Monday Stuff
Jan
18
2010

It’s the start of a new week. Kids are home from school today but the dude is at work. They’re all calm. For now, LOL. But it appears like it may just be sunny for a while so I can send them outside (thank goodness) and hopefully get some work done. I may be busy, but a deadline is a deadline and it doesn’t care that I’ve done something insane like decide to move when I have books due like a total foron.

Because of the Book Binge ladies, I had to download KMM’s Dark Highlander to my Nook yesterday. It was the first KMM book I ever read and romance wise, it remains my favorite of that series to this day. But the paperback got destroyed and I haven’t had it to go back to. Yay for digital downloads which take me all of ten seconds, LOL!

Dark Highlander has a perfect pitch. The combination of the dark, broody and nearly broken hero and the heroine who is strong totally hot for this man totally works in a way few books can achieve. Bet Me has this pitch too along with Welcome To Temptation. Oh! Naked In Death is another. There are a great many books I adore and revisit at least in some part, but few of them hit me just perfectly. We all have our own buttons that certain books hit for us – y’all have any?

Doing some advance work on my next book, which remains title-less and I need to figure that out, LOL. It’s the next installment in the de La Vega Cats series (that started with Trinity). After that it’ll be Mesmerized, which is the second book in the PHANTOM CORPS mini-series. Oh and somewhere in there I need to write up a proposal for Adrian’s book to get to my editor. I have the basic idea of who the characters are, I just need to work out the storyline.

So busy, but all sorts of fun type busy. I’m pretty damned lucky, I have to say. Thank you to everyone who gives me all these great moments!

Cue Soapbox:

I noticed something new yesterday – a reviewer gave a book a one star rating at Amazon solely because it wasn’t available in Kindle format. You know what? That sucks and it’s misplaced anger. Do people actually think authors have any actual say in that sort of thing most of the time? You can one star authors until the sun burns out, but we can’t make it happen. So really, all the one star for no Kindle people are doing is harming the person who can’t do a thing about it, and being uselessly negative in the bargain. I get that it sucks, but I think it sucks too. See, we’re on the same side so why on earth would there be some sort of attack on the author when he or she can’t do anything to help you? Write the publisher. Click the “I’d like to see this book available on the kindle” button. But that one star review will net you nothing but negativity and I’d hate to believe people would rather be negative for negativity’s sake.

We like to get our books into your hands. I promise. But I don’t have a darned bit of control when or if my books show up in the Kindle store. Not a bit. Believe me, I want them available there too! One star reviews or 5 star reviews, it’s totally not in my hands. I don’t own those rights, I can’t do my own distribution and neither can most other authors, especially those who’re signed with a publishing house. The publisher handles all that. NOT the author.

It takes a lot of time and effort sometimes, but it DOES happen and we’d like to get those books out in a wide variety of formats because we love our readers. But man, I gotta tell you, I feel no fondness to get attacked for stuff I can’t control. We can work together and hopefully make a difference, or some can attack the wrong person who can’t do anything to remedy the situation. I’d rather it be a positive than a negative. But that’s just me.

/soapbox

Everyone have a great MLK Day! What a complicated and complex man Dr. King was. Imperfect and yet, tireless and unswerving in the fight for equality and justice.

Here’s a few of my favorite quotes:

A man can’t ride your back unless it’s bent.

Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness

I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant.

Comments are closed.