Month: January 2014

Interview with author M.E. Sanford

Yey! I’m so excited about this one. I love M.E. Sanford’s stories. They are so magical and touching!So when Shelby and the others from our secret group feared there wouldn’t be enough authors for the Hiding Under Covers anthology, M.E. was the first one that came to mind. I knew I just had to ask him if he was available and, thank God, he was.
Here it is,peeps. Hope you enjoy this interview as much as I  did.

Hello, M. E. , welcome to my cozy shell. Thank you for accepting my invitation.
You kindly accepted to write for the Hunting Under Covers anthology even though you hadn’t taken part in the Scavenger Hunt challenge and you had no idea what it entailed and the story you submitted was an extraordinary peace. What spurred the idea of (spoiler?) mermaid-like aliens? Did I express myself well?

M.E.: You’re absolutely right! I had NO idea what was going on, or what was expected of me. But when I saw one particular requirement for the anthology. It got my brain spinning and I said to myself, “How in the hell would I write a story about male pregnancy?” Thus, the aliens.
I loved that you turned perspective and you made the story from the alien’s point of view, rather than from a human’s point of view. Humans were, in fact, the aliens in your story. How hard was it to describe an alien, both physically and mentally?

M.E.: Since I came up with the race impromptu, I had very little understanding of how they looked. But I knew they had scaled bodies with fleshy undersides and fins on their legs and arms. That’s really all I knew while writing. 😀
As for mentally, they are simple people living along the shore in clay/mud housing. Mentally, they only worry about what is needed for the now and the near future. It was pretty simple, as my MC was very fun to write.
Do you think there is a secret to making aliens believable and emotionally close to the reader?

M.E.: Oooooh. Good question. In earnest, I believe that if you can convey a sense of genuine wonder to the new, then an attachment to the alien race would be natural. I feel very attached to people who show awe at the things unexplained.
Do you usually outline or do you just write?

M.E.: This, I spewed onto the screen with no outline. Usually, I outline the first act. Then pants the rest once I have my plot and characters described and planned. It keeps the process of writing fresh for me.
Did you enjoy writing mpreg? Many shy away from this sub-genre. What do you think is the reason and what would you say to people to change their minds?

M.E.: I loved writing m-preg! It’s what made me write the story about fish-like aliens. I think the reason it’s not touched upon much, is the simple fact it’s impossible. Readers can only stretch their imaginations so much, in my opinion. But if it’s done in a way that…for example is using fishy aliens as the vessel for male pregnancy. Then people may feel more comfortable reading about a man giving birth. 😀
Your stories always have a very emotional ending that leaves a huge impression on readers and makes them crave for more. Tell us what other projects you are currently working on.

M.E.: Well thanks! I’ve finished the rough draft of a very emotional romance that I feel is very promising. It’s my favorite kind, a hurt/comfort sort of plot that has some personal, real life truths in the story.
I have a few novellas that I’d like to polish and get into people’s eyes. But I’m distracted with my current novel.
I’m also working on a high fantasy, epic novel series that will take some time finishing.
Finally, where can readers find you?
M.E.: My e-mail is ready to be filled: thesleepinggods@gmail.com
Since, I’m always on Goodreads.com. I keep my blog there, on my profile. M.E. Sanford. Look me up!

Thank you so much for this interview, Mitch! I wish you the best of luck in the future. Please, come visit me again 🙂 

More to come

Hi guys! hope you had a better week than me and hopefully we will all have a better week this time around.
I’ve launched into full interview mode with the release of Hunting Under Covers.
This week, we’ll have an interview with authors Aimee Brissay and M.E. Sanford, who will talk about their stories that are part of the Hunting Under Covers anthology. i remind you this is a completely free anthology published with the support of Divergent Publishing.
And more surprising interviews to come. Stay ‘tuned’ to find out.
Wishing you all a good day and a fantastic week.
Hugs and kisses,
Shayla

Today…

Hello, friends, today is a very bitter-sweet day, with emphasis on the bitter side.

