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.