My website won’t be available tomorrow. The following notice will be in its place. If you’ve got a blog or a site, would you consider joining me?

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The debate over SOPA/PIPA (https://www.eff.org/issues/coica-internet-censorship-and-copyright-bill) is being presented as a fight on behalf of creative people against content piracy.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

I am a creative person. I create content. The proposed laws do not protect me, and they were not written with the best interests of either myself or my readers in mind.

The short version is that the proposed legislation allows the government or their appointed representatives to remove content they don’t like with no explanation or appeal.

Readers, writers, and buyers of erotic fiction are already aware of how easy it is for retailers and transaction middlemen to say what we enjoy is “bad” and that we have no right to create it or consume it. And that’s with Constitutional protection of free speech.

If you’re okay with turning over all creative control to corporations with the power to lobby Congress, just come back tomorrow when the strike is over.

If you find this, er, naked power grab disturbing, dangerous, and un-American, go here: http://sopastrike.com/strike

I’ve been cheating on erotica with another genre. Honestly, I think I just burned out a little. My editor is one sharp cookie – she noted that some of my sex scenes were getting a little repetitive. Great if you really like swimming scenes in your erotic fiction, not so great if you need variety.

Anyway, I’ve been working on something with absolutely no sex. The female lead is a computer.

And taking a break seems to have been just the inspiration I needed, because a great little short erotic story practically jumped into my computer. I had a ball.

(Little secret from the trenches: Some days, the words pour out of you. Some days, every sentence is a struggle. When you go back and reread your work a few weeks later, you will not be able to tell the difference between the fun days and the hard days. It’s not FAIR. But it’s why experienced writers will tell you that you gotta write even if you’re not in the mood.)

This one is pure erotica. There’s a story, and characters, but the focus is a hot and sweaty threesome. I broke the C-word barrier, which is probably not a big deal to you but was huge for me. I’ve got the edits back and done, and now I’m writing the HTML. My in-house designer whipped up a cover:

Yes, I’m self-publishing it. Rant on: There is literally no place for me to sell this story where it would even pay for my time. I’ve been doing work for hire as a professional writer since the mid-90s. Fifty bucks and copies? Seriously? Those are not professional rates. I made more per hour writing “confessional letters” to porn magazines fifteen years ago. Not that I would do that today, because they’re still paying the 25 bucks a letter they paid fifteen years ago.

Now, I can think of a couple editors who have such spectacular reputations and put together such crotch-throbbing awesomeness in their anthos that I’d take a crappy fee just to be near them. But those are the superstars. If you can’t pay me with your independently verified genius, I want to be paid with money.

But even the places that supposedly pay with money are upping the insanity factor on their contracts. Rights purchased for the life of the copyright? That’s not just stupid, that’s INSULTING. A chunk of the net with no definition to “net” but “what we get from the retailer”? I might have fallen for that as a kid… wait, no, I wouldn’t have, because everyone who’s ever read Variety knows that there IS NO NET by the end of a production.

Self-publishing gets easier every month. Sales go up every month (at least, mine have yet to flatten out – and my self-pub work is getting better reviews to boot). And the industry response to this is to make the contracts harsher and less fair?

Anyway, my experience with self-pub has been so enjoyable that I’m just going to get this story in front of the only people who matter. You. You’ll be able to read it next week, for 99 cents.

My Google alert pops up whenever someone reviews my books. Like most authors, I check the “score” and then I read. I’ve just been convinced to do things in the opposite way.

The review was of my Tuscan. The score was a C+, and I admit, I winced. The review, on the other hand… well, she didn’t feel it was the most developed story ever, or particularly believable. (For the record, I can see how a reasonable person might think both things, even if I disagree with the first part!) Then she went on to say the book was “an extremely romantic, very cute, entertaining, heartwarming novel about the ultimate fantasy.”

Ding! You know what? That’s exactly what I set out to write. (I couldn’t resist emailing her to thank her, and we had a nice exchange that suggests to me that we both totally understood what the other one was saying.) The Tuscan was basically me having an extended daydream and hoping to bring readers along with me. It is deliberate, unashamed, unapologetic escapist fluff. The world NEEDS fluff. After a long day at work, both paid work and work taking care of my family, I’m tired. I enjoy a meaty, thoughtful book as much as anyone – I adore Kazuo Ishiguro and I would totally have Richard Dawkins’s babies – but sometimes, I just want someone to tell me a story.

