On the good hand (WTF does that even mean?) I’ve lost a little bit of weight and a few inches. I can also feel my body getting stronger which gives me even more hope that I can survive the apocalypse that isn’t really going to happen, but that occurs in my head every damn time I go into a Wal-Mart (sorry Wal-Mart shoppers, but you all really do look like zoned out zombies to me, so it’s a natural leap. And yes, I probably look like a zombie to the other shoppers too, and that’s okay). But I need to make time this summer for some expanded training. And to create a checklist. And to plant a garden.

But I can’t think about that right now because I’m busy with…

Vampire Relationship Guide Volume 3: Edits

Got the file back from the editor and overall, comments and feedback were great….but…as always, there are some things…some kinks, if you will, that must be worked out. Need to add a couple more scenes and resolve one issue. Then I can submit the manuscript for another round of edits/ proofread.

My goal is to get it done, formatted and published by June 15th because on the 16th I’m taking…

My Annual Birthday Fuck-Off Night

I’ve never been a real birthday person because frankly, I resent the fuck out of this whole, “getting older” thing that I can’t adjust, edit, fix, stop, or control in any way. To me, it feels like being on a horrible roller coaster that Never. Fucking. Stops. I hate it. But I have to mark it somehow. My best friend’s birthday is just 2 weeks after mine (young bitch) so we usually select a date between the two to do Something Fun. For a couple birthdays, we ended up getting a hotel room and just hanging out like sad, tired, old alcoholics. We’re doing that again this year at the amazing place we stayed in last year. It’s right on a bay so we can just sit on the dock and watch dolphins until we’re so drunk we can’t see.

It would be nice for my stress level if I had VRG 3 and Pack Mistress 5 out by the time I go to there.

So that’s it for me. What’s up with you these days?

I’m shooting for a release date of May 31st or June 15th for Vampire Relationship Guide, Volume 3: Family & Feuds (the tentative title). Yes, this is later than I had originally planned. What can I tell you—the creative juices can only be pumped when they wanna be pumped—like breast milk. So far, it seems worth it to squeeze them only when they’re ready, because my critique partner loves the manuscript—and she’s red-pen happy so this is a big deal.

Anyway, we finished the trailer today, and we actually did two versions of it, they are both below.

Free Book and Interviews

Tomorrow I’ll be on the No Math Allowed podcast interviewed by two very funny ladies (and I’m not just saying that because I know their Google alert will pick up this post) Jessica Barton, who is one of the book reviewers for Nerdist, and the lady with the best name ever–Lisa Love. We talk about books and stuff. It’s cool and fun and all the kids are listening to it.

I should also have a video interview going up this week on Anthony Cardno’s blog, Rambling On. Anthony is an author, reviewer and juggler. Okay, he’s only two of those things…but I’m not going to tell you which two.

In honor of all this talking about myself I’ve been doing, I made Are We Still On For Tonight FREE as a bird for today and tomorrow. Go spread your webbed fingers and click to it, my friends.

Trailers for Are We Still On For Tonight? Dating During the Zombie Apocalypse

We also did a second version of the trailer using some tools that distressed the video:

About the book:

Not everyone who survives the zombie apocalypse should.

Rachel Finnikin was prepared for a lot of things. She was prepared to marry a rich doctor. She was prepared drive a luxury vehicle. She was prepared to be a rich lady of leisure.

She was not prepared for the zombie apocalypse to effectively cancel her first date with Dr. Dream-Come-True.

Rachel isn’t one to let something as ridiculous as a horde of savage undead ruin her chance of a dream future. Instead, she allows her underlying ruthlessness to seep out as she works to survive the zombie apocalypse with every hair in place AND make it to the restaurant by 8 p.m.

But will the doctor?
—
This novella is approximately 16,700 words. That translates to a 50-60 page book.

Amazon

Smashwords

My bookstore

Barnes and Noble should have it approved by this evening. iTunes and Sony take a looooonnnnggg time, but it has been submitted to them.

As fate would have it, a few weeks after I found out about it they added a Florida race. As awesome friends would have it, my friend noticed this and sent me a link.

Now, I am a lazy son of a whore. Daughter of a whore. Shit (*Waves* Hi mom!)—forget it, my point is that I’m lazy. I try to walk sometimes, but never more than for 20 minutes at a time and never really working that hard. I have never, ever been that interested in running a race and I have the stick-to-itiveness of a 5-year-old with ADHD, no medication, and contempt for every activity known to woman.

But a race where zombies chase you? Oh, c’mon! Of course I want to do that.