This blog post was supposed to be a happy one because today is my one year blog anniversary and also my birthday. 
Unfortunately today started very bad for me. I found three out of my four recently born puppies dead. Their mother had put them in a plastic bag that was laying around in our tool shed to keep them warm and they probably suffocated. I hate myself for not checking if the opening was wide enough, if they had enough air to breathe. For the most part I was delighted of how smart my dog was. The bag contained a couple of old clothes. It was supposed to be a warm and welcoming place, but I should have realized how dangerous it could be for the puppies. Now they’re dead and both their parents are suffering. I know people will laugh at me for humanizing animals so much, but I’ve had enough pets to know animals’emotions are just as deep as ours. These four are both of my dogs’ first litter. And I ruined their happiness by neglecting to take care of them. 
God rest my puppies in peace. I hope their souls come back to us in another form so I can make up to them.

Edit: the last of my babies died about 10 minutes ago. I had called the vet to check on him He told me it’s possible the other three died because of constipation and told me to be careful about the last one as well, but she was already pretty lifeless when the vet checked on her. I had no idea constipation could be such a serious problem for new-borns. At least now I fell 1% less guilty. 

Interview with author Kathleen Hayes

Hello, Kathleen! Welcome to my blog and thank you for accepting my invite. 🙂
You wrote a very cute time travel story for the Hunting Under Covers anthology. How did you come up with the idea?

Kathleen: Some of my very first romance novels (back in high school)were Scottish time travel romances. Three series in particular – the Outlander series by Diana Gabaldon, the Son of the Sword series by J. Ardian Lee, and the Highlander series by Karen Marie Moning – will always hold a special place in my heart. Once I got into M/M romance, I always wanted to write something in that genre. With time travel as one of the things on the scavenger hunt list, I couldn’t resist bringing a Scottish highlander into the present day and letting him find his true love. 😉

I love how Angus spoke, all prim and proper. Did you have to research on old English and old names? 

Kathleen: A little. I googled Scottish names and made sure to pick on that had actual Celtic roots and had been around awhile. I love to make my names mean something related to the character. In this case, Angus means “unnaturally strong, singular, only choice” and the Celtic god Angus Og was a god of wisdom and intelligence. I thought this was appropriate based on the prophecy, traveling to the future, and dealing with it in a pretty spectacular manner.  As to the language – I probably should have done some research but I read so many historical novels, I just made him talk like an amalgamation of my favorite characters and prayed no one with a degree in historical linguistics would come along and rip it apart. I did have Angus incorporate some modern language and Brian pick up a few more formal turns of phrase (mostly speaking without contractions occasionally) because I know it only takes me about three days to start picking up bits and pieces of how new people I meet talk without even realizing it.

What I really loved about your story is that you actually got inside Angus’s head and really described vividly how the 21st century must look to him. It made me think how we’d react if we met aliens. Have you ever thought of writing a sci-fi story?

Kathleen: I love to read and watch sci-fi but I have always balked away from writing it. I am generally a little lax on research and technological stuff. I like to write what I know because it comes easier. I have so little time to devote to writing in a given day that I would rather devote it to the actual writing – not researching. I feel part of sci-fi is to really nail your world building and technology. I have done one story that was set in a dystopian future (Falling Apart) and I think my betas wanted to strangle me with that one because I couldn’t keep my terms straight and kept messing up all the technology. So, I guess it’s not out of the question but not in the near future.

Plotter or pantser? Why?

Kathleen: Umm…both. I generally start out by making an outline. But I only get a couple of scenes in before I get carried away and then start writing. Then I keep writing as long as it’s flowing (sometimes that the rest of the story) and only stop to outline more if I hit writer’s block about something. Then I’ll outline a few scenes before my muse gets carried away again. This has mostly worked for me because I have only written short stories so far. It gets me in trouble when I try to write anything longer. For example, the serial story I have on my blog (True Love’s Kiss) has kind of stalled out because I didn’t outline and I took a hiatus and now I don’t remember where I was going. I have a project I am working on right now and as soon as I finish that I am going to have to go back and wrangle True Love’s Kiss into line with the mother of all outlines. *sigh*

Much to my shame, I didn’t manage to read all your stories, but I know your writing is very sweet. Where do you get most of your inspiration from?

