This is a trailer I created for a gay Gothic romance anthology called Gothika #1: Stitch. In addition to my story, called Watchworks, the anthology also contains stories by Eli Easton, Sue Brown, and Kim Fielding.
It will be released in April 2014.
The music for this video was written by Jamie Fessenden (me), and all of the images are, to the best of my knowledge, public domain or purchased stock photos.
Filed under Book Trailer, gay, Historical, horror, New Release, Occult/Paranormal, Romance, SciFi, Victorian
So I confess that I was worried. When I quite my day job to write full-time, I was concerned that I might slack off. I know myself. If I can nap all day, I might just do that. But although my workday is considerably less hectic than it was in phone support, I’ve discovered that one deadline is almost immediately followed by another in this gig.
There are plenty of writers who write faster than I do. I talk to people daily who find it easy to churn out 2,000-5,000 words a day, and it’s not because they’re writing crap. Some are among my favorite authors.
I can’t do that. I can do 1,000 words a day on average, generally a bit more. When the spirit moves me, as it did for the final couple weeks of my YA novel, Gods (Book Three of the Dreams of Fire and Gods trilogy), I can do twice that. But that’s not a normal writing pace for me.
I’m also a little fuzzy on the whole deadline thing. Always have been. I try very hard not to piss off my publisher, but begging an extra day or two is sadly not uncommon.
However, I’ve had a pretty productive summer despite my shortcomings. I turned in the manuscript for Gods, which turned out to be 66k words long, in mid(-ish) July, and submitted a 20k Christmas novella for the Dreamspinner Advent Calendar on August 1st. Then I spent a week or so starting a steampunk project for an October deadline (it’s currently at 8.8k), but put that aside to finish a 9.5k story about two men on a business trip for a charity anthology, where they will learn about ichimoku cloud strategy for their business. In between there have been miscellaneous bouts of editing, blog posts (not counting guest blogs), and other promotional work. About 30k of Gods was written since going full-time, so I’ll say that’s about 68k written in the past … well, about 86 days. Which works out to about 790 words per day….
Oh, wait. I get to take out 24 days for weekends (there were also some holidays in there). That brings it to just over 1,000 words a day.
Well, that was all rather pointless then, but at least I can justify not searching through Help Wanted ads for a bit longer.
Anyway…
My current project is a contemporary (more or less — it takes place in 1996) college romance novel, currently called Second Chances. Yes, my publisher has already suggested changing the name, since are probably about ten million romances out there with similar names. It’s not all that descriptive anyway. It’s just the best I’ve thought of so far.
Anyway, the story concerns a cute, somewhat jockish redhead named Jake, who resembles the possibly naked young man pictured on the right. Jake was mentioned in Billy’s Bones, as the high school best friend of Tom Langois. Tom had had a crush on him and came out to him, only to have Jake freak out and run away. Tom brooded for a while, walking past his house every afternoon trying to build up the courage to go knock on the door (yes, I did this once, when I’d had an argument with my best friend in high school), until Jake’s father threatened to put a restraining order on him. (In real life, my friend and I just patched it up and we’re still friends to this day.)
So, back to Jake. Jake, we learn in this next novel, is gay too. He’s just closeted, as a result of growing up with a homophobic father and two older brothers who enjoy beating him up. His family moves away from the area before he can figure out how to patch things up with Tom, and sadly they never see each other again.
But Jake goes off to college and that’s when, in 1996, he moves into a creative arts dorm at UNH (the dorm I lived in) and becomes roommates with Danny, who resembles the possibly naked young man pictured on the left.
While Jake struggles with the guilt he feels over rejecting the best friend he ever had for being gay, knowing that secretly he was gay too, Danny is dealing with the aftermath of what happened when the jock he was crushing on in high school betrayed him in a rather horrible way.
This story is a bit lighter than Billy’s Bones, though it deals with some similar themes. That part wasn’t intentional — they just kind of crept in there. But Jake and Danny are young and living in a dorm with coed bathrooms, marathon D&D sessions in the lounge, and naked pizza parties, so I think it’s a fun, entertaining read. And God is it nostalgic for me to write! The years I lived in that dorm were some of the best years of my life.
It’s a bit over half done, since I started it in the spring. I had to put it aside for the other commitments, but my publisher wants to see it in mid September, so I really have to get cracking! The first half was so much fun to write, I’m really excited to finally have a chunk of time to finish it.
I finally finished the contemporary psychological drama I’ve been calling Billy’s Bones (awful, awful title!) and several friends are reading it to tell me if it’s any good. I’m really not sure. I like the first half, but it gets very grim in the second half. Ever read the beginning of Alice Sebold‘s The Lovely Bones? That’s about the level of grim I’m talking about. To a lesser extent it resembles the revelation of Tom’s repressed memories of “Callanwolde” in The Prince of Tides (considerably toned down in the film version). Not exactly what most people expect in a romance novel.