I don’t mean I just crap out my stories. I work hard. After a first draft, I work on developing subtext, themes, foreshadowing, all the good stuff. Sometimes I succeed, sometimes I fall short, but generally I think each story is better than the last one. I want my romances to be good escapist fluff. But I don’t apologize for writing fantasy, and I’m so proud and happy that the story I wrote connected with this reader on that level. I’m going to take that C+ with pride.

It’s fall! Wood smoke, leftover Halloween candy, crisp mornings, and @#$% Christmas music at the shopping centers. Seriously, what’s up with that? We’re not supposed to worry about holiday gifts until November.

*checks calendar*

Holy hell, it’s November.

Fine. That means it’s time for my favorite fall tradition… Monkey Bread. I learned to make it as a college student, but I didn’t realize what a powerful thing it was until I moved into a fraternity house. I started making it one night, completely alone. Then one tousled male appeared, then another, until finally the kitchen was full of boys trying to act casual. After the bread came out of the oven, I was the recipient of so many hugs and offers to fix my car or soup up my computer or take me out to dinner that for a moment I knew what popularity felt like.

And it never got old or lost its charm. Girls who hung around the house in revealing clothes couldn’t compete with me when I fished the bundt cake pan out of the cabinet.

I’ve seen several recipes that class it up, make it fancy, make it… work. Effort. Feh! And frankly, the results are no better. This cheap recipe tastes like fall and being the homecoming queen.

Monkey Bread

Four little tubes of biscuit dough (Get the cheap generic ones, not the brand name ones. I have no idea why, but the pricier dough doesn’t work as well.)

One stick of butter

Cinnamon

Sugar

Mix the cinnamon and sugar in a bowl. Pop a tube of dough, and rip each biscuit into four pieces. Roll each piece into a ball, and then roll the ball in the cinnamon and sugar. Toss each ball into an ungreased bundt pan. Repeat until all four tubes of biscuits have been turned into awesomeness. Pour remaining cinnamon and sugar over everything. (Use your head – if you have two cups of sugar mix left, don’t dump it all in there. I guess I usually have a quarter cup or a little more left over? Not sure. I’ve been making it for twenty years and I’m fuzzy on the specifics.)

Melt the butter in the microwave. If it separates, just stir it a little. Pour evenly over the dough balls.

Bake according to the directions on the dough tube – if it’s got a range like 11-13 minutes, go with 13 or 14. Let it sit for five or ten minutes to solidify after you take it from the oven. Molten sugar butter is basically lava and will burn off your tongue.

Invert pan over a platter. The buttery gooey slop runs a little, so you want a couple inches of room, or a lip of some kind. Then stand back, if your audience is young and male and ravenous. You could lose an arm if you get in between them and the bread.

Do you have your own recipe for Monkey Bread?

Okay, not really. These are vacation pictures. When I went on that once in a lifetime trip to Florence, I did not meet any tall/dark/rich Italian princes. I went with my beloved husband.

Also, we went in 2006, and at that point, I was doing a lot of whining about wanting to be a writer, but not doing any actual writing. (I feel silly about that now. The only thing that keeps me from feeling bad about it is that the affliction is quite common.) So I wasn’t thinking about what would be good for a book. I was just having fun.

When I did finally sit down to write an erotic romance set in Florence, I enjoyed the excuse to take out my vacation photos and use them for “research.” Okay, I’m full of it, I was just having fun. I did find that it helped, though. Some of these pictures evoked smells, sounds, and feelings for me, and once I knew my characters, I had a world ready for them to live in.

I’m building a promo blog post around some of these photos, but I figured the three of you might enjoy the album, now with actual explanations in the captions.

I know that some people sing about winter holidays. Summer gets a lot of good press. Yeah, yeah, whatever. Give me autumn any time. The cool air justifies woolly slippers and cups of hot tea. The world is beautiful with tons of things to do, and at night after a long day of apple picking or fall festival browsing, you fall asleep in a cool room (a temperature achieved by opening the window, not spending money) snuggled under blankets.

