Ugh, look...

...I don't think I have the mental capacity to read all the LJ entries I've missed in the past couple of weeks, so just tell me how you all are, okay? Are you all well? Healthy? Whole? Having wonderful times doing exciting things?

I am getting back into the working groove after my holiday. We had a hot, sunny, seafood-filled time in Spain, and I got to swim every day in the pool and the ocean, which was awesome. We got back to the UK on Monday to rain and grey clouds, and it now feels very autumnal here, which makes me want to make dozens of spicy, pumpkin-scented perfumes. But I don't have any pumpkin-scented oil yet, so never mind. Instead I'm working on The Crow Bride and trying to make sense of the piles and piles of work emails I have waiting for me (apparently we hired some people while I was away? And now they need stuff from me? Or maybe we're going to hire them but they need stuff from me first? I don't know. I forgot how to do my job while I was in Spain).

Anyway. I missed you all, internet people! You don't look at me funny when someone asks what I'm thinking about and I say "werelions."

Save the Pearls WTF: Chapter Three

I keep meaning to get on with this and then other stuff happens. But tonight no other stuff is happening, so let's proceed with chapter three. If you recall, at the end of chapter two, Eden's awful, bullying, arrogant, prejudiced, Coal boss, Bramford displays extreme prejudice against racial-slur-hurling Eden by suspending her from her job. It was so sad, you guys. But it was okay because her "dark prince" Jamal is going to see her later.

Right! Where are we?

"The shrimp that sleeps is carried away by the current."

*That is a Chilean proverb. I don't really know what it means** and it's not really relevant to anything, but I like it. So feel free to make it your quote of the day and tell it to all your friends and co-workers!

**I guess it means "don't fall asleep on the job" or something similar. The Chilean version is better.

Anyway! Here's five things for your Monday morning:

1. I achieved my goals last week. I wrote a query letter and synopsis for Undertow and yesterday I submitted it to a couple of places. I will submit it to a few more this week as well, but I ran out of steam yesterday. Writing a synopsis is haaaaaaaard.

2. Because I achieved that goal, I started writing again today. I haven't really done any since June, apart from something I started and then scrapped, so I feel a bit rusty. I decided to ease myself back in with a novella, so I'll be focusing my efforts on finishing The Crow Bride, the last Brides of Darkness novella. I got about 900 words done this morning, aiming for 2k altogether today.

3. Is anyone else following @SarcasticRover on Twitter? I am pretty excited about the fact that, hey, we built a thing and got it to Mars! I have to admit, most of my excitement stems from all the future "how they faked the Mars Rover" documentaries I'm sure will happen.

4. Want to see 50 cakes that look like Cthulhu? Of course you do.

5. Just a quick shout-out to two amazing independent perfume-makers I've discovered recently - Mannaia Fragrances and Fabled Fragrances. I'm making a big effort to cut synthetic products out of my health and beauty routine where possible, and as much as I love Pure Poison, that goes for perfume too. Luckily, in addition to making a kajillion of my own, I've found places like this too. I'm wearing Mannaia's Bathory today and it's beautiful.

And that is my Monday. How's everybody else doing?

Guest Blog - Sandra Bunino

Today we've got Sandra Bunino and a rather tasty teaser from her new release, MIA'S SUBMISSION. This is already shooting up the bestseller charts - check out the snippet to see why! I adore the colours on this cover, as a side note.

Hardworking Mia Lavender's been offered a promotion she can’t refuse--VP of Client Experience at New York’s exclusive BDSM club, The Satin Rose Experience, or SRE. Mia's kept her submissive tendencies a secret, until now. She'll have ample opportunity to explore her fantasy because to succeed in her new role at SRE, she will need on-the-job training at the hands of Asher Cane.

During Asher Cane's very first training session with Mia, he fails to follow his own rules and has the hottest vanilla sex of his life. Mia needs training, and Asher is damned if he'll allow another Dom to touch her. Can Asher be the dispassionate trainer Mia needs to learn the exquisite give and take of dominance and submission? Or will her submission come only at the cost of his heart?

Mia’s Submission is Book One of The Satin Rose Experience (SRE) series.
 
SRE, New York’s elite BDSM club residing on the twentieth floor of Rosebud Resorts, contains ten uniquely themed suites, each with its own story to tell. Find the introduction of SRE in The Satin Rose Experience, a short story in Evernight Publishing’s Keyboards and Kink Anthology.

Just a quick note...

