I have to use my Christmas icons while there's still time!

Okay, so first of all, another of my Lauren Esker books is published FINALLY. This is the "werewolf puppies + evil scientists" book: Guard Wolf. It is also the sequel to the very classily named Handcuffed to the Bear, and various characters from that book appear in this one as well.

Guard Wolf is only 99 cents, but for you guys, if anybody wants to read it, I'd be happy to email it to you. :)

(And it doesn't hurt my feelings AT ALL if you aren't interested, trust me.)

Thank you to everyone who provided suggestions on how to fix my "getting my characters caught without having them be stupid" conundrum, by the way. Your suggestions were incredibly helpful, and the final scene is vastly improved!

Meanwhile, the full list of Yuletide requests has been released for people writing treats. Now that I've got the book cleared off my to-do list (\o/) I plan to write a couple of treats ... actually, I have already written one, though I'm waiting 'til after the regular Yuletide deadline to upload anything. Now I just need to find another prompt that catches my fancy ...

Along those lines

I have been slowly and without much fanfare adding stuff to Lauren Esker's website. EVENTUALLY I'll have free short stories and things along those lines, but right now it's just the books and whatever small extras I have to go along with them (such as a timeline for the Shifter Agents books).

Lauren also has a Facebook page. I can't remember if I've linked to that here before.

I am very pleased and gratified that the Lauren experiment is actually working out pretty well! I have books (three of them now), I have readers, I have actual signups on Lauren's mailing list. I'm making more money as Lauren than I was with Dreamspinner Press (though admittedly this is at least partly because a) it's a more lucrative market, and b) I'm doing a MUCH better job of writing to the market - if I do go back to small-press M/M, I think I'm probably going to launch a new pen name rather than limping along with the one I've got).

You might have noticed that, in spite of all my talk earlier this year about launching a YA or MG pen name and an F/F one, I have done nothing along those lines. This is mostly a case of only having so much time and get-up-'n'-go. Between Lauren's stuff, my weekly Kismet webcomic, the group-writing project, and a handful of other projects that come and go, I am literally up to my eyeballs in all the writing/promotion I can handle (or at least, all I can do competently -- actually I'm a little over-committed even now; I haven't been able to put as much effort into Kismet as I wanted to this year, for example). And I've realized that trying to add anything else would stretch me too thin. So that's why those projects are backburnered for now.

I do plan to write one non-Lauren, non-romance book next year, however. So we'll see how that goes.