RITA ® Award-Winning Author of Fantasy Romance
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Thunder on the Battlefield, the fabulous anthology that contains Negotiation, the prequel story to The Mark of the Tala, is on sale through Friday, April 11! You can get the digital book for only 99 cents.
Hell of a deal!
Kindle:
http://www.amazon.com/Thunder-Battlefield-James-R-Tuck-ebook/dp/B00EE15GY6
Nook:
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/thunder-on-the-battlefield-james-r-tuck/1116359900?ean=2940148400660
Kobo:
http://store.kobobooks.com/en-US/ebook/thunder-on-the-battlefield-sorcery
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I’m over at Word Whores today, talking about the reveal of the cover for book 2 of The Twelve Kingdoms, The Tears of the Rose, as well as the word of the week: debt. I’m not going to chide you about your credit cards, but we there’s another kind to be thinking about.
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I’m over at Word-Whores this morning, talking about my lovely ARCs (!!!) and the good and bad of book contracts.
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Yesterday I received my page proofs for The Mark of the Tala. Aren’t they pretty?
I’m tremendous
ly blessed that the production editor at my publisher has turned out to be a major fan of the story and she went to lengths to make the book beautiful. She wanted special fonts, black-feather icons in the line breaks and special swirlies under the chapter numbers. (I would have looked up the term for that, but that’s the exact word she used in her email to me, so…)
Don’t they look great??
And yeah, you get tiny little teasers along with those. I would say I’m sorry, but I’m not.
LOL.
(On Twitter there’s a newish meme to apologize for stuff like this and add the #notsorry hashtag to the end. Adds the perfect bit of smirk to every tease.)
The other terrific thing about her liking this book and this series is that she’s a serious fantasy geek, the kind that rereads Lord of the Rings every year, so I love, love, love that this book is speaking to someone like that. 
I also have cover flats that I’ll take to Adventures in Fiction next month. And soon there will be ARCs! It’s all very exciting.
Finally, the second installment of Master of the Opera, Act 2: Ghost Aria releases this Thursday! 
This release-every-two-weeks thing makes me feel a bit breathless. Especially while receiving page proofs on Mark and finishing drafting Emerald, the new full-length novel, which will be renamed.
One day I’ll write interesting blog posts again!
(Presuming they were EVER interesting. *snort*)
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First off, OH MY GOD I HAVE A COVER FOR THE MARK OF THE TALA!!!
Thanks to the sharp-eyed Sullivan McPig for seeing it in the wild and telling me about it!
I’m all breathless.
Finally, on this penultimate day of the Twelve Days of Gifts for all you writerly types who are online today, my lovely agent Pam has a special gift for you! She’s offering a query and first chapter crit to TWO of you! Just spread the word and let me know that you did!
Tomorrow I’ll draw ALL THE WINNERS!
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Longtime readers of my blog know that my mom has given me a Christmas ornament every year since I was born. These last few years, we’ve formed a tradition of shopping with my stepsister the day after Thanksgiving. Not big box store mob sale shopping, but at this lovely outdoor mall in Tucson. Our first stop is always Crate & Barrel, where I now get to pick out my own ornament(s).
This year I spotted these sparkly castles – just perfect to remember that this is the year my Twelve Kingdoms books come out. I’m so in love with them.
Once again, however (this make two years in a row – eep!), I’ve decided not to put up a Christmas tree. Jackson, though no longer a kitten, is still wild to tear up any and everything he can. He’s also become keenly interested in climbing.
Uh huh. Exactly.
Also, we’re going on a bit of an odyssey this year. We’ll drive to Tucson for Christmas, then drive up the western slope over several days to Billings, Montana, for my stepson’s wedding on New Year’s Eve. We won’t be home until January 2, at best. Maybe later if the driving weather is bad, since we’ll return down the front range.
(For those who don’t know the Rocky Mountain region, the weather on the western side of the mountains is typically much warmer and drier than on the front range, the eastern side.)
Though we’ll have a house sitter, that’s still a lot of opportunity for Jackson to wreak havoc. And, by the time we get home, I won’t want to deal with TONS of clean-up. Last year, however, I found I really missed getting out all of my ornaments, revisiting all those Christmas memories. So this year, I plan to do a lot of garlands and suspend the non-breakable ornaments from those.
(I haven’t SEEN Jackson climb walls, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he did.)
One of my nephews has gotten into juggling lately, so we’re getting him a copy of Robert Silverberg’s Lord Valentine’s Castle. It might be a bit dense for him, but he’s struggling with adolescence and I think the themes of being dispossessed and discovering who you are will speak to him. Plus, juggling!
I recall that book for the way his learning to juggle gave Valentine the keys to handling his problems. It’s been a long time since I read it, so forgive me if I get the details wrong, but I recall the concept that, while keeping the balls in the air is part of the point, dropping one isn’t the end of the world.
I think about this sometimes because I often use juggling as a metaphor for keeping up with everything I’m doing. We all do, really, referring to “dropping the ball.” (Or is that a sports metaphor? Brilliant, really – the metaphor that works for both sportsing types AND theater geeks!) The problem with that is, I get so focused on keeping those balls going, adding in more, concentrating on catching and throwing, that it’s easy to lose the sense of fun.
And yes, juggling is fun.
Also, occasionally dropping a ball is part of the game.
If there wasn’t the possibility of dropping a ball, then juggling wouldn’t be interesting. The real joy, too, is when you get them all flowing.
Like magic.
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Many things going on today. Why today, I don’t know. Beware the Ides of October?
I’ve got a guest post over at What’s Beyond Forks today. She also gave Rogue’s Possession a lovely review.
I also am up over at Paranormal Romantics, talking about the map I drew for my Twelve Kingdoms trilogy and why maps of imaginary worlds are so compelling.
