Looking forward… (plus a contest)

This is a repost from the Blaze Authors Blog from Thursday, in case any of the Super Lucky #1 Fun Blog's visitors might like a chance to win a book.

Hey, everyone! Happy… Dear God, mid-November? When did that happen?

I know it's a bit premature, but I've been thinking about goals for the new year. Goals have been on my mind all through 2011, since I've been doing all those ridiculous monthly Lent experiments, and while I don't want to do anything as intensive and constant as Discipline Year again any time soon, I am still very much pro-goal. So what to aim for, in 2012? Some aims are obvious; write and sell as many books as I can. Stay healthy. Learn when to step away from the keyboard. And between July (no sugar) and this month, alcohol-free Novembooze, I'm eager to keep eliminating sugar from my diet (if anyone else shares that mission, I can't recommend this lecture enough as motivation). But here are some more measurable, targeted goals I've been kicking around:

1. Read more. I'd like to read one hundred books in 2012. That's two a week, and I know to some of you voracious types, that's laughable. You could read a hundred books by April, I bet! But in the past few years, since becoming a writer, my fiction-reading skills have taken a battering. Every book I open up turns into a lesson. Not drudgery, not homework, but I'm so semi-consciously preoccupied with seeing how other authors put their words and stories together, it takes me ages to read, now. I'd love to relearn how to read quickly, nuts to turning the act into a learning experience. So, a hundred books in a year. That's my first goal.

2. Cook new things. My vegetarian month, Meat-Free May, and our participation in a farm-share program (we get a box of fresh, local, seasonal vegetables every week) have reminded how much fun it is to try new recipes. I'd like to try a new recipe once a week in the new year, to keep my modest culinary repertoire expanding…and to make grocery shopping a bit more adventurous.

3. Run ten miles. I used to hate running. But in the last decade it's gone from torture to chore to routine to something I even look forward to, some days. But I've yet to run farther than five and a half miles without stopping, and most days I go about three. I'd love to be able to say I ran ten miles, even just once, just to know I can do it. I'm going to aim to reach that goal by my birthday (May 2), with a little help from a renewed YMCA membership once the weather here turns inhospitable. Which could be any second now. [checks watch]

4. Land an agent. I really need to get off my butt and do this! It's a scary goal, because of all the ones I've listed, it's the one whose success is ultimately out of my hands. I can try and try and try, but I could still fall short. But that's a stupid reason to not try, so come January, I'm an author on a mission!

So those are my goals. I think 2012 is going to be an exciting year! I'll be attending my first Romantic Times Booklovers' Convention in April, and those folks actually just nominated Caught on Camera for an RT Reviewers' Choice Award, for best series debut. Pretty cool. So cool, in fact, let's do a contest! Tell me a goal you have in mind for the new year, and I'll pick a commenter [from the original post's comments] at random to win a paperback copy of Caught on Camera (or if you've already read it and you're patient, I promise I'll mail you a copy of my next Blaze, once it's published). I'll even make the contest international, so go ahead—tell me what you hope to accomplish in 2012! I'll pick a winner on Sunday, around noon, EST, and announce it in the Blaze Authors Blog comments.

Take care! Can’t wait to hear what your goals are.

Meg

Stuff that's good…

I spent so much of May in a rough mood, I wanted to write a post about stuff that's good. So without further ado, here are some awesome things.

1. A new season of The Bachelorette. My favorite guilty TV pleasure…until Instant Watcher posts another season of Celebrity Rehab, anyhow. I'm saving yesterday's episode for tomorrow afternoon, once I've hit my word count goal and tackled a bit of design freelance and wine o'clock rolls around. And whenever possible, I like to complement a new-sale bottle of champagne with an episode of The Bachelor or Bachelorette. I figure if I poison both my mind and body at once, they'll cancel each other out. So far this season I'm rooting for two of the dudes—West and JP. Not sure they've got the best chemistry with Ashley out of the whole group, but I hereby declare them my top-pick foxy front runners.

2. Neko Case. I've been listening to her 2006 album Fox Confessor Brings the Flood practically non-stop for the past month. Love love love. It's already right up there in my moody-folky-chick-rock favorites list beside Patty Griffin's Flaming Red and Tori Amos' Boys for Pélé.

