Thank you for all the virtual snowflakes. I may be able to convince myself that it's too snowy to go to work and that means staying home and writing!!

We're running contests during the month of December over at Slash & Burn, so come on over. Today is my contest post. (Though if you've been to my house in December, you can't play in the second part!)

I hope your month is going well!

An Improper Holiday is available now at Samhain Publishing, ARe, for Kindle and wherever else you usually find me. I'm doing a Twitter contest, and another contest at Slash and Burn on December 9.

For the Twitter contest tweet the answer to this question @ka_mitchell: What did Ian come home from the war without?
The answer can be found in the free excerpt available at Samhain and ARe (or in Kindle's free sample). I'll pick two winners from the correct answers tweeter by noon EST tomorrow. Winners get a free copy of their choice of my ereleases.

I'm very excited about my upcoming Christmas release on December 1. It's my first m/m historical and I had a lot of fun with it. I set it during the Regency, a time period I've always loved in romances.

Here's the blurb.

Nicholas, Lord Amherst and the Honorable Mr. Ian Stanton will take questions here and at the slash and burn blog.

And to whet your appetite, here's a little excerpt that's not on the Samhain website.

( from An Improper Holiday )

I don't like to share stuff when it's in its early phases for a lot of reasons. For one, it usually takes a couple false starts before I start rolling. Two, creating expectations in other people can steer me off my course before I have one. Three, I can't ever promise until I'm at least a third of the way in that the story will even work. All of that is still true, but for some reason, I want to talk about these guys.

They nagged a bit, made me write out the first few pages while I was still trying to finish No Souvenirs, but that's not why it's so different. For starters, the characters are much younger, twenty-one and twenty-two, though since they have such train wrecks as back stories, life has aged them. And because of their respective train wrecks, they have really weird ways of looking at the world.

So here. It doesn't have a title, and this may not be the right place to start the story, but for anyone who wants to know, this is what is eating my brain. And at a hell of a clip, too.

( Unedited and maybe unusable )

So I've had my head buried up my characters' asses in No Souvenirs and I just turned it in. My fabulous editor at Samhain tells me that you will all get to read how Dr. Jae Sun Kim goes down swinging when he meets his match sometime in March of 2010.

My day job has been particularly soul-sucking, and a lot of amazing people really helped me make my deadline. LJ readers who answered my poll. People who cheered me on on Twitter, like Sarah F. and Zoe Nichols and M Jules Aedin. People who listened to me whine, like Erin and Kathy. People who read and told me what was and wasn't working like, Bonnie, Chris, Thomasine and Wendy. My editor who kept asking about Scuba Cowboy. And Casey who did everything short of reaching in and yanking the story out of me to help me get through it. Thanks, you guys. I can't think of anything non-cliched that explains how I couldn't have made it without you, so I'll leave it at that.

I have an awesome circle of friends and readers. Throw in the fact that I get paid to write down stories about the hot guys fucking and falling in love who live in my head and I am the luckiest person I know.

Poll #1458171 Name Joey and Aaron's dog
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 38

At the end of Collision Course Joey and Aaron got a beagle-pug mix from the pound because, in Aaron's words, "The fucker had Joey's eyes." Now Joey and Aaron and their pugle are making an appearance in the book I'm working on now. What should we name Joey and Aaron's dog?

I blogged over at Slash and Burn about having to cut scenes. The biggest tantrum I threw (fortunately just with a critique partner and not with my lovely editor) was over a scene from "Custom Ride."

(Sorry, baby. You were right all along. How did I ever forget that?)

While in retrospect the scene did not deserve such agony--mostly for my poor critique partners--I thought it might be fun to share.

Please stop over at Slash and Burn for the blog and then pop back if you want to read the scene.

( My first resurrected zombie from the cemetery of deleted scenes )

If any of you are in the DC area and want to stop by and say hi, I'm going to be signing at the Marriott Wardman Park hotel along with about 500 other authors. It's free to attend and please don't feel you have to buy anything, it would just be awesome to meet some readers.There will be other m/m authors there, too.

