Orbitz was a drink introduced in 1996.  It didn’t take and disappeared from the shelves soon thereafter.  I swear I’ve never seen one in real life.  Now take a good look at the bottle on the left, then read the below snippet from my unfinished SF romance masterpiece:

On the further side of the terrace, a table had been set up for him, under a gazebo tent, with flowers and plates of canapes that were more structurally complex than most sentient creatures. He filled two glasses from a pitcher of spright-of-day, a clear libation with suspended, pearl-sized bubbles of sunfruit juice. He took one glass in hand and drank out of it. The other one he left on the white tablecloth.

She was paralyzed, her dolce-dimmed mind failing to interpret his intentions.

He glanced at her. He seemed amused. “Would you prefer something stronger? I have wine and”—he picked up the placard next to a carafe of purple-black tipple and read—“ ‘Guaranteed Good Time. Our version of this classic party favorite is made with premium black vodka, triple distilled sweetwater brandy, lilyplum tonic, and pompear fizz.’”

She approached the table and drank from the glass of spright-of-day. A bubble of golden sunfruit juice burst on her tongue, sharp and bright.

Wouldn’t you know?  They are drinking Orbitz!  The future has truly already come and gone. 

In other news, PRIVATE ARRANGEMENTS is out on audio.  You can find it on CDs and cassettes here, and as a download here.  And isn’t the cover just absolutely gorgeous?  Sigh.

Okay, enough of my indecent love for that book. If you enjoyed DELICIOUS, please vote for it at http://dabwaha.com/blog. Voting closes 8pm EDT today.

And here is DELICIOUS in all its audio glory. Sigh, so pretty.

I just received the audio CDs for DELICIOUS in the mail yesterday. Now I feel like a rock star, or at least like Diane Settlefield, whose book The Thirteenth Tale, was the last book I listened to on audio. The narrator is Virginia Leishman, who also narrated Possession by A. S. Byatt for Recorded Books. Boy, does she make me sound like Masterpiece Theater. And it’s got a great cover. (My camera is broken. I’ll see if I can’t take a picture of it with someone else’s camera.) I’m wondering if I should do a giveaway. This would be the perfect romance conversion item, cuz your quarry wouldn’t even have any idea s/he was listening to romance, until it’s too late of course.

I’m running a contest on my website, giving away an autographed copy of Shana Abé‘s Smoke Thief, the first book in her Drakon series, in honor of her upcoming new release, Treasure Keeper. I’ll interview Shana Abe and give away Treasure Keeper on my e-newsletter on the day of her release, March 24. I’ll also be posting the interview here. There is an absolutely hilarious story which I’d never read anywhere else on how she came to write about those dragons. Stay tuned.

If you haven’t read GQ‘s feature on Robert Pattinson (ya know, the guy who plays Edward Cullen in the Twilight movie), you are missing the year’s best comedy. I was rolling in the aisles. It is the most hysterically funny feature article I’ve read in a long, long time. The thing is, you have this clueless dude who comes into this mania completely blind. He is the anti-Edward, a beta male (a child, really), he doesn’t smell good, he’s insecure, completely flummoxed, and cannot stop talking earnestly and semi-coherently. I felt like making him tea, knitting him a pair of socks (I don’t know how to knit), and maybe getting a girlfriend to have pity sex with him just to tell him it’s alright. He’s a nice kid. I hope he comes out of this okay.

The only movie I want to see right now, The Young Victoria, is, alas, not yet playing in the U.S. I usually don’t go for costume dramas–surprising I guess, given I write costume dramas–except for Pride and Prejudice. But this one, I’m dying to see, cuz they’ve captured Victoria and Albert as real people, young, passionate, flawed–and hot, omg hot.

And last, but not least, I finally have a proposal accepted. Change of plans. It won’t be THE IDEAL GENTLEMAN, for now. But a new one, THE PERFECT DECEPTION. When I’m further along in the writing I will make a page for it and post excerpt. For now, I’m still grappling with elements of the story. Suffice to say, it was inspired by Meredith Duran’s upcoming book Written on Your Skin. Go read an excerpt. She is going to be one of the greats in our genre.