Book Trailer Woes

Do you want the bad news first? Might as well, stop it spoiling the good news. On Tuesday, we were lamenting the fact we’d had two rejections. Our lovely Facebook friends were rallying around to boost our flagging confidence and encourage us. On Wednesday, we had another one.

That’s the bad news out of the way. Though there isn’t actually any good news to heal the wounds. Sorry about that. But we want to share our mistakes so you don’t make the same. These mistakes concern the book trailer. If you follow us on Twitter, you will have seen all the tweets that end with #booktrailerwoes because this thing is driving us crazy. Well, ok, we were already there, but it’s jabbing us with sharp sticks and taunting us that we’ll never escape. First there was our epic search for the right music. One of the best sites we’ve come across is http://incomptech.com which is Kevin Macleod’s site. It’s all royalty free, free music. You just have to credit him and if you want to donate, it’s optional. The guys ha literally hundreds of tracks. We know, because we’ve listened to almost all of them. We’ve picked out a couple we think we can use for our book trailer, but have to see if they match our images first. http://freesounds.org is another that has free sound effects, things like howling wind, crunching snow, screams, etc.

So the music’s sort of done, it’s just the images. The bloody images. We have spent DAYS, if not weeks, scouring websites for royalty free images. http://morguefile.com has absolutely free ones. So far, the best ones we’ve found are on http://123rtf.com and http://fotalia.com. 123 is the cheaper of the two and they have thousands of really cool images, for 47p/63p per credit (you need credits to download the photos). But this is where we made our mistake. After days of trawling the sites, marking down the pages of images we liked in our journals, a notebook, whatever paper we had to hand, when it came to narrowing down our selection, some of the images had jumped to a different page, or we hadn’t written down which website the pages for ‘woman with rose’ came from. We trusted our memories, forgetting our memories eloped with our sanity years ago and neither have been seen since. When we finally got round to registering on 123, we discovered the lightbox feature, where if you find an image you like, you add it to the lightbox and all your images are stored there, save you searching for them. We nearly cried when we discovered this. So if you find images you like, register and put them in your lightbox before they do a disappearing act on you. Do it now! NOW!

Urged on by our friend, Lisa Dee, who’s also learning about ebook publication with us, we’ve set up a fan page for Gunning Down Romance on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/pages/Gunning-Down-Romance/234554763292573 there’s also going to be a launch on Facebook for it. We’ll probably post anti-love songs, links to buy the book and have the book trailer on there. If the damn thing ever gets made. Oh we also have to write a synopsis, finish redrafting the stories, do a proper front cover then format it. With just over two weeks to go. Might need some more Red Bull…

Love Kills

Ok, a few days have passed since we announced our challenge to have an ebook out there for Valentine’s Day. We’ve been regretting it ever since. We knew it would be a lot of work and we only gave ourselves a month’s deadline, but we didn’t realise how many precious brain cells we would lose in the process. We can’t afford to lose any more! They’re too little and confused to be let out alone. After several more sleepless nights and frustrating days, we might actually be getting somewhere. By that we mean we haven’t checked in to the mental hospital. Yet. The Black Kiss is done and polished. Til Death Us Do Part is probably done. Kiss of Death has been extensively worked on, rewritten in parts and slaved over so much we’re sick of the sight of it. Can’t bear to look at it for a few days. So we’ve been working on our promo trailer. We thought we could have it done in a day and set about excitedly collecting royalty free images and music. We started that on Monday. Thousands of images and hundreds of songs later, our eyes and ears are bleeding from the effort and our trailer is still locked inside our heads. We don’t do anything small. We don’t just think big, we think EPIC. If we had Hollywood’s budget and talent, we would be dangerous. Instead we’ve got writers’ budget and zero talent. Just a lot of fantastic ideas that would be more beneficial in someone else’s head.

We now have three covers for Gunning Down Romance mocked up with the same graphic but different fonts. One of our FB friends gave us a link to a free font site and we spent the day hyped up on excitement. Is it weird that we get just as excited over fonts as we do over ghost tours? Simple things…Seeing the book cover keeps us focused on our task when we all want to do is run outside and scream. But that would probably bring the chuckle wagon straight to us. We’re pretty sure our mum has them on speed dial. It’s our birthday three days after Valentine’s Day so we might book a room as a present to ourselves. We have nothing else planned, we’ve been too busy with the book.

