New Release! Charity Sip Release & Blog Hop!

Our Bloghop Starts Here: Torquere Press

Each year, Torquere Press does a charity drive supporting an LGBT cause. (These stories are out now.) The authors donate their royalties and Torquere matches that amount. Each year the stories are themed reflecting the cause the drive is supporting. I don't participate every year; I don't always have a story that would fit.

But this year's cause is close to my heart -- to the extent that it's difficult to talk about why. Curae leves loquuntur ingentes stupent etc. Growing up, I wanted to join the military -- I had big dreams, and they didn't work out. Perhaps ironically, it wasn't because of my LGBT status, though I've often wondered how things would have turned out. If I had gotten my dreams then, would they have been dashed later? It's impossible to know what might have been.

Anyway. From their about page:

"Outserve-SLDN is the association of actively serving LGBT military personnel and is a non-partisan, non-profit, legal services, watchdog and policy organization dedicated to bringing about full LGBT equality to America's military and ending all forms of discrimination and harassment of military personnel on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity."

If you think the difficulties facing American service people who are LGBT ended with Don't Ask Don't Tell, please educate yourself further. Trans* people are still barred from serving. The fight is far from over.

September Update!

Well, September's been anything but boring, but sadly all the interesting things are happening in my private life instead of the wonderful world of writing. BUT there will be a proper writerly post in about week, as Torquere Press are organizing a blog hop to promote the upcoming Charity Sips.

Tune in for that, as there will be something like 24 stories coming out all once, all in aid of OutServe. The stories themselves are out on Friday the 19th, so if you must have them immediately (and who would want to wait?) make sure to mark your calendars.

To help get you in the mood I created a mood board for my sip, Ad Astra (to the Stars).

A little snippet for those who haven't seen it yet (so very NSFW):

News, and Going Dim

But not going dark -- more on that below.

News first:

The BIG news is:
Brown: Grisaille in Sand and Sunset is out from Torquere Press!

In smaller news:
1.) Pentimento: Poppy is now available from All Romance Ebooks.
2.) Gray: Grisaille in Stone and Sky is written, and has gone off to the editor.
3.) I am Torquere Press' Featured Author until May 7th.

In not-fun news, this blog is going dim for a while -- it's not because I haven't been putting up something new weekly, though it's for the same reason:

I'm in pain, and an awful lot of it. Getting Grisaille in Gray done was excruciating, and I've learned that voice-recognition does not work for me, for writing fiction. It works (when it works, which is not all the time, either, for other reasons) for posts and email.

So I'm going to be taking time away from the computer, not just typing. There may be odd posts occasionally, but I will not be trying to update weekly. I apologize for this, but it's largely out of my control -- the only part that I do have control over is trying to heal, and I have to take responsibility for that.

Saturday is like an extra Friday

I'm pretty sure this really will be a short round up, unlike last week's short round up.

For those curious, my speech recognition software is still making my teeth clench, which is at least a different kind of repetitive strain injury. But moving along to the interesting news (some of which I have already covered):

1.) I have a new website (which is to say, I have a website): www.mollychurch.com. Please check it out.

2.) I have a new release, Pentimento: Poppy, available from Torquere Press.

2b) If you're interested in an excerpt or a "sexy snippet" for Poppy both are available (just follow the links).

2c) An extra scene, which doesn't appear in Poppy is also available.

3.) Another free story in the Dylan and Xavier semi-series was written on Wednesday (St. Patrick's Day) in honor of release day. It follows in a separate post.

New Release - Pentimento: Poppy is OUT NOW

Pentimento: Poppy (10700 words and published by Torquere Press), is out now.

To celebrate that, and St. Patrick's Day, I'm throwing a bit of a party on the Happy Hour LJ.

In other news, I have a website: www.mollychurch.com. Please check it out!

Try, try again

Aside from apparently having some black hole in my memory where the fact that it is Friday falls in, I have had two good reasons for not being properly up-to-date with my blog - my apologies.

