Release Day! Break and Enter :D

Afternoon, folks! It's been a busy winter round these parts--today is release day for my third new title in two months, Break and Enter. It's a fast-paced, funny, cyberpunk romp starring two rather manly men (an ex-Special Forces penetration tester and a paramedic) getting up to all sorts of mayhem and sexiness. It's also the first title I've co-written in this genre; I had the tremendous pleasure of creating this story with my dear friend, business partner, and Siamese brain twin, Aleks Voinov.

Our blurb and cover, let me show u it:

Ex-Green Beret Victor "Cyke" Kellermann is on the run for a crime he didn't--well, okay, did commit, but he didn’t realize it at the time. He’s a good guy, a “white hat” hacker for hire. He’s also more teched out than the Bionic Man, though his ailing ’ware creates as many problems as it solves.

His latest series of break-ins are proving…difficult. Sentinel Tech’s security is cutting-edge, and the cops are hounding his ass. He sees only one reason why his employer hasn’t called off the dogs: someone inside is stealing data for real and setting him up to take the fall.

Paramedic-cum-tech-phreak Bear keeps scooping an increasingly battered Cyke off the sidewalk, and each time, his fascination for the fugitive and his mysterious ’ware grows. So does the attraction that makes him reluctant to turn Cyke in. Every time they touch, barriers fall. Before long, they're both laid bare.

Cyke can handle losing blood, even losing consciousness. What he can’t afford is to lose his heart. Distractions like that get people killed—and if he succeeds in unlocking Sentinel Tech’s ugly secrets, he won’t be the only one in the line of fire.

Product Warnings

This book contains mechanical eyeballs, multimillion-dollar hand warmers, pushy mind probes, a man too stubborn to quit when he’s bleeding, an underpaid paramedic whose services are needed entirely too often, and circuit-scorching cybersex…without a computer.

It's a little bit of a departure for me--still gritty, but not dark at all, and the boys get their HEA. I hope you'll check it out. And since Samhain discounts all their new releases by 30% in their opening week, you can get this novella directly from them for just $2.45 this week! Click the link to read an excerpt and see if this one's for you :-)

/shameless plug :D

Happy holidays, my dears!

Back from Vacay with a New Book!

Greetings all! I'm home from a much-needed (but sadly working) vacation, and I even brought back with me a special souvenir head-cold. Knew I shouldn't have licked those poker chips . . .

On the plus side, the food was great, the weather was warm, the seas were . . . well, stormy, quite frankly, pretty much nonstop, but I do so love a very rocking boat when it isn't making me nauseous (which is about half the time), and the company was wonderful (I was traveling with my brand-spanking-new stepmother, who is as awesome as they come). And even though I had a big pile of edits to do for Riptide while I was away, doing them on a deck chair overlooking a tropical island is way better than my kitchen table.

So, I came home and I realized that I have a new book coming out in eight days--Break and Enter, co-written with Aleksandr Voinov and releasing from Samhain Publishing--and I haven't even begun to think about doing anything fun with it yet. I've been so busy with Riptide that I actually forgot. So, that underwear model on the cover? He's Major Victor "Cyke" Kellermann, and I have no idea what happened to his pants. I think Aleks and I will do a Find Cyke's Pants scavenger hunt and maybe give out a classic Nook I've had hanging around the house since the summer. Sound like fun?

Oh, and just a quick housekeeping note, as well: since Riptide Publishing has acquired Guiltless Pleasure Publishing, Counterpoint is now available for sale on the Riptide site, yay! Which means you can earn bonus bucks if you purchase it there (they'll be working soon, I promise :-p), and while none of the story's content has changed, it does have a shiny gorgeous new Riptide layout. Right now it's only available in PDF, but in about a week, it'll be available in Epub, Mobi, and HTML too, and all the copies on third-party sites like Amazon will switch over from the GPP layout to the RP layout.

And now, apropos of nothing, some eye candy of the kind you've all come to expect from me, beneath the jump. It involves cats and actor crushes and I think it's my new favorite thing ever.

Crescendo Sneak Peek #4

Good morning, folks! Hope you all had a lovely weekend. Mine was spent mostly in the world of Crescendo, and I'm happy to report that for the first time, I can look into the not-too-distant future and see the end of this story. If I had to guess, I'd say I've got ten to fifteen thousand words left to write. I may actually get it done by the end of the month :-D

Since I'm still very much in head-down / ass-in-chair mode trying to finish this novel, I don't have too much spare time, so I thought I'd share with you all a short excerpt from a bit of Crescendo I wrote today. That's beneath the jump. But first, one quick bit of news:

I'm all giddy about having finally figured out how to send a newsletter! So, my first-ever newsletter went out on Friday night. If you'd like to get in on the fun, you can read it here (the link is at the bottom of the page), and subscribe to future ones if you'd like. There was a big fat exclusive excerpt from Break and Enter in there, and I gave away an autographed copy of Counterpoint to one lucky subscriber. I'll have an exclusive excerpt and a giveaway in the next newsletter too, so don't miss your chance to win!

