jana_denardo: (kept tears)




So I made a mistake. I didn't research something as well as I should have both then and now. Six years ago I revamped a very old story in the Vampires in Vegas universe. I did try to see where Arrigo could live on the strip and at that time only the SkySuites came up so I picked it. I didn't have GoogleEarth then and barley had internet that wasn't dial up at that point. So I made an error. It's the wrong place for Arrigo and I've moved it to the Veer.

Of course, Crisis in Faith was published in 2010 with the wrong living area and it had a balcony. I'm not sure that even Sky had those. Originally in the 90s when these stories were first written it was in New Orleans but even in 1993 that was a cliche setting for vampire stories (I was younger then, more naive, forgive me). I should have edited out that balcony bit since it really didn't matter if they were there or in the living room looking out over the view. Sigh.

But that was my lack of due diligence six years ago. This current lack ties into it. Crisis has been out there for six years. I am busy turning the story that proceeded it Blood Red Roulette into a novel so you'd think I would have reread that old companion story. Yeah, I didn't. I was always 'too busy.' So I wrote Fadil into the story (albeit long distance since I knew he came to Vegas in Crisis). Honestly I thought originally Arrigo spoke to Fadil about Eleni in the short story.

I was wrong. It's not a tremendously hard fix mind you. And there a few others I have to make. Frankly I'm sad to have to make them because it makes more sense for Fadil to have been consulted. I guess I'll have to make him unreachable somehow. I'll have to come up with another friend Arrigo calls on. That's not hard as Fadil is never really seen in the novel.I could trim out some of the scenes entirely and improve word count.

But I'm still annoyed. I'd rather revise Crisis and I know that's possible to but it's not just cleaning up some grammar and removing a few epithets. It's changing content (beyond changing the name of his condo which I AM doing because the SkySuite is way down on the wrong end of the Strip for what I wanted).

Next time (because there will be other sequels etc of various series), reread no matter how busy you are.
jana_denardo: (kept tears)
So I'm staring down at the pipe at a very busy August. On the 14th Snowbound is out. On the 19th Boldly Go my freebie Vegas wedding story will be out. On the 21st out comes Soldiers of the Sun, my second novel. It's going to be fun. Hectic. Insane.

But can I just say I'm thrilled that people are buying all three Soldiers stories. I have sales of the novella and pre-sales for the above mentioned ones. I couldn't be happier.

And the domain for my webpage has been purchased and my friend is busy working on it now.

I'll be hosting the cover reveal for Soldiers of the Sun on tuesday so be watching for that.


I did in fact finish Camp Nano and would have put some graphics up if freaking photobucket didn't try to download a virus into my computer via its shitty ads. Instead of a graphic how about a taste of the opening pages of Blood Red Roulette. That's more fun anyhow.


This was no place for a ghost hunt. Arrigo had thought that even before he started out for his destination, Delilah's Diner, a greasy spoon hanging onto the 1950s with the tenacity of a bear trap. He remembered the location from the other week when he had been in the area on his actual job. As an enforcer for the Chiaroscuro, he had taken down a renegade vampire just a block away, in a biker bar called The Alibi. As a vampire himself, Arrigo belonged to an organization helping to keep ill-mannered and dangerously violent supernaturals under control. About the only thing worth noting in The Alibi had been a cute blond bartender. As for the vampire he had been sent there to end, the idiot was so young, so full of himself, it hadn’t been much of a fight.

Arrigo knew when Delilah's Diner crossed his desk at his day job at Taabu and Giancarlo's Psychic Advisement and Paranormal Investigations, it couldn't possibly be part of the new business he was considering: a ghost walk. Las Vegas had a few, but if Tripadvisor was to be believed, they were light on history. He hoped to come up with a tour backed up by Vegas history, with some good ghostly stories and a reasonable walk. It was a perfect job for vampires and there were several young vampires in town who weren't old enough to be out in the sun, like he could be, who could be tour leaders. Arrigo thought there was probably a joke in there somewhere, a vampire hunting ghosts.

