Wishing all my friends, family, readers, and most importantly the American soldiers currently or having had served a very Happy Independence Day. I hope you all have a fantastic day. Play safe, be safe and get home safe.
Happy birthday America!
Tag Archives: Friends
Happy Canada Day 2016
Wishing all my fellow Canadians a happy Canada Day. When this posts up I shall still be snuggled in my bed enjoying the fact that I can sleep in. Eventually I’ll have to get my butt up to do some cleaning around here, and a load of laundry. Later in the day I have to head out for the first of two BBQ’s scheduled. I was hoping to get in some writing but that will have to wait until the “official” weekend, there’s free food and bevvies after all, and my momma didn’t raise no fool.
Stay safe, play safe, and get home safe. Don’t become a statistic this weekend. Hope you all have a fab day, a fab weekend and we’ll chat again soon.
Pulled in all directions
Hello everyone, long time no post. I know, I know – I’m terrible at this most days. But since I had a couple minutes before I need to head out to meet a friend for lunch I figured, why not? The day is sunny, warm and getting warmer. Only bad thing is my allergies. Good gravy! Only downside to spring in my book is all the random sneezes that come from out of the blue and scare the bejeesus out of everyone around me. Although, I will admit, that part is kinda funny. I am not a dainty sneezer if you hadn’t guessed.
Lot’s on the go today, none of it writing though. I have lunch with one friend, coffee with another this afternoon and then I’m showing friend number two around town. She’s thinking about moving here for work and wants to get a lay of the land before she makes the call. Then I’m meeting up with a couple co-workers for dinner before coming home to collapse. Tomorrow’s a loose schedule with my friend from out of town, depends on what she wants to do but again pretty much no time for writing unless I’m up at the crack of dawn. Not being a morning person that sort of thought really makes me shudder.
I’m hopeful dinner tonight doesn’t go too long and then I can get in a couple hours. And if I’m even luckier I can talk my outta town buddy into doing a few things late morning, early afternoon. If it all works out then it’ll give me several hours to get some work in. Characters are talking to me which is a great thing. That means there will be progress. Jotted down a couple notes for what they’re talking about to use later.
Well, that’s about it folks. I’ve gotta get a move on or I’m going to be late. Have a fabulous day ~ Moira
Happy Easter!
Hope everyone is having a lovely weekend, and enjoying their Easter however that may be. The weather’s supposed to be pretty good again today, chilly but mostly sunny from what the weather app on my phone tells me. If not for the family types I’d be out on my balcony enjoying it. Gotta enjoy the sun while you can get it.
Good news for any who are wondering, Living Victorious is progressing along nicely once more. I won’t have much time to work on it this weekend given everything else going on, but I’m getting there. The flow is back after a couple hiccups from the characters. For a short time they were torn about which way they wanted to go. Thankfully they must have “sat down” and figured it out because they gave me a huge gob last weekend and are still chatting as of when I wrote this post. Unfortunately they’re going a little faster currently than I think I can do the old fashioned way during my downtime sans computer – ie: hand writing in a notebook.
Anyway, I should let you all get to enjoying your Sunday. Don’t forget, if you haven’t already, go check out my joint blog with six other fantastic authors at Naughty Quills. We always have a lot to say, and it’s usually pretty helpful too. Mixed in with humor, real experience and plenty of fun.
Have a great day ~ Moira
Happy New Year 2016
Another year has come and gone, and we face a clean slate. A brand new beginning with nothing yet set in stone or decided. I hope everyone makes it a fabulous year, but whatever you do make it your own. Decide what you want and go for it, no one can make decisions for your path but you.
I don’t make New Years resolutions, never have, never will. While I may have a vague idea what I want to achieve in the year to come it’s never set in stone, that’s not who I am. I much prefer to take things as they come, adapt, and make decisions as I need to. Yes, I am a very “by the seats of my pants” sort of girl.
My only plans for 2016 are to keep on writing and to hopefully grow even more than I have in the last (almost) two years of my writing career. I will even keep working on my comma addiction (every editor I’ve ever had will likely approve of that one!) and keep expanding my general repertoire. I can’t say what I’ll yet be bringing to the New Year except for the Living Victorious series. Book three is slowly coming together, this one’s a bit harder to write than the others due to a number of factors (damn characters!!) but the muse and I are getting there. I also plan to write more stories of a holiday specific nature, to go with my Christmas story of 2015, but that’s just a general idea with nothing yet written in stone.
