Anya Bast

Yesterday I had a booksigning with Shiloh Walker, Toni Blake (aka Lacey Alexander) and Lora Leigh. The bookseller who organized the signing baked all these yummy goodies for the readers and authors. I gained three pounds, I think.

Here’s a shot of Toni/Lacey signing a book (she’s kind of hidden behind the sign) and Lori Leigh and her husband.

…is finished and sent!!! *butt wiggle*

There’s nothing like the feeling of a deadline met and a project finished. I love it. Of course, on October 1st the next countdown clock starts. This one will be for Witch Heart, the third book in the Elemental Witches series.

I’m really looking forward to writing this one. Of course, I’m always looking forward to writing all my books. The anticipation comes from having the story and characters spread out in front of me like a shining sea of possibility. But the heroine of this book especially intrigues me and I can’t wait to get inside her head.

This weekend I’ll be taking it easy, though. Tomorrow I have a booksigning in Lexington with Lora Leigh, Shiloh Walker and Toni Blake. If you’re near Lex, it’s at Joseph-Beth Booksellers from 2-4pm — 161 Lexington Green Cir. On Sunday we have a family outing planned. We’re taking our daughter on a hay ride and to pick pumpkins. Should be fun!

I hope you all have an enjoyable weekend!

This post has absolutely nothing to do with writing. 🙂 Also, I cross-posted this at The Bradford Bunch blog.

I am super, duper bleeding heart animal lover and have been since I was a kid. This is evidenced by our 8 cats, 2 rabbits and one dog. Most of them were hard luck cases. All but one of our cats were strays. Our dog we found slated for death at Animal Control.

Our rabbbits, one of them anyway, was slated to be Great Horned Owl practice prey at a Raptor Rehab program I was volunteering for. I, uh, smuggled him out. I love birds of prey, but I couldn’t volunteer there after that.

The owl food was the black one.

So, when I opened my patio door last week and spotted this guy on the deck near the dog house I was charmed completely. I grabbed my camera, which is always close at hand because I don’t want to miss any toddler photo ops, and took this picture:

Close up of itty bitty teeny tiny tortoise face:

It didn’t look damaged, so I thought he just got lost. It didn’t occur to me in my non-caffeinated state (it was morning) that he could not have gotten onto the deck without, uhm, “help”. I didn’t know what kind of turtle he was. I failed turtle identification class.

Worried it could be a snapper, I carefully got him into a container for transport:

I didn’t notice the blood when I took the picture…..

I moved turtle to our pond, where likely he was living before he had “help” getting onto the deck:

I wished him a happy and productive reptilian life and assumed my good turtle karma had gained a few points. That’s when I turned around to gather the container and saw…The Blood. Taking a closer look at the turtle, (remember, still not caffeinated yet), I saw his shell had been crunched upon and the soft underside (his actual body) had been bitten.

I knew instantly who the offender was:

Our dog. The scourge of all wildlife in our yard. Springtime is brutal around here, let me tell you…. Obviously she’d determined turtle was a really cool dog toy.

So I went back into the house and called my local vet to see if I could bring turtle in for treatment. They don’t treat exotic pets, she told me, but pointed me in the direction of a vet who does. So…. I gathered turtle up from the pond and put him back into the container with a little yummy pond water for his comfort. I rousted the kiddo from her high chair and off we went.

The strangest passenger I’ve had in a while. I don’t think turtle was all that amused.

Finally, we reached our destination:

Turtle was handed over to a really cool vet who does pro bono wildlife rehab work on the side. Turtle has a fighting chance, but the lining of his lung was punctured. She thinks she will take a couple months to get him back up and running and they might have to put a feeding tube down his little turtle throat. I can call later to check on his condition. If turtle heals but cannot be returned to the wild, I told them I would take him as a pet. He turned out to be a water turtle, not a snapper.

After making a donation to the program (what a cool program!) we came back home. Whew! Not the morning I’d had planned.

Why’d I take pictures of the whole thing, you ask. Uhm, I’m just a dork that way. *shrug*

Tell me about your animal companions! I love to hear about pets, animal rescues, really about anything warm and fuzzy. I’ll give away chocolate to one of the posters. (Yes, I’m running the contest over here too. *g*)

I’m still buried under deadline. I’ll be back full force after next Friday (that’s D Day for me). The Darkest Kiss is complete, but I’m revising and polishing, being generally anal retentive, and generally worried about the book right now. That’s the last phase of my editing process.  Having a toddler chasing the cats around (she went from crawling to walking to running in like the span of a week!) is not helping (but it is seriously cute). 😉

The book itself ended up at about 92k. That means for Sweaty Seventy I wrote…*calculating*…  62k on The Darkest Kiss. BUT…I wasn’t only writing on TDK during this time. I also wrote… *more calculating*… 15k on another project (a skreeit one!). That brings my grand Sweaty total to 77k. I did it!

That’s actually not what I came here to write…

I had a question emailed to me by a reader. She asked why I don’t use the harder words in Witch Fire and is wondering if my editor asked me not to. I thought I’d answer this one here.

No, it was my choice to not use the harsher words in my Berkley books. I use them in profusion in my Ellora’s Cave books, but in writing books that I knew would reach a wider audience, I chose to refrain. I still use sexy language, especially for the male parts of anatomy. For the female parts I’m going a bit softer.

