More #MMRomance Than You Can Shake a Stick At! or New #Contracts! (Heh, she said "Stick"!)

I'm so stinkin' excited, y'all! Just this week I signed TWO more contracts--one with Dreamspinner Press and the other with Dreamspinner's YA imprint, Harmony Ink. (Yup, the revise and resubmit has been revised, resubmitted, and accepted <3)

Here's the new estimated release schedule as it stands:

The Most Beautiful Words in the World 

(OCT 2014)

Twelve-year-old Autumn's world is shattered when her beloved Great-Pop, Tommy Johnson, suffers a stroke that leaves him comatose. With everyone around her resigning themselves to the inevitable, Autumn is the only one not willing to give up. She and Great-Pop have more secret stories to share with each other, after all. More stories about Roy McMillan—the great love of Tommy's life whom he lost fifty years ago. 

Autumn struggles to keep Great-Pop on this side of death's door. But how can she compete with the beautiful and mysterious Valley—a place of surreal magic where the sun never sets? Especially when there's someone familiar in the Valley who will do everything he can to keep Great-Pop from returning to her.

Bowl Full of Cherries 

(EARLY DEC 2014)

Porker, Fatty, Tons-of-Fun, Roly-Poly: Crowley Fredericks has heard it all. He’s dropped a lot of the weight since his high school days, but he’s still a big guy, and the painful words follow him. Rejected—again—because of his weight, Crowley’s starting to think that maybe love just isn’t meant for huskier men. And then his roommate, Tyler, invites him home for Christmas in snowy Susset and everything changes.

Averell “Rell” Lang is one half of the Lang Twins. But where his brother Tyler is snobby, elitist and the consummate ‘hipster’, Rell is funny, laid back, and yes, maybe a bit of a slacker. The twins couldn’t be any more different. So when Tyler brings home his roommate for the holidays, Rell expects the worst—a Tyler clone. What he gets instead is Crowley. Beautiful, funny, fascinating Crowley. Rell’s never looked at a man this way before, and what he sees in Crowley Fredericks has nothing to do with his weight.

Can both men overcome their hang-ups to unwrap more than Christmas presents this holiday season?

Alchemy Ever After (with Siôn O'Tierney) 

(LATE JAN 2015)

The city of New Alexandria is filled with marvelous wonders: the largest library known to man, powerful magicians-in-training, mechanical follies, and much more! Yet it is not this thoroughly modern metropolis that lured Idrian from his hometown, but the promise of learning the new art of alchemy. Master Maketh is a scholar combining the spectacular new technology of the era with the ancient art of magic, and he’s taken Idrian in as an apprentice. Together, they are animating a living sculpture from ice. It is the culmination of years of research, and Idrian cannot wait to unveil it alongside all the other marvels being presented at the annual Spring Festival.

But after witnessing his master in a passionate embrace with one of the students from the New Alexandria Academy of Engineering & the Magical Arts, naive Idrian's mind is no longer strictly on things alchemical. When his warm touch accidentally awakens the consciousness within the living sculpture, Idrian learns lessons firsthand about passion and physicality.

I'll Always Miss You 

(MAR 2015)

Isa Zaman could forgive his parents for taking in a friend of the family's son if only he wasn't the most boring teenager in the universe. Macklin Cormack’s only interests are "reading and the outdoors"? Yeah, right. Isa's convinced that "Mackie" is either a pyro or a klepto. Plus, as a white kid, Mackie looks ridiculous in the Zaman’s Arab-American household. Forced to share a bedroom with the new intruder, Isa keeps butting heads with Mackie, until a hilariously absurd fight breaks the tension between them.

Isa’s just starting to figure things out: this new house guest, his cultural identity, school, and girls, when the whole family is suddenly uprooted from their home, for reasons Isa can't understand. They move from their tiny apartment in the city to a giant, old house in a small town, hours away from all he's ever known. Oh, and the new house? It's probably haunted, or so says the ten-year-old next door who can't make facial expressions. As if things weren't weird enough, Isa's friendship with Mackie just took a strange new turn, down a path he's not sure he wants to follow. Mackie Cormac? Not near as boring as Isa imagined.

~ ~ ~

My life's work, right there... I know it seems like I squeezed out all these novels at once, but actually, all my releases have been in various stages of completion for the last decade. 

Now what?

Writing, of course! I've got more stories to tell and hopefully I'll be able to get back into the swing of things soon.

--Raine

Dreams, Goals, Contracts, and the Day My Husband Contracted an #MMRomance!

When I do blog tours, I talk a lot about dreams. We're often told that dreaming is for babies and it's a waste of our time and we should be doing XYZ instead. And I'll grant, if you only dream...you're going to get no where. My (charming) father, used to say, "Wish in one hand, piss in the other..."

But overall, I think dreaming is important. Dreams sustain us when our wells run dry. If you find yourself re-writing a scene for the seventh time and you can't remember WHY you even bothered starting in the first place, you sit down and you dream big, and you remember, and often, you're able to go on.

I have two main writing dreams and they has nothing to do with publication at all:

Never stop writing and touch someone's heart.

Goals, on the other hand, I have in abundance. Real, measurable goals and slowly, but surely, I'm checking those goals off. They range from the very simple, to the wildly outlandish.

• Publish a novella
• Become a Goodreads Author
• Have my name on a cover
• Make $20
• Make $40
• Sell 100 copies
• Collaborate
• Do a DSP chat
• Publish a novel
• Have my book in the library
• Have an audiobook
• Make a bestsellers list
• Win awards
• Win the Newbery (that's seriously a goal of mine...)

Last night, I accomplished another goal on the list:

Publish a novel.

Dreamspinner Press contracted my novel-lengthed work, The Most Beautiful Words in the World last night with a pub date of Oct/Nov 2014. It will be in print. I can touch it. I can hand it to people. I can set it on a bookshelf. There are so words to describe my joy.

As I'm marveling at this accomplishment, another contract comes in, this one for a co-written novella called Alchemy Ever After that will be out Dec/Jan 2015. And just like that, my husband, Siôn O'Tierney, became a Dreamspinner Press author alongside me. We've been writing M/M together for almost ten years, and it's so THRILLING to know that are names will be side-by-side on the cover of our collaborative work.

Dream big.
Plan sensibly.
Never stop writing.

Under the Table and Into His Heart!

I've contracted a new work with Dreamspinner Press called Under the Table and Into His Heart. This short story will be released for their Valentine Rainbow Event, but it is not part of a compilation--it's a stand alone work! (Woo hoo!) Each of the titles in the event will have a different color of the rainbow for its cover... I jumped immediately on green. Don't think green has anything to do with Valentine's Day? At Under the Table host club, it's all about the green!

Here's my official blurb from DSP:

At the Under the Table host club, Valentine’s Day means one thing: cash. Neglected housewives, newly ex-girlfriends, and lovelorn thirtysomethings pay for the attention of handsome men. Shy bartender Jem has always wanted to be a host, and when the club’s owner, Miss Rye, accepts a contract from a MensLove Convention, Jem volunteers to flirt and make out with another host for the ladies’ entertainment. Bailey, an older man who’s had his eye on Jem, convinces Miss Rye to let him be Jem’s partner, and everyone gets more than they expected—especially Jem and Bailey.

I'm super pumped about this little 10K work because... it kicks off a BRAND NEW SERIES I'm writing called Dirty Business that follows the men of the Under the Table Host Club and their wickedly profit-minded proprietor.

Hope you will enjoy!