/drumroll please:

Alexandra Adamovich

Alexandra, I’ll email you to get your shipping information (if you don’t email or message me first.)

And congratulations!

“So, at least I finally get to see what I missed the other morning,” Cade murmured.

Angie eyed him balefully over the rim of her coffee cup as she took a fortifying swallow. “Well, feel free to leave now that you’ve satisfied your curiosity.”

Shaking his head, he patted the playbook. “I really did come to go over this. I didn’t expect to find you still in bed at nine o’clock in the morning. But I can’t say I’m sorry I did. You look…wonderful.”

“Oh, please. I look like death warmed over.”

“I think you look sleepy and rumpled and desperately in need of kissing.”

“You have to stop that,” she snapped. Because all of it was true. As irritated and unsettled as she was by his presence, her lips felt heavy and swollen with need.

Both pairs.


“Why?”
At first, she thought he was pulling her leg, but then she realized the question was absolutely genuine. He really didn’t see a conflict.

“Because you’re my boss. You can’t just come to my house first thing on a Saturday morning and hit on me while I’m still in my pajamas.”

“Well, you could always take them off,” he suggested, waggling his eyebrows.

“Oh my God, you’re impossible.”

“On the contrary, when it comes to you, I’m willing to be very, very possible.”

I’m giving away a Kindle Paperwhite to celebrate the release of Skin in the Game. To be eligible to win, you need to sign up for my newsletter and like my Facebook page. You can increase the number of chances to win by also adding Skin in the Game to your Goodreads shelf, tweeting about the contest, and following me on Twitter. Here’s the widget to enter. Good luck!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

It’s finally here! It’s finally here! I’ve been dying to reveal the cover/cover copy for SKIN IN THE GAME, my Entangled Brazen debut, for weeks. And now, I finally can.

*drum roll, please*

SKIN IN THE GAME (A Play Action Novel)

Angela Peterson was always the quiet, shy kid growing up in Harper Falls, crushing on the high school quarterback and honing her football strategy skills. Now grown up and coaching the high school team, she’s shocked when that same sexy quarterback returns to Harper Falls asks her back to his hotel room. And then tries to steal her job. Injured NFL quarterback Cade Reynolds is in Harper Falls to take over as interim head coach, and he never thought the tall, blond bombshell he propositioned would offer up any resistance. Not to a repeat of the amazingly wild night they shared and certainly not to his coaching position. But the Harper Falls High Eagles are Angie’s team, and even the hometown hero won’t take that away from her, no matter how hot he is. As the two engage in a battle of wits and wills, this is one game neither is prepared to lose. Preorder at: Amazon Barnes & Noble

Yesterday, I was discussing with another author her puzzlement that a reviewer had given her book one star on Goodreads but a C- grade on a website. “Doesn’t one star mean F?” (She was totally okay with the fact that the reviewer didn’t like the book, by the way, just surprised that the grade was so much higher than she’d expected.) Then, coincidentally, I oversaw a conversation on Twitter about the fact that a reader might dislike a book but recognize that it’s well-crafted.

I immediately thought of Moby Dick, which I had to read in high school. I found it one of the most loathesome, most boring books I’d ever had the misfortune to encounter. If I were giving that book a star rating based on how much I enjoyed it, I would unequivocally give it one star. In fact, I would probably give it zero. But I would be hard-pressed to say that Moby Dick is a poorly crafted book. It’s not badly written. I just didn’t like the story it had to tell or the way it went about telling it. But liking a work isn’t a measure of the *quality* of the work. And letter grades are a measure of quality, at least in my opinion. So, for quality of work, I’d be forced to give Moby Dick an A, even though I didn’t enjoy reading a single word of it.

What makes this disconnect interesting to me is that, while I can easily see how a book can be very good from a craft perspective but utterly unenjoyable to a reader, I wonder how poor the “craft” part of a book before the “enjoyment” part of the story is damaged for the majority of readers. Personally, I find that the craft of a book has to be at least a C grade for me to enjoy the book. If I am constantly being jerked out of the story by craft problems like poor mechanics, inconsistent characterization/world-building, or holes in the plot big enough to drive an elephant through, I really can’t enjoy it. Clearly, many readers feel differently and can overlook things I can’t. I suspect errors in grammar, punctuation and spelling in particular are less noticeable to many readers than they are to me, as are certain world-building issues (i.e., errors in forms of address in historicals drive me up a tree because I’ve spent so many hours trying to determine what’s correct that errors stick out like a sore thumb to me).

Do you have a book you hate that you recognize as great? Or one you recognize is terrible from a craft perspective but love anyway? I’d love to hear about them!

