Look at me! I got reviewed in Publishers Weekly!
Woot! It’s a big deal for any author to be reviewed in Publisher’s Weekly, and they liked my book…mostly!
http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6704403.html?industryid=47141
They said:
The cosmology of this battle between good and evil approaches Saturday morning cartoon levels of unsophistication; the mystery could be solved by Scooby-Doo; and the big-breasted bombshells and hunky men are cookie-cutter romance standard, but Myles’s debut somehow sustains an extraordinary, confectionery appeal. After suffering a vampire bite and enjoying passionate sex with a fallen angel, mousy museum curator Jackie Brighton is transformed into a gorgeous, sexually ravenous succubus. Guided by porn star succubus Remy Summore, Jackie is drawn into the search for a magical halo and a love triangle with fallen angel Noah and vampire bouncer Zane. Myles manages to be cleverly hilarious while making all her jokes work for the plot. These particular characters may not be deep enough to hold up through the planned sequel, but Myles’s sexy, wacky humor is definitely something to watch. (Jan.)
Emphasis is mine. 
I’m pretty darn thrilled.
Cover Art! And a sample chapter!
YAY! Finally I can show the cover for GENTLEMEN PREFER SUCCUBI:
I absolutely freaking love it. So sexy! What do you think?
Want a bit more?
More Books to Pocket
So this popped up on PM late yesterday:
Author of GENTLEMEN PREFER SUCCUBI Jill Myles’s next book in the Succubus Diaries series, as well as the first book in a new paranormal romance series set at a paranormal dating agency, to Micki Nuding at Pocket, by Holly Root at Waxman Literary Agency (world).
Pause. HOORAY!!!!!!! Pause.
I am so terribly excited to be doing two more books with Pocket! I love my publisher and my editor is fabulous, so I’ve been pretty much on cloud nine since RWA, when we discussed the new books.
What this deal contains:
Book 3 of the Succubus Diaries, which I am calling MY FAIR SUCCUBI. It picks up where book 2 left off, in the ongoing series of my characters that starred in both book 1 and book 2. Things will be wrapped up. Other things will be called into question. Sex will be had. It will be glorious. And fun.
(For those of you that have asked me if the books are a typical romance…yes and no. YES in that the relationships drive the entire story. NO in that it’s not all wrapped up in a bow and happily ever after at the end of Book 1. I’ve compared it to the Katie Macalister Aisling Grey series – which are totally hilarious, btw – multiple books about the same romantic couple. They’ll get their happily ever after, naturally, but we’re going to play with the relationship for a bit longer. In evil, evil ways. Fun ways, but mostly evil. I do have a definite end in mind, though.)
MY FAIR SUCCUBI (title subject to change) comes out in February 2011. Kind of a ways away – a full year out from book 2. But I’ll be posting short stories set in the same world and teasers to my website along the way, so hopefully it will not feel so long.
The book deal ALSO includes a new book, which is tentatively called HEAT. This book *is* a more traditional romance. It’s a very loose series that will be based on different sets of characters that work for – or interact with – a dating agency that caters exclusively to paranormal clients. At the agency, clients don’t like to date vampires because they’re not into corpses. Werewolves don’t date outside their kind. Were-cougars and were-foxes might mix it up with a were-bear, but never a were-deer. And pretty much no one wants to date the harpy. Naturally, this makes matchmaking a little bit tricky.
The first book stars Bathsheba Ward, the office manager of Midnight Liaisons (the dating agency). Humans are forbidden to date members of the Paranormal Alliance, but she’s been blackmailed into going out with a male were-cougar who is in desperate need of a date (even a yucky human one).
I’m really excited about this one, because it was a ton of fun to write and I can’t wait to see what everyone else thinks about it. I’m noodling with a loose sequel, and I can’t wait to tell more stories in this setting. This one is scheduled for August 2011.
I’ll be updating my webpage with more info on the new series soon enough. But right now, I’m just super excited to have more books with Pocket Books.
Hooray!
Galleys
Just heard from my editor’s assistant – galleys for book 2 (and the final stage for both books — at least on my end!) are heading my way for a Thursday delivery.
Hmmm.
Work on galleys or watch Supernatural…?
Work on galleys, or watch Sam and Dean?
Galleys? Winchesters?
Oh decisions, decisions.