Deliah's was too far off either the Strip or Freemont Street to make it good for the walk, not to mention it was a sketchy side of town. Still, he could add it into a book he'd been commissioned to write about haunted Vegas. Also it afforded Arrigo the chance to swing by The Alibi. He wanted to know more about the family who seemed to run the place, or at least the hot blond. The gray-haired, bearded man who screamed redneck with the bayou accent to back up the image held no interest for Arrigo other than to inspire distaste because of the hostility he lorded over the two young men who worked the bar with him: one was the blond that had caught his eye and the other was brawnier with darker hair. Arrigo decided they were obviously his sons from the way they interacted. Their accents were Louisianan, Cajun, actually. Arrigo figured they had come west looking for new homes after Hurricane Katerina like so many others. He knew a whole clan of vampires who gave up the New Orleans cliché and moved to Tempe, Arizona. Arrigo recognized the accent because he had lived in the Pontalba Apartments in the French Quarter once upon a lifetime ago.

Since he was on that side of town documenting haunted diners, Arrigo decided to stop at The Alibi, even though he hardly fit in. Maybe he'd see the hot blond. Those stunning blue eyes, short golden curls, and a muscular build got his motor running. Arrigo never discriminated between sexes when intimacy was concerned. Not that Arrigo had approached the blond and probably wouldn't tonight either, at least not in The Alibi. This sort of bar probably thrived on gay bashing, and he was not in the mood to get into a fight with people he’d gladly drain down to the last drop.


And I wanted to add another of those 100 things about writing here too

100 Things #91- Newish trends I like. )
jana_denardo: (kept tears)




Turning Your Characters Stupid to amp the tension is something I see all too often. It's something I fear doing unintentionally myself. I read a lot of mysteries and it's unfortunately a pretty common trope. The author wants to give us a heart-pounding, everything-on-the-line ending with our protagonist in mortal danger but rather than work on a way to do that naturally, we get the lazy way out.

For instance let's look at the last two mysteries I read. One has our heroine go off to a strange city by herself, telling no one she's there. She knows the bad guys are after something in an ancient Mayan ruin and have killed to get it. So what does she do? Goes into the ruins by herself completely unarmed. Because that's what people do in mysteries some times. They're one step up from the ding dongs in horror flicks that Geico so beautifully mocked in their commercial last year. I guess we could excuse her because she's an amateur detective, but really? She even knows the bad guys are there because she's watching them and thinks she can sneak past him.

Maybe a professional detective would know better. Not so much, the book I read before this one was about a lady cop and she also goes hiking off into the woods without telling her boss, her partner or anyone so she can spy on the bad guy who has kidnapped, raped and tortured numerous women. Yep, because this is what smart cops do, go in without back up. At least she was armed.

And it's not just the ladies doing it. It's one of the reasons I stopped reading the Jonathan Kellerman Alex Delaware books. How many times could I watch Alex do something stupid just to get that 'exciting' ending? Even authors who are expert in their fields have done this. Kathy Reichs, Linda Fairstein and others have had characters do something so incredibly dumb they're lucky to be alive and somehow not lose their jobs. As much as I loved Buffy the Vampire Slayer & Angel, all too often the tension was in the characters not sharing something vital and doing something dumb instead.

Then I had to sit back and think to myself, have I done this? If I have, is it at least justified? Humans DO make stupid choices after all (though I still maintain a trained detective knows better than what I see half them doing). I'm struggling with this right now in my Vampires in Vegas story. In the very original story which I wrote back in the 1990s, I was far less experienced as a writer and I have to say, Arrigo was a complete nitwit and the villainess, Eleni even stupider.

Granted some of that was an artifact of trying to tell the story in the much more restrictive word counts back then. 5-7K was considered generous. I was rushing the story through. Now that I've completely reworked this and am turning it into something newer (basically all that remains of the original is the idea), I'm struggling to make them more believable. However, if Arrigo is as sharp as he should be, the main action would never happen. Eleni is smarter in this as well. She does still send taunting letters but anonymously because killers DO that sometimes.

