Samhain Publishing Ltd. Weblog

Overnetworking

I recently blogged about a flood of e-mails I receive from a Yahoo group to which I belong. Switching it to Web Only didn’t work, but I think I finally worked it around so I’m only getting Special Notices.

Yes, it did take me several months to a) finally get around to doing this and b) figure it out. There’s a reason I’m not an IT kind of person.

But as it dawned on my how annoying this flood was, I started to look around at all the e-mails that I get. Very few individuals actually e-mail me, but I receive, not counting this particular group, well over 40 e-mails a day from various legitimate entities and groups.

Car Lust

I’m on the verge of something new, something bold. A ground-breaking new sub-genre of romance. Performance car porn. Where the story’s not about the sex you have IN the car, but about the car itself.

I’m going to posit that you haven’t truly lived until you’ve driven a car that prompted a mini-orgasm purely by the force of the sensual cushion of leather on the seat, the slide of the steering wheel under your fingers, the roar of the engine surrounding you, the vibrations of the mother road humming through you as you push the pedal to the floor in a car built by angels on earth: German engineers.

Heart of the Sea

I’m thrilled (thrilled, I tell you!) to be part of the Love & Lore anthology — my first print release with Samhain!

Here’s a little “behind the scenes” look at how Love & Lore came into being:

Back in January, Samhain sent out a call for submission to their anniversary anthology with a Celtic theme.

I didn’t pay much attention to it at first. I had another project in the works and didn’t think I had any ideas that would fit. Well, the other project foundered and I was frustrated, looking for a new story to work with. I found the anniversary project call again and trolled through my idea file. I had about two pages of an intro that featured Selkies, but it had never really gone anywhere.

Bang. I was off and running. In a month, I finished the 16K word short story — only a thousand words over the required word count. I thought I was pushing it a little, but I knew if it was accepted, I had plenty of room to move during edits.

Carolan, Gia and I were the only ones who submitted! But we all submitted shorts, as per the original word count requirement. Angela James, the editor of this anthology, gave us a choice. We could either leave the stories as they were and release them as e-books only, or we could lengthen them all to make the required word count for a print release.

Guess which option we chose?

We all jumped at the chance and soon we had our novellas ready to join the Love & Lore anthology. And now here we are!

One more tidbit before I go.

Make Mine Myth

I love myths. Fairy tales and folklore fuel my imagination.

I love mythology so much, I blog about it every other Friday at Beyond the Veil. I’ve covered Norse, Egyptian, Basque, Slavic and Irish, to name a few and I’ve barely scratched the surface of these fascinating cultures.

The question I’m addressing today is: What is it about tales that are thousands of years old that continue to resonate with us even now?

Have Coffee Will Write

Ah, caffeine. The lifeblood of writers since coffee became coffee.

As nice as it is to curl up with a book and a cup of tea on a rainy day, when it’s time to write, there’s nothing that gets the blood pumping and synapses firing like a good cuppa joe.

Queen of Chaos

I had a hundred different blog topics to discuss until today. When it was my turn. Which, by the way, I thought was Friday because I wrote it on my calendar wrong.

So that’s what I’m going to talk about. Organization or the lack thereof.

I’m disorganized. A Queen of Chaos. A Duchess of Disarray. A Mistress of Messiness.

As I tell my husband sometimes when he’s down to his last work shirt, “It’s a good thing I’m so sexy.” gg