Marginally connected to that, I’m aux anges with the set-up of a KVM switch between my two machines, so that I can now write in Scrivener on the mac and still do everything else on the linux box WITH ONLY ONE MOUSE AND KEYBOARD. This makes my life so much easier.

Anyway, that’s my January update. I’ll now go back to shoveling snow.

Oh, wait, before I forget: I didn’t do a best of my reads of 2016 (sorry, I was swamped), but you guys will have to read Kirby Crow’s Malachite. Trust me on this. It is easily the best thing I read in 2016.

By now you’ll have heard about Indiana’s Religious Freedom and Restoration Act, and you’ve probably heard of the pizza place that discriminated their own business into the ground and then brazenly asked for financial support to stay afloat and got it. Yeah, that. A lot of adjectives come to mind to describe that situation. Unfortunately they won’t change a thing.

What will change a thing? Getting queer kids off the streets, providing beds and support. Helping the helpers; that changes things.

Kate Aaron, Meredith King, and AJ Rose have organized a push-back: Between now and May 1st, donate the money for your next book purchase (or, of course, more if you can and are so inclined)  to one of the fundraisers set up to counter the hate (or any other charity of your choice). In order not to deprive you of your read, we, the participating authors, are raffling off copies of our books. In my case, the winner will have the choice between Santuario and The Other Side of Winter.

So, go. Play. Donate. Show the bigots your fully extended middle finger and LGBTQ kids your support and compassion.

Find all relevant information and Rafflecopter at Diverse Reader.

Follow the booktour all week to read 10 new scenes set between the end of Santuario and the beginning of The Other Side of Winter. Almost 6000 brand-spanking-new words for you. Please be mindful of the spoiler alert, though, if you haven’t read Santuario yet. Leave a comment and your email at the tour stops to be eligible for the prize draw at the end of the tour.

Getting into the heads of new characters is like putting on new shoes. No matter how often you’ve seen them in the window or even handled them before, when you first slip in, they feel stiff and weird and alien. It takes a few miles of walking in them before they’re comfortable.

Same with characters. Even though these two have popped up in the previous book, writing them as POV characters is different. I have to consciously think about which way they would think/feel, and what they would do. It’s like a naggy tag in the neck of your shirt. Not actively painful, but ‘there’ in a way that’s distracting. It makes for slooow writing. Over the years I’ve learned to just write it anyway. That’s what rewrites are for; by which time the characters have become a second skin. Can’t wait for the feeling.

As for the Bluewater Bay novel, I wrote synopsis and blurb last weekend, and finished the cover art request, so that one’s out of my hands until the dev edits come back.

That leaves me free to work on Black Box. I started writing that one around Christmas, but fizzled out after only a few hundred words. The plot outline I had was just not working. The beginning bored me to tears. And if it bores me, it’s going to bore you, which is not acceptable. I’d been more or less idly kicking that one around in my head for the past few weeks, the muse feeding me stingy little bits and one-liners that ever so slightly shifted the characterization of both protags. Today I sat down to redo the outline. I threw index cards around like confetti, rearranged them in elaborate mosaics, scribbled here, scratched out there–in short, I made an inspiring creative mess of things, and I’m much happier with what I have now. I should be able to do at least the first few chapters, before I run into a couple of looser points that need to be tied down still. We’ll see.

Thank you to all of you who bought and loved Santuario, who gave it away as gifts and told others, and especially those of you who took the time to write a review. I appreciate every single one of them.

2013 has also seen the muse and me hard at work to continue the story of Bengt and Alex, which brings me straight to our resolution for 2014: Get that second book out into the world and into your hands. It’s looking good so far. The first draft is done, the rewrite is almost on track (I just have a dying motherboard to replace, and we’ll be back in the saddle, so to speak).

Apart from that, my head is full with stories and characters banging against the inside of my skull, so we shouldn’t run out of books to write any time soon. I want to try a few strategies to work on my writing speed, but only as far as they don’t compromise quality. We’ll see where that goes.

Love you guys. Thank you for making 2013 fantastic. Hope you’ll stay around for the next 365.

Lambda Literary: Dick Smart’s Romance in Theory and Practice (last review on page)

Holy hell. And did I mention “Holy Hell”? My first reaction was an amazingly uncool squee.

Then I saw the muse, stunned and slack-jawed, pointing at the words ‘Book Two’ before huddling in her favourite blanket in her favourite corner rocking back and forth, succumbing to the pressure of expectation. It’s way too easy to see her point. ‘Santuario’ was about ten years in the making. How can we come up with an adequate sequel in just one or two?

I try to remind her that a lot of the work, the world-building, the characters, the main plot-line are already done.

“It’s a very different book,” she wails.

“Because the guys are at a different point in their lives and relationship.”

“They’re gonna hate it! We’re gonna disappoint everyone!” She tends to speak in dramatic exclamation points when she’s deeply moved.

“People don’t always want the same thing.”

“They do too!” It’s really hard to argue with exclamation points. She stops rocking and reaches for the brown paper bag to hyperventilate. She’s starting to make me very nervous.

At the same time little bubbles of squee keep exploding inside me. I’ll have to coax the muse with their sparkle and keep the jitters confined to a dark corner.

Meanwhile, here’s to wonderful betas and brilliant editors who’ll take no excuses and no prisoners when it comes to telling me to cut the shit.