• Crazy interviews!
• Play lists with parental warnings!
• Unnecessary reveals!
• TMI in every line!

I still have three slots left in the tour if you would like your little corner of the interwebs to be a part. Email me, and we’ll set you up with the details you need to host!

This is going to be a blast!

Soundtrack for this post: Bad Romance

Single Edged Blades is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble and iTunes.

My Facebook family was instrumental in helping me develop the list that you’ll find in the e-book of Single Edged Blades: 7 Stories for a Broken & Angry Heart. Each story has a sound track and a thorough listing appears at the end of the book.

I’m going to put my top choices in each category here for your listening pleasure or derision. The full list runs from Punk to Country to Hair Metal — every genre. Feel free to add suggestions for other songs in the comments.

Misery

Rage

Revenge

You can pick up the story collection for 99 cents at your favorite vendor, Amazon, Nook, or iTunes.

While I had not really planned to self-publish, this seemed like a great opportunity. I could always pull the book if it wasn’t chosen. But my novel for 9-12 year olds was indeed selected to be one of the first ten books in their program under their own imprint, Travis Press, and then I was one of five authors chosen to be spotlighted with an author page.

Within just a few days of their marketing push, Jinnie Wishmaker rose to the #2 most popular book in Youth/Young Adult and #120 in books overall.

I’m not sure of their plan for the book beyond this, if they will move the title to Amazon and Barnes & Noble. It’s all very new. If you’d like to stay on top of what happens with Jinnie, as this is a series that will continue in the spring, go hang out at my kids’ blog (I had to use a pen name for obvious reasons, given THIS blog. ) If you are a subscriber, you will get information about those books as well as the progress on Stella & Dane, and the short-story collection coming out in 2012, Single Edged Blades. Now that I’ve embraced the whole indie movement, I figured I might as well move forward with all the previously published things I have the rights back to, and get them out there.

It’s a very exciting time to be a writer!

Two kids. A split household. Two small businesses.

Sometimes you can’t see my sink.

Okay, usually you can’t see the sink.

But despite the day-to-day essentials of lunch packing, homework helping, books balancing, order filling, photo taking, and household managing, I know that what is most essential about me must also be nurtured. And that is the writer.

The trouble is, I’m the must-really-focus-and-be-bathed-in-silence kind of writer. I wish I weren’t. I’d love to be a put-on-the-headphones-and-shut-out-the-world type of writer. I’d also like to be able to write in short bursts, say, in between dropping off and picking up for trumpet lessons.

But no, I need to feel my time won’t be disturbed, to settle in. If I get on a roll, then sometimes, if I’m super lucky, I can keep that momentum, gliding through the day slightly above its rushed activities, doing what must be done but still keeping the story whirring in my head. It’s a delicate balance, much like riding a unicycle on a tightrope.

With people tugging at your elbows for a snack.

National Novel Writing Month re-prioritizes my world for 30 days.  I’m supposed to write 50,000 words. I’ve achieved that five times. Last year I only managed 35,000. (But I added moving to a new house and setting up a new studio to the month—priorities didn’t budge.)

All of my novels have started out as NaNoWriMo projects. I don’t draft by the seat of my pants, but using an outline. I always have a direction for my stories, so I’m not writing total blather. While often I end up keeping 15% or less of the November words, they still serve an excellent purpose. Several, in fact:

1. It tells me whether my story idea is one I want to live with for the next year through editing.
2. It gets all the “junk” out. We often reach for familiar story lines and overused character types in our first drafts.
3. It helps me find the “voice.” Slow drafting with breaks in between often means the character will pick up characteristics and mannerisms based on the new experiences and influences around me. Fast drafting helps me keep the voice consistent through the first version.

I never “come down” from the story. I leave my laptop powered up and open to the novel document at ALL times, sitting on the dining room table. Passing it keeps the action fresh in my mind, so when I sit down again, it all starts flowing, as if I’d never stopped.

Usually I take December off from the book. Most years the story isn’t done, as an adult novel is 80,000 words, so I’ll review what I did in November, edit the story line, make notes on changes, and finish out the draft by March. Usually by summer I have a good first draft, revised and rearranged, to start presenting to my critique group.

