Kerry Allen

Blog: Noticed every single WWIR post was titled with April dates and fixed. Nothing against the month of May, honestly. I can’t believe it will be June in just a few minutes.

Rhan: Decided no sex for the incubus with his twue wuv (mean, mean writer!). Felt bad for him and decided phone sex was permissible. Wasted valuable time vacuuming up the ashes of the beta reader who spontaneously combusted. (Interesting how saying something naughty seems so much naughtier than doing the naughty thing being said. And awesome to have a heroine who can talk the talk without blushing and stammering. “Potty-mouthed, sexually liberated Jezebel!”)

WL: Did absolutely final self-edit. Made sure the town thread and the list thread ran throughout. Did nitpicky language stuff like agonize over replacing as many was-es and were-s as possible with better verbs. Crept a little bit over 100,000 but not cutting back down without some compelling motivation (i.e., “We want to publish this immediately, but only if it’s 2,000 words shorter”).

IIWS: Was I out of my frickin’ mind? Nifty idea, but unnecessarily complicated. There’s a point where giving the reader a choice of direction when CLEARLY this is the way the story wants to go and dealing with the fallout of that wrong decision is just a pain in the ass. Does picking which hero you want and letting me take it from there count as interactive enough? Probably end up just carving it into 2 separate stories so I can finish the bloody thing. Goodbye Annabelle, hello Anna and Belle.

I decided to go ahead and convert the site proper to a WordPress template, so at the moment, there’s nothing over there but a blank.

This would be a perfect time for a bunch of people to take a keen interest in me, yes?

Edited to add: Oh, how I love it when HTML actually does what I want. Too bad I have such bad retention. I know I’ve done a Table of Contents type thing (click to zoom to another section on the same page) before, but I had to look it up again and spend an hour futzing with it to get it right…

I had an actual face-to-face, use-your-inside-voice conversation with someone I don’t know very well (a rare event, and with good reason), and somebody threw my writing into it during an awkward lull, resulting in the token expression of interest and vague question about the subject matter.

I sometimes forget normal people don’t see words written out in their heads the way I do, so when I say I wrote a romance novel about djinn, they hear “gin” and think I tell tales of alcoholic love.

NEW HOT SUBGENRE ALERT!

I even have the tagline for my new Boozehounds in Love web site:

He likes you if he holds your hair while you puke, but if he kisses you after, you know it’s TRUE LOVE.

WL: Combed its hair, washed its face, pinched its cheeks and sent the first 50 out for another visit. My query-writing skills must have improved now that I’m at version 8.3.

Note to self: Next book, completely rewrite query 8 times before sending one.

SC-1: Rewrote Elle’s half of Chapter One. Slowed down a little to set tone and broke up the infoberg. (Whaddya mean I don’t have to explain everything RIGHT NOW?)

SC-3(?): Wrote a bit of dirtiness. Realized I could not transplant it to, for example, SC-1 because it doesn’t fit those characters. Patted myself on the back for not having interchangeable characters. Strained shoulder. Learned valuable lesson about humility.

Not precisely writing-related, but I’ve moved up in the Google world. I used to be stuck after pages and pages of John Kerry with some political dude last name of Allen, but now I’m in second place behind a 24-year-old dead backpacker, and frankly, I don’t expect to compete with that and win.

…appear to be born already possessing all the skin they will need as adult bloodhounds, and they just lope around in all that excess wrapping.

Kind of like a toddler wearing your clothes.

It’s not attached anywhere except their feet!

You could use one for a parachute in a pinch.

I could have played with that floppy skin for hours.

Yes, I am easily amused.

(Picture from here, not the actual little dude I was playing with, who was about half that size and even less grown into all that skin.)

And no, we are most definitely not getting another dog. Ever. My nurturing phase is over, relegating small things that need constant attention and behavioral training to the “annoying time suck” category.

But it’s still fun to coo over other people’s annoying time sucks.

Personal Demons by Stacia Kane
Mass Market Paperback, 306 pages
ISBN: 9780809572557
Available Now
Retail Price $6.99
First in series

(For your viewing enjoyment, Chapter One can be found here.) 

This post can be subtitled: How Blogging Can Sell Books.

I’ve been reading the blog of Stacia Kane (aka December Quinn) for ages (or for LiveJournal fans, same content here). I find her blog writing funny and quick-witted and likable, so it stands to reason I’d find her fiction writing to be the same. Now, there are plenty of writers I like as bloggers but don’t read their books because the subject matter isn’t up my alley, but how could I resist this one?