Um…short answer: I don’t know.

Longer answer:

I finished Skin in the Game, the first of two contemporary novels I’ve contracted with Entangled for their Brazen line, earlier this week and sent it to my editor. They have not yet given me a formal release date, though, so I really have no idea when to expect it to be released. If I had to guess, I’d say by April or May at the latest, but really, that’s pure speculation. As soon as I have that information, though, I’ll share it with you. I’m also hoping to get an unedited version of the first chapter up on the website soon.

The second of these novels has a due date of May 1, so I need to get started on it fairly soon. I wrote the cover copy for the story, titled Rules of Possession, right before I went of vacation last week. For me, the process of writing a book almost always begins with coming up with a title, followed by writing the blurb (which tells me what the story is about, more or less), and then writing the actual book. In the case of Rules, I knew who the hero and heroine would be, because they both make appearances in Skin, but I didn’t know exactly what the problem or conflict between them was going to be until I wrote the cover copy paragraphs:

After the car accident that crushed his ankle, pro quarterback Warren Harris isn’t sure he’ll ever walk normally again, let alone play football. Then he meets Rachel Lindsey, a crack physical therapist who’s convinced the problem is more in Warren’s head than his foot. She promises to get him in fighting trim for next season as long as he follows her rules, the first of which is to keep his hands to himself. Unfortunately, that’s going to be a tall order, because the petite, curvaceous brunette pushes every one of Warren’s buttons.

It goes against every rule of professional ethics to get personally involved with a patient, and Rachel won’t break rules, even for a guy she’s lusted after from a distance for years. That is, until a freak late spring blizzard snows them in for a long weekend and the gloves—and everything else—come off. Now Rachel fears she lacks the professional distance to complete his rehabilitation, but Warren is determined to keep her…both in his bed and as his therapist. And he just might win. After all, possession is nine-tenths of the law.

Now, however, I have to do some “percolating,” which for me means visualizing the major scenes and turning points in the story so that I can start writing it. While I’m doing that (which should take me about a month or so), I am hoping to write the third and final Lords of Lancashire novella, A Matter of Indiscretion. This story has been percolating for a while, and it’s the one that makes the most sense for me to finish before I dig into Rules, so my goal is to have it finished and off for editing by January 1. Assuming that happens, it should be out sometime in February. (Um, yeah, I know. Optimism springs eternal.) If I don’t get it to the editor by January 1, then it’s likely that the manuscript will return to the backburner until Rules is finished, which means it won’t be out until summer. (Go, optimistic estimate!)

So the long story, essentially, is that I’ll have something new out before summer. Which book and when, I cannot say. I wish I were better at estimating how long it will take me to write a book, but unfortunately, as with true love, the course of writing a book never did run smooth!

Introduction

Enjoy, and maybe when I get back, I’ll have time to post some pictures and stories from the trip.

A few months ago, a friend in Germany had and I had a friendly disagreement. Over Tweetdeck, we DM’d with each other, arguing good-naturedly about whether the world had changed much since the 1980s. He said no; I said yes. My friend’s reasoning was that we still had rock, we still wore t-shirts and jeans everywhere. There was technology, he said, but the basic fabric of society had not changed.

However, I pointed out that the shifts caused by technology and the end of the Cold War were pretty drastic. The very fact that I was having a conversation on my Macbook with a guy in unified Germany I’d met over Twitter was not something that would have happened in 1982. It has been said that the past in another country; it was very odd to think of my childhood and early adolescence in the 1980s, in a world without the commercial internet, where 16-bit games were the latest and hottest technology, where magazines were still important, and MTV still played music videos of white guys with big hair. I remember my little prepubescent tech-geek self was pretty smug about being able to play the latest games, and wasn’t it such a huge leap from games like Pong from the primitive ’70s! I think of myself when I was twelve, and I feel like an entirely different person, who lived in a completely different world.

So I used to imagine myself in a kind of “Peggy Sue Got Married” scenario. I would imagine myself wandering around in the late ’80s. I can still picture the vast white Miami Vice style lobby of our apartment building, where tons of Omni magazines where put on a huge glass table besides a few potted palms; the sexy robot ladies on the cover seemed both seductive and ominous. I would also picture the “Brass Plum” teen boutique at the local Nordstrom’s, with its prevalence of totally rad music videos and cheap and gaudy polyester clothing. But mostly, I would picture the local library; this was my main hangout because I was total nerd. (Even the librarians knew me.) I loved perusing the bins of records, the VHS tapes, and the mass market and genre fiction. Since I was an aspiring artist even back then, I would spend a lot of time looking at the covers.