Stella & Dane, my current project, has been part of an experiment to keep readers involved since I’m writing a prequel to a novel just published last month. I’ve released bits and pieces of it, knowing that those scenes may not end up in the final draft at all, and certainly not in their current state.

Editing them, which is usually forbidden, has slowed me down just enough that I might not make the 50,000. But I’m very deep into this book, and the characters live with me now. And that’s the single best part of NaNoWriMo—immersing myself in a writing world, making it the first thing I do each morning, if only for 30 days.

This is my seventh year to do NaNoWriMo. Last year I failed to make my 50,000, and it’s looking kind of close for this year!

But my novel Stella & Dane is going well. I’ve got several hundred subscribers getting installments of the book. (You can subscribe too — you’ll get the e-book for free before it goes on sale in 2012 plus my super-deluxe stuffed-turkeyfied Thanksgiving edition has free reading from THREE novels.)

Now, I’ve joined the Smashwords Project! You can download the first three chapters of Stella & Dane (including two chapters I didn’t send to subscribers!) for FREE at Smashwords!

So, what you are you still doing staring at THIS page?

Go download some Thanksgiving reading for free!

In the first excerpt, you met Stella, who wanted to climb the water tower during the day as a parting experience before she blew out of her small town of Holly, Missouri. Her plan to leave is delayed when her grandmother is sent home for hospice care.

Prior to this excerpt, Stella has met Dane at the garage where he works. Despite a pretty serious attraction, Dane’s current girl arrives to establish her territory. Stella isn’t interesting in fighting over a man, so she lets it go.

Chapter Five marks the first time we’ve heard from Dane in his voice. He goes out with Darlene, all the while knowing something has just happened with Stella, and feeling pretty wary about how his girlfriend will react to the threat.

_______________________________________

Dane bought himself some time by checking the other tires. He didn’t want to look Darlene in the face, afraid his withdrawal might show. She’d been all right for the two weeks since he’d come to town, and he’d made a show of keeping her with the gift. But her claws were out, and after Stella’s obvious interest, no doubt she’d try to sink them into him.

His boss seemed to understand, and instead of releasing him as Darlene had suggested, asked him to vacuum the car before he took off.

Darlene rolled her eyes and settled in a chair in the waiting area. Dane attached the wand to the vacuum, taking great care in cleaning the creases of the already impeccable seats. He didn’t put too much stock in women, overall. The one love of his life had run off inexplicably, and not even for another man. She’d just…gone. Didn’t want anything to do with him.

Dane shook it off. Five years gone. Screw her. Too immature, or messed up, or whatever. Water under the bridge. And if Stella made him think of Pam, then that was one hell of a sign. Run the other way, fast.

He glanced at Darlene. She’d been all right, not too clingy, just fun. He didn’t blame her for reacting sort of strong to Stella’s intrusion. In a town this small, those two probably had a history. She dug through her purse, extracting a nail file. Not so bad to look at. Interesting enough in the sack. She’d do for a time.

He shut off the vacuum. In fact, she’d do for tonight. Quite nicely.

__________

They rode the highway back to Holly. Dane had wanted to go somewhere bigger, and Darlene had been up for a bit of traveling on the bike, about an hour to the next town. To her credit, she hadn’t complained about the discomfort of the ride, even though he knew she had to feel it. She wasn’t used to the rumble of an engine between her legs for long periods. She’d be sore tomorrow.

Dinner had been pleasant enough. Small talk. She hadn’t brought up Stella, or been bitchy. She carried that perfume bottle in her purse like it was some great treasure. She’d pulled it out after dinner and excused herself to spritz it again. Not that she needed it. He might be regretting the purchase before long.

Summer was long gone, and while the days were warm, the chill of night bit his cheeks as they approached town. Darlene kept her face in his back and clutched him tightly. Girls wrapping themselves around him on the bike was one of the reasons he loved motorcycles. That and the view, and the smells. A bit of oil, lots of pine, the wetness of a hidden pond in the dark. When they slowed, he could catch that perfume. Hopefully it had faded a bit.

