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.

In other news, I’m sorting ideas and cut scenes for the blog tour, I’m waiting for the print copies of TOSoW to arrive, and for some things to fall into place enough to be announced. Stay tuned.

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.

Cover by Reese Dante

I’ve also gone over the beta edits for the Bluewater Bay novel and submitted that earlier this month (another tada).

So everything feels done, done.  I’m scribbling a sentence or paragraph here and there, but the muse has eaten too much chocolate and gingerbread (I also suspect she got into the rum we brought back from Cuba), and is idly twirling gift wrapping ribbons around her thumbs while I’m organizing files. I’ve long been planning to collect all the bits and pieces like plans, plot bunnies, orphaned scenes, half-written novels, and terrible first drafts into a private wiki, so I can find things back at a click when I’m looking for them. That is finally happening. It’s the classic year end clean-up that allows for a breather, sets a symbolic marker, and frees capacities for a fresh start.

In that spirit I’m toasting you with some rum-spiced eggnog and wish you all Happy Holidays and lots of cheer celebrating whatever you’re into.

The Bluewater Bay novel is out to betas. Which, since it’s due at the end of the year, is a huge weight off my chest.

And, while I’m waiting for the lines for Santuario II to come back, I started plotting another Santuario novel. It’s not, strictly speaking Santuario III yet, as it has a different main couple, and Alex and Bengt appear without carrying a POV. But it does deal with one of the open plot points of the first book. So, a spin-off? Tie-in? I’ll call it 2.5 aka Black Box for now. The muse couldn’t care less. She just really wants to write this one. One of the MCs is trans. We’re both pretty excited about that, since it touches ground close to home. I worked out a decent plot skeleton today, and will start a first research wave tomorrow. Wish me luck.

There’s this cabinet from probably somewhere around the turn of the last century. It’s no valuable antique by any means. My great-aunt had already used it as a paint cabinet in her (rather damp) cellar for 60+ years, and it’s sat in our carport as storage cum potting bench for another ten.

It’s a skeleton of a cabinet. A rotting skeleton at that with ample wood borer traces. But I’d kinda like to restore it. Or rather, make it into a usable kitchen cabinet that still retains some of it’s old-world charm. It’s too far gone for a proper restoration. It needs sundry parts replaced, and probably a sturdy re-enforcement of the back wall, if I don’t want it to collapse under whatever I put on top of it.

Anyway, today I cleaned it off and brought it inside, so I can keep working on it, even when the snow starts falling outside. So, that’s where I’ll be when I’m not writing. My man thinks I’m utterly demented, but he’s too much of a gentleman to say so. He even helped me bring it inside, which, I might add, means, middle of the living room. Yeah, he rocks. Hard.

When I’m writing, I’m currently re-writing. Bluewater Bay that is. Filling in holes, straightening plotlines, ironing out character motivations. Slowly, ever so slowly, it’s starting to turn from a first draft into a manuscript. Which is good, because I need to wrap it and get it out to betas, preferably before the line edits for Santuario II come back, which could be any day, now.