I should have seen it coming, of course. I came up with this plot centered around repressed memories of sexual abuse and murder, and then when I came to the part where the repressed memories begin to surface, I thought, “I could have the character tell the story to his therapist or his lover (who is actually the viewpoint character), but it would be far more dramatic to show it in a flashback!”
Yeah, great idea.
Except that I soon realized that what I was writing was too horrific to describe in any kind of detail. There’s a reason that I tend to use crimes against children to represent evil in my novels: I find them absolutely horrifying. I don’t think I’m alone in this. So there’s a fine line between being boring by not dramatizing it and showing too much by dramatizing it. It wasn’t my intention to write a horror novel.
So I wrote the scene out, but didn’t go into graphic detail. We’ll see what my friends say, when they read it.
The other potential problem is that my viewpoint character (Tom) almost disappeared in the last quarter of the novel, as Kevin works with the police to piece things together. I had to go back and make sure he said something now and then to remind readers that he was still there. I don’t know if that worked. We’ll see.
What all of this demonstrates is that I can’t write in a vacuum — at least, not all of the time. While I’m working on the first draft, I don’t let anyone look at it. I generally have a sense of whether it’s good or not and I like to think I’m a fairly good storyteller. At that stage, I don’t want people injecting their opinions. But as soon as that first draft is done, I lose the confidence I had while writing. Sometimes my ego is too fragile for criticism for a week or so, as my husband has learned, but fairly soon after the first draft is done, I need feedback to tell me if the story came out any good or if it should be scrapped.
Sounds a bit like a disease, doesn’t it? But no. I’ve signed a contract with Dreamspinner Press for my occult mystery novel, Murderous Requiem!
As anyone who’s been following my blog or facebook page knows, I’ve been fretting about the marketability of this book for a long, long time. It has a lot of sex, some of it rather raunchy, and more importantly a lot of occult information concerning ceremonial magick that could make some readers uncomfortable. There is a romance between the main character and his ex-boyfriend, but since they’re in a sort of “free-love” commune environment, they have sex with other people while they’re working things out with each other. Some readers don’t like that. There are also some parts that cross over into horror.
I wasn’t sure if Dreamspinner would like it, because it doesn’t fit the classic romance model. But they publish a wide variety of stories, so it was worth submitting it to them to see. And now I have a contract! Yay!
No info on a release date at this stage, but I’ll let everyone know when I have something. Incidentally, the “cover” design to the left isn’t official and definitely won’t be the cover. I cobbled that together from pictures I found on the Internet and used it as my “cover” for NaNoWriMo a couple years ago.
In related news, I did not win NaNoWriMo this year. I didn’t even come close. But I did get a start on my YA novel, Dreams of Fire and Gods book three, and re-wrote the ending of Dreams of Fire and Gods book two. Trust me, the new ending is infinitely better than it was when I submitted it. I’m very lucky that my publisher was understanding enough to humor me, when I asked her if I could resubmit the epilogue after we’d already signed the contract. I also finished most of the edits on Dreams of Fire and Gods book one — we’re at the galley proof stage now. That one will be released through Harmony Ink Press on December 15th.
Filed under Fantasy, gay, Mystery, NaNoWriMo, Occult/Paranormal, Romance, Writing, Young Adult
My time-travel novella Saturn in Retrograde (part of the Time is Eternity Daily Dose anthology at Dreamspinner) was released this weekend!
So far it’s received a couple excellent reader reviews/ratings over on Goodreads and a very nice comment here on my blog!
This is the fastest I’ve ever received an acceptance of a submission: 6 days! But it probably has more to do with deadline pressure than my brilliant writing: Dreamspinner wants the anthology to be released in early June.
I’m very excited about it! Not only did Saturn in Retrograde turn out to be something I’m rather proud of, but a release in June keeps me in the public eye. It’s bad to go more than a year between releases, if you’re trying to build up a readership (or at least I’ve read that the “magic number” in the publishing world is a new release in not more than a year and a half, if you don’t want people to forget about you). And although I did have a release in December (The Dogs of Cyberwar), and it garnered some nice reviews, it didn’t sell particularly well. Seiðman will possibly be released this year, but I’m not sure yet. So a new release in June is good.
In the meantime, I’ve been struggling with Shinosuke again, my re-telling of a 17th-century samurai love story. I’ve written about five thousand words in the past two weeks, which is hardly a great pace. It’s been pretty awful, in fact. I was blaming the slow progress in the first week on having my attention focused on getting Saturn in Retrograde out the door, but I don’t have much to blame the slow progress of the past week on. I have a handle on the manners of the period, now. At least, enough so that I don’t have to worry about it constantly. And I like the story. But for some reason, it’s hard to write it.
I guess the only thing is to keep plugging away at it.
In other news, Dreamspinner Press is hosting a workshop for its writers in New York City this week and I’ll be there! I’ll be hopping on board a train with my friend, Claire Curtis (who needs to be there for moral support — travel gives me panic attacks), Thursday, at 9:17am in that wretched time of day some more optimistic people like to call “morning” and returning Sunday night. No doubt, I will achieve some kind of writerly enlightenment somewhere in the middle.
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