And see below for my Arisia schedule, you Massachusetts folks!

See you soooon!

Nicole: Welcome, Denise!

Denise: Thanks for having me, Nicole.

Nicole: Did you know my middle name is Denise?

Denise: I did! That’s great. It’s a great name.

Nicole: And my mom’s maiden name is Townsend. Isn’t that crazy?

Denise: Yes. Crazy.

*silence*

Nicole: Anyway, can I just tell you that I really loved your book.

Denise: Well, I love yours!

Nicole: I just think you’re really talented. And that we have a lot in common.

Denise: I know, right? It’s like we could be the same person.

*silence*

Nicole: So, tell us about Ocean’s Touch.

Denise: Ocean’s Touch is about a woman, Meredith, who is bound up by grief, having been widowed at a young age. Meredith feels like her only purpose is to live for her dead husband’s legacy, but a visiting selkie, Dylan, knows better. Dylan helps her rediscover herself, her sexuality, and her real desires–which include the local artist, Alex. Alex challenges her in every way imaginable. Eventually, Dylan brings the three together, in every possible way.

Nicole: Every way?

Denise: Well, most ways that will fit in a novella. I’m sure there are more, but I had space limitations.

Nicole: Rawr. So what do you think makes your book different from other erotic romance?

Denise: This book and my next book, Ocean’s Surrender, are very much romances and very much have that HEA. But it’s really about the woman learning to be happy with herself, and becoming open to love through that process, rather than someone coming in and just making her happy. So it’s really about female empowerment and women learning to love themselves and to embrace their sexuality. I think there are a lot of forces in this world that still try to keep women from feeling comfortable in their own skins, and I want my books to address that.

Nicole: That’s so weird. I have very similar philosophies.

*silence*

Nicole: Well, moving on, what else can you tell us about the book?

Denise: It’s very hot, very much something that will make you blush on the subway, and I’ve heard from a few sources it might even spark a few tears. You can read a sexy excerpt, here.

Nicole: Wow, that is hot.

Denise: That’s just the third chapter.

Nicole: And there will be more in the series?

Denise: Yes, hopefully. The second is already finished, I just need to do some edits based on beta readings and get it off to my marvelous agent, Rebecca Strauss.

Nicole: Oh, wow, my agent is Rebecca Strauss!

Denise: Yes. Yes she is.

*silence*

Nicole: Well, that’s awesome you have more lined up. Are they with the same characters?

Denise: Oh, no. Different characters all the time, but there’s always an empathic selkie willing to help the suffering humans.

Nicole: That’s very generous of the selkies.

Denise: I think they enjoy it.

Nicole: I think we will, too. The books sound great and it was lovely to finally meet you.

Denise: You too. We should hang out more.

Nicole: I think that’ll happen, for sure.

So thanks again for coming by and now for a GIVEAWAY! For no interview can be complete without a giveaway. For +1 entry, just comment below. And you’ll get extra entries for the following: follow Denise on Twitter or Facebook for +2 entries EACH, retweet or share this interview on facebook for +2 entries EACH, blog about Denise for +2 entries, and if you review Ocean’s Touch on Samhain’s website, Amazon,  Goodreads, etc., or your own blog, I’ll give you +5 pts EACH! 

Just post your initial entry and follow it up with everything else you’ve done (+2 followed on Twitter and FB, +10 review at my site http://yourmama.com, etc) and tally up your points for me. This is partly because I can’t add, and partly because I’m lazy.

What will you get for winning? I’ll pre-order you a digital (it’s digital only, but can be read on a PC) copy of my upcoming Trueniverse short story, “Something Wikkid This Way Comes,” starring the fine ladies of Triptych, to be released mid-January, and I’ll also order you ANY TWO paperbacks or kindle e-books for $15.99 or less off Amazon.

So that’s any two books at $15.99 or less, each, and my own upcoming digital short story.

The contest will run until Friday, January 13th, to give people lots of time to review. And because it’s appropriate, I think.

Good luck and see you back here Friday, when I will be blogging the toast cups that go with that Peeler Family Crab Dip. I know you’re excited!

