Category Archives: Books
Well, well, well!
Would you just look at that!
Huge thanks to everyone who’s buying and enjoying Kel’s inaugural tale (and remember, reviews are love). I can tell you that J.T. is a VERY happy erotica writer right now, which is good because Valet’s Pleasure will be out on Tuesday and there is definitely a drive to keep this particular ball rolling.
I am grateful
An amazing number of things have happened to me professionally in the last two weeks things that have reinforced my decision to switch genres and start writing the stuff I always wanted to write. I am deeply grateful for all of these wonderful opportunities, and I want to thank each and every one of you who read my work because you’re the reason why so many good things are happening right now. You people rock.
- May 8th I signed a contract with Me and the Muse Publishing to have Trickster translated and published in German.
- May 15th held three important career milestones for me:1) For the first time in my writing career I cracked the five figure mark in writing income.
2) I cracked the five figure mark for yearly writing income.
3) I made five figures (oh, screw it — $10,000) on one title. And yes, it was Empress of Storms.
- May 16th I signed a contract with Juno Publishing to have Empress of Storms translated and published in French.
- May 18th I signed a contract with photographer Javier Cortina to use a photograph of Colby Keller from Javier’s The Legend of St. George photo shoot as the cover for my fantasy historical M/M romance The Chevalier, coming out in August.
On the verge of turning 50, I feel like my life and career are truly on track, and I’m very excited to see what the next few years bring.
I never actually told you about the cover, did I?
D’oh. So a couple of weeks ago an insanely talented Spanish art photographer named Javier Cortina did a most spectacular photo shoot of Our Man Sans Culottes entitled The Legend of St. George (click this link to see NSFW pics). And lo, L.D. Blakeley and I did squeal about the beauty of said pics, until I said the fateful words, “That second pic, the closeup where he’s holding the sword — that would make an awesome book cover, don’t you think?”
“I do! You should contact Javier and see if you can license it!” she enthused.
“No, I can’t do that. Can I?”
Suffice it to say that an hour later I’d fired off an email to Javier asking him if he ever licensed his photographs. It turned out he did, and we’ve negotiated a deal for me to use the picture as a book cover. Herein lies a story; Javier, quite reasonably, asked me what the book was about, to which I replied, “Um…”
*thinks frantically about picture*
“…it’s about…”
*pounds head against wall until something shakes loose*
“…it’s about a fantasy world loosely based on 17th Century France where an impoverished nobleman joins the royal guard as an officer and promptly gets embroiled in palace intrigue after he discovers the handsome young man he was flirting with at a masked ball is the Crown Prince, who is being blackmailed by a foreign ambassador. I’m calling it The Chevalier.”
I swear to God, I have no idea where this stuff comes from.
Well, then!
As of yesterday, Empress of Storms earned approximately $6,092 in royalties for Q1 of 2016. Not only is this a career high for quarterly royalties, it’s also a career high for any individual title from me, and has paid for Wild Wicked Weekend, my upcoming appearance at RT 2016 (plus my awesome steampunk mermaid costume), and part of our new furnace. As Carl the Groundskeeper from Caddyshack would say, I’ve got that going for me.
Even better, the sales don’t seem to be slacking off any time soon, so hopefully this trend will continue because we still need to fix the foundation and put in new flooring and windows (right now the house is echoing with rapid fire knocks as the roofers tear off our old shingles and put on new ones in advance of the storm we’re supposed to get tomorrow. Thank Cthulhu for homeowner’s insurance, that’s all I have to say). In the meantime, I’m hard at work on Palace of Scoundrels, and since cover artist Jay Aheer has now been signed exclusively to Evernight Publishing I’m going to take a crack at doing the cover myself. I showed the draft cover to L.D. Blakeley a couple of days ago and her response was, “LOVE!” so I think I’m on the right track. Once I’ve got everything ready for edits and loading into various sales outlet I’ll do a cover reveal, promise.
Of course, if you want to see the cover earlier you can always sign up for my mailing list. It’s super low traffic, and subscribers get first crack at covers, sneak peeks, and swag giveaways.
In other news, I’m about a third of the way done with my RT costume, and I picked up eye makeup, press-on nails, and false eyelashes last night to complete the look. I also popped for blue contacts — they’re not super obvious, but look nice enough. It was fascinating to see myself with blue eyes (my real eye color is brown), because the resemblance to my blue-eyed blond brother became much more marked. Now if I can just finish the chemise, bustle skirt, and crown by April 9th, I should be ready to roll.
A blast from the past
Today’s writing project was Cross Current and despite not one, not two, but THREE cats insisting on jumping into my lap to help I finally finished knocking out 3K on it, bringing my total word count up to 6,409 words. I’m also very pleased to announce that I get to use one of my very first characters in this novel — yes, for fans of my novelette A Boon by Moonlight I’m bringing back Lord Jerrek of House Carwin as a consultant for the Olympic Cove crew on how to handle the runaway selkie prince who just landed on their shores. As it turns out Jerrek owes Poseidon a favor or two, and he’s being deliciously snarky as usual as he negotiates the trade of information with my two lead characters.
