Healer-Priestess Shaiandral would rather let the Dragonlord rot than save him. But when her Healer’s oath is called upon, she must rise above the contention between their two shifter tribes and travel to his realm.

When she arrives, the Dragonlord Veren is dying of a magical toxin. Shaiandral makes a sacrifice of her own blood to raise the required energy for healing, but her actions raise a demon from Veren’s flesh. A demon that can become incorporeal at will and is impossible to fight.

The demon gives her two options. She can either sacrifice her Oath-bound virginity to heal Veren–or she can become his new host. At first Shaiandral refuses, but faced with a choice between losing her virginal power or losing herself, she chooses the lesser of two evils. Taking hold of the rising energies, she threads them into a complex weave. Just when she thinks she’s failed, Veren takes a deep breath, returning to life. Using the power released in her orgasm, Shaiandral forces the demon into a wilting red rose, binding him forevermore.

Except Shaiandral has caused more problems than she’s solved. The sacrifice has left her with a sudden, consuming lust–and an inexplicable attraction to Veren, a man she should hate. Now, a demonic infiltration threatens both their realms. Can they overcome their differences and work together to stop this threat before the demons take hold once more?

Interested in an excerpt? Clicky!

(I’ll have a contest of some kind up in a couple days or so. )

January 22nd, 2007.

Yay!

The blurb, if anyone’s interested:

Healer-Priestess Shaiandral would rather let the Dragonlord rot than save him. But when her Healer’s oath is called upon, she must rise above the contention between their two shifter tribes and travel to his realm.

When she arrives, the Dragonlord Veren is dying of a magical toxin. Shaiandral makes a sacrifice of her own blood to raise the required energy for healing, but her actions raise a demon from Veren’s flesh. A demon that can become incorporeal at will and is impossible to fight.

The demon gives her two options. She can either sacrifice her Oath-bound virginity to heal Veren–or she can become his new host. At first Shaiandral refuses, but faced with a choice between losing her virginal power or losing herself, she chooses the lesser of two evils. Taking hold of the rising energies, she threads them into a complex weave. Just when she thinks she’s failed, Veren takes a deep breath, returning to life. Using the power released in her orgasm, Shaiandral forces the demon into a wilting red rose, binding him forevermore.

Except Shaiandral has caused more problems than she’s solved. The sacrifice has left her with a sudden, consuming lust–and an inexplicable attraction to Veren, a man she should hate. Now, a demonic infiltration threatens both their realms. Can they overcome their differences and work together to stop this threat before the demons take hold once more?

They want to publish it. With one minor change, a scene I wasn’t sure about in the first place. But… they want to publish it.

*squee!*

I finished the revisions for A Passion Draconic!!!

Currently, I have it out to my CPs and dedicated readers; once I get it back, I’ll go over anything they mention and then ship it out to LSB. *bounce*

So, now I need to make the edits, do a basic line edit on the rest of the manuscript to see if there’s anything I haven’t caught, and probably print it and run over it again, just to be sure.

So I sat down yesterday and decided to come up with them. Trying to come up with titles is a royal pain in the ass. I ended up looking at song lyrics and titles for inspiration — a lot of the gothic music I listen to has very complex, poetic lyrics, so I thought it might help. And it did — to the point I got more than one title out of it.

A Passion Draconic
This will be the new title for Resurrection. I think it fits, because the hero is a dragon shapeshifter. It doesn’t much describe the heroine, but I don’t think I can without having an overly complicated title.

A Caress Vampiric
This book takes place in the same setting — kind of. It’s about the son of a vampire who discovers he is a necromancer and ends up crossing over to the world of A Passion Draconic. I’m actually revamping this one from game notes from a game I GM’d — all the characters and worldbuilding are mine; I just need to excise some of the stuff the other player added that I don’t want to use.

A Kiss Serpentine
I have no idea what the plot for this is going to be, but I’d intended to do something with the serpent shapeshifters, so …

Deceived by Twilight
This will be the title for ArielleWIP. I didn’t want anything overly “romance”y for a title. My first two thoughts were The Assassin’s Embrace and Kiss the Blade, but I think this works better for what the story is.

Beyond the Veil
The title for the second Arielle & Jackson novella, if I should write it. I’m thinking that one will deal with the portal reopening and Jackson’s past coming back to hit them both in the face.

How do you come up with your titles? Any new and interesting ones you want to share?

In other news, I mentioned about a month and a half back that I’d entered Resurrection into Liquid Silver’s Satisfy Our Naughtier Side contest. It didn’t win, but I just heard back from Rachel Fox, the main editor. They rejected it, because they felt the heroine resurrecting the Dragonlord trodded too close to necrophilia, especially as a major plot element.

But … they said if I was willing to change this, they’d be happy to look at it again.

So I wrote her back and asked if they’d want to see just the edited partial or the full edited manuscript. Now, just to wait and see … *crosses fingers*

Also edited a chapter in Resurrection.

