Monday madness, new release, chatting, and other assorted insanity.

You know, a smart, organized person would have written this post up in advanced and had it scheduled to go live automatically.

I am apparently not that person.

For starters, I'm chatting over on Goodreads today and tomorrow, on the BDSM group there. It's a discussion forum kind of format, so you can drop in anytime. Feel free to participate in the chat or the Q&A or just hang out. :)

Goodreads BDSM group link

Tonight I've got DnD with friends, and have been working on refreshing myself with the rules. We're playing 3.5 and I stopped playing somewhere around the original or AD&D version, with a lot of GURPS mixed in. I'm picking it back up, though. Yay! I still have trouble figuring modifiers sometimes, because we weren't using the D20 system way back then. (Geez, that makes me feel fracking old! LOL)

Also, Dexter -- WHAT THE FUCK??? I am really pissed off. I thought no show could come up with a series end worse than The Sopranos did.

I was, sadly, wrong.

If you haven't watched all of Dexter, stop at about season 4. Seriously. Just stop.

And do NOT download IOS7 yet. UGH. I made the mistake of going ahead and putting it on my iPad, and I. HATE. IT. In addition to it looking cheesy, they took away the swipe-to-delete function on email, and that REALLY pisses me off. I should have known better not to update, but I did it anyway. I should have learned. I will NOT be updating my iPhone 4S anytime soon. GRRR!

I also have a new release today! Hope Heals is live on BookStrand's site. It'll take 4-6 weeks to hit third-party outlets like Kindle, Nook, etc. but you can buy the various formats there and manually transfer them (some tablets/devices support direct downloading), OR if you have a Kindle, you can enter your device's email address into your BookStrand account, and they'll send the file TO your device for you. Easy-peasey!

Kindle how-to link for BookStrand

Hope Heals on BookStrand

People ask me if I pull from real life for my books, and this book is a prime example of that. In my mind, the Heckmans' property is the property my dad's parents used to own while I was growing up in, yes, Odessa, Florida. My grandmother's sister lived next door (in Betty's house, in my mind). They had some sort of long-term war going on, however. My grandmother took great pride in waiting to burn leaves and stuff until the wind was just right and blowing smoke over toward her sister's house. LOL Next door to them, on the same property, was a tiny wood house built by my great-grandparents'. Although, in my revisionist history I've transformed that into the large, spacious home the Hope men now own.

Nope, no goats, chickens, pigs, horses, or steers (with or without tennis balls) in sight, although we did have dogs. And they didn't have a pool, just a lake. (Why on earth would they have a pool when they had a lake? LOL seriously, that was their mindset.)

I remember lots of times my dad loading up a couple of mowers (they sold and repaired them) on the trailer, and taking me and my sister over there, and we'd spend hours happily zooming around and mowing.

Yeah, who'd a thunk free child labor could have so much fun? LOL We only lived a few minutes away from them, and had fun swimming in the lake. I learned how to water ski on that lake.

The shop Dana works at really exists, although the man who runs it, his name is Rick, and he's awwwweeeesoooommme. (In fact, I have an appointment with him later this week. Time for more blue highlights. LOL)

One of the highlights of my grandmother's life was when former Tampa Bay Buccaneer bought a house one property over from them and moved in. She proudly showed us a couple of large frames she scavenged from their garbage, giggling that they used to belong to someone famous. (I don't know if she ever reused those frames or not, or just enjoyed knowing they were now hers and had been touched by fame.)

They eventually sold that property and moved farther north in the state to be closer to my aunt. It no longer resembles the house they owned, because the new owners gutted, rebuilt, and expanded, and added a barn and horses. The little wooden house is also gone. My grand-aunt's house is still there, owned by her son. But my memories of the place will live on.

Books are funny things. Sometimes, I'll get a single line of dialogue or snippet of an idea, or even a title. Sometimes, it's a character, or more than one character, but no plot. Sometimes, the whole idea slams into me and forces me to write it out of my brain just to shut it the hell up.

Hope Heals was the latter. I was lying in bed with Hubby one night, trying to go to sleep, when the scene where Sarah is questioning her dad about Big Mac's tennis ball slammed into my mind. My eyes popped open and in five minutes, the whole plot was THERE. I had to get up, get my laptop, and start writing. I got that scene written immediately, which was enough to satisfy "the voices," apparently, into letting me go to sleep.

I got up the next morning, read through it, and still thought it was good. Although I wasn't sure it was as funny as I thought it was. So I called Hubby in, he read it, and laughed his ass off.

If  I can make him laugh out loud, then I know it's funny.

So that's how Hope Heals made it to life, asshole ninja assassin pet goats and all. :) I hope you enjoy it.

And yes, there likely will be more stories from that gang in the future. Nothing concrete from "the voices" yet, but they're rumbling. My other stories that this one bumped are still chattering more loudly at me, so I'm back to working on those.

Happy Monday! :)