B10 Mediaworx (print and digital)
Amazon (print and Kindle)
OmniLit (digital)
Barnes & Noble (print and nook)
Smashwords (digital)

And its first review!

The five runners up are

Traci Kenworth
Rachel T
Ju Dimello
Peach
Gian Faye

who will receive all the ebooks in a bundle as soon as I gather your email addresses together.

There were 37 entries total, counting each link or citation as a separate entry, and each link is very much appreciated. Thanks to all who participated and helped get the word out!

That was kinda fun. Maybe I’ll do some more contests…

For this, I thought it would be fun to have a contest. The grand prize winner will receive an Easter basket full of goodies pertaining mostly to Magdalene, and five runners up will win a trilogy ebook. Here’s the grand prize:

(Click to make big; a couple of the items are not shown.)

1. Print copies of The Proviso, Stay, and Magdalene, all signed,

2. Two canisters of Jacques Torres hot chocolate (one milk and one spicy),

3. Magdalene mug and mousepad,

4. One new CD of Carmina Burana,

5. A thumb drive with all three books plus their playlists,

and

6. A super secret and sexy prize hinting at what Mitch and Cassie might have done in a scene I never wrote…

…all in a nice Easter basket that will arrive at the grand prize winner’s doorstep at least a week before the release date. (Even if you live out of the country. I can do that. Because I’m in charge.)

2011-04-04 UPDATE: I failed to remember that many of the songs on the playlists are full albums, so instead of burning them to the stick, and in addition to Carmina Burana (orchestral version), these will be included as full (new) CDs: The Piano (Michael Nyman), Messiah (Handel), Nutcracker (Tchaikovsky), and the Rach 3 (Rachmaninoff). (Unfortunately, the chamber version of Carmina Burana that I have is an import and very hard to get.)

The five runners up will receive their ebooks at the close of the contest.

But every contest has rules, right?

1. Post about Magdalene and link to this blog post anywhere on the web.

2. Come back here and comment on where you posted it.

3. The more places you link from, the more chances you have to win. (One link per comment.)

4. The contest runs through midnight, April 10, 2011, US Central Daylight Saving Time (Chicago).

5. If you’re related to me or you worked on the book, you’re not eligible. I will know who you are. *ahemDudeahem*

That’s it.

I’ll use random.org to pick the grand prize winner and five runners up.

Adam K.K. Figueira

If you’re passingly familiar with Christian myth, it should be quite clear where I’m going with this.

But let me tell you a little about my main characters.

Mitch Hollander, PhD, metallurgical engineering; founder and CEO of Hollander Steelworks, headquartered in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. He is also a widowed Mormon bishop who served half an 18-month mission in Paris, France. He likes fast cars and ZZ Top.

Cassie St. James, MBA; Vice President-Restructuring Division, Blackwood Securities. In a previous life, she was a high-dollar hooker. She is divorced, lives in Manhattan’s Upper East Side, has four adult children (all of whom live with her), engages in strategic revenge, and possesses a latent penchant for silliness.

So I was on the search for a special little gift that Mitch could give Cassie that meant something but was not expensive. After all, what do you give a woman who can buy anything she wants?

Naturally, I turned to books because I have a vested interest in people buying books (product placement!). I decided that Mitch might have a special book that he may have acquired on his mission and is probably in French. Naturally, I googled, and then headed over to Wikipedia where I stumbled upon a list of French novels. I doggedly worked my way through them one by one, read the synopses, then picked one based on a vague similarity of the plot to Cassie’s past.

I wrote it into my book as if I’d read the thing (but hadn’t), then decided I probably should read it. And it freaked me out. Big time.

The book? Angélique, the Marquise of Angels by Anne & Serge Golon, first published in 1958.

Unbeknownst to me, this was a huge hit in Europe and apparently a big hit here. I’d never heard of it, never stumbled across it in the intellectual drunkenness of my youth (that actually amazes me).

The book is heroine-centric, so it’s all about Angélique. The parallel I found between Angélique and Cassie was that they both had arranged marriages. The similarity stopped there.

Angélique didn’t know her contracted husband, feared him at first, then grew to love him.