Copyedits have landed
If I’m quiet lately, it’s because I’m busy. I started a side project just for fun, and sure enough, as soon as I launch into that particular project…copyedits arrive!
That’s all right, though, because I’m quite happy to get my copyedits out of the way.
It’s funny, because when copyedits were originally mentioned to me, I had the notion that someone would send me a big long print-out of changes to make to the manuscript. Then, I’d have to take each page and make the changes on my document. After all the endless changes were done, I’d print out a fresh one and send it back to my publisher.
Apparently, I was not the only one with this misconception. The letter on top of my manuscript says, quite clearly (and possibly in bold AND capslock) – make the changes on this document. Do not print a fresh document. We need this document back. Lose it and die.
(Okay, so maybe the last part is not on there)
I was also provided (very thoughtfully!) with a green pencil. At first, this amused me. They’re sending my copyedits…AND a green pencil? Some sort of weird two-fer deal? But the green pencil is very important. My copyedits are marked up with red, grey, and blue already. I have to use a different color so my changes stand out.
Armed with my green pencil, I dive in to see what a copyedit is all about. Turns out…it’s about reading other people’s marks to my manuscript to see if they make sense. Some of them are punctuation related. Once upon a time (and even today) I loved me some extra commas or em-dashes. My copyeditor does not like them so much, so there’s a lot of them marked out. Other punctuation changes. Deleting unnecessary words and sentence tags (there’s an embarrassing wealth of this).
I also have in the margins several notes about things to clarify. “On page 12, you said it was a diner. On this page you say it’s a café. Which is it?” So I correct the item and write ‘fixed’ over the note. The bigger changes, I’m making a note to go back and fix at the end. For now, I’m still re-reading.
Did I mention this is a long, time consuming process? The first few days, I had no clue what I was doing and didn’t know what half the marks meant. Took me 2 days to get through 25 pages. (Did I mention I have to have this turned in ASAP?) Luckily, I’m getting more confident with the changes as I go, and was able to make a big leap in progress yesterday. I should have no problems finishing on time, which is nice.
After all this is turned in, about a month later, I get galleys! I have to admit, I’m really excited about seeing galleys. That’s when all the fonts and styles are set, and the book starts to look like a real book instead of just my old manuscript.
More stuff I can’t show you.
I got cover art for my second book last night! It made me squee in all the right places. Love my publisher – Pocket does really amazing romance covers, and it makes me sosososo happy to see mine.
But I can’t show you. At least, not until I get approval. BUT! I can show you a little something that is going on the cover…
“Laugh-out-loud scenes, scorching eroticism, and pulse-pounding adventure.” — Kresley Cole, New York Times bestselling author of Kiss of a Demon King
Perhaps you did not read that closely enough. I’ll wait here while you read it again.
KRESLEY FREAKING COLE BLURBED MY BOOK YOU GUYS.
(Perhaps you recall last RWA, when I mentioned I might meet Kresley? And I was excited? And posted this picture?)
That’s right. She was nice enough to make my day year decade and blurb my book.
You so want to read it now, don’t you? Yeah. Me too.
(But I get to! Because I am getting copyedits this week! And I’ll get to read — and edit — the whole thing AGAIN. Oh writer’s life, you are a glamorous one.)
Anyhow, there was some great link salad going on around and about the interwebs, most of it related to writing. Here ya go:
http://m-stiefvater.livejournal.com/111221.html <-- On writers and self confidence, and how being confident in your work does not equal ego. At least, not always. (Maggie has an awesome journal, guys. You should be reading it.)
http://beth-bernobich.livejournal.com/282487.html <-- Beth Bernobich talks about poisonous writers on the web. Can I get an amen?
http://jimhines.livejournal.com/450145.html < -- Jim Hines talks about writers with 'real' jobs vs writers without real jobs. Excellent post. Jim's posts on the business side of writing are an absolute must.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9JK7IKSfyLE < -- Earworm of the day (not the real video, just the song)
http://mymilktoof.blogspot.com/ < — Cutest blog ever. EVER.
And that’s all I got for now.
Plotting. You either take it in the front, or in the rear.
So, plotting. Some people ‘pants’ their way through a novel, without an outline except what’s running through their heads. Some people religiously outline before starting a book. There’s really no wrong way to write a novel, but I know that a lot of people will tell you that if you are a pantser, you’d better learn how to plot once you get contracted! Or else! And I think I’ve even said that before myself.