But that leaves me with how to make Arrigo's less diligent aspects seem realistic and believable. I don't want it to look like I took the lazy way out. It's harder than it sounds. If Arrigo does everything like he should, the Eleni should fail almost immediately. I did add in a new level, a partner for Eleni, one Arrigo doesn't know about. That makes it much harder on him. He might think he's got the bases covered. Lust is also in the mix and that can often lead to bad choices.

Regardless, its a harder row to hoe and I'm not sure I'm getting it right. Time will tell. My question to you then is, how do you avoid making your characters do stupid things just to get that tense ending? Or do you avoid it?
jana_denardo: (kept tears)



There was a lot of angst, disappointment and giddy joy going around on my social media hang outs this past week. It was the sign ups for GRL conference which is a big one in the gay romance genre I write in. I have to say I had disappointment but not because I didn't get a featured author spot (did you see the The Big Bang Theory episode where the boys are frantically clicking on their laptops trying to get Comicon tickets? Yeah it's like that to get a spot), but because I know I can NOT go.

And for the foreseeable future I can not go. It's not a matter of money or desire. I would love to go as a supporting author or just plain guest the first time (I would hate to jump in with both feet having never been there at least once before). But my job gets in the way. And for me this sucks just a little. Certainly GRL and other conventions are not going to suddenly make me a bestseller and I can quit my day job (I'll never be able to quit that unless I write the next 50 Shades of crap, but that's a whole other conversation for another time). That said, going to these conventions is an excellent way to network with other authors (there are some I would very much like to meet.) and with fans.

However, professors don't usually get time off. It's understandable. We DO get off at least part of the summer and between semesters. Now a lot of us do research in the summer so it's not just us lounging pool side for three months. Others, like me teach in the summer too. Here's the rub: if I were an English professor, I could legitimately claim a writing convention as building my craft and making me a better professor. I'm a scientist. Want to know how gay literature relates to my job? Yeah, not much.

In theory I could burn my personal day to go but that leaves me rushing there and back again and paying a lot of money for the experience which won't be as good as it could because I don't have the time to give to it. And that's provided I can find an exercise for my students and/or someone to cover my class. Also it has to be approved before I could burn that day (granted my school wouldn't hassle me over that).

My years before teaching were spent seeing patients. Conventions doubled as vacation. Even now as a professor, they still do. I have trouble breaking that mind-set. So in my head I'm paying 400-500$ for a weekend where I see just the inside of a convention room AND I lose pay to do it. Yes, the other way to see it is doing something positive for my writing career and it's hard to get hard numbers to quantify the value of making the trip.

So I thought okay, let me try a smaller convention. I'd be a little fish in a very big pond at GRl. At least at a smaller con, I might be more noticeable. Shira Anthony mentioned one in Florida in July. I'm assuming she meant Rainbow Con and Queer SF has a table there, which is a good thing since I write genre fiction. Naturally I teach in July. I would have to miss one day of the convention because a day of summer school is like a week of regular school and I would need to be there. I'm not counting it out.

However, if anyone knows any good conventions in May/June, tell me about them please! That would be ideal for me (barring Memorial day weekend when I'm already at a science convention).
jana_denardo: (kept tears)




Just like the header says, Why are titles so hard to come up with? At least they are for me. I suck at it. I loathe it. I hide from it. Basically I half-ass something to call the file while I'm writing it then I run around flailing crying huge tears when it comes to putting an actual title on it.

However, I have to wonder am I failing at coming up with a good title. I look at some of my recently releases and while they do well judging by the review blogs as far as that's concern, the sales numbers aren't where I'd like them to be. True, there probably isn't something known as 'too many sales.' And this isn't a post 'whining' about not selling enough, however, for the record, I don't call that 'whining.' I call it being legitimately concerned about a business. My friend, FH, pointed out on his Facebook that talking about it isn't going to make it change. You need to do something and that's what I'm thinking about here.