In fact, the entries were so good that Juliet very generously offered to increase the prizes offered so that she could choose some honorary mentions. The honorary mentions can all pick any book from Juliet’s body of work currently available on Amazon, while the true wiener gets a copy of Dead Bolt from Juliet AND any other book of Juliet’s available on Amazon from me.

Drum roll please! Here’s Juliet!

Nicole *really* knows how to make a woman sweat.  I’m just saying…I’m a Libra, which means I’m decision-making-challenged.  I’m like the anti George W. Bush:  I’m the indecider (or would that be the undecider? I’ll ask George, I’m sure he’ll know)

ANYWAY…the point is, I had one heck of a time deciding which of the entries for Best Erotic Cozy title should win our coveted prizes.  But after much consideration, having checked in with cozy perverts of all stripes, and accepting advice from drunk people in bars and, one memorable evening, at a strip club… I pronounce…

Several Honorable Mentions:

Toni in FL, with her Rub One Out: A Massage-Parlor Mystery (A mafioso’s feckless nephew is found dead, but smiling, in a massage parlor run by a competitor… and new masseuse Touchée Yourbum has oil on her hands. It’s up to her fellow masseuse, amateur detective Happy Ending, to prove there’s no blood on those delicate-but-strong digits, too.)

And Bobbee Gerson, with He Died Smiling (Fanny Ryder’s best employee ends up with a dead John. It happens sometimes. The autopsy, however, points to murder. Fanny must find the killer or her Employee Of The Year will lose everything.) ***Extra points for the title: Arse-Whips and Old Lace, for which the Pensfatales have developed an entire series set in the kinkiest retirement home in Florida, and in which Detective Domme is on the job.

And KL’s Sex Toy Series, especially The Belle of the Ball Gag, will be written by someone soon, I’m sure.  That title is FAR too good to pass up.

But the grand prize, because of her lovely coziness combined with a truly dirty mind, goes to Adrienne Merl!  She had three particularly cozy, yet thoroughly lewd, title ideas:

Summa Cum Loud: To avoid losing his tenure, a college professor will do anything to keep his affair with a student quiet, including commit murder!

Death Doggie Style: When thighs start heating up between a veterinarian and his assistant, murder comes barking!

…and…

Condoms, Corsets, and Coffins: When a Showgirl i na Vegas revue is murdered, a police detective goes undercover to find the killer.  He PULLS OUT all the stops to solve the case, while providing PROTECTION for the other girls in the show.

Yay! Will all four wieners please email me their addresses at iheartselkies(at)gmail(dot)com and we’ll get your prizes sorted ASAP!

Thanks to everyone for, er, entering. I enjoyed the contest immensely and couldn’t believe how funny these things were! I’m also inspired!

And speaking of inspiration (and wieners), I’ve got some big news! Denise Townsend has finally launched her website. It’s got a cover, information, and a pre-order button for Denise’s erotic romance debut, Ocean’s Touch, which comes out December 27th. It’s about selkies and if you like Jane, I really think you’ll like these. Denise is very close to me. Very. Very close.

If you have any questions about Denise, please feel free to email me at iheartselkies.

Thanks again and see you back here soon!

You might also be wondering about the winner of Juliet Blackwell‘s  Erotic Cozy Title Contest, all in honor of her release of Dead Bolt. Because of the time difference and people joining the contest late tonight (it’s Thursday as I write this), Julie and I thought it was only fair if she judge Friday, so we don’t miss anyone who enters after I go to bed. All this means is that she’ll be announcing her wiener on Monday, instead of today. So check back here Monday, and sorry about the confusion. It’s hard to organize a contest with someone on the other coast!

BEING A WOMAN

Philip Palmer

I had the idea for Artemis a few years ago, very soon after getting a book deal for my first novel Debatable Space.  Looking back at my notes, I see there are many major plot differences between my original concept and the finished novel. But the biggest difference of all is: Sex.

In other words, originally this story had a male protagonist.  But by the time I came to write it, Artemis McIvor had come along.  And instead of being a Guy story, it’s very much a Grrrl story.

There may be deep psychological reasons for this preference for female protagonists. Or it may simply be that I’m accustomed to the presence of strong females in my life. I am in fact the only male in my house, which I share with my wife Sally, my daughter Bess and my female dog Lucy (you’ll appreciate that I would not dare call ANY of these ladies a bitch.)

