DEBONAIR DYKE Acquired by Ellora's Cave

I am so excited that my manuscript DEBONAIR DYKE has been accepted by Ellora's Cave. Usually, I like to wait until I have cover art to post such big news but in light that this if one of my FF Love babies, for now the infant remains faceless...

This will be my second book released by Ellora's Cave. The first being PRODIGAL SLAVE

Posted At The Femmes Guide Last Week

For those of you who missed my post over at the Femmes Guide To Absolutely Everything last week, I'm reposting the important parts now, or if you prefer to see the original post you can go there. It's titled The Bitchin' and Moanin' is Over.

For those of you who have read my earlier posts griping about publishers who claim to publish LGBT and who do indeed provide their readers with the G … but rarely if ever any LBor T … I am finished complaining. At least for now.
Why?
Because I finally found a publisher willing to take a chance and I will have my first (L) being released in March…originally as an ebook but a few months later in print. My Femme character Simone Sinclair is finally going to have life breathed into her. Call me wickedly thrilled.
The publisher is Samhain Publishing and I am very excited by the publicity this up and coming publisher is getting, so cross your fingers that HEART OF CHANGE will do well and will open doors for me to get more of my lesbian work published.
So for today, my bitching and moaning is over and I am celebrating.

Here is the quick tag:

No yesterday’s Cinderella story here, Simone is a self-made woman who thought she needed a man to make her dreams come true and discovers no man is required especially when the woman chasing her heart is strapped on and knows how to use it!

And the longer blurb:

True love hides where you least suspect it.

After the truth comes out about her age, forty-something porn star Simone Sinclair is handed her walking papers, ending a career that has become more extreme sport than art form. The final straw is her long-time partner’s idea to start their own international studio with a marriage proposal tossed in to sweeten the deal. After two decades of waiting for him to deliver the white picket fence, it’s not exactly the offer she was expecting.

At least she doesn’t need a man to answer the alarm of her biological clock. And when she shares a dance with Geri, one of her lesbian gal pals, she discovers she doesn’t need a man to fulfill other fantasies, either. But Geri’s not interested in touch and tease—she wants more than Simone is ready to give.

Torn between three dreams—a post-retirement career, a family, or lasting love—Simone retreats to get her head on straight, coming to one conclusion. She can’t have everything. But two out of three is worse than nothing at all…

I hope you’re intrigued enough to support me in my effort to get lesbian erotica out in the mainstream world! Spread the word about HEART OF CHANGE because the more copies I sell, the more likely Samhain Publishing will be to represent

Edits, Writing, and PMS...

As you know I've been working on LOVERS this week, hoping to start submitting it around by the end of the month...and ready to absolutely pull my hair out because every time I tie up a loose thread I find two more...completely ripped out a fatal flaw and started from scratch on one of my secondary characters...yikes...but with eight, yes I said eight, main characters...all interconnected lovers...and written from each character's POV it was bound to get messy.

I sent in a proposal for my paranormal that got only so far as, "maybe this is too much horror" for our audience...hmmm...last time I looked it wasn't very horrorific which just goes to show that both my proposal skills and my blurb skills need work. This time last year I had an amazing editor I could bounce proposal ideas off of and he would point out what worked and what didn't work...but since he has fallen off the edge of cyberspace I am now left to my own devices...sigh.

Maybe I'll just kill everyone off at the end of the paranormal and make it a horror story then I could use the current proposal to sell to a different market.

No doubt, they'd write back and say its too erotic romance for them...

Really, I'm not being bitchy, it's the PMS talking.

It is a frustrating game I play though, bouncing ideas back and forth and hoping someone somewhere will like what I've already written...and not have to go back to square one as is so many times the case. I have dozens of partials sitting on the back-back burner waiting to be fleshed out...and at least six (I think I'm forgetting one) on the back burner almost complete...and four I'm drifting back and forth between polishing up. Which means I am constantly scanning the lists for who is acquiring what in the hopes I have something that will fit...and in the case of the recent Secretary WIP (which is now titled SO YOU WANT A JOB) I started from page one word one and just wrote to meet the need...

The good news is...

Edits are finished on both REAPER and PRODIGAL SLAVE (both coming out with Liquid Silver) Reaper has been through both proofer and readers AND has cover art. Prodigal Slave should be shooting off to the proofer in short order....

A final draft of SO YOU WANT A JOB has been sent in to Loose-Id and is now awaiting edits.

Oh, oh...and PORNSTAR now has a home with Samhain!!! Yes, my lesbian erotica will be published! It also has a new title: HEART OF CHANGE.

And SACRED SECRETS is waiting in queue waiting for a release date with Lyrical Press:)

All in all it hasn't been a bad week...

Throwing More Confetti!