Autumn has also been a time of personal renewal for me. It probably started out that way because school started in the fall, and although I didn’t get a social clue until high school, I enjoyed the academic side of things from the beginning. But the pattern held. I always seem to hear about new jobs in the fall. My boyfriend proposed in the fall, and a year later we had an autumn wedding. I got serious about writing fiction in the fall of 2009, and although family and work obligations remained constant, I have had a modest run of good things in that sphere.

Now I’m scurrying around getting the promotional stuff done for my third Carina Press novella (itself my seventh publication). It finally feels normal, just one more thing I do. I, sitting here in my sheepskin slippers with my cup of tea, am a writer.

I’m a writer with a crapload of leaves to go rake after this. Well, no season is perfect.

What’s your favorite season?

My October release has a cover, but don’t tell anyone

I love the font, love “Marco,” am pleased that they gave “Sara” actual curly hair (as opposed to merely wavy), and I love the colors. I’m still slightly bemused at the setting. The book is set in Florence, one of the most iconic (and inland) cities in Europe… and this looks a lot like an Italian coastal city to me. Honestly, Florence is practically a character in the book, it’s that strongly tied to place.

Hope this cover makes you want to read it This is absolutely my favorite book so far. If you’re looking for a real Cinderella story, and a summer romance to help you keep warm during the winter, mark down your calendar for October 10!

My day job, acquired because it was supposed to give me more time to write, has been draining my energy. Not mentally, but after a long day at the computer, I just don’t have the energy to sit at it for another two hours.

I was a consultant/contractor with four jobs, now I have one day job…the math worked on paper. And as a matter of fact, the math did work out in one key way. I’m back to having ideas for stories and dreaming about the plots in my head. You see the problem. What good are ideas if your butt isn’t in the chair getting them down on paper?

That was the thought going through my mind when I sat staring at the Word file on my monitor. Paper? What paper? I laughed a little, a brittle sound, when I realized I had not written anything on actual dead tree paper in… uh… good grief, twelve years.

Eureka!

I found a spiral notebook in the closet, sighed when I realized it contained the outline of my “I’m gonna write me one of them RO-mance novels and make a million dollars” book, tore out those pages, and started writing. No outlines. No marketing plan. No plot twist lifted from a Lifetime movie. Just the story in my head. When I covered a page, I set it down and turned off the light and went to sleep. I haven’t missed a night in three weeks.

Rediscovering paper and pen (cheap ballpoints are less smeary for lefthanders than the fancy gels, BTW) sounds ridiculous, but try it. Here’s what it’s done for me:

- Less fiddle farting around. On the computer, I can’t resist dinking with old text. Rewriting, smoothing, etc. I blow at least half an hour on every session rearranging old words and not producing new ones. With the notebook, I might scribble a margin note (sample: “No, she didn’t go to LA, she’s a local girl through and through”) and then I get on with writing as opposed to editing. I’m writing less per session, but I’m closer to finished with the first draft than I usually am after the same amount of time spent.

- The critical brain is off. It’s hard to stay in creative mode, and let the magic happen. Spell check, grammar check, typos, formatting, it intrudes a little no matter how on fire I feel for a story. With the notebook, my critical brain is engaged with holding the pen, not smearing ink, slowing me down so I can read my own handwriting… all good stuff, but not interfering with creation.

- No distraction. There’s no Minesweeper. No Twitter. No “I just gotta research this one thing.” I know there are a million programs I can use to block out the distractions, and of course there’s always self-control (pfft), but the notebook solves all of those problems for free.

Writers! What do you do to get your word count goals met? And do you give yourself any days off, or are you like me and one day off turns into four?

I love the Victorians. I love their smut, their children’s books, their prose style… I love everything about them except for their class structure. You know, the way they were completely okay with a tiny percentage of their population controlling all the wealth while everyone else was part of an underclass that didn’t deserve time off or fair wages?

Aaaaaanyway, many of my favorite authors are either Victorian or have their roots in that period, and their work is in the public domain. For years I have been collecting their books in the oldest editions I can find, but honestly, the best thing that ever happened to my collection is the Kindle. My offspring is three, and as much as I love the smell and the beautiful printing and binding…well, the books are safer up on a shelf. Louisa May, I’ll get you down again someday. Besides, I can get all these wonderful “collected works” files for free, and that leaves me more money for books.

You can’t argue with that logic!