3. Weekly writing goals. In just the past three weeks I've switched from daily word count goals to a weekly one. It's tough to predict whether I'll be able to churn out 4,000 words before lunch, or struggle all day to type a measly 500, so instead of saying, "I'm going to write 2,000 words every day this week," I'm saying, "I'm going to write 10,000 words this week." It's an ambitious number for me, but I try to take weekends off from writing and editing (work-life-balance and all that) so if I'm still a thousand words short on Saturday morning, I can play a little catch up. I think the key has been not capping myself at 2K for any given day, as I used to, as once I'd hit that number, I was off the hook, mentally clocked out for the rest of the day. Now I think, "I hit 2,000 easily. Better push for 3,000 in case tomorrow brings a word drought." It's working great so far, and I recommend it to other writers with fluctuating daily counts. A good month for me used to 30,000 words, and now I'm looking poised to bank about 45K.

4. Dog the Bounty Hunter's autobiography. Well, his second autobiography, anyhow. I'm just about done with Where Mercy is Shown, Mercy is Given. I grabbed it randomly from the library and checked it out without shame. It's not a literary masterpiece, but it's endlessly entertaining and surprisingly heartfelt.

5. No sugar = I lost three pounds. Actually, I couldn't tell you if it's absence of sugar or my getting back into yoga and calisthenics in the past couple weeks, but I've lost weight. It's likely both, of course. But ditching the sugar has definitely reduced the random carb cravings. As with meat last month, I'm really not missing it—the odd wistful twinge as the manfriend enjoys a block of chocolate or an ice cream sandwich, but nothing I could classify as true temptation.

6. Klondike. I've absolutely re-addicted myself to Klondike. Found the nifty free Real Solitaire app for my iPad and both the manfriend and I can't quit. Every morning over coffee, over lunch, over beers while dinner's cooking, before bed… In fact, new Angry Birds Rio levels came out yesterday and we haven't even opened them yet—the deck's got us by the throats.

6. Crank 2. We watched this movie randomly because for whatever reason, Revolver (another Jason Statham movie) decided not to play on Instant Watcher. I can't remember the last time the manfriend was so delighted by a movie. We'd never seen the original Crank, but that didn't matter. This action movie was spastic, incessant, ridiculous, nearly seizure-inducing…but really fun. Plus it's got Statham in a fitted hoodie, running really fast, all throughout the movie. And you know what a fast-running, desperate man does to me. He also electrocutes himself with jumper cables every ten minutes or so, which I found oddly stirring.

Hope everyone's enjoying their Junes so far!

Skin Game

Giveaway!

Just wanted to share the new ad for my evil conjoined erotica-writing twin Cara McKenna's upcoming release, Skin Game. It's sort of a weird mix of Lost and Survivor and the Stanford Prison Experiment, plus a bunch of nasty outdoor sex crammed into a hefty, extra-long ebook package. It's out next Friday, but I'll be busy at the RWA New England Chapter's annual conference (go NEC!) all weekend, so forgive the advance BSP. Click on the ad if you want more info!

And why not, how about a giveaway? Leave a comment before noon EST on Thursday, April 28, and I'll pick a random winner to receive the book the day it comes out! Go ahead, go nuts.

Release day, wooo!

Feels like I just had one of these a couple of weeks ago…oh wait, I did. But publishing is nothing if not stormy and spastic, so here we are again in the midst of my feast (famine to commence shortly, I'm sure).

So The Reluctant Nude is out today from Samhain! It's a contemporary romance about an unorthodox affair between a no-nonsense ecologist and a hot-blooded French sculptor, sequestered together one autumn in the artist's studio on Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. I'm very proud of this story. It's very me, as an author…quiet and intimate and a bit wonky. Fallon, the heroine, is waaay out of her element, and as a result she's wary and irritable and defensive. The hero, Max, is somewhat eccentric and occasionally galling, as provocative as Fallon is guarded. A match made in my own twisted idea of heaven.

I was going to make a big to-do, maybe post a recipe from Nova Scotia or Britanny, France, as there is a lot of food and wine consumption in the book…maybe talk about my Cape Breton honeymoon in 2009 which completely inspired the story…well, the setting, not the plot… But on second thought, I'm exhausted from the week already, so I've decided to keep the pimping minimal.

Ah, Cape Breton in autumn! Photo ©Dave MacDonald

But I must spew forth my thanks! Thanks to you future readers, and thanks to the book's very first readers, MB, Amy and Liz. Thanks to the judges who deemed it worthy to final in the 2010 Golden Heart, gigantic thanks to my editor Anne Scott for choosing it and making it stronger, to Kanaxa, who designed the beautiful cover, and to the kind reviewers who've weighed in on it so far.