The sky over the treeline was a jagged field of stars. In the distance, he could make out the craggy outline of the Ozarks. He’d made a good decision, leaving Texas, his oppressive boss at the Harley shop, the dead mother. Ryker had convinced him at the funeral to come on up to Holly, start over.

He didn’t have much tying him down other than a girlfriend who’d pleaded that he stay. But he hadn’t relaxed into her, moved in any closer than he had to. Something kept him away, distant, like the way you approach a stray dog or an overheating radiator. So he’d moved on, using his mother and brother as the excuse.

Darlene tugged on his jacket. He turned his head slightly, and she pointed to a dirt road to the right. He nodded and slowed, turning onto it, dodging the worst of the ruts.

The road narrowed, so little used that the trees encroached on them, occasionally whipping across his face like a slap. He slowed again, but a break in the trees revealed a ramshackle cabin. He pulled up. “This where we’re headed?”

Darlene swung her leg over the bike, stiff and awkward in her steps. Not a complainer. He liked her better than he had even earlier in the day, or yesterday when he’d gone to the perfume place. Her hair was calmer now, the hair spray blown right out of it, now brown and long and flowing down the sides of her head instead of all high on top.

He killed the bike and followed her. “This yours?” he asked. No telling what sort of squatter could be living there. It looked like an old hunting cabin.

“My uncle’s. He off in Colorado.”

She lifted a flower pot, showering dead leaves across the porch, and extracted a key. The moonlight lit the face of the cabin, but barely. She seemed to know it all by feel. Dane figured she’d brought a man or two out there before. He didn’t care. This was about the here and now.

The door opened with a squeal that set his teeth on edge. She flipped the light, but it didn’t come on. “He often shuts off the power,” she said. “We can find the box if you want.” She turned, fumbling with something, then a beam of light crossed the room. “Or we can go by flashlight.”

“Works for me.” Dane stepped in the cabin, musty and dank. He stifled a sneeze and closed the door behind him.

Darlene took his hand and led him to a sofa. This place was a good find, actually, as Darlene lived with her mom still. Seemed like half of Holly was grown and still at home. And Dane bunked with his brother, who seemed to have a different woman there every weekend. He didn’t know where he even found them all. After a month, Dane still didn’t have a good sense of the town’s size, or the number of available girls.

 But without even a car, privacy had been tough to come by. Even though they’d been together two weeks, she hadn’t brought him here before, making do with quickies while her mom was shopping or playing bridge next door. Or taking over Ryker’s bedroom at their rundown duplex during lunch breaks. Maybe she hadn’t trusted him before, and wisely so, to be alone in the middle of nowhere. Changing her mind about it probably had to do with Stella.

__________________________________

Subscribers will find out if Darlene succeeds in knocking Stella out of Dane’s mind. Sign up!

The welcome email will include links to exerpts you have missed. And you’ll get the finished e-book of Stella & Dane before it goes on sale in 2012.

Of course, Dane already HAS a girlfriend, but that doesn’t stop Stella. It’s not like he’s married, and besides, they’d been together all of what, two weeks? She had zits older than that.

But the meeting doesn’t quite go as she planned, and Dane takes off with Darlene on his motorcycle. And in Chapter Four, the book switches point of view. So we start to get to know Dane himself.

Last night I found I’d written myself in a corner. I was so afraid of Dane’s POV that I ended the scene at a page, which technically made it a sequel, not a bonafide scene. So I shut down for the night and lay in bed thinking about how to write myself out of the hole. I needed a problem for him, something with some meat in it. That’s when I wondered–what would Darlene do? She saw the sparks with her long-time rival. She’d go for broke.

And so Darlene leads Dane out to her uncle’s hunting cabin in the Ozarks, planning to make her move.

I had the scene.

Unfortunately, I woke up early, and with the sun just entering the horizon, and me in my decidedly unsexy flannel jammies, hair in some indecipherable knot, I made my first attempt at a sex scene from a man’s point of view.

