So Freya’s Bower (one of the veteran epublishers in the landscape) has this annual anthology called Dreams and Desires, where the proceeds from it go to a charity. This year’s charity is A Window Between Worlds, a non-profit organization that provides art supplies and training for art as a healing tool free of charge to battered women’s shelters across the United States.

Marci Baun, Freya’s Bower’s Perpetrator In Chief, asked me to contribute a story to the anthology, and because it’s a) for a good cause and b) for the #1 cause on my personal list of good causes, I said SURE! The result? Short story “Twenty-Dollar Rag.”

For fans of the Dunham series, the hero in this one is the weird kid from Stay (who wears kilts and sleeps in trees), Vachel Whittaker, all grown up and possibly more normal than the rest of the Dunham men. Lo, there is no religion or politics in it.

Here’s the blurb for Dreams and Desires:

True love, freedom, self-worth, security… Dreams and desires of the ordinary woman, or man. From a thirty-something, single woman who wants a baby to a jeweler who finds love with the least expected man to a widow who wants to finish her degree and find love to a young, futuristic woman who’s still searching for herself to an 18th century saloon girl whose lost hope but still dreams of love to a man who has escaped his abusive lover but has lost himself. This collection of nine stories celebrates the attainment of all one can dream or desire. Which one do you secretly yearn for?

And here’s the blurb for “Twenty-Dollar Rag”:

One night. One man. One dress.

Regina Westlake sees nothing wrong with her clubbing lifestyle until the gorgeous guy cleaning her pool refuses to play her games. When he’s hired to be her arm candy for a formal event, he makes his disdain for her clear by re-dressing her in something far more appropriate than what she had worn to the party.

Shattered, she takes his contempt, his dress, the memory of his kiss—and rebuilds her life from the ground up. She never expects to see him again, but when she does…

Buy the collection, have a few hours of entertainment and help somebody out at the same time. Win-win!

Dreams and Desires ($5.99)

“Twenty-Dollar Rag” (12,000 words) ($2.99)

Final download tally in 26-1/2 hours: The Proviso, 420 and Stay 364.

* * * * *

I’m going to try something here. Y’all know I’m a writer and I have books for sale. More than 1500 copies of the sample for The Proviso have been downloaded, and 450 for Stay. That’s awesome! Thank you!

The thing is, I’m excited about the world I created and I want you to be as excited as I am. But I’m a new-to-almost-everybody writer and I write long, angsty, family saga books that can be polarizing, so one might be hesitant to try it. I get that.

So just for the next little while (a couple of days or so 24 hours), I’m going to offer the ebook versions of The Proviso (book 1) and Stay (book 2) for free. In their entirety. (The files are huge.)

Enjoy!

Book 1: The Proviso

Book 2: Stay

.

UPDATE: I’m going to disable the sample links on the sidebar while the books are available free. I don’t want somebody to pick up the sample, thinking it’s the whole thing and then be upset.

UPDATE 2: This is good until Friday, February 26, 2010, at 3:08 p.m. CST. When I said “today only,” I meant for 24 hours. What, you can’t read my mind???

UPDATE 3: So, exactly 24 hours after I posted the links, what did I get? Numbers. I don’t really know what they mean, but I’ll share them. In 24 hours:

The Proviso: 385

Stay: 333

I’m not sure why there is such a discrepancy between the two, but I’m going to guess it had something to do with file size and download time. I’m breaking these links by midnight, so hurry! The samples are back up on the sidebar, plus they are littered elsewhere throughout the web.

Anyway, thank you all for participating in my experiment and I hope that you enjoy my imaginary friends as much as I do. And if you do, could you tell somebody else who might?

. Thank you!

*

At 12, Vanessa Whittaker defied her family to save 17-year-old bad boy Eric Cipriani from wrongful imprisonment and, possibly, death. She’d hoped for a “thank you” from him, a kiss on the cheek, but before she could grow up and grow curves, he left town.

Fourteen years later, Vanessa is a celebrity chef at the five-star Ozarks resort she built. Eric is the new Chouteau County prosecutor on his way to the White House.

Four hours apart and each tied to their own careers, their worlds have no reason to intersect until a funeral brings Vanessa back to Chouteau County, back to face the man for whom she’d risked so much, the only man she ever wanted—

—the only man she can’t have.

*

For those of you who read The Proviso, you know it ended on January 1, 2009. Stay picks up with the adult Eric Cipriani (Knox’s executive assistant prosecutor) and Vanessa Whittaker (Knox’s ward and business partner) on January 5, 2009, five days after Eric replaces Knox as the Chouteau County prosecutor. “The Pack” are secondary characters, with enough face time to give you a good idea what’s going on in their lives.

