Monthly Archives: April 2013

zomg!

This week I have taken my writing procrastination to new heights: I have gotten involved in boutique perfume making.

No, okay, it’s more reasonable than it sounds. I’m friends with the lovely ladies who run ZOMG Smells (“Fine nerdy scents for fine nerdy people!”), and one of them recently had to leave town for a few weeks on urgent family business. So I’m stopping by the lab a few days a week to help the left-behind partner stay up to date on filling orders. Verdict: making perfume is so cool. I feel like an alchemist, searching through the dozens of dark glass bottles to find just the right one to measure out twelve drops into the mixture I’m currently compounding. All that’s missing is the mercury poisoning, and frankly I’m fine with skipping that part.

Because I’m pretty much always thinking about my various imaginary friends, yesterday afternoon as I labeled tiny vials I started thinking about what scents would suit my characters. Keliel, the elf from my Love Has No Boundaries story, is probably Four Seasons in Mighty Contention on Trivial Matters. Tavren, his human mage counterpart, might be The Melancholy Death of Nikola Tesla, or perhaps Magnacephalopoda Aesthetica (they’re not kidding about the nerdy part!). The main character of the novel I have out on submission begins his character arc as Bosie, and ends it Wrestling Tigers While Calling Your Mum Long-Distance. (But only because their catalog somehow doesn’t contain Burning Cities Down to Flee the Authorities. Maybe I should suggest that for next month’s limited edition.)

It’s a fun way of shifting gears, and thinking about characters from a direction I don’t normally while doing a productive thing entirely unrelated to putting words in order. Maybe that’ll help me get past the writer’s block I’ve been having lately.

And even if it doesn’t, hey. Alchemy.

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coming soon…ish

I swear the hardest part of publishing is the waiting period in between finishing up work on a story and having it go on sale. But here we are! At this point it looks likely that my next release will be my contribution to this year’s Daily Dose collection from Dreamspinner (I could be wrong; I have a story in the pipeline with ForbiddenFiction, and they don’t get release dates finalized far in advance, so maybe that’ll hit sooner). My Daily Dose story will be out on June 1, though:

400x600_72DPI_AFightingChance_LG

(Someday I’ll write a Daily Dose/Advent story long enough to get an individual cover, too.) The theme for this collection, as you can probably tell, is sports! So I wrote sci fi, since that’s what I do:

Luis Delgado, a boxer, and Davey Taylor, an artist, live in a future when Earth is home to the destitute and the only chance for a better life is found among the colonies that orbit the once-great planet. Davey has the opportunity to make a name for himself with an art sponsorship on the Luna Minor colony, but he needs to get there first. Luis may have the answer, but it means choosing between his career and his future together with Davey.

They’re good kids! And I’m looking forward to sharing them with everyone.

…In other coming-soon news, I’m a few thousand words into my contribution for Love Has No Boundaries, the mid-year free fiction event put on by the Goodreads M/M Romance group. If you’re a member of the group, you’ll be able to read some excerpts and info about what’s in store in my story—I’m doing a little thread hop with some other group members, and my first contribution is scheduled for tomorrow, right here in this thread.

I’d better get back to work on those boys, really—I’ve been sick this week, but porn and tide wait for no man, or something like that. Onward!

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