Becky Black

B + B = A – Alphas, betas and Higher Ground

Becky Black — Sat, 18 Feb 2012 22:42:27 +0000

If you’ve read any romance you’ve come across the alpha male. We all know an alpha when we see one. He’s a natural leader. He doesn’t need permission or validation. He’s charismatic. He often walks a fine line between being admirable and being a gigantic asshole. Alpha males are fun to read about and work well in stories because they’re dynamic, they get stuff done, and they’re extreme. They’re great for the going on of quests. Or sweeping the love interest off his or her feet.

But there are other types of heroes besides alphas. Thinking about it, there have to be. There is not, despite what some say, a lot of room at the top. Everyone can’t be the leaders, so that’s where you beta hero comes in. Now beta heroes are definitely not wimps. They may not be as larger than life as an alpha hero, but they can be just as interesting. They’re the sidekick – Robin to the alpha’s Batman, Watson to his Holmes. They’re the loyal lieutenant. They can be an alpha’s right hand man. His executive officer, actually getting the things done that the alpha commands will be done. A beta tends to be a bit more practical, flexible, and realistic. Maybe able to compromise according to circumstances that would lead the alpha to decide he was being insulted and offer someone single combat because of.

The pure, full on, Grade A, definitely an asshole alpha male is pretty rare these days, but less dick-like alpha heroes are still very common in m/f romance And why not? They’re certainly fun to read about and great fantasy material – as long as they keep on the right side of the asshole line. I’m a bit unsure what they’d be like after the happy ending, when they have to settle down. Can you imagine trying to persuade a guy like that it really is his turn to clean out the cat’s litter tray or do the ironing? (Fortunately many alphas are able to put their natural leadership skills and lashings of charisma to good use and are billionaire tycoons, so they employ people to do that stuff.)

Sparks fly with two alphas in the mix

I'm always at your side

A + A?

But what about in m/m fiction, where you have another hero to contend with, not a heroine? Of course you could have two alpha heroes and oh boy, the sparks will fly then! They’ll inevitably be rivals as well as lovers. They’ll jockey for position. It could be a very exciting relationship. I’m working on a book right now with two alpha heroes trying to figure it all out. They’re not giving an inch!

A + B?

Or an alpha paired with a beta, which will have more of that hero and sidekick vibe. It’s not the same as with a hero and heroine of course, at least not if written well, but the alpha and beta have their own dynamic. The beta isn’t a wuss, as I said. He can definitely stand up for himself and the alpha can’t walk all over him. But we know who the top dog is.

B + B?

Pairing two beta heroes on the other hand is kind of fun too. (Frankly, it’s all fun, putting these guys together.) Two beta heroes will form a partnership, a team, not only in their sexual relationship. They know how to cooperate. They’re team players. Adam and Zach in Higher Ground are both beta heroes at the start of the story. Neither thinks of himself as a natural leader. Zach is a rather anti-social, academic sort of guy; Adam is fun-loving and a touch lazy. Alpha heroes are certainly never lazy. An alpha doesn’t hit the snooze button when the alarm clock rings. He leaps out of bed ready to kick the world in the nadgers and make it submit to his will. I kept many characteristics of Adam and Zach equal or near equal, like age, intellect, stage of their career, to make sure that neither of them was an obvious candidate to be “in charge”.

"You and me. We're the kind of people other people would like to be."

Though Zach ends up the leader of the group in the story, that’s something he only feels he can do as part of a team, which includes Adam as his right hand man. Though this puts Adam into the sidekick position for a while, he gets the chance to show his mettle too and how far he’ll go to protect someone he loves. In a way, they’re alphas in training. Not all alphas are born bossing people around. Some take time to come into their own. They’ve got the potential in them, they’re just waiting for the right circumstances to test then and bring that potential out. Zach especially has much more confidence by the end of the story than he does at the start. He’s a man with the intellect to be a leading scientist eventually, but he doesn’t have the confidence to take a leadership role until it’s forced on him. But once he takes that on, he learns how to cope, he blossoms. In the end B + B = A in this story. Two betas together add up to an alpha. Neither can be that without the other.

I know, when you get down to it, this is all silliness. Men aren’t wolves, lions or gorillas, the whole alpha, beta, gamma, omega thing isn’t directly relatable to humans, and characters should never fit exactly into a mould. But it’s a lot of fun to speculate about and see how well a hero fits into a classification, or doesn’t.

From dream to release date

Becky Black — Sat, 11 Feb 2012 23:52:20 +0000

From dream to release date – writing Higher Ground

It all started with a dream.