I'm trying to identify what I could be doing better. I have confidence in my stories but of course, there is always room for improvement. I'm looking for other reasons sales aren't where I want them to be. I did my best to get the word out and my publisher didn't leave me hanging either. They promoted too. I know one problem that I need to deal with (website) but I had to think where else I could be going wrong.

1. Cover art - fantastic. No problems there (and I only have so much control over that. All I can do it make sure I give the art department the most complete picture I can and trust in their abilities. They have never let me down yet).

2. reviews - The ones I've gotten have been very good. I suppose I could get more reviews. I feel awkward and shy about approaching review sites

3. Titles and blurbs. - Hmmm, might need work.

And since we already know which one I want to talk about, let me get to it. I'm wondering if the titles aren't doing their job which is to catch the eye and intrigue people. For example If Two of Them Are Dead is a clever play on a Ben Franklin saying and goes to the heart of the story but since this is supposed to be romance first and steampunk/mystery second, it probably does the story a disservice in retrospect. (though really I'd rather it be the other way around, romance as the subplot but that is a completely different kettle of fish).

Kept Tears refers to a line in the novel but does it catch the eye? I don't know. Maybe it's confusing or bland or I simply don't know.

So what do you think? How much does a title play into your picking up a book? Or is it more blurb/cover art (I confess, this is me but I'm trying to see where I can make small changes that might help.

Who knows, maybe being a first novel didn't help it much either. I do have a second one coming out this summer (another reason to be thinking on what to change now so it's in place by August/September). The subject matter alone worries me there (being m/m/m and historical urban fantasy) so I'm trying to do all I can to make it easier.

Sucking at titles doesn't help.
jana_denardo: (kept tears)




Yeah, I have to admit it: My process can be annoying as holy hell. Okay not so much the actual writing but my way around writer's block or the way I puzzle out difficult to write passages. General it goes like this. I find someone who is foolish generous enough to talk me through it. They offer suggestions. Sometimes it's exactly what I need. Sometimes it ends up in me going 'no, that can't work and here's why!'

And believe it or not that is very helpful. While I'm busy telling them why it won't work something that WILL work shakes loose in my brain. Take this weekend. I'm busy telling [livejournal.com profile] evil_little_dog why her suggestion won't work and OMG I've just written a bunch of stuff that will never work and I don't know what to do (and she's probably thinking STFU) and bam, it occurs to me, hey try this! This will allow you to use what you wrote without spoiling what comes next and hey it might even foreshadow something. Wow, my brain is wonderful. Go brain go.

Of course this process has to annoy the fuck out of anyone without range of it. It annoys ME, but apparently my brain works best with conflict and stress. You give it either of those things and it works. Give it peace and serenity and it finds another excuse to play Bejeweled Blitz. My muse is sort of an asshole sometimes but at the end of the day it gets the work done. And my friends only want to slap me a little a lot.
jana_denardo: (kept tears)
No seriously.



For example, I got my royalty statement today and it's far more detailed than it used to be. That's both helpful and a bit depressing. No, this isn't going to be a post about not enough sales. No one really wants to hear that. Even if it's true.

But sometimes I'm bemused at sales prices like eight cents. Seriously, eight cents was the whole take on one short story of which I get half. My worries are over :-).

The same group sold a novella for twenty cent so I had to go look it up because I didn't know what it was and it turned out to be basically a netflix sort of thing for books, a digital library which does give a token amount to the author's if someone who has subscribed downloads their books. Okay fair enough. I'm an avid library person so I can hardly complain about that but it was pretty silly seeing that eight cents worth of sales. In fact scribd would be a godsend to my blind friends. Really.

I think I was more bemused by the amazon customer who bought and then returned one of my e-novellas. I laughingly told Mom this and she said 'they probably read it in an hour and returned it. That could be true. Could be they realized they duplicated a purchase. I've done that before but I've sucked it up as my own fault and didn't return it. I've seen people complain about people returning ebooks. I can't say I'm a fan but I'm not going to whine about it. I'm just glad someone didn't say 'hey this sucked and I sent it back.'