Kathleen: Usually, I get it from my everyday life. I’ll hear a song on the radio and a scene will pop into my head or I’ll be talking to one of my patients and a phrase or word they say will trigger a snapshot or I see really beautiful scenery as I’m driving and there’s a story back drop. When stories pop into my head it is usually as a series of snap shots and then my work comes in figuring out how those moments in time connect to each other.

What projects are you currently working on?

Kathleen: I am currently working a story for Less Than Three Press’ Missed Connectionscall. It will be the first story I have ever submitted to an actual publisher so I am pretty nervous about that. As I mentioned above, when I finish that story my plan is to wrestle True Love’s Kiss into submission. I don’t get to write anything else until it is done! 

Please show us some pics of Angus and Brian.

Angus: 
Brian:
Although, I’ll be honest, I never really think about what my characters look like, picture wise until after. At least half the time, my first draft doesn’t even have a description of either MC and I have to go back in and add something. I almost always ignore descriptions in other people’s books too. I just let my feeling of the character create the image in my head. I don’t even know if the above pics match whatever descriptions I gave of Angus and Brian in the story but they have the right feel. You can give them what hair, eyes, etc they story says they have (if I even remembered to mention it)!

Wow, those are some mouthwatering guys. You know, the characters really do give off the same vibe.
Well, thank you so much for coming here, Kathleen. I wish you good luck with your future projects and hope to talk to you soon.

You can find Kathleen on her blog, Romancing the World,  and on Goodreads..

Interview with author Kaje Harper

Hello, dear, friends, as promised Kaje is giving us an interview about her newest story, Changes Coming Down, featured in the free anthology Hiding Under Covers.

Hello, Kaje, welcome to my little shell. Thank you for being here.

Kaje: Thanks for inviting me over.

You wrote a wonderful story for the Hunting Under Covers anthology. I’m pretty sure if it weren’t for you, most people wouldn’t have heard of our anthology so quickly or been as keen to read it. You’re a very prolific author and your stories are superb. This time, you wrote an M/M/M, your very first published gay ménage, in fact. What inspired you to write the story? Did you intend for it to be a ménage story from the beginning or did it just turn out this way? 

Kaje: Thanks for the kind words – doing Hunting Under Covers was a lot of fun. I admire Katie, for whom the book was a gift, and made friends in the project group, so I enjoyed the whole thing.
I didn’t go into the project with expectations. Basically, Marc roped me in. He said, “Come see this anthology we’re doing, trying to get in all the Scavenger Hunt Points in one book. Maybe you could write something.” I was fairly late to the project, and they needed more stories, so I just asked what points hadn’t been covered yet. I got a list, which included the major themes of “Sports”, “Law Enforcement” and “Cowboys”, all of which had to actively involve the MCs to count. Since I love a challenge, and it wasn’t clear anyone else was joining in, I said I’d do all three. (It turned out there was another Law Enforcement story, but not before I was deep into my own.)
So the menage aspect arose out of not wanting to double up two major professions in one MC. But I’d also been thinking about trying M/M/M for a while. There’s a challenge to making readers believe that a three-way relationship is strong enough, and necessary enough, to work better than any two of the guys alone. This gave me a good excuse to try menage. Changes Coming Down was the result.

I love the fact that you didn’t put your characters though unnecessary drama, as most ménage stories are about the emotional implications of settling into a polyamorous relationship. Changes Coming Down concentrated on coming out of the closet and facing the consequences of being both gay and in a relationship with two persons instead of one. All your characters risked losing something as a result of coming out and they all showed moments of weakness throughout the story. Who do you think is the most vulnerable of them and why did you choose him in particular?

