Heading Out...

Well, I'm getting ready to leave for Reno tomorrow morning. This RWA National is going to be wicked fun! All of my editors, as well as my fabulous agent and a gaggle of author girlfriends will be there. I'm looking forward to networking and drinking entirely too much.

Keep your fingers crossed for Elphame's Choice to make a good showing in the Bookseller's Best and the Daphne, and Goddess of Spring to kick ass in the Prism (I adore those exquisite little glass pyramids).

I hope to see some of you at the literacy signing tomorrow night! (Yes, I'll come back and post all the good gossip.)

PC

Undead and hilarious...

I've happily started working my way through my gihugic TBR pile of books which have been teasing me with their uncreased spines and potentially lovely new worlds...God I adore books! Anyway, last night I finished MaryJanice Davidson's newest, Undead and Unappreciated. Okay, I love MJ's undead books - and this one is no exception. I can say without hesitation that it was worth every cent of the hardback cover price. Truly. (And well done MJ for going to hb!) In this book Betsy finds out that she has a half sister who is, well, Satan's spawn. LOVE that MJ made Satan a woman. (I think of God as a woman, so it only makes sense to me that The Dark Side would be female, too. Plus, let's face it ladies, women are meaner than men. Not in the 'shoot 'em up yeehaw cowboy' way men have of starting wars, etc. In the 'rip out your heart and soul and make your life a living hell' way. Plus, we multi-task. Satan should be able to multi-task.) Sinclair is delicious, as per usual. And her horrid step-mom, the Ant, is pregnant. Gross, man. Love the Book of the Dead ramifications, too.

Naturally, the ending is a non-ending because there's another book. Which is good. And bad. I hate waiting. When's the next one out, MJ??

Now I'll take a moment to totally gush about the fab Mysteria anthology that will be out in July 06, and say once again how thrilled I am to be a part of it! Sue Grant, Gena Showalter, the to die for MaryJanice Davidson and moi! I am sooo looking forward to next summer!

Okay, after I finished the fab Undead I started on Kushiel's Dart. (Uh, a much different read, by-the-by.) So far I'm intrigued, but the book has a bazillion pages and my TBR pile is ridiculously high. Which means if the book doesn't continue to grab me I'll probably set it aside and dive into another. Not that my attention span is freakishly short, but (as we have already discussed) there are so many books...

Just curious...

So I bought my fab daughter a copy of The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova. (She loved Bram Stoker's Dracula so I thought she'd enjoy this, too.) Okay, she took it back! She said, "Mama, I read 35 pages and it sucked." I was planning on reading it after she was finished - but now I think I might just wait for the inevitable movie. Have any of you guys read it? Was her "it sucked" review just an 18 year old reaction? Or does it truly suck?

Opinions?

PC

Mysteria novella done done done!

Yea!! I finished my novella (tentatively titled Candy Cox and the Big Bad [Were]wolf) at about 4:00 am this morning! Yea! I'll set it aside now and do a rewrite next week some time, and then send it off to my editor before I leave for the RWA National Conference in Reno on the 27th. So now all I have to do is finished the line edits on Brighid's Quest (my December release for Luna) and I am totally caught up! Actually, I'm ahead...which is odd...so I"ll probably start my next Goddess Summoning Book early (it's a retelling of Aida and I'm researching goddesses right now for it). But, what I'm really excited about is that I CAN CATCH UP ON MY READING! (And maybe loll by the pool and drink too much...) So I bought Bitten by Kelly Armstrong, as I already said in the werewolf blog, and I'm looking forward to that. And I have Kushiel's Dart by Jacqueline Carey on the recommendation of my werewolf writing friend, Shaunee (see previous post for an excerpt from her fab manuscript).

Along with those two books I have Liz Maverick's Crimson City added to my to be read pile. I love Liz's funny blog - you guys may want to check it out at http://lizmaverick.blogspot.com. And my daughter just bought me a copy of Julie Kenner's hilarious looking new book, Carpe Demon. Here's the link to an excerpt: Excerpt:http://www.juliekenner.com/CarpeDemon.htm.

I'd love it if you guys would post a review here for any (or all) of the above books! Tell me what you think! I love insightful, intelligent reviews. Naturally, I believe all of my blog readers (and fans!) are insightful, intelligent readers!

PC

Werewolf blog!

Hi All!
Working on this novella and writing a werewolf character for the first time has, naturally, made me think of some of my favorite werewolfs. In movies I remember seeing an erotic B film years ago (like in the 80s) where the hero was a wolf and he didn't actually kill the heroine (lots of Red Ridinghood references, though - it was set in the woods, etc.), but I can't for the life of me remember the name of the movie. I loved Jack Nicholson in Wolf. As for books...Donna Boyd's The Passion is my all time favorite. I hear Angela Knight's Master of the Moon is wonderful - and it's in by TBR stack. Here's an excerpt - sounds delicious. Excerpt:http://www.angelasknights.com/masterofthemoon.htm

How about you guys? What are your favorite werewolf movies and books?

PC

Out with the old...