I’ve always been fascinated with time travel. I’m not sure if it came from my early love of Back to the Future or Quantum Leap, because I remember being pretty keen on time travel reading classic E. Nesbit and Edward Eager books around 1984 or so. I’ve always liked the idea of different times happening simultaneously; I especially loved the idea that, on the other side of a door, you could be a hundred years in the past, or a hundred years in the future. But for years I just contented myself with historical fiction. The first time I tried my hand at an actual time travel story was back in 2004; the plotting was insanely tricky, though. I put it aside and concentrated on other things.

However, back in 2010, I was stuck in the middle of another one of my epic historical fiction stories, when I got tired of working on something that wouldn’t get finished. I decided to revisit the whole time travel thing, except this time I would use my vaguely “Peggy Sue Got Married” imaginings and set something in the late ’80s. I think I set a land speed record writing the first draft. It took a month. In some ways, it seemed to actually be writing itself.

In Quantum Leap, Sam is always going back to help rescue some lost soul who needs his help. It’s never addressed how all this meddling would eventually screw up the space-time continuum, though I always imagined it would. I still love the show; I imagine it’s had more than a little to do with the fact that one of my favorite plots is a woman rescuing a doomed, beautiful man. However, instead of ‘rewriting the timeline’ idea that you find in both Quantum Leap and the original Back to the Future, I decided to use (obliquely) the alternate timeline theory, which was put forward with eloquent simplicity in Back to the Future II.

“What is the alternate timeline theory?” you may ask. It’s the best way to prevent the grandfather paradox. The grandfather paradox poses the question of what would happen if you went back in time to kill your own grandfather, which causes a paradox (e.g. how can you therefore exist to kill your own grandfather in the first place?). Well, in alternate timeline theory, if I went back in time to kill my own grandpa, I would cause a new timeline to diverge–one where I would not be born. However, since the original timeline where I had been born still existed, that means that the paradox is avoided (and the space-time continuum doesn’t explode around me).

If this confuses you, don’t worry–I go light on time travel theory in A Question of Time. (Though some questions will be answered in the sequel!) My heroine, Celia, finds herself back in 1989 and meets her beloved English teacher, Mr. Forrest, who was killed in a tragic car accident that very year. As she spends a weekend back in the Reagan era, she finds herself falling in love with him. Can she save his life? Or will she be forever lost in time?

The book is available on Amazon, at the Champagne Books store, and at other vendors like All Romance Ebooks and BookStrand. It will be available soon on Barnes and Noble.

If you follow me on Twitter or are friends with me on Facebook, you may already have heard that I accepted an offer from Entangled Publishing last week for two books in their Brazen line. These are category-length contemporaries, released pretty much exclusively in digital format, although there could eventually be a print version. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Entangled, they’re a relatively new publishing house, but are behind some recent major success stories, including THE MARRIAGE BARGAIN by Jennifer Probst and WRONG BED, RIGHT GUY by Katee Robert, both of which hit both the New York Times and the USA Today bestseller lists. Needless to say, I feel like I’m hanging out with the right crowd .

Want to know more about the first book I sold to Entangled? I’ve got the blurb and the first chapter up here.

So, I’m super thrilled about this, but–you knew there was a ‘but’ coming, didn’t you?–needless to say, it kind of throws off my planned writing schedule for the next six months or so. When my agent submitted my proposal to Entangled, I figured it would take them several months to get back to me, since I’d heard through they grapevine that they were swamped with submissions. Plenty of time, I thought, to finish INCARNATE, its accompanying prequel, and A MATTER OF INDISCRETION (the third Lords of Lancashire novella) before I had to turn my attention to finishing the manuscript I’d sent, should the publisher even want to contract it. Needless to say, life is what happens when you’re making other plans.

Obviously, finishing the books I’ve contracted to Entangled is now my top priority. That doesn’t mean I won’t continue working on the projects I’ve planned to self-publish since the beginning of the year, however, their release dates are likely to slip into 2013. I know, I know. Bad writer, no cookie!

Anyway, I’ll be adjusting my “Coming Soon” page to reflect the new order of business. Because I’d like to wrap up the Lords of Lancashire series so I can get the print anthology out as soon as possible, A MATTER OF INDISCRETION may be the first order of business once I’ve met my deadline for Entangled. On the other hand, I was pretty well into INCARNATE and really having fun with it when I had to shift gears so… (Did I mention I’m a Gemini and I’m hopeless when it comes to making decisions?)