Did I succeed? And more importantly, did Darlene? I’ll assess the scene tonight and decide if it’s worthy of inclusion in the next excerpt, going out in Thursday’s weekly newsletter to subscribers. Not on the list yet? Click here to get on it! New subscribers will get links to the content they missed in previous emails.

I remember a few bottles tossed my way by well-meaning boyfriends. But I remember these particular perfumes most by the commercials. See if these bring back some memories.

 
I STILL sing this song!!!

Who DIDN’T want a bottle of Charlie? It had to be the most advertised perfume of its day.

I still remembered this Windsong tag line 30 years later.

I don’t remember this one, but wow, so 80s.

Everyone loved Stella from Baby Dust so much that I decided to tell her backstory. So much happens to her in the 44 years prior to her arrival in my novel.

Book summary:

Stella is one step from leaving her honky tonk town when bad-boy Dane arrives. Their dangerous romance keeps the town talking, but when Dane is sent to prison for manslaughter after a bar fight, the couple discovers their love runs deeper than their reputations.

When Stella’s pink plastic shoe slipped off a rung one-third of the way up the side of the water tower, she realized she probably should have thought through her choice of footwear for the task.  

Her knee banged the cold metal as she scrambled to hang on and secure her position. “Damn. That’s going to bruise,” she called down. “And don’t scream.”

Janine covered her mouth to keep from crying out. From this height, her friend resembled a Rainbow Brite doll in purple tights with yellow leg warmers. She cupped her hands and shouted, “You shouldn’t be up there in jellies and a mini skirt.”

Stella twisted around to face out on the ladder, the flimsy shoes curling around the rung as she grasped the bar and leaned forward. “You coming?”

Janine covered her eyes. “Please don’t hang like that.”

“I’m not going to fall at this late date. I’ve done this drunk at midnight.”

Her friend peeked between her fingers. “I know. I watched you then.”

“It’s not so scary in daylight.”

The sun blasted off the aluminum roof of the shed at the base of the water tower. High noon, and she was late for work. But walking along the block, Stella just had the urge to climb the tower.  

Twenty-one years in this po-dunk town, and scaling the only tall structure in the middle of the day was one thing she’d never done. Seemed like something to do before she left for good. Should’ve had Janine bring a camera. Get a shot of her underneath the giant black letters that read “Holly,” the town’s ridiculous name.

“Sheriff’s gonna catch you,” Janine called.

“Only if you keep yelling at me.” She whipped back around on the ladder and climbed to the next level. Just one ladder left until she reached the platform that encircled the massive silver tank.

“Hey! I’m going to get docked. My boss ain’t like yours.” Janine backed away from the base of the tower, crouching down to duck through the section of the chain-link fence that had been cut and pulled back decades ago by high school seniors seeking to spray paint the broad side of the tower. Stella herself had added a blood-red “Senior ’81″ just a few years back.

Stella waved down at her and scurried up the last segment of the ladder. She reached the platform and pushed through the narrow opening, grasping the bar that served as an ineffectual rail. As far as she knew, nobody had ever fallen off the darn thing, and she wasn’t going to today. She wouldn’t get caught either.

Plenty of people had been up there before her. The entire circumference of the tower was defaced with “Mark loves Ellen” and hundreds of other couplings, many crossed out and amended. Stella had warned the boys never to put her name up there. That was a deal breaker, certain to seal the doom of whatever short-lived fling she was having.

But one of them had disobeyed, Carter something-or-another, a Texas boy, who moved up to Missouri when his dad started working at the bank. Full of himself and his shiny Camero. He’d been after her, thinking he was doing something romantic by scaling the tower with an eight-foot ladder to inscribe “Carter & Stella” higher than any of the other graffiti.

Stella followed the platform to the other side, facing downtown, where a huge black splotch covered his transgression. Being on the short side, she’d had to drag a TEN-foot ladder up the damn tower to get rid of it. And after blotting out his mistake, she emptied the rest of the spray can on his little red hotrod.

