What am I up to now?

Yay, I survived Thanksgiving without adding too many pounds. LOL I hope everyone survived it safe and sound (and sane!). And tomorrow, Mercury goes from retrograde back to direct. (Can I have a hallelujah?)

And on Friday, the fourth installment in my Deep Space Mission Corps series, Out of Bight, Out of Mind, releases from Siren. (Hint: You can pre-order it now! *smile*) Don't worry, there will be more books in that series. Books five and six will focus more on the crews of the Kendall Kant and Braynow Gaston, although Emi and her boys will make appearances. And there will be books beyond those.

So right now, I'm finishing a WIP to turn in to Siren, tentative titled Foggy Daze. (Not sure I'm totally in love with that title, however, but it does apply to the manuscript.) It's a mfm menage, and a prequel book to my Coffeeshop Coven series that I'll be putting out next year.It's not technically a paranormal story, it's more a contemporary, although we're introduced to a few characters and magickal elements we'll see in later books in the series.

EDIT: We did go ahead and change the title to It's a Sweet Life. (It's the name of the heroine's bakery.)

(Another hint, Out of the Darkness is a prequel to the Coffeeshop Coven series, which focuses on the people who call the Many Blessings new age shop a second home. If you read OotD, it'll set up the backstory for the series that while not mandatory to know, it'll give you greater insight into the first book and the events that took place leading up to it. And Red Tide contains related characters as well.)

Here's my working blurb (subject to change):

LacieBell Addams, known as Libbie to her friends, has a mortgage on her building in Brooksville, Florida, a struggling bakery, no love life, no health insurance...and fibromyalgia. She's worried how she'll continue making ends meet when two hunks show up looking to rent the extra apartment over her bakery. Not only do Ken and Charles make her money worries go away, they offer to help out in the bakery in their spare time, giving her hope. They also make her panties damp. Too bad they're gay, but they are great eye candy.

Ken Dougherty and Charles Stackhouse have a secret--they're not the gay cousins they pretend to be. They're actually twin brothers in disguise and on the run from a vengeful New Jersey mob boss. Charles is actually Allan Donohue, formerly a prosecutor with the State Attorney's office in Miami. Benjamin Donohue was the Miami-Dade detective who helped break the case wide open. Now they're both marked for death. They hope their ruse is enough to keep them, and Libbie, safe. Because now that they've both fallen in love with the struggling baker, there's no way they're going to let her go.

But what happens when fate strikes and vengeance comes calling? Will there be a lifetime of days both foggy and sunny for the three, or will their love suddenly be ended in a deadly eternal night?

--

What comes next? December will be spent finishing Tony's story and getting that submitted to Siren. It's going to be a mf BDSM book, and emotionally it's been grueling to write (although not nearly as much so as The Reluctant Dom was.)

In no particular order (no, I don't have any potential release dates yet), here are the projects topping my whiteboard from hell at the moment, and which I anticipate being done/released in the early part of next year:

• The Denim Dom (Tony's story, and will catch people up on characters from Safe Harbor, Cardinal's Rule, Domme by Default, and The Reluctant Dom)
• Triple Trouble 5 (I can't decide on a title for it yet.)
• Without Porpoise and Porpoisefully Yours, books 3 and 4 in the Placida Pod series
• Book 1 in the Coffeeshop Coven series (mfm and as of yet untitled because I can't make my dang mind up--heeeey, Macarena)
• Book 2 in the Bleacke Shifters series
• Deadline, a contemporary mystery (mf) with romantic elements that I'm self-publishing as Lesli Richardson (it's in edits now)
• Pinch Me, a contemporary thriller (mf) with romantic elements... *ditto ^^^*

When I say those projects top my whiteboard from hell, that's not to say that's the limit of my projects. Ooohhh no, bucky. That's just the list of the ones currently screaming at me the loudest. LOL I have a whole tree's worth of sticky notes plastered over my corkboard squares (if Grimmy would quit swatting at them and knocking them down!) of projects.

Also in the queue for next year, more installments in the Good Will Ghost Hunting series (hopefully at least two of them, more if I can manage it) and my Brimstone Vampire series (at least two). Along with more Coffeeshop Coven series books, a couple of BDSM novels, a couple of one-off menage stories (one a contemporary, one an adventure set in Yellowstone) that keep popping their heads up and shouting at me to write them (but they keep getting shouted down by other stories), more from the Triple Trouble gang, another DSMC book, possibly the sequel to Fierce Radiance, a new post-apocalyptic series that I'm thinking of as "bird flu pandemic meets The Stand meets The Walking Dead minus zombies meets classic Old Western pulp fiction," and some other stuff.

I've been asked why I'm self-publishing some of my fiction as Lesli. Good question. :) I am COMPLETELY satisfied with Siren-BookStrand, let me say that right up front. The publisher is fantastic to work with, and I have nothing but good to say about them. Seriously. However, their niche is romance and erotic romance. And honestly? My brain has some contemporary stories to write, some without any sex in them at all, and that means they wouldn't be a good fit for Siren. It's nothing to do with them. (You wouldn't take your Ford to a BMW dealership for repairs, would you? Same principle.) Also, I've always wanted to build up my Lesli Richardson pen name (since, heck, that IS my real name) and I've just been too busy to do it. So rather than sexing up some books that really have no business being sexed up because it would be extraneous, I decided, why not take a chance and do this? Quite honestly, sometimes my mental palette NEEDS the non-sexy writing so I don't get burned out. Rather than letting those manuscripts languish in a metaphorical drawer, I decided why not self-publish them?

While we're here, I'm shamelessly drumming up "likes" for my Facebook page: http://facebook.com/tymberdalton I'm over the 900 mark and shooting for 1,000. If you haven't gone there and liked it yet, please do, because when I do hit the 1,000 mark, I'm going to randomly pick one of the people who've liked it to win $20 in Strandbucks from Siren-BookStrand. :)

So what are your thoughts? What do you want to see popping up on my Coming Soon page? *smile*