And I have fond memories of an SF novel I read in my teens called I Will Fear No Evil by Robert Heinlein, one of the all time great writers in the genre, who wrote the story a dying millionaire who pays a fortune to  have his brain transplanted into a new body; and ends up in the body of a woman.  It’s years since I’ve read this book, and the critical consensus is that it’s not that well written (since Heinlein was very ill during the writing process.)  But I remember being blown away by it at the time, with its amazing concept of a man becoming a woman. (Hey, I was a teenager in South Wales, and I’d never heard of gender change surgery back then.)

Up till that point,  you see, I’d been reading space operas featuring white Anglo-Saxon blokes exploring strange alien worlds.  But this was the first time I’d felt what it was like to be someone very different to myself; someone female.  THAT felt stranger than being yet another white bloke zapping aliens.

I tried to push this ‘being someone different’ approach to its limits in Hell Ship, where the main character Sai-ias is not only female,  she’s alien – with tentacles and a carapace.  And I have to say I felt very at ease being in her body. Indeed, for weeks after finishing the book, I yearned to go back to having tentacles and a cape.  Oh, the joy of being able to fly through the air, coupled with the ability to drink eight pints of beer at once!

Obviously all writers have to inhabit the bodies of the characters they create; and all readers do the same.  And indeed, one of the reasons I’m such a huge fan of Nicole’s Jane True books is that it gives me a chance to feel what it’s like to be HER, to be Jane – female, empowered, sassy, shamelessly sexual, and a selkie to boot.

If you’re a typical shy male writer however, it’s not often you get a chance to actually act out this fantasy – of being a Someone Else, who happens to be a woman.   But I did have that very experience a few months ago, during the script editing process for a movie I’ve written – a film noir called Inferno.

Now film noir is the home and origin of the concept of femme fatale – the double-crossing, ruthless sexy woman who stalks those means streets, screwing over men.  Kathleen Turner in Body Heat is a classic sexy femme fatale. And Linda Fiorentino, in the brilliant and very funny The Last Seduction, is just as sexy and even more fatale. She is in short an evil ruthless scheming bitch! And I love her to bits, even though she has NO redeeming qualities.

The femme fatale  in my movie, Elaine, is Welsh (don’t laugh! Welsh people can be evil and scheming too!) and in order to get a firmer grip on the character, I did a ‘hot seating’ exercise with my director, Marc.

Hot-seating is a technique I learned about many years ago when I was running writers’ workshops at the Royal Court Theatre. It’s an actor’s technique in which the actor sits in the aforementioned ‘hot seat’  and has to answer questions about his or her character, but always in the first person.

For some years, I’ve been using an adapted version of this technique with writers, of varying degrees of experience. It always works, sometimes astonishingly well; even shy people can be transformed by this exercise into the very incarnation of the character they are channelling.  And it’s therefore a great way to create a character when developing a screenplay.

Oddly though, I’d never had this hot seating technique done TO me (it’s by no means a standard script editing tool – I’m pretty much the only drama script editor I know who does it.)  But I briefed my director on how it worked, and away we went.

And boy, I became that evil scheming bitch.   Every question I was asked, I knew the answer, in infinite detail.  I discovered truths about my character’s childhood. I knew all about the lies she had told, including those that weren’t in my actual story.  I knew how she was able to get her way by playing mind games and exploiting her charisma.  I knew her vulnerabilities and her fears.

I had by this point written Lord only knows how many drafts of this script; but it wasn’t until I did the hot seat that I TRULY knew the character.

I even, at one point, got a little bit flirtatious with my red-bloodedly heterosexual male director.  Luckily he called a halt to proceedings, before things got out of hand.

Ahem. Moving on.

It was, in short an extraordinary and empowering experience. Yes of course, as a novelist I do this all the time – every character I create I ‘inhabit’ and feel and know.  And as a reader I do this too; when I read one of  Nicole’s books I BECOME Jane True; when I read a Lilith Saintcrow book I become, in the same way, Dante Valentine, or Jill Kismet. And when I read George R.R. Martin…it’s out with the winter woolies.