Well, now that Goddess of the Rose is winging its way to my editor it's time I turn my attention to my next project. And this is a fun one! Those of you who have checked out my website (http://www.pccast.net) know that this spring I was invited to contribute to a charity anthology for Triskelion Publishing, and that I then teamed up with MaryJanice Davidson, Gena Showalter, and Susan Grant to sell expanded versions of our short charity episodes to Berkley. That anthology, Mysteria, will be released summer 2006 - and it's that novella that I'm working on right now. I am having a wicked good time with this one! If you want a sneak peak of our 4 novella, check out the charity anthology by following the link on my website to purchase the e-book version, or you can pick up the printed Bewitched, Bedazzled, and BeVampyred - ISBN #1-933471-29-8. I promise that it will tweek your interest...speaking of - here's an interview Gena Showalter and I did about Mysteria for her agent, Deidre Knight's blog (http://www.knightagency.blogspot.com):


Recently we (PC Cast and Gena Showalter) were contracted to a romance anthology at Berkley – tentatively titled MYSTERIA -- PC by her agent Meredith Bernstein and Gena by her agent Deidre Knight. We thought it might be interesting to describe how the project developed.

The beginning: We were invited to be a part of a charity anthology for Triskelion Press. Triskelion already had characters and plots we could have used for our episodes, but we wanted to write something different, something all our own. We really saw it as an opportunity for us to explore our wildest imaginations.

Gena: “I had a mental picture of three young, beautiful witches dancing naked through a graveyard and accidentally raising the dead – and one of the sisters falling in love with one of the. . . well, corpses. He’s only recently dead, so still handsome of course. I mean, imagine if Achilles from the movie Troy came back to life. Totally lovable, right?”

PC: “Oh Lord…I’ll probably raise lots of brows with this but…I got my idea from real life. An ex-student of mine finally talked me into going out with him – yes, on a real date (he’s 26 ½ and I’m 45). So I was dating him and having one hell of a good time…then Gena told me about the anthology and I started giggling because I thought how much fun it would be to use a page from reality and sprinkle it with a heavy does of fantasy (he’s not a werewolf, nor is he a gigolo).”

Gena: ”We enjoyed writing those episodes so much, we decided to take it a step further.”

PC: “Yeah, Gena and I talked about how much we’d like to expand our short episodes. Neither of us were finished with our characters (grin). So I said that we should set our own anthology in OUR fictional town – kinda like Desperate Housewives meets Bram Stoker.”

Gena: “I’m a huge Desperate Housewives fan and love the street the wives live on: Wisetria Lane. The moment PC said Desperate Housewives meets Bram Stroker’s Dracula – a stroke of brilliance on her part, I must say – I burst out with: they have to live in Mysteria.”

PC: “As always, Gena and I were in perfect agreement. The next step was for me to approach my editor at Berkley, Christine Zika, and see if she’d be interested in an anthology like this (before we put anymore time and effort into writing it). Christine was receptive, and she said if we came up with a Bible for our town, short proposals for each novella (short as in a couple of pages), and a couple more authors, she’d be happy to read it.”

Gena: "PC and I got together and brainstormed who would be perfect for this project. We kind of looked at each other and it was one of those moments where everything clicked into instant place. We knew right away MaryJanice Davidson and Susan Grant -- who had also participated in the charity anthology -- would be perfect."

PC: “Sue and I were already friends, but I was still nervous about approaching her. I mean, no author wants to hear a generic ‘gee, that’s a nice idea, but…’ from anyone, let alone a well-respected sister author. But Sue replied immediately and was very excited about the project. She felt the same way about her charity episode – she adored her demon hero and didn’t want to let him fade away.”

Gena: "I shot MaryJanice an email and like Sue, she returned my email that same day with a yes! Talk about propelling me straight to the stars. Being in an anthology with three of my favorite authors. . .a slice of heaven on earth!"

PC: “So with all the authors in place, Bible written, short proposals done, I called Christine. She was pleasantly surprised to hear from me, and then immediately excited about the group of authors. I emailed the proposal to her on that day (Thursday) and she called me MONDAY with a big fat YES! After that the details were really easy – Christine is a dream to work with. And all four of us were amazed to learn that this is the first author initiated anthology Berkley has ever published! Until now, they have always come up with the anthologypremise and then contacted authors. (This is a little detail I’m glad I didn’t know in the beginning.) So look for MYSTERIA in Summer 2006!”

Gena: “It will have a little bit of everything: demons, witches, magic, shape-shifters, vampires and so much more. Life doesn’t get any better than that, does it?”

For more information, visit PC Cast at www.pccast.net and Gena Showalter www.genashowalter.com
posted by Deidre Knight at 8:35 PM 5 comments

So...can you see why I'm having such a good time writing this??? Don't you love it when life lends itself to fantasy? (And a delicious young fantasy at that!)

Back to research...research...research...

PC

Amazing new review

Dahlings!

Check out the fab review of Goddess of Spring on the incredibly insightful Smart Bitches blog, http://www.smartbitchestrashybooks.com. LOVE those Smart Bitches! (Also while you're there scroll down to the entry Keeping Maili Amused and click on the Steve, No! Don't eat that! link. Oh. My. Goddess. I laughed so hard I hurt my side. Seriously. )

XXXOOO
PC