We plan to hold a book launch on Facebook on Valentine’s Day to celebrate it’s release. Might even take our laptop to the pub so we can enjoy the release of a bloody romance collection surrounded by happy couples presenting each other with wilting red roses bought from the petrol forecourt and fluffy teddies holding hearts. Since when did teddy bears become the gods of romance? They’ll be staring all googly eyed at each other, we’ll be playing anti Valentine’s songs and reading gory scenes where lovers meet a grisly end. So come Valentine’s Day, if no-one has bought their lover a cheesy cliché and wants something different, download our book. There’s romance (sort of), sex, humour, blood and scenes some readers may find disturbing.

Give your lover a Valentine’s Day they’ll never forget…

Valentine’s Slay

We’ve been so caught up in all things ebook we’ve forgotten to blog. Yes, we are that unprofessional We’ve spent so long reading up on formatting and e self publishing that our brains have reached full capacity and are now on standby preparing to hibernate. They’re also divorcing us for cruel and unusual punishment. We’re not going to contest it. We’ll just go our separate ways and look back on our fond memories of the past 28 years. *Tumbleweed blows past* They’re so full we haven’t slept properly for days and are now purely powered by Red Bull. If you put your ear against our veins, you can hear them fizzing.

We’ve discarded the idea of releasing Death’s Cold Kiss and hit upon another idea. Releasing a trilogy of bloody Valentine’s tales on Valentine’s Day. Which gives us a month. We work better when there’s a deadline because it stops us wandering off and getting distracted by shiny things. Anyhoo, the trilogy will be made up of Til Death Us Do Part (previously published in Dark Fire’s ezine), The Black Kiss, (previously published on Draven Ames’ blog) and a new story, Kiss of Death. We’ve redrafted Til Death Us Do Part and added 500 words to The Black Kiss but because their original versions are available to read for free, we’re going to price the whole trilogy at 99 cents (Smashwords are American so we presume we’ll have to price it for the American market). We feel it would be unfair to price it higher for that reason.

And we are so close to being done the tingles have started. And that’s not because we’ve only had one small Red Bull this morning. The Black Kiss is polished so much we can see our faces in it *shrieking and running behind the settee.* Til Death Us Do Part needs to be printed and checked for hidden errors and Kiss of Death is being redrafted and redrafted and redrafted and having its ending changed. We’ve done the copyright notice, the licencing agreement, the acknowledgements page, the author page and the table of contents. Just got to put everything together and format it. Our mate Ryan mocked up a cover for us last night and it looks fantastic! He’s doing another version today. At least he said he is. If he hasn’t…*fetching jump leads and car battery* we know where he lives And today we’re going to start working on our book trailer. We’re currently downloading images of hearts from Morguefile. Though most of the hearts are all lovely and Valentiney. We want images of wounded hearts, burning hearts, the type of hearts that will never feature on Valentine’s card because the image of a shattered, bloody heart just doesn’t say ‘I love you’ in a commercially acceptable way.

Just got to find creepy copyright free music for the trailer. This is so scary. It’s so different from print publication in anthologies or magazines. Once they’re published our involvement is over, except for some promotion. We don’t get feedback on it. But this is all us. If the format’s wrong, that’s our fault. If people hate the stories, that’s down to us. If it fails it’s because we haven’t worked hard enough at promoting it. We’re preparing ourselves for bad reviews. There will be bad reviews, our writing isn’t to everyone’s tastes. It kinda feels like standing in front of a giant target on a shooting range and waiting for hotty soldiers to pull the trigger. Mmmm, hotty soldiers. If it all goes horribly wrong, we’ll go and live in a cave. And you’ve never heard of C L Raven. Then if anyone asks about us, shrug, mumble, look really embarrassed and create such an air of awkwardness they’ll stop asking. At least, that’s how we do it

Voyage of Self Publishery

Over the past couple of months, we’ve been seriously considering self-publishing. We downloaded David Gaughran’s excellent book Let’s Get Digital (we can’t recommend it enough) and it really inspired us to bring something out as an ebook. We love printed books. We don’t have enough shelf space in our room for any more books and our floor stacking now has a couple of layers. Our dream is to hold our own book. With the short stories we’ve had published, we prefer the ones in actual magazines or books because we can hold them. It makes it more real. But print self-publishing is more expensive and unless we fire up our back-up plan of becoming guinea pigs for scientists, we can’t afford it. When we were younger we always printed out our stories and designed our own covers for them, including cover art and blurbs. Our own cheap way of self publishing, so doing this professionally appeals to us.

