Cute Picture Day

So...after the rash of reviews and interviews I've been doing, interspersed with some WOO HOO about getting "The Call" from Entangled, I've been finishing and revising that NaNo manuscript and getting to work on the next book.

So I just thought I'd stop in and share some cute pictures.




This is the Hell Hound. Also known as Penny. She just started taking Prozac, so hopefully she'll become slightly less hellish soon!

And look who was wandering around Hollywood Blvd a few weeks ago!  No, really!  Okay, not really, but still. I wonder. If you all of a sudden look in the mirror and realize you are a dead ringer for a celebrity, are you morally obligated to move to LA to pose for tips? 



ADDICTED to Charlotte Stein

My name is Teri, and I'm addicted to Charlotte Stein stories.

I mean, really. I have my own stuff to write, and a full-time job, and a crap-ton of kids, but all of that gets ignored when I have something of hers to read. So when I was gifted with a review copy of  ADDICTED, I said, "Laundry, wash thyself!  Dogs, walk thyselves! Kids, do whatever it is you do because you ignore me most of the time anyway." 

Charlotte Stein writes erotic romance (*gasp!*). And it's kinky, spanky stuff, stuff that makes you go: O_O! Stuff that makes you look twice at that nerdy guy who just walked out of the office supply closet (but that's a different story). 

ADDICTED did not disappoint.  It's the not-so-classic tale of the Naughty Librarian and the Smoking Hot Penguin Keeper (?!). 

Here's the blurb:

Kit Connor has always led a safe, cautious life. But when her friend points out that her erotic         writing lacks something, she decides to attend a Sexual Healing group to improve her knowledge.

Kit expects to find the gritty underbelly of sex, and instead finds louche, laidback, sex-loving Dillon Holt.

He makes a suggestion to her: that he will tell tales of his sexual excess, and help her book get the realism it needs. She agrees, but hasn't the least idea of what she's getting into.

Dillon doesn't have simple advice in mind … he has lessons to teach her. Lessons on everything she's never dared to experience, from kink to real passion.

Now Kit is never sure: is Dillon the addict, or is she just addicted to him?

What the blurb doesn't tell you: Kit's a librarian who has a lot of interesting ideas about how she'd like sex to be, but is a little twisted up inside and can't exactly get those ideas out with a real lover...Until old' hunky Dillon comes along, and he makes it his mission to help her loosen up. But then, what about Dillon? Is he really as loosened up as he'd like Kit to think? 

I just love the characters in this story. Kit is so wonderfully insecure--not in an I-want-to-smack-her Woody Allen kind of way, but in an I-totally-get-that kind of way. 

      "And then I see him, out of the corner of my eye. I see Dillon Holt, strolling towards me, in a way that makes me want to glance over my shoulder. You know, just in case there's a sexier, wilder sort of chick behind me, and she's actually the one he's aiming for. 

      This imaginary woman has to be the one he's aiming for.

      Right?"

There are parts that make me get choked up, and by choked up, I mean "about to cry", not "gagging on -you-know-what-since-this-IS-smut-I'm-reading."

    "He's not going to nearly cry because he's being hugged--but I think he understands that I might." 

And there's just the way she says things. Things like,

     "...apparently it's parade day at Fort Dillon's Underwear."

Yeah, I read that line while I was in the car with the family on the way to church. Fortunately, I didn't have a mouthful of coffee.

Okay, that's all I'm going to say, because it's tempting to quote the whole damned book here. That would be a bad thing, probably resulting in piracy complaints and defeating the purpose of convincing you to go buy a copy for yourself.

Jessica Lemmon : A Tempting Interview

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that my awesome friend Jessica Lemmon 's first book, TEMPTING THE BILLIONAIRE* has been released. I read it, it's AWESOME, and the cover is black and white and pink.  And I'm not just saying that because Jessica is my friend and I'm hoping she'll say the same thing about my book when it's published. If I didn't like it, I would say something like, "Please buy this book, because Jessica needs to pay for writing classes." or, "It's black and white and pink."  If I only kind of liked it, I would say something like, "Jessica is a writer to watch. I look for bigger and better things to come from her." or,  "It's black and white and pink and has some funny parts." 

Anyway. 

I have the privilege of hosting Jessica on her big world Blog Tour today, so I asked her some very deep, probing questions about her writing life and TEMPTING THE BILLIONAIRE.

So, Jessica, here we go:

1. This is your first published novel, but I know it's not the first one you've finished.  What's the WORST story you've ever written?

