The Weirdness Continues

Happy Friday, all! Alas, it's looking like a bit of a mess round these parts, as the eye of Hurricane Irene is forecast to, well, glare really hard right over my head. (Is anyone else surprised that, between the very rare northeast hurricane and the even rarer northeast earthquake, that nobody's yet found a way to blame God's wrath on teh gays or portend End Times? Doesn't that usually happen right about now?)

Anyway, long story short, the disaster folks are telling us to expect power outages for days and possibly even weeks. Since I don't have time to front-load my blog, I'm afraid it will go without updates for as long as I'm stuck without power/internet. An even more unfortunate side effect may be the delay of the Crescendo release by a couple weeks, since I'm supposed to be wrapping up edits in the next couple weeks and can't do that if my battery's dead. If it looks like the power situation is truly ominous, I'll try to get out of town, but where I live literally becomes an island when there's flooding and odds are good the roads will be closed for a while.

Don't worry about me, though--I'll be perfectly safe in my (sadly flood-prone) basement, reading my Kindle by candlelight as the storm blows by. Until . . . well, whenever! :-)

Sex So Good the Earth Shoo-- Oh, Wait.

Yeah, so, that was a thing that happened, eh? My first earthquake ever. If you live in the affected area, was it your first as well? Did you know what it was when it happened? I . . . did not. I've had attacks of vertigo on rare occasion, so that was my first thought. My second, since I live about 10 minutes by air from Newark Airport, was that we were being buzzed by a plane. My third was that a plane had crashed. My fourth was a bomb. Friggin' earthquake in Central Jersey? Yeah, that was a distant fifth. And thank goodness it was nothing serious, because even after I figured it out, I was still just sitting at my computer, watching stuff on the walls rattle, totally baffled. Here, let me illustrate:

O_o

Then all my neighbors went outside to O_o at each other. After a few minutes, we decided that, yes, that did actually just happen.

And then . . . then pictures of the devastation started coming in from Washington:

via famousdc.com

So, er, yeah, everyone's fine round these parts, except perhaps for a little too much group excitement :-)

Conference Swag Giveaway

Morning, all. Let's start the week off with a giveaway, eh? 

I have a giant pile of AAD conference swag. My giant pile of AAD conference swag, let me show you it. (Click to make gianter.)

Comment if you want it, and I'll select one winner at random on Friday. Also, yeah, that's my conference badge in the back there, and yeah, it is indeed powered by tiger blood. I'll send that along too if the winner wants it.

A Good Editor . . .

. . . is worth her weight not just in gold, but also in coffee, chocolate, and kittens. While I'm neck deep in some very, very good (and difficult, sigh) edits on Crescendo that will make the book about a thousand times better than it was in draft form, I wanted to take this Friday to celebrate good editors all around the world, and mine in particular, Tal Valante.

(Actually, I'm pretty sure the cat's hers too.)

So thank you, Tal, for kicking my ass with such gleeful vigor and skill.

Have a lovely weekend, folks. I'll be huddled indoors, nursing my sore ass and the slowly emerging wheat from the chaff of my first draft :-)

Crescendo Deleted Scene

Good morning, folks! Edits on Crescendo continue (have you pre-ordered your copy yet? /shameless plug), and a recent edit had me cutting an entire three-page scene. It was a wise, wise cut (I mean, nothing happens in this scene but a whole lotta navel gazing), but still, seemed a shame to waste it. So, my deleted scene, let me show you it.

Beneath the jump, for first-draft sloppiness and potential spoilers. (I mean, I don't terribly think so? We all already know it was Colonel Mustard in the conservatory with the candlestick, after all. But better safe than sorry, I suppose.)

Authors After Dark Photo Recap

Afternoon, all! I'm finally recovered from the wild time that was Authors After Dark 2011 (or #AADPhilly for my tweeps out there), and now I come bearing photos. I also came home with fifteen(!!!) free books and two giant tote bags stuffed with swag. It was pretty insane.

I also have karaoke video, but Blogger is giving me fits, so I'll be putting that up on my facebook page instead.

Met lots of wonderful new-to-me authors and readers, and also finally met a great many of my GR, Twitter, and blog buddies who I'd never seen face to face before. All the fun, beneath the jump--click to embiggen.

New Cover Art, and AAD Bound

Morning folks! I promised you on Monday that I'd tell you a little about Master Class, my new BDSM novella releasing with my new business venture, Riptide Publishing, this fall. I'm still waiting on the official blurb, but here's a rough rundown:

Nicky Avery is starring in the Broadway revival of Godspell, but he lacks the confidence and self-respect to look beyond a string of heartless one-night stands to fill his needs. A quick flogging, a rough fuck, he blows off steam and seeks a new whip-hand to manipulate next. He finds challenge but no satisfaction in such pseudo-domination and pain. Nobody's managed to master him, and he thinks that's just fine. But he simply doesn't know what he's missing.  

