Jules Jones

My m/m contemporary romance Nice Tie is 50% off today with any purchase at All Romance eBooks. :-)  The deal is over, but once you've read it, you can head over to Loose Id and pick up the wedding short story Knotting the Tie as a freebie.

Knotting the Tie is currently scheduled for release in next week's batch of new books from Loose Id. And... it's free during pre-order and immediately on release, although I don't know how long it will be before it reverts to list price. Herewith the blurb and buy link -- excerpt to follow as soon as the approved excerpt is available.

Knotting the Tie

After a year together, Alex knows what he has with Robin is for life, and he wants to stand up and say so in public. It’s time to propose, and he’s doing it the old fashioned way – roses, champagne and going down on one knee. But it may take more than that to persuade Robin it’s safe to put the past behind him. Maybe even more than the persuasive powers of a glass of champagne and going down on both knees…

This is a standalone sequel short story to Nice Tie - it's the story of Alex proposing to Robin, but you can read it without knowing anything about the novel.

Pre-order at the Loose Id website: http://www.loose-id.com/knotting-the-tie.html

I have, as usual, been taking part in PicoWrimo, for values of "taking part in" that include being too busy getting in my 200 words a day to participate in the comm itself most days. I've been even worse than usual this time round because the day job is well and truly eating my brain, to the point where I dropped my "hope to reach" target to 200 words a day because I knew 300 wasn't realistic.

It has, however, been successful as usual in getting me to get actual words down on page. For June Pico I wrote at least 200 words a day every single day on the current novel length work-in-progress. I was all set to continue with this in July, but on the 2nd of July Loose Id posted an internal call for submissions asking for wedding sequels to gay romance novels in the catalogue which didn't already have a wedding. As occasionally happens, the first line appeared in my brain while I was on my way to work that morning and insisted that I write the rest of the story. On 8 July a 6200 word wedding story for Nice Tie went off to the beta readers, and on 9 July it went off to my editor (who is still thinking about it).

Strangely enough, my hands hurt after that. I've still managed to write something every day, but it's been using Dragon to dictate a rough outline for a short and notes for some story ideas. Dragon is extremely useful, but it's hard work for fiction, and really does change my voice, so in general I don't find it worthwhile to try to write manuscript with it if there are notes I could be writing.

My new release, Nice Tie, is 10% off at Loose Id through until Sunday: http://www.loose-id.com/nice-tie.html

And Mindscan has gone off special, but my silkie novel, Spindrift, is now on special for $3.59: http://www.loose-id.com/spindrift.html

My shadowy mistresses at Loose Id would like me to point out that a number of other books are on special, some up to 50% off. You can find the Daily Deals page here (and I must grab the one I had my eye on while it's still on special): http://www.loose-id.com/specials/daily-deals.html

If you're reading books on a Kindle or a Nook, you can still buy your books direct from Loose Id, as they sell .mobi format (for Kindle) and .ePub (for pretty much everything else, including Nook and Kobo). You can find instructions on sideloading to various devices and apps on the Loose Id website: http://www.loose-id.com/faq/

They also seem to have been tarting up the VIP Club while I wasn't paying attention. This one's for the heavy-duty readers -- buy a VIP Club membership, and get 10% off every book you buy direct from Loose Id for the rest of the year, plus a load of other members-only stuff. http://www.loose-id.com/specials/vip-club-2014.html

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

Doing edits on Nice Tie. Note back to editor re one suggested edit:


Pavlovian conditioning at its finest. Thank you, Langford.

The contract for Nice Tie is now in the post box. I do hope it doesn't get lost in the Christmas postal avalanche. Next job -- start drafting the other paperwork. Some of this can't be finalised until after the contract is signed off at the other end, but I can at least make some notes for it. I also need to consider whether to update my bio, because it's ten years old and somewhat out of date. Probably not, because I still lead a very boring life out in meatspace, and anything interesting I could put into a bio without getting into trouble would have relationship issues with reality anyway.

Email this morning to say that Nice Tie has been accepted by Loose Id, subject to the usual tweaks. :-) So the rest of my free time this week is going to be taken up with reading the fine print on contract paperwork, as I've out of circulation for so long that all of the paperwork is different now.

Just completed the first revision pass on "Nice Tie", a job that has been outstanding for far too long. But this weekend I had both a functioning brain and the necessary uninterrupted time, and have been chugging through it. I'm still not entirely satisfied with the last four chapters, but I think I've dropped enough foreshadowing of one point into earlier chapters now, and I've managed to add some business to break up the blocks of dialogue.

Not really enough business, I suspect, but I'm about to send it through to Alex to see if it reads more smoothly to her now. It does still need work, but at this point I'd be happy to send it to my editor if she wanted it in a hurry for a first look. It's currently 42 kwords, so that's going to be decent short novel length for an epubbed romance, even if it doesn't get any longer in the editing.

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.