Yesterday, I received another acceptance letter in my email! This time from Samhain for my F/F working title piece Porn Star. (The title of which I've been asked to change to something else. Which is okay. I'm not necessarily attached to the title.)

Honestly, I'd given up. They'd had it for awhile (since August 2008) and I'd made revisions (around Christmas) and resubmitted with no word.

I was worried to the point of querying a few other publishers to see if they'd like to see it and got the same standard reply...not really interested in F/F because it doesn't sell as well.

You will notice the photo I attached to this post, a M/F/F menage...which even though the story is not a menage, the blonde in the middle (my pornstar) is in love with both a man and a woman. I swear, my friend Susan must have some psychic connection because this photo was in my email this morning when I woke up:) And it is perfect.

Well, readers...
I hope you help me prove the critiques of female bisexual and lesbian erotic romance wrong! I know there is an audience! I know there is. So, it's going to be up to us to get the word out! Who's with me?

Ranting at The Femmes Guide Today!

I haven't really blogged a lot at the Femme's Guide To Absolutely Everything lately, so since Bonnie and Laura took today's post at the Flog Blog (see below) you can find out what I'm ranting about today (the usual) by visiting the Femme's Guide:)

I'll Get Back To BDSM Soon...I Promise

I was talking to Xandra Gregory today about a whole lot of stuff, mainly writing, sick kids, and trying to guess the whims and trends of publishing houses...

I think she still has concerns that I am turning my back on what I know...BDSM.
But what I really know is erotica...
And what I have been studying for the last twelve years is how to craft a story...
So, I'm not really turning my back on anything.

I actually have three...yes THREE...WIP's with heavy BDSM in the works...
It just so happens I also have three paranormals spinning around my head, my heart, and simmering on my backburner...

Then there's the lesbian erotica which is and always has been a major writing focus...it just isn't published anywhere. Why? Don't get me started on the LGBT soapbox...in case you missed that rant.

This week I'm working on Frankie and Holly's story...F/F...next week...who knows.

And a small PS...
Is anyone in my reading audience a serious Rachel Maddox fan? You may want to read this.

Writing Lesbian Erotica

My current paranormal WIP has been put on hold...
My current BDSM WIP has been put on hold...

It's Sir Hotness's fault...
He took me to The Pub for lunch. I love going to The Pub, they serve the best bar food anywhere and they serve Leffe. The eyecandy is purely incidental... guys in kilts and girls in very, very short plaid skirts. The gal behind the bar could have been the love of my life if...
she was a decade older
or
I was a decade younger...
or
if we somehow met in the middle.

I used to be really pissed off when I saw older guys (middle-aged, 40 plus) with younger girls (20-something)

And then I turned forty.
Hypocrisy is hell.

I digress.

The girl behind the bar is made of the stuff that makes my knees go weak. Dark hair, dark eyes, too much dark kohl around her eyes... petite, thin, small breasts... and the tats...

Now the tats can only be described as beautiful and sexy as hell. Left arm sleeve and up the back of her legs thin lines, mimicking the hosiery of women long ago, and at the tops of those thin lines, barely peeking from beneath that very narrow plaid skirt her family crests.

I crane my neck to watch her move from pull to pull, she looks over her shoulder while she's pouring to maintain eye-contact and conversation...

She. Is. Too. Young.

So I come home and write lesbian erotica.
Because in my novels I can be any age I want to be and twenty-four or five isn't too young.

And BTW ... Happy St. Patrick's Day!

Read To The End...

I'm sure by now that you have heard of the sixteen year old boy who was held against his will in a California home for more than a year, being tortured and abused. It now becomes a case of who was afraid of whom...a man, and two women have been charged. Click the story here.

In unrelated news, you may not have heard that late yesterday afternoon, the Parisian branch of exclusive jewelers Harry Winston was the target of one of the world's largest ever jewel heists. The story only becomes interesting because the head like I read stated: Drag Queen Robbers Steal $100 Million Dollars in Diamonds.
You can read that story here.

Why am I starting my sexy, erotica blog with news?
To keep from boring you with the real stuff maybe...

I woke up to snow...yuk.
I'm painting my daughters room in six different neon colors today...and by blogging I'm procrastinating starting...
I climbed at the rock wall yesterday and am frustrated that I seemed to have stalled in the area of improvement...my teen daughter, Beautiful Girl, can climb circles around me...really...and she doesn't even have to be roped in...I try to remind myself that there is twenty-seven years age difference...no, you really do not have to do the math to figure out MY age...

The Good News is that I haven't blogged for a few days because I am writing...
And submitting...
Porn Star is back with the editor, so cross your fingers...I'm trying to keep in mind that a lesbian love story is a hard sell...actually, I've had two previous editors request that I turn it into a menage...one female two males (my dyke girl getting to be a boy for real...yuk) or two females and one male but the male has to be a yummy, likable, alpha male HERO... (if you can't tell, I'm rolling my eyes)...

