Scarlet Letters

Tonight is celebrating her three (!!) October releases in a chat. Drop by! I will unfortunately be working, but I'm in awe of her productivity. When: Monday, October 29, 8 PM, Central Where: Angel's Chat Room. and click the "Enter my Chat room" link Why: to promote "Raising the Dead," "Shifting Back" and "Ain't No Easy Run" Why should you come: fun! Frolic! free e-books! Also, M.R. Sellars is getting serious ink today. Actually yesterday, but I had no time to read the Sunday Post. Murv is a helluva guy, and he makes good book. Seriously, when I was a barely-published hack with two e-zines to my name, he sat down with me and gave me some of the best career advice ever, and made me a fan. He also writes the terrific Rowan Gant mystery series, in which his detective is a witch of the real-life Wiccan variety. He also is a witch, and he began writing the series in part because he wanted to see a realistic portrayal of Wicca in genre f...

"This story is gripping and raw with intense emotion and great characters... This vampire world and its characters are created so realistically you almost expect to hear about them on the evening news, and not be able to sleep afterwards." -- Coffee Time Romance* http://www.coffeetimeromance.com/BookReviews/Abaddon.html * Warning: Mild spoilers in the full review. Now don't you want to buy it? Sure you do! http://www.cerridwenpress.com/productpage.asp?ISBN=9781419911224

Enchanting Reviews has this to say about ABADDON: "This story is not a romance by any means. But it is a story of loss and revenge. A story of love and a hate that has lasted for a hundred years and that will not be denied. It is a story of fire. The fire of the human and the vampire hearts. A story of a hate that must be stopped or the vampire and human friendships that are barely holding on will be shattered because vampire consorts are being killed and someone wants the vampires to take the blame.... ...a storytelling ability to rival that of Stephen King." Wow. Thank you!

Because it came up about 3846921 times in last night's chat, here's the official status of the Sanctuary universe. As most readers know, there are three published Sanctuary stories, all in the SETTING SUNS collection (available now from New Babel Books!). From what I've heard from readers, they were among the most popular stories in the book. I enjoyed writing them, and was pleased that so many people seemed to enjoy them enough to ask me (constantly) when they can get more Sanctuary. The first book is written. And rewritten. But the current version was written before NOCTURNAL URGES or my subsequent three books. I look at it now and cringe. I am actually glad the one agent to whom I submitted it turned it down - it would have tanked (and been blasted by reviewers) in its current incarnation. It needs work. Enough work that I simply don't have time to do it right now. See, it's all about cash flow, folks. The 2007 convention season is over, but 2008 is looming and I...

Thanks to everyone who came to the Therapy Chat! My computer unfortunately barfed the trivia contest, so that part ended fast. But it was great to hear everyone's thoughts and predictions, and even better to hear that people are enjoying ABADDON. Seriously, the best part of all of it is to hear from someone, "I really enjoyed your book." Even better is "Damn you, woman, you made me cry!" It seems the parts that needed to work did, and the parts people were supposed to notice they did. Creatively, I'm happier with ABADDON than anything I've published to date. It's almost enough to believe in. Heh. Now back to work... And remember, if you liked the book, TELL SOMEONE!

You asked for it, you're gonna get it. Since so many readers have told me they need therapy after finishing ABADDON, we're gonna give you another chat to let out your feelings. Oh, and celebrate Halloween with your fellow lunatics. WHO: All you characters, god help me WHAT: Therapy/Halloween Chat! WHEN: 7-9 p.m. CST Tuesday, Oct. 23 WHERE: The Wilderness Chat Room (directions below) WHY: To discuss ABADDON and/or throw things at the author, plus celebrate a horrorific Halloween! The usual prizes and silliness, only the trivia questions will be about horror movies and novels, not just my stuff. You know you wanna. Wilderness Chat Room a) Go to http://wilderness.homeip.net/wilderness/connect/bean/index.html. b) Wait while it loads. This can take a minute. You may see a little coffee cup thinking. c) If it asks you if you trust the applet, you say YES. d) You'll see a little black screen. Click File and go down to Connect. e) It will ask you for a login name and password. You ...

I spent the weekend in my old town, tooling around with my friends from college. It's always a blast to see them, even if they do remember way too much of my youthful shenanigans. Ho-hum, look at ceiling, nice day for a morning, eh? But while I was in town, I thought I'd get a little work done. When I was last in Memphis in March, I hit all the independent bookstores I could find, but Burke's Books (famous indie new-used store) was in the process of moving from its fabled location on Poplar next to Circuit Playhouse to a new location in the Cooper-Young district. So this trip, I hit Burke's. Missed the owners, but the kind young man behind the counter took my pitch kit. I also dropped by the main branch of the Memphis library and the University of Memphis library to donate copies of Setting Suns, along with contact info in case they have any questions or concerns. The Memphis library didn't exist when I was in college, and if it had, I would have LIVED there. It...