That award would have to go to my first manuscript, a rambling 35,000 words about a girl returning home to her ten-year reunion. *cringe* I think the characters had potential, but, oy, cliché much?

 

2.  How much fun is it to write a nekkid scene and know that your mom is going to read it?
 

Confession time (I’m in a safe space, right?): I had *such* an issue with this for a while! Nekkid scenes, swearing, innuendo…then I realized I am thirty-sev-er…something years old! I can do what I want! *adds foot stomp for effect*

3. I know your hero, Shane, is the Supreme Overlord of Chocolate Chip Cookies, and he's good at a lot of other things (heh heh) but we had a little trouble at the Twitter party convincing him to do his Magic Mike impression. Do you think that maybe, in a future story, you can convince him to do a guest appearance strip tease at someone's bachelorette party?

 

I love that title! Maybe he should replace his desk plaque, Shane August SOCCC. ;)  Yes, he’s not much of a dancer, I’m afraid. His hips are better utilized in other ways. What? I meant hula-hooping. (No I didn’t.) P.S., I think that guest appearance is most definitely, assertively, not going to happen. Sorry.

 

4.   If Crickitt hadn't met Shane, do you think she would be Team Jax from Sons of Anarchy, or Team Dean and Sam from Supernatural (either or both ;))?
 

HA! I know *my* answer. *stares into space while thinking about Jax Teller* …what were we talking about? Oh, right, Crickitt. I think she’d side with Dean. Given her affinity for scary movies and the supernatural, he’d be right up her alley.

 

5.  I'm a contemporary romance writing girl, too, but I love to read in other genres.  If you were going to write in another time period, what would it be?  
 

Don’t I know it! Can’t wait to celebrate *the* Teri Anne Stanley’s first release! Another time period? Hmm, as romantic as historical reads are to some folks, I am a focus-forward kind of girl. I’m going to (ambiguously) say “The Future” and leave it at that. Beam me up, Scottie…indeed.

Thanks a billion (ha. ha.) for visiting today!

*disclaimer:  This billionaire has no intention of tying up any virgins for spanking purposes. 

Umm...I guess it's real!

Soooo....back in November, I did that whole NaNo thing again. The committee in my head had been suggesting that I bag the whole writing thing and maybe go back to making posing suits for female body builders. But you know what?  I don't have to worry about how my abs stack up against fictional women, so I decided to stick with writing for a while longer.

So I did that NaNo thing, but I signed up for an online bootcamp that Savvy Authors and Entangled Publishing hosted.  You can read about it below.

BUT WAIT! Before you click that link, I want to tell you to make sure to read all the way to the bottom, because GUESS WHAT!!!???!!!!

I WON A PUBLISHING CONTRACT for my very rough, very incomplete manuscript from NaNoWriMo!   Nina Bruhns, the editor for Entanlged Suspense, called me two Sundays ago to tell me, and I've been a basket case since then, waiting to be sure it's all real, before I told you all, my Blog Friends.  So it's officially on their website, which means it must be real. 

Okay, you can click on the link now, I have to go have another nervous breakdown. 

What are you waiting for???  GO CLICK!  LOOK!  THAT'S ME! 

Entangled Publishing NaNo Smackdown

Back It Up!

We have some extra teenagers living in our basement right now.  We call them the Trolls. They are twins,  high school seniors and legal adults, but for reasons I probably shouldn't blog about, they live with us instead of their parents.

Mr. Stanley and I aren't real foster parents, but we're trying. Our goal is to keep a roof over their heads and get these guys to graduate from high school and get jobs so they can move out of our basement. Because our own kids are probably going to have to move down there, but that's another post.

ANYWAY, they have these research papers due. Two months ago. Which is probably going to keep them from graduating if they don't get it in gear.

Anyway.

They have all their information on the cloud drive thing that the school system provides.  And of course, Tuesday, when they were supposed to have things turned in, the system crashed (coincidence?  I have my doubts).  So I said, "Don't you have a flash drive?"

Blank faces in duplicate.

*Runs upstairs and finds a flash drive without any naked romance scenes on it*

Okay, so we got that worked out, I think. They now know to save it to the cloud, save it to their laptops, email it to themselves, and put it on the danged flash drive! 

So this morning, I went to open my WIP, which I had emailed to myself at work, (good girl) only to find that somewhere in the stratosphere, the last scene had disappeared.  Which is probably good, because I was thinking that I needed to cut it and start over, but HEY!  I wanted that to be my choice, not the internet's! 

So anyway, today's public service announcement:  BACK IT UP every chance you get, whereever you are!  Hey, that sounds almost dirty, doesn't it? 

