TGM: Ah Just Made a Liar o’ Mahself

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So my boss gave me ten days off because of my cold. A bit of an unnecessary length of time for recuperation since I’m practically healed now, and I can go back to work on Monday. Oh, it’s tempting, waiting till next Thursday to go hustle my butt back to Berkeley, but I seriously get bored, lounging around the house, even with my running list of chores. Plus since I only work part-time, I don’t get paid for sick days.

As a quickie update regarding my cold, then, thumbs up. :) Two lessons learned from this week-long crapfest…

OTC stuff meant for cold symptoms and so on doesn’t work and is a waste of my money. All those fancy-schmancy, unpronounceable words only got me woozy and irritable in the end.

You know what worked? Ibuprofen and Benadryl. Yep. Just those two. No wimpy-ass, updated decongestants or non-drowsy stuff for me. First generation antihistamines know how to whip your system into shape. True, they make you drowsy, but since I’ve got extra time off, it was a price I was more than willing to pay.

Anyway, on to the main point of this post…

Remember when I said that I wasn’t going to touch The Glass Minstrel for its second edition? Yeah, I lied. While the book didn’t really need another thorough editing work, I still asked to go over the print proofs for surface-level errors, and I found quite a few. Mostly repeated words in a passage and a few long, awkward sentences that needed to be broken up.

The biggest change I made, though, involved THE scene. Jakob’s masturbation scene. It was a controversial passage that Mark, my previous publisher, and I went back and forth over, and I was more than willing to hit delete in case he found it too explicit. We ended up keeping it in the book, but for the second edition, I saw that it was borderline explicit and not really reflective of the books I’ve published with Queerteen Press, so I lightly revised the scene for the new edition.

Oh, sure, the scene’s still there. It has to be. It’s an important one in terms of how Jakob deals with his sexuality and his delusions about Covell (if you’ve read the first edition, you know how and why I say that – I’m trying to avoid spoilers here). But it’s more suggestive than explicit now and certainly more in line with the way Heinrich and Stefan’s sexual encounters are described.

So the proofs are back with my publisher, I’m very pleased with the way things turned out, and I can’t wait to get my copy of the second edition.

To prove further that I made a liar of myself, I decided to do a giveaway for the new edition. It’ll be mid-August, and I’ll keep you all posted. Now if only the pizza delivery guy would just show up… I’m starving.

Masks: Evolution Giveaway at TNA (and Some Stuff)

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Egad, people, I feel like a Romantic poet. I’ve been steamrolled by the cold bug for the 289,521,444th time this year alone. I’ve no idea what’s going on as I’m still keeping up with my fitness and have worked running / brisk walking into my weekly workout schedule, and yet… and YET…

Here I am, coughing, sniffling, wheezing away, about to give Keats a run for his money. My immune system’s down for some reason and despite all the time I’ve put in, keeping myself active and fit. I’ve never been this prone to colds before. Ever. Even Andy’s baffled.

At any rate, here I am, all hopped up on over-the-counter meds. Fun times.

Anyway, I’m doing an ebook giveaway for Masks: Evolution, which comes as a package of sorts. Since you can’t read Book Two of the trilogy without reading Book One for context, I’m tossing in Book One for good measure. Head on over to The Novel Approach, toss your name in the hat, and Lisa will be picking a winner on the date noted.

Speaking of Masks, the seventh and last book is now underway (currently being written, that is), but as I’m too woozy from decongestants, expectorants, and suppressants, I’ll try to tackle today’s writing this evening before I go to bed. I find myself defaulting to my old writing schedule as of late, which is the late night hours. Coming full circle, ain’t we?

I’m not a morning person, though, and I find it extremely difficult getting into the swing of things even at midday. Creative work that requires a lot of brain-hammering tends to work best after dinner for me.

At any rate, if you’re participating in the giveaway, good luck! Lemme deal with this annoying cold first, and I’ll be back with stuff to talk about.

Now Available: Masks: Evolution (Book Two)

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Huh. Too many colons in the subject header. Ah, hell. But dem’s good news, no? :D Because TA DA! Ye Olde Second Book of the Masks trilogy is finally out in its second edition, brand spankin’ new cover and all that.

Second verse, same as the first – it’s on sale at 20% off as a new release. And that’s only if you purchase directly from either Queerteen Press or JMS Books. Can’t have the same deal elsewhere (mainly because it’s really not available elsewhere – yet). But lope over yonder and check out the blurb and excerpt. Hope you enjoy the series if you’re just getting into it.

As a quickie addendum, Ordinary Champions (Book Three) will be out in September.

Cover Art: The Glass Minstrel (2nd Edition) Plus 4th Anniversary Freebies

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With the release date coming up next month, The Glass Minstrel emerges in its 2nd edition version (blurb and cover, that is – everything else in the book remains the same). Here’s the cover:

The Glass Minstrel (2nd Ed.)

Updated blurb:

It is the Christmas season in mid-19th century Bavaria. Two fathers, Abelard Bauer and Andreas Schifffer, are brought together through the tragic deaths of their sons. Bauer, a brilliant toymaker, fashions glass Christmas ornaments, and his latest creation is a minstrel with a secret molded into its features.

When Schiffer sees Bauer’s minstrel ornament in the toy shop, he realizes that Bauer is struggling to keep his son’s memory alive through his craft. At first he tries to fault him for this, but then recognizes that he, too, is seeking solace and healing by reading his son’s diary, a journal that reveals, in both painful as well as beautiful detail, the true nature of Heinrich’s relationship with Stefan.

Fifteen-year-old Jakob Diederich is the son of a poor widow. The boy is burdened with his own secret, and he develops an obsession with a traveling Englishman who stays at the inn where Jakob works. The lives of Bauer, Schiffer, and Diederich intersect during the holiday as Schiffer tries to focus on his family in the present, Bauer struggles to reconcile his past, and Jakob copes with an uncertain future.

Echoing the sensibilities of melancholy 19th Century folktales, lyrical prose and rich period detail quietly weave a moving tale of redemption, hope, and haunting, but timeless, themes.

This is the only book whose contents I didn’t touch for the 2nd edition. I reread it when Cheyenne Books announced they were closing their doors, and I’m pretty happy with the contents. The editor I worked with was pretty thorough, helping me go over the text as well as the content itself, and I didn’t see anything that bothered me enough to want to tweak. So the book remains the same, stylistically and content-wise.

It was pretty damned hard, too, looking for an image for the cover that’d work well with the book. A winter scene (not necessarily Christmas) as well as a distinctively European setting (preferably Bavaria, but that was too specific, I guess) turned out to be a challenging combination. This image, happily enough, came up in my search over at Dreamstime, and it’s perfect for what I need. :)

I won’t be doing a giveaway for this book since I’ve already done one a couple of months or so ago. I’ll only be submitting it to different review sites, hoping someone would take it up for a review to help me with the marketing. I’m keeping my fingers crossed here as historical gay YA fiction is a crazy tiny market, and if finding reviewers who’re willing to take on fantasy gay YA is an ongoing challenge, what more with a pure historical, right? ^^;;;

In other news, JMS Books, LLC just turned 4 years old, and they’re celebrating by offering a free e-book download from their site every day of this month till the end of July. :) I’m offering a free copy of The Weeping Willow for you guys. I don’t know when it’ll be posted at the site. You’ll have to keep checking every day. Plus you’ve got a chance to enjoy a month’s worth of free downloads from JMS Books’ backlist, so win-win! \O/