Monday, September 23, 2013

An Untold Want is Live!!!

Just a short note to let you know that An Untold Want went live yesterday on Amazon.

I would write more, but I spent fourteen plus hours on Saturday reading for typos--and I still missed one, dammit.  It was hiding behind the cover page.  Yesterday, I made the changes (fixed the typos, except the one I missed) and uploaded it to Kindle Direct. [The nice thing about Kindle, I can reload the image after fixing the stupid typo I missed, and will this coming weekend.]   I thought I would be all excited, but right now, I'm just tired.

But don't get me wrong, I am excited.

You can buy An Untold Want now for $2.99 or wait until mid-October when I'm going to put it up for free for a couple of days.  Either way, please pull it down.  And if you don't know, you don't have to have a Kindle to read Kindle books.  There are free apps for smart phones, tablets, and PCs.  So, see, you got no excuse.

For the next few weeks, I'll be working on marketing, starting with an author spotlight by Serena Akeroyd [erotica author] on her Naughty Nookie News (Blog).


Sunday, September 15, 2013

Dialogue Only Contest Entry

Sorry I haven't posted anything lately, but I've been working on a quilt and editing An Untold Want and doing a bit of writing for fun.

My latest is my entry for the Bartleby Snopes Dialogue Only Writing Contest.

The Rules: Compose a short story entirely of dialogue. You may use as many characters as you want. Your entry must be under 2000 words. Your entry does not have to follow standard rules for writing dialogue. Your entry cannot use any narration (this includes tag lines such as he said, she said, etc.). These are the only rules. Manipulate them however you see fit.

You can find my entry, either by scrolling down to "My Writing Samples" or by following this link:  The Old Lynley Place.

And by the way, most of the past entries only had two characters.  It was much harder with no tag lines and three characters.  So I'm patting myself on the back for this one.

Sorry about the formatting, but cutting and pasting from Word into BlogSpot isn't the most user friend of interfaces.  I went ahead and let it put a background behind the text.  At least I changed it from white background/black text to vice-versa.


Let me know what you think!!!



Monday, September 2, 2013

Flash Fiction - Catfight Club

My writer friend, Sherry, has recently been competing in Indies Unlimited flash fiction contests. Her writing is quite good, and I was a little--no, a lot--jealous because I'm mired in the miasma known as self-inflicted, perfection-seeking editing. In other words, I'm not having a lot of fun writing.

This week's flash fiction topic is Oscar, "the terror of the night, king of the alley cats. He’s sixteen pounds of fang and claw and fighting fury. He’s defeated everything from copperheads to Rottweilers. Everybody knows he’s the toughest cat around, but that wasn’t how life started out for him. Oscar wasn’t born on the mean streets. In fact, he had it pretty soft for a while…"

I'm not competing, per se, I just wanted to write something fun for a change.

Anyway, here's what I wrote:

Gather round my grand-babies; I’ll tell you the story of how I lost this eye. That always gets their attention. No matter how many times I recount it, they purr with contentment. These days, I’m old, forgotten. I can only relieve my celebrity by repeating stories.

I wasn’t always Oscar, I tell them. My first human couldn’t even ascertain I was male; the idiot named me Monica. At this the grand-babies hiss. My adopted mom changed my name to Tom which, at least, was masculine, but so generic. Tom didn’t have panache. And so, in despair, I floundered through my first few lives, just letting myself be coddled.

But all that pampering made me antsy. One night during a bout of insomnia, I ventured out. That’s when I met Tyler, a loner who lived in a dilapidated house in an abandoned part of town. Most nights we would play, you know, torturing mice and batting each other around, but the ruckus attracted other toms, wanting to fight.

At the sight of my shiny coat, one tom had the nerve to call me Oscar Mayer, a weenie. That night, I gained a name and lost an eye, but he lost several teeth and half an ear. And the match. He ran. Never saw him again. At least not with this eye, I tell them with a wink.

That’s the night the Catfight Club formed. And even though I started out pampered, I learned fast and reigned as champion for five lifetimes.