So I will end this post with wishing all my friends, family, readers, and fellow authors (no matter who you write for) all the very best in 2016. Prosperity, and peace to you all. ~ Moira
Having a great weekend
Hope you’re having a great weekend! I definitely am so far. Just got back from having a late lunch with a bunch of friends. It was filled with laughter, lots of joking, a bunch of teasing, and a horde of innuendos being tossed around. On the up side, I think we’ve found our bi-annual meeting spot of choice. Mainly because we weren’t getting shushed by the staff every time we dared to laugh, or got a little loud. It was a blast and a half to see them all again, and play catch up as well.
In other news, first rounds of edits for my story in the Uniform Fetish Anthology have been completed, and submitted back to my publisher for the second look. They were extremely minimal, and I only had a couple of things I actually needed to fix. Beyond that it was adding in a little more detail on a key point of the story per my editors suggestion. Didn’t take all that long once I figured out where the hell to put it in. Only problem with a short story of this nature, you don’t always have a lot of room for additions. I was relatively smart and kept myself a bit of room when I submitted it originally. Now though with the addition, I’m sitting a little more snugly in the word limit so hopefully there isn’t too much more required on round two otherwise I may need to consider a bit of fat trimming.
Great news to also share is that book 5 of the C&M Security series, Dangerous Pasts, will be out this Wednesday. That’s January 28, 2015 for clarification. I’m waiting on the cover to look over, and approve anxiously, and hopefully I’ll be able to post that up soon as well. For anyone that’s interested I’m also running a contest on my Facebook Group site for 1 of 2 free copies of the book. If you’re interested you can join the group HERE or just enter on the post if you are already a part of the group – I’m only accepting entries on FB. It’s super simple, and a little bit of fun all rolled into one.
Other than that I’m planning to get some writing done this weekend. I’m hoping it will be on book 6 of the C&M series but only if the characters feel like talking. They’ve been quiet of late so I’m rather fearful they have something planned I may not like. I never know with this group what might suddenly pop out of my brain to throw a wild twist into my stories. Things I then need to figure how to get them back out of to get the HEA ending required.
I know for sure I’ll be working a bit on my paranormal story, I’ve had little twinges of ideas of where to take them next. Likely I’ll probably do a bit more on my other still unknown what the hell genre it falls into story. Seriously, I have zero clue where these characters are leading me, but it should be interesting to say the least. They seem to enjoy butting heads, and basically doing everything in their power to annoy the other. Makes it a never ending roller coaster for me as the one writing it, I never seem to know what they next plan to do to the other character.
Well, that’s all the updates I have currently. So I am off to work on whatever WIP comes to me first as needing some more written in. Have a great weekend ~ Moira
Ringing in 2015
It’s that time yet again, the time to say bon voyage to yet another year. While I wouldn’t say that 2014 was a completely smooth year – it had more than a few bumps along the way – it was definitely an interesting one.
It started like any other year. Too little sleep, a little too much alcohol, and a desperate need to get some form of caffeinated beverage into my body. There was a mild familial crises to deal with, some time off the day job to tend to that, and then there was some brutally cold weather.
Amid all of that I was working on my very first book. A novella I’d call it given the word count. After showing it to a long time friend, who was an author in her own right, she advised that I send it into a publisher. Then came the big choice. Who the hell to send this to? A few late night discussions, a lot of pros and cons lists later my friend helped me to make the decision. Evernight Publishing was the top of the pile. There were a couple of other really close runners on the list, but from what we’d dug up, and generally discovered I thought that EP was the best fit for who I am as a person, and who I’d like to be as an author. So off I sent that very first submission.
What my friend neglected to tell me about was the gut clenching terror that immediately takes hold the moment you hit the send button for your submission. The doubts that creep in: Did I forget one of the items on their checklist? Did I attach the right file? Did I actually read the file I sent to them at any point? And then, the worst in my opinion, did I spell my own name right? ARGH! Quickly into the “sent” folder to review exactly what was sent. While this relieves a bit of the terror, it definitely does not ease it fully. Because now I’m a part of that dreaded “waiting game” I’ve heard her talk about, and read about from other author type people I’d friended on the various social networks.
The good news was, EP accepted the story, put me and it under contract, and the terror eased. Right up until that first round of editors. Again from various author folk I “know” you never knew what type of editor you may end up with. I was truly blessed with an amazing woman, Laurie Temple, who instantly relaxed me with her very first comment bubble on page one. She gave me a little information about herself, her general rules of thumb when she’s editing, and then gave me her impressions on the story itself. She was helpful, polite, and at times even threw in a wickedly amusing comment that made me actually LOL in my living room. I don’t know if I’ll forever be blessed with her awesome self, but I can definitely dream. I truly don’t know what I’d have done without her gentle, but firm, handling during that first book.