Kaje: Wow, tough call. All of the guys are vulnerable in different ways. Will is faced with losing the only home and family he’s had since he was seventeen. Casey is a cop, whose job has been his life – now that part of who he is may be about to come tumbling down. And Scott is headed for a spot on an NHL hockey team, where there are no out gay players yet. This is his lifelong dream, and his father’s, and with competition excruciatingly fierce, he can’t afford any disadvantage.
But if I had to guess, I’d say Casey is most vulnerable. Scott is the strongest inside, I think. He’s the one who will survive whatever he has to. Will is loneliest, but he also has lived that way a long time, and made it through. Casey is the one who’s been a Marine and a cop, a take-charge guy who had all the authority and the answers. Losing that is a big dark hole under his feet.

The way the story worked out took some turns that I wasn’t expecting, and that didn’t satisfy my wishes for the main characters to have all the happiness and justice they deserved. I’d have liked to see the good guys properly rewarded and the bad guys all punished. Is it hard making these kinds of decisions between giving the readers what they want and giving them what you know is best from a writer’s perspective?

Kaje: One of the most important things I strive for in my writing is for the stories to feel real. Even when I’m writing sorcerers, or mafia with plane crashes, I want that edge of underlying belief. And part of that is that life doesn’t always work out neatly and perfectly. Sometimes you have to settle for good enough.
Readers do occasionally grumble that I do more Happy For Now, than Happy Ever After endings. In my books, the homophobic supervisor doesn’t always get fired. The bullet wound leaves weakness and not just an attractive scar. For me, that’s part of how I choose to write. So in this story, I did consciously avoid the fairytale ending. I gave the guys a happy conclusion that was imperfect. But hopefully it felt real. (And those HFN endings have the bonus of opening up sequel potential 🙂 )

Okay, I’m sure you’ve been asked this many times, but I’m also convinced no one will stop asking you for the simple reason that you’re a living miracle: how do you manage to write such long stories in such a short amount of time? Do you organize your schedule in a certain way or just close yourself between four walls and cross your fingers that no one will bother you until you type “the end”?

Kaje: LOL. I’m fortunate enough to work my day job part-time. My older kid is now off at college, and my younger is very independent. Although I have a lot of other family duties, I still get more writing time than many authors. My husband is patient and supportive.
And then, my stories seem to write themselves in the back of my mind when I’m doing other things (like driving, which occasionally is not the best thing. “How did I end up at the supermarket? I was trying to drive to the library.”) So when I sit down to type, the words come out about as fast as my eight-finger typing method allows. The slowest part of a first draft is researching the little points. (Like, would an experienced rancher say “a two-thousand pound Angus bull” or “a twenty-five-hundred pound Angus bull”? That takes a quick search for the average weight of Black Angus cattle. Thank heavens for the Internet.)
I’ve learned to power through a first draft, and not go back to edit. For me, that’s vital, because if I start tweaking the beginning, it will never end. So I write a fast first draft. I don’t plot or plan ahead, or do all the advance prep work, (like character sheets), that some organized writers do. I have the idea of a guy or two, or three, and a scene, and I sit down and start writing.

I know there are still a lot of things that readers would love to explore about your characters. Casey has a lot of unresolved issues with his father.

Show/hide

Plus the way the three men met is only briefly discussed in the book since it’s not the subject of the plot. So you plan on writing a prequel? Sequel? Both?


Kaje: I admit, I’d love to do both. I made them an established trio, because I thought that might make it easier for the story to stay short. (You can see how well that worked.) But I do have the image of their first night together stuck in my head. And then yes, that is a HFN ending. The daunting part about a sequel would be all the research about pro Hockey. But maybe.

Tell us what other projects are you working on right now and where can readers find you.

