A Review for It Takes Moxie by The Long and Short of It:

This book is utterly captivating. Ms. Deleest has crafted a novel full of fun, dry wit, humor, adventure and romance. There is nothing boring or slow about this book. It is fast-paced and filled with hilarious situations and delightful dialogue that had me laughing out loud and my husband asking what was so funny.

And, Moxie. Now there’s a character I would love to meet in real life. Her zest and spunky personality draw you in for the adventure. I could certainly see why Ben, the wonderful hunk-o-man hero, allowed himself to be pulled along for the ride. Not that these characters were too perfect. They had their flaws which made them stronger, more believable and real. The characterization was beautifully woven and I found that the characters stayed true to themselves, making decisions that were consistent with their personalities, strengths, weaknesses and fears.

I also appreciated that this story didn’t get bogged down with scenic descriptions and long internal debates. The pages were filled with interaction between Moxie and Ben as well as with the people that crossed their paths. And what people they were, too. It was a wonderful cast of quirky and delightful secondary characters, each enhancing the story and helping to reflect qualities and character traits of Moxie and Ben.

I want to point out something about this book that I found exceptionally wonderful. The dialogue between Moxie and Ben was believable, relaxed and open. It left you with no doubt that these characters “clicked” on a different level. There is a comfort level to their conversation and interaction which makes the reader feel as though they are watching two soul mates discover one another. There’s no greater feeling than that.

I suppose after all my raving, it is no surprise I am giving this a LASR Best Book rating. How could I not? I’m already itching to pick it back up and dive into the adventure again!

Here's some great recommended reading for you all.  My friends Stacey and Donna had their first full-length release today from The Wild Rose Press.  It's a 4 story anthology set in a small town in Wisconsin, it's called Welcome To Redemption     Check it out, it's a great read.  Since I'm the one who talked them into the anthology idea in the first place, I hope the book is a roaring success.  It should be, it's got 4 great stories filled with memorable characters and a really big dog.

Another shout out for my friend Morag's book, Perfidia   I haven't read it yet, but it's sitting on my shelf, patiently waiting for me.  It's set in Nazi Germany during the beginning of WWII.  What's not to love about that?

I've got release dates for It Takes Moxie!  It's coming out digitally on October 5, you can download it and read it on your computer, or in February 8, it'll be available in print.

I finally got my covers today for both It Takes Moxie and Eye of the Beholder. 

 

Tell me what you think of them.  Are these the kind of books  you'd pull off the shelf and read?  Are the covers intriguing - make you want to know more?  Curious minds want to know.

Look at this!  Entries two days in a row. 

Let me tell you a little about Eye of the Beholder.  It's working title was Ugly Hero, which is pretty self explanatory.   Adeline Pierce's brother was going to die unless he got out of the harsh weather conditions of Wisconsin and moved to the dryer climes of Arizona.  The Pierce family had no hope of getting the funds for this move until William Denning came into the picture.  Horribly injured and disfigured during WWI, Will was a recluse, the last of the Denning line.  He wanted an heir to carry on the family name and was willing to pay to get it.  Seeing no other choice, Adeline marries this scarred, bitter man against the wishes of her family and without telling Mic Cafferty, the man who wanted to marry her...and still does.  Will the love of Mic and Adeline prevail, or will Adeline discover that there's more to Will than meets the eye?

There, now are you just dying to read it?  I'll post an excerpt in the next couple days.

Okay, I'm being really bad about updating in here.  For the record, I'm a real good girl about updating my personal one - almost every day - so I'm not a total blog loser.

Let's see, what's happened since the million years ago that I wrote last?  It Takes Moxie is all edited and I'm waiting for the cover art to be done.  It's slated to come out in September.  I sold Eye of the Beholder, more commonly known at Ugly Hero.  It's coming out about 3 months after Moxie.  Both are being published by The Wild Rose Press.

Currently, I'm working on a time travel.  My heroine goes back in time to a 1920's speakeasy.  I'll post excepts of them all in the near future.

This was kind of a boring entry.  I"ll try to be more entertaining with my next post - which will hopefully be made sooner than 3 months from now.

Thanks for the congratulations everyone!  I didn't think anyone was even reading this.  I guess I'd better be more active here.

I got the promotional information from my publisher today.  I only had time to skim the e-mail and it was kind of overwhelming.  I'm sure that when I have some time to slowly read it all - probably on Saturday - it'll all make sense.  I'm still in shock over the whole thing.  Once I have to get down to the business of editing, though, it'll all hit home.