But at the end of the day, bemused or not, I'm just glad people are buying anything I've written. Every single story I had on offer was purchased at least once this last quarter, so what do I have to complain about? That I'm not selling as much as 50 Shades? Okay yeah I could complain about that (or laugh at how hard my secretary took time away from telling me about God's plan to scold me for not thinking 50 Shades was a great book and for not making plans to see the movie!)

The writing game is just plain strange but that's what makes it interesting.
jana_denardo: (kept tears)




#88 gutting your baby )


And totally random but Chuck Wendig is hosting a Year End favorites post over on Terrible Minds Here is mine:

1) Favorite novel of the year? Skin Game by Jim Butcher

2) Favorite non-fiction book of the year? The Killer of Little Shepherds by Douglas Starr

3) Favorite short story of the year? Broken Phoenix by Edmond Manning

4) Favorite movie of the year? Guardians of the Galaxy

5) Favorite TV show of the year? Gotham

6) Favorite song of the year? All of Me by John Legend (yes I know it’s from 2013, but I live in BFE and it didn’t start playing til this spring here)

7) Favorite album? The Circus At The End Of The World by Abney Park (ditto what I said for song)

8) Favorite video game? Criminal Case, yeah, it’s just a hidden object game on Facebook but I’m trying not to play games because I get too sucked into them.

9) Favorite app? Mlife, a slot machine simulator that lets you earn points towards things in Vegas owned by the Mlife group (the Mirage etc). Okay technically this is one I think I’d like. I have a dumb phone…

10) Favorite [something else] of the year? I’m going with favorite moment. Holding my very first published novel, Kept Tears, in my hands (couldn’t get the box from the publisher opened fast enough). A little self-centered? Yes, but it’s my favorites list so…
jana_denardo: (kept tears)
No I'm not going to break out into the Frozen soundtrack but this post is about letting it go.





It is very hard sometimes to let your novel/novella/short story go. You keep fine tuning it. Sometimes you outright ignore it. Sometimes things spin out of your control. But finally I have let Soldiers of the Sun go. A full ten months behind schedule. Some of it I have a good reason for. The spring was taken up by promoting my novel, Kept Tears and novella, If Two of Them Are Dead and finishing a professional paper for work.

Then I had rotator cuff surgery and my mom's health took a downswing. It was a hard, pain-filled summer and for months I couldn't sit up at the computer for long and I was staying with my parents for my recovery and frankly that didn't leave a lot of time. Also I had to spent what computer time my arm could endure remaking a class I haven't taught in five years. If anyone thinks teaching is easy, they're wrong. It's suprisingly time-intensive.

A new horrible schedule at the college ate away more time and frankly so did my own foolishness (looking at you computer games) played a role but finally I got it to where holding onto it no longer made sense. Yes I'm insecure about parts of it (Maybe I should have cut more sex scenes. Maybe I should have done this and not that with my villains etc) but I think it's a good, solid novel and I hope everyone else likes it.

I couldn't have gotten it to where I did without my friends. They know who they are. Thank you. If Dreamspinner picks up Soldiers of the Sun it is in no small part thanks to you.

And since this is about demon hunters, maybe instead of luck, I can borrow a line from Buffy Summers 'Wish me monsters.'
jana_denardo: (kept tears)
Some days you have to sit back and wonder 'is my story cursed?' We all have one. The novel that doesn't save your changes. The novel that is lost repeatedly in hard drive crashes (disc failure, flashdrive failure, didn't back up into the cloud). The novel that develops five problems for every one you solve. You start whimpering whenever you even think about that story even though you love it.

For me, right now, that's Soldiers of the Sun. I'm TEN months behind on getting it sent to a publisher for consideration. I've had first reader issues. I've lost edits I've made. Edits they made. I come up with fixes only to find they don't work.