Reason the first: I am having a real problem with RSI, making it important to prioritize story-writing. I am still having problems there (although I may be investing in some speech recognition software - I hope to try it out today), so this will be a short post.

Reason the second: I had news, but wasn't ready to share it. Well, it wasn't sharing-ready. It is now.

News:
1.) Grisaille in Brown is out on April 28th. The title is Brown: Grisaille in Sand and Sunset.
1b) I just got, yesterday, the cover-art request form (for Grisaille in Brown). I'd seen it already, so it wasn't like I didn't know what to expect - but it was surprisingly hard to pin down what I wanted to say. I'll definitely be filling them out in advance, in future. But the really interesting thing for me wasn't just the filling out the form, and musing on what the cover might look like (though that was fun). The really interesting thing was that it was just how hard it was to answer some of the questions. I really think that thinking about those questions in advance will help me as a writer, and that was something very cool to discover.

2.) Those keeping up at home may remember that Grisaille in Brown is the first part of a two part (I hesitate to say series, because the stories do stand alone, but) series, and that Grisaille in Gray is out in September. BUT! There is another piece rounding out our tale, currently called Pentimento: Poppy, with is an interlude, of sorts, between Brown and Gray. Again, they all stand alone, and I think there are advantages that Poppy is out first, in terms of storytelling, regardless of chronology.
2b) Pentimento: Poppy should be out, all going well, March 17th, which yes, is St. Patrick's day (come along to the Torquere Social Happy Hour that day!)

3.) Speaking of the Happy Hour, I will be there the following days:
Tues. March 9th
Weds. March 17th
Thur. April 22nd
Weds. April 28th

Okay, back to Grisaille in Gray - which, please be patient if/when you see me writing it as 'Grey' here, as grey is the default spelling of gray in my head - but the title is 'Gray'.

grisaille in virtual ink

Okay, so finally, an update! I should warn you, it's on the convoluted side.

So, a few weeks back I was talking about having two short stories coming out next year, for Torquere's new Color Box line. Actually, it turns out, they're a minimum of 10,000 words - so the stories are now just "stories" and not so much with the "short" part - but more about that later.

More to the point, in the last post I was really struggling to come up with some way of summarizing my story - and I figured out why. The story wasn't working. And sometimes you get the feeling a story isn't working, and it's just not working for you right now, and you learn not to drop a story because of that and to push on. And that's an important lesson to learn. But the one that comes after that one, that sometimes, no, the story really isn't working, and it's time to drop it and move on, is also important. (Maybe not just as important - because learning to finish things is probably the most important thing you can learn to do as a writer.)

It wasn't that the story was bad - it was actually quite good, and there were a number of directions I could have taken it in. I thought at first that that's were the problem was, that I wasn't entirely sure which direction in which to take the world building, and that's where the problem was. So I continued with the writing, ingnoring the big world building questions, and just concentrated on the character scenes. And it still wasn't working. And I finally figured out why, and knew it was time to do something else. Nothing was going to make this story work.

So I could either restart the story, and hope the new version worked (that seemed unlikely), or start a completely new story. One of those sounds like a lot more work than the other, but it really depends.

The major issue here was that I had signed a contract, with a title, for a specific theme. I'd had a story in mind when I did that: could I come up with something else that matched the theme and title?

Actually, yes. Nearly as soon as I dropped the story I knew I couldn't write, I had a new idea. A few hours later, most of the world building was done.

But I only had ten days left to write the story. A bit of pressure, sure, because I also had other things I was supposed to do, but far from being the end of the world. The story was only supposed to be 10K long (remember, at this point, I'd missed the small detail that it could be much, much longer).

I wrote that 10K in the ten days I had. But I still had more story to tell, and no time to do it in, and no idea how far over the 10K I could get without it becoming a problem for my editor.

So I emailed my editor, asking for an extra couple of days - she gave me fifteen, and reassured me that 10K was a minimum, not a maximum. I was elated.