Back in I think 2009 I had a rather vivid dream, which involved me and other people climbing up hills, to rising sea water. This appeared to be in San Francisco, as I looked back to see the top bits of the Golden Gate bridge still just visible out of the water.

Next day I wrote some notes down, thinking it seemed like an interesting idea, to maybe put a group of characters together, and have them cope with having to climb away from rising water. I imagined what kinds of incidents they could have. It was an idea that appealed to me, since I like a story where characters have to cope with a disaster and pull together to survive. I like to see the characters tested, and grow; finding potential in themselves they didn’t know was there. That’s why I like books like The Stand and The Day of the Triffids and movies like 28 Days Later, or TV shows like Lost. They all influenced me to explore my own take on these themes.

In fact Lost later freaked me out when, after the draft of Higher Ground was written, the final episodes included bits of the island starting to sink down into the sea, making me shout “No, don’t do that!” at the TV, fearing too much similarity. Fortunately that was only a small part of that story. Phew!

NaNoWriMo 2010 approached and I started brainstorming on a few ideas. I wanted a science fiction m/m romance idea of course, and one of the bunnies I worked on was this “climbing away from rising water” idea. I figured the story could centre on a couple brought together by a disaster, and how their relationship unfolds under this extreme pressure. I started to work with the idea that the relationship that might have otherwise been quite conventional is forced into a kind of fast forward mode, taking them on an express ride through phases of a relationship that would otherwise have taken them weeks and months to work through. So that gave me a structure to the love story, as well as the obvious structure of the background story that the love story is playing out against. It came together quite easily.

For the characters, well going on the idea that I wanted to explore the way characters are tested in the situation, and have to come together to succeed, I found I wanted to have two guys who were relatively young and untested in life, and who would become a team as much as they’d be a couple. To that end I wanted them to be very much equals, so there’s no one guy “in charge” of the team or the relationship. So I kept them of around the same age, both at similar stages in their careers, intellectual near-equals. And I didn’t want either to be the alpha hero who would naturally take charge of the group. They do take charge of the group, but I didn’t want that to be something that comes naturally to either of them. That’s all part of the testing! They’re both “beta” heroes for sure. Perhaps they’re on a journey to become alpha heroes, or at least beta + heroes. I’ll talk more about beta heroes next week!

I chose this story out of the others I was considering, as it was the one really speaking to me. The characters had started to come to life in my mind. I chose the names – which is always a big deal for me, being slightly name obsessed. I wavered for a while between Zack and Zach, before going for the version with an H. It’s softer somehow, suiting a beta hero, where Zack is for an alpha for sure. Of course, I ended up regretting choosing a name starting with Z, as shift and Z can be quite awkward to type!

It was a smooth ride through NaNoWriMo. I followed the outline without much deviation and finished the story at 72 thousand words, inside November. I think a story like that suited NaNo rather well. The plot has that inevitable progression to it – the characters have to keep moving or they’ll die. The water will keep coming. Just like the NaNo novelist has to keep writing as the deadline gets closer all the time and word count debt will drag you down.

After I finished it, it went away for a rest for a while. I worked on editing Stowaway and I wrote another draft, then went back to Higher Ground and edited it. Meanwhile Stowaway sold and I was doing publisher edits on that. I finished the edit of Higher Ground and submitted it to my editor at Loose Id around the time Stowaway came out.

It was rejected.

Damn.

However, it wasn’t one of those “and the horse you rode in on” rejections. It was a Revise & Resubmit rejection, with notes as to what they’d like to see changed if they were to reconsider it. It would have been easy to be lazy and just send it as is elsewhere. But I liked working with Loose Id and I trusted my editor to know what she was talking about. The main change to make was to extend the start of the story and as soon as I read the email I started getting ideas for that. So I decided to go for it and spent the next few weeks working on that, ending up adding about 15,000 words to the start of the story, and made other changes.

I sent it back in and this time – yes- it sold! Phew! So it was definitely worth taking the time to make those changes. The story is better for them. And I now know that I have to watch myself for starting stories too late (I had to add some scenes to the start of Liar’s Waltz too.) Very useful.

So I had a contract and an alarmingly close release date making me nervous – especially with Christmas right in the middle of the time my editor and me would have for making edits. They came a bit closer together than before. But we made it through them with plenty of time to go, and now release date rapidly approaches!

Things I never planned and only afterwards realised I’d done – Time. At the start of the story the time of day it is matters and the people in the story are as concerned with it as most of us are. There are many references to what time it is. By the second half of the story onwards there are barely any, or at least no more fine-grained that “day” and “night. I didn’t consciously do this, it’s something I’ve noticed after the fact and realised fits perfectly.

