Sherry Thomas

What Happens in the Las Vegas Suite

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Stays in the Las Vegas Suite, of course.

But below, in no particular order, are the highlights of my trip.

1) The Woodley Park Zoo metro stop.  The escalator coming out of the metro stop is the longest and steepest escalator I’ve ever seen.  Going up for the first time, I had the distinct sensation that the man some ten, twelve steps higher up was hanging on for dear life directly above me.  It was dizzying, but in the best way.

2) The digital publishing experts.  I think I’d met both Angela James of Samhain Publishing and Kassia Krozser of Book Square and Quartet Press before–Kassia owns a very cool Barbara Cartland romance board game, if I remember correctly from RWA 2008 in San Francisco–but I didn’t really have a chance to speak with either.  This time I did.  And it was informative and eye-opening and most reassuring, to know that the wild, wild frontier of digital publishing is manned by cool, calm, in-charge women who know exactly what they are doing.

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Written on Your Skin: And You Call This a Book Launch?

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I know, I know.  Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.  Today Meredith’s long-awaited WRITTEN ON YOUR SKIN hits the shelves and we’ve nothing for it.  In fact, I totally forgot about it until I saw the fabulous A+ review it received at Dear Author.

So I’ll just post a video of Meredith I stumbled across on YouTube last week.

As you can see, her photos don’t do her justice and she is disgustingly gorgeous in person.  Now time for everyone to run out and get WRITTEN ON YOUR SKIN!

RWA and Bookplates for You

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RWA National Conference is upon us again!  Meredith and I will be there, not with bells on exactly, but with enough wide-eyed eagerness that you can’t really see our deadline-induced raggedness underneath.

We will both be signing at the Literacy Autographing, which is open to the public.

Wednesday, July 15
5:30-7:30 p.m.
Marriott Wardman Park Hotel, Exhibit Hall

I was reading Joanna Bourne’s blog a while back and Jo, much better prepared than either Meredith or I, had custom bookplates printed ahead of time so that she could give them to readers who already had her books at home.   And I thought, what a great idea.  I emailed Jo and asked her about it, she very kindly emailed me back with step-by-step instruction on how to obtain similar bookplates.  Alas, then I asked the crucial question: How long would it take?

Well, there just wasn’t enough time.  So I abandoned the idea for a while.  But then I since I regularly make bookplates from mailing labels–not very pretty ones by the way, just functional–I thought, oh, what the heck, let me give it a try at home.

So for Meredith, I took the masthead from her website and shrank it down to fit a 1″ x 2 5/8″ label.

duran

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Not Quite Enough About Meredith

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I can tell you this much.  Neither Meredith nor I planned to be on deadline so soon together.  But well, we are.  🙂

Meredith has a deadline in August.  And so do I, since 10 days ago when my agent emailed and said she wanted the first draft of the next tour-de-force done by August 1.  LOL, guess no-matter how much I deny being in the shitty-first-draft camp, I’ve been unmistakably tainted by my undeniably shitty first drafts.

Had things been different we’d hold a much grander celebration.  But now we’ll just toss this little interview out and call it a release party.  Enjoy!

You have said on this blog that you brainstorm to blaring Top 40 hits on the radio. Can you give me some examples of songs that have helped Bound by Your Touch and Written on Your Skin take shape?

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NQAH: A Visual Companion

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UPDATED: Now with map!

Because every unfamiliar setting deserves one.  🙂  Passages in blockquote are from the book.

NOT QUITE A HUSBAND starts in Rumbur Valley, on the North-West Frontier of British India (today’s North-West Frontier Province, Pakistan) Rumbur Valley is one of the three valleys known as the Kalash Valleys, so called because of their unique Kalasha population. The Kalasha are a tribe of pagans who worship a pantheon of gods. They believe themselves to have descended from the soldiers of Alexander the Greek–and it is not unusual to find among the Kalasha fair hair and blue/green eyes. Unlike the Kafirs of Afghanistan who were forcibly converted to Islam in mid-1890s by the Amir of Kabul, the Kalash Valleys happened to fall on the British side of the Durand Line, and the Kalasha were allowed to continue in their ancient beliefs first under the British, then later under the constitution of Pakistan.

Across the stream, fields glinted a thick, bright gold in the narrow alluvial plain—winter wheat ready for harvest. Small, rectangular houses of wood and stacked stone piled one on top of another along the rising slope, like a collection of weathered playing blocks. Beyond the village, the ground elevated more rapidly, a brief stratum of walnut and apricot trees before the bones of the hills revealed themselves, austere crags that supported only dots of shrubs and an intrepid deodar or two.

Image by Yodod
Image by Yodod

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Meredith Duran Is Here and You Should Be AFRAID!

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To know Meredith Duran is to hate your own parents.

She is talented.  God, is she talented.  You could put her on the cover of a romance directly, no retouching required.  She can drink George Clooney under the table–a quality, particularly in a woman, that makes me green with envy, as a cup of hot cocoa can drink me under the table.  And she will mostly likely put a Ph.D. after her name in a couple of years, something that my shallow, snobbish soul covets, but is too lazy to do anything about.

Meredith and I have always been destined to meet and fall in mutual fangirl adoration, though neither of us knew it.  Or at least, I didn’t.  You see, we have been part of the same menage for years, both of us sharing the same critique partner, Janine of Dear Author.   But we’ve never critiqued each other–and still don’t–and I didn’t even know she existed until she won the Gather.com contest.  Upon which point, Janine excitedly mention to me this other critique partner, and I asked, sobbing, “Since when have you been cheating on me?”  🙂

(To Meredith, once and for all, I came first, I’m the chief wife, you are just the concubine!)

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Just for LOLZ

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I couldn’t resist. I could not. Once I saw that the site existed and I could make a three-D video just by typing, well, I couldn’t resist.

I think I went where no romance writer has ever gone. But that’s very likely because I am the frog at the bottom of the well who doesn’t know what’s going on in the big, wide world. So if there are other romance trailers made this way, please let me know. (I still think I must be among the first five, if not the first.) 🙂

So here it is, a talking trailer for NOT QUITE A HUSBAND.

P.S. And I just learned this myself. Click on the little triangle at the bottom right corner of the youtube video. And then click on the little tab that pops up. It will recede the video and reveal both its url and its embed code.

Delicious FTW, I hope

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DELICIOUS is up now against the number 1 seed in the bracket, Loretta Chase’s YOUR SCANDALOUS WAYS, in the DABWAHA tournament. I didn’t even notice when PRIVATE ARRANGEMENTS went down. PRIVATE ARRANGEMENTS can take care of itself, but DELICIOUS, DELICIOUS is my precious, preciousssss…

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.