Last night I was almost ready to whip it into the correct format for the publisher and then remembered I found a stack of hard copy edits when I was house cleaning. I made them this summer and kept them just in case my flash drive died before I got home. It didn't. But I DID check them and sure enough...they hadn't saved. I about wept. It's weeks worth of work lost.

I have to fix it again. Then I realized I had a timing issue (relatively easy to solve) and I still have a dialog issue. This is 1932 but the characters don't really sound all that 1930ish. They didn't in the other couple in this series either so I don't have to load it up on slang but I would like more. This will not be an easy fix. I look at this novel and just despair. I think it's a good one but my god, it's been a long hard labor and delivery.



And I decided to get my nano time wasting out of the way early. I've mocked up a cover for my Vampires in Vegas project.

 photo bloodredroulette2_zps3d2140aa.jpg
jana_denardo: (kept tears)




100 Things #85 The Impact of Words )
jana_denardo: (kept tears)
There is one thing to always remember about historicals, the people who read them then to know their history. They will not hesitate to point out if you're wrong. I remember this even though it's been several years, a 20-something member of one of my on-line writers group cheerily announced she was going to write a historical but she found research boring so she wasn't going to do any. Several of us tried to point out that this would probably Not. Go. Well. We got that 'shut up, old people' attitude. I wonder sometimes if she ever really tried it.

The big things in history are pretty easy. Not even all that much research needed to find copious amounts of material. It's the little details that can be a downright bear to find. And not every historical period is as 'glamorous' as others. Victorian, Regency, Roman, you're covered. I'm struggling to find out things for the 1930s (especially specifically for Pittsburgh that isn't steel mill orientated). Yeah there's the Depression, thanks for that. Never knew. Rolls eyes. Now, it is important to find out things like when was Prohibition lifted (one of my first readers thought it was earlier than it was).

But what I really wanted was, how did every day life go? Yeah I asked grandma who was less than helpful (in spite of being married with a kid by then so I know she damn well remembers it). I have remnants of it in her house. My friend [livejournal.com profile] silvrethorn mentioned the other day about the rural areas not even having electricity or running water in the 19-teens (I forget now why we were discussing this other than she's writing a historical as well with the extra added layer of 'fun' because it's in another country, another language). Grandma had the kerosene lamps, the bowl/pitcher wash up combo, the metal wash tubs (we store wood in it now), cast iron clothes irons (I use it for a pannini press) and an outhouse (until 1952). The other grandma had the ginormous radio.

And that's what I mean by little things. In Soldiers of the Sun, Temple is an enormous fan of the radio. He loves music, loves to dance and is a radio drama junkie. He, like the other demon hunters, live in apartments inside the Soldiers' complex. It's not that spacious but the man has the biggest radio he could jam in there. It occurs to me, however, that some readers will have no idea that the radio I'm talking about isn't some little thing on a shelf (it is described a little).

So today I was at the Mothman Festival which was great for story ideas. Let's be honest, my upcoming holiday contemporary short story is an aberration for me and crazy stuff like Mothman gets my mind whirling (and let's not think too hard on the idea of normal doesn't enter my thoughts too often). It's my tradition to always go to the Mason Jar, a sizable antique store in Point Pleasant (gets me out of the sun, it's one of the few shops that doesn't die in PP's sadly decaying city center and I love antiques). This time I found two 20s-30s radios. Either of them would be perfect for Temple (wish they had the dates more specific) so I thought I'd share them.


 photo 100_3557_zps649371dc.jpg This one is probably a little newer. It has knobs.

 photo 100_3556_zps1e03a7ed.jpg This is more what I had in mind. The door is used as volume control. If I had a house instead of a crappy apt, this one would have come home with me. I love it. It's in beautiful shape.

So yes, definitely, dig as much as you can to find those little details.
jana_denardo: (kept tears)
So I was thinking about reviews lately, mostly because I haven't been getting too many and while the empirical data behind whether or not it helps sales isn't as solid as I'd want it to be, I think it would help some. No, this isn't me begging for reviews (but if you read something of mine and you liked it, I'd love you to go to Amazon/Goodreads etc and at least put a star rating.

