So far I’ve gotten feedback on Empress of Storms from two of my beta readers. These are people I trust to tell me when I’m fucking up, and apart from some spelling/punctuation errors they’ve been enjoying the story. One BR, who is gay, said that he was even kinda frustrated because his husband wasn’t home and my smut made him want to jump hubby and, I repeat, “bang him like a screen door in a hurricane.”

When a MF story has that effect on a gay man, you know you’re doing something right.

While I’m waiting for copyedits from the team I’m going through and doing a third edit/polish and setting up the ebook formatting. It will be available in all formats through Amazon, All Romance eBooks, and Smashwords, and will be available as a print book through CreateSpace by next week (I need to format the interior and get the page count to Jay so that she can calculate the spine size and do the front and back cover for me).

And of course we’re doing a release party on FB this Sunday, so make sure you come over and join in the festivities. The lovely and talented L.D. Blakeley will be joining me to cohost and we’ll be doing giveaways, posting pics, and generally having a grand old time.

Apropos of nothing, I got into a discussion about inspiration so I thought I’d share the pics that I’ve been staring at for the last six weeks while I wrote feverishly. The hilarious thing? I had no idea they’d been in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo together (why, yes, I’m kinda slow when it comes to popular culture).

I go by visuals and sometimes voices when I look for character inspiration, then I work out their backstory and how they behave as the story progresses. Actors work well for this because I know how they sound and can use them as mental paper dolls as I write. I already had Daniel in mind when I started writing Matthias (warrior king, tormented by his wife’s death, not thrilled about this new marriage, thousand yard stare, you do the math), so when I stumbled across a picture of Ms. Mara I thought, “Ooh, yeah, she’s got grit and determination, and she can pull off regal at the same time. She’ll work as Danaë.” It wasn’t until someone asked me if I was a Girl fan that I discovered what I’d done. I probably need to see the movie at some point.

Oh, I’ve also been asked why I’m using Nicola M. Cameron on Empress of Storms. I lifted the idea from the late, brilliant Iain Banks who wrote mainstream fiction as Iain Banks and science fiction as Iain M. Banks. It was a way of differentiating between the two genres without having to use a pseudonym, and I decided to use the same trick here, especially as I noticed the rather sharp falloff of sales with my MMF novel Deep Water. Nicola Cameron is pretty much associated with MM/MMM fiction by this point, so if you pick up a Nicola Cameron book that’s what you’ll get, whereas Nicola M. Cameron writes MF fiction with occasional forays into MMF. That should keep everyone happy.