Things I changed – there was going to be a character called Sam in the story. Until it occurred to me that a guy called Sam climbing a mountain had been done before! I didn’t want to look like I was making a deliberate reference to Samwise Gamgee, especially as this Sam isn’t anything like as heroic as that Sam.

So it’s been a combination of a smooth and bumpy ride with this story, but it will be out there soon and I can’t wait for people to read it.

Want to read an excerpt? Check out Chapter 1 here!

Out later this month – Higher Ground

Becky Black — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 22:08:27 +0000

My next book comes out later this month – Higher Ground is released on the 28th of February from Loose Id

Below may not be the final blurb, as Loose Id’s people will no doubt make a sexier and more awesome version. But it will serve for now to let you meet the latest victims – I mean characters – to be chased up a tree and have rocks thrown at them. Say hello to Adam Gray and Zach Benesh.

Higher Ground by Becky Black

Zach is impatient and likes to hurry. Adam likes to take it slow and to tease. But, they’d have worked it all out – if only the end of the world hadn’t gotten in the way.

Zach Benesh is sure his prediction is right – the island colony of Zahara is about to sink into the ocean. Adam Gray isn’t as certain, but he’s happy to follow the intense, brilliant geophysicist into the mountains to escape the flooding. Though he’d be even happier without three hundred other people – and their pets – tagging along. He’d like to have Zach all to himself out there. But Zach’s prediction is right and as disaster begins to unfold towards an unstoppable, inevitable conclusion, the two young scientists must become a team in the fight to save their people. They draw strength from their rapidly developing relationship, but the higher Zach and Adam climb the more difficult the tests they face – as lovers and as men.

It’s my longest release so far at a little under 83,000 words, so it’s a nice big chunk of story to get your teeth into.

Zach and Adam are scientists. Intellectuals. Let’s face it, they’re nerds – but hot nerds. The story is very much about the way they come together not only as a couple, but as a team. And it looks at how a relationship that might have otherwise developed quite conventionally is tested and forced into fast forward by this emergency they have to face together.

It was a story I found quite easy to write. The first draft was around 70,000 words and yet I wrote that whole draft inside of a month for NaNoWriMo in 2010 – more about that next week when I’ll post all about the writing of the story. Though one thing wasn’t easy and has taught me a lesson. Never again have a main character whose name starts with Z. Do you know how hard it is to do Shift+Z? Hundreds and hundreds of times? My pinkie and ring finger on my left hand were practically permanently clawed by the end of it! I had to train myself to use the right side shift key more often – and you don’t need to start retraining yourself to type in the middle of NaNoWriMo, let me tell you.

Watch this space for more info later! The book will be available there from Loose Id and also from reseller sites, like Amazon, All Romance Ebooks, Barnes & Noble and others very shortly afterwards. I’ll put all the buy links on the book page for Higher Ground as soon as I get them.

And if you want to add it to your To Read list on Goodreads you can find it here

See you next week for more about the writing of Higher Ground. Where the inspiration came from, what influenced me, and how to got over its bump in the road on the path to publication.

Linky New Year

Becky Black — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 21:22:02 +0000

I seem to have collected lots of links this month. It’s been a long, long month!

M/M specific
What’s in store for 2012 in M/M romance?
Sharita Lira makes some predictions.

In defense of women
Heidi Belleau talks about women writers in m/m fiction.

Quote: “And that’s just two of a million possible explanations or reasons, some good and some troublesome. We’re a varied group, so being reductive and saying all women do X for Y reasons is inaccurate at best and offensive at worst.”

Why does Hollywood hate gay sex?
M/M on the screen not the page – where is it? Oh and for the sake of your sanity, stay away from the comments sections

Writing

The Inkpunks advise you to write a bad book.
All about giving yourself permission not to be perfect.

Quote: “Writing is for some reason the only art form in which we expect our very first effort to be successful. No painter expects his first painting to end up in a museum, no sculptor expects his first pot to sell for thousands of dollars, and yet writers, we always think here’s my first novel, I’m done, give me a contract and make me famous.” – Dan Wells

Jordan Castillo Price on re-releases
JCP discusses the increasingly common practice of authors re-releasing books where the rights have reverted to them.

25 things writers should stop doing
Shooting from the hip advice telling you to stop sabotaging yourself.

Don’t eat the butt – Lies that can poison our writing career
And in a similar vein to 25 things, the first of a series of posts about “the toxic beliefs that can KILL a writing career” starting with “I’m not a real writer until I have a finished manuscript, landed an agent, am traditionally published, am selling books, have spent my retirement funds earning an MFA in Creative Writing.”