But the vicarious experience of writing or reading a character is not quite so intense as actually acting out the role.  Bear in mind I’m the world’s worst actor; I’ve never had the experience of standing on stage and pretending to be someone else. But by means of this hot seat exercise, I was able to make like a Method Actor, and BE my character.

And boy, I miss being evil, and sexy, and scheming. (Almost as much as I miss having those tentacles.)

Artemis herself has a few things in common with the character from my character in my movie;  namely, she’s ruthless and scheming.  But she’s very different in one major respect; she never lies.  Artemis is a rare example of the ‘reliable narrator’.  When she does bad stuff, she tells you about it; she may lie to get her way in the story, but she never lies to her reader.  That makes her a more complex and more unexpected character than my Welsh femme fatale. 

And if at some point I write another novel featuring Artemis, maybe I should hot seat her too;  to feel the unique joy of being Artemis McIvor at first hand…

What a great post, and what great advice for aspiring writers. I tell my students something similar about knowing their character’s ins and outs… even the things that would never come up in a book. But I’ve never thought about how productive it could be to actually workshop this idea. Needless to say,  I’m thinking about how I can incorporate this idea into my undergraduate Writing Urban Fantasy course next semester.

If you have any questions for Philip, please ask them in comments.

And see you back here on Monday for Julie’s wiener!

But we’re trying something new.

In spending a lot of time with Juliet and Sophie Littlefield, one of the things Juliet often jokes about is that she’s jealous of us, with our genres’ flexibilities. For example, Sophie gets to write a lot of violence (and does so beautifully). Meanwhile, I get to write a lot of sex.

Juliet and I were joking that one of the reasons her genre–the Cozy Mystery–doesn’t get to do much sex-writing is because of their titles. If you’re at all familiar with the genre of the Cozy, you know they LOVE their puns. Here are some great examples:

The Long Quiche Goodbye (CHEESE SHOP MYSTERY) by Avery Ames

Affairs of Steak (A White House Chef Mystery) by Julie Hyzy

The Gingerbread Bump-Off: A Fresh-Baked Mystery by Livia J. Washburn

Liver Let Die (A Clueless Cook Mystery) by Liz Lipperman

One Foot In The Gravy: A Nashville Katz Mystery (D… by Delia Rosen

Due or Die (A Library Lover’s Mystery) by Jenn McKinlay

The More the Terrier (A Pet Rescue Mystery) by Linda O. Johnston

Shoe Done It (An Accessories Mystery) by Grace Carroll

You Better Knot Die (A Crochet Mystery) by Betty Hechtman

Ghoul Interrupted: A Ghost Hunter Mystery by Victoria Laurie

These are absolutely adorable titles, and they represent everything that’s great about the genre. Cozies are cozy–they’re delightful openings through which readers can escape into a world here nothing too bad is going to happen and where everything will be solved in the end. Juliet and I both love cozies and we both love their punny titles.

But can you imagine the amazing, car-wreck-happening-in-front-of-your-eyes nature of ….

AN EROTIC COZY MYSTERY’S TITLE?????

Just the thought had Juliet and me in absolute stitches, and that’s when we came up with the idea for this contest.

We’ll each be giving away a prize. Juliet will offer a copy of her latest Haunted Home Renovation mystery, Dead Bolt, and I will up the ante by offering to Amazon you a copy of one of Juliet’s other books, of your choice. So you get two books for one pun.

But that’s the catch. We want you to come up with your own Cozy style, punny title . . . but for an EROTIC MYSTERY. The raunchier and more ridiculous, the better. I’ll be facilitating the contest, but Ms. Juliet Blackwell, herself, will be judging. We’ll announce the wiener next Friday, December 9, 2011.

To enter, just tell us your best Cozy Erotic Mystery title or titles (you can enter as many as you come up with) in comments, and Juliet will decide from those.

Best of luck! Or whatever other appropriate word you can think of, that rhymes with “luck.”

First off, I’m sorry that everything about this post is belated. I’m afraid that I am belated, this week. I’m revising revising revising and although it’s going well, my brain is a bit of a scramble.

So first off, let me extended a belated, but heartfelt pimp slap to three of mah favorite ladies, Lee McClain, Sophie Littlefield and Rachael Herron. Sophie’s beautiful new YA, Unforsaken, released last week.  Here’s the cover. Gorgeous.