Both Stanford & Harvard agree that even negative reviews can drive sales (and no I'm not suggesting we go a-trolling). Pretty much for the same reason banning a book or movie drives sales; we want to see what the fuss is about.

I saw on Brain Games a clip talking about the psychology of the star rating, how people will go to Amazon to buy, well just about anything, and if faced with two similar products that are more or less the same price, they'll buy the one with the ratings vs the one without it. Our brain wants direction and it perceives the ratings as such, even if the reviewer doesn't know shit from shinola (and we've all had that reviewer whose talking about things you're not even sure are in your book or can't figure out the character names or things real things aren't real etc). If we see a lot of stars, we're more likely to buy that item.It's a little scary how that works.

So reviewing most likely does matter. It helps the author grow and keep on writing. More sales certainly gives the publishing house more confidence in the author which leads to more books being available.

If you want to help your favorite authors, take a few minutes and write a review or at least spare a few seconds to slap some stars on it. It matters and we'll love you for it.
jana_denardo: (kept tears)
It's been a while since I've put any real content here other than the What's Up Wednesday stuff. I should fix that up. I of course choose the day I earned a wound from making my steampunk hat.

Seeing [livejournal.com profile] chrissymunder's plan for the end of the year, I thought 'hey, that's a good idea.' It would be helpful so here we go.
100 Things #81 Planning out the rest of the year. )
jana_denardo: (kept tears)
100 things #80 Believablity and it's importance. )

And in completely other news, and very good news at that. Project Fierce Anthology is now up for pre-order. I'm in this great cause with so many other talented authors. The money raised goes to help LGBT homeless youth around Chicago. My story Nothing But Himself is urban fantasy and I really had a great time writing it. I would love to revisit the story.
jana_denardo: (kept tears)




100 Things #78 Research )
jana_denardo: (kept tears)
Because authors can't ever have enough of these. I often have too many of them but I really wanted to participate in this challenge. It seemed like fun (I even thought about putting in a prompt of my own but wasn't sure how many authors did that or was it more just readers. Now I see it's both.) Competitions for prompts was stiff but I did end up with one I liked.

I hesitated a bit wondering if I should. I actually already have a demon hunting series that is m/m/m but this is much different (my Soldiers of the Sun series has no vampires, werewolves etc. Just demons and demon hunters). I like that the characters are just a bit older and it sounded like a fun prompt. It had a nice bit of meat on the bone without being so exacting that it's daunting. You can check it out below.

Here's the picture. It's the guy in the middle that caught my eye. I'm actually not a blond fan (I love dark hair personally) but he has presence.

 photo dontreadinthecloset_zps90ff2dae.jpg

Three alphas will probably end up with head butting. I see an organization bringing all three groups together, sort of like the Watchers from BtVS. I'm not sure what to name it because I've done this sort of organization in several places and I've run through all the names that easily spring to mind for me.

Not really sure how the fire fighting is going to get worked in yet but I at least know how it opens and what the roles of two of them are. The werewolf is alluding me but I'm thinking he'll be the youngest, maybe fresh back from Afghanistan.

I'm setting it locally which should be fun.

The thing that scares me most (besides time crunches) is coming up with a title and character names early. Oh the wailing there will be. I hate putting titles on things.

I did decide to go with mage (Druid in particular) over fae since the idea of the three is a powerful symbol and since it was part of the prophecy (which I like and plan at the moment to use as written by the requester) I thought that would be more fun.

Now to inform the boys they need to pick their damn names up front. No going through the story as XXX until I can pin them down (seriously, Geminis don't make decisions easily some times. We're of two minds).

In their way, the boys will function as a 'rescue glove' for the Athens area.

Love's Landscape prompt )
jana_denardo: (kept tears)
100 Things #74 - Riding High )

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jana_denardo

February 2024

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