So I've asked you to read to the end in case for some reason my editor, post revisions, still thinks that a lesbian love story is too risky...

Know of any successful LGBT Publishers willing to actually stand by their "L"?
You know, just so I have a back-up plan..

Porn Star Revised...

Okay, so I've ripped my ms Porn Star a new one...and then some...then I went back to the original and rewired it...I'm calling it done (the second time around, third, whatever, not the first...which sucked...I can admit that it sucked about my own ms as long as I fix it, right?)

Anyway...I'm reading through it now, hoping to have back to my VERY PATIENT editor tonight...and crossing my fingers that the revision gets her kiss of approval.

I will say that it is not what it started out to be...a menage.
And I love menage as much as the next girl...
But this one actually begged for a monogamous Happily Ever After.

I know.
Who knew.
Really?
OMFG!

I think this happy marriage I'm in is screwing with my head...I'm jaded, right? I don't believe in HEA? I know. Crazy. Next thing you know I'm going to start writing stories that start with the words Once Upon A Time In A Land Far Away...

I'm happy.
It's a schizophrenic, dysfunctional relationship story...with a lot of mindless sex...a lot of mindful sex...and a happily ever after.

Whew.
I'm not done with the read-through yet, but I'm calling this draft of Porn Star done:)

Pornstar Revisions...

I may have mentioned that I am revising Pornstar but I didn't realize how much that would mean to me...because Pornstar started out as a F/F romance...and then on the advice of an editor who I am no longer working with to get the ms into a certain publisher's guidelines (even though they advertise LGBT but really don't mean L just GBT and F/F can only happen as part of a menage but preferably all menages should be MMF...call me frustrated?)

Anyway, to make the long story short, I added a MF romance to make the FF acceptable... that didn't happen ...because bottom line, I couldn't live with myself and the publisher wasn't willing to accept any FF if the M wasn't involved (Can he watch? Ewww...)... so I sent queries off to another editor who I absolutely adore and the revisions she asked for weren't unreasonable (and as usual were right on target)

The problem lies in when I first tore into it...expecting an easy fix...but then I started seeing all the places I'd changed the story, softened the story to try to make it "acceptable" for publisher one...

Sigh...this was not going to be a quick fix...because I want to tell the story that needs to be told.

I jumped ship on Pornstar and started edits on Voyeur...
Now that edits are complete on Voyeur and I am sitting waiting it's release (Oct 28) I am again ready to face Pornstar...and I'm taking my time...letting it percolate as I chop all the subtle sentences that were meant to "soften" the work and make it romance reader friendly...

And I think with the rewrite it is still going to be romantic...I think it is going to be hellatiously romantic...but it is also going to be FF hot... I'm not backing down on what this story needs to say and be. This is a grown-up story with grown-up angst and grown-up need. This story is going to be a little messy and I can't wait to get into the real meat of it.

Pornstar excites me.
Publisher number one wouldn't be able to handle the "real" girl on girl sexiness of Pornstar...
I hope publisher number two can.

And if not, I've got my big girl panties on and I'm going to find a publisher willing to take a chance on a real FF romance because this story deserves to be written...and read.

Anyone Reading This Blog Enjoy F/F Erotica?

Here's the thing, I write a lot of F/F erotica, I attribute it to being Bisexual and currently being in a marriage with a man, so I just think about women when I fantasize and not men...

A lesbian friend asked if I've always exclusively fantasized about women...
Uh, yes...
She laughed and said I was delusional if I thought I was Bi...
Whatever.

Point being, I have a LOT of F/F manuscripts that need a home, and sadly many of the e-book publishers who advertise LGBT really mean that they only take gay male cowboys and gay male vampires...so there really isn't an L, a B, or a T...unless the B is in a menage and then that would work too...

Yes, I'm venting a little.
Not a lot, but a little...because I write really hot F/F and no one is getting a chance to read it. Sad but true. Recently I selected four of my dedicated readers and sent them an ms that was F/F (one of those readers being a committed lesbian who has never been with man in her life)...and the comments I got ranged from, "I forgot I was reading F/F" to "You really challenged my boundaries but I loved it."

I know, regular dedicated, die-hard Roxy fans, family, and friends probably don't count as far as a solid critique goes, but it made me think I need to submit this one outside the box...(ie the small e-book community I've lately been hanging my hat)
So if anyone knows where I can submit F/F and not be turned down or told "change it to M/F or change it to M/M"...please let me know!

Any success stories for other F/F writers would also be quite delightful.
Thanks

Hugs
Roxy

**And please don't bother asking which publisher, cause baby, I don't kiss and tell...