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

Read Crescendo Chapter 1!

Happy Monday, folks! It's a particularly exciting day for me, because today is the first time a long and fully-edited sneak peek of Crescendo is going up on the interwebs. The entire first chapter, in fact. Almost 3500 words. I'm so excited I can't even wait the 23 minutes until it's officially Monday. Ah well, it's Monday in Europe, right? :D

You can find the first chapter at my publisher's book page for Crescendo. Wait--don't go quite yet! Let me tell you about a second exciting thing first: Crescendo pre-orders start today, and there is ten kinds of awesome going down with that. The ten kinds of awesome, let me show u them:

1. For one thing, everyone who pre-orders gets 20% off--you pay $7.99 instead of $9.99 for the ebook, $11.99 instead of $14.99 for the paperback (plus free domestic shipping!), and $14.39 instead of $17.99 for the print + ebook bundle (plus free domestic shipping). I'm not sure how long that special will last, so if you've been waiting for Crescendo, definitely take advantage of it while it's still there.

2. Awesome Point #2 is that folks who pre-order get to download their book a full two days before the "street date"--October 5 instead of October 7.

3. Awesome Point #3 is raffle prizes! Each copy you pre-order gets you entered into a drawing for--get this--a free first-gen Nook pre-loaded with my entire back catalog! A second lucky winner will get signed copies of both Counterpoint and Crescendo, and a third lucky winner will get an autographed print of the gorgeous Crescendo cover art.

Okay, so it turns out there are only three kinds of awesome, but I think they're awesome enough to count for 3.33 points of awesome each, no?

Anyway, off I go, dancing giddily away to wrap up edits. I hope you'll go off to Storm Moon Press and read the first chapter of Crescendo. And I hope it's everything you've all been waiting for :D

. . . Oh, who are we kidding. We both knew I couldn't get through a whole blog post without a picture of Michael Fassbender. So, my present to you. Look, it even unwraps itself!

(Now go! Read Crescendo!)

Weekend Hotties!

Yup, one more day of hottie picspam. I'll get back to real blog posts on Monday, I promise. In the meanwhile, I'm sure you're all absolutely devastated by the alternative ;-)

So, a big pile of my latest two obsessions (and quite possibly my longest-running in many years for this flighty little bird of an-- Ooh, shiny!) beneath the jump.

(Come on, you didn't really think I could go a whole week without posting pictures of Fassavoy, did you?)

(Because, srsly u guise, u guise, srsly . . .

)

Book Review: Duck! by Kim Dare, 4 of 5 Stars

Morning folks. My sis is in town this week for the first time since December, so I'll be cheating the blog content juuuuust a little by posting some book reviews I did on Goodreads, and maybe some picspam. (Are you tired of Michael Fassbender and James McAvoy yet? Because I have a whole folder of hot naked guys who are not them; I just haven't felt compelled to open it lately ;-p)

Anyway, today I want to share a review for a delightful M/M BDSM book, Duck! by Kim Dare.

A modern day M/M, BDSM retelling of The Ugly Ducking Fairy Tale using avian shifters. 

Raised among humans, Ori Jones only discovered he was an avian shifter six months ago. Unable to complete a full shift until he reaches his avian maturity, he still can’t be sure of his exact species. 

But with species comes rank, and rank is everything to the avians. When a partial shift allows the elders to announce that they believe Ori to be a rather ugly little duckling, he drops straight to the bottom rung of their hierarchy. 

Life isn’t easy for Ori until he comes to the attention of a high ranking hawk shifter. Then the only question is, is Ori really a duck—and what will his new master think when the truth eventually comes out?

My review, beneath the jump.

Chatting with Cassie Exline

Here to wrap up the 2011 All Things Romantic Suspense Tour is author Cassie Exline, who'll be dishing on all things writing and her latest release, Ruby's Deadly Secret. I'm a huge fan of the cover art for this, so let's get started, as always, with the cover and blurb.

What do you get when you add a ruby, diary, secrets, and a mansion? A motive for murder. Sheryl Locke Holmes and her best friend, Dot Watson, have been offered an exciting opportunity to explore Bridgeside, a Victorian mansion, to search for items for their antique shop. Their adventure is short-lived when they discover a diary containing dark secrets and a newspaper clipping with a warning written in what appears to be blood. They get trapped in the attic, Dot is attacked and they find out the owner died inside the house. As if that isn't enough, Jake is spotted with another woman. Clues are pointing to Sheryl as the next target, no matter who gets in the way.

Sound interesting? We've got an excerpt and an interview with Cassie, beneath the jump.