Come by and say hi.

eta: Oh yeah. A date would help. It's this Wednesday, June 15. *facepalm*

Ha, nothing so grand, I'm afraid. I just couldn't resist that subject line.

I've blogged over at slash and burn about word choice and linked that back over here in case anyone wants to take a peek at my efforts to write m/m historical romance. And yes dammit, it will have a happy ending. It's romance.

( So here's the first chapter of the work in progress. )

So I'm working with some new characters and I'm just wondering...
Poll #1420805 Imaginary People
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 22

As a reader, do you usually fall in love with characters

As a reader, do you usually identify with characters

As a writer, do you find it easiest to work with characters

As a writer, do you fall in love with your characters

Wow! Two posts in a week. You'd think I had a new release or something.

I don't know if getting everyone to sing Mr. Rogers' theme song before I talk about m/m romance but since it was stuck in my head, I felt we might as well all be in the same boat.

There are very few authors I've ever wanted to write to. One, I figure they're busy and I'd rather they write me more books. Two, I'm kind of shy and a horribly geeky fangirl when I try to talk to someone whose work I admire. (You should have seen me when I met Kathleen Woodiwiss, and I think I scared Emma Holly.) Three, as much as I LOVED the book, it was the characters I fell in love with, not the writer.

So because I have an awesome web designer, people can now email my characters directly (instead of writing to the very boring person who wrote down their stories). I've always wanted to ask some of the people in books questions. How could you? Why did you? What's your favorite song? What's your favorite position? (So I have a prurient mind.)

Even Kim (the ER doctor in Collision Course) has an email address if people want to know what's going on with him as I work on his book.

So if anyone wants to ask a character a question, feel free to go to the contact page on my website.

Or feel free to email me and tell me I'm insane and these people aren't real.

Hi! I'm not dead, just broken.
Chasing Smoke is available on Tuesday, June 9, and I come bearing gifts of free porn fic.

In the best of times, Daniel Gardner hates visiting his family. With his boyfriend pressuring him for a mortgage-serious commitment, Christmas in Easton, PA sounds, for once, like a welcome escape. His old house holds more than memories of a miserable adolescence, though. It has Trey Eriksson.
At seventeen, Trey was taken in by the wealthy Gardner family after his father was jailed for his mother’s murder. Until he left for the Army, he fought a double-edged battle—for proof of his father’s innocence and against his attraction to Daniel.
Fifteen years later, things haven’t changed. Trey is still looking for the real killer. And Daniel has never forgotten how Trey used to sneak into his room at night.
Now new clues to the murder are resurfacing—and so is Trey and Daniel’s sexual chemistry. Except this time, Trey has come to terms with his orientation.
But their connection may not be enough to overcome the mistakes of the past. Not while a murderer still walks free…

So that's the premise, and as enticement (or entrapment) I'm offering this free prequel not available anywhere else. (No, not even in stores!)
Please heed the warning.
Warning: Daniel and Trey are seniors in high school during this prequel. If consensual sexual contact between adolescents of the same age is a squick, don't click.
( September, fifteen years before Chasing Smoke begins )

Thank you all for indulging my insanely competitive nature. I love the mix of a tournament and books. I'm going to keep going back to vote and check the standings--mostly because I love tournaments and what I know about college basketball could be painlessly carved on my thumbnail. Oddly my basketball brackets are doing marginally better than my book brackets. :)

Thanks again, everyone!

Thank you all so much!!!!!

*throws sparkles on you*

I made it through the first round. I now feel all bad for being so competitive and now will try to go back to doing what I'm supposed to which is writing a book. But if you happened to go back for the second round to get me in the Sweet Sixteen...

It's not something as exciting as a prequel, but I'm back with an update on the Dear Author tournament for books. All the m/m books have lost so far.

Of course my competitive spirit is engaged for my book, but I'm also a big fan of the genre. As Bertie Wooster would say, "Rally round, Jeeves." C'mon. Drag everyone to vote, if not for me, than for another m/m title.

vote

When it comes to awards, I love to say the whole "It's great just to be nominated" thing, and for the most part, I have really tried to refrain from hauling y'all into some popularity contest because well, it's icky and makes me feel like an attention whore.