Quote: “The title is not something we earn it is who we are. Our title defines our level of commitment. No other entrepreneurial profession waits for success or outside validation before they feel comfortable using a professional title.”

The Builders and the Wreckers
Sarah A Hoyt advises you how to spot and defend yourself from those who’ll tear you down while saying they’re trying to help. Long, but worth it!

Quote: “These are people who were brought up thinking they were creative geniuses. They have tried to be creative, have fallen short of their own ideals and want to – no, need to – tear down anything else anyone else builds, to salve the gaping wound in their ego and self esteem.”

Can critique groups do more harm than good?
There are more potential problems than just the “wreckers” described above at a critique group.

Setting goals for your writing.
This is so close to how I set my goals I had to check I didn’t write this. But it’s Andrew Grey, who’s produced an awesome amount of writing this way.

Quote: “…keep your goals to things you can control, that way you’re more likely to succeed.”

Contests Good, Bad or Ugly?
Discussion by Ginger Simpson of the value of writing/book polls and awards.

25 things writers should start doing
Because it’s no good just telling us what not to do!

Quote: “Give your work the due it deserves. If someone asks what you’re doing? Don’t tell them you’re writing. Don’t say you’re telling stories or penning the Great American Novel. Tell them, “I’m working. I’m down in the word mines breaking my brain to bring this ink into the world. Now shut the door and get me a quad-shot espresso.” Don’t just put your nose against the grindstone: rub your entire naked body against the grindstone.”

About Pen Names
Cassandra Carr discusses the minefield-littered area of pen names.

Learning Every Day
Maisey Yates on how it’s okay not to have it all figured out.

Quote: “I say this because I think it’s important for people to know I don’t have all mah crap together. Not even close.”

Books, reading and reviewing

Humans are hardwired to read books
According to psychologists from Washington University.

Quote: “If reading were to decline significantly, it would change the very nature of our species.”

Why do romance novels continue to be met with disdain?
Maisey Yates discusses why romance and other fiction mostly produced by and for women is so often dismissed.

Quote: “Is reading a thriller adrenaline porn? Do action movies give men unrealistic expectations of getting into a car chase? I don’t think so.”

An Open Letter to Those Who Review on Goodreads
Goodreads has been somewhat fraught lately. This open letter is an apology from a writer to reviewers. Thought provoking.

Quote: “If we can’t stand Goodreads, we shouldn’t go there. But if we choose to anyway, it is fucking ridiculous of us to think that just because we get those sexy author profile pages Goodreads is suddenly our space to be assholes to people who are doing what Goodreads was made for: reviewing books and interacting with people who love (and hate) books as much as they do.”

Enough is Enough. Authors Need to Chill Out and Not Respond to Reviews
And more discussion of recent kerfuffles on Goodreads. That place is turning into a battleground!

The Reader Author Paradigm
Dear Author blog’s Jane adds more thoughts on the reviews issue and Goodreads kerfuffles.

Quote: “But one constant remains: book reviews are not the same as a workplace performance evaluation. They are not even meant for authors. Reviews are for readers. This needs to be our mantra.”

The “citizen-journalist” and the e-book piracy fallacy
Aleksandr Voinov weighs in on ebook piracy.

Sci-fi is for women too
JL_Hilton talks about this on the Carina press blog and I’m certainly not going to argue with that assertion!

The Dreaded Three Stars
Reviewer Jenre discusses how to upset a writer by saying you like their book. Sort of.

Quote: “Different people have different ideas about what constitutes a three star rating. Good Reads criteria is ‘I liked it’, which if you think about it is actually a decent description for a book. I think many authors should be pleased to know that their book was liked.”

Submitting, Querying and Publishing and other insanity-inducing activities

Don’t be cute. Don’t be creative. Be professional.
Straightforward advice about how to format your MS so that basically you don’t look like an idiot trying too hard.

Editors Passed on Same Book Critique Group Loved: 6 Reasons Why
The gap between what your critique groups loves and what an editor will love.

A Dozen+ Reasons Books are Rejected by Agents & Editors, and Set Aside by Readers
Lots of basic mistakes to watch out for. One I definitely need to learn to watch out for and keep having to fix:

Quote: “15. Story starts too quickly. This brings us full circle, back to the opposite of (1), the story starting too slowly. We, as readers, do need a little time to get to know the characters so we can care about what happens to them.”

Five attitude toward publishing you should avoid
Wise words from Jane Freidman on Writer Unboxed blog

Quote: “Sometimes writers express sentiments that make me want to issue a red-flag warning: STOP. You are about to hurt yourself. Here are five of the biggest ones.”