I’m plowing through Frances Hodgson Burnett right now. A Little Princess and The Secret Garden are as awesome as I remember. Little Lord Fauntleroy gets a bad rap, but it’s right up there with Garden as far as I’m concerned in terms of style. Its only flaw is that nothing particularly bad ever happens to the kid – he neither suffers like Sara Crewe or has anything to do like Mary Lennox. He’s totally one dimensional, and that’s why this book doesn’t have the staying power of Princess or Garden. But it’s still a great read, and in her lifetime I think it was her most successful story.

Yes, indeedy, her books are classics. She must have had a golden pen and a lucky star… wait. What are these?

Go ahead. Get the collected works and read some of these stinkers. There’s one in here where the book starts out brilliantly. The character suffers, has a reversal of fortune, is plunged into a mystery with people plotting to kill her… and she solves the problem by going to stay in town with a couple friends, and the bad guys give up and move overseas. Very sensible and realistic, but not much of a story. It reads like a serial she got bored with writing.

There’s another one with wonderful characters, a marvelous plot, a backdrop of events that will eventually lead to World War I, all clearly leading to some kind of enormous world shaking event when the two child characters grow up (and probably learn to appreciate their guardian, who they’ve mistakenly blamed for their suffering). Instead, the two child characters grow up, meet at a dance and decide they like each other very much, the end.

The first one I mentioned came out post-Fauntleroy but pre-Garden. I thought perhaps I was seeing the evolution of a writer. (Personally, I struggle with both plot and letting bad things happen to my characters.) But that second one was her last book, finished several years before she died. The mediocre mixes with the great throughout her career.

Her biography gives a few clues to this state of affairs. One, she wrote for money, not Art or a Muse. She tossed a lot of copy out there to see what would stick. Two, she had a dramatic personal life. Anyone who puts her material in the category of melodrama should check out the woman’s actual life. If you match her biography to her bibliography, and assume there was a bit of lead time for the books to be edited, proofed, and published… well, I’m more of a Watson than a Sherlock, but even I can draw a few connections.

At any rate, pondering the wild range of quality from this author gives me hope. She was successful and popular in her own time, even if some of her work was crap. She wrote a few things that have stood the test of time. I could do worse than to have her bust on my metaphorical piano.

If you like folk/classic country/roots music, do your ears a favor and check out Robin and Linda Williams. I’ve been a fan of theirs since I was in a musical they wrote. I bought a bunch of their albums at the time, but since it was 1994 and I was broke, I bought them on cassette and not CD. I couldn’t afford the CDs, and heck, cassettes are forever, right?

So here we are in 2011. I hadn’t heard their music in…forever, because I haven’t owned a cassette player since three moves ago. Just for grins, I tried to find the Williamses on iTunes. There they were! All but my favorite album, naturally. Before I could get too cranky about that, I noticed that the songs from the actual musical were available as of last month.

I hit play on a song called “Don’t Let Me Come Home a Stranger.” I couldn’t hold back the tears.

In the musical, the song is sung by a Civil War soldier who is afraid that he’s so changed by his experiences, and that it’s been so long since he saw his home, he’ll be a stranger to the people he loves.  It’s a touching song, but even so my reaction was much stronger than I expected.

I scrolled through the rest of the songs on iTunes, and noticed they also recorded Stranger in 1984. I hit play, and the song that issued forth is the one I remember from the soundtrack that I have on cassette somewhere.  Touching, but not powerful.

What’s changed? Linda. She’s twenty seven years older. Her voice has lost some of the sweetness, some of its clarity. That rougher tone has turned the song into something so much richer and stronger. There’s also something about the way she’s hitting the words now. I don’t know if the singer would say her perspective has changed, but it used to be when she sang “will there come a time when the memories fade, and pass on with the long, long years” you felt a little sentimental. Now it might break your heart.

Or it could be me. Now I know what a quantity of riches would be lost if memory faded, if the ties that bind my son and my husband and me were to loosen and fall away.

Maybe it’s both.

What a gift this singer has that she can bring all of that to life with her words, you know? It is such a privilege to be an artist, and with my words create a relationship between a listener/reader and an idea. I don’t know if the things I’ve written will stand up to the passing of the years, but I am grateful that I can appreciate the gift in others when I see it.