Rachael also the release of her latest knitting romance, the cover of which I think is precious:

All I can find on the net is this weensy copy of it, but it’s lovely!

Finally there’s Lee McClain’s book. Lee is my colleague at Seton Hill, and one of the people responsible for hiring me. She’s also an amazing lady who I’m so glad I get to know and call friend. I really respect her and care for her, and this book looks adorable. It’s young YA, with tons of heart. It’s Sizzle!

So git to shopping! Sizzle would also make a great edition to your child’s library at school, so you might want to buy an extra to donate.

And, finally, we have a wiener. The contest can has spoken and JESSICA S, you get to email me with your address and any two mass market paperbacks ($7.99 or under) available on Amazon that you’d like me to order for you. Thanks for playing!

Time for me to get back to work. No rest for the wicked!

The Versatility of Urban Fantasy

Do you remember the first urban fantasy you ever read? It may not have been labeled urban fantasy at the time, but I bet you liked it. A lot. I know I did. And I wanted to read as much of it as I could get my hands on.

What’s so great about this subgenre of fantasy is that it’s versatile. You get your fairies and elves or your vampires and witches, and you can have your urban setting with all its contemporary trappings, too. Talk about imagination. Wow, there are so many combinations of the weird and wonderful that the possibilities are endless.

This is what drew me to writing the genre. My head is filled with strangeness most of the time anyway, and to pour it into a story within a world of my own making is like paradise for me. Combining real emotions and familiar situations with the fantastic couldn’t be more satisfying.

That’s how Chalice was born.

Chalice is the heroine of KNIGHT’S CURSE, the first book in my urban fantasy trilogy being published by Harlequin Luna. She’s not so magical as she is powerful by virtue of super human senses that enable her to be an awesome thief. Chalice doesn’t even like magic, at least not at first. She’s kidnapped by a sorcerer and forced to steal cursed and charmed artifacts. She’s a different kind of urban fantasy heroine with an unusual sort of problem. She’s bonded to a homicidal gargoyle as a way for her kidnapper to keep her in line. She can be a slave, or she can die. Her choice. And there are times when death seems the better option.

It’s her ancestry that intrigued me when I began writing the first book. The story sprang from Chalice’s heritage and the mythology I created to go with it. She’s descended from an order of female knights who fought in the Crusade Wars of the eleventh century. All the knights had special talents because they were the progeny of angels, and that gave them an edge over the enemy. They kept the knighthood strong over the centuries by mating with their guardian angels to procreate new knights for the order.

Chalice is adverse to magic because she blames it for everything bad that’s happened in her life, yet she’s forced to confront it every day. Magic is all around her, in nearly everything she touches, even in the man she falls in love with.

I had great fun putting Chalice in harm’s way every chance I got because I knew she would learn from the experience and use it to her advantage. Which she does. The second book explores her knighthood of sisters and the danger that comes close to exterminating them all. The third and final book takes Chalice on a perilous journey that seals a circle of trust, family and love. From the beginning, magic is the constant glue that holds everything together.

If you could create an urban fantasy, or have one custom made just for your reading pleasure, what would make it different from other books on store shelves? How would you make it special?

Thanks Karen! What a great post. And now I’d like to do a contest for Karen. The prize will be any two mass market paperbacks of your choice that are available on Amazon (totaling about $15, or the equivalent in your country’s money). You can enter by answering Karen’s question. You can also earn extra points by reviewing Karen’s debut on your blog, Amazon, Goodreads, etc (one point for each entry); adding Karen on FB and Twitter (one point each);  and/or by adding me on FB or Twitter (one point each). Just be sure to add up your entries for me, as i’m no good at math.

The Contest Can will pick a wiener in two weeks, on October 14th, to give you reviewers a chance to read and write. Buen suerte!

For those of you who follow me on Twitter, you know I’ve recently become obsessed with the television show, Mad Men. Many people perceive it as a love/hate relationship, because I tweet things like “Mad Men makes me want to stab something while watching EVERY EPISODE.”

These tweets are misleading, however, as I don’t have ambiguous feelings about the show at all. I adore the show. I think it’s brilliant, and at least five times an episode there’s something that happens with the writing, or the cinematography, or the direction, that makes me marvel at the show’s genius.