Actually, I will dwell on the reviews. I've taken to forcing my forthcoming romances on my RWA chaptermate Penny Watson, and so far she's enjoyed them both, despite her repeated claims that she doesn't like contemporaries. She promised if she hated the book she'd diplomatically keep those feelings to herself and not review it on her blog, but as it turns out, she loved it! You can read her review here.

And this morning I woke up to an equally kind and thoughtful review from Smexy Books. Apparently I made both reviewers cry, which is pretty delightful since so often it goes the other way 'round for us authors.

Anyhow, for more information (blurb, excerpt) or to buy direct and save 30%, you can check it out in the Samhain online store. It's also available for Kindle and Nook, and come February of next year it will be available as a paperback.

That's enough for now. Thanks for swinging by on this exciting day!

Spotted in its natural habitat!

Yesss! It's the very first sighting of Caught on Camera in the wild! Big thanks to my Twitter buddy @EmilyCale. I don't suspect I'll ever fail to be excited by this, so if anyone else spots it, do feel free to e-mail me the evidence.

A thousand days later…

I won't ramble on and on, but I wanted to share that it's my very first [official] romance release day! Caught on Camera is out from Harlequin Blaze today. It's actually been out for a couple of weeks on eHarlequin, but now it's available everywhere as both a paperback and e-book, such as Amazon and Barnes & Noble, and maybe even in bookstores (not sure—haven't gone out to hunt for it in the wild yet).

I haven't popped champagne for a release day since my first erotica release in February 2010… But I think today I'll relax my what's-woot-worthy policy and celebrate. After all, this is a day I've been dreaming about for exactly 995 days—since I first opened a blank Word doc and began to write my very first romance. Wow, from zero-to-mass-market-published in just under a thousand days! That's kind of cool.

I'll be cracking open the champs around four this afternoon, and also cracking open my iPad and celebrating with some Angry Birds Rio. A big thanks to everyone who made this day happen—my husband, my beta readers Jen and Amy, Blaze editors Laura Barth and Brenda Chin, my RWA New England chaptermates (I utlimately sold the story based on a two-sentence pitch at our 2009 conference), Les Stroud and Bear Grylls, and all my awesomely supportive family and friends, both tangible and digital!

Quick additonal note—I was recently invited to guest post on the RT Book Reviews blog, so I'm over there today, chatting about my personality disorder. Er, my writing.

My book, you knows you wants it.

Quick note—it's my day to post on the Blaze Authors Blog, and as it's St. Patrick's Day, a holiday all about luck, I'm giving away a paperback copy (or perhaps two) of my Blaze debut, Caught on Camera (out in bookstores next month). Head over HERE for a chance to win!

"Someone already hates your book."

No amount of philosophy can ever prevent the screaming. 

Those are my husband's grim words of wisdom on the topic of reviews. They sound harsh, but he means them philosophically. As many writers will agree, we live our lives in cycles of pain and joy, fear and delight. I'm now entering the pre-release phase on two books, my first two romances. I already know from my experience publishing erotica that book pre-release is a time of jitters, of both the happy and terrified varieties. Excitement for the world to finally have access to my work, and fear that it will disappoint them. Greater fear that it will disappoint them and they will share their displeasure with the internet and shave away a little sliver of my self-worth. (Luckily, self-worth regenerates, much like a starfish's appendages.)

I'm at a funky, unnerving point this week. Advanced review copies of my two romances are circulating, and the paperback and ebook versions of my April Blaze seem to already be available to buy from eHarlequin.

Reviews and ratings are already trickling in for both stories. Positive ones. Out of the blue I discovered that Caught on Camera (the Blaze) had earned four-and-a-half stars from Andrew Shaffer at Romantic Times (you need a subscription to view the review for the time being, but the highlights are on my books page). The story also received glowing praise from Penelope's Romance Reviews—Penny and I are RWA chaptermates, and she told me up front in her charmingly blunt way that if she hated it, she'd be diplomatic enough not to post her opinions. She doesn't mince words or kiss asses, so I was relieved as well as surprised when I earned a lovely write-up from her this morning. Also today, I Twitter-stumbled (twumbled?) across this review from a self-described Harlequin aficionado. Colored me flattered!

So I'm on cloud nine, right? Dear God, no! I'm terrified.

