What's Up, Doc?

Lots of great news! I'll be on Tor Book's Teen Tour this summer in the Midwest and West! The only place I've visited in the Midwest is Kansas, where my college roomie lived, so I'm excited to see more of the inside guts of the country. I'm working with Amazon's new ACX program, which partners with Audible and iTunes, in creating audio books of my Casa Dracula series, and Tor Teen will be releasing an audio book of Dark Companion. More on that later.

Tomorrow Lynda Hilburn guests blogs about the new edition of her seriously smexy The Vampire Shrink books. Lynda was the very first person to host me at her website, Paranormality, when I began writing, and I'm delighted to return the favor.

Abigail at All Things Urban Fantasy has put together a terrific selection of covers for upcoming releases. My favorite is Incarnation by Emma Cornwall. Now, I'd say that name is clearly a nom de plume, but I'm working with an illustrator whose real name is ridiculously romance novel hero-ish. However, Emma doesn't have a website, so I'm guessing this book may be a packaged book, i.e. someone came up with a concept and hired a writer.

This steampunk vampire story will be released in September by Gallery, so I'll ask for a copy to give away here.

Bites has an interesting post about the move toward the online socialization of books. Sites like Goodreads and Facebook encourage constant commenting on reading progress, and things will no doubt become more invasive when e-books begin to have pop-ups asking for status reports.

If your reader has the capability now you can have running comments on the books you're reading, as if it were the main post in a forum and you can comment on it. Or live links in the text that, once clicked, will take you to a website. Basically the article is saying that books are the last bastion of antisocial elements and will, eventually, cave to all that is social media for the sake of keeping up.

While I love the fact that readers can share their passion for books online, the people behind the social sites are not book lovers. They are tech lovers and money makers. If they could figure out a way to make a taco interactive so they could sell advertising, they would. (Actually, I'm pretty sure that's happened already.) The beauty of books is that you can sink into one and cut yourself off from everything else.

Will the constant interruptions from interactive media change that delicious feeling of becoming completely immersed in a story? I think so.

GRATUITOUS VIDEOS OF THE DAY

I'm really enjoying Lost Girl, the fae series out of Canada that's shown in the US on the SyFy Channel. There's a nice combo of grittiness, humor, and smexiness to the stories about a woman who discovers that she's a succubus and that there's an entire world of fae who coexist with humans. These aren't your gramma's twinkly fairies.





Kenzi is easily my favorite character in the series. She steals every scene she's in and has about 100 times more chemistry with Dyson than Bo does.