Just for laughs

Diary of an Author – Day 1
Funniest “diary” since The Very Secret one.

Quote: “Checked rankings on Amazon. Called my mother and cried. She said something about my aunt’s tumor getting worse. Thanks for caring about MY problems, MOTHER!”

Know your tall ships. (video – doesn’t autoplay!)
For those of us who like to read a bit of Age of Sail but don’t know the bobstay from the spanker boom, a fun little cartoon that explains the different rigs of different types of ships.

Crowley and Aziraphale’s New Year’s resolutions
By Neil Gaiman himself! If you don’t know who Crowley and Aziriphale are, get yourself a copy of Good Omens as a matter of urgency!

Quote: “Resolution #7: On the orders of Head Office I will encourage the belief in Intelligent Design, because it upsets everyone.”

February is Higher Ground month on my blog, leading up to the release on 28th. After that I’m moving the links post to the first weekend of the month, so next links will be 3rd or 4th of March. You might have managed to read this lot by then! Phew!

Be sure your sin will find you out – on the Internet

Becky Black — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 16:48:44 +0000

Be sure your sin will find you out – Numbers 32:23

It’s not like a person of the non-religious persuasion like me to start a blog post with a Bible verse, but I do rather like that one. It’s a good one for writers to apply to stories and characters – make sure that a character does will come back and bite them in the ass later. However, today I’m talking about the fact this warning could have been written with the Internet in mind. That Moses dude sure was a prophet!

The Internet is a permanent repository of the sins you’ve committed online – I mean do you know how hard it is to truly delete anything from Facebook? But I’m thinking mostly about writers here and anyone who’s working on becoming a writer. I did a guest post on Clare London’s Live Journal earlier this week, about the things I’ve learned since becoming a published writer. One of those was that if you’re a writer active on the internet and networking out among the three dimensional people you have to be on your best behaviour 24/7. One snarky reply to a critical review and you find yourself on the list of entitled, Prima Donna authors who people say will eviscerate any poor reader who dares to give anything less than a five star review.

And if you think that’s pressure, consider that ideally you have to have had that insight long before you came under the scrutiny a published author is under, because The Internet Never Forgets. It’s a Catch 22 for sure. Nobody told you when you first got online that you needed the ability to see into the future, did they? That one day you’d be a writer and living in mortal dread that people would find something embarrassing from the days when you still thought LOL meant “lots of love.”

So what if you have in fact behaved badly in the past? Even if your earlier online life was under a different name and identity from your writer persona you can never assume the two will never be connected. A bit of internet detective work will connect you now to you then. At best this might be mildly embarrassing when they find those My Little Pony fanfics you wrote fifteen years ago. At worst it might have the kind of implications for your reputation that the revelation of Batman’s identity would have on his crime-fighting.

If you’ve been on the Internet for many years, and especially if you first started as a teenager, you will have changed plenty in that time. But even if you were already a grown up, you’ll still have moved on, evolved, learnt new things, met new people – the Internet itself will have been a big factor in that for many people. Looking back at some of the things you’ve said and done on the Internet years ago may well make you cringe, just as thinking back to some things you did in the real world a long time ago does. And with the Internet you generally can’t use the excuse of “I was very, very drunk at the time.” You read those old postings and wonder “How could I have been so whiny/ignorant/entitled/privileged/offensive/just plain dumb?”

You can try to delete that stuff of course and in some cases you can do it. For example you can purge your Live Journal along with every post you ever made on a community and every comment you ever made on the whole of Live Journal. But with many sites you won’t be able to do so, many forums for example. And forums are prime fertile ground for “unwise” comments you regret later.

But even if you’ve deleted something never assume it’s gone forever. Bad news! Someone somewhere may have it saved. I’ve personally got a load of Yahoo! group messages and Live Journal comments saved in my Gmail. Not to embarrass anyone with, but because, well, Gmail has enough space and the search is way better than on Yahoo! or Live Journal. But I know for a fact I have records of comments and posts that have now gone from their original sites, some of which the poster may regret ever posting now. Even in supposed private spaces, including email, don’t assume you’re safe. Friends fall out. Private conversations go public with the click of a Forward or Reply to All button either deliberately or accidentally

And of course there’s the Internet archive, aka The Way Back Machine, archiving websites since 1996. A godsend when you’re trying to find that old Geocities page with the great My Little Pony fanfics on it that’s now disappeared. A curse if someone else finds an idiotic post you made in 1997 and thought you’d deleted long ago. One that’s guaranteed to offend everyone in your book’s genre should it ever get out. With luck nobody will ever dig out this old stuff, but never assume it can’t happen.