If you have preference for what you want me to tackle first, let me know in the comments. Otherwise, I’ll keep you posted .

I’m having a bit of a love affair with this song. The lyrics really speak to me about the challenges of modern romantic relationships. Until today, however, I hadn’t seen the video. Now that have, I love the song and Matt Nathanson himself just that little bit more.

Edited: I am having malware issues with my site, which I think might have been related to this embedded video. I removed it to see if I can correct the error.

Modern Love by Matt Nathanson and Mark Weinberg
copyright 2011

She said this talking
Kind of wears me out
And all these salesmen
Baby, make me tired

They’re no good, to tell you the truth, she said
I’ve been gettin’ used to liars

They send me love songs, with store bought words
They make promises, like politicians

We stumble
And disconnect
Over and over again

This modern love is not enough
She said, watch your back
I’m nobody’s girlfriend
This modern love is not enough
Oh oh oh oh oh oh
They said one big exhale never did me no, good

I’d let em in, I
Oh man, I’d let em win
I’d burn my house down
Just to hear them scream my name
I’ve carried hopes
And heavy daydreams she said
But I’m done with sleeping

Take the phone calls
Take this circus
Take the drama, cause baby it’s worthless

This modern love is not enough
She said, watch your back
I’m nobody’s girlfriend
This modern love is not enough
Oh oh oh oh oh oh
They said one big exhale never did me no, good
One big exhale never did me no good

And the bright light shines
And we ache and we break and we try
Stage light shines
And they blind our eyes
To it all
Still we ache and we break and we just can’t get it right

This modern love is not enough
She said, watch your back
I’m nobody’s girlfriend
This modern love is not enough
Oh oh oh oh oh oh

Oh this modern love is a taco truck
Come on take the phone calls baby
I’ll take all the silence

This modern love is not enough
Oh oh oh oh oh
One big exhale never did me no good
One exhale
One big exhale
Yeah one exhale never did me no good
Never did me no good

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I’m getting ready to do a major overhaul of my website. As much as I love the look and feel of this template, which Croco Designs did for me quite a few years ago, it’s time for a change, not just for “freshness,” but because I’m branching out into more genres and this website is entirely focused on my historical brand (the “History Made Hot” tagline).

That’s never really told the whole story, though, since I’ve published several contemporaries going back as far as 2008. And now, with my first historical urban fantasy book coming out later this year (I hope; at the rate I’m able to write these days, I might not finish until this time next year!), I really need to clarify and expand my brand.

To that end, I’ve commissioned the awesome Joanne Renaud to do a series of illustrations for me which will then be incorporated into my website design. She’s done three illustrations so far:

Walter and Artemisia from Hot Under the Collar	Elodie and friends from Incarnate	Angie and Cade from Skin in the Game1

From these illustrations, Joanne stitched together a three-part header graphic which will appear on all the pages that are shared across genres (e.g., my welcome page, the blog, my bio, etc.). I think she did a fabulous job with this and it’s going to look awesome in the final design (it’s a little small here; it’ll be wider/taller and more legible when it’s actually at the top of the page):

But here’s my dilemma. You’ll see my old “History Made Hot” tagline for my historical brand on the left and “Modern Love,” which is my tagline for my contemporary brand. But I’m absolutely stuck for a tagline for my urban fantasy brand. And I need help! I’ve come up with a few ideas, most of which are either lame or I know are too tongue-in-cheek. However, for the record, here (in no particular order) are the ones I’ve come up with:

• Urban Fantasy with Spirit
• Gaslight (Urban) Fantasy
• Kick-Sass Urban Fantasy

Yeah, the last one is really stupid, lol, but my punning brain just couldn’t resist.

Anyway, the problems with these taglines are many. First of all, I think all of them might be a little too tightly related to The Reapers series. It’s my first urban fantasy and it’s set in 1903, so it’s historical, but once that series is finished, I have a few other story ideas that fall into the urban fantasy/science fiction realm, and one of them is contemporary while the other is futuristic. So, ideally, I need a tagline for that center panel that is very generic but still has a “brand” identity to it (i.e., it doesn’t just say “Urban Fantasy and Science Fiction”).

As I’ve been thinking about what my “brand” is when it comes to my stories in this subgenre, it’s that they are less action/adventure oriented and more about solving mysteries or puzzles. They’re more brain than brawn, I guess . So a good tagline for that panel would capture that idea even more than the idea of paranormal creatures or time period.

Long story short, I would love suggestions. Here, on Twitter (to @jackiebarbosa), or by email (jackie at jackiebarbosa.com). Any and all ideas (even snarky ones!) are welcome.