What pisses me off (and what is supposed to piss me off) is the society Mad Men depicts. But it pisses me off in a good way, and it pisses me off in a way that I think our country needs to be pissed off, especially now.

After all, we’re living in a time of major economic difficulties. I’d love to be all upbeat as usual, but when it comes to the economy, I can’t. I think America has been living in a very luxurious bubble for a really long time (something that Mad Men addresses) and the fact is that bubble has to break. When half of the world lives on less than $2.50 a day, it’s a bit bizarre to assume we should all have our own McMansion, complete with multiple cars, flat screens, etc. The fact is that Americans are going to have to scale it back, and live like the rest of the world. But this is a difficult adjustment, and another sad fact is that major inequalities in our society mean that some still get to live the caviar lifestyle, undented, while others have lost everything. This makes people angry, and it makes people lash out against easy scapegoats. Age-old scapegoats for rough times have traditionally been the Other: other races, other religions, and other genders.

I have a lot of friends who shake their hands, wondering at the recent spate of attacks on women’s rights. Under the auspices of “pro-life” legislation, there are insane attempts to redefine rape and ever-increasing attacks on women’s health care (even Fox News reported on this one). I would argue that these are merely the more extreme symptoms of a more pernicious malaise: the idea that some people wish we could go back in time, to when things were “simpler.”

When confronted with America’s instability (both economic and social), with our countries ever-loosening grip on its role as the world’s sole Super Power, and the struggles with our own identity that these facts engender, is it any wonder that people are looking to the past for answers?

Especially when that past was so lovely, right? We’re involved in a “quagmire” of a war, when the war my grandparent’s generation fought is known simply as “The Good War.” Everyone had employment, and people stayed in those jobs until they retired. Children didn’t engage in inexplicable “flash mobs” (either of the dancing or the looting variety). Wives didn’t work 60 hours a week when their husband’s can’t even find a job, and they certainly didn’t divorce their husbands to “find themselves.”

It all sounds so great, right?

The fantasy does sound awesome. In a world where I confront about 50 decisions a day, where I see myself, my friends, and my students struggle to figure out how to make it in a world in which there are no more rules, even I understand the allure of a black and white world.

And that’s where Mad Men comes in. It is that golden world that we’ve heard discussed in hushed voices. A world in which the Greatest Generation strides the earth like lions, smoking up a storm and napping at work. At work! After having a four martini lunch!

Then there are the outfits, and the hair, and the garters. I swoon at the women’s garters, alone, and I imagine myself with enormous torpedo-shaped breasts, swanning around in about fifteen layers of lingerie, and petticoats, and dresses, while batting my luxurious fake eyelashes up at my gorgeously suited companion.

But let’s look under the proverbial petticoats of that world, something that isn’t hard, since Mad Men‘s genius is that it makes sure we do just that.

The structure of Mad Men is a bit like a call and response song. For every moment of glamour, beauty, luxury, and ease of lifestyle that’s depicted in Mad Men, there is an answering moment of pettiness, ugliness, poverty, and difficulty. Yes, the white women in the beautiful dresses go into powder their gorgeous noses in a luxurious bathroom. But the answering tableau is of the African American bathroom attendants peering out at the ladies as they leave, wondering how they’ll make a living now that the purses in fashion are too small to hold the tip money upon which the attendants live. Yes, Don’s beautiful wife Betty wears the singularly most gorgeous outfits we’ve ever seen, but she does so while sitting for hours and hours, smoking alone, at her kitchen table. Yes, the men all pull out the ladies’ chairs, but they also order for them, and this situation is a metaphor for their whole lives.

In fact, there are a hundred little carefully inserted needles an episode, puncturing the balloon that is the fantasy of Mad Men. For example, in the wonderful scene where Don’s secretary confronts her nemesis, the great beauty of the office, Don’s secretary says something about how she’s the first woman to write copy “since the war,” pointing out that part of the country’s current largess was due to the hard work of women who stepped up while the men were fighting, and who had to then step back into subservient roles when the men returned.

