Writing

November 22, 2012 1 comment

My mistake is your bit of awesome.

Screwed something up, posted the same entry twice. Very sad faced for me 🙁 but super awesome lucky for you.

Leave a comment and I’ll send you an ARC copy of “Spores!” by Sol Crafter, a mm superhero piece. Basically a sex pollen story with a kanon twist.

The call out was fairly routine. A madman threatening to destroy a big chunk of the city with some kind of death machine. It was only after they were in the air and headed toward the site that they received word that it was Major Mayhem and he had some kind of bio-agent he’d stolen from a government lab and might have been tinkering with.

“Great,” Bonecrusher growled, “those eggheads couldn’t think to say anything before we left. Did we even pack the hazmat suits this time?”

Lady Arcana snorted and shot Captain Victorious a pair of nearly lethal side eyes. “Of course not,” she said in her faux-Russian accent, “our dear leader had us leave without the full compliment of gear.”

Vic rolled his eyes behind the lenses of his mask. “Yes, it’s all my fault. I really want to see us being liquefied by some kind of bio-weapon. It’s all part of my most stupid leadership plan.”

“You are the one that said it, not I,” she said, tossing her long red curls and pouting those sexpot lips. “We will have to stop his madness before he has a chance to use his weapon.”

This option is open until December 1st when the ARCs will go out.

An Elderly Lady is Up to No Good at Amazon

November 22, 2012 0 comments

EXCERPT: Tuesday Night, by Sol Crafter – ONE

Title: Tuesday Night
Author: Sol Crafter
Genre: mm superhero
Rating: Mature
A/N: Starts off with a m/f scene that’s pretty important to the plot.

Summary: In a world where Ashley never returned, Tony had to keep going forward alone. With just a few–giant!–life-changing errors on the way.

TUESDAY NIGHT
By Sol Crafter

ONE

Sometimes the loneliness ate away at him like a cancer. It made him writhe and scream and more than anything he wanted everything to be okay again. But that so rarely happened in real life.

He cried himself to sleep on the nights like those, depressed and gray and so horrible it made him shake in misery, his whole body aching with loss. With every breath he took, he got farther and farther away from his center, becoming something else.

Her name beat the sound of his heart: Ashley. The only girl he had or would ever love.

When he got too melodramatic, Sunfire would toss something at him and tell him to “Get over it. I know it’s hard, but she’s gone and you’re still here. You need to live.”

And it would be like someone had hit a switch deep inside and he would suddenly come back alive again. It was as though he’d been given the permission he needed to hear to be able to get past the death of her.

Loss was a swirling vortex beneath his feet trying to pull him down. He would fight it for awhile, but there was no way he was going to be able to withstand such force for very long. So one day he would slip and down he would go into the depths that only despair could take him, and who knew what would happen then? What could total loss get him to do?

Tony had to be grateful that Sunfire always seemed to show up just when he was losing control of himself. And just having his friend around lightened the pressure on him, seeming to give him the air he needed to breathe.

Sunfire made him feel that everything was going to be all right, if not immediately, in the future at least.

They played video games and watched movies and Sunfire never seemed to mind when Tony just wasn’t in the mood to talk. He just seemed to make allowances in their relationship for times when Tony would be silently moody.

It was kind of funny how such a tragedy could have led to him realizing just how great a friend Sunfire actually was. Always before he had just thought the man was kind of irresponsible. The kind of guy that would forget a birthday and would never be around when he was really needed.

Tony had had his eyes pried open when he realized just how thoughtful a guy Sunfire really was. Sure, he said dumb stuff sometimes, but he always remembered a promise and he always seemed to know what to say and what not to say. It was actually pretty great.

But sometimes Tony wanted something more. He wanted the warmth of physical sensation. He wanted to bury himself balls deep in moist heat and let go of everything that had ever troubled him. Even if it wasn’t for forever, he just needed that little bit of breathing room.

Which is how Tony found himself lounging on the couch in the common living area with Solar writhing in his lap, rubbing her naked breasts against his lips.

November 7, 2012 0 comments

Update and Excerpt: Woke Up In Vegas, by Sol Crafter

I realize that I seemed to disappear for several days, but that’s because I’ve been doing a handful of different things… all at once 🙂

NANOWRIMO — I’m working on my NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) story. If you want to cheer me on, here I am at NaNoWriMo.org: HarperKingsley. The title of the story I’m working on? “Across Two Divides,” by Sol Crafter, which you can find with the rest of the NaNo stories at Smashwords. 100% sampling if you want to read along 🙂 Across Two Divides.

I’m writing my heart out and I’m actually really enjoying this story. Feedback is much appreciated.

RUMBLE BUNDLE EBOOK GIVEAWAY — I’ve got a giveaway going on. You can enter now and it runs until December 15th. The bundles include exclusive content.

What I’ll be giving out:

10 ebook bundles of “Across Two Divides” and “Woke Up In Vegas,” by Sol Crafter.
10 ebook bundles of “Leviathan,” “Piece of Cake, Slice of Pie,” “Tuesday Night,” “Spun,” and “From Diamond to Coal, Arc 01.”

EXCERPT — Here, enjoy the start of “Woke Up In Vegas,” by Sol Crafter.

