Freddie's Braindroppings

It's finally here! Release day for A HONEYED LIGHT! Y'all, I can't even contain my excitement; my stomach is roiling . I'm just so very happy to share this labor of love with you. Please go ahead and grab a copy from the retailer of your choice, and most importantly, leave reviews! Those reviews really help my book get seen and read by others. In other news, I have a book blitz happening on Enchanted Book Promotions here and one at Dog Eared Publicity here . I also have two giveaways going! One is at the stops along Enchanted (or right here ) and the other is connected to my Headtalker blast that went out at 10 AM EST. Retweet that to get a chance to win! I"m pulling winners this weekend from the #AHoneyedLight hashtag so get on that! Hmm what else? If you've read it, you'll see that there's a neat little setup up at the end for a sequel, and yes, I do have plans for that to come!  More on that later. Right now I'm just super exci

Today is November 14th, which means we are officially only one month away from A Honeyed Light's  release date. I think now's a good time to start freaking out. I'm calm. I swear I'm calm.* *This is a lie. Anyway, I figure now is a good time to start the real promo push! I'd love to get more people to add the book on Goodreads , so here's what we're gonna do. Read on!

Hi everyone! I wanted to post a bit more than this but I've been sick (on my vacation no less!) and playing a lot of catch up. But I had to post today because I just handed back in my copy edits for A Honeyed Light which is officially only two months from release! Breathe, Freddie, breathe. (That would be easier to do if I wasn't super congested still) I also buckled down and worked out my budget for the book, including business cards, advertising - both web and social - and everything else. It's a pretty decent budget, and I may be able to add more to it when I get my Christmas bonus, but for a first round, this is not bad. My copy editor seemed pretty excited about this book - they asked if there would be a sequel/if it was a series and yes, it is! So I hope you fall in love with the creepy little town of Harmony, because there's more where this came from. I just need to buckle down and write the next one.  In the meantime you can preorder A Hone

It's the big day! Well one of many upcoming "Big Days" I hope, but this is the big day that the cover for my December novella A Honeyed Light  is released into the world!  The cover was done by Aisha Akeju , my absolute favorite cover artist, and I'm just so enamored by it!  Here's the book's blurb: Kunal, relative newcomer to the strange town of Harmony, has his hands full preparing for Diwali. That should be enough to keep anyone's mind preoccupied, but Kunal can't really ignore that he's nearly thirty, single, and still buried in the closet. Out of town at a gay club one night, he bumps into Oscar, proprietor of Harmony's only sex shop, and figures his secret is now officially out. What he doesn't expect is a slow seduction, or to have to decide what it is he really wants in life. Read on to see the finished cover as well as a little cover breakdown. 

Hey folks, guess what? PRIVATE DICKS: PACKING HEAT is now available for purchase! You can grab it from a bunch of different places ! PRIVATE DICKS: PACKING HEAT edited by Samantha Derr Last week I talked about the inspiration for Kana, the love interest in the story. Today I'm talking about Robert Inoue as he's known to people at Black Suede. Robert's supposed to be a rich businessman who wouldn't look about of place in a fancy club that happens to have some unpleasant things going on in it. So I pictured someone who looks good in a suit, but wouldn't look out of place trafficking drugs in a night club. And I found the perfect face.

Hey everyone! If you didn't know, there's an awesome anthology hitting Less than Three's shelves on Wednesday 8/31 and yours truly has a short story in it. I may have mentioned this once or twice before... ;) PRIVATE DICKS: PACKING HEAT edited by Samantha Derr The life of a private investigator is never easy. Most often tedious, the job requires patience, diligence, and a touch of creativity. But some jobs come with a little danger, and some come with a lot, and the only way to safety is to fight as hard as the enemy. Private Dicks: Packing Heat is a collection of stories about private investigators not afraid to fight their way out when the heat is on. From Black Suede, Red Velvet by Freddie Milano: Black Suede is one of the most exclusive clubs in town, and one with a lot of secrets. The owner, Fujimoto, is suspected of drug trafficking, and James Tachibana goes undercover to get enough evidence to bring in the kingpin—and starts to get too close to Kana, Fuj

July was hard, folks. I don't mean that in any euphemistic ways. It was busy as hell at work. Day Job is crazy in the summer because everyone's on vacation, half the office is not around, it's high convention season, and the workload seems never ending. Still I should have been making time to blog. But I'm getting back on track now with this new Writing Wednesday post: Why I Write HEAs.

Hi everyone! My post's up a bit later than usual today as I had some appointments and wasn't able to make the post until now. Today I want to talk about favorite books, but not favorite books to read, I mean favorite books as tools for writing. There is one clear winner out of all of the writing resources I've read over the years, and it's Rachel Aaron's 2K to 10K . So why do I love it so much?