Signs you're done for the day: “So the full-immersion course isn’t standard?” Cat said, trying to crack jokes. No one was laughing. Including the author. Fuck! 31,461 / 90,000 (35.0%) It's like when I get in the room with JASPR, the fun dies. I intended for them to lighten up the book, expand a bit in the world of ghostliness and most of all, expand the word count. It ain't working. It's not the characters' fault - okay, maybe it is, they're all a little too sour. Either Shane or Justin needs to be the serious one, and the other one needs to be a smartass. I think it needs to be Justin - Shane's all law-and-order. I don't know. I'm into a new sequence now, the break in the parade o' flashbacks. Chapter Five is one giant flashback, from the boys as kids up to the promise at the river. Then we break, and Cat spends a little time with JASPR trying to figure out what the hell is going on (and going on an investigation) before she goes ...

29,459 / 90,000 (32.7%) I'm amazed I could get any words at all tonight, the weekend I've had. The Pirate Festival yesterday, church this morning and Six Flags this afternoon. My aches have aches, and the rum is gone. (Make your own jokes, I'm tired.) But I picked up the new CD from Three Pints Gone, which seems to be a group that conspires to inspire me. Last year's sea chanties inspired the final sequence of THE COLD ONES, believe it or not, and this year's collection includes several songs that seem designed for YELLOW ROSES. Playing them helped me get through the first of the flashback sequences. Not much to be changed here, just language and cleaning it up. I did note that I named Colin's adoptive parents Parker, which is a bad move since Det. Parker is such a major character in the NU series. So I switched it to Massey. I knew a Massey once. Other research: • Diptheria was quite common at the turn of the last century. In the 1700s it was rumor...

26,644 / 90,000 (29.6%) In the end, I solved my JASPR problem by ignoring it. I fixed it up a bit, but nothing was making me like it. So I went on to the next scene. What do I tell aspiring writers all the time? If you get stuck, bust through it. If you can't bust through it, step around it and keep going. If other JASPR scenes also suck, I may rethink their position in this book. But for now, we're on to the flashbacks. Get ready to cry.

One of the prizes I gave away last night needs some explanation. There is a true Elizabeth Donald collectible, believe it or not. My first print publication was in a small Canadian horror magazine called 13 STORIES. It was adorably pocket-sized and had really good stuff. They bought my short story "Silent," and it appeared in 2003. I celebrated like mad - there was little to no money involved, but up until then I had only been published in small online magazines. Unfortunately, that was the last issue for 13 STORIES. They went bust. I still have a handful of my contributor's copies. And Mr. Drew Sanford won one in the contest. It's rather appropriate, since I named a major character in ABADDON after him. If I ever make the big time, the final issue of 13 STORIES will be worth something, I expect. If not, well, it's cute.

It's odd how one gets reinvested. I haven't written anything on YELLOW ROSES in at least a week. Of course, the whole "flying to Phoenix" thing didn't help, but the real reason was that I felt blocked. The JASPR scene was not to my liking. I still want JASPR in the story - I think it will help a lot with tone, pace flow and so on - but it wasn't funny. Or interesting. And I didn't know how to fix it. The scene needs to be there, it's important both for the storyline and for the pacing, but... meh. It really kind of derailed me. And right after this is the flashback sequence that, to me, is the best part of the book. So I need to slam-dunk this scene. The boy gets the benefit, I guess. I need several hours uninterrupted screen time. So unless he gets his little self in trouble today, he'll go to skate night and I'll hole up with the laptop at St. Louis Bread Company or Sacred Grounds. Maybe Sacred Grounds would be better. Nothing breaks up a bl...

I am happy to report my new horror-mystery novel, ABADDON, is now available for purchase on Cerridwen Press's web site. http://www.cerridwenpress.com/productpage.asp?ISBN=9781419911224 ABADDON Beneath the dark Memphis streets, something is stirring. Filled with ancient fury. Seeking revenge on the ones who live above. A revenge born in fire. The fires are raging in Memphis and no one is safe. Ryan and Samantha must descend into darkness beyond their imagining to find answers to mysteries of the past as Detectives Freitas and Parker seek the truth about the present. And the return of an old foe could make the future a dark place indeed…save for the flames of Abaddon. Go forth and buy! And don't forget, if you don't like the ebook style, email me at elizabethdonald at yahoo dot com after you've bought the ebook. I can arrange for it to be printed at cost for $8 and shipped to you. Hope you like it!

