biancadarc.com Blog

NYC Book Fair – Sun. Dec. 2nd

If you’re out and about in New York City this weekend come see me at The New York Center for Independent Publishing, located at 20 West 44^th Street (between 5^th and 6^th Avenues) on Sunday between 11am and 5pm. I’ll be signing books and giving away goodies!

If you’re in the NY area, come on down and see us! There will be a whole bunch of authors there at the 20th Annual Indie & Small Press Book Fair. (More info at: www.nycip.org )

Hope to see ya there!

Guest Blog: Lucy Monroe

Can I share my newest reading glom with you? It’s not a particular author, but another romance sub-genre that I find I really enjoy. I haven’t been this “glommy”" since I first discovered the non-demonic side of paranormal romance. Vampires could suck blood, but they didn’t have to kill people. How cool was that? But I digress. This is about my most recent joi d’ pour lire experience. It’s gay romance.I would never have stumbled across this subgenre if I hadn’t first become a huge fan of eBooks. So many authors, so little time – how true that is. In the three years since I started really reading eBooks, I’ve bought and read hundreds and hundreds of titles on top of my already busy print reading schedule. And a big chunk of those electronic books have been gay romance lately. Authors like JJ Massa, Sean Michael, Stephanie Vaughan, JL Langley and Vic Winter have become as strong an auto-buy for me as Jayne Ann Krentz and Christine Feehan.

So, it should come as no surprise that I have incorporated a few gay characters into my most recent book DEAL WITH THIS. I’ve got to admit that Jillian’s flamboyant, pink-haired boarder and show’s co-star, Gavin, stole my heart and came close to stealing the story. It’s a good thing I was so eager to write Jillian and Alan’s romance, or it would have happened.

What is so compelling about gay romance that it’s become a permanent and significant part of my reading life? I think it’s the purity of the romance, the intense emotions and yes…the fact there are two heroes is nothing but a bonus, you know?

So, do you read gay romance and if you do…who are your favorite authors?

I love to give away prizes, so I’ll be drawing a name from the comments on this blog to receive a hardback edition of WILLING and signed cover flat of my brand new release, DEAL WITH THIS.

Hugs, Lucy

http://lucymonroe.com

http://lucymonroeblog.blogspot.com

Writing Challenges & The Shower Trick

So you might have noticed the word count meter is starting to creep up again. Yay! One of my little tricks when I’m stuck and don’t quite know how to move forward with my story – and this may not work for everyone – is to take a shower. I know it sounds strange, but my mind tends to wander when I’m in the shower and I always seem to come up with solutions to problems that have been plaguing me. Some people “sleep on it” but this works faster. lol.

This is something I discovered by through serendipity. Over the years, I began to realize that I had a number of “eureka” moments in the shower. Weird, huh? The forced moments away from the distractions of my regular life and the soothing smells of soap, shampoo and the trickling of water, seem to act as a stimulant for my mind.

So if you ever have a thorny problem and don’t know your next step, I suggest you find a loofah and some great smelling soap and take your problems into the shower. Chances are, when you step out, you just might have an answer!

Writing Again – Thanks Goodness!

Now that my edits are done (for the moment), I’m getting back on track with the writing challenges I’ve set for myself this year. I have a LOT of catching up to do, but as you probably know, I’m a fast writer, so I think I can plug away over this week and Thanksgiving and get back to where I want to be.

For those of you who have never done NaNoWriMo, I committed to doing it again and I really want to get my 50,000 words written for it this month. The goal of NaNo is to write a total of 50,000 words for the month of November – or about 1,667 per day. When I actually sit down to write, 1,667 words is pretty easy for me. Actually, when I sit down to write, 5,000 words per day is within easy reach. It’s just that of late, I haven’t been able to sit down and write anything new.

On that front, the edits have gone well. I sent them back to my editor and should only have one final read-thru to finish before I can put this puppy to bed. I can’t wait! In the meantime, I’m going to try to write some new stuff today and catch up on my goals. Anybody else NaNo’ing? If so, I wish you luck and happy writing!

Long Time, No Write

It’s been longer than I like between blog posts for two main reasons… first, I caught a little bug that had me living on the couch for a few days. Luckily that’s over now. Thank God! Also, I’ve been deep in edits with my December release. Doing edits is tedious work and a necessary evil of the business, but I still like to gripe about them. lol.

With the loss of Chippewa/Lady Aibell, I’ve also had to do a little retuning of my website. It’s an ongoing process, but I’ve made a start in between editing. (I find it’s easier to keep my focus if I put down the edits every few hours to do something completely different, then come back with a fresh outlook.) You might notice I’ve changed the header graphics on the Home section of my website to eliminate the Military Men link, because that series has no home now. I’ve also done a little reorganization on the Paranormal section to eliminate the first three vampire stories and get rid of some of the extra pages that were proving cumbersome. I want to make the site sleeker and easier to navigate, so I’ll probably be doing some alteration to the FutureWorlds section next… but maybe not until I get over this upcoming release. It just depends on whether or not I can find the time.

