Love Across the Universe Cover Reveal!!

Love
Across the Universe

Genre: Science Fiction Romance

Publisher: Stars and Stone Books

Date of Publication: August 1 2017

ISBN-10: 0-9977081-8-2

ISBN-13: 978-0-9977081-8-9

ASIN: B071JSHCGC

13 Stories of
Science Fiction Romance Set on Intergalactic Shore 


#spacebeachlove

Summer love is summer love, no matter the planet. Climb aboard your
spacecraft or time machine and travel across time and space with these
thirteen tales of love on beaches in the future and among the stars.

Includes stories by USA Today Bestselling Author Traci Douglass, Cara
McKinnon, Rhonda Jackson Joseph, A.E. Hayes, Sheri Queen, M.T. DeSantis, L.J.
Longo, K.W. Taylor, Mary Rogers, Elsa M. Carruthers, Emmerite Sundberg, Serena
Jayne, and Oriana Maret.

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Traci Douglass – “A Dream to Build a Kiss On”
Can passion bloom between a bookish botanist and an analytical android?

Cara McKinnon – “The Pirates and the Pacifist”
Kai doesn’t believe in violence. Sam and Dek believe the ends justify the
means. Will passion be enough to bridge the gap between the pacifist sent to
broker galactic peace and the space pirates hired to keep him away at all
costs?

A.E. Hayes – “Tristan’s Tryst”
One mysterious being. Two lovers who find her. Can this threesome handle
the heat of this scorching summer?

Sheri Queen – “Red Sand”
If she can only save one thing, which will it be—the red beaches of Mars
or a love she can’t imagine living without?

M.T. DeSantis – “The Princess of Sands”
Secrets and lies. Can they be each other’s freedom?

L.J. Longo – “Breathless”
The manager of a resort planet and the head of its secret defense unit
team up to save the guests—and discover danger is a potent aphrodisiac.

K.W. Taylor – “Reprogramming”
Alex didn’t want to be marooned on an alien planet with a robot, but it
may just be exactly what she needs.

Mary Rogers – “Breakfast on Pluto”
Doing the right thing isn’t always what’s best—but sometimes it pays
off.  A chance meeting of two people unaware of their destiny with each
other results in a bond too difficult to break, but even duty has its
boundaries. Will love help them break free—and will love be enough?

Elsa M. Carruthers – “All B+ut You”
Lou is looking for the right guy and finds him where she least expects.

Emmerite Sundberg – “Fluid”
She’s everything she’s ever wanted but with one flaw – they can’t
actually touch.

Serena Jayne – “You Only Love Once”
Carpe diem the hell out of love.

Oriana Maret – “Renewal” 
She’ll brave the arms of destruction to shed the arms that betrayed.

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Beatrice: Cute but Crazy

After I had Drucilla a few months, she seemed lonely and out-of-sorts. I brought her to the vet, but they couldn’t find anything wrong with her. So I decided that she must need a friend. So I found Beatrice. I must admit I picked her over another chinchilla, closer in age to Drucilla, because she is gorgeous. Seriously, she’s the most beautiful chinbaby in the world.

But I found out pretty fast that she is a crazy, crazy critter. When I first got her, I used fleece liners in her cage. She would look me in the eye and pull the fleece into the corner of her cage and sit on it with an angry look on her face. When you open the door of her cage, she grabs your hand and pushes it out of her way so she can escape. She will only allow me to pet her through the bars of the cage. If you try to pet her and she doesn’t want you to, she will get in her wheel and without breaking eye contact, run furiously toward you.

She’s a weird one. Sadly, she never got along with Drucilla, but I sure love her.

Wednesday Coffee – Full-Bodied and Robust

I’m not one for taking mirror selfies. I’m not saying you shouldn’t do it yourself, but I don’t do it because I suffer from what some call “bad body image” and what others would call “body dysmorphic disorder.”  In other words, I find it hard to see a photo of myself and think it looks good.