I'm excited to announce that my perseverence has paid off and I was offered a publishing contract for It Takes Moxie.  Moxie is set in the 1920's on a cross-country car trip.  Moxie kidnaps herself a ride out of St. Augustine, FL with plans on catching a train once she gets out of her step-father's reach.  She hadn't factored in her vitim, Ben Kincaid, or the fact that she accidently stole some very valuable diamonds and now had some very nasty characters after her.

I'll give you information on when it's going to be available as it comes.

For the first time ever, I have all four of my finished manuscripts polished out and simultaneously sent out to various editors.  What a sense of accomplishment!  I told myself I couldn't start anything new until I had all my other projects finished.  Once I get Eye of the Beholder broken up into acceptable chapters, everything will be all neat and tidy.  Woopee!

Okay, so maybe this isn't being entirely pro-active, but at least I"m making an effort.  I had submitted a couple things a long time ago and hadn't heard back from.  Well, I contacted them last week and received a request for a partial from one and a full for a different manuscript from another.  Woohoo!  Making progress people! 

Currently, I'm partnering with two other writers for an anthology submission.  I've hit some writers block, but knowing that they're expecting me to do my part is helping to force me to keep going.  It's for a contemporary, which is an interesting change from my usual.  I don't have to spend time checking my word usage or my handy-dandy 1923 Sears reproduction catalog to see if something's been invented yet or not.  But, contemporary people don't get to drive fun cars like Studebakers, wear cloche hats or go to illegal speakeasies.  But, you have to take the good with the bad, I guess.

One of my main problems as an author wannabe is that I have a very hard time sending out submissions to different publishing houses and agents.  It's a real mental block I have and I need to get over it.  I have friends who send out 5-10 submissions a month and all I can do is wonder who they're sending all of them out to.  I'm so picky and choosy about who I submit to - or maybe it's just that I hate to send something out and make the recipient feel that I wasted their time because my stuff doesn't fit their criteria.  I don't know what it is, but this year I'm making a vow to myself to send out at least one submission a month.  Cause you won't get published if you don't submit!

One thing I love about writing is that you can create your own world.  While writing contemporaries or historicals, you need to keep your characters into the confines of the 'real' world, but you can still create characters and situations unique to your story.  BUT, when you write science fiction or paranormals, you have the freedom to create an entire world all your own.  You make the rules, you are the god.  Why I'm I writing about this?  Well, I just finished reading a science fiction book.  I don't, as a rule, usually read sci fi, it's just not my thing.  But this one caught my eye, jumped off the shelf and into my bookbag and came home with me.  It was okay, I finished it because I kind of wanted to see how it was going to end.  But, I had some issues with it.  Something that wasn't possible on page 235, suddenly became so on page 242.  The author forgot the rules of her world.  I don't mind incredibly scenerios - that's what sci-fi is all about, but the scenerios need to be consistant or it pulls you right out of the story, which is what happened to me. 

The first 75 pages or so also skimmed through about 100 years, a date was given, then a few pages of backstory.  Then another date followed by more backstory.  But her dates were meshing with each other, unless time worked differently in her world.  But it didn't appear to, and if it did, it was never explained throughout the entire 400+ page book.

I couldn't help  but feel that the author failed her readers.  She gave them a world without boarders or steadfast rules.  I felt cheated and thus, my enjoyment of reading the book was gone.  I finished it, but I turned the final page with a sense of relief that it was over, not a longing to know more.  Which is not a good thing, especially since this was the first book of a series.  I series I will never continue reading.

I got my full manuscript along with a form rejection letter from Medallion books today.     The whole Medallion saga started way back in May of 2005 when I first received a request for a partial of All Balled Up by their editor at the time.  It took until November of that year before I felt it was ready to send out.  Then it lanquished in the slush pile at Medallion until August of this year, when I received a request from them for a full.  Well, the trail ended today and All Balled Up is officially off the Medallion hit parade. 

I still have querys at a couple different pub houses for a couple other manuscripts.  I really should send more out to other places - it's just hard to know what place your stuff will match up best with. 

Due to moving along with a bunch of other stuff, I've gotten zippo done in the writing department the last month.  So, there's nothing new to report here.

Though, something in the works:  A few writer friends and I are talking about working together on a short story anthology.  All the stories are going to run along a common theme of a female vampire clan doing battle against an opposing werewolf clan.  My part is going to be about a flapper vampire from the 1920's who falls in love with a bootlegger/werewolf.  The werewolf clan opposes the match and breaks the couple up by doing something (not quite sure yet) to the bootlegger/werewolf - probably taking him far away or locking him up or something, and attempting to kill the flapper/vampire.  It's their relationship that instigates the feud between her clan and the werewolf's clan.  It should be a fun little project.

