PSA

Do not buy Ghost Pepper sauce and use it like Tabasco. Ghost peppers are one step below defensive pepper spray and rated at 1,000,000 Scoville units. Habeneros rate around 350,000 for comparison.

You’re welcome.

And here, have a haiku for Ghost Pepper Sauce:
One million Scovilles/A ghost pepper inferno/don’t get in your eyes.

Saved by a book

Last week there was a lot of Not Fun medical stuff, culminating in Saturday’s half day at the hospital getting my blood drawn every hour while I tried not to throw up the sugar solution I’d ingested, which would’ve meant having to start the test all over. What made my day bearable? I brought along Carrie Vaughn’s Voices of Dragons, a YA I’d wanted to read but hadn’t gotten around to. Turns out, it was the perfect length to read in between sitting in the chair to give the latest blood donation.

Voices of Dragons is set in today’s world, with one minor difference; World War II woke up the dragons and spawned yet another human/dragon war. That conflict ended in an uneasy truce both sides had maintained for 60 years. Until the human protagonist accidentally encounters a dragon in an unplanned border violation. It’s a story of laws and their consequences, friendships of all kinds, the price of peace, and, naturally, dragon voices. There’s a lot of depth here that an older reader can appreciate while younger readers simply enjoy the friendship between human and dragon. An excellent story that saved my day, and left me hoping for a sequel someday.

You can pick it up along with Carrie’s latest YA, Steel, and have yourself a whole lot of adventure, no matter where you’re reading.

And now it can be told!

Remember when I said Men of Action was getting tweaked and for a to-be-announced purpose? Now it can be told!

You already know that Sasha White and I teamed up for an independently published title, A Rock & A Hard Place, with plans to do some more of this kind of thing. Meanwhile, other authors were having the same idea and thinking it’s more fun to do it together than go it alone. And so, Walk on The Wild Side Books was born!

It’s not a publisher, it’s a publishing hub for our independently published titles. If you like stories by me or Sasha White, you might also like stories by Anne Calhoun, Portia Da Costa, HelenKay Dimon, Alison Kent, and Saskia Walker! And to give you a chance to try us all out, we’re giving away a May Basket of Books, so go check out Walk on the Wild Side and enter the giveaway.

Writing dangerously?

Marjorie Liu’s always insightful blog asks today about extreme possibilities, which reminded me off Lynn Veihl/PBW’s writing dangerously.

So I asked myself what extreme possibility I could imagine for my writing. What dangerous projects do I yearn to tackle?

1. I have a crazy love for Harlequin Presents but have never tried to write one, largely out of fear I’d end up writing a parody.

2. I have a crazy love for dark fantasy romance/UF and a series idea that has sat on the backburner for too long. I’d love to write the living daylights out of it and knock it out of the park, commercially and artistically.

3. I have a crazy paranormal action-adventure romance I need to finish and set free. Magical weapons of mass destruction, bad guys, hot sex! What could go wrong?

4. I have a crazy love for YA and a great project I haven’t had time or brain cells for.

I think basically my extreme vision is being able to do it all; Presents, UF/Paranormal romance, YA. Well, why not try? It’s good to have goals. And as Marjorie points out in her blog, it once seemed extreme to earn a living as a writer. Having hit that, it’s time for a new extreme vision. (And my Presents attempt really might turn out a pathetic parody but I’d probably learn something in the process, and finally be able to let that dream die, at least.)

Behind the scenes

Men of Action is down and getting fiddled with. I will tell you why on the 20th, mwahaha.

Meantime, I have all these books to finish. Mostly ready for a baby at this point, so I no longer have to think about that. Will be mostly done organizing the house after this weekend, too. Basically April seems to be the month I get many things off my brain and free up some space for stories.

While I finish stuff behind the scenes, I’m listening to story music so things can grow in the free space. Music is a great jump-starter for me. Muse food. The energy helps me get a handle on the energy of a character, a scene. Sometimes you have to move sideways to move forward, and decluttering a room while listening to music can set things up for forward progress.