I've never owned a new car, but I have to imagine this is what it feels like, right after you've been handed the papers and keys to your dream ride. At this moment in time, it's perfect. Unmarred by scratches and mud and spilled drinks. The second it leaves the lot, the danger begins. You almost beg for a dent, just to get it out of the way, so that you may give up the suffocating dream of perfection and the pressure that comes with it. That's where I am now, waiting for the first inevitable ding. Practically praying for one, so I can breathe and move on in glorious, dignified imperfection.

When I reach this phase and become nervous and self-doubtful and sometimes downright paranoid, my husband likes to lay that line on me. "Someone already hates your book." What he means is, no matter how great a job a writer did, somebody, somewhere, won't like it. Quite possibly, many somebodies won't like it. It's a scientific fact. When he says that to me, he does so hoping to set me free from my own expectations. It pretty much works, at least in theory.

This job comes patterned in alternating stripes of relief and fear. Relief at the hands of a satisfied reviewer, fear that the next one that won't be so kind or impressed. Relief to have finished a book, sold a book, seen its cover, smelled its pages. Fear of what will happen to it, thrust out into the world and the interwebs. For each book, this pattern has a peak, and the descent down the other side eventually smooths out as my release day [or week, or month] high fades and my focus shifts to the next story. I'm not there yet, though. With a double romance debut ahead of me in the next month, the white-knuckling is just beginning. I am making the jerky, clunky ascent to the zenith of the roller coaster's highest drop, awaiting free fall, twists and turns before I'm deposited sweaty but safe back on the ground. And wouldn't you know it? The second I am, I'm already counting my tickets and scouting for the next ride.

Box-o-Awesome!

Waaaaahhhhhh!

Woo hoo! Went down to start a load of laundry and found the best box ever waiting on the back steps—a slew of my very first author copies from Harlequin! I really underestimated how thrilling this would be. Like Christmas. Actually, no…Christmas morning hasn't excited me this deeply since 1989, the year my brother and I got our Nintendo (with Power Pad). This was Christmas, but as a kid again.

I also went onto Goodreads this morning to update the blurb for Caught on Camera, and discovered it's already been rated! Wow, that was quick, considering it's not out for another month. Then I realized the rating came from a Twitter acquaintance who writes book reviews for RT, among other things, which filled me with spastic, hopeful excitement. Hoo…I need some lunch. Can't be safe to get this overstimulated on an empty stomach.

Win stuff!

I'm guest-blogging for Katie Reus's 30 Days of Danger and Secrets event today, and she's giving away two books to two lucky commenters! Head over to her blog for a chance to score a free copy of Simply Irresistible by Jill Shalvis, or Fear No Evil by Allison Brennan! Contest closes at noon EST on Monday, February 14.

Baby's First Romance Cover

Finally! I can share the cover for The Reluctant Nude, my first romance title with Samhain, due out this April. I've been getting taunting e-mails from my editor for the past few weeks, asking for my authorly input on various versions, and left to salivate while I wait for the green light to share. Now the wait's over! Behold!

Huge thanks to the artist, Kanaxa. It's my aim to keep this blog as light on the book promo as possible, but if you want more details about the story, you can head to the books page of my website.

Oh and since this post is borderline self-pimpy already, I may as well mention that I also just found out my debut April Blaze, Caught on Camera, is available for preorder on Amazon. Surreal.

Best "New" Things This Year

Bear in mind I'm not always at the cutting edge of, well, most anything, so these are new-to-me favorites for the year, not necessarily actual new things. But anyhow, here's what topped my lists in 2010:

MOVIES District 13 (French, post-Apocalyptic-ish action, 2004), Cemetery Junction (drama, 2010), Ong-Bak (Thai, martial arts action, 2003), and Harlan County, USA (documentary, 1976).

MUSIC My boy Elvis Costello's new album, National Ransom (2010), various Lady Gaga singles, and a slew of outdated pop and hip-hop I won't embarrass myself by ennumerating.

BOOKS A Wolf at the Table by Augusten Burroughs (2008), The Shallows by Nicholas Carr (2010), 703 by Nancy Makin (2010), Attachment (2008) by Isabel Fonseca, anything by Kristan Higgins.

TV SHOWS Louis (comedy, 2010), An Idiot Abroad (reality / travel / comedy, 2010), various new-to-me seasons of Top Gear (reality, current incarnation 2002—present), seasons one through five of Say Yes to the Dress (reality, 2007–present). Oh and Hoarders, as always.

GAMES Angry Birds and Angry Birds Seasons (iPad, 2009, 2010), Mario Kart 64 (Nintendo 64 emulator, originally 1996), Machinarium (Mac, 2009), Boggle (iPad, 2010).