I don’t usually post about personal stuff like this nor do I get very heavy with my posts, preferring to post fluff that will make everyone happy to anything that might show my fears and skeletons. But two things have prompted this post.

One: I saw a woman in my store the other day who could easily weigh less than 100 pounds. I’ve seen her around during my several years’ service at my store. Each time I see her, she gets thinner and thinner. Every time I see her, it breaks my heart because all I can think is “there but for the grace of god go I.” That could have been me. Easily. So obsessed with the idea that I’m fat that I can’t see the truth.

Two: I came across an old post of mine from several years ago about the clothing industry. Not the fashion industry that has crazy thin models that parade around with their plastic surgery. Everyone knows that they are an unreachable standard of beauty. No one really wants to be them. I’m talking about the people who make clothes. The ones who apply the words “extra large” to arbitrary sizes and coined the term “plus sized.” The one that when you go to buy pants from the same brand, you wear three different sizes, and then when you wash them once they are so tight you have a muffin top, no matter your actual body type.

So I have a few more confessions to make on top of my past inability to see myself as anything but fat. I wear a size 17 pants. This lodges me firmly within the “plus sized” family, which starts at size 12 and suggests that anyone within that size and higher are an outlier group that shops must cater to differently than the “average” twiggy teenager who wears clothing smaller than that. I weight 181 pounds. According to the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, I am overweight for my height of 5’7”. I am bordering on obese. Don’t look it up, really. Your sanity doesn’t need that kind of pressure. I know mine doesn’t.

So. Now that you know that I’m overweight and plus sized, please look at the photo I have attached. A mirror selfie.

I used to be so obsessed with the idea that I was fat that I couldn’t see the truth. That I am me. I am beautiful. Clothing industry tries to make me think that I am worthless because of my body size by suggesting that I need to shop in different stores than “normal people.” The very health officials that are supposed to be keeping me healthy are trying to grind me into the dirt by calling me overweight, borderline obese.

And they’re doing the same to you.

So. The next time you feel bad about yourself and your body, look yourself in the eyes in the mirror and say, “Fuck them. I’m beautiful and as long as I can see that, it doesn’t matter what anyone else says.”

Because the fashion industry thrives on making sure you feel bad about yourself so you buy more clothes. And the health industry no longer sees you as a patient, a human being, but instead a customer. Someone to sell something to. Like a miracle pill.

So let’s stop this self-depreciation nonsense and see our bodies for what they are. Ours. And no one else’s.

I can’t help that customer but I can try to help you. Don’t fall prey to what others think. I’ve beaten my body dysmorphic disorder and so can you.

Chinchillas! Meet Drucilla

Drucilla is the chinchilla who has been with me the longest. She’s a little love muffin and absorbs all the pets I can give her. She doesn’t like being picked up or eating rosehips. Every time I pick her up, she quivers in terror and emits a “scared” odor. Poor thing. She trusts me enough to squeeze her face during pets but not to pick her up.

Drucilla as a baby before she ever came to me. Photo by the breeder. Can you blame me for choosing this little face?

 

 

She came to me at three months old when I finally realized I could fulfill my lifelong dream to own a chinchilla. I was sent a message by a friend about a breeder in a nearby town and originally negotiated to own two other chinchillas before we settled upon Drucilla. Daughter of ribbon-winning show chinchillas, it’s easy to see. She’s a beautiful little fluff.

I had her for two months and she often spent her time sitting on her shelf, staring at me. I decided she was lonely and started looking for another chinchilla to be her best friend.

Drucilla, Dru, Droobs, or most recently, Gerbs.

 

 

 

Tuesday Coffee: Write Every Day

It is an old saying that you have to make your own mistakes, and I suppose that is true in a lot of things. I always prided myself in seeing others make mistakes and not doing the same thing they did. I learned by other people’s mistakes, not my own. But at the same time, I was terrible at taking advice. When I first started in the Writing Popular Fiction MFA program at Seton Hill University, I was told to write every day. There was a module on time management and my class was given a calender on which to plot out when we would write. Every day. I giggled to myself.

