Loved this dragon sculpture on the waterfront in San Diego.

So, in the flurry of travel for a weekend-long seminar for my day job in San Diego – which was illuminating, valuable and utterly exhausting – I totally forgot to announce the THING I’d been waiting to announce officially since, um, August. You all pretty much know about it already – that I signed on with Carina for a new trilogy. These are essentially more Facets of Passion books, but full-length novels, which means 2- to 3-times as long.

All you people saying “I wish it had been longer!” – see how I give you what you wish for??

The reason we did not announce immediately is because we – meaning Agent Pam, Carina and I – all wanted to go for a retitling and rebranding of the series. It’s sad on the one hand, because I really did love my “jewel” titles. But readers would see those titles – Sapphire, Platinum, Ruby and Five Golden Rings – and not know that they were erotic romances. I’m no marketing or business guru, but apparently that’s a problem. 😛

Thus, though I snort-giggle at some of the titles out there, I have gone full Borg and have been assimilated.

(You would not believe the cool stuff this ocular implant can do!)

So, I’m delighted, excited and just really pleased to OFFICIALLY ANNOUNCE

*clears throat*

*makes jazz hands*

My new erotic romance trilogy:

FALLING UNDER

The books will be

GOING UNDER (July 2014)

UNDER HIS TOUCH (January 2015)

UNDER CONTRACT (mmfflbrg 2015)

When you all get your paws on them, you’ll find that the titles really *do* reflect the stories themselves, which was important to me.

You all know about GOING UNDER already, because I had been calling it Emerald here. And yes, it’s all written. In fact, I’ll be working on developmental edits on it as soon as I finish this post.

An amusing story came out of my critique partner (CP) reviews of the initial draft, which carries a useful take-home message.

See, these books will also be a departure for me, because I’m including the hero’s point of view (POV). The Facets books were all from the heroine’s POV. Going Under, at least, alternates between the hero and heroine’s POV’s. (Probably they all will, but you never know what will happen when I get to actually writing them.) I wrote from the hero’s POV once before, in the fairly obscure Hunting the Siren, but this was my first significant effort to capture a “guy voice.”

Part of his voice emerged in that, at least in the lustful throes of sex, he thinks of her breasts as “tits.” To me, this is a convincingly guy thing. Particularly this guy. It’s a strong word, as these things go. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever used it in a story before – and pretty much not in real life either. Well, one of my CPs (nothing against you, darling!) mentioned, pretty much as her very first comment, that I needed to search for “tits” in the manuscript because I’d used it way too many times.

Taking her comment to heart, I searched for it and found 19 occurrences. In 308 pages and over 82,000 words. Conversely, I used the word “breast” well over 100 times. (Hey – it’s erotic romance. What did you expect?) That’s a 0.02% incidence of tits versus over 0.12% for breasts (I got tired of counting) – an order of magnitude in difference.

But, because “tits” struck her as such a strong word, it stood out.

I guess I mention this because readers will always have their pet peeves. Especially with sexual terms. Sometimes a blog post or Twitter hashtag will prompt people to riff on the words they hate. “Moist” crops up quite often. Surprisingly often, to me, because I don’t have the issue with it that so many seem to.

The thing is – this is something a writer simply cannot control for.

It falls under the “you can’t please everyone” umbrella. It’s simply not worth worrying about. Let the readers have their fun and riff on most-hated words and phrases – heavens know, I have them, too – but don’t write accordingly.

Way too crazy making to fret over too many tits.

I need that on a t-shirt.