Oh, and Ceit? Your namesake just made her first appearance (in discussion, at least). The beautiful, brilliant Lady Ceitlin of House Selbach is waiting for her wayward groom to get his ass back to the pod and go through their marriage ceremony. But will that be the end of it? Oh, hell no — things just get more interesting from here on in.
Also, apropos of nothing I’ve somehow managed to wash all of the master bedroom bedding today. Considering that we sleep with a ridiculous amount of bedclothes (all my fault — Ramón calls me the Greater American Nesting Female) that’s about seven loads of laundry, plus I carried all the clean clothes upstairs and put them away. I think I can take the rest of the night off, yes?
Nicola’s Progress Reports
Since I was poked by my buddy Peter on this:
Palace of Scoundrels (Empress sequel) – 1,645 words since I spent a fair amount of time outlining the thing. Nonetheless I’m hoping to have this done by RT — I would like to have it out and available, but that may not be possible. We’ll see.
Behind the Iron Cross – 76,039 words and I’m storming into Act Three as we speak. This one is gonna take mega editing, though.
Cross Current (Olympic Cove #4) – 3,538 words, and I came up with a refinement for my main character that is extremely organic and effective AND makes the story more diverse.
“Do No Harm” (Dark Captive antho entry for Evernight) – 1,520 words. This is the one I really have to focus on since the deadline is March 15th. It’s also the most difficult of the bunch because, well, here’s the antho description:
Dark Captive will be a collection of dark erotic romance stories featuring alpha men with fierce sexual appetites. They’ll stop at nothing to get what they want. And they have their sights on one man. Possessive and bold, these heroes give their conquests exactly what they crave—to be taken … to be owned. Any resistance offered will be tested, but in the end love rules.
So, dubcon with a romance and HEA/HFN. Kinda hard to do that effectively in less than 25K words, but I think I found a way to make it work.
I’m also trying to catch up on some desperately needed housework in my spare time, but I think I’m breaking down and paying for a professional spring cleaning of the place after I get back from RT. My blue collar South Side soul is screaming blue murder at this, but my professional writer brain is saying, “You can spend time cleaning or you can spend time writing. Which is more productive and satisfying to you? Plus if you hire a service you’re pumping money into the economy, and you can give them mega tips to shut up that screeching soul of yours.” Works for me.
Happy anniversary to me!
Facebook’s Memories function has just been kind enough to remind me that three years ago today I got my acceptance from Evernight on Storm Season. My exact post on the topic was:
So, yeah, uh, I just sold my first standalone novel, Storm Season, to Evernight Publishing. Um…I’m a novelist. So what do I do now?
The answer is, write another novel, of course. Which I did, and I thank each and every one of you out there who has been buying them and chivvying me to write more. Y’all rock.
Speaking of books, writing continues apace in the Cameron manse. I’ve started on Palace of Scoundrels (the Empress sequel) and I’m flipping back and forth between that, Iron Cross, and Cross Current depending on my mood. Hey, it works for a lot of bestselling authors so why not me? But three books (plus a short story, plus another project that I’ll announce here in due time) apparently isn’t enough for my sozzled slavedriver of a muse, since she’s been prodding me to write a MF contemporary standalone like you would not believe. Thing is, it has some really deep, relevant hooks for me so I think it’s got to go on the To Be Written list (which is now stretching to 2020 and beyond).
At least it means you have lots of reading material to look forward to, right? That’s what I keep telling myself.
In other news, I’ll be at Wild Wicked Weekend this weekend in San Antonio and I’ll have print copies of Storm Season, HIS: Manlove Edition, and Empress of Storms with me, so if you’re coming and want a copy please hunt me down. This is my first romance convention where I’m a signing author, so I’m both excited and a little nervous. I’m putting together a gift basket and bringing swag, but I still have to learn the lay of the land and what’s expected from an author at such events (e.g. this ISN’T a science fiction convention so the graphic t-shirts will probably be left at home).
And yes, there will be pictures. And I’ll give you a full report on our outing to the Lair (San Antonio’s premier BDSM club). Pity I can’t wear what I wore to the Rubber Ball in London, muwahahahahaha…
Happy Tuesday
It’s Day 2 of A More Productive Me and so far it’s been going pretty well. I knocked out 3K of the Empress of Storms sequel outline yesterday (working title is Palace of Scoundrels), made dinner, did laundry and food shopping, and realized that the fingerless mitt I’ve been working on for the last year or so is way too big so I frogged that back and started over again with a smaller size. That shocks me, to be honest, because I have man hands and I’m so used to going to the largest size possible. The fact that the pattern includes a size that’s too big for me is kinda impressive.