We always used to think that self-publishing was in a way, a failure. Someone wasn’t good enough to be taken on by a publisher so had to do it themselves. Then we learned how tough the publishing industry is and changed our minds. We then thought if one of our novels received a lot of rave rejections (‘we really liked it but it’s not right for us’) then we’d self-publish because we would know it was good enough. But hearing back from publishers/agents, takes time and we’re not patient people. Anyone who’s seen us in a supermarket queue knows this. We’re the kind of people who will drive several miles out of our way to avoid a traffic queue, even a short one because we hate waiting. Our Renault 4s feel the same way and one just had to look at a queue and he’d overheat. Then we read David’s guide and the success stories and thought ‘if they could do it, so could we’.

So we sent one novel, Soul Asylum to be edited, made a front cover with GIMP and tried to learn about formatting. Then we thought, maybe we wouldn’t risk a novel first, we’ll write a collection of rewritten fairytales. We’ve got 3 versions of Snow White, finished writing Sleeping Beauty and done a few redrafts and are now writing Cinderella. But this is going to take some time to get them all up to publishing standard. Our friend, Lisa, is joining us on the self-publishing adventure and she’s way ahead of us. Did we mention we’re highly competitive? We have to catch up. So instead, we’ve decided to release a single short story first. We’ve chosen one of the first we ever wrote, Death’s Cold Kiss. It’s one we really like and doesn’t really fit a genre, so we’ve struggled to find a magazine to take it.

Now to learn formatting. Those of you who follow us on Twitter, or are friends with us on Facebook, will know all about the epic battle we had with GIMP. If it was a wrestling match, GIMP had us pinned in a full nelson, mushing our faces into the canvas. But we fought back and victory was ours. Sort of ours. We still haven’t figured out how to make our font bold, but the only experience we had with photo software is Picture It, which is ten years old. Now we’ve fallen victim to Movie Live Maker’s cruel games and it has broken our spirit. So the thought of formatting leaves us cold inside. Going to read up on it now. So if you hear hysterical sobbing, the gods cowering in fright from our swearing outburst and the sounds of a laptop smashing coming from the Cardiff area, you know formatting has defeated us. Might just book a room in the nearest institution in advance.

We see a Dark Moon Rising

Issue 6 of Dark Moon Digest is out now. And we’re in it! We’ve been waiting since June for it to be released and finally the wait is over. We’re so excited. It’s our first American publication. Hopefully the first of many as long as we behave ourselves and don’t get our names black listed The Ferryman is an updated version of Chiron but set on a train driven by Chiron’s son, who was forced into the job and is now stuck there. The hero, Hayden, misses his train and ends up on The Ferryman, where he discovers the end destination is quite possibly Hell on earth.

We’re also editing a short story, The Darkshines, a dark story set in a town that is the physical manifestation of the horror of depression. It took us ages to write because we stopped to work on our NaNo novel but it’s now finally shaping up into the atmospheric tale we imagined in our heads.  Once we’re done with that we’ll submit it then continue working on our Twisted Fairytales collection which we’re hoping to epublish this year. We’ve done 3 versions of Snow White and are redrafting our version of Sleeping Beauty. Just have to decide which other fairytales we’re going to twist. Though not sure we can make them more twisted than the original versions

Blog Off 2011

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 1,800 times in 2011. If it were a cable car, it would take about 30 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

Welcome Lacey Wolfe

We are thrilled to welcome the lovely Lacey Wolfe to Ravens’ Retreat. Lacey is the author of Amber’s Muse, a brilliant erotic novella about Amber, an erotic author who needs a muse for her steamy love scenes and finds a willing guinea pig in her hunky neighbour, Jax. Her second novella, Fool Me Once, is out now. It is the first in her Hot Bod series and she’ll interviewing the main characters, Skylar and Drew, here today. If you’d like to win a copy of Fool Me Once, leave a comment with your email address for a chance to win one.

*Whipping dust sheet off the chair* we’re not used to having guests. *Moving stacks of magazines to the floor and breaking out the best biscuits.* Sit down, Lacey, Drew and Skylar and welcome to Ravens Retreat. Have a biscuit.

 

Lacey: Thank you so much for having us here today. I’m really glad that Skylar and Drew have taken time out of their lives to let me interview them.

Skylar: I don’t mind, today was boot camp day. That day is starting to become my least favorite at Hot Bods Gym.

Drew: Anytime I’m out of the office is a good day in my book.

Lacey: So tell me Drew, has Skylar forgiven you yet for leaving her alone after that hot weekend and never calling?

Drew: **Rolls eyes at Lacey** Did you really have to bring that up? I hope **turns to Skylar** that she has. I think I’ve done everything I could to show her just how much I love her and I never want to hurt her again.

Skylar: **Squeezes his hand** You have.

Drew: Good. **Gives her a light kiss on the cheek**

Lacey: Okay, let’s cut that out. I know exactly where one simple kiss between you two can lead. Are there any plans in the future to moving in together?