If it does, if the ghost of Internet past comes to haunt you, what then? Well first off, don’t try to deny you said it. Before you know it, people will be bandying around IP addresses and you’ll be bang to rights. And don’t start defending the indefensible. If you’d now take issue with the same post if written by someone else then don’t start defending it just because you wrote it. It’s fine to no longer agree with yourself. And don’t get defensive in another way either by pulling the “OMG! Oppression!” response. Nobody is censoring you by calling you on what you said. Disagreement is not censorship, it’s other people using the same right to free speech as you have. Of course if you do still agree with what you said then by all means stand by it and brace to take the inevitable flak!

More likely you no longer think that way. In which case the most gracious way to handle it is just to own it. Yes, you wrote it. You can see now that it’s stupid or offensive. You no longer think that way and hope people will judge you on the person you are now, not the one you used to be.

Sock puppets - you'd have to be crazy to use one.

This isn’t only about things you did in the past. You can be a hundred different people on the internet after all and say things under a different identity that you won’t say under your well-behaved author persona. But don’t think you can create a sock puppet to run amok with and never have it traced back to you. The hand under the sock puppet is nearly always exposed eventually.

To get Biblical again, the Golden Rule is always a good guide to any interactions in life: Do as you be done to. Treat others with the respect and consideration you’d like them to give you. This works as well on the Internet as everywhere else. Or to make it even simpler think of writer and podcaster Mur Lafferty’s Rule 5- Don’t be an ass. Always watch out for signs you’re being an ass right now and have the self-awareness to admit when you’ve been an ass in the past.

Now, be good, and if you can’t be good, sorry… you’re probably going to get caught!

Liar’s Waltz Print Release Contest

Becky Black — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 05:15:14 +0000

This contest is now closed. Thanks for your interest.

To celebrate the print release of Liar’s Waltz I’m giving away a copy to one person who comments on this post between now and next Friday. Say hi! Say hi even if you don’t want to enter for the book. Having a print release is really exciting in a new way, different from the all the other exciting moments I’ve had over the last couple of years around becoming a published author. I sense a post about the whole e-books and paper books question coming on. Look out for that in a couple of weeks.

Details of Liar’s Waltz

Bar owner Karl thinks his new lover is an ally in the fight to save Eternity — the last gay bar on space station Saira. But Greg is actually a reluctant spy desperately trying to salvage his military career.

Blurb: Firmly-closeted Lieutenant Greg Matthews takes a transfer to space station Saira to make a fresh start. But a rogue military intelligence officer has discovered Greg’s secret and forces him to spy on Karl Webster, the owner of the last gay bar on Saira. The disapproving military authorities want Karl’s bar closed, too and he’s feeling the heat. He thinks his gorgeous new lover is an ally in his fight, but Greg is reporting back all of Karl’s plans to save the bar. As the campaign against Karl escalates Greg becomes ever more reluctant to deceive the man he’s falling in love with.

Despite his fear Greg is too jittery and unstable to bother with, Karl wants him too much to give him up. He can’t guess the real reason behind Greg’s anxiety—constant fear of what will happen when Karl discovers his deception. The inevitable revelation shatters their relationship and their lives as the blackmailer takes drastic action to silence Karl. Greg must sacrifice everything he’s been trying to protect to undo the damage and save Karl.

Books!

Check out the Liar’s Waltz book page for more details. If you don’t win, but you fancy buying it, or the ebook, all the links are there.

Remember this is a contest for a paperback, so you’ll have to be happy to send me your address if you win. Maybe one day I’ll be doing one of these for Stowaway too and others after that.

Writing to get off the B Ark

Becky Black — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 11:19:48 +0000

The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

Since I must be realistic and assume that not everyone is as familiar with the work of Douglas Adams as I am, I guess I have to explain what the B Ark is. In The Restaurant at the End of the Universe – book 2 of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series, two of our heroes Arthur and Ford, through reasons too complicated to explain, find themselves on a giant spaceship full of people in suspended animation. People who were once hairdressers, second-hand car salesmen, PR consultants, insurance salesmen, advertising executives and telephone sanitizers. Oh there are so many telephone sanitizers.

The crew tells Arthur and Ford that their planet, Golgafrincham, was Doomed – so they were told – and they had to build three arks to evacuate in. The A Ark to put all the leaders and thinkers and artists in, the C Ark to put in all the people who “did the actual work, who made things and did things”. And the B Ark, for the rest. And the B Ark was to be sent out first. On a pre-programmed course so it couldn’t turn back. At this point Arthur and Ford try to avoid looking anyone in the eye.