I’m doing sequels – “The Family We Make”, a sequel to my Holiday freebie (although if it becomes a novel, it won’t be free. My husband put his foot down on that one LOL.) Also Hidden Wolves 3is done in first draft, with my cross-dressing werewolf. I’m polishing that to submit it. And The Rebuilding Year 2 is about a third written.
You can find me at:
Website: http://kajeharper.wordpress.com/
Goodreads Author page: http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/4769304.Kaje_Harper  

Finally, could you, please, show us some inspirational pictures of Casey, Will and Scott?

Kaje: I don’t use pictures, and in fact often don’t have good visuals of my guys when I write. I keep index cards to remind me of their eye color LOL. For me, the characters are a gestalt that is much more about who they are inside than how they look. Readers are welcome to hunt down likely pictures though. I’ll enjoy looking at them. 🙂

Thank you so much for your presence on my blog. I wish you the best with all your future projects and hope to ‘see’ you here again.

Hiding Under Covers is out and proud!

Remember how I told you I wrote for an anthology? Well, it’s finally out and it’s completely FREE!
You guys will love it! This book has a little story behind, because it was made in honor of the Scavenger Hunt challenge organized by moderator Katie of the M/M Romance group on Goodreads. Katie recently gave birth to a baby girl, and we thought (well, Shelby thought and we all agreed)  it was the best way to show our appreciation for all the effort she put into the challenge despite her very pregnant condition 🙂

I will follow up with an interview with authors Kaje Harper who wrote a yummy ménage story that’s part of the book and Kathleen Hayes who wrote a lovely time travel story that inspired a few bunnies to hop in my little head. Of course, I”ll try to convince the other authors to talk a little about their stories so you get to know better what this anthology is about. I’m searching for people willing to host me on their blogs to spread the word out, so, if you’re willing, let me know at the usual e-mail address – shayla.mist@gmail.com.

Well, without further ado, here’s where you can download Hunting Under Covers from and, if you like the stories, please don’t shy away from leaving a review. Always appreciated.

Divergent Publishing
ARe link
Smashwords
For Goodreads aficionados, here’s the link to add our book to you TBR list.
Goodreads 
Well, that’s all for today, guys. Hope you have a great week!
Hugs and kisses,
Shayla

I’m a reviewer. Yey!

Hey, guys. Happy Monday!
Not so happy for me, because I’m down with a cold. But other than that, I have great news. Author Caitlin Ricci welcomed me to her team of reviewers on her new site – Read the Rainbow. Here’s my first review: http://readtherainbow.weebly.com/1/post/2014/01/review-scott-sapphire-and-the-emerald-orchid-by-geoffrey-knight.html

There are many more from where that came, so keep your eyes open. If you have a book to review, you can find a segment on the site on how to submit your book. Who knows, you might get the chance to be reviewed by amazing me *cough cough* I’m very happy to be part of this team.
I know being reviewer will help me write better, understand the process of different authors and help improve my critiquing technique. Moreover I will get to discover new authors and new books every day. thank you, Caitlin, for giving me this opportunity.

The second good news is that I managed to finish another story. And it’s free! It’s part of an anthology and I’ll post the link as soon as it’s published. I’m so very excited because I worked along an incredible team of very professional and reliable people and I feel proud to have been part of it.

That’s it for today. You may noticed I posted a new poll. On the last one the voters chose author interviews to the question ‘What you’d like to see on my blog?’, so I’ll do my best to find authors to bring to the blog, although, surprising as it may be, no author answered my call to be interviewed. I guess my blog is too new and uninteresting or my writing sucks too much and they don’t want to be associated with me *sorry about that (>-<)*.

This new poll I posted concerns a work in progress of mine that reached a crossroads. I’m unsure whether to transform the unlikable coworker into a love interest or follow my initial plan of getting my MC back together with his ex who left him when he contracted a mysterious alien illness (the ex, not the MC). I’d really like some opinions on this.

Leaving you with my boy GD’s latest MV (hmmm… hope I didn’t post it before; when it comes to G-Dragon I can’t help myself).

Hugs and kisses,
Shayla