Freddie's Braindroppings

You know I keep promising to stop disappearing like this, but if there's one thing I know about myself it's that I get distracted super easily. Which is why I'm getting started on something a month early to hold myself accountable. Yeah that's right. We're talking NaNoWriMo time!

The news just keeps coming! I submitted a story for this anthology call , and it was accepted! Read on to find out more and how you can get a free copy, but only until 5/8!

Well time just keeps on slipping away, doesn't it? At least I haven't been idle. Here comes this [long overdue] Friday with Freddie!

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...

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:

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 ...

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 ...

Heya folks! Look: I didn't let another whole month go by before posting again! Success!  I hit some awesome milestones already this month so I wanted to check in. First off, the story I was diving back into in my last post? Finished! Sent it to some beta readers for initial edits. I'm hoping to have it fully edited and ready for submission by year's end. Though I know acquiring editors get a lot of submissions in December due to NaNo, so maybe I'll wait until January? I'll think it over. But rather than rest on my laurels I moved onto the next project while I wait for edits to come back. I had a lot of setbacks with this one. It started rough and dry, and I scrapped it and started again, but that was also sort of leading me in circles. Finally I sat down and rewrote my 'outline' (it's really just a massive plot dump, but it's step by step what I want to happen) and everything started falling into place. I have better motivations for the char...

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...

I've been gone a long time. I know. It's been a little rough here in Milanoland. Day job's been busy - I even went away on a business trip a couple months ago. But most importantly, I've been struggling with writer's block. Not just "I can't advance this story," but  "I don't know what to write in my blog" as well. Hell it's been hard even to just get through reading a book, much less trying to write one or about one. I don't know what's causing it, but I'd guess a bad mix of stress and depression. I'm muddling through. I don't now what broke the spell but I opened one of my WIPs about an hour and a half ago and started reading through it. I did some editing as I went and wound up adding a good 2000 words, and linking parts of the story together that previously were unconnected. I feel really good about it and actually feel like I'm back on track. Yeah that's me right now. :D In other life ...