You can special order it in print from your local bookstore or library (it’s in the Ingram’s catalog—don’t let them tell you different) with ISBN 9780981769639. You can order it in print online at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-a-Million, Powell’s, and Book Depository (Borders is, apparently, out of the loop). You can get it in digital at Scribd, Amazon for Kindle, and Smashwords.

What we hope you do, though, is buy directly from the publisher, B10 Mediaworx, in either print or digital, as it’s cheaper for everybody.

Finally, Stay has a website, just like The Proviso does. What’s there is not all I have to put there, but regular updates will happen to make it fresh.

Magdalene, Book 3 in the Dunham series, has a tentative release date of April 24, 2011.

Thank you for your continuing indulgence on the travails of designing a cover if you’re not a designer of covers. As I’ve said in the past, it took me almost a year and hundreds of hours of Photoshopping to come to the cover I did, which I affectionately call The Bewbies™. Originally, The Proviso was one book and it was enormous. Then I figured I’d probably do better to split it out into 3 parts, 1 part per romance. Then I realized there was no way to write this in three parts without making everybody crazy.

We are now at the final cycle of decisionmaking, when The Bewbies™ perked up.

So I decided to weave all three storylines back together as one big honkin’ epic. One problem: Still couldn’t figure out what to call it. I tried the following: The Miracle of Forgiveness, which is related to the church, then Variations on a Theme of Hamlet: The Rest is Silence, The Play’s the Thing, and then I got tired to trying to think of something thematically clever that encompassed each individual story arc within the greater arc.

The Proviso happened cuz I was just plain ol’ tuckered out. You get that way sometimes.

More importantly, the eponymous proviso directly impacts every choice Giselle, Sebastian, and Knox make—and has for years. By extension, the minute Bryce, Eilis, and Justice show up, the proviso sucks them in, too, and changes their lives completely.

Clever? No. Apropos? Yes.

Anyway, my cover ideas were flying fast and furious and I was changing them as fast as I thought them up. During this time, also, I was also settling a whole bunch of other details about websites, press names, printing vendors, and such, which is why there is such a disjointed look to the finer details of the covers, why some earlier covers have The Proviso on the cover and why later versions didn’t. These covers evolved in the course of about a month until I found The Bewbies™:

Hamletesque, you know, skull, overlays of blood and the to-be-or-not-to-be soliloquy. The, um, title.

More Hamletesque, except the flames are particular to Bryce (and a little to Giselle), but the book’s not about Bryce; it’s about Knox. (Although some people disagree with me on that!) It had to go. Also, way too over-the-top melodramatic, even for me! (That’s saying something.)

Back to a church theme title overlaid on Union Station, where the last scene in the book takes place, fronting the KC skyline from that angle. But again, the phrase “miracle of forgiveness” is a Bryce theme, although I could stretch it and say it applies to everybody. [Insert rimshot here.]

And we’re back to Lilith, but again, it’s too specific to be able to stretch over the whole story, instead of the one couple it really applies to. Plus? This just sucks in about 156 different ways.

The J.C. Nichols Memorial Fountain, which I was DESPERATE to use in some way, plus a blood-spatter overlay. Yeah, this one didn’t even get to the stage of making a JPG out of it. Until now. To show you. Concept okay. Execution, well, not.

Oh, yeah, now we’re getting somewhere. I played with this for the longest time, showed it to Dude, who said, “It’s nice.” I said, “Okay, what’s wrong with it?” “Well, I wouldn’t pick it up in the bookstore.”

So I sighed and went back to the Photoshop. No, actually, I went to iStockPhoto and resigned myself to spending DAYS and DAYS looking for something that encompassed everything I wanted to say.

Two days into iStockPhoto, right? I finally run across The Bewbies™ when it had something like 10 downloads. It was perfect on so many thematic levels, and I knew it immediately. My first thought was not, “Does that say what I want?” It was, “Do I have the balls to put that on my cover?”

Yeah. I sure did.

Thank you for your continuing indulgence on the travails of designing a cover if you’re not a designer of covers. As I said last week, it took me almost a year and hundreds of hours of Photoshopping to come to the cover I did, which I affectionately call The Bewbies™. Originally, The Proviso was one book and it was enormous. I originally titled it Barefoot Through Fire. Then I figured I’d probably do better to split it out into 3 parts, 1 part per romance. This is the story of book 3.