Cassie knew the man she was to marry, adored him from afar and was eager to marry him, and then quickly realized that her marriage was a sham.

Cassie is familiar with the story via film, so she has no problem making this parallel and had, in fact, written a paper on it during her undergrad years.

What doesn’t show up in the plot summary is a description of the hero’s “unusual way of life.” Joffray (the hero) is described as “scientist, musician, philosopher.” I didn’t think much of it. Mitch is a scientist with his own lab, true, but he’s also a CEO and I’ve always thought of him in those terms.  He’s not a musician. He’s not a philosopher. At heart, he’s a blue-collar steel worker who loves steel enough to reinvent himself and the industry; steel is his life’s work.

Turns out that Joffray’s science is metallurgy. That was freaky.

Turns out that Joffray is hung out to dry, religiously speaking, for reasons that have nothing to do with religion and everything to do with power, politics, and money. That was even freakier.

As I got deeper and deeper into the book, I felt like I’d entered the Twilight Zone.

Then I got to the end. Angélique plunges out into the cold night, penniless and powerless, to exact revenge. That is so Cassie. I nearly expired from the freakiness the universe had perpetrated upon my person.

I couldn’t have picked a better novel if I’d written it myself.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.

PS: Yes, I know Mary Magdalene wasn’t a prostitute.

PPS: In the mid-1980s, missions were, in fact, only 18 months long for men.

A lot of authors use real people as the basis of the looks of their characters. Some authors even reference those people in the text (I did it with Giselle and Bryce). Some readers like it, some don’t. Some readers like faces on their covers, some don’t. Some readers (*ahem* Th. *ahem*) don’t like any description at all. It gets to be a balancing act for an author not to intrude on a reader who likes to imagine the character, yet provide enough for the reader who wants to know which famous person the character most looks like.

Anyway, I’ve been debating writing this post for about a year now, but I’m going to go ahead and bite the bullet. Wanna know who I had in mind while writing The Proviso and Stay and Magdalene (albeit Magdalene‘s only about half written)? Here you go, in order of actual appearance across the books:

Readin’:

Torn by God by Zoe Murdock

The Seabird of Sanematsu by Kei Swanson

Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk

The Actor and the Housewife by Shannon Hale

The Ugly Princess by Elizabeth K. Burton (OOP & no linky)

Writin’:

Work out my sticking points on Magdalene. Thing is, I know what it is; I just can’t visualize how it all goes down.

Edits on Stay when I get it back from above-mentioned editor.

‘Rithmetic:

Create a couple of new products for My Other Business That Is Not Publishing.

There are other things I need to get done, but that’s all pretty boring stuff like, “put up a shelf” sort of stuff.

In case no one missed me, I’ll tell you what I’m doing:

1. Damned Day Job. You know, I’m awfully glad to have one right now, so I’ll refrain from bitching. See aforementioned financing art to understand why I feel obliged to tell you that.

2. Had a very short deadline drop in my lap for a project I feel privileged to be part of, so there is much e-mailing and such going on around my office in order to get this yumminess out into the marketplace.

3. Stay is finished sorta. A secondary character (a throwaway, but how come all my redshirts end up demanding their own stories?) garnered some attention from alpha readers who said, “Hey, what happened to him?” The original story with Vanessa and Eric is finished and in the hands of beta readers. Yet again I’ve decided to do something bizarre, which is to say, put two mirror-image stories back-to-back in the same spine.

4. Magdalene is 3/4 finished. I believe Cassie St. James is the woman I’ve most enjoyed writing. Ever.

This balancing the art with the marketing is getting on my nerves, quite frankly. I’m a writer and I love my imaginary friends; I settle in with them and I’m mentally…gone…for days.

Plus, I’m still convinced that an author’s brand is the writing, the stories themselves. How can you have a brand that’s the writing if you only have 1 product?

I like blogging, don’t get me wrong—when I have something to say. I also didn’t like feeling like a slave to my stats, who’s visiting, where they’re coming from, what they’re reading…

Some days, I just don’t have anything to say and you know, I think more people should just not say anything when they have nothing to say. Not every second of every day must be filled with words just because we fear silence.

