a very good standalone, which is one reason the installments are all free.

Unfortunately, by putting it up on various sites as a freebie, rather than just putting it up on my website as I originally intended, it's naturally the first book a lot of readers come across. I actually don't know if I'm helping myself or hurting myself by putting the Innocence books up as freebies on various sites, but having started, I guess I'll continue. I'll be working on formatting Innocent today and getting it up on ARe and Smashwords.

Innocent is completed

It wound up three chapters long and around 7600 words. Read it here. I will endeavor to get it formatted and up on sites this weekend (my poor daughter thinks she's coming home for spring break, but actually it's FORMATTING TIME!!! *laughs evilly*).

Sundowning

Dad keeps getting very cranky and hard to deal with late in the afternoon. He seems to go through an angry, you're-all-upset-with-me-for-no-reason, tantrumy phase every day at about the same time. I finally looked it up (yay Google!) and discovered this is a normal part of dementia called sundowning. Dad doesn't have severe dementia, but anyone his age is bound to have some degree of it. It's nice to know that it's not anything we're doing wrong; it's just something that's going to happen, and we'll have to learn to cope with it. It also seems that lighting his room better might help. He insists on turning off the overhead light; if I can convince him to keep it on, that may improve matters.

Our First Christmas

Our First Christmas, an m/m romance, is now available on All Romance eBooks and Smashwords for 99 cents.

Young billionaires

In my Dominance series, Stephen Dominick is a thirty-year-old billionaire, and of course it goes without saying that he's hot as hell. In Romancelandia, of course, there are gazillions of young, single, handsome billionaires brooding in their offices, just moping behind their desks while they wait for that special guy or gal to wander in and heal their emotional scars with a sweet smile and a few hot sexual encounters. In real life... yeahhhhh, not so much. It's no wonder most of us never stumble across these hot hunky billionaires, because there aren't actually that many of them. According to this Forbes article, there are only a few more than 1400 billionaires in the entire world, and a mere five of those are thirty or younger. Only twenty-three are forty or under, and only nine of those twenty-three are in the United States.

So your chances of running into a youthful, sensual, dominating billionaire who wants to bend you over the desk and have his wicked way with you when you apply for your next job? In Romancelandia, about one in ten (and maybe even better than that if you're sweet, innocent and a little on the clumsy side). In the real world... well, you probably have a much better chance of winning the lottery or of being struck by lightning. Thank God for romance novels!

INNOCENT, Chapter 2

I finally got the second chapter of Innocent up here. Scroll about halfway down the page to read the new material.

A few notes on Teaching Dallas

Glancing through Teaching Dallas today, I noticed a few things worthy of comment:

-There's no such college as Chesapeake State University. In Dominance, I had Gabriel attend a real Norfolk school, Old Dominion University, but since Teaching Dallas revolves around a professor dating a student, I felt it preferable from a legal point of view to use a made-up school name.

-Dallas lives in Whaleyville, Virginia. When most of Suffolk was Nansemond County, Whaleyville was a very small incorporated town. Now it's actually part of Suffolk, and is located in the southern part of the city, near the North Carolina border and close to the Dismal Swamp. It's still mostly farms and trees. There are a lot of great old farmhouses still standing throughout Suffolk, which were the inspiration for the Palmer farmhouse.

-So far no one seems to have noticed my tiny little Doctor Who reference. Adrian wears bow ties and tweed jackets to work, and early in the story I establish that it's because he thinks bow ties are cool.

-I'm planning a sequel called Teaching Adrian. It's a very rough idea in my head right now, but I'm thinking it'll be about Adrian's dismay when he has to teach a literature class on gay erotica, which he (with his highly focused interest in Shakespeare) has very little knowledge of. But Dallas will help him learn all about it!

Of Superbirds

While I was looking over Innocent, I saw I'd made a slight error in the first chapter. I'd originally made Dom's car a ragtop Road Runner, then changed it to a Superbird. I left the word "ragtop" in, however, but alas, the Superbird did not come in a ragtop form. Or so I thought. When I Googled it, I found that someone once modified a Superbird into a convertible, which looked like this. Still, I think a hardcore collector would want as close to the original as he could get. Also, once again he wouldn't actually be driving the thing, as it's worth $200K or so.

Wondering what a Superbird looks like? Here's a picture from Wikipedia showing a Superbird painted "Vitamin C":

Yes, it actually did come from the manufacturer with a decal of the Road Runner holding a helmet. Go figure.

INNOCENT excerpt

As promised, the first chapter of Innocent is up on my website. More tomorrow, I hope!