Title: Woke Up In Vegas
Author: Sol Crafter
Characters: Riley Curtain, Brent Caldwell, Natasha Swaggart, Geoffrey Heele
Genre: mm contemporary romance
Excerpt Rating: teen+
Warning: there’s some swears. Just a heads up about that

WOKE UP IN VEGAS
by Sol Crafter

They lay sprawled across the tangled sheets, their faces turned from each other but their dark hair meshing on the pillow. Morning light edged in around the gaps in the curtains and the only sound in the room was their quiet breathing. The second double-bed across from theirs was still made up, a miniature pink bowling bag the only thing to disturb the white-on-white comforter.

August 20, 2012 0 comments

Interesting Changes At My Blog

As anyone who knows me knows (I know, right?) I am one of those people that is always hunting for a bargain and a good deal. I don’t have much in the way of money and I’m desperate to see my stories out there for the world to enjoy. Just the thought that people are reading the things that I’ve written… it gives me this kind of deep sense of happiness and I hope that they’re enjoying it.

I like getting feedback as long as it’s constructive (or praising! Praise me, praise me!) and not too hyper critical. Someone telling me I’ve misspelled a word or my sentence came out wonky is one thing, but someone completely tearing my book apart… well, I’m very sorry you didn’t enjoy my story, but I won’t be responding to you and probably won’t do anything more than glance at your review on Goodreads. Have a great day! (Because I will. Fake it ’til you make it.)

I loved having Wendy beta read Echo because the minute she said something about there not being enough physical description, it was like a “D’oh!” moment for me. She made that story better with just a few words.

Which brings it around to what’s been going on at my blog recently. I’m still recording my audio posts, though I’ve got a lot of clip edits to do (I’m a stuttering, yawning, tea slurping, lazy, perfectionist. It’s my cross to bear.) There’s been a lot going on in my regular life (*sob*) but I’ve just got to take one day and listen to all my posts and record some other ones. (One day I will have my own recording studio and it will be so much easier for everyone involved.) So that all will happen as it happens, and I’m sorry to anyone that has been inconvenienced.

In other news, if anyone has been to my blog recently, you ‘ll notice the fancy new iCopyright bar everywhere. That’s right, I’ve joined the clip & copy generation, everything must go, consume, consume, consume.

No, really, if you’ve been following my latest diatribes you may have caught my rising concern with copyright infringement. People buying my ebooks then brazenly listing them on torrent sites through a Google link. If you’re going to steal from me, at least be cool enough to do it from the shadows and not rub my face in it. But when your results pop up right next to my book in search… that’s where the line is completely drawn. Just like Terry Goodkind, my opinion is that you don’t come into my house and announce the fact that you’re screwing me over. I will not put up with it. And the Internet is my house (shout out to the peeps!)

I’m all for free speech and fair use and the first purchase doctrine and blah blah blah. At the same time, I owe people money and I’m tired of living in poverty. You might be thinking I’m being dramatic and I’m bitching about not being able to buy the next new thing and whatever, but no. I want to pay off my bills and have money to live off of, yet at the same time I don’t want to be a complete scrooge.

More than anything, I want people to be able to read the things I write. I’ve been poor for a long time, I know how bad it feels not to be able to have something that everyone else takes for granted. But I don’t really have anything big to offer the world — I’m not a farmer, I don’t make food, I don’t make quilts, whatever — the only thing I’ve ever really been good at is writing. So that’s something I would like for people to be able to enjoy whether they have the money to pay for it or not. I just don’t like the idea of people stealing from me.

So that’s where the iCopyright comes in. If you’ve clicked it, you’ll notice that it offers all kinds of republishing options. The only options I’m not providing are ebook and print book, and that’s negotiable if someone is seriously interested, it’s just not available for automated licensing.

Most everything else is right there on the table. Printing, emailing, syndication, adding my posts to your own website, even making your own newspaper or newsletter. There’s plenty of free options as well as pay options of all levels. So you can just come in and read what you want, or if you want to have some of my stuff on your site you can and you don’t even have to have an awkward conversation with me first. With a system like that, no one has to pirate my stuff because they can just come in and enjoy it and no one has to feel like a criminal and I don’t have to feel like an angry cop.

You’re probably wondering what this all means. Well, it means that I can feel safer when I put stuff up on my site. If you’ve been keeping up, you’ll have noticed that I have several novels I’m serializing here and at Kimichee. They’re pretty rough at the moment, but you can enjoy the stories if you’d like and if you notice any big errors I’d be happy to hear about them and they will for sure be addressed in the final copies that will go in the ebooks and paperbacks.

So if you want to be involved in my writing process and immortalized in print when I add you to my books’ acknowledgement pages, the comments are always open. Or if you just want to enjoy reading a story before anyone else in the world… that’s open to you too. If you would like to serialize any of my content on your site, iCopyright handles all that — you just put the code they provide on your site and whatever you’re licensing appears in the frame. If I update a post, iCopyright will update it on your site, so you never have to worry that you’re showing a dated copy. When the content expires you can either renew your subscription or iCopyright takes it down automatically. At no time do you even have to talk to me at all if you don’t want to. Which relieves my social anxieties a lot.

At the same time, I will be self-publishing the ebooks and paperbacks, and I will not lie about a book having previously been serialized online. So if you just like buying books, you don’t have to worry that I’m going to try and cheat you. And anyway, the official ebooks and print books will have added content and all kinds of cool things just for them.

I’m hopeful that iCopyright will help me make enough of a living that I can offer more things for free. So if you can afford to pay, I would be really grateful, but if you can’t at this time, that’s okay too. You’re welcome to read what’s here. And feedback is always appreciated.