I haven't done much writing lately.  I guess I just haven't been in the mood, but I've started up again.  I'm almost to the part where she turns the demon into Johnny Depp, which is bound to be fun.  I can't remember if I mentioned in here what my latest project is.  It's a modern retelling of the Greek myth of Hades abduction of Persephone. 

I've also got my critique back from the San Franciso Heart to Heart contest for Ugly Hero, so now I've got edits to work on for that one also.  I love writing rough drafts, but I'm not tos good at the rewrites and edits.  I guess I have a short attention span.

The latest firestorm in the romance writing world is some bubba named, of all things, Fred Head.  He's some yahoo running for office in Texas and his main platform isn't what he's wanting to do, but what his opponent has done in the past.  Yes, the woman running against him wrote...GASP a romance novel, or as he put it, pornography.  She had one book pubbed 16 years ago, a standard run-of-the-mill romance from what I've seen of it - yet he's announcing that she's going to ruin the morals of Texas' young people.  Like young people need any help in that department anyway - heck, an hours worth of a reality show does more damage than a Harlequin ever could.  He also claims that she's a glutton for publicity since she had her name printed on the top of every other page of the book.  Uh, has this doofus ever read a book?  The authors name is ALWAYS printed at the top of every other page.  As someone pointed out, even the Bible does that - so does that make Matthew, Mark, Luke and John publicity hogs?  I'd like to move to Texas just to vote against him.

Washington DC directed its own jab at romance writers too.  http://www.greaterwashington.org/images/metro_ad.pdf

Apparently the people who developed and approved of this ad have no idea that romance novels constitute over 55% of TOTAL books sold - that's ticking off a whole lot of potential people.  But, then again, we all know what a bastion of honesty, morality and uprightness Washington DC is in the first place, now don't we?   People can be such hypocrits.

A couple people have mentioned being here in the last couple days.  Of course, that made me feel guilty for not making any entries - so, here I am.

Update on my writing life.  Eye of the Beholder, the project I call Ugly Hero, tied for second place in San Francisco's Heart to Heart contest in the historical category.  I've just spent the last month tidying up the manuscript for that one, and farmed it out to a few friends for critiquing.  The general consensus is that it has way too much story before the hero and heroing meet and someone suggested a way to lop off a bunch of  pages, yet still have the story make sense.  So, I'll have to get to that.

But, not right now.  Because I've got a new plot bunny bouncing around my head that demanded to be let out.  So I'm writing something new and having way too much fun doing it.  Unlike most of my other stuff, this story isn't set in the 1920's, but is kind of a fantasy/time travel thing based on the Greek myth of Hades abducting Persephone with a bit of a modern twist.

I spent the month of august working on a different project.  That one was a contemporary.  I got about 40K into the story when my heroine turned into an annoying pain in the butt, so I temporarily abandoned the project for a later time when I feel like doctoring the whole thing up.  Don't know when exactly that's going to be though. 

I put the Cully/Britta story on hold for the moment because I was inspired to work on something else I had started a while ago.  This is another 1920's era story about a straitlaced cop and a rather spirited flapper.  It's supposed to be a romantic comedy, but I seem to be having problems making it funny.  I just may have to go back to Britta and Cully.  Can you say WAFFLE?!?

I've been doing an August wrimo.  I was pretty pathetic the first couple days, but made up for it today.  At this point in time, I"m at about 3100 words, and it's still 7:30 pm, so I've got a couple hours yet before bedtime.  Yay me!

Here's the basic jist of the story I'm working on.  Frank Culhane (aka Cully) has just been released from jail after spending five years there for a crime he says didn't commit.  He'd been accused of robbing the bank owned by Britta Nordstrum's father.  Cully had been dating Britta at the time and her father was the man who identified Cully as the theif.  Britta cut off all communication with him after his incarceration.  So now Cully is out of jail and just wants to live his life, but he and Britta's paths keep colliding, and proving to them that the spark they thought had died is still alive and well.

Okay, I'm seriously not good about updating this, now am I?  Excuses?  I have none.  It was laziness, pure and simple.

Recent updates.  After angsting about it for way too long, I finally got Moxie all edited and I shipped it out to Avalon yesterday.  Now I'm going to sit back and forget about it.  (I hope)

Some friends and I are doing a wrimo for August, a smaller one than the national one held in November.  We're having a goal of 30K instead of the 50K the regular Nanowrimo does.  Not that it's a whole lot of help since I still don't have much of a plot or characters to go with it.  Without that, 30K is about as unreachable as 200K.  Oh well, I'll come up with something, I always do.