All through the C&M Security series I was again blessed to have Laurie as my editor. She became as invested in the characters as I was. And it quickly became apparent she was keeping track of what I was, and wasn’t sharing with readers in books. She started looking for things in the next ones, and keeping me honest along the way. The woman is a rock star in my books, and deserves a huge bonus. Ahem! Hear that Evernight admin people – give that woman a raise! LOL!
Thankfully my personal life was relatively calm, mundane even for the balance of 2014. It allowed me to have time to focus on my writing, finding my groove with my series, and left me time to actually interact with my readers. I have readers, fans even. Freaky right? But apparently this happens, or so the great mystics proclaimed. I’ve even had more than one reader adopt a character from my books. Now if I could only get him back from her 😉
Now, here I am, heading into a whole new year – 2015. Fresh, unknown, open to all sorts of possibilities. While there will always be challenges, personal and professional, I can only continue forward one day at a time. I’m not one to make resolutions since I know myself too well. All I can say is that I will be writing every day, I will be who I am and let no one change me, and I will come through it all the better for hopefully having learned something new and amazing along the way.
So to all my website readers, my book readers and fans, and everyone out there on the web. Happy New Year, may it be bright, wonderful, and may you too learn something new and amazing this year. Until next year ~ Moira
A slightly chaotic rant
Figuring I should do up another post on my website I sit here staring at my screen. I have no clue what this post will be about given the number of things tumbling around in my head currently. So I think I’ll let it just ramble out at it’s own pace and see where it might lead. Be warned, this may be long, with some point to point insanity tossed in, and may actually get down, dirty, and plain old nasty. Here we go…
First thing that comes to mind is an issue of piracy. An author friend of mine recently had a release, and as part of the lead up to it had an ARC (Advanced Reader Copy) give away. Being the smart cookie that she is, my friend found a way to embed coding into each copy to make them individually unique so when she gave them to the readers who won a copy, she’d know if any of them decided to be a douche. One such person proved themselves to be just that, a douche. This person took the gift from my author friend, and promptly uploaded it to a known piracy site. Because of the encoded meta data my friend put in it was easily traceable.
It’s people like this that make us authors so wary to gift our books. Personally I always do it via a site that has the DRM in place. Not saying this is the be all, end all to stop these folks. But it’s definitely a step in the right direction. The personalized meta data encoding is another. Making each book unique, easily traceable, and so you know exactly who the perpetrator is. Sadly I’m not sure what else you can do. While the FBI has a division set for cyber crime, including intellectual property theft on the Net, what all can truly be done to stop these jerks? You shut down one site, and another pops up. You find new ways to secure books to prevent this from happening, and some jackass finds three ways around it. It really makes me, as an author, wonder why I bother to do prize giveaways. Or at least ones involving my books. It also makes me fucking mad that these people continuously get away with stealing. And that others seem to think it’s perfectly fine.
Yes books cost money, so does gas, so do things like clothing, shoes, food. But not a one of these pirates goes out to steal a cup of coffee, or a loaf of bread because that would be “wrong”. So where the fuck do they get off thinking it’s perfectly okay to steal an author’s work? We spend hours, days, months getting a book just right before we send it into our publishers. Then there is more time in refining it, getting it perfect for sale, and then the hours of pimping the books to garner those sales. This is all time that we, at least initially, are giving away free. Because it takes a damn long time to actually make any money off your books.
Prime example. My first quarter as an author I earned enough to buy exactly 8 XL cups of Tim Horton’s coffee with a few pennies left over. Yes, I am a Timmy’s addict, and damn proud of it – so shush. My second quarter I earned enough to get exactly 16 XL cups of Tim Horton’s coffee (should mention this is prior to the just recent price hike of said XL coffee cup) with a few pennies left over. Yes that was twice as much as the first quarter, but it’s still not enough to live off of. No where NEAR enough. Yet I hear all too often, and this is a paraphrase of several different people, “authors make so much money why are they bitching about one/two/three (whatever number) of their books being pirated – it’s free advertising basically”. Bull-fucking-shit. It is THEFT. Unfortunately there’s no way YET to nail these assholes to the proverbial wall. Yet.
Okay, enough on that topic. All it does is piss me the fuck off which is totally not conducive to getting my head into the proper writing space. Which I need to do soon enough. I now have three, yes THREE damn WIP’s on the burner. Don’t know where the hell they keep coming from but they do seem to pop up to drive me insane.