Skylar: We’ve talked about it, but I’m not sure. I don’t want to leave my BFF Amy hanging. She has had no luck finding Mr. Right. Hopefully she does soon though. But for now, we just have sleepovers and it seems to be working. We get alone time when we need it. We have our entire lives to figure out a wedding date and all that other stuff.

Lacey: So, is it official yet?

Drew and Skylar: Maybe

Lacey: I think it takes a special man to be able to deal with your feistiness Skylar. Is Drew the one who can?

Skylar: God, he better. We’ve been through way too much for him to not. Don’t you think Lacey?

Lacey: Oh yeah. Drew you better not ditch and run again.

Drew: That is the last thing on my mind.

Skylar: It better be!

Lacey: Does Francesca still come to Hot Bods?

Skylar: Really Lacey, you have to bring her up? **Rolls eyes** Yes she does. But we keep our distance. I suppose when your under contract with a gym it isn’t exactly simple to just find a new one. She hasn’t taken any of my classes. She is typically in the cardio area when I see her.

Lacey: Do you see her Drew?

Drew: Uh…not on purpose. She is a nice girl, really. Just needs a little guidance.

Skylar: You’re not the one to be giving it to her.

Drew: I know. Lacey, can we change the subject to something else?

Lacey: Sure. Sorry about putting you in the hot seat. How about we get this over by you telling me what your favorite thing about the other one is. Drew, you first.

Drew: I love everything about Skylar. She’s perfect. She is beautiful, speaks her mind—even when its directed toward me. Skylar will help any friend in need. And for whatever reason, she puts up with me and loves me. I couldn’t ask for a better partner in life.

Skylar: Awe, you’re so sweet. My favorite thing about Drew is his c—, oh sorry that might be inappropriate. My favorite thing is that he always makes me feel special and like I’m the only one who matters.

Lacey: I can see by the way you two are looking at one another; you are more than ready to get out of here. So, I won’t keep you love birds. Thank you so much however for taking the time to chat with me.

Skylar: Anytime Lacey! Without you, we wouldn’t have our happily ever after.

 

Fool Me Once (Hot Bods, #1) by Lacey Wolfe

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice…

Drew is the last person Skylar wanted to see across from her at a local bar. A month ago he’d wined and dined her all weekend, leaving her feeling fully in love, but then she awoke alone in an empty hotel room and she hadn’t heard from him since.

The weekend Drew spent with Skylar was phenomenal. There had never been anyone who made him feel as complete as she did. He shouldn’t have disappeared, he should have called, but his feelings for her scared him, so he distanced himself. But when he saw her again, he knew he couldn’t stay away any longer.

Skylar’s determined not to give Drew another chance to hurt her, but he’s just as determined to win her back. Although it won’t be easy, he’s up to the challenge, and he’s willing to do whatever it takes to accomplish his goal.

Content Warning: Explicit Sex

Amazon / Nook / BeachwalkPress/ _AllRomance / Bookstrand

www.laceywolfe.com

 

Losing It

We’re not going to bore you by moaning about what crappy lives we’ve had – trust us, they’ve been crappy – because this isn’t The Jeremy Kyle Show. We wouldn’t get invited on there anyway – we’re not Chavs who have no idea who the baby’s daddy is. Anyhoo, we wear our scars with pride because they show we’ve survived. And no matter how bad it’s got, how much into the darkness we’ve gone, there’s always been one thing that’s kept us sane. Relatively sane. Fine, out of the asylums. One thing that’s helped us to escape the torment of our minds and turn our Darkshines into a creative place where for that brief moment, the pain goes away. It’s our writing. Our writing is the only part of us we’ve ever believed in. The only part we’ve ever truly liked. Even when we got nothing but rejections we always had the belief one day we’d make it. That our writing was good enough. It was just a matter of time. Someone who would see in it what we did. Wow. It’s a lot like our dating history. No wait, that’s worse. We’ve at least got stories published. But we never gave up. Never stopped writing. Never lost faith.

Until now.

It’s gone.

And we don’t know if it will ever come back.