So then Dear Author does this thing that's like the March Madness tournament brackets. Making a book award into something like sports spikes the competitive adrenaline in my bloodstream ao much that I am here to whore myself.

Collision Course is in the tournament and if you could spare a few clicks of your mouse, beginning March 19, I'd love to have your votes. Joey and Aaron. You know how competitive they would both be. Here's the link to vote starting March 19.

Obviously, you should totally vote for the books you liked, but I'm not above bribery to make it to the Sweet Sixteen. Anyone who's found me via nouveau_monday can ask her about specific bribe.

You can also fill out a bracket and play along for prizes. A Sony ereader among other things.

I will now try to stop being a whore and get back to work on Kim's book. But it's a (sports) tournament. With seeding. And it's Joey. And Aaron. *imploring look*

When I was reading romance by the boxful in the eighties, it seemed to me that the first sex scene always happened in chapter four. In fact, I remember a friend saying she was just going to write a book called Chapter Four, and it would only be the love scenes without all the other build up. I guess she wasn’t a fan of sexual tension.

Sexual tension can be amazing in a romance, when it springs from the core beliefs of the characters and not from constant artificial interruptions (doorbells, phone calls, bodies through the ceiling). If it becomes the be-all, end-all of the characters’ relationship, once they “do it,” it’s all downhill from there. But I’m not talking about Moonlighting, am I?

While I love reading sexual tension in a romance, as a rule, I don’t write it. As one of my friends is fond of pointing out—not the one with a passion for chapter four—“Women need a reason; men just need a place.”

An important bulletin from the Department of Duh: Sex is fun. With a little experience and a good partner, sex can be holy-crap-I-found-religion amazing. That’s all the reason my characters need to find each other hot and get off. The fun (for me as a writer) comes afterward, finding reasons for them to do it again, helping them to an awareness of their connection and giving them realistic reasons why they can't have their HEA right now.

That brings me to my WIP. I really didn’t plan it, but I’m finding that wonder of wonders, I’m creating sexual tension. But talk about your artificial interruptions! These boys just can’t seem to find a place and time to get off. There are illnesses, location issues, and supply issues. I’m not through chapter four yet, but I’m starting to worry about missing even that benchmark.

My characters are getting a little frustrated and so am I. I guess only time will tell if I’m creating believable, skin-tingling sexual tension leading to religious-experience consummation, or if I’m just leading them on.

Stop by the romance tv website. Marisa will be posting a round table discussion with me and Ally Blue, Jamie Craig, LB Gregg, JL Langley, Josh Lanyon, Jet Mykles and Chris Owen, all m/m romance writers. It was a really interesting discussion, so stop over and see us. And feel free to spread the word on this, especially if you have some friends who are thinking of taking the plunge into m/m romance. It might be a nice ice breaker for them. C'mon, what's more fun than creating more addicts, more people to give you awesome recs?

After much frantic banging at the keyboard, I finished this book on deadline and miracle of miracles, my editor said she loved it. It'll be available either in May or June. (Please be May. June is my month of hell on earth and how will I have the time to frantically check how the book is doing on every site on the internet?)

It was a different sort of thing, what with the external plot and a modicum of suspense. I mean it's not like you don't know that it's all going to work out or even that the identity of the villain is a secret, but still it was very different for me to write.

I also had fun using my errr ancestral town (can I say that?) as the setting. Both my parents grew up in Easton, PA and I've spent enough time there to have a love/hate relationship with it. Getting off at the appropriate exit doesn't give me hives like the exit to the town I grew up in does, but still visiting Easton is not without its stressors. But it was fun to set a book somewhere where I was confident about the feel of the neighborhoods, instead of relying on Google Maps.

If you've stuck with me this long, I suppose I owe you some sort of smutty excerpt, hmm?

( Here be smut )

Here's the sequel to "Custom Ride" I promised.

It's FREE!! And Christmas-y. Unless you're sick of that sort of thing. I still really like the lights, and it's just Twelfth Night.

Custom Christmas

Please let me know if the link doesn't work.