Sharp Words

Lorelie (whose faboo story Tarnished Angel, with the pretty, pretty cover, is currently running on The Serial) just informed me in the comments for the previous post that Like a Thief in the Night is on the slate for DA BWAHA March Madness contest, in the Erotica category. Wow. There are so many damn good reads on that page, I’m not sure I would even vote for Like a Thief. I am, however, super excited and honored to see my little novella on the list.

I’ve been meaning to move the blog over to Wordpress for the longest time now. Figures I’d get the gumption to do it the same weekend I vow to buckle down and wrap up a proposal I’m working on. Ah, procrastination.

Anyway, here it is. I still have a bit of work to do. I reserve the right to redo the title graphic at some point. I also need to redo the menu on my website home page…the list goes on.

If you’re looking for a way to procrastinate, may I recommend Joanna Bourne’s The Spymaster’s Lady? It’s one hell of an awesome book. I read it in one sitting, and ended up ordering in dinner because I read instead of cooking. Oh, well. Good books make up for mediocre food any day. At some point I will write a post to enumerate all of the things I loved about this book.

One nice bit of news, over there on the left. Like a Thief in the Night hit number 7 on the My Bookstore and More list. Thanks to everyone who has purchased and/or reviewed Like a Thief in the Night.

That’s how I felt when I hopped on the Internets this morning to read Sherry Thomas’s combined review of Ember and Like a Thief in the Night at Dear Author.

I should be all aglow with happiness–the final version of Like a Thief in the Night is turned in, and the excerpt is up on the Samhain site. Instead, all I see are things I want to change.

I can’t help it, I’m a fiddler. I nitpick. I tweak.

Editor Laurie and the ever-patient Bam can attest, every time I send in a draft, something is different. I just can’t help it. Just yesterday, I noticed in Ember chapter 8 that I described fabric as jacquard when I really meant brocade. O, the horror! I can’t believe I did that! (Sorry, Anonymous Auction Winner!). It will be fixed in the full PDF.

I can’t leave well enough alone. I change a word here, a sentence there. When a question about my main character that wakes me in the middle of the night like, “What does she do when she’s not killing people?” I have to answer it.

It’s like some kind of curse: Lo, and she shall edit nigh until the very end.

One of these days, I’m going to have to learn to let go. Maybe I can do that by obsessing on my next WIP?

WIP Title: Rohais
Word Count: 7,000/95,000
Current Favorite Words:

Alone of all my sisters, I was not named to honor queens or saints. Instead, my stepmother named me for the climbing rose on the south wall of her garden, with its sweet scent and wicked thorns.

You already know how fascinated I am by the whole editing process. Perhaps if I am published several more times, I will become jaded enough to complain about it, but, for now, it’s super neat-o cool. My editor Laurie has been great about explaining the process, the schedule, and all that. She’s fabu to work with, besides. (You should check out her blog.)

But today, I’m going to write about a far more mysterious person, the FLE. I got the Final Line Editor’s revisions on Like a Thief in the Night this week. Wow. She caught mistakes I’ve missed again and again. Little things that would totally jump out and annoy a reader, like mentioning “bullets” when only one shot is fired. And big things like an anatomical inconsistency in a love scene that I am totally embarrassed to have missed.

On a side note: I always wondered how authors could make such mistakes in love scenes, and now I know: Cut & Paste. The love scene mistake the FLE caught was not the result of me not knowing how everything fits together, but the result of a previous version of the same scene that had the characters positioned in different locations relative to each other. I thought I was being economical by not rewriting the entire scene when I decided it should run differently. I guess now, as a reader, I will have to be a little more forgiving of those sorts of mistakes.

Anyway, FLE, you eagle-eyed woman of mystery–I salute you. :o)

The cover and blurb for Like a Thief in the Night are up at Samhain. Yay! It even has an ISBN number. Oooh, don’t I feel official.

“Like a Thief in the Night” by Bettie Sharpe

Genre: Romantic SciFi-Futuristic, Red Hots!

ISBN: 1-59998-865-8
Length: Novella
Price: 3.50
Publication Date: January 15, 2008
Cover art by Scott Carpenter

Blurb:

She’s a heartless assassin; he’s an immortal thief. In another life, they would have been lovers. In this one, he’s her target and she’s his prize.

A Strangers in the Night story.

Death comes like a thief in the night. For reclusive thief Sevastien Aniketos, death comes in the form of slinky assassin Arden Black. But Aniketos has a surprise for his would-be killer—he is immortal. And he is about to turn the tables on the pragmatic femme fatale.

Arden finds more than she bargained for when she sneaks through the window of Aniketos’s glass penthouse to take his life. The immortal thief is no victim; he’s a clever strategist who has set his sights on capturing the lethal lady and making her his own.

Trapped with a man she cannot kill, Arden slowly succumbs to Aniketos’s scheme of seduction, ceding her secrets, her loyalty, and eventually her heart. But when Arden’s wicked past catches up with her, Aniketos is faced with a choice.

An endless life without Arden, or a paltry mortal lifespan with the woman he has come to suspect he cannot live without.

My author information and book blurb are up on the Samhain Publishing site. I wonder what the cover will look like…

Woke up this morning, bleary-eyed and bitter - same as any morning when I have to wake up before noon (which is just about every morning). Hopped over to my laptop to check my email accounts. Screamed and jumped up and down like my name had just been called on The Price is Right.

Right there in my humble little gmail was an email from Laurie Rauch saying they had picked “Like a Thief in the Night” for the Strangers in the Night Valentines Day 2008 anthology, and was I still interested? Of course I was still interested. I was over-the-moon still interested. I was hopping-up-and-down-scaring-the-bejeebus-out-of-my-cats still interested. I replied to the email and then hopped over to my blog to post the good news.

Kate left a comment on my last post delivering the best bad news ever - namely that I was disqualified from the Samhain 1st line contest because the contest was not open to Samhain authors. (Squeee!!! OMGOMG!). A word here: Kate is awesome (go buy her books), and has been so encouraging. Her alter ego, Summer Devon is my ePub hero.

My husband was a little weirded out to find his morning grouch of a wife waiting for him with a crazy smile, breakfast and coffee. He was ok once I assured him that the uncharacteristic morning good cheer was due to good news and not due to aliens secretly abducting his wife and replacing her with a preternaturally perky stepford zombie android.

Called my mom and told her the good news. Then I told her she couldn’t read the story because it had S-E-X in it, and knowing my mom had read a story about S-E-X would make it difficult for me to continue believing I was the result of a virgin birth. (Never mind that it was her old Harlequins and Barbara Cartlands that got me started on this whole Romance thing in the first place. Denial isn’t just a state of mind, its a state of being.) She says she’s still my biggest fan.

Lastly, I sent off an email to Bam thanking her for holding her monthly writing contest, as “Like a Thief in the Night” grew out of my two hundred word entry for her May contest.

Writing all this down has helped me calm down a little - but Oh, here’s something else that makes me so happy - the other authors in the anthology are Bonnie Dee (she of the many, many great stories!) and Veronica Wilde (I heart all things Elvis, so I’ve been jonesing to read her forthcoming short story Hunk of Burnin Love). I’m both excited and scared to see my name on the same list as these two amazing authors.

And now, here I am, posting the whole thing on my blog. Dayum. It’s 1:30 - I’d better get some work done.

Remember to spay and neuter your pets!