And now today's Crescendo excerpt, beneath the jump. Also, a random hottie (SFW) for the heck of it. Because you can never have too many random hotties.

Break and Enter Finds a Home! :D :D :D

Excellent news, folks! Break and Enter, the M/M cyberpunk novella I co-wrote with the fantabulous Aleksandr Voinov (of Special Forces fame), has been accepted at Samhain Publishing! We're shooting for a Dec 2011 release, and I suspect I'll be doing a lot of bouncing off the walls between now and then.

For those who are curious about the submission process, or at the submission stage for their own stories, or who just want to see what Break and Enter is about, here's the query letter we sent to Samhain (minus the biographical paragraph):

Major Victor “Cyke” Kellermann is on the run for a crime he didn’t— well, okay, did commit, but at least he didn’t realize it at the time. Cyke’s a good guy, you see: a security expert, a “white hat hacker” for hire. He’s also more teched out than the Bionic Man, even if the army did leave him to his ailing ’ware when they abandoned him three years ago.

Cyke’s latest series of break-ins-for-hire are proving  . . . difficult. Sentinel Tech’s security measures are top of the line, and though Cyke has no trouble getting in, he keeps tripping up on the getting out part. The cops hounding his ass aren’t helping matters, either. Why haven’t his employers told them he’s legal and called off the dogs? Cyke can see only one reason: someone’s stealing SenTech’s data for real and setting Cyke up to take the fall. 

Fortunately there’s Bear, a paramedic-cum-tech phreak fascinated by the mysterious stranger and his even more mysterious ’ware. Bear scrapes Cyke off the sidewalk after more than one brutal SenTech cyberattack. When Cyke is injured and out of options after a disastrous third break-in, he stumbles onto Bear’s doorstep. Cyke hasn’t trusted another man in years, hasn’t felt desire for one in even longer, and Bear’s none too thrilled about harboring an alleged fugitive. But the more time they spend together, the more they realize that each is exactly what the other needs. Together, they might just clear Cyke’s name and expose the ugly secrets of a company whose business is locking secrets away.

You can read a bit more about Break and Enter in an earlier blog post, here, along with a sneak preview of the novella. And because I'm feeling excited and celebratory and can't wait to share Bear and Cyke with you all, here's another sneak peek, beneath the jump.

It's THE FUTURE! (And a teaser for Break and Enter)

Break and Enter, you say? Yes, that's the official-for-now name of the M/M cyberpunk novella co-written by me and Aleksandr Voinov that I was talking about in my last post. Complete at 25K words in four days. Mostly the right words, too, and more or less in the right order. Not even bad sex gets finished that fast. I'm still not sure how it happened, but I blame Aleks. If he suddenly goes missing, nobody look in my basement. I would never, ever kidnap him and make him help me crank out a novella a week. Seriously, what kind of person do you think I am?

Oh . . . Right.

Today is editing. By tomorrow we'll have the query letter and synopsis (whose writing I'm currently avoiding by doing this blog post). Six days from conception to submission to our first choice publisher. Not sure we'll be their first choice though. "I can just see the rejection letter now," said Aleks: "You made two editors throw up."

But honest, it's a love story. I promise. In THE FUTURE!

As for THE FUTURE!, it's become my new answer to everything. "Where's the cat, honey?" "In THE FUTURE!" "What's for dinner?" "THE FUTURE!" (As you can see, sometimes it works better than others.) One of the many wonderful and joyous things about co-writing is the discussions that come up in the process. Aleks and I were working on Break and Enter in Google Docs, which meant we could both edit the same document at the same time. When he was writing a passage, I could sit back and watch the smexins appear on the page like magic. And comment on them relentlessly in the document's chat box. Toward the climax (of the story, you pervs!), Aleks wrote a line about our hero getting to break our villain's expensive flat-screen TV. I immediately changed this to holo-screen, and reminded Aleks (say it with me now), "It's THE FUTURE!" Since then, it's sorta stuck.

So, yeah. I'm sure you cared about that much more than this teaser I've delayed posting so I could share our story with you. But just in case you didn't, here's the teaser below the jump: