Category Archives: Jana Blogs

Jana Blogs

Rainbow Snippet

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Survived week one of work but still no signs of whether or not I have my sabbatical for next year.

Here’s a little more of my WIP These Haunted Hills It’s more of Brendan’s conversation with his ex, Kristen.

In spite of his protestations about being good, he could still hear the worry and pain in her tone. “I can do that. Besides we might be going ghost hunting at night soon anyhow.”

“I can almost picture you bouncing around like a little boy.”

At that his heart clenched. Kristen went silent, no doubt feeling the same pain. If it was this bad for him he could only guess at the pain she felt losing the son she had sheltered inside her body.

He forced a smile into his voice. “I am. Joshua and I even went looking for foxes in the woods around my cabin.”

She laughed. “You in the woods? I still can’t picture it. What brought that on?”

If you’d like to play along, Rainbow Snippets is a Facebook community where we post up 6 sentences of one of our LGBT stories every Saturday. It’s been fun and you can find it here. Be sure to check out all the offers! It’s been a great supportive group!

Jana Blogs

Sunday Small Talk

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A few years back I was talking with Shira Anthony at a conference and she said something along the lines of writing contemporary LGBT romances allowed her to write the genre SF/F/UF sorts (I should mention this was an anime con and all of us there are obviously genre fans).

For me this was a few novels ago and didn’t quite have the experience yet to appreciate that statement. I do now, though the reality of it makes me a little sad. For example, Blood Red Roulette (urban fantasy, vampires) took me years, I poured my heart into it. I wish I could say it is selling like gangbusters but it’s not where I’d like it to be (I’m surprised a little by it given the gorgeous cover and that vampires tend to be popular). On the other hand, Purrfect Holiday, my contemporary short story is selling very well.

That statement from the con reverberates in my head. Contemporary romance is what sells. Granted I knew this but it has taken a long while for me to realize just how much better it sells. That’s where my sadness comes in. Unlike some of my genre-loving friends, I don’t also like contemporary fiction much.

There is an old writing chestnut that we’ve all heard of ‘write what you know’ which most of us have changed to ‘write what you love’ (because if you love it, you’ll research it and then you’ll know it). This is where my problem begins. I don’t love contemporary romance so it makes it hard for me.

It’s difficult to write a contemporary romance to give you something in the bank while you write your genre novel when you don’t love it. Short stories are easy enough but to do something longer, you have to love it or it will show.

It’s an uncomfortable feeling for me. I wish I could be easier with writing contemporary fiction, that I could learn to like it more. I’ve tried. I’ve read it by my favorite genre authors but even liking the author hasn’t helped. It’s just not in my field of interest.

So I guess that just leaves me one avenue: to write what I love and to buy and help promote what I love so the other authors who write it can have a little more success of their own.

And maybe from the contemporary shorts I do write, maybe I’ll find readers who will be willing to take a chance on my genres down the road.

In the meantime, have some writing links
The Significance of Setting (I’ve talked about this one myself)

17 Literary Podcasts to Ease Your Commute

My 20-Step Plan to Writing a Book: Part 1 (Steps 1-10) (I’ve noticed that Bookbaby is starting to recycle their links a lot so I don’t have that many new ones to share)

And from my friend:

How to Promote Your Book for Free (much of it is newsletter related but I’m not so sure that works well. I honestly don’t read 90% of the ones I get).

Writer Jay Odjick with some words of advice to his 19-year-old self

The Inner/Outer Balance

Questions to Consider When Plotting a Scene I really like this one.

Trends For Authors And Creative Goal Setting 2019

A Field Guide to Six Infectious YA Clichés

Jana Blogs

Rainbow Snippets

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Now that the holidays are over maybe I won’t be rushing at the last minute to read everyone’s stuff.

Cross your fingers for me. I might get the chance to be on the author panels at the Steampunk Symposium this year. It would be such fun.

I’m picking back up with my WIP because I need to get inspired to finish it. It’s These Haunted Hills which I haven’t shared from since Sept. It’s a paranormal story set near where I live in Ohio. Josh is a professor at a local college studying foxes and is a ghost hunter in his spare time. Brendan is a world famous author who lose his son to cancer and is just now tiptoeing back out into the world and is researching ghost hunting for his new novel.

This is set the evening of Brendan’s first big ghost hunt and he’s checking in with his ex, Kirsten. She’s worried about his mental state (i.e. running off to a cabin in the deep woods). In spite of their break up they remain close friends (they couldn’t make it work after losing their son).

“Brendan, how are you?”

“Pretty fantastic. Josh took me to a haunted hotel, the abandoned one I’m using as the inspiration for the book.”

“You went crawling through an abandoned building? Is that safe?”

“No, I’m sure it’s not but it was a wild ride!” He mixed a load of garlic into his ground meat along with cheddar. “A ghost threw a board at us.”

“Are you high?”

“No, well we shared a bottle of wine but I’m dead serious. We have it on recording, Kristen. It was like the best episode of Ghost Hunter ever!”

The pause on her end stretched a bit too long. “You can’t be serious. Brendan, do we need to set you up to see Dr. Potter again.”

“I don’t need the psychiatrist,” he replied, more crossly than necessary.

“It’s just that you never believed in that sort of thing and now you sound…well over the moon. Really it’s good to hear you this excited but ghosts?”

Brendan could picture her face as she said that. Her face crinkled up in such a cute way. She meant it to be stern but Kristen’s fine features just couldn’t pull it off. “I know, I know but seriously it was such an adrenaline rush. Swear to God, I thought I was going to crap myself when the door slammed shut and wouldn’t open!” He could almost taste his terror again remembering it, shocked that he wanted more of the same, so much more of it.

If you’d like to play along, Rainbow Snippets is a Facebook community where we post up 6 sentences of one of our LGBT stories every Saturday. It’s been fun and you can find it here. Be sure to check out all the offers! It’s been a great supportive group!

Jana Blogs

Guest Post -Always Forward! Never Straight

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Hello and Happy New Year!
Thank you, Jana, for having me to celebrate the start of 2019 and the release of my latest MM Romance!

Bryan, the main character in Always Forward! Never Straight, is a nerd. That’s what he calls himself, anyway. To the rest of the world (the story world!) he’s a tech whiz hermit, so I had to give him something cool to invent. Every tech start-up has to have an idea, a spark that sets them apart from the others. But I’m no tech whiz (although I do love tech toys!) so I went through a few ideas before deciding which one would be BaxCo’s signature, their golden ticket to start-upsville. Here are two of those, deleted from early drafts, as described by Bryan.

“My Voice” app that filters your voice with the press of a button. Actually, it’s a sliding scale. You drag your finger between “male: young” and “female: young” and the other scale drags between “male: mature” and “female: mature”. There’s a setting for everyone on “MyVoice” and you can have more than one pre-set too, to cover you no matter who you’re talking with.

“Just Friends” app matching LGBTQIA+ users for things like concerts and movie nights, all without actually outing anyone who wanted (or needed) to stay on the d-l. (Oh. My. God. You didn’t just think that. You’re too old for expressions like “on the downlow”. You don’t even know if it’s all one word or hyphenated.)

Obviously, I’d buy either of those in a hot minute!
Now here’s an excerpt where he ponders the tech toy that made the cut and is featured in the story. Stick around after the excerpt and comment about an app or a tech toy you’d like to see invented. Don’t forget to enter the Rafflecopter!

Sponsors got to park in a special lot, so once I navigated the traffic—thick even by Portland standards for a Saturday morning—it wasn’t much of a walk to get to the starting line. The usual crowd had gathered: serious runners who looked like a half marathon would be a cakewalk, slightly doughy folks like me who seemed as spooked as I felt, and people wearing regular street clothes, whose plan aligned with what mine would have been a year ago—listening to the music and avoiding the exercise portion of the day.

Children ran around laughing, wearing new and often matching running gear. No teenagers I could see, which was disappointing. Teenagers were an untapped demographic for my—or rather, BaxCo’s—drone butler, Alfred. His main function was to patrol the perimeter of a property, but he could hover over a pot of boiling water or watch a driveway for parents to arrive if that’s what you needed him to do. Alfred could watch just about anything you didn’t have time to watch yourself.

Ugh, I’m playing BaxCo’s YouTube commercials in my head; that’s gotta be a new low.

I walked along the race course to the first stage, where my sponsorship dollars proudly proclaimed that BaxCo cared about the environment.

We didn’t draw the best location, but maybe that wouldn’t matter. Some of the crowd had come for the music and not the exercise—hopefully they would spend enough time at the first stage to recycle something. The green and black logo had been designed for optimal marketing impact—brand recognition—it was boring and generic and, in my opinion, didn’t say anything at all. I caught the negativity of my internal monologue and resolved not to think about BaxCo for the rest of the day. While I stood there, bemoaning the placement of three glorified garbage cans with the company’s logo, the race started.

After the serious runners passed me, I began to run. Okay, jog. I intended to make a real effort to participate in the race. I’d trained and psyched myself up for weeks—promotional opportunity aside. I casually scoped all the runners, not actually looking for anyone, content to do some people-watching. I snickered at myself because secretly I hoped to hook up with one of the men blowing past me, to have their slender, muscled bodies pressed against mine, their lung capacity put to good use—

I almost swallowed my tongue when a tall, striking man pulled up alongside me. His arm brushed against mine, and even though skin didn’t touch skin—he wore a long-sleeved shirt, no doubt a technologically advanced fiber meant to wick the sweat away from his skin, probably as it gave him a massage and helped combat climate change—I felt an electric shock at the contact. It actually crackled.

He turned, one eyebrow raised, and smiled. “Did you feel that?”

“Um, yeah.” I tried to keep up, even though men like him—svelte athletic types who can pull off trendy shaved-on-the-side-and-longer-on-top haircuts—didn’t usually notice plain, out-of-shape nerds like me.

His handsome face creasing in concern. “Sorry. If the spark came from me.”

Fuck, he’s hot.

“N-no problem. No harm done. It was probably me.”

I shocked myself all the time—literally, not figuratively. I led the most boring life imaginable and rarely left my apartment unless forced. Pavement doesn’t exactly possess the same properties that make carpet and wool socks generate static electricity, but it still could have been me. Just looking at this man gave me a charge.

He seemed like he wanted to say something else, but he smiled instead. His blue eyes held as much flash as the actual static that had passed between us.

“Cay.” He held out his hand, and we shook.

“Bryan.” The breathless quality of my voice had little to do with the running. Or at least that’s what it felt like. “Kay, as in Sir Kay, the knight?” I don’t know how I was able to grin at him, but I did.

“No.” He chuckled. The rich sound of his voice set something alight inside me I hadn’t heard from in years. “C-A-Y. As in Cayman. Like the islands.”

He gave me a look, and it took a moment to realize he was serious. Luckily, that happened before I tripped on anything or ran into anyone. “So, is your sister’s name Aruba?”

“No. That’s my brother.” He turned to face forward for a few paces and then shot me a wink.

That wink made me stumble. I’m in trouble.

Always Forward final.jpg

Media Kit: Always Forward! Never Straight by Charley Descoteaux

Blurb:

Love isn’t a sprint, it’s a marathon.

Baxter Bryan is the nerdy half of BaxCo, a start-up in Portland’s Silicon Forest creating cutting-edge high-tech toys. He’s also a hermit. When BaxCo sponsors the Portland Rock and Roll Half Marathon, Bryan decides to break out of his comfort zone and do more than listen to the music with a beer in hand. The race has barely started when he bumps into a fit, handsome man, causing sparks to fly. But the long hours needed to make BaxCo a success aren’t the only reason Bryan spends most of his time alone in his apartment.

Cay Nissen runs every day to stay in shape. He would love to run away from his job in a Silicon Forest cube farm, but keeps returning to support his teenaged daughter. His true love is music. Cay writes songs for the band he helped form in high school but doesn’t see any way to turn music into a career. The half marathon seemed like a decent way to pass a Saturday, make his boss happy, and catch a performance of his old band all at the same time. When he meets a man who sparks his interest, the safety of his cubicle isn’t the only part of his life that’s in jeopardy of changing.

Buy Always Forward! Never Straight or read free on Kindle Unlimited

Amazon Universal Link: mybook.to/AlwaysForward

Add to Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/43096991-always-forward-never-straight?from_search=true

Rafflecopter Giveaway $5 Amazon Gift Card, runs 1/1/19 – 1/1119
: a Rafflecopter giveaway
https://widget-prime.rafflecopter.com/launch.js

About the Author:

Charley Descoteaux is the author of the Buchanan House Love Stories. Book One was a USA Today Must-Read Romance.

Charley has always heard voices. She was relieved to learn they were fictional characters, and started writing when they insisted daydreaming just wasn’t good enough. In exchange, they’ve agreed to let her sleep once in a while. Charley has survived earthquakes, tornadoes, and floods, but couldn’t make it through a single day without stories.

Rattle Charley’s cages:

Newsletter: https://my.sendinblue.com/users/subscribe/js_id/2m34r/id/2

Blog: http://cdescoteauxwrites.com/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/charley.descoteaux.3

Facebook Author Page: https://www.facebook.com/CharleyDescoteauxAuthor/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/CharleyDescote

Goodreads: http://tinyurl.com/aqe7g7r

Pinterest: http://pinterest.com/charleydescote/

e-mail: c.descoteauxwrites@gmail.com

Publisher: CeeTwo Publications
Release Date: January 1, 2019
Pages: 86

Cover Artist: Rainbow Danger Designs

Jana Blogs

Sunday Small Talk

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Somehow it’s the end of the year and it doesn’t seem real. So many people had a terrible year and if I look at the political crap we all had it bad here in the states. Personally, however, it was a fantastic year for me. I became a full professor. I took a bucket list trip to the Canadian maritimes. I published a novel Blood Red Roulette, one that I’ve held near and dear to me for over 20 years (In case you missed it –
blood-red-roulette
Blurb Arrigo Giancarlo’s friends think he’s a rich young man with the unusual job of paranormal investigator, working with his psychic assistant in Las Vegas. In truth he’s a two-thousand-year-old vampire and member of the Chiaroscuro, a group of Supernaturals dedicated to keeping humanity safe from the more dangerous of their kind. He’s also openly bisexual… but alone.

When he spots Luc St. John in a bar, Arrigo is intrigued. What begins as an effort to repay the kindness shown to him in the past quickly turns into much deeper feelings for the suffering and displaced Cajun. For Luc’s part, he feels too poor, too uneducated, and too bound to his hateful family to ever be worthy of elegant and cultured Arrigo.

An old enemy, Eleni, blames Arrigo for murdering her true love. On the anniversary of that death, she’s back to take revenge. As Arrigo’s closest friends fall victim to savage attacks, he fears nothing will keep Luc safe. Should he break both their hearts and let Luc go, or is it too late? If Luc’s already in Eleni’s sights, Arrigo knows that like most things in Vegas, the odds are against him.

You can find it on Amazon here or at my publisher here)

I also published a Christmas short story with DSP Purrfect Holiday You can order it here at DSP purrfect-holiday AND I had a SF novella picked up by Ninestar Press what will be out in 2019. I also published a middle-grade steampunk short story that I’m very proud of (and frankly made more money from than almost anything else which shocked the living hell out of me).

Heck I even managed to get my blood sugar under some semblance of control and I’ve started dancing again (when I say dancing I don’t mean ballet or jazz tap or anything. I mean mostly just getting up and moving to the beat however the hell I feel like it and how the arthritis lets me move.) So I can’t complain about 2018. I’ve had WAY shittier years.

So what’s on deck for 2019? I don’t have much in the way of resolutions but I do have some goals. 1. FINISH These Haunted Hills. I think this is one of the best things I’ve written in years and I need to finish it. It’s two-thirds done. I would love to finish it by May.

2. Find a home for my solarpunk story. I just saw a solarpunk anthology but it’s set in winter and mine is most definitely fall and it’s such a part of the story I can’t really change it (so if you hear of any solarpunk places, let me know).

3. Fix the ending of the Cassadaga story and resend it (yeah I know I said that last year and I did not do it. Sigh).

4. Fix up my bear shifter story because it needs doing badly.

5. Consider a sequel to Blood Red Roulette. It didn’t sell as well as I’d hope from what I can tell but the reviewers have asked for a sequel.

That is a modest beginning for 2019 so I’m happy with that. Anything more will be sauce.

And here’s some writing links to take us into the new year.

How to Outline Your Novel

Story Planning Books: 3 Approaches to Consider

APODS – Priorities: The Four Ps (Part Two – SMART Goals) by Amanda Cabot

Seven Things Writers Get Wrong About Language

Can I Craft a Setting Without Bigotry?


Self-Publishing Is Not A Back-up Publishing Plan

What Binge-Watching ‘Stranger Things’ Taught Me About Storytelling


Transcription Software Can Be A Huge Time-saver


Avoid The Cliché “Strong Female Character” (I’ll add being a bitch does not equal strong!)