Please do not leave Victoria Foyt's home address in the comment section of my blog. I am not interested in "outing" the personal/contact details of writers, no matter how misguided, inappropriate, or downright hateable I or you might find that writer to be. Posting someone else's person details around the internet is never okay. I will delete any comments containing that kind of information.

"It may be bad, but it's the only way you can do anything really good."

So as previously noted, writing. That's not happening for me at the moment. But you know, you can only spend so much time bemoaning your writer's block before you start to feel like a bit of a twat. Or I can, anyway.And since the only cure for not writing is to start writing, I have resolved to do so. I figure that even if what I write is total rubbish, it's still a step up from nothing.

Plan for the week:

1. Write a synopsis for Undertow
2. Write a cover letter for Undertow
3. Have Undertow submitted to at least two publishers by the weekend.
4. ???
5. PROFIT. Start writing something else.

I have three projects on my USB stick - the sequel to NIGHT AND CHAOS, the last Brides of Darkness book, and something else I can't remember and therefore must be very important and dear to me. My plan is, by next week, to have started work on one of these. And I don't care if I end up writing utter tripe, I just want to write.

Save the Pearls WTF: Chapter Two

You know, I've read a lot of reviews of this book this week, and I've seen a few comments along the lines of "just don't talk about this book. Bury it. Ignore it. Let it die." And while I can see the logic in not giving it any more publicity, I don't think "not talking about it" is ever the right course of action. I firmly believe that if things happen in real life, they are worth writing about, and that includes racism. And, intentionally or not, Save the Pearls is very, very racist. So to me, we need to talk about it. We need to pick it apart and mock it and slam it for being A) very very racist and B) very very badly written. I don't see how we make the world a better place by not talking about things, even ugly things.

Also, this book is so full of WTF, it would be a crime not to mock it.

So, onwards, to chapter two!

Perfume Lab: Lessons learned in making oils

So I've been trying my hand at perfume oils recently, which is fun but also frustrating. I mentioned in an earlier blog that I get a really clear idea of what I want a scent to be like, and if I can't match that in real life, I get pretty obsessive about working and re-working it until I get it right. Example - a couple of weeks ago I picked up some new fragrance oils (coconut, mango, sea spray, sweet rum) and decided they'd go really well with cedarwood and watemelon, and it'd be like a sort of "shipwrecked on a tropical island" fragrance. Six oils is more than I like to use in solid perfumes, so I had a go at making a perfume oil.

Lesson learned: cedarwood is way stronger than I think it is. I only added two drops to the mixture, but after a day of aging, it was all I could smell. No fruit scent at all. It actually worked quite well with the sweet rum, but it was less tropical and more "I spent a night in a dubious bar." So I gave it to Kyle.

I was still determined to get this castaway-tropic-shipwreck thing right though, so two days ago I tried again, without the cedarwood and watermelon. I upped the coconut and mango (which is a gorgeous smell all on its own) and cut the sweet rum down to two drops.

Lesson learned: sweet rum is also way stronger than I think. This version has been aging two days, and again there's no fruit scent at all. I'm going to leave it a week, but I think it'll be back to the drawing board on this one again.

My earliest batch of oils is currently ready for testing on skin, so I'm wearing one today - a black pepper, ylang ylang, sweet orange, and lily of the valley combo. It smells amazing in the bottle; the ylang ylang makes it really heady and sweet. But it smells of nothing on my skin.

Lesson learned: you can get away with not using proper base, middle, and top notes in solid perfumes, but not in liquid. With solid ones, I think they definitely last longer with a base/middle/top combo, but I guess the wax holds the scents together well enough that it isn't necessarily essential. If I'm wearing a solid perfume, I usually carry it around with me anyway to reapply and sniff like a freak every now and then, so it doesn't bother me if the scent fades after a couple of hours. But with the oils, I want to be able to apply it first thing, get all the joy of smelling it change throughout the day, and not need to carry a breakable bottle of mess around with me.

So, again because I have a really vivid idea of how this scent should smell, I'm going to remake it tonight with some base notes and a binder note to hold it all together and see what happens. I'm getting really impatient with my day job at the moment, because once I decide I want to do something, I want to do it right this second, and having to sit at a desk and pretend to work for several hours a day is really interferring with my actual life.

Anyway. This is my life at the moment - get home, clean up cat hair (Fergus's current favourite sleeping place is the dirty laundry pile in the bedroom), make perfume. I can't say I'm unhappy with it ^_^ Just need to work the writing back in there...