Devon Turner is a self-possessed film star and expert Dom who knows what he wants the moment he sees it, and what he wants is Nicky Avery. Nicky's clearly a broken boy, but Devon knows exactly how to put his new sub back together again. 

Yes, those are the boys from Sublime: Collected Shorts, finally getting their full-length story. Well, novella length :-)

Also, my gorgeous cover art by L.C. Chase, let me show you it. (Click to embiggen.)

The book is complete, so expect a blurb and some excerpts soon!

In the meanwhile, I'm heading off to Authors After Dark tomorrow morning, and I'll be there through Sunday. If you're hunting for an invitation to submit to Riptide, I'm amenable to being pitched. I'll be hosting a hospitality suite at 9am on Friday with the lovely Cat Grant, so that's a good time to find me.

Friday will be hot men picspam, and I'll be back on Monday with tales (and blackmail photos) from the con.

The Seekrit Project Unveiled!

Good morning, all! You've been putting up with me talking about my Seekrit Project for some time now, and today I'm very, very excited to share it with you. Ladies and gentlemen, let me introduce you to the love-child of myself, Aleksandr Voinov, and Chris Hawkins:

Our stage-one website launched late Saturday night at RiptidePublishing.com. We're a gay fiction press with a focus on romance, but we also publish erotica and literary gay and trans fiction. 

There's quite the lineup already, including some M/M favorites and some amazing new talent: Andrea Speed, Brita Addams, Bryl Tyne, Cat Grant, Damon Suede, Kari Gregg, L.A. Witt, Peter Hansen, Rhianon Etzweiler, Storm Grant, and of course works from myself and Aleksandr Voinov, too. 

We're opening this fall, but in the meantime, we hope you'll visit our website to learn all about us, check us out on Facebook and Twitter for all kinds of behind-the-scenes tidbits, and join our already very active Goodreads Group to chat with our authors and learn more about their upcoming works.

On Wednesday, I'll tell you all a little about the new book I'm releasing with Riptide. If you're a fan of Devon and Nicky from Sublime, you'll want to see it :-)

A View of the Cutting-room Floor

Morning, folks! I'm still banging away at Crescendo edits, and a big part of the editing process is to "kill your darlings." I've been doing a lot of that with Crescendo; a first draft, for me at least, is almost always overwritten because so much of it is exploratory. Rather than condemn these passages to the darkness of deletion, I thought I'd save some to share with you. So, here's one that won't ever make it into the final story.

The road sloped gently upward, toward the third wall and the Second Ward beyond it a league or so distant. Beyond that, at the top of the rise, Ayden could just make out the parapets atop the final wall and the spired roof of the castle keep.

Their caravan halted at the heavily-guarded third wall, and Ayden watched with wary interest as a captain spotted the ambassador and rushed his fellows into opening the gate. They were afraid of this man, and if their actions weren’t enough to confirm it, their songs certainly were.

After three weeks on the road with him, Ayden couldn’t blame them.

The air in the Second Ward was sweet with broad gardens and autumn leaves, stately terraced homes of brick and stone set wall to wall but well back from the cobbled road. ‘Twas sweet relief to be among the relative quiet—fewer songs pressing in against his mind-ear, fewer threats against which to hold himself ready. He spotted no idlers on the (clean) streets; the men were about their business, the children surely at their lessons, the women no doubt home where these humans so single-mindedly thought they belonged.

Yet he knew the sense of security here was false. A few powerful men were no less dangerous than an armed mob. 

And ooh, if you haven't seen it yet, the whole first chapter of Crescendo is up now at the publisher's site!

Have a lovely weekend, folks!

Autographed Ebooks with Kindlegraph!

Happy Monday, folks. This weekend, a friend of mine discovered a very cool little application that lets you collect personalized electronic autographs on your Kindle! The site is KindleGraph.com, and I thought it was pretty neat, so I created a page there too: http://kindlegraph.com/authors/RachelHaimowitz.

Neat, huh? You just go to the site, search for the book you'd like autographed, and send a request. The author receives the request, types in a note, signs it, and hits "send." (You'll receive the document via your Kindle email address.) And viola!, you have a signed ebook :-) (For more information, play their "about" video.)

I'm happy to sign anyone's ebook--I don't even think you actually need to own the ebook (it looks like KindleGraph basically sends you a signed title page that you can then add to a folder on your Kindle or manually insert into your own PDF documents). After all, this author's ego isn't big enough already . . . as you can tell by her referring to herself in the third person.

And if your favorite authors aren't on Kindlegraph yet? Well, I'm sure most of them wouldn't mind you giving them a little poke through their various social networking sites. I'll be doing some poking of my own for sure. Watch out, Rowan Speedwell, my poking stick is sharp >:D