Second topic of irritation I want to throw out there since I’m in a venting mood – Christmas. It is not the “holiday season”, it is Christmas. In a lot of things I am PC…to a degree. But not on this. I don’t give two shits who I offend, cause it’s my fucking country, it’s Merry Christmas. Every culture has their own version, I say celebrate it accordingly and proudly. But when folks who come to our country for a better life get all pissy because our holiday offends them, too fucking bad. We were here first and it’s our holiday. You get to celebrate your holidays without all of us getting pissy at you. So, quite honestly, if you don’t like it, there’s the fucking door – don’t let it hit you in the ass on the way out.
Sadly too many things are getting all white washed out to ensure we don’t offend anyone. It’s more than beyond time to get back to the way things were. A time when kids weren’t given everything they snivelled for, but had to earn it with hard work. Or where a teacher actually had some authority over her classroom instead of getting fired for giving a student a failing grade – I had to earn my marks, why don’t the “next generation”? Come on, all this is doing is raising a bunch of people who think they don’t have to do anything to get it all. Personally I can’t wait for the reality check most of these little shits will get one day when they are all flipping burgers at McD’s or somewhere similar for barely minimum wage. How you going to afford the latest and greatest toys then?
Okay, I’d better stop before I really get myself worked into an unholy tizzy. Time to take some of my annoyance and put it into my writing. I need to get to work on those otherwise there’s not much coming out from me in the New Year. EEEK! Not good. All right. Sorry again for the rambling, spewing crap I tossed out. But I needed to get it out of my system. I hope all of you have a lovely weekend, and play safe out there in the malls, and stores. ~ Moira
A toasty Tuesday
Came home feeling a little wilted around the edges today. Not all of which had to do with the lovely heat we’re currently getting – yay summer! Work was more than a little bleh! today. Some peoples children should never have been set lose on the world at large – at least not without warning labels tattooed across their foreheads in big block letters. Something along the lines of “I’m an idiot, and everything out of my mouth will make you curse the fact you got of bed today” would do nicely. After all, forewarned is forearmed damn it.
Maybe it’s just me and my particular job. Look, I know that not everyone knows what I do about it. Hell, I don’t even know everything about it – but I have people around me with plenty more experience upon which I can draw from. And I do, draw upon their experience, after all – that’s why they are there. Mostly. Sort of. Actually I think they are there to do other work but if I find them standing around looking lost I’m damn well going to use them for all I can get until they run away screaming. But that’s a different issue and we won’t be going there tonight.
Damn, where was I? Oh, right, all melting and getting home. So! I get home, get in my comfy clothing, grab a nice cold drink and then get online to see what’s been happening while I’ve been toiling in the mines during the day. So many good things, including a new blog post from one of my “friends” on Facebook. She is an author, quite well known in certain circles, and she is wise beyond her years. I love her view on things and the fact that she tells it like it is. Best way to recover from a blah day in the salt mines is to read anything she’s written. Now, I shall admit *hangs head in shame* I’ve not actually read any of her books. BUT! She is on my TBR list – a couple of her books actually are sitting there patiently awaiting me to get to them. I swear I will get to them so I can lift my head up proudly once more. But it will have to wait, cause it ain’t happening tonight LOL!
I’m off to do some writing and finish up watching my movie. Hope you all have a great night ~ Moira
Trying to
Figure out the big reveal. In my current WIP I mean. I’m kind of leaning towards building it up a little more and, honestly, I’ve been going with my gut on all of this anyway so I think I’ll follow it once more.
I could do the reveal sooner but I think the tension needs to be built up more. Yes there’s definitely some now, the back story, the current troubles but I think it needs to be bigger. If I reveal it too soon then I’m worried this will piss of the readers. Which would be seriously bad. So very bad.
Don’t want a lynch mob coming for me after all, lol!
So, yeah, I’m going to prolong the “reveal” I think. It feels right and will make the story all the better. I hope. Well, I suppose there’s nothing to lose from at least trying it and seeing how it “feels”. If it doesn’t work I can always rewrite it, I suppose. But only if my Beta readers give me the thumbs down about it. I do rely on them, and my friend that got me headed down this path, to give me the nitty gritty of their thoughts. So far they haven’t led me astray.
All right, decisions made, I’m off to do some writing. Get this WIP to the big blow out of all blow outs. We’ll chat again later ~ Moira
Moira Callahan 