He’d known she had done it, but the small town was good at closing ranks to separate the born-and-bred from the newcomers. Carter’s dad hadn’t wanted to make waves in the community, so her lawlessness had been ignored. They hadn’t stayed even a year in Holly. Missouri just didn’t suit.

Mostly Stella didn’t date in her own town, preferring boys from other small cities, close enough for a booty call, far enough to not watch her too carefully.

Right now she was between booties.

Standing on the tower in the daytime was a completely different experience than all the nighttime jaunts. She wondered why she hadn’t done it before. She peeked down at Janine’s purple form hurrying along the block, heading to the grocery where she worked as a cashier. Janine stopped suddenly and pointed ahead of her without looking up. Stella followed her arm, puzzled, then saw the sheriff’s car cruising into view.

But the ticket didn’t scare her now. She wasn’t as poor as she had been just out of high school. Her job at the perfume shop got her a bit of commission, and one thing she could do was sell. Bring anyone into the shop-man or woman-and she’d have them walking out with something they didn’t need.

In fact, she’d put together enough money to get her the heck out of dodge. Beatrice, her boss, would certainly give her a good rec. Stella just didn’t know where or when to go. Nothing had prepared her for whatever else was out there. No sense going balls out only to have to come crawling back home six months later, broke and humiliated.

The sheriff’s car idled along the broken pavement. No need to court trouble. She kept her back to the tower until the squad car passed, glad for the silver lamé shirt to help her blend in. Once he’d turned the corner onto Mulberry, she stepped away from the wall to look out on her soon to be ex-town.

The school. The track. The athletic fields she’d never stepped foot on, not once.

Houses filled a few blocks, then the highway snaked through town, the artery lined with what few shops currently attempted to make a profit in the dying populace. She’d worked at a few, even the convenience store for two weeks, until old man Spiller took to showing up in an overcoat, barelegged in black socks and dress shoes. Her mama made her quit before her purity got stained. Ha.

She didn’t have much keeping her there. Her sister, eight years older, had married off and split at first opportunity. Her parents were no reason to stay and, in fact, every reason to go.

The wind kicked up as she stood there, belly on the rail, leaning over so hard she could have somersaulted around the pole. And why not. She rushed forward, her necklace hitting her nose, and the world whirled as she spun around the spindly bit of metal, the only thing that kept her from crashing five stories to the ground.

Her feet didn’t quite make contact with the platform, and her ankles smashed into the sheet metal in another bruising connection. Damn. More purple. But the rush of it felt good so she did it again, this time tucking her knees a little higher.

She felt the metal give a little, crunching in. Panic zipped through her as she realized the rail couldn’t quite hold her weight. Her head was down, and she’d lost momentum. The town below was a blur of green and gray. She realized how easy it would be to just let go, be done with it all. Wasn’t much worth hanging on for. Start over reincarnated as a cat maybe, or a crow.

The world righted itself as she rolled the rest of the way around, the metal pinching in just enough that her lower back grazed the platform. She clutched the bent rail, feet dangling, trying to figure out how to wiggle her way backwards and up onto it without letting go of the thin bar.

Her shoulders screamed with the effort of keeping her in place. Stella looked down, imagining her body smashing into the roof of the shed below. Good God, what had she been thinking?

_________________________

Subscribers get to read the rest and will get the finished e-book before it goes on sale next year!

Sign up to be one! Your welcome email will include links to read anything you’ve missed.

Deanna’s Free Stuff List!

Fans of the first novel can absolutely sign up to receive excerpts of the book as I write it, and best of all, GET THE E-BOOK FOR FREE WHEN I’M DONE! Yep, only subscribers will get it, and you’ll get it first!

So go sign up. I’m not one to send out a jillion emails, and you can unsubscribe yourself at any time.

Deanna’s Free Stuff List!

The first excerpt of Stella & Dane should be sent out the first week of November. Don’t miss anything! Get yourself on the list!

Here’s a summary of the book:

Stella is one step from leaving her honky tonk town when bad-boy Dane arrives. Their dangerous romance keeps the town talking, but when Dane is sent to prison for manslaughter after a bar fight, the couple discovers their love runs deeper than their reputations.