So, what does this have to do with me and writing? Well I have one of those type of day jobs that would instantly get me a spot on the B Ark. There’s nothing wrong with those kind of jobs as such, and I’d never criticise anyone for doing honest work. But in the end I can often get home thinking that nothing I did that day really mattered. So okay, maybe I should stop whining and go get a more satisfying job. But of course now the only job that would really satisfy me is being a writer and I’m doing it! I just have to keep doing the other one too to put food on the table. There are some views I have about how women especially have been lied to about work – but that’s for another post!

Writing makes me feel like I’m sending something out there into the world that matters a bit more than what I do at my day job. It’s not like I think I’d be in the First Class writer’s lounge on the A Ark rubbing shoulders with Charles Dickens and Jane Austen, but at least I feel like I’ve done something to earn a place in the steerage section! I have many reasons to write of course, but one of them is “to get me off the B Ark.” (Which is a fictional spaceship, whose story is primarily for satirical effect, but hey, I’m a writer, I’m allowed to be a bit crazy.)

Thinking about the B Ark also helps me keep things in perspective at work. If I get stressed or riled up about something I just have to remind myself “this is just B Ark shit. It doesn’t matter.”

I won’t spoiler you for where the B Ark ends up and the ultimate fate of the middlemen of Golgafrincham society. But I will tell you that all the smug gits left back on the not-so-doomed-after-all planet were later wiped out by a virulent disease contracted from a dirty telephone.

What about you? Would you fear ending up on the B Ark? For that matter, who would you like to see put on a B Ark of our own? I’d personally vote for the Z-List celebs infesting the endless reality shows. Someone try to get “Mutant Star Goat” trending on Twitter.

Mutant star goat?

Published writer – year 1

Becky Black — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 17:52:17 +0000

My 2011

I’d call it a mixed start to the year. I was physically low with health issues. But having my first published book, Liar’s Waltz, released on 4th of January certainly gave me a boost. I’d set the goal a few years back, that I’d work towards this. Then in 2009 I started work on the first book I intended to submit. I submitted it in 2010 and Loose Id bought it, and New Year 2011 it came out.

Which meant I had to set a new goal, since I’d met the “get a novel published” one. I had to follow up on that and get another novel out there and start to build my backlist. Getting books out there doesn’t happen quickly, I have to think long-term. But I was already working on the next one – Stowaway. I’d written that in 2010 and finished the editing of it in February 2011 and submitted it in March. Meanwhile I was wrestling with the tax man trying to figure all that side out once I started receiving royalties, and I finished off the last of the non-pro work I had outstanding. That was a little sad, the end of an era. But a new era was starting and I could focus on my pro work.

Loose Id bought Stowaway in March (yay!) and we started on the edits. In between doing those I was outlining and drafting another novel, called Ganymede Tilt. It was a bit of a hard slog through that one, but I made it in the end, finishing at the start of June.

Summer was a busy old time. Edits of Stowaway, editing Higher Ground (another draft completed in 2010), planning the next draft, which I eventually called Chrysalis Cage, and the very first inkling in my head of an idea for a book series. It wasn’t all sweating over a hot laptop though. I attended the UK Meet of m/m, f/f, GLBT writers in July. It was great to meet up with people who I only knew through the internet and their books. Late summer Stowaway came out and I submitted Higher Ground to Loose Id. I also started writing Chrysalis Cage.

Then September came along. September rather sucked. I stopped working on Chrysalis Cage after a slow painful crawl through a few thousand words, and realised it just wasn’t ready yet. Also, it’s probably not technically a romance. Then Higher Ground was rejected. It was not a good month.

But there was light at the end of the tunnel. Chrysalis Cage might not have been ready, but the idea I’d first had back in the summer for a series was growing apace, was now called the Indiaman series and I began working on that in earnest. I found out Liar’s Waltz was going into print. And the rejection of Higher Ground was not a “you and the horse you rode in on” rejection, but rather an invitation to revise and resubmit, with suggestions for what they would like to see change.

Well I could have been lazy and left it as it was and started sending it elsewhere. But I’ve enjoyed working with Loose Id and my editor there. The suggestions they made were good (and made me say “why didn’t I see that?”) so I decided to make the changes.

I worked on that and the planning of Indiaman through October. In November I wrote the first 55,564 words of the draft of Indiaman #1 during NaNoWriMo, and continued on into December, while also completing the last of the Higher Ground revisions. I resubmitted Higher Ground on 13th of December and this time Loose Id accepted it! I got the first round of edits fast and finished them and the rest of Indiaman #1 before Christmas. Phew! What a year!