So I started training for the race two weeks ago. Training for a 5k is different than just walking. It’s much harder. In starting, I realized just how quickly I would die if there really was an apocalypse—or any massive emergency, really.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized how much my survival depends on having a bug-free, air conditioned shelter around me with a phone to order pizzas and a car to drive me out to places with things like donuts and coffees. Without these things, as it is now, I’d be lying on the ground dying. I couldn’t realistically survive if I was forced to live in the wilderness—or even if I was forced just to live without a car.

This made me start to wonder how much my self-confidence would change if I knew that I could survive any life event because I had both my physical health and some survival training. I wondered how it would change me to literally know that I could survive the worst thing that could ever happen to me (lose my home, lose my husband, lose my fat soft kittehs).

So I decided to springboard this zombie race training into a full-scale incidence of crazy-bearded-off-the-grid girl survivalist training.

This is not a new idea. There are many companies dedicated to providing these services to other crazy people. I’m going to take a page  out of the books of these fine folks and design an entire year’s worth of apocalypse training junk. From learning how to grow my own food, to learning how to shoot a gun to figuring out how to reuse trash. The only thing I won’t learn is how to kill and skin animals. Holy Mother of All the Baby Kitties wants me to be a vegetarian should there be an apocalypse, and who am I to fight against that? I’ve got some courses and stuff lined up and I’m going to share the whole journey with you. To follow it, just look at the tag I gave this post—because they will all fall under that tag.

So what would you focus on in apocalypse training? What skills would most concern you or would you think are most valuable? How do you think it would change you to know you were capable of surviving without all the comforts known to man?

On any given day, I have at least two careers. My main career (if there can be such a thing) is as a freelance writer. This is the career that has supported my family for over three years—and for a family with only one income, that’s pretty important.

My second career is as a fiction writer, something that I’ve only been doing for about a year and that doesn’t exactly bring in the dough necessary to feed a growing Wolverine, a zombie-race-gonna-be-running Hussy and two cat prodigies.

The interesting thing about these dual careers is that in each one, I have a set of “clients.” In fiction writing, my readers are my clients whereas in freelancing, those who secure my services to write for them are my clients (the end readers are THEIR clients).

Each of my two client groups has made an investment in me—the freelance clients invest their money, reputation and faith. The fiction clients (you guys) invest their money and their emotions by getting drawn into my worlds and my characters.

I can’t tell you how hard this makes it to prioritize everything these two careers require. Because while freelancing clients may pay my mortgage and health insurance, you guys have invested something even more valuable, even if it’s something that doesn’t exactly put food on the table.

When I launched my fiction career, I never anticipated that I would have growing pains as my freelancing business became more popular than ever and my fiction ideas grew. As it stands, I’m really happy with the progress of the fiction side—but that doesn’t mean there aren’t unexpected complications that I’m trying to overcome.

Some of the difficulties I’m having will change how I do business in the future, and it will be interesting to see how that affects the success (or…unsuccess) of my fiction. For example, I was pretty careful to commit to release dates for projects over the past year (failing to meet just one of them so far). I did this because—if you’re like me—you like to put an exciting book release date on your personal calendar and make a whole day of it. But I did this thinking as a reader instead of as an author. Next year, I think I’m just going to release books when I feel like releasing them, with no calendar, no commitment and no obligation. I have a feeling this may adversely affect my sales, but my happiness will be positively affected, and that should probably be my priority anyway.And if you’re a follower of this site, my Facebook, my Twitter or on the Hussy List, you’ll hear about the release, so it won’t be exactly like that tree that fell out in the forest.

Another change I’ll be making is that I’ll be putting all my books in print–either as stand-alone work or collections. I have yet to see any profit in print, but I don’t think one year can really give a person a true handle on what is, and isn’t, possible.

What I’m Working On Now

It’s hectic in the Hussy house right now. I’m ghostwriting a couple of books for clients and trying to finish some of my own. I started the next book in the Dating During the Zombie Apocalypse series, this one following a substitute teacher named Hannah. I’m hoping to release it this year. I’m also working diligently to finish Vampire Relationship Guide, Volume 3. There is SO much going on in this book, it’s ridiculous. Finally, I’m doing final edits on Pack Mistress 4. Again, a lot going on in this book–holy hell.

I’m playing around with another serial, but I’m on the fence about whether to do it as a serial or just release it as a stand-alone novel. How have you been enjoying the Pack Mistress serial format? Does it annoy you more than excite you? Would you rather have read nothing and waited a year for me to write it, and then read it all in one week?