And I think I’m in the running for the Nitwit of the Week award here. I’d been bouncing emails back and forth with Faith at FB about a couple of possible novellas. I’m serious about the ideas, but wanted to gauge whether or not she would be before doing the development to turn the ideas into full-fledged premises/synopses. She asks me for a rough outline … and I’m still not “getting” that she’s interested. So I get an email saying that she needs something more solid to base a contract on — which floored me, cause I wasn’t even thinking contract. *sigh*

… I wish I could blame it on cramps and PMS, but I can’t say I wouldn’t have made the same mistake ordinarily.

So in addition to rewriting Stronger and revising Resurrection, I’ll be developing two novellas. I’m going to be a buuuusy kitty. (In a good way.) One of them should be reasonably easy, as I basically need to chart what I’ve already got from the story and develop it further. The other one, a follow-up to the Bites with Arielle and Jackson, will be a bit more complex as I’d like to potentially take that to short novel-length.

And here I am, thinking I’ll be heading to bed fairly shortly, and my Muse is going: “Nuh-uh! You don’t need sleep! You’ve got more work to do!”

My muse is a slave-driving workaholic hell-bitch. (And I love her that way, but don’t tell anyone, mmkay? )

I haven’t managed to get quite as much done as I’d wanted, but it’s been a hellish week.

Morgan was feeling social on Wednesday, so we went out to see X3 with a friend of his. I liked the movie a lot, but I was very disappointed with how they handled Phoenix. I remember watching the animated X-Men series on TV when I was a kid, and there was a lot more conflict and exploration of Phoenix’s character in that then the movie. Which is sad in a way, cause you expect more of a teen/adult movie than from Saturday morning kiddie cartoons. Well worth seeing, despite that, though.

That was the fun bit. The not so fun bit:

I’ve had a sinus headache from hell all week. Literally. It was bad enough that I thought it was a migraine — because I mostly the same symptoms — but meds did pretty much nothing for it. The stuff I normally take for sinus problems didn’t help, either.

Yesterday, I had to go up to Boston to let the vampires collect their vials of blood. I’m seeing an endocrinologist for (extremely) elevated testosterone levels and have to go back again today, after taking an adrenal suppressant, and then again on the 6th for an ultrasound. Then back on the 8th for a follow-up with my doctor. Sometime this month, I also have to see a gyn. I’m on doctor overload here. On the bright side, I haven’t seen anyone who hasn’t been pleasant to deal with yet. (I’m a nurse’s daughter… I was trained from very young not to put up with doctorial bullshit. LOL.)

Boston + forecast of rain + sinus headache = da ebil.

It was bad enough I picked up a box of claritin yesterday — or rather, walgreen’s generic brand, because the price for the brand label is fucking ridiculous — thinking that if it was caused by an allergy of some sort (pollen?), it might help.

Heh. Heh. Heh.

It started my sinuses draining, which increased the headache by a good three times. So. Not. Fun. Add to that, the 85 degree heat (it felt like at least 90, but it was so damned muggy) really hit me hard. Unfortunately, since developing the fibromyalgia, I don’t have the heat tolerance I used to.

I got back to South Station and took the train back home. For once, the train was well air-conditioned, but the shock of going from 85+ heat to something in the high 60s = not good. I was extremely nauseated by that point. Morgan picked me up, we went back home, I got another shock from the heat to cold and lost my lunch.

I pretty much crashed in bed for several hours, and when I woke up, I still had the headache. >_<

Then I remembered the bath salts I have that are frickin loaded with eucalyptus. Grabbed the bottle, opened it, took a big whiff, about fell over as the eucalyptus started burning out my sinuses. Okay, not really, but that's what it felt like. Got rid of the headache, though, and don't have one this morning, which is, like, YAY.

Writing-wise, I've only managed to revise a couple chapters of Resurrection and write the synopsis. The syno was not as good as I’d want it, but with the headache, I didn’t have the time or concentration to get it the way I want. So I let the male look over it, gave everything a final pass myself, and sent it off right before the contest deadline. Whee!

It’s kinda weird, because, for all that I’ve been writing and submitting this many years, I’ve never submitted a novel before. It’s like … woah. This could really sell. (At least, I hope!)

It’s an … intimidating sort of feeling, in a way. It’s odd, because most unpubbed writers talk about how much they want to be published and how they fear rejection. I don’t fear rejection — never have, really. Even when I was fourteen and fifteen, I had a professional attitude; if it didn’t sell, then I’d just keep shopping it around till it did. (Nowadays, I’m not surprised that none of it did, because it sucked ass, but it was the best I could do at the time, and I was proud of it.)

It’s not rejection I fear. It’s success. I’m not entirely sure why that is, because it seems to be the antithesis of the rest of the writing community. Then again, maybe more people fear it, too, and use rejection as a foil — both from themselves and from the rest of the world.

I dunno. But I’ve got to run here … I’ll probably write more about that later, though.