Megan promises listeners to her her radio call-in show that she’ll “slay their personal demons,” and they believe her. So do the personal demons. Although she doesn’t know it, Megan is the only human without a personal demon on her shoulder. This, coupled with her psychic abilities, makes her a valuable weapon for any demon “family” that can gain her allegiance. It also makes her a serious threat—not just to the personal demons, but to a soul-sucker known as the Accuser, who has an old score to settle.

Dr. Meg is forced to use a ridiculous tag line about demon slaying on her call-in therapy show, and the demons take her literally, their response along the lines of: “Oh, you’re gonna slay us? Not if we slay you first, beeyotch!”

Immediately following her first show, Meg is paid a visit by tall, dark, and smexy Greyson Dante. First impression: Slick lawyer dude. Second: Yay, her very first stalker! Third: Is it wrong to be attracted to a crackpot with delusions that he’s a demon?

Meg has to accept the existence of demons when they start showing themselves and trying to kill her, but they’re not all bad. Grey is slowly but surely seducing her, and the three overzealous bodyguards he’s assigned to protect her 24/7 (privacy? fuggedabowdit!) put their lives on the line for her. Pretty much everybody else is trying to end her life, though, or at least ruin it. As resourceful as Meg is (FYI, in a pinch, you can beat a zombie to death with a showerhead), she needs all the help she can get to stay alive long enough to figure out why she’s really the object of all this demonic interest.

The story is told in limited 3rd person POV—you get only Meg’s version of events. So when Grey’s being all tight-lipped and enigmatic (99% of the time), you get to share Meg’s frustration for the duration because there’s no cutting to Grey to explore his innermost feelings. (Although the reader does have the advantage of being unclouded by that new-relationship insecurity Meg suffers. I mean, the man defies his very nature as a demon to protect her and do honorable things to please her. He’s obviously up to his sardonic brows in love with her.)

Although there are plenty of romantic sparks, Meg and Grey’s relationship isn’t the primary focus of the book, so I’d call this one UF with strong romantic elements. It’s bite-your-lip scary in places, fan-yourself sexy in others, and laugh-out-loud funny all over the place, the most all-around satisfying read I’ve had in a long time.

Why I love Meg: I’d hang out with Meg, and we’d have a blast. I wanted to high-five her at several points in the story, like here:

She’d won the battle. Was it worth torturing herself in order to get back at him?

Yes. Yes, it was.

She also has a lot of interesting stuff to grapple with (and I’m not talking about Grey). For instance, she doesn’t have an evil little imp on her shoulder pushing her to do wrong like everybody else does, but she hasn’t been a saint. Does that mean she’s naturally a bad person? 

Why I love Grey: Since I ended up with a list here, maybe I should revive HOTM for him. He’s a protector, at least when it comes to Meg. The rest of humanity? Couldn’t care less. Because he’s a demon.

“What did you expect demons to do, teach baking classes and have sewing circles? Fucking with humans is our purpose in life.”

He’s another one of those guys who is what he is and doesn’t feel the need to apologize for it—always a score with me.

Book the Second, Demon Inside, is scheduled to come out in 2009. It will be mine.

Also, many moons ago, Stacia/December was posting metrics from another WIP, Unholy Ghosts—stuff like word count for the day, rampant drug use (presumably in-story!), and a sample of what she’s dubbed Downspeak, which is a speech pattern for certain characters. I was charmed by the Downspeak (I can’t remember the last time I was charmed, but I’m fairly sure it was something by Dr. Seuss) and am jonesing for her Big New Agent to find that book a home so I can have it in my hot little hands sooner rather than later. Watch out for that one.

NB: Came up with lame-but-at-least-not-comical title. Found my ending in Mistah Hilliard’s “issue.” Spit-shined the whole thing. Wrote cover letter. (Incidentally, summarizing 15,000 words in 5 sentences is a whole lot easier than doing same for 100,000. Surprise!) (And it is precisely 15,000 words. It got up to 15,227, but that was an easy trim.) Shot it off to the NB people. Yes, that’s right: subbed. As in, about 5 minutes ago. Now to fuggedabowdit and gitonwitsumpinelse.

(Oh, crap, you mean now I have to actually work on one of those huge-heartbreaking-investment-of-time-and-energy things again? Anyone else up for a trip to the liquor store?)

(I don’t drink, but the alcoholism gene triggers a calming effect if I hang out around large quantities of booze.)

(Actually, this story contains evidence of my being a series whore. I refuse to devote any more time to it at this point, but in the event somebody didn’t think it was utter garbage, I could probably crank out two more of these little puppies.)

(I just wanted to use parentheses again.)

SC1: Refreshed my memory about the 2 chapters I already have. Heroine is a bitter, soulless bundle of wrath. For some odd reason, I look forward to working with her again…