As discussed, music really influenced me in the writing and designing of this book, both philosophically and thematically. The heroine in the third couple’s book, Justice, loves Rush (“Neil Peart writes my hymns and Rush is my choir.”)and her favorite song is “Freewill.” Since free will is one of the major themes in this couple’s relationship, I titled the book thusly. And Justice is very well aware how the song “New World Man” fits Knox. The clock, you will notice, is almost at midnight, which is also significant, but I’m not going to tell you how.

And Justice for All… was the original title to the Knox and Justice story that I began in 1995. I liked the duality of the theme and Justice’s name being encompassed in the title, but when I got to working on it again in the fall of 2007, I was uneasy with how trite it seemed, which was probably unnecessary insecurity on my part. But then I changed it back, leaving off the “and.” Trite or not, it still fit the story.

The courthouse image is that of Platte County, Missouri. It’s the real county on which I based Chouteau County. Chouteau County has a bad reputation for corruption, and its prosecutor, Knox, blatantly fulfills and spreads that reputation. This is the only made-up place in the whole series. I don’t know the Platte County prosecutor, but I’m sure he’s a nice guy and I’d really hate to be dragged all the way up there to account for myself for casting aspersions on him and his county.  And you know, it’s a really pretty courthouse and deserves to be on a book cover.

[Added November 6, 2009: The Platte County prosecutor's name is Eric. Eric Zahnd, actually. I had no idea when I was writing The Proviso and Stay. And...like Eric Cipriani, he leans libertarian. Freaky!]

The third cover seemed to cover all my bases thematically. Or at least, that’s what I was trying to do. Since Justice is a girl and the Goddess Justice is always depicted as a female, it fits that way, too. However, like the other 3 covers, this represented only a small part of structure of book 3, much less the structure of the series. The art is by Edwin Abbey for the Harrisburg, Pennsylvanian capitol building.

What’s different about book 3 is that its theme is not overtly sexual. The relationship of couple number 1 is based on sex and the “sinfulness” of sex; couple number 1 communicates through sex. The relationship of couple number 2, while not based on sex, is more sensual than sexual and has no “sin” component. The relationship of couple number 3 includes sex, but their issues are those of the mind: agency, trust, philosophy, and interdependence.

So I had a real problem in that the other 2 book covers were similar thematically and this book cover just…wasn’t. And it wasn’t ever going to be. When I put all 3 of these together, they were jarring, and I wasn’t fully satisfied with cover #3. I probably would have changed it 2 or 3 more times if I hadn’t finally decided to braid all 3 stories together. But I did, and that’s where my experimentation with the individual covers stopped.

Next week, the evolution of The Bewbies™.

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:

Scroll down to #64.

064) Stay by Moriah Jovan (MS POLICY), finished July 15.

My faith that I put in Moriah after reading The Proviso was justified. This book is good. Parts of it are excellent. And it’s still only a draft. It still has explicit sex (though not as much) but you should have no other qualms about checking this one out when it’s released in a few months.

Congratulations, Moriah, on a great book. Keep ‘em coming.

MS POLICY

I am positively giddy.

Also, independent publishers Zoe Murdock and Riley Noehren and I had a roundtable chat about independent publishing. What we have in common: We’re female, LDS, and publishing ourselves. That transcript (and awesome discussion) are up at A Motley Vision.

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.

I’m doing this without my editor’s approval, but hey! I’m feeling rebellious this evening.

Stay is the second book in the Dunham series. It is not entirely necessary for you to read The Proviso before you read Stay, but I do recommend it. Now, neither main character is an actual Dunham by blood or marriage, nor are they Mormons (shocker, I know, but there’s still plenty religion, money, politics, and sex), but there is a method to my madness in the series order. If you have read The Proviso, you might have (or not) picked up on a hint or two that these (very) minor characters might have rather . . . interesting . . . histories that were not explained.

Here’s the official back-of-book blurb:

At 12, Vanessa defied her family to save 17-year-old bad boy Eric from wrongful imprisonment and, possibly, death. She’d hoped for a “thank you” from him, a kiss on the cheek, but before she could grow up and grow curves, he left town.

Fourteen years later, Vanessa is a celebrity chef at the five-star Ozarks resort she built. Eric is the new Chouteau County prosecutor on his way to the White House.

Four hours apart and each tied to their own careers, their worlds have no reason to intersect until a funeral brings Vanessa back to Chouteau County, back to face the man for whom she’d risked so much, the only man she ever wanted—

—the only man she can’t have.

* * * * *

DECEMBER 14, 1994

“People versus Eric Niccolò Cipriani. Charges of statutory rape, sexual assault in the first degree, and forcible rape in the first degree.”

“Ms. Leventen, how does the defendant plead?”

“Not guilty.”

“Hilliard?”

“Remand, your honor. The victim is thirteen.”

“So ordered.”

* * * * *