On Twitter the other day, I clicked on a URL that normally wouldn’t interest me, but for some reason caught my eye. It was about the new Kraft corporate logo:

Read the whole article, because it’s instructive, and I’ve been thinking about that off and on ever since. I don’t know why. Then I saw Sunday’s Wal-Mart insert and saw its new(ish) logo:

Do you see a difference?

Most of you will, I’m sure, since they’re back to back, but I, in all my ADDness, will glance and not see anything of import to differentiate the two. Thus, I will gloss over both. I’ve seen many other, similar logos, but I couldn’t tell you what companies they belonged to. I guess that’s my point.

I follow several different blogs that talk about social networking, branding, marketing, etc. because I know zero, zilch, nada about all this bullshit and I’d really rather not learn. However, it seems to me, in all my naïveté, that you would want your brand/logo to stand out, no?

All the writerly/agently/editorially blogs talk about branding one’s writing. Do we have logos or don’t we? How does one “brand” something that is, inherently, about…you? You have one product, or two, maybe sixteen, but really the product is you. If you have a following, your following buys you. If people don’t like your product, people don’t buy you. You are identifiable by your name.

But then there’s something like this:

.
Okay, I’m as much a sucker for matching anything and thematic continuity as the next fashion-obsessed girl, and don’t mistake me—these are gorgeous covers and put ’em together like this, they look plenty different. But put me in a bookstore without a list and I won’t remember which one I have and which one I don’t. What’s scary is that I could chalk that up to my gnat-like attention span or my ADD, except I’m not the only one with the complaint. By far.

It’s not just corporate brands or book covers. It’s cars, too.

When I was in high school, a girl in my class had a ’72 Torino. A guy had a ’69 Nova. Another had a KITT car. I drove a ’72 or ’73 Beetle (one of those freaks of nature with the auto-clutch). Occasionally. I used to be able to tell what car was what, and possibly the year.

But now?

They all look alike. It was annoying when I didn’t have a vested interest in cars, but I went looking for a luxury car for Bishop Steel Baron (Magdalene, book 3) and I found…nothing that would differentiate a luxury car from a cheap Saturn, it was downright maddening. Are you kidding me? All this time I’ve been attributing that to the laws of aerodynamics and that’s probably the most likely explanation for it, but across the brand/corporate spectrum, from Saturn to Volvo, from economy to luxury, from SUV to SUV, the vast majority look alike.

I put him in a Bugatti, in case you’re wondering.

Don’t get me started on tract housing, and that includes McMansions.

I know it’s human nature to be drawn to the familiar, but humans also like variety. I’m feeling a bit of brand oppression. The smoothing out of fonts, the smiley faces and flowers, the streamlining, the…aerodynamics.

Am I missing something? I thought branding was about differentiation. If people can’t tell you from someone else, how do they know to throw their money at you?

Since Mitch lives in the heart of the steel belt and she lives in Manhattan, she has quite a bit of trouble figuring out which ward he oversees, where to go, and what time to be there. Thus, she turns to Mitch’s best friend, who left the church halfway through his mission and is a professed and semi-practicing pagan. He gives her the procedural rundown and says,

“The more you understand about our culture, the better you’ll understand Mitch.”

“Our culture?”

“Well, yeah. Mine, too. You don’t stop being a Jew just because you convert to Christianity.”

“That’s genetic.”

“With us, it might as well be.”

I live in a place that’s rich with Mormon history, so, like any native, I take it for granted. I don’t feel any sense of heritage when I go to Utah (which state I avoid like the plague). It’s in Nauvoo, Illinois, where I feel this connection to my heritage; every time I go, I find my cynicism and willingness to snipe seeping out of my soul, leaving a refreshing softness and wistful smiles. And, well, I got married in Nauvoo. That might have something to do with it.

So I took some pictures when we were there in August for my cousin’s wedding. Enjoy.

*There’s a saying about a portion of folks who identify as ex-Mormon or recovering Mormon (yes, there is a 12-step group for it): You can leave the church, but you can’t leave it alone.