Book length is a sensitive subject for me (That’s what she said.). I get emails from readers who want my books to be longer. I have also noticed that a few reviewers wanted my books to be longer (That’s what he said.) (And no, I don’t read reviews, as I’ve said before, but occasionally, my eye accidentally snags one and then I have to run to the nearest First Aid kit while yelling, “IT BURNS! IT BURNS!!”.)

I’d like for readers to understand that when I sit down to write a book, I don’t decide ahead of time what length it will be. I might have an idea in mind, based on my outline, but I don’t make sure I wrap everything up at xx,xxx words. I write until the story is done.

I also write books that I want to read. You see, when I read most full length novels, I find myself doing a lot of skipping. One series that I lurved was hella filled with battles and shit—and I didn’t read hardly a lick of them. I just looked around for dialog and love scenes between these two, beautifully written characters. The author told her story how she wanted to, but you can bet I would have been thrilled if she did less war-battle stuff and just focused on the interpersonal. Of course, I wouldn’t tell her that because she doesn’t need to do what I tell her to—she just needs to write her books because they are awesome (at least, the love parts are…I wouldn’t actually know about the rest.).

When I write, I like to put a microscope to a certain situation and write about that. I like to focus on a particular theme (For VRG–what would a relationship REALLY be like with a vampire? For PM, it’s about this moment of transition in Lorena’s life. For AWSOFT it’s about how Rachel initially deals with the zombie apocalypse.).

In doing so, my goal is to entertain the shit out of you for an hour or two, never bore you, show you a different way of looking at a common theme, and keep you at peak excitement the entire time I have you. Also, because I sometimes write about really annoying heroines (Rachel, I’m looking at you dear) I don’t want to extend my welcome. Leaving you wanting more means that I’ve done my job.

I also try to make sure that I charge a reasonable price for the length of my work. I use other traditional publishers in the romance and paranormal genre as a guide and price accordingly.

I guess my point here is that size doesn’t matter, what matters is that you enjoy the time you spend with my books. If you find the length frustrating (heh) then you might want to step away until I decide to do a full length novel because all the ideas I’ve got right now seem like short ones, and I’m not going to shove words in just for the sake of length, because then my books will suck donkey balls and holy mother of all the baby kitties, do we really want that?

Just remember, if you wanna read it—for free—you need to be on the Hussy List. If you are on the Hussy List, then you’ve either received a Hussy List email or a confirmation email in the past three weeks.

If you haven’t received these things, then either you haven’t subscribed or you might want to check your SPAM folder and remind it that no matter how pink and pudgy I am, I am not a canned ham.

You’ve got to be a Hussy Lister on the day the book is released in order to get it for free, so go ahead and get on that (instructions are here).

Benefits of Hussy Listing

As a Hussy Lister, you get:

• To be called a hussy
• Emails (up to 8 per year) about book releases
• Free books. I have three freebies planned for this year, including AWSOFT
• Invites to special events for Hussy Listers only

Benefits of Hussy Listlessness

By choosing NOT to be a Hussy Lister, you:

• Won’t be called a Hussy
• Won’t get emails from me
• Aren’t forced to see my free books entering your electronic mail space
• Don’t hear about special events you weren’t interested in anyway

Two roads lie before you, reader-friend. Which shall you choose? The one that labels you a hussy for life? Or the one that…doesn’t.

You can buy it on Amazon, Barnes and Noble and here. I’m working on getting it to iTunes, Sony, etc.

Also…Are We Still On For Tonight? Dating During the Zombie Apocalypse is with the proofreader and will be released next week! Yay! The little book that I was beginning to think couldn’t-–will! Beta reader feedback for the novella was great—and I hope that reflects the experience you will have when you nestle it on your lap for a little afternoon delight. Delight as in read, perv.

I wrote the novella as a gift to my Hussy Listers, who are all going to receive a free copy, but of course I’m going to sell it too. Sort of because making money on books allows me to continue investing the time and moola into writing and publishing them, and also sorta because I just like to roll around in my book money which I use as a mattress because my sleep number has a dolla sign in front of it. Holla!

Both releases for this month (Are We Still On For Tonight? Dating During the Zombie Apocalypse and Pack Mistress 3) are in the final editing stage. PM 3 will be sent to the proofreader over the weekend. PM3 is being released on 2/20 and AWSOFT is being released no later than 2/29, although I’m trying to get it out a little earlier. Hussy Listers, you will get an email announcing the PM3 release and you will all receive a free copy of AWSOFT when it comes out.