But here’s the thing. It’s not like if you’re a pantser, you turn in this random mess of garbage to your editor. You don’t claim that 25 independent chapters are a book, and weird shit happens on page 3 and then we switch narrators on page 300. Or maybe we do. Anyhow. I’m a pantser. I shamelessly admit this. I don’t like to know where a novel is going until we’ve shaken hands and possibly gone out on a first date. This is about page 50 or so.
This post gets really, really long right about here (fair warning).
I digress – I did want to share plotting out book 2 for my succubus series. When we had editor interest, my agent said “Can you come up with a concept for book 2?” So I sent her back a paragraph blurb about what I thought book 2 would be about. My agent wanted more info, so I actually came up with an extended ‘back blurb’ pitch. I phrased it like the back of a book, got into a little more detail about who would be doing what, and included some plot points that were key and a few funny scenes I was interested in writing. The whole thing was about a page. Not an outline by any stretch of the imagination.
Still, it was all I had when we sold the two book deal and got the go ahead to write it. I wrote the entire novel in about a month and a half, did an edit pass, and returned it to my editor. Because my book got rescheduled, it took a while for me to get edits because I got bumped.
But! The day of glorious edits came, and my editor had only small tweaks. Things like, “You’re not showing us why this character is likeable” or “I like this plot! Can we see more of it?” and just general clean-up. So I read through the book again (and it had been a while since I’d even thought about this book) to see what I thought of it as a reader.
And wow. What a surprise. I’d dropped entire story threads and characters back and forth in the book, and so when they popped up again on the back end, *I* was surprised. I’m the author!
This is not good.
About this time, Caitlin Kittredge posted her plot board for The Witch’s Alphabet . This looked inspiring to me, and organized! So I created one of my own, which you can see here.
Wall of Notes - Before
Let me explain what you’re looking at. I broke the book up into chapters. For each chapter, there’s a white notecard and my main character’s interal conflict and external conflict. Mind you, since I’m a pantser, I had no idea what these conflicts were until I finished the book. So they needed tweaking as well.
At any rate, the white notecards are for the main character (Jackie). Since it’s 1st person POV, every chapter is in her POV so I don’t have to worry about her not being in the chapter. Each other color post-it is for someone else that interacts with her in the storyline, and each has their own motivation and subplot. One color post-it is actually for Jackie’s ‘growth’ arc. I wanted to make sure I built that across the story as well. This may look like a bunch of garbage, but if you pick apart the colors (like, say, pink), you’ll notice that there’s long spans of book where the character and their plotline doesn’t show up.
To me, this is bad. That means this character/plot isn’t even on the radar.
So I added notes to myself on how it should look when I’m done. I filled in notecards for the ‘missing’ plot holes and wrote such helpful things on the post-its like “ADD STUFF HERE STUPID”. Here’s the end board:
Wall of Notes - After!
The colors are much more even, aren’t they?
Too bad these boards didn’t help me. Well, not really.
I mean, I tried really, really hard to be organized. I took my changes from this plot board and wrote them all out on an outline. For Chapter 3, I needed to add more X! Sprinkle in Y! Set up the plot for Z! And I was going to go chapter by chapter. First the page edits (which I always do, cleaning up phrasing and tweaking reactions). And then my editor’s edits! And then my notecards! And then I could finally move on to the next chapter!
And this was freaking overwhelming, y’all, it really was. I was going back over the same chapter over and over and over again without looking at the entire story’s cohesiveness and it was driving me crazy. Took me a week to just do one chapter. Obviously this wasn’t working for me.
So I went back to my old method. I made a list of things I wanted to fix. Things like this:
1) Make X more sympathetic.
2) Give Y a subplot! What’s his/her motivation?
3) Foreshadow Z a lot more!
And I treated each one as a separate draft. For the first draft, I’d work on nothing but #1 on the list, and making X more sympathetic. That was my entire goal. This might take 5 minutes, or it might take 4 days and re-tweaking every page. But that was my goal. Once that was done, I flipped back to the beginning of the manuscript, and started with #2. Rinse and repeat until I hit all bulletpoints. There were about 15 on my list, of various sizes. So this meant I re-read my manuscript over and over again, but it was far easier for me to tackle one aspect of revisions at a time than 20 all at once.