In case you missed it, my vampire novel ABADDON comes out tomorrow from Cerridwen Press. FINALLY! My first horror novel to begin as an ebook, so I'll be interested to see how that goes. (Link will be added as soon as it's up.) WHAT: Online chat party to celebrate the release of ABADDON WHEN: 7-9 p.m. CST Thursday, Sept. 27 WHERE: The Wilderness Chat Room (directions below) WHO: Everybody! Including me, probably with a rum and coke in hand. WHY: Fun! Prizes! Free! Wilderness Chat Room Directions: a) Go to wilderness.homeip.net/wil...ndex.html. b) Wait while it loads. This can take a minute. You may see a little coffee cup thinking. c) If it asks you if you trust the applet, you say YES. d) You'll see a little black screen. Click File and go down to Connect. e) It will ask you for a login name and password. You only have to do this step once. Don't worry, no one's logging so much as an IP address. We got goooood prizes this time, folks. Be there! And oh yeah, buy the ...

24,835 / 90,000 (27.6%) Finally got the first JASPR scene written. I don't like it. It's not funny. I mean, they bitch at each other, but I don't know if that qualifies as funny. My ghosthunters are: • Rivka Zoole, de factor leader. She's about Cat's age, with short-cropped black hair and a two-pack-a-day habit. She's tough, and used to being mocked because of her belief in ghosts. Her grandmother appeared in her dorm room three days after the funeral, and she's been fascinated by ghosts ever since. • Shane Moore, a cop who works with JASPR in secret so it doesn't impact his career. He saw a ghost during a foot patrol, where he ended up chasing a man through the woods who had died in the road several minutes before. • Sora Newton, a sensitive who has believed in her psychic ability all her life. I'm not sure if she really is psychic or is simply sensitive enough to people's emotions to feel a presence in the room. She doesn't tal...

Beginning today, there will be a trivia contest running on my YahooGroup! Each day, I'll toss out a question and the first one to answer it wins a prize! We'll do this each day until ABADDON is released on Sept. 27. It's coming out as an ebook from Cerridwen Press, and I know you'll ALL want to pick it up! Sure you will! Join the Yahoogroup at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/elizabethdonald/join, you know you wanna.

It's no secret that my favorite author is Stephen King. King was my entry drug, my segue from the world of Nancy Drew to grown-up novels. My mother deemed his books usually too adult for me, so I swiped them out of her bookshelf and left the dustjackets in their place so she wouldn't notice they were missing. I read everything he wrote, except the Dark Tower books because they were hard to understand. As I grew older and began to appreciate the value of books as collectible items as well as purveyors of story, I began to collect first-edition hardbacks of King's work. I have never had the opportunity to meet the man and have him sign any of them, but I live in hope. The problem is, I have a dreadful memory. Although I have read everything he has written outside the Dark Tower, many of those books were my mother's, not mine. I have often found myself in a used bookstore somewhere, staring at a hardback King and wondering, "Is this one I already have?" I have an...

22,214 / 90,000 (24.7%) And falls flat. Okay, not yet. But I got to the first new scene, where I introduce JASPR... and I got nothin'. I guess I'm just not feeling the funny today. Not that JASPR is supposed to be all yucks, they're going to be serious about this deal, but... it's just not in me tonight. And as my dear friend Frank Fradella says, you can't MAKE yourself write. It's there or it's not, and tonight it's not. Tomorrow is a no-writing day, thanks to an insanely early AND late day. We'll attack JASPR on Friday night's writeapalooza.

Cat knelt beside the gravestone, her gut still twisting, her heart pounding. She didn’t look over her shoulder, trying not to think who would be there. And when her mind turned from the cemetery’s darkness, she felt physically ill, as though Mark had punched her in the stomach instead of gazed on her with anger and hurt. She wanted to turn back time, make things right, fix whatever had gone wrong that began somewhere within herself. Something in her chest felt broken, and for the first time she could recall, the broken edges rubbed against each other, stabbing her from the inside out. I'm writing the cheerful stuff! 20,973 / 90,000 (23.3%) Cat is quite possibly the most fucked-up heroine I've ever written. Have I said that before? Well, it bears repeating. I love Cat so much. Tomorrow things get interesting. New scenes. New characters. Did I say tomorrow? I meant Tuesday. Alas, tomorrow is a night shift at the paper. Silly day job, making me work and stuff. Today...

News is just bustin' out all over. Can you tell a new book's almost out? • The "I Hate AirTran" Scratch-and-Dent Sale! Yes, thanks to the charmers at AirTran that managed to destroy my lovely leather duffel bag, the books inside it had some damages. Mostly crinkled covers or scuffing along the spine. My misfortune is your gain! Starting today through ABADDON's release on Sept. 27, I'm offering damaged copies of SETTING SUNS for $10 and NOCTURNE for $12. Only while the damaged copies last! Once they're gone, it goes back up to the regular price, folks. Order by emailing me at elizabethdonald at yahoo dot com - the web site(s) are still selling undamaged copies at full price. • The "Make Way For New Shirts" Sale! The CafePress shop will get a complete makeover soon, with a new look, new stuff, new designs and all-new merchandise. So now's your last chance to get most of the products currently available on the site! Drop over and pick something ...