My Berkley books are still very hot, much hotter than most mainstream romances, (I think…), but I never, not even at EC, wrote sex scenes that had that harder edge to them anyway. I know lots of readers like that, but it’s just not my voice. When I write a sex scene I’m striving for emotion, sensuality of language, and titillation. I do want the scenes to be hot, of course, but not in a coarse way. This is all a matter of perception, though. One person’s sensual sex scene is another person’s coarse.

Oh, watch me tangent!…

Sometimes I’ll write sex scenes that are little harder in the beginning of the book, before the characters have had a chance to connect in a deeply emotional way. As the characters fall in love, the sex scenes change and become more sensual/emotional, to show the development of the relationship. They’re still going to be erotic and kinky (I love to write kinky) but they’re going to have a softer edge to them emotionally.

Anyway, coming back to the question, I deliberately left out the harder words in Witch Fire (and Witch Blood, The Darkest Kiss, ect), while still trying to maintain a high level of hot, in order not to alienate a large portion of my readers. I don’t think the harder words add anything to the plot or the character development, anyway. They haven’t for me so far, in any case.

Caveat is if I ever write a character who I think would use the harder words and it skews his/her character not to, I would use them in his/her POV. I just haven’t run into that yet. Maybe down the line I will.   There’s always a caveat.

Kentucky Romance Day

Join authors Anya Bast, Shiloh Walker, Toni Blake and Lora Leigh at Joseph-Beth Booksellers

9/29

2-4pm

161 Lexington Green Cir.
Lexington, KY 40503

859-273-2911

And……

Saturday-Oct 13, 2007 1:00 to 3:00 PM

Kentucky Romance Writers Annual Multi author signing and dinner afterward at

Stone Hearth. Make your reservations now at The Bookstore to reserve your spot at supper.

301 W Lincoln Trail Blvd
Radcliff, KY 40160
(270) 351-1801

Please join these wonderful authors coming

Oct 13, 2007 to The Bookstore in Radliff, KY.

J.R. Ward

Teresa Medeiros

Elizabeth Bevarly

Toni Blake

Patricia Rice

Anya Bast

Teresa Reasor

Shiloh Walker

Kimberly Logan

LuAnn McLane

Heather Grothaus

Maddie James

Jan Scarbrough

Janet Eaves

Magdalena Scott

Robyn DeHart

Janice Maynard also writing as Elizabeth Scott

Beverly Bartlett

Patricia Sargeant

Sara Reinke

Lora Leigh

Just a note to say that I’m all full of deadline right now. Any spare moment I have beyond the day job and my daughter is spent writing/revising The Darkest Kiss. I will still be blogging here and there, but not steadily again until the beginning of the month.

Oy!

The fantabulous Lauren Dane had a new release last Wednesday! (yeah, I’m a little behind. Blame deadlines.) I love her books, so I can’t resist giving a plug.

Fire and Rain is now available from Ellora’s Cave.

Rain Foster works as a waitress while working hard to make her career take off. Her paintings are the center of her life until Laurent Cole walks into the cafe. Suddenly she’s dealing with a very alpha male pursuing her and the not so very tiny detail that he’s a werewolf too.

Laurent Cole has been the Third in Command in the Cherchez Wolf Pack for decades. His life is simple, good – but he knows he’s missing something and when he claps eyes on Rain, he knows what it is.

Their coming together is complicated further by the past Rain has worked so hard to keep a secret. Laurent isn’t about to let anyone do his wife any harm and Rain begins to believe Laurent and her new family will keep her safe.

But the world becomes more complicated every day…

Our air conditioning has been on the fritz all season and we’ve been too cheap to kick in the $$$ for another one, even though it’s been one of the hottest summers on record. Funnily, however, it’s been okay. The nights are cool, and as long as we get those nice cool nights, we’re pretty comfortable. If I wanted to go all environmental and simply turn off the air conditioner altogether, I think I could do it. As a result of having the air conditioner shut off, we’ve had our windows open. That means we have more bugs in the house than usual. I found a cicada on the bedroom floor this morning. *has the willies*

Clearly, I don’t have much to blog about today.

I’m just sitting here, revising The Darkest Kiss and eating Cheezits (I luuurve Cheezits. They’re one of my guilty pleasures). For the record, TDK will be about 90k when it’s all finished. That means I’ve written about 60k on it for Sweaty Seventy (which haven’t been very good about updating lately). I need to get to 70k, since that’s the goal, but there’s still time! I have lots of other projects in play.

On October 1st, I’ll start Witch Heart (title subject to change). I’m really looking forward to writing this book.  I might even start early.

I can’t upload this particular video to wordpress, but go see for yourself.

My houseguests are gone and I miss them already. It’s sad when good friends live far away. Now I’m back to normal life which, for me, means DEADLINES. I have a proof of Witch Blood to do, and I also have the deadline for The Darkest Kiss looming at the end of the month.  Because I have a wee one in the house, that complicates matters. Oh, and a day job. Yes, I still work my day job. So if I don’t blog very much this month, you know why.

Blogging always runs hot and cold with me anyway. If I have something to blog about, I blog. If I don’t…well, then I don’t.

Recent books I’ve read…..

Magic Lost, Trouble Found, by Lisa Shearin. Did I post about this one? Very entertaining fantasy. I really enjoyed it and am looking forward to the next book in the series.

Poison Study, by Maria Snyder. Loved. This one is historical fantasy. I couldn’t put it down and had to run out and get the sequel right away.

Now I’m reading Beyond Varallan, by S. L. Viehl.  Still loving the series.

I’ve been blessed with lots of yummy books lately.