Cover Lovin' - Convincing Leopold

The inbox stalking paid off. I received the cover art for Convincing Leopold! Many thanks to the talented April Martinez for the awesome cover. I love the blue tones - very angsty, which totally fits the book.

If the guys, and the house, look familiar, it's because the cover artist used the same guys from the 1st book. See -

Same dudes, different images and Arthur's tied his cravat in a different knot. Historically dressed dudes are so hard to find, I'm quite impressed she was able to find multiple images of them. And very happy. Convincing Arthur is my only cover with fully dressed dudes with their faces showing. It could have been a bit...awkward if different dudes showed up on the sequel's cover. Who are you? And what happened to Leo....

In other news, I've been typing away over the holiday weekend, working on the holiday novella. Oh, and doing lots of research. Why ever did I decide it was a good idea to have a scene at a fencing academy? It sounded like a cool idea when I wrote the synopsis, but I know nothing about fencing, besides that swords are used. Well, no, they're actually foils. I do know that now, and a bunch more about fencing than I ever thought I needed to know but that I actually do need to know in order to write the scene.

On a related note, my brain now hurts. The version of 'The School of Fencing' (1787) that I found on Google books doesn't have a single lowercase 's' in the main body of the text. No joke. Every 's' has been replaced with a 'f'. As in 'You muft ftand ftraight...'. Google must have read lowercase s as a f when it digitized the book. The sad thing is it took me about two pages to figure it out (insert very confused Ava wondering what an 'infide opening' was), and even sadder, a couple more pages into it and I was able to read it just fine.

Hope everyone had a fantastic and relaxing holiday weekend!

New Contract News

I have news and I can finally share!

I am going to be part of Carina's M/M holiday anthology, which will be released 12/5/2011. Also in the anthology will be stories by Josh Lanyon, KA Mitchell, and Harper Fox. I know - awesome company! I'm quite geeked about it. My novella is tentatively titled My True Love Gave to Me, but that will likely change (my guess is to something a bit...shorter). And yes, it's a Regency-set story.

In other news, Deliberately Bound is available on All Romance eBooks as a free story. I've had readers ask if my other free stories were available in .pdf format, and it got me thinking about offering the stories as .pdfs as well as having them on my website. Turns out, it's not all that difficult to format a Word doc and turn it into a .pdf, and it's even easier to upload a book to ARe. Over the next month, I'm going to format Deliberately Unbound and Pleasures of Somerville Park and put them on ARe, as well. I'll post here when they are on the site.

Deliberately Bound - free story

Deliberately Bound, a new free short story featuring Oliver and Vincent from the Bound series, is now up on my website. Click HERE to check it out.

The story takes place about 7 months after Bound Forever, and like their other short story, it's pretty much one long sex scene. I got the idea while working on edits for Bound Forever. It felt like something the guys would eventually do, so of course, I couldn't resist making it a freebie story. I won't give away any spoilers, but I'll give you a couple of my fav lines -

"You are enjoying this immensely, aren't you?" Vincent muttered.
"Indeed."

I hope you enjoy the story!

Updates Version 2.0

Just a quick post to say I finally finished Deliberately Bound, the next free short story for Oliver and Vincent! In fact, I just finished it about five minutes ago. Once Shawn, my awesome crit partner, gives it a read (and finds my typos), I'll have it posted on my website. Should be up by Thursday, and I'll post here when it's available.

Speaking of Oliver and Vincent, Bound Forever is now available on Amazon for Kindle.

I found this quiz over at Eyre's blog and couldn't resisting sharing it. How Many Baboons Could You Take In a Fight (armed only with a giant dildo?) I had a pathetically low score of 16. *hangs head at self*

And a thanks goes out to Lily for the cookie. I snagged it ages ago from her blog. I just can't resist studious cookies.

Updates

Well, it's mid-week and I haven't posted Deliberately Bound yet. The reason - I haven't finished it yet. In the future, I'm going to try to keep my mouth shut until something's done, because just when I think my schedule is perfectly planned, it gets wacked. Never fails. In this case, I thought I was totally safe. I was only looking out a week and the short's 1/2 written.

The source of the wacking? An opportunity popped up. That's all I'm going to say for now since I don't want to jinx myself. Hopefully I'll have more news soon.

I'm not procrastinating. Promise. I am busy writing, but I want to finish Deliberately Bound, so I'll find some time to finish it soon. It's a smexy-fun story to write, plus I really like writing about Oliver and Vincent. The Bound series may be done, but I'm much too fond of the guys to say goodbye to them just yet.

As for today's cookie, I'm reading Dragon Bound by Thea Harrison and this pic reminds me of Dragos. Plus Marco Blaze is hot. ;)

Oh, and I checked my keywords for the blog today. Most intersting one - 'regency cookies'. I'm thinking whoever is searching for regency cookies isn't looking for the type of cookies that can be found on my blog. *g*