The only page I haven’t updated yet (that I’m aware of) is the Books page. I figured I would put that up in a week or two, when Sweeter Than Wine comes out. We’ll see. I might do it sooner, if I can get everything arranged. In the meantime, just about everything else in the Home section of the site has been updated to the new, darker castle entrance graphic. I hope you’ll let me know if there are any spots I missed or links that don’t work.

I should be finishing my latest round of edits tonight, so after that, I hope to write some new material and get back on track – at least for a few days until proofing starts – with my writing challenges. It’s been a rough writing November so far!

Chippewa & Lady Aibell Closing

I found out this afternoon that both Chippewa Publishing and Lady Aibell Press will be closing at the end of the month. You may not realize this, but Chippewa was the very first publisher to ever offer me a contract.

Near the end of 2005, I saw an announcement on the EROS list about a vampire romance anthology competition offered by Chippewa for their Vamprotica 2006 collection. I’d never written a vamp story before, but had read a bunch and loved the genre. I figured, why not?

I wrote the story in about an hour – there was a 5k limit – and sent it off, not really expecting anything would come of it. A few weeks later, though the story hadn’t been selected for the anthology, I was offered a contract for One & Only to release as a single-title. I was floored!

That was in October. In November, I did NaNoWriMo for the first time and decided to try another new topic – dragons. I finished writing Maiden Flight in about 3 weeks. Building on the newfound confidence of having One & Only contracted, I decided to send Maiden Flight off to Samhain. It was contracted shortly thereafter. Although Maiden Flight was my first book to actually come out (on Valentine’s Day of 2006), One & Only was the first ever contracted, so it holds a special place in my heart.

I also went on to write more vamps and expanded the world to include weres and fey. Rare Vintage came next, then Phantom Desires, which did make it into the Vamprotica 2007 anthology. Forever Valentine went to Samhain, as did Lords of the Were, and in a few weeks, Sweeter Than Wine will join the collection.

There is some uncertainty regarding those first three stories right now because they won’t be available for sale after November 30th. However, I’m already looking for a new home for them and will underoubtedly be expanding them before they are re-released somewhere else. Stay tuned. I’ll let you all know when I know where they’ll be going.

In the meantime, I’d just like to thank the folks at Chippewa and Lady Aibell for giving me my start. I suppose this’ll be one of the last times I get to post the covers for these books. I created them and had a lot of fun doing so. Thanks again to Chip/LAP for allowing me to stretch my wings artistically.

New Blog Feature

I’m featured today over on the Smut Sluts blog. Great name, huh? Go and have a look. These girls are a hoot! http://smutsluts.blogspot.com/  Many thanks to the ladies over there for the feature!!!

Discovery Comes Home

Great landing for Discovery in Florida yesterday. I was glued to my TV and computer to watch the action. (The computer stream has a few seconds lag behind live TV, so I had to supplement with the little coverage the news channels had to see it truly “live.” Or as close to that as I can get.)

Anyway… the mission was incredibly cool to follow and there was even a cute little side story associated with the historic mission. Apparently, the handle to Luke Skywalker’s lightsaber was packed in the cargo hold of the shuttle for a few days in orbit. (Read more about it here.)

Now, as for my writing update, things don’t look great on the new writing front right now. I got hit with both edits and a galley proof yesterday – by the same editor! She’s trying to kill me. This is incontrovertible evidence.

So until I finish this mountain of work, I doubt I’ll be writing anything new. Hopefully sometime next week I’ll be finished with the edits and galley and can take a half hour to pound out a few new words. We’ll see.

Space Update

I’ve been watching the live coverage on NASA TV as they try to bring the space shuttle Discovery home. It *should* be landing tomorrow.

In the meantime I’ve been reading up on a comet that unexpectedly flared to a brightness where it’s now visible to the naked eye. I’m going to see if there’s an opportunity to view it where I live, since this is what they’re describing as a once-in-a-lifetime kind of event.

This comet, called Holmes (makes me wonder where Dr. Watson and Moriarity are!), is believed to be exploding, which is what’s causing the noticable brightening. Apparently it did this once before, in 1892, which is what led to its discovery by a fellow named Edwin Holmes (so that explains the name, lol). Cool, huh? You can read more about it here, if you’re interested.

I’ve also been reading up on a solar system they’ve found with 5 confirmed planets – one within the habitable zone, where water can exist in liquid form. There’s a good article on it on Space.com. While the planet they’ve recently confirmed is probably a gas giant, there’s some speculation that a rocky moon orbiting this big planet could possibly have water and therefore, the building blocks for life as we know it.

New: Cover for Sweeter Than Wine

Here it is… the long-anticipated cover for my December release, Sweeter Than Wine. Isn’t it cool?