But the greatest triumph of Mad Men is what makes it so difficult to watch. When I first Tweeted that I was watching it, I had about a dozen people reply they couldn’t get past the first episode. And I had the same feeling. I wanted to punch everyone in the show in the face, hard, about fourteen times an episode. The women? They’re vain idiots, who fill me with a deep sense of shame and anger. The men? They’re monsters–silly boys who with no sense or sensibility, horrifyingly granted the powers of Mark Twain’s vicious child on the beach who destroys his sandcastles because he can.

It is here that I locate Mad Men’s singular power: it understands how, as we saw in the Plantation South, great beauty can be built upon grotesque underpinnings. We also see the fallout the various characters endure: the loneliness, spite, and eventual craziness of the women (Betty Draper’s shooting the pigeons with her cigarette dangling from her lips has to be one of my favorite TV moments ever), and the emotional paralysis of the men that has them shuttling between variously inappropriate women while competing with each other with the viciousness of  fighting cocks.

And this is why I think everyone should watch Mad Men: because it does piss you off. Indeed, it wants to piss you off. Its power and its genius is that it makes you so angry about issues that we don’t even want to fight about any more. If I had a dime for every young, awesome, confident female student I’ve had that has blithely said, “I’m not a feminist, ew,” I’d be a millionaire. I think the feminist revolution was so successful that it’s easy to forget how recently we were empowered. Watching Mad Men’s women ask their husbands for money, or ask them whether it’s all right they work or pursue interests, or sit quietly despite desperately wanting to know about their husband’s lives is an amazing lesson in what our own realities could still be like, if we hadn’t had women willing to stand up for themselves, and for us.

So go watch Mad Men. Get really, really pissed off. Become absolutely horrified. Then think about what you’ve learned from those feelings, while you look around our own world.

See anything you don’t like?

*********************************************

And now for our Wieners from last week’s contest! The Contest Can has spoken!

The Wiener’s are Allison W., Holly K., and donnas! Email me at iheartselkies(at)gmail(dot)com with the name of ANY book on Amazon at $7.99 or under, with your address, and I’ll have it shipped to your door!

Thanks for playing, folks! Your comments were awesome and I’ve learned a lot. I’m really glad people are reading the blog, and I’m considering doing a newsletter, probably 2x a year.

Thanks again for all the comments.

I’m back in  Greensburg, believe it or not! I came home to a dusty, but intact, apartment. Yay! Then I had TWO FULL DAYS of meetings for the day job. It was intense! But great seeing my colleagues again, all of whom are awesome.

But that’s not what you want to hear about. You want to hear about Authors After Dark! And see all the pictures I took, right?

Wellllllllllll….imma tell you about my photography skillz.

I have none.

So I took all these wonky-assed, out of focus, ridiculously far away photos of stuff that amused me at the time, but now I a) can’t think why and b) am not really sure what they are.

Which is why there will be my USUAL DEARTH OF PHOTOGRAPHS on this blog post. Because I suck.

AAD, on the other hand, DID NOT SUCK. It was, in fact, SO MUCH FUN! So fun I have to use all caps AND exclamation marks. There was just such a great vibe at the con: everyone was super enthusiastic, eager to be there and meet each other and the authors, and generally just be happy and enthusiastic. I had a blast meeting everyone, and hanging out with people, and I don’t know what else to say except it was GOOD.

There was much laughter, quite a bit of food consumed, some raunchy readings, many panels, I put the slap down as a moderator on occasion, and incited some pinnings of pensises on our poor founding fathers. To top it all off, there was also a film crew, filming a documentary about the romance community. So all in all it was a surreal, but fabulous, experience.

I will definitely be rocking out AAD 2012 in NOLA, my fave city. That said, it’s gonna be hotter than the hubs of hell, but you’re supposed to sweat in NOLA. If you ain’t sweatin’, you ain’t doin’ it right.

So that’s all she wrote about AAD. It’s not that I don’t have more to say, but it’s already been AGES, and everyone else and their mother has done AWESOME blog posts on everything that happened (with pictures! That don’t suck!). So if you’re intrigued, just follow the #aad2011 hashtag on twitter and it’ll lead you to many blog posts.

But it DID rock, and if you’re on the fence about coming next year, don’t be. Get off that fence and get to New Orleans!