I filled in the calendar for a week, knowing full well that I wasn’t going to be writing on any other days than my two days off.

I did this for two terms. Writing was hard. It dragged. I hated what I wrote and I had to lock myself in the bedroom, music blasting to be able to concentrate at all. Sure, I made my monthly page goals, but I didn’t have any fun.

So this term, I decided to try that whole “write every day” thing. And guess what? Writing became easy. I liked what I was writing. I could suddenly kick over 1k words in about an hour. Amazingly, keeping your book fresh in your mind helps. So, don’t be like me. Don’t ignore advice. Learn from my mistakes.

Write every day. Make time for it. It’ll be worth it.

Books! Review of Cherie Priest’s Maplecroft

In America, there’s nothing we like better than an unsolved mystery. The slaying of the Bordens has spawned several movies and books, all trying to explain what happened to inspire such brutal murders. Maplecroft by Cherie Priest is one of the most imaginative. In this novel, Priest has seamlessly blended the unfortunate lives of the Borden sisters with Lovecraftian strangeness. While they may seem unrelated topics, it is obvious that the author has done her homework on the Borden sisters. All of the dates corresponding to real events in their lives were unchanged. And the setting is close enough to the setting in Lovecraft’s work to tie the two together. Ms. Priest even utilizes locales from Lovecraft’s work, such as Miskatonic University.

The book is written in a highly Victorian form, as a series of journal entries and missives. This helped to completely root the reader in the Victorian era without having to add too many other Victorian elements. But also as such, it presented three problems for the reader. One, only the information that the characters wish to share end up on the page. Secondly, some of the tension is removed when the reader knows that the character “writing” the scene lives to write it down. Lastly, some of the tension is also removed with musings on religion and other thoughts that the character adds during the later chronicling process.

Don’t, however, assume that these minor things make for a boring book. Lizbeth Borden and her accompanying cast are a strange group and the events surrounding them make things even stranger. Something unusual is happening to Fall River, the hometown of the Bordens, and what happened to their parents was just the beginning. Following the women and their allies as they try to learn what is happening and how to stop it keeps the reader going until the end. The chilling descriptions of people-turned-monsters are truly horrifying and make the reader as interested to find out what is happening to them as the characters are.

Possibly most extraordinary is how the inner thoughts of the characters, ruminating on very Victorian concerns, reflect concerns in modern society. Each of the characters, at one point, considers his or her own stance on the loss of religion in a highly religious society, a woman’s struggles to make a name for herself in science, and the acceptance of homosexuality. Priest’s chosen era, the 1890s, is when all these things were first being considered on a wider scale, but are still hot-button issues in modern society. By presenting them in a historical setting, though, they can feel less immediate and allow for a little more introspection. Priest’s handling of all the issues is expert, presenting them not as a vast statement, but without commentary beyond their importance in her characters’ lives.

Maplecroft is a tale of horror and acceptance and how sometimes saving others can overcome a desire to hide one’s self away from the world and criticism.

Wednesday Morning Coffee

The invention of the hoop skirt in the southern states during the Victorian period really did stand to reason. Have you seen how many layers the average Victorian lady wore? There’s at least four layers of petticoats (for propriety, you can’t have any gentlemen even getting the impression that you have legs, let alone get a glimpse of their shape), topped by bustle or other type of flounce (also sometimes worn as a separate layer over top the skirt), and a skirt. On the top, there was a a chemise, a corset, and a corset topper, only to be covered by a shirt and a jacket. Good gravy.

When I wore a similar construction as a Halloween costume this past year, I was hot. Capital letters hot. H. O. T hot. And it was October and already chilly. I was not even wearing any of the proscribed petticoats, bustle, chemise, or corset. And I was still ready to die.Really, it’s no wonder there are so many stories of Victorian ladies fainting. It wasn’t their delicate constitutions, it was that they were just overheated.*

So really, a construction that holds your dress out from your body must have been the only way to survive. That and the paper fan. Thank heavens someone invented shorts.

* this is not an actual fact. Please do not include this in a history paper.