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...

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...

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 ...

I have awesome news! I submitted one of the stories I'd been working on to Less Than Three's Packing Heat anthology and it was accepted! I got the news on Saturday but because the holidays are coming up fast and furious, I didn't have a chance to update it until now. I have my signed and counter-signed contract, it's in the editing queue and now is the waiting game, part the second. The anthology probably won't be out until at least mid next-year, but I'm certainly not resting on my laurels. I have two more anthologies and at least one collection call I'd like to write for, that I have ideas for. Some a bit more solid than others. Not to mention some general submissions as well. Hoping to get a lot of writing done during my holiday vacation. We'll see. Wish me luck. And while I don't know who else is gonna be in this antho with me, if you're out there reading this and you got accepted to Packing Heat, congrats! I can't wait to be in ...

So much writing, guys. So much. I'm not actually doing NaNoWriMo proper this year (when do I ever have time these days?) But I still have managed to do a ton of writing since it began. I wrote one article, one essay, and yesterday, wrote 2K words and finished a novella! It's in the beta-read/editing stages now. I do plan to submit it to Less Than Three Press, since it's a sort-of sequel to the story that was in the WON'T BACK DOWN anthology. You don't have to have read that story to read this novella, but it's nice to see recurring characters. I also just submitted something else so I've holding out hope for that too. Even the essay I wrote I'm seeking a publication in an anthology, but I don't want to say any more on that until I know more about it. Also, I've re-jiggered my schedule to include the new collection calls and anthologies Less than Three has put out. I'm not sure I'll write for all of them, but I've scheduled them ...

Welcome to fall, if you're in the Northern Hemisphere like me. I woke up and it was suddenly October and I realized I needed to get my rear in gear where my next submission to Less Than Three was concerned. I have a story previously published in an e-zine that I'd like to rework for this next submission. It's only 1500 words shy of the minimum word count and I sat down this morning to figure out how I was going to work this out. After a quick outline I figured out what I needed to add and change. Next step is getting the story removed from where it's currently up for free. But all that to say there was writing done today and more to come! I'm pretty excited abut this and hoping I can cram enough writing/editing time into the month to get this submission in. It's for the Packing Heat call. So, that's where I am right now. My October's pretty packed itself so I just have to make sure to make as much time to write as possible. What are your...

Looks like the summer's over, huh? It's Labor Day today, aka the unofficial last day of summer. Though one look at the weather for this week makes it pretty clear nature's not ready to let go of the heat just yet. I have the day off today so I figured I should get some writing in, at the very least some planning and blogging. Less Than Three has put out a new anthology call , this time for fairy tales. I'm really excited about this one, because I have a few fairy tales I've already written I could rework, but there's one in particular about the moon that I never finished. This is the perfect opportunity, and better yet, I have until The end of March which means I can continue work on the two stories I'm currently working on getting done before the end of the year. The story I'd originally intended for the Lovely Dark and Deep  anthology is now firmly into novella length. I don't expect it will be long enough to be a novel, but it's cert...

Well hey everyone. It's been a while. I missed all of October and September without posting and I apologize. I got very busy and then just fell out of the habit of posting. No more excuses! I'm here now. Good news: I got a promotion at work! It comes with a pay raise and an office. My duties start after the holidays and it's a big shift from what I'm doing now, but working the the same people, so I'm looking forward to it. The down side is I have no idea how much time I'm going to have to write. On the plus side, I can close my door and bang out a hour's work of writing at lunch, but I have no idea if I'll have the brain power at that time. We'll just have to see. Speaking of writing, I'm currently writing for the Villians Inc anthology call at Les Than Three. I wante dto finish in November so that I could spend December and January writing for the Intertwined call, which I want to be considerably longer since it's a collec...