Hey everyone! Back with another Fridays with Freddie post, up a little later than usual today. Today I'm talking about why I write what I write. First of all, it would probably help to make sure you know what I write before I start going on about why. I write diverse LGBT/queer romance often with fantasy, urban fantasy or paranormal overtones. Sometimes the romance takes a bit of a backseat to the overall plot, but it will always be there and it will always be queer and/or diverse.  Obviously I'm still growing my platform, so there isn't a lot already published that I can point to as examples of what I write, but that doesn't mean I can't talk about it. So let's talk about why I write it. I am a queer, plus-size, cisgender woman of color who rarely - if ever - has seen myself in the books that I read. I tend to read the same genres I write, and the reason is in the sentence right before this one. There are only a few liberties taken here; this is

Today I'm going to talk a little about settings. I'm going to feature the setting in my story Feint of Heart in Won't Back Down, a kingdom called Trysien. You don't get to learn too much about Trysien's history in Feint of Heart, but I'm planning to revisit the world and expand on it some. Here's what we do know:

Hey everyone! I'm back again with a new Writing Wednesday post. I was scrolling through my resources tag on Tumblr and found this awesome post . I don't know about you folks, but I often like music in the background when I write, but I can't really listen to something with words or I find myself singing along and getting distracted. I have some instrumental playlists I use for this purpose, but I need more variety. This post is perfect. I have some favorites among the various genres, but what I listen to depends on what I'm writing, but Classical-type music usually does the trick. Some of my favorites:  Baroque Bach Handel Vivaldi Classical Beethoven Mozart Romantic Brahms Chopin Liszt  Rachmaninov  Rimsky-Korsakov Schubert  Tchaikovsky But these are nothing new to me. What was great was the modern stuff separated by the feel of the song. That's what I need. If I'm writing a fantasy sword fight, I want epic music that su

Welcome back folks! As promised I'm back again with a new Fridays with Freddie post. Today I decided to follow along the same vein as last week, when I talked about being organized. I mentioned how often I get ideas I can't use just then. Jumping off from that, I'd like to tackle these questions: Where do your characters come from? Do you draw on real life? Do you create character profiles? Let's get into it!

I'm back already? I know, crazy, right? Well like I said I had some ideas to help me keep posting with more regularity. I'm instituting Fridays with Freddie where I'll blog about any number of topics from inspiration and book reviews, to behind the scenes in my books and newsworthy events. I'm starting today off easy with a common question authors get: How do you keep your ideas organized?  This is a multi-response question here because it depends on what we're talking about. I tend to get ideas all the time. I mean, all the damn time. While at Day Job, while eating, while showering, on the train, in those moments when I'm rolling over and trying to get back to sleep. All. the. time. But they're scattered and ephemeral, not usually something solid I can get started on right away. Or they're for future books that I have to put aside because that's not my current WIP. When I get bombarded by ideas like that, I need to get on top of them immedi

In an effort to blog more frequently and reliably, I'm instituting some themed days on here. Today kicks of Writing Wednesday. I'm hoping to do this every other Wednesday. The theme of Writing Wednesday will be resources, tips, and other things that assist me or that I've seen assist other writers. I'm starting off real easy with this epic masterpost of writing tools that I saved over on my Tumblr.  I haven't managed to explore every link yet, so there's a good chance future WW posts will be one or more things on this list, expanded and opined on. For now, I'll just list some of the ones I'm most interested in exploring. Name Generators - name generators are my JAM. I use them most in my non-contemporary stories, or for secondary, tertiary or less important characters in contemporary ones. MCs always get a bit more thought put into them. That's a post for another day. Ways to avoid saying the word 'very' - I'm most intereste

The last almost two weeks have been intense where my writing is concerned. I think I churned out about 28,000 words in that time, which is a ton for me, considering I work full time and sometimes struggle to squeak out 400 words a day. So I decided to make my goal 440 words per day. Then I noticed I was consistently putting out 1,000 words, so I decided to up the goal to 1,000 to meet what I was already producing. As soon as I did that, I started putting out between 1,500 and 2,000. This past Friday I wrote 6,000 words. I haven't had this kind of productivity since I did NaNoWriMo six years ago and churned out 7,000 words on day one. And that was because I wasn't working at that time. So I'm really proud of the success I've had with this novella. And even better, I finished it today. I need to reread and edit like crazy, as well as give it to a couple other people to read, but I finished it exactly when I wanted to. Not only that, but I already have a ton of

If I'd written this post last week I'd have been excited about the warm weather, digging out my spring dresses, and the prospect of going out to write in coffee shops or accessing my own wifi from my yard. Instead, here I am, in a sweater, having come inside and doffed my winter coat and scarf. My hair is sad I chose this week to let it breathe after a month of a protective style, and I'm generally grumpy that mother nature has decided to play a late April Fool's joke on us by dipping to below freezing temperatures. That aside though, I've been writing during my breaks at work (got over 1,000 words on Monday!) and fully outlined my next novella this past Sunday, so I'm hoping I can finish it in time for my deadline. I struggled with a title and was actually considering submitting it without one and working with editors to select one, when I pulled a phrase from an important poem that comes up and found that it worked perfectly. I dislike writing without

This year has started off a little rough for pop culture lovers. Losing David Bowie and Alan Rickman in the same week, at the same age, to the same disease has made me want to write off 2016 before its first month is even over. (Pausing a  moment here to say fuck cancer .) But both of these men meant something to a lot of people. David Bowie made many people feel like they were not the only freaks in the world. He made being weird seem utterly cool and perfectly acceptable. That's so very important. Alan Rickman portrayed a number of character, spanning so many different genres it's hard to think that people haven't seen him in something. From Hans Gruber in Die Hard to Severus Snape in Harry Potter. My personal favorites were his roles in Dogma and Galaxy Quest. He was a brilliant actor, and form all the accounts of his co-stars, a great man. So yeah. It's been a rough week. But there have been some positives as well. I got my first round of edits back