Today’s goals — 3K on Iron Cross and finish off the Palace outline, finally get around to taking down the Christmas tree (yeah, yeah, I know I suck), crit the two manuscripts due at my writers’ group meeting tonight, finish an editing project for a friend, and see if we can squeeze in a showing of Deadpool at some point (we were going to see it on Valentine’s Day, but I took a nap after the con that turned into a coma). I also think the writing goals for the next two months are:
- Finish Iron Cross by the end of the month, get off to the agent by mid-March
- Finish Cross Current by the end of March, get it off to Evernight by mid-April
- Concurrently finish Palace of Scoundrels by the end of March, get it released by mid-April (or sooner if possible).
Plus there are some short story goals scattered in there when I have time. Seems doable to me.
Mid Week Tease: Cross Current #MidWeekTease #MWTease
Hello, chumrades, and welcome to Mid Week Tease! This week I’m featuring anohter snippet from Cross Current (Olympic Cove #4), where our hero Matt winds up being abruptly introduced to the paranormal world. No pressure.
Enjoy, and make sure to hit the list after the teaser to see other great Mid Week Teases!
Matt choked on his wine.
Griffin leaned over and whacked him on the back as he spluttered. “You all right, mate?”
“Yeah,” Matt managed, grabbing a napkin and wiping his chin. “Sorry. Uh….”
He pointed at the beach, where a guy who could have worked as a body double for Chris Evans was climbing out of the surf. Shaggy blond hair surrounded a face that should have been on a romance novel cover, while the water slid off muscled arms and a perfect V-shaped torso, drops trickling down to—
Matt swallowed as the man’s naked and well-hung groin cleared the water. Jesus God, how does that thing not act like an anchor?
If that wasn’t enough, a sleek brown head also emerged from the water, letting out a ringing bark. One of the biggest seals Matt had ever seen thumped out of the water with the aid of powerful flippers. Man and beast headed straight for Dunn’s cottage, where Naked Guy dropped to his knees at the stairs, bowing his head. “My lord,” he said, voice rough and exhausted, “I come to ask a boon.”
My lord? And then Matt noticed Dunn’s expression. The amusement from the meal had turned into grim authority, while Ammie’s delicate features firmed into a more feminine version of her husband’s glower. Griffin leaned back in his seat, rubbing his mouth.
Matt turned back to the newcomers just in time to see the seal start writhing on the sand. It let out a series of pained noises, deforming as if something inside the creature was trying to get out.
And then the sleek sable fur on the breast split, a human hand pushing through it. The animal abruptly turned into a seal-shaped balloon that slid off the shoulders of a dark-haired man who crawled out of its skin.
Also naked, a hysterical little voice in the back of Matt’s head said. Although not quite as well hung…
The seal man got to his feet with an effort, looking drained. “Lord Poseidon,” he said to Dunn with a weary bow, “my name is Malcolm Muir, and I formally ask for sanctu—”
Before he could finish the sentence his eyes rolled up. With a gentle smile he collapsed face forward into the sand.
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You Got Girlie Bits In My M/M Romance!
As you know, Bob, I’m currently working on Cross Current, the fourth book in the Olympic Cove series, so I have the first three books on my mind at the moment. They’re all still selling, and to date Deep Water has gotten some very lovely reviews. This is reassuring to me because, yes, external validation is a thing and I like to have some of it once in a while.
That being said, I have also noticed that a number of the reviews make a point of saying that Deep Water, unlike the first two books in the series, is a MMF menage. There’s no real complaint about that, more a tone of puzzlement along the lines of, “Well, we don’t know why she decided to add female characters, but the story’s still good so we’ll work with it.”
So lemme ‘splain why I broke the pattern. Basically, my subconscious does whatever the hell it likes, and it decided that the first two books would be MMM, the third would be MMF, the fourth MMMFF, the fifth MMF, and the sixth MF (although now I’m kinda leaning towards MMF). I was fully aware that this could be problematic with regards to sales, as MM readers tend not to read MF stories and visa versa, and indeed I noticed a distinct downtick in sales with Deep Water as compared to the first two books in the series.
But. The Olympic Cove series is not your usual erotic romance series, as I suspect y’all may have noticed by now. It’s a cautionary tale about climate change as seen through the lens of fantasy, giving the planet a voice in the form of Gaia and her divine offspring. Yes, there are great big dollops of sex, but the main theme of the series is the environment and how humans are negatively affecting it, and that’s more important to me than sticking to one particular romantic grouping, be it MMM, MMF, etc.
Ultimately I hope that I can serve the story well enough to keep people reading even if I’m not using their favorite menage arrangement. And for the die-hard MM fans, I promise you there will be more side stories about Col and Kasos, just as soon as I get some wiggle room in my writing schedule.
Nicola Cameron Writes 