And when that was done, I printed out the manuscript one more time and read to make sure that it flowed as seamlessly on paper as it did in my brain.
And I liked it. I’m very happy with it, and I felt confident about turning it in. It might have taken me a dozen drafts and far more reads than I preferred, but that was my method, and it worked for me. Everyone’s methods are going to be different. The trick is finding what works for you.
Here’s the thing. I could have saved myself a lot of time (a LOT) by outlining the book ahead of time. Right? It would help if I was organized and knew that by Chapter 4, L needed to show up and cause trouble. And to foreshadow something by Chapter 7. But I didn’t, because that’s not my method.
I guess what I’m trying to say here is that being a pantser does not make you WRONG on how you write your book. It does not make your book less ‘well thought out’ than a plotter’s book. It does not make your work shoddy. It makes you have to do your editing and plotting on the back end of the book, rather than the front. I can edit and build plot and give the character a redeeming arc, but I have to have the groundwork laid first.
Make sense?
(And you may be that rare unicorn that can pants out a book with zero edits in the end, but I am not a unicorn. More of a donkey.)
Random stuff
I am sad that a certain someone has been voted off of Survivor. I loathed him, but he was entertaining. Now he can no longer lead his team with his eyes! Oh noes! Farewell to the strongest, most true warrior!!
Let’s see. What else. Oh. Supernatural’s season finale was good. Can’t wait for more Castiel next season.
Other than that, there’s been a little bit of writing, but it’s mostly idea scribbling. I have a really difficult time working on two projects at once, no matter what I do. So I told myself that I’d work on edits, and when I got enough to feel virtuous about spending my time, I’d switch to one of the projects burning at the back of my brain. Except…when I work on the edits, then I get caught up in the edits! And find it hard to switch. Just not much of a multi-tasker.
Oh, and there is a dead possum in my back yard. Apparently it’s been dead for quite some time (like, months). And apparently I need to go into the back yard more often, because we never knew it was there until the Orkin man pointed it out.
Yeaaaah.
Oh oh oh!! And Succubi Like It Hot (Succubus Diaries, book 2) is now available on Amazon! You know you want to pre-order it. The book will be released on January 26th, 2010 — one month exactly after Gentlemen Prefer Succubi hits the shelves.
Yay!
Coming Up For Air…
Hey everyone!
After a month (well, almost) of slogging, I’m done with my edits. Hooray! I wasn’t sure how I’d handle my first ‘real’ big change letter, but it was a learning experience and a fun process, and I’m 110% happier with my book now than I was when I started. So yay for that! I’ve got a few last minute tweaks to make and it’ll be winging back to my editor. And that means a mini vacation for yours truly.
But I should be back to blogging again, which is nice. Things are moving along in the book publishing world — I should be receiving finalized back cover copy soon (which I will share) and a few more blurbs (which I will also share).
In the meantime, I am thrilled to be done. It’s a great feeling of accomplishment.
Haven’t posted in a bit, sorry.
I’m currently in the middle of edits of book 2, SUCCUBI LIKE IT HOT. Edits are currently eating my brain to the point that I’m not really functioning like a normal person. I just stare at my computer and reword the same sentence over and over again.
I’ll be back in a few weeks when edits are turned in. In the meantime, I offer a (very small) snippet from book 1, GENTLEMEN PREFER SUCCUBI:
(Jackie and Zane are in the New City Museum of Art, looking for clues)
“Are you going to be in there long?” From outside of the claustrophobic storage closet, Zane’s voice echoed in the quiet hall. “Or shall I wander off?”
Oh hell no. I didn’t want him wandering off at all. I had to think fast. “Wait,” I called out, cracking the door and sticking my head out to look at him. “Do you know what Nitocris’s cartouche looks like?”
The vampire gave me a blank look. “I beg your pardon?”
“The cartouche?”
An offended look crossed his face. “How dare you ask me about such a thing? She is my queen, not some common slut-”
I blinked hard, and resisted the urge to giggle at the piss and vinegar look on his normally blasé face. “Whoa there, stud. I meant her name. Spelled out in Egyptian hieroglyphs.”
He flicked his cigarette butt on the floor, no doubt to tick me off. “No, I wouldn’t know.”
#
See you on the other side of edits!
