When you say stupid shit and read it back almost 2 decades later when you’re cleaning up your blog
Part 2 of a series
Magdalene: a contest and a prize.
03/28/2011
[link removed]
Tales of Dunham
Say You’ll Go
“Tess … ” She stopped cold at the breath of a whisper, her heart slamming into her ribs so hard she thought it would fall out right there on the table and flop around. She turned slowly—so slowly.
She opened her mouth to scream at him for ambushing her, but she realized just in time that he was as stunned as she was.
And he was beautiful. More beautiful than he had been when he was nineteen. More beautiful than he was the night he’d left her. Yet nothing about him had changed. Read more
Book updates
1. ALLOW ME TO INTRODUCE MYSELF
My story, “Allow Me to Introduce Myself,” that appeared in Monsters & Mormons has been ready for me to put up for sale for quite a while. I just haven’t gotten around to it. I hope to get that done before Christmas. Kidding. Not really. It won’t be on the Dunham site, so if you want to buy it from me (please do!) it’ll only be here, in the sidebar.
A Mormon nun battles demons and insecurity in the Louisiana bayou—with a baby alligator by her side and weapons powered by cold fusion. Read more
Two new books
 |  | go on sale today! The print books are available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and all the regular places. The ebooks are available from me (see links above), Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and all the regular places (iBooks coming soon). From now until May 15, 2014, they will be priced at $1.99. After, they will be $5.99 and $4.99 respectively. Get ’em now! |
Oops
That awkward moment when you’re a book designer and you design your own books and the print is even too small for you. (The re-do added 100 pages to it.)
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The Paso Doble & We Were Gods release
Paso Doble & We Were Gods
May 1, 2014
from May 1, 2014 – May 15, 2014
the ebooks will be $1.99 each
On May 16, 2014,
the ebooks will go to a regular price of
$5.99 and $4.99, respectively
On parenting
Tess: “You know this makes us like all the evil meddling parents in all those novels who pay off the boyfriend from the wrong side of the tracks, and then are responsible for the seething hatred between their daughter and her boyfriend until they meet up twenty years later and have angry sex.”
Étienne: “You say that like it’s a bad thing.”
Tess: “But by that time, the boyfriend has used his seething hatred to make a billion dollars just to show her father up and comes back as a master of the universe to get his revenge on the parents and his girlfriend, even though she has never stopped loving him and was heartbroken that he never tried to contact her—” Read more
On credibility
“I,” Emilio said to his youngest brother, “am a manslut. That is a direct quote. Don’t be that. There will come a day—”
“A girl you like says, ‘Let’s be friends.’”
“You’ll turn forty-two and find out the woman you’re in love with thinks you’re the scum of the earth.”
On fetishes
The problem with exhibitionism is that sometimes people watch. —Tess LaMontagne
Paso Doble
“You’ve been smooth as a baby’s butt since you were gored three years ago,” Victoria said.
“You’re supposed to be smooth,” Emilio replied, suddenly irritated. “That’s the point.”
“Yes, but! Your posture isn’t quite straight enough when it should be and your shoulders aren’t back quite far enough and you don’t lean in quite close enough to the bull. When you go down on one knee, you’re right in his blind spot. When you make the kill, you go a little too far left and you have to reach for it. Your veronicas are a little too studied, and I haven’t seen you do a mariposa in, oh, years. Your faenas are a little too cautious, the time it takes you to turn the bull a little too long, and the horns are a little too far away from your legs.” Read more
We Were Gods cover
We Were Gods
Étienne’s ex-father-in-law: “I have faith in you, Étienne. You can fix anything. I would like to see my two favorite people together again. And building. You become gods when you build together.”
Oui. Gods. They most certainly had been.
Once.
WE WERE GODS
A Dunham Novel
Release date: May 1, 2014
A Dunham Novel
Release date: May 1, 2014
On the creation of man
Étienne looked down at his pop can. “I’m building a time machine,” he said abruptly.
Knox snorted in amusement.
He shrugged. “I won’t be able to. If people could travel through time, it’d be— The universe would implode. The Big Bang theory? Totally true. It was because somebody traveled through time.”
One day I started writing a book.
That day was November 6, 2013. I finished it December 8, 2013.
I haven’t done THAT since I was working graveyards at a convenience store, but Sabrina Darby kept poking at me.
Whatcha workin’ on?
NOTHING! I’M DRY AS A BONE! DUNHAM DRAINED MY WELL! I’LL NEVER WRITE AGAIN!!!! WAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH!!!!
So … what’s in your idea folder?
OH, FINE. Here’s a list. I don’t know what to do with ANY of this stuff.
Tell me about THIS one. It seems most fully developed.
It’s just sketches. I have no idea what to do with it.
Hmm. *reads* So, um, why does X character do Y thing?
And that was pretty much all it took Read more
Being honest with your fellow man
Jennie Hansen is a respected reviewer/writer in Mormon fiction. She reviews at Meridian Magazine and (I believe) is a judge for the Whitney Awards.
She is also a LIAR. Read more
“Heroine decapitates someone in the first scene”
I am proud to announce my first 1-star review for Dunham, which you can find here. But I will quote it in its entirety for your convenience.
This book contains some shocking and gory scenes of violence that, for me, were difficult to get past. It seems more like historical fiction masquerading as romance, which isn’t my preference as a reader. I found little to recommend the heroine (she decapitates someone in the first scene), and the hero’s introspection was clouded by odd lines that were stream of consciousness? Bad poetry? I’m not sure what it was, other than that I didn’t like it. I’m surprised that kind of thing got past an editor, as it should have been punctuated or scrapped entirely. In all, I just didn’t like the book–it seemed a little too in love with itself and was weighed down by too much needless dialogue that I couldn’t be bothered to wade through. This one was a DNF for me, unfortunately.
(bold is mine)
Dunham: The Past
It is finished. I will now wring out my brain.
Now, you! Go go go! Get it and enjoy Revolutionary War swashbuckling on this Independence Day!
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READ THE EXCERPT |
Side note: A bit of this book occurs on the Barbary Coast. Celia, the heroine, has spent some time in Egypt. So I am finding the Egyptian uprising today particularly poignant. Independence Day for Egyptians too?
The making of Dunham
And so begins a post (or series of them) (you know how wishy-washy I am) on Dunham, the privateer-heroine and pirate-hero Revolutionary War swashbuckler, which, for those of you not following the serial, will be available for sale JULY 4, 2013.
To kick it off, here’s the final cover for the official book: Read more
Magdalene and Publisher’s Weekly
For an author, a Publisher’s Weekly starred review is one of the holy grails of reviews. It’s one of those things that, for a writer, is right up there with The Call (“Hi, Mojo. I want to offer you a contract for your book.”). I’ve had pretty close brushes with getting The Call, which (three times, to be precise) ended up to be “I love this book and I want to buy it, but I can’t because of Freak Things 1, 2, and/or 3.” What I have never dared aspire to (especially once I started down the self-pub path) is a review in Publisher’s Weekly at all, much less a starred one. But then Tuesday, this happened: Read more
“A book a year is slacking.”
This sentiment got some traction in writerland a couple of weeks ago, but since the beginning of this digital publishing surge, it’s been a (sometimes unspoken) maxim. No, actually, it’s been around a long time. Way back in the day when I was a member of RWA and went to all the chapter meetings (MARA), there were two prolific category writers in my chapter. They worked for both Harlequin and Silhouette and put out three titles a year minimum. Then you have the James Patterson-type book mills wherein a team of ghostwriters is assigned to an idea and a title and off they go. I now know of many writers, especially erotic romance and erotica writers who espouse this view. Read more