Now, because I don’t have any of my OWN GODDAMNED PICTURES BECAUSE I SUCK, I’m going to share with you what has to be my favorite piece of fan art yet. I know, I say every new piece is my favorite, but that’s because it is!

I bet you readers will know exactly where this scene comes from, no?

This was made by Regan Johnson (blog and website) and I adore it! It’s now my wallpaper on my laptop.

I totally get a kick out of stuff like this, so whenever you’ve made anything Jane related, lemme know! I’ll pimp it on the blog. Because one of the things AAD and RomCon reminded me of is that I have the coolest fans ever. They’re people I like hanging out with, people who inevitably get me since they get my books, and people whom I’m lucky to have in my corner.

So VIVA LA FANS! In honor of you all, I’m going to do a contest. Just comment here about anything you like that authors do. Do you like when we blog? Do book groups? Do you like newsletters? Tweets? What? Let me know, as I’m always trying to figure out new ways to reach out to you and get you the information you desire.

So comment below, and on Monday, August 22, at 8:00 AM ET, I’ll randomly pick THREE winners (lucky number three!) who can pick ANY MASS MARKET PAPERBACK (the kind that are $7.99 or under) on Amazon and I’ll have it shipped directly to your door. Sound good? That’s ANY mass market paperback: it doesn’t have to be mine, or UF, or whatever. I can also ship it to your kindle if that’s how you roll.

I heart you guys! GROUP HUG!!! *slobbers*

How are y’all! I thought I’d take this blog post to clarify something that a lot of people have been asking me about. Basically, I’ve been getting a lot of questions about why I “chose” to change the covers of my book. Now, don’t get me wrong: I love that people are curious, I love that they care, and I don’t mind answering this question. I just thought I’d do it here, so everyone can see, in case you were wondering that same thing.

The thing is, unless you’re self-published, authors do not choose their covers. Instead, our publishing houses choose them for us.

I have been really lucky in that my publisher, Orbit Books, has been really nice about asking me my opinion. They’ve worked with me loads, trying to make sure I’m happy. And I absolutely love them for it. But the fact is, they don’t have to do any of that…they’re just a really good company.

Because the only thing authors control are the words inside the book. We don’t choose fonts, we don’t choose headers, we may not even have been able to choose our own titles. Depending on who you publish for and how big your name is, you have more or less control, but most contracts stipulate that an author’s position on these sorts of decisions is that we have the right to be “consulted.” Which means if we absolutely hate something and threaten to poison ourselves in order not to finish a book with that cover, they are free to take on board our opinion. Or not.

So I had nothing to do with the changes made to the covers of my books. Do I like them? Yes. Did I like the original covers? Yes. Do I understand the marketing strategy behind them making the changes, after it was explained to me? Yes.

And that’s what I think is hardest for people outside the business of publishing to understand, and I include myself in that camp. Publishers aren’t just creating the perfect art for a book–they’re creating a product they want to attract people’s attention and make them want to buy it. So choices that might seem arbitrary or weird to me, may actually be a great marketing strategy.

Will the new red panels and the big, bold branding of my name and titles sell millions of copies and rocket me to the top of the New York Times Besteller list? I certainly hope so, although it’s doubtful. But I’m really lucky to have a company that’s investing in me, and trying new things to try to make me as successful as I can be.

That doesn’t mean you have to like the changes, obviously. And if you love them feel free to attribute any and all genius solely to me. But seriously, I just wanted to let you know how things worked, so you got a better idea of the biz we’re all a part of, as readers and as writers.

So that’s my lecture for the day! Dr. Peeler will now take off her lecturing cap and put on her CONTEST LEIS!

I wish I did have contest leis. That would be awesome.

Who won a copy of any one of Juliet Blackwell’s FABULOUS BOOKS?

The contest can has spoken . . . and the wiener is . . .

LETHEA B!

Yay, Lethea! Pick out any of the books listed here, and email your choice and your address to ihearstselkies(at)gmail(dot)com. Let me know if you have any questions and congratulations!

To everyone else, thanks for playing and I’m sure I’ll have another contest soon. I should also probably start doing some stuff about the book that’s out in about a month, shouldn’t I? Maybe some readings? Hmmmm?