I got the story in, but man was I glad for those fifteen days - the story continued to grow. And I'll be honest, it could be longer. It's just over 18K now, and there were some scenes I'd have liked to write, but couldn't, and one that had to be removed because although it was a nice scene, it didn't really make sense if you didn't include some of the other scenes I didn't get to write. I don't know - I might be able to add some of that back in in the editing phase - I'm still very new to all of this.

But at the moment, it's 18K long.

The working title is still Grisaille in Brown (it does have another title, but I'm keeping that one under my hat until I know whether it will be the final one). It comes out in May 2010, I do believe, and it's sequel, Grisaille in Grey comes out in September. And if Brown is any indication, and my editor has no objections, I think Grey might very well end up novel length, which is very exciting for me.

Coming up with a non spoilery summary is still a problem. In any case, Grisaille is sci-fi (and male/male).

I should point out, this is the sort of sci-fi where Earth does not figure into the story at all - like in Star Wars, for example, there is no Earth. Also, like Star Wars, the characters are human. I won't pretend that this is the most rigorous piece of hard sci-fi, but I did attempt to lean to the hard side. This is not, by the way, a slur on sci-fi fantasy, which I adore - I mention this only as a way, I guess, of describing where on the continuum of sci-fi this particular story falls.

Grisaille in Brown is entirely told from the point of view of Corvo, a historian with his homeworld's (Tiberia's) Bureau of Diplomatic Affairs, and describes his journey to Biryan, and his meeting with the young soldier-slave Ardán, and of how they come to fall in love. Grisaille in Grey will (well, this is the plan at the moment - and book plans, like those for battle, do not survive contact with the enemy) - Grisaille in Grey will not follow on immediately from Brown, but be set a little into the future, and a little more into their relationship, and will be told entirely from Ardán's point of view.

Aside from their love story, Grisaille is also a story about war, and diplomacy, and violence, and language, and history, and duty and family and obligation, and I'm very much looking forward to writing the next part.

(I'm actually even looking forward to doing the edits, that's how much I'm enjoying this story.)

So, update!

Oh, there might actually be another post today/tomorrow - I think there's something I've forgotten. But I will add a reminder that I will be hosting the Torquere Social Happy Hour on Torquere's livejournal next week, on Tuesday the 22nd, and there's a very short story in the works in honor of that (I'll cross post it here, as well), and I will probably be willing to write a little flash fiction to prompts, too.

Okay, that's the update.

In which the heroine is productive

A second post, as promised!

Okay, I totally hedged that bet. I do that. I do not come from a family of good correspondents.

In any case, a second post, this one with actual news.

I have updated my profile, and observant readers might have noticed that I have gone from a "twenty-something" to a "thirty-something", and deduced that I have just recently turned thirty. The beauty of this, however, means that I only have to remember to change my age it once a decade, in the autumn.

Also in my newly updated profile, is a discreet line mentioning that Torquere Press have picked up another two stories for 2010 - publication in April and September if I read my contract right (not to worry, I know exactly when they are due - deadlines are Fixed Dates in my head; everything else is broadly negotiable. Except my birthday, which lasts about six weeks.) Come closer to when they're coming out, I'll post the exact dates, and will hopefully take a turn in the Torquere Social driving seat.

The first one has a working title of "Grisaille in Brown" and the second, "Grisaille in Gray". I had actually planned to write more about this, but I've kind of run out of time.

Intro post

As my bio says, I've recently had my first short story, A Hope in Hell, published by Torquere Press.

"A Hope in Hell" is just shy of 12K long, and tells the story of the meeting and burgeoning love affair of Yare'ach, an angel trapped in Hell, and the demon Lord Ayve.

In "A Hope in Hell", I've attempted to creature a unique and plausible vision of Hell; world building has always been a favorite part of writing for me, and I like how Hell turned out here.

A summary and sample of "A Hope in Hell" are available here.

And a review is available here.