And to top it off, my 5 free copies of the Liar’s Waltz paperback arrived today. What a great way to end my first year as a published writer!

Books!

So what does 2012 hold for me?

A lot of editing to start off with. With a tight turnaround needed to get Higher Ground out for February 28th I’ll be busy on those edits for the next couple of months. I’ll also be starting on the edits of Ganymede Tilt and then of Indiaman #1. I have plans for new drafts later on in the year though.

I’ve joined the Romantic Novelist’s Associaton – like the UK equivalent of the Romance Writers of America, probably with more tea involved. So I should meet up with some local fellow writers through that and then I’ll be going to the annual conference in July. Look at me, I’m going all mainstream! I’m looking forward to the 2012 UK Meet too, bigger and better than ever!

Thanks to everyone who’s bought my books, read my blog and Live Journal, Tweeted with me, followed me on Facebook and Goodreads and Tumblr and of course who I’ve met face to face for the first time, having been brought together by writing and reading. It’s been a good year and I can’t wait for my second year as a published writer.

Happy New Year!

Links to read while the Christmas dinner cooks

Becky Black — Sat, 24 Dec 2011 05:30:00 +0000

Writing
Are you called to write?
25 things you should know about your completed novel
25 things writers should know about rejection

Querying
Breaking into publishing
Stop Helping Yourself
Personalized rejections. Why not?
How to: withdrawing your book from consideration (Angela James often give great practical advice that doesn’t seem to show up elsewhere.)

The writing life
5 Most Dangerous Career Pitfalls For New Writers
25 financial fuck ups writers make

Editing
What to expect from an editorial letter

Marketing
Why Twitter is THE Place for Writers
10 things authors should know about Twitter
HOW NOT TO BLOG: Beginning Blogging for Authors Part II

Happy Christmas if you’re celebrating, general best wishes otherwise! Back next weekend with a look back at my first year as a published writer.

Advent opinions

Becky Black — Sat, 17 Dec 2011 06:00:00 +0000

It’s so near Christmas, and who wants to start a fight near Christmas? Not me. I’m too busy for one. So here are some short and silly opinions about some things I think are good, some bad and some that wobble around the middle.

Good!

Terrible Minds – my favourite writing blog of the year.
Absolute Write Water Cooler forum – a big busy forum which I should probably stop spending so much time at.
NaNoWriMo – I’ve done it six times now. It suits me down to the ground.
Receiving royalties! – I don’t need to explain that one.
Twitter – It’s fun, it leads me to find loads of great links, it helps me connect with loads of great people.
Editors – they make my books better, how could I not love them?
Live Journal – poor old Live Journal, constantly embattled these days, against the might of the Russian establishment. But it hangs on and I still love it.
Pringles. Mmmm…Pringles…
Meeting other writers at the UK Meet – they never look like you imagined they would.

Benedict Cumberbatch in Sherlock

Benedict Cumberbatch – weirdly sexy. One of my characters looks like him in my mind.
And speaking of BC – Cabin Pressure. A BBC radio comedy I’ve fallen in love with this year. Cumberbatch’s character, Martin, is very different from his Sherlock Holmes.
Smartphones – what did I do before I had my tricorder? I mean smartphone. I suppose I managed to struggle through somehow, but it can’t have been much of a life.
My Kindle – it’s made me appreciate paper books more now I buy fewer of them – at least when they’re the lovely glossy hardback type full of gorgeous pictures.

Bad!

Klout Who died and made Klout king of the Internet?
Google + – I admit, I’ve barely bothered after a first look. It looked like a pale Google imitation of Facebook (and I do mean “pale” literally. Don’t get me started on the Google “we hate contrast” new look.) Google does best when they innovate, not imitate.
The British railway system. The day commercial flights to the moon become available they’ll be cheaper than the price of standard class rail ticket from Aberdeen to London. And will get there quicker.
HMRC – that’s the tax man to you non-Brits. They’re not evil because they want some of my royalties money – that’s only annoying. They’re evil because they make to so hard to actually work out how much of said royalties they want! Dealing with the IRS was easier.
Amazon sales rank – Because we all need something else to track obsessively and worry about…

Things that are inbetween good and evil and yet I can’t give up.

Goodreads – I love it for tracking my own reading and finding new books to read, but the social networking aspects go a bit over my head.
Tumblr – (Can I buy a vowel, please?) It’s a nice space between Twitter and Live Journal or WordPress for a quick post with a bit more permanence than Twitter. And great for pictures. But its controls are minimalist to a fault.
Facebook – I’m warming to it a bit, but mostly for playing Scrabble and Words with Friends on.

Now I just wonder how I’ll feel about these various things at this time next year.