Jules Jones

The novelette now has a not-sucky title courtesy of Watervole, comments from one of my betas, and more wordage as a result of the comments. It is in fact now a novella, having crept past 20,000 words this evening. Revised draft has gone off to two of the betas for further comments. There may yet be another round of revising, at which point someone else can look forward to it arriving in their inbox in search of a fresh pair of eyes.

Shall reconsider the market list when I think I've got the thing pinned down to a submission draft. But it's not really getting any less vanilla or low-conflict, even if it's getting longer. It's got more lovingly drawn word pictures of cocks, though. (Yes, I've been reading too much Oglaf today.)

This morning's cat-vacuuming -- setting up my Author Central account and author page on Amazon Japan. Here it is: http://www.amazon.co.jp/-/e/B002BMHH60

Top tip - use Chrome for this. The in-browser translation makes life ever so much easier. As far as I can tell you'll need an ordinary account on Amazon.co.jp first, which you then use to sign into Author Central at https://authorcentral.amazon.co.jp/

No idea why only some of my books are on .jp - I may have to pick up the Amazon IDs of the missing ones from .co.uk and try searching directly.

I've been mostly offline for the last couple of weeks, so I'm late with this news. Romance book blogger Jane Litte and her group blog Dear Author have been sued by erotic romance publisher Ellora's Cave for reporting on the problems experienced by some of EC's authors. Those problems include allegations by a number of authors of late or non-existent royalties payments, and books being put out with little or no editing.

There is now a defence fund, as this is going to be an expensive suit to fight. I've donated, because I believe that Dear Author should be able to report legitimate concerns about a publisher's behaviour without fear. There's more information about the fund at Dear Author's post. As some people in comments have been concerned about their legal name being exposed by the donation process, I can report that the GoFundMe site asks for your name twice, the first time being the name to use on the public acknowledgement, and the second time defaulting to using the same name but allowing it to be changed to the name on your credit card. There's also an option to be anonymous on the public acknowledgement.

It's been mentioned in the comment threads at Dear Author (and in the coverage at the Absolute Write Water Cooler, which is where I first saw the news) that a few authors have been publicly gloating about the lawsuit. The authors in question have had poor reviews, and as a result think that the Dear Author blog deserves everything it gets by way of punishment. They're being very short-sighted. It may give them a warm happy glow now to see their supposed nemesis punished, but the chilling effect of this suit is going to have major repercussions for authors if bloggers decide it's safer not to report on publishers' misdeeds. That includes the self-publishing platforms -- some of those have done some very naughty things that I'd rather know about when I'm deciding where to publish.

No, I'm not just saying this because Dear Author was nice to me. The only review I've ever had from Dear Author was a D, and I think it did hurt my sales. I'm saying this because I think that Dear Author's reporting is good for authors in general, and I resent someone trying to make them shut up.

Nice Tie is currently scheduled for release in next week's batch of new books from Loose Id. This is subject to the usual caveats about problems in getting the formatted ebook files onto a working server, but you should be able to get your hands on the book on Tuesday. Herewith the blurb and buy link -- excerpt to follow as soon as the approved excerpt is available.

Nice Tie

Alex Hall likes watching good-looking men doing up good-looking ties, a kink he can safely indulge on his morning commute as long as he’s discreet. At least until the day he meets new client Robin Wood, whose face seems oddly familiar. Embarrassingly familiar, when Robin recognizes him as “that guy on the bus.”

Lusting after the client and his tie is a really bad idea. Acting on it would be even worse. Which doesn’t stop Alex’s impulsive suggestion when he realizes that Robin's as intrigued as he is awkward. They’re both grown-ups, they can handle the conflict of interest, and if nothing else it will get the awkwardness out of the way. And there’s a cheap hotel at the end of their bus route.

Just one date. One night for Alex to enjoy watching beautiful hands managing a tie with style. One night for Robin with a man who can understand his own grooming kink, even if it’s not quite the same as Alex’s. One night, and then just good friends, while they’re working together. Nobody else’s business.

But Robin has entirely too much experience with romance at work, and the past isn’t staying past.


ISBN: 978-1-62300-771-3
Publisher: Loose Id
Author: Jules Jones
Cover Artist: Valerie Tibbs
Length: 42,000 words
Price: $5.99

Just received the finals for the Nice Tie cover art. :-) I still don't have a blurb or buy link to share with you, but you can see Valerie Tibbs's work below the cut. Note that there is mantitty, although it's not particularly NSFW.