Finally, the BDSM Goodreads group is featuring Ruby on the group homepage. You can listen to a clip of it, which is really quite fun, I think. There’s also an interview with me, in case you don’t know everything already. :-p
Whew!
That’s stuff for Covenant of Thorns, Twelve Kingdoms and Facets of Passion, all on one day. What I get for simultaneously writing erotic romance, fantasy romance and fantasy.
It’s funny because I was at a conference this last weekend sponsored by a non-RWA writers’ organization. So the attendees wrote in a wide mix of genres. I gave a workshop called “More than Wham, Bam, Thank-you Ma’am: Wooing the Female Reader.” I wanted to make the case for adding love and sex to a story in ways that appeal to women. A number of the writers present came from a more hard-core epic fantasy lens. In fact, one guy handed me his book to peruse and, though the jacket copy mentioned probably five or six characters, not one was female. I nearly said I’d never read a book that doesn’t even mention a female character in the jacket copy, but I figured he wouldn’t care. I wasn’t his reader.
But I think I did take people aback a bit – even though I dedicated a slide at the start to a Fair Warning! that I write erotic romance and talk frankly about sex. A few people did leave, but more stayed. We had a great discussion. One question that comes up over and over is if I admit publicly to being a writer of erotic romance.
I find it funny that people ask that question. As if it’s something to hide, possibly to be ashamed of.
The gal who gave the opening luncheon address tossed off a remark that she wouldn’t want E.L. James’ paycheck (the writer of Fifty Shades of Grey) because she wouldn’t be able to face her grandchildren.
It struck me as a very odd thing to say.
After all, I have grandchildren. They’re obviously too young to understand now, but when they grow up, I’d be honest about what I write. I’d hope that they’d be proud to have me for a grandmother.
At a neighborhood party recently, the mother of three kids down the road said something interesting to me. She told me that she grew up in a farming community, filled with corn and conservative people. I wasn’t sure why she was telling me about it, but she finally said, “I am just so happy that my kids are growing up in a neighborhood where an erotic romance writer lives up the street. Even if they can’t read your books, it’s so good for them to know amazing people like you.”
It was one of the nicest things anyone has ever said to me.
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The lovely Sheila Deeth is hosting me over at her blog today, where we’re talking about my Twelve Kingdoms story, Negotiation. Come on over!
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My editor at Kensington, Peter Senftleben, asked me to draw a map of my world in the Twelve Kingdoms trilogy. This is what I plan to mail him tomorrow. In a poster tube, because it’s big! Though I hadn’t drawn anything in a really long time (20 years? More?), I enjoyed doing this more than I thought I would.
However, I also plan to tell him that, if they want to have a real illustrator redo it, my feelings won’t be at all hurt.
So, this week’s topic in the Word Whores bordello is – *rummages around in the purple pimp hat we store topics in* – Basing Characters on real-life people: the dangers and advantages. Hie on over yonder, to read more.
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In the mornings, we get up at six o’clock, get dressed for the gym and leave the house via the garage. This means that, blearily stumbling about as I’ve been – not a chipper morning person – the moment we hit the button to raise the garage door is my first real sight of the day.
This time of year, it’s right at the onset of sunrise and what a spectacular sight it is.
There’s something about the dimness of the garage, the way the heavy door lifts, with its cranking motor, that reminds me of a theater curtain – that unveils the large screen of this.
The outside comes in and steals my breath away.
It’s an amazing way to start my day and I treasure that.
I value so much about my daily life and am truly blessed to have it. Our daily routine is dull by most standards. Most days I don’t leave our property except to go to the gym. I love each phase of my day, from the kitties walking across my pillow when the alarm goes off to ensconcing myself in my reading chair at night with a glass of wine. The sun shines, flowers bloom, rains fall, the sun sets and rises again. It’s a good rhythm. A long-term cycle.
All through this, my steps seem to be set by the words I lay down in whatever I’m writing. I mark the passage of time by the change of seasons and the accumulation of word count. Writing a novel is an exercise in this kind of patience, I’ve found. For long periods of time – days and weeks and months – the the project continues. Every day I add a little more and track my progress. But it’s incremental and I can’t worry about it feeling like it’s taking forever because it takes as long as it takes.
That’s one of the keys to understanding novel-writing. Patience, persistence and endurance.
Until, suddenly, I’m near the end.
That’s where I am now. On Tears of the Rose, Book 2 of The Twelve Kingdoms, I’m at 84, 502 words. I’d originally thought it would end up around 85K, but once I dug in, once I judged the pace and length of Act I, in fact, it became clear that the first draft would top out around 98K. Writing about 2,000 words per day, as I am now, that means I’ll be done in a week.
And I’m filled with all kinds of odd, restless energy.
It’s as if, now that I can see the city on the horizon, I’m no longer satisfied with traveling 65 mph. I want to go faster and to hell with a speeding ticket. I want to drive all night, just to get there already.
I’m filled with impatience for everything else.
News articles – from frivolous to searingly serious – irritate me. People post jokes that I find facile, ridiculous or even infuriating. Every Facebook and Twitter post I see seems to elicit a snarky response from me and I have to stop looking, because I’m afraid I’ll lapse and actually type one of these comments. Even pics of cute baby animals annoy me.
It’s like I become a total sociopath.
I sometimes think that if I were a full time writer, I would take myself and my last 15-20K and just lock myself in a remote cabin or beach house somewhere. Which I find bewildering, because I love my beautiful, peaceful home and the life we have in it, with our lovely daily rhythms.
Somehow, though, this process of completing the book – which means the ending, because I write my stories from beginning to end, no jumping about – absorbs so much of my thoughts and mental energy, that I snarl at anything else impinging on it.
Also, I’m pretty sure I write a post like this every time.
You all are lovely to put up with me, really.