Who's Love Child Are You?

The new season of Justified started last week.  This makes me very happy.

I love me some Timothy Olyphant.

L.O.V.E. me. some. T.O. Don't you just want to eat him up?

In  case you're not familiar, Justified is a series on FX about a U.S. Marshall who comes home to Harlan County, Kentucky, where he runs into his best friend from his younger days, who is living on the other side of the law. As a matter of fact, EVERYONE from the old neighborhood, including Dear Old Dad, is living in the gray zone of lawful behavior.  Hijinks ensue.

Elmore Leonard is the executive producer.  You know, the Get Shorty guy.  No, not Danny DeVito. The writer.

ANYWAY.  I was thinking how much I appreciate Elmore Leonard's sense of irony, and as a writer, I really want to channel some of that. Except, I'm a romance writer. So I've decided that I'm going to be the love child of Elmore Leonard and Taylor Swift. Please, let's not remind me of how much older I am than Taylor Swift . As in, old enough to be her mother. It's a metaphorical kind of thing, right?

So.  Who do you channel?  Are you a cross between George Lucas and Lady Gaga?  No? Then who? Discuss.

Celebrating a Life That May Have Saved Your Life

I'm going to take a break from my regularly scheduled ramblings to tell you about this guy who used to work in my building.

Some of ya'll may know that I'm a science geek by day.  I work in a lab, merrily surfing writing blogs between experiments. I've never discovered anything big, but I keep trying. Maybe I'll get to work on something that will help someone someday...but that's not what this is about.

When I came to work in my current lab, there was this nice old man who had an office on the third floor. He drove around on a little scooter and smiled and greeted me every time I saw him. One day I noticed a poster with his picture on it, hanging on the wall.  One of those "Go to UC, We're Great" kind of promotional things. 




Turns out this nice old man, Dr. Elwood Jensen, had just won the Lasker Award.  Huh?  Well, it's the American version of the Nobel Prize for medicine. 

A while back, Dr. Jensen discovered the estrogen receptor.  You know, the one that people refer to when they get breast cancer.  Used to be, if you had breast cancer, they automatically removed your ovaries, and anything else that might produce estrogen, because estrogen makes some types of cancer grow faster.  But then Dr. Jensen found this molecule, the Estrogen Receptor... and now, when someone gets breast cancer, one of the first things they do is find out if it's HER+ or HER-.  If it's HER+, they treat you with Tamoxifen, or some other variety of estrogen receptor blocker.  And they don't automatically have to remove your ovaries.  And you have a much better chance of wearing pink for a much longer time.

So.  There you go.  If you, or someone you know, has had HER+ breast cancer, you might want to stop a minute and send some good thoughts to the Jensen family, because Elwood died recently.  He was 92, and was a nice old man. 

Happy Release Day, Jessica!!!

At the risk of sounding completey corny, sometimes I am overwhelmed by how blessed I have been since deciding to explore this writing thing.  I started blogging to conect with the writing community and it's like...that song from Oliver! (Ya'll are sooo lucky that I'm not going to post a clip of me singing about considering yourself at home.)

ANYWAY. 

I've made a lot of good friends here, not the least of whom is Jessica Lemmon.  I think we first connected by following each other's blogs, but then quickly learned we live in the same RWA Chapter Zone, and met up in person at our OVRWA meetings.

Since then, I've been fortunate enough to see her land a book offer, and agent, another book offer (and yeah, kind of in that order)...and shed a tear or two of joy with her.  All the way she's shared encouragement and advice and excitement about this thing called Being a Romance Author.  And today is her big day! Tempting the Billionaire came out in e-Book today. 
 

So I just want to say, "Go, Ms. Lemmony!"( And again, you, my beloved readers, are lucky that I am not posting a clip of my happy dance. )

New Years Rationalizations

Because really...who am I kidding?  Resolutions?  Just something else to feel guilty about. 

No resolutions this year.  A few things on the To-Do list, like:
1) finish editing (and finish in general) the NaNo book
2) re-edit last summer's MS
3) Clean off my desk.

Cleaning off my desk might be the most difficult thing on the list, but I'm going to give it a shot.  I'm making great strides.  I moved a dead plant into the trash and wiped up the dead leaves.  That was HUGE. 

Then I got rid of all those pesky Coke Rewards points I've had piling up there.  That took me half an hour, because then I had to spend the points...

I've moved some piles around, making small piles into big piles, so it LOOKS a little neater.  Just don't open any drawers, okay?

So what's on your Not a Resolution List for this year?