( Read more... )

Just had an email to say my short story "Bread and Butter Pudding" has been accepted for Dreamspinner's anthology "Not Quite Shakespeare", due out in June. Paperwork still to be done, but pleased with this. :-)

Doing some tidying up, both physical and virtual, and came across the email conversation with my editor discussing the recently submitted draft of Lord and Master 2, and my plans for the third Lord and Master book. *Detailed* plans, and whether what I had in mind would fit in with Loose Id. But with a comment that if a job resulted from one of the interviews that week, it would take a while to write.

That conversation was five years ago this week.

It wasn't just the new job that resulted from one of those interviews, although that basically chewed up six months of all of my time and energy. A lot of it was one medical issue after another over the last four years, starting with the vicious viral infection that started a couple of weeks before Redemption 2009 and wouldn't go away.

At least now I'm back to being able to write reasonably consistently for stretches of several weeks at time, and did actually manage to complete the first draft of a short novel over the last 7 months, in spite of a couple of interruptions. That doesn't mean L&M3 is going to get worked on any time soon -- it's a complex story that needs to be very carefully managed and will take some time to write even if I'm fully fit and can give it my undivided attention. Realistically, I'm better off doing another one-off short novel I'd outlined last year, and getting Nice Tie up to submission standard. Any serious work on it is at least a year off, I suspect. Bit I do still intend to write it some day.

On Thursday Predatrix sent me some comments on the rough draft of Nice Tie, which I will be trying to work on over the bank holiday weekend. Not that I've got to it as of late Saturday afternoon... The gist of it is that a) the story works overall, b) the first four fifths is mostly pretty good, the last fifth has a bad case of plot being obtrusive.

I'm not surprised by (b). When we discussed it, the section she pinpointed was precisely the section I'd been wrestling to get down over the last two months. A couple of other comments about spots earlier where the characters were doing things for the sake of plot also mark points where I was hit by an inspiration particle that changed what I was doing with the plot. So one of the things I need to do is go back and make that all blend together a bit more smoothly. (Amongst other things, I need to do a bit of in-cluing much earlier on about Alex having seen a colleague's problems with an abusive/controlling partner, plus make it clearer that the reason for the lack of "why did you not mention this boyfriend before" is the lack of privacy to have that conversation.)

The other thing that I think is going on is that for much of the last section it's almost all dialogue and very little description/business, which makes the pace feel forced and is adding to that feeling of things happening for the sake of Plot. Predatrix agreed when I suggested that -- she hadn't consciously noticed it, because she's even less visual a writer than I am, but on having the possibility pointed out to her she thought it was a likely component of her reaction.

But (a) is good. Given the way this story changed and grew as I was writing it, I did wonder if it made sense outside my own head, and if there was enough story to support the word count it had grown to. (b) I can fix, as long as I have (a).

It's gong to take me a while yet to get this ready for submission, which is a shame because I'd hoped to have it ready to send off to my editor by now. But at least I've got something novel-shaped to work on, which is a distinct improvement over the last few years.

I forgot to mention that I have a new toy, namely an account on Authorgraph. This site provides an interface for readers to request electronic autographs from authors, whether to add to their ebooks, or to print out and keep with a print book. And yes, it really is a personalised autograph if you so choose. The author can type a message and then sign their name using a tablet, and the resulting file shows the actual signature process.

It's funded by affiliate links to Amazon, so you can only request signatures for books available on Amazon. However, you don't need to have a Kindle to request or display the autographs.

I've put most of my titles currently available on Amazon into the system, and you can find my account here http://www.authorgraph.com/authors/bookfetishist should you wish to have a play.

...it would appear that I have temporarily burnt out on writing sex scenes.

Or at least I'm having trouble getting any further with the one I should be writing at the moment. Okay, it's porn, and I mean porn as in True Confessions, not literotica, but there's actually a smidgen of plot in there and I feel enough interest in the characters and setting to keep my Inner Editor happy. But apparently I have run out of ways to describe the actual insert tab A in slot B bit. Even though I *want* to write this story, about these guys and what they're doing.

This is what happens if I lay off the 300 words a day for a month. :-( Had too many other things to juggle, and I was struggling with the scene anyway, and now that I have time/energy to work on it, I can't get back into it. Can't even skip this and go on to a new bit, because it's a 5 kword short (and one of the reasons for doing it is to get in some practice at writing to a specific length).

I suppose I'll have to do the other trick, which is stare at the screen each night for as long as it takes to wring out at least 50 words. That does eventually kick-start most things.