We write all day, every day. We don’t take days off, we don’t have holidays. We love it. To most people a job is just a job. Not to us. Writing isn’t what we do, it’s what we ARE. We’re so entwined with it that without it, we have nothing. We ARE nothing. We haven’t had an acceptance since…June. Since then it’s been nothing but rejection after rejection after rejection. Normally we shrug, note it down then send the story somewhere else. But now…we no longer believe in our work. What if all along, they were right? What if their ‘I enjoyed reading it but it’s not right for us and we hope you keep writing’ was just a polite way of saying ‘you’re crap now fuck off and stop wasting our time when we could be reading stuff by talented people.’ We’re still desperate to succeed. We just don’t think we will any more. We’re not good enough. Maybe we never were. And now we’ve lost faith in the only thing we ever believed in. We use self deprecating humour all the time, we love it, it’s who we are but we’ve never mocked our writing. We’ve never slated it, never hated it. Just continued writing, waiting for that day when someone says ‘you were right. You’re geniuses.’ Ok they’d never say that but we can dream. We can quote the authors who’ve been rejected countless times. Stephen King could paper his walls with his rejections. Gone with the Wind was rejected nearly 40 times. Lord of the Flies was rejected 20 times. We know the saying “the only difference between published writers and non published writers is non published ones give up’ and we’ve always felt there’s a terrible tragedy of those who give up their dreams and go and have normal jobs. But what if there comes a time when you have to realise you’re not going to make it? That your dreams are just fantasies that will never become reality?

Where our believe was is now a big black hole of nothing.

In Criminal Minds Spencer Reid said “sometimes, for an artist, the only difference between insanity and genius, is success.”

 

We Wish you a Bloody Christmas

We wish you a bloody Christams

We wish you a bloody Christmas; 

We wish you a bloody Christmas;

We wish you a bloody Christmas and a crappy New Year.

Severed heads we bring as we slay your kin;

Severed heads for Christmas and a crappy New Year.

 

Oh, bring us the head of Santa;

Oh, bring us the head of Santa;

Oh, bring us the head of Santa and a cup of elves’ blood

 

 

We won’t go until we get some; 

We won’t go until we get some; 

We won’t go until we get some, so drain those elves here

 

We wish you a bloody Christmas;

We wish you a bloody Christmas;

We wish you a bloody Christmas and a crappy New Year.

 

Jingle Bells

Santa’s feeling blue,

the reindeer are on strike,

they told Santa to

“take a fucking hike!”

 

Santa swore and screamed,

he was steaming drunk

then he hit on the elf girls

‘cos he thinks he’s a hunk.

 

Jingle bells, jingle bells,

Santa’s crashed again.

He got another DUI

and blamed it on green men.

Oh jingle bells, jingle bells,

the cops took him away.

They slapped the cuffs on that old git

a hefty fine he had to pay.

 

Santa tried to flee

from the sleigh’s crash site.

“You can’t do this to me!

Not on Christmas night!

I’ll be taking names,

put you on my naughty list.”

Then he tackled the copper

stole the watch right off his wrist.

 

Jingle bells, jingle bells,

the aliens began to sob.

They were mad at Santa’s ways

then punched him in the gob.

Oh jingle bells, jingle bells,

Santa poked him in the eyes

he kicked him in the candy cane,

brought tears to his eyes.

 

Jingle bells, jingle bells,

Santa tied them with a bow.

He made off in the cop car

shouting “yo ho ho ho ho!”

Bieber Fever

Bieber, All I Want for Christmas is you

I don’t want a lot for Christmas,

there’s just one thing I need.

To see that twat Justin Bieber

hanging from the Christmas tree.

I just want his severed head,

more than you could ever know.

Make my wish come true,

Bieber all I want for Christmas is you.

 

I don’t want a lot for Christmas,

there is just one thing I need.

To see that twat Justin Bieber

squashed beneath the Christmas tree.

I will choke him with my stocking,

push him in the fireplace.

His screaming will make me happy

with his death on Christmas day.

I just want his beating heart,

more than you could ever know.

Make my wish come true,

All I want for Christmas is you, Bieber.

 

I won’t ask for much this Christmas,

I won’t even wish for snow.

I’m just gonna torture Bieber,

poison him with mistletoe.

I will make a list and send it

to Hell’s dark pits for Old Nick.

I will even stay awake to

hear the poison make him sick.

I just want him hog tied tonight,

*wrapping festive ribbons tight*

What more can I do?

Bieber all I want for Christmas is you .

 

His crazed fans are crying,

there’s tears everywhere

And the sound of wicked

Laughter fills the air.

And Bieber is swinging

His death song I am singing.

Santa won’t you bring me the one I really need?

Won’t you please bring that Bieber to me?

 

Oh, I don’t want a lot for Christmas,

this is all I’m asking for.

I just want to see that Bieber

Gunned down right outside my door.

Oh I just want his butchered limbs,

more than you could ever know.

Make my wish come true

Bieber all I want for Christmas is you.

 

All I want for Christmas is you Bieber.

All I want for Christmas is you Bieber.