I’ve moved…
My Cara Bristol blog has moved to http://www.carabristol.com. All the features on this blog have moved with it and there’s more great stuff to come…
Please join me at my new URL.
Secret Desires “an orgasmic read!”
A book reviewer for Just Erotic Romance Reviews called my novella, Secret Desires, “an orgasmic read” and rated it four and a half stars (out of five). Said the reviewer: “Secret Desires was not my normal cup of tea, but boy was this an orgasmic read! I do have a tendency to seek out ménage stories, but most don’t have the storyline to be believable or the characters simply aren’t honest enough. The characters in Secret Desires were spot-on in their perceptions, the dialogue was real, and the sex was dynamic! What more could a person ask for?”
Secret Desires is the story of Morgan and Jack. Both want more from their relationship, but each is afraid to tell the other one. When Morgan’s chronic tardiness drives Jack to brink of his patience, he spanks her, freeing both of them to express their secret desires.
Secret Desires is the second novella I’ve written. It’s available as a individual PDF download from Black Velvet Seductions or in the anthology, Spanked!, which also includes my first novella, Intimate Submission. Spanked! is available in ebook and paperback formats.
JERR Review of Secret DesiresTalking about spanking at Nice n Naughty
Today I’m guest blogging about how I got started writing spanking stories. Sometimes you never know what path your career will take! Join me today at Nice n Naughty and read a excerpt from Secret Desires, one of my stories in the anthology Spanked! Nice n Naughty is a group blog of erotic romance authors.
A big thank you to Paige Tyler (who also writes spanking stories) for setting up this guest blogging appearance.
Weird writer ways…
Writers like to squirrel things away
Writers aren’t like normal people. Perhaps the hours in isolation at our computers makes us squirrelly, but we’re a little different. We come from diverse backgrounds and cultures, might be introverted or extroverted, may have started writing early in life or late in life, but we share a kinship with each other, and I think, certain traits.
- Writers love words. We love the nuances of meaning, the way words look and sound. This may seem like an obvious no-brainer, but can you imagine a house builder loving bricks or two-by-fours?
- We have imaginary friends. Writers daydream a lot, spend a lot of time in our heads, making up stories, conversing with imaginary people.
- We hoard things. We squirrel away facts, scraps of paper with snippets of information, newspaper articles, impressions of people or places.
- We deal in magic. We take something intangible—an idea—that exists only in our heads and weave an entire world around it to amuse and amaze others.
- We are obsessed with or addicted to what we do. Writing isn’t always a choice, Grasshopper. We are compelled to write. We have a need to communicate that can only be satisfied by writing—putting thoughts to written words—as opposed to speaking or painting or composing music.
- Writing is more discipline, than inspiration, but when we are writing from true inspiration there is no better feeling in the world and there is nothing that we would rather do in that moment than write. This is not a good time to interrupt us.
- Whether we want to or not, we compare ourselves to other writers. We either think, “I can do that,” or “Damn, I wish I could do that.”
- We love writing. Another seeming no-brainer, except that while we want to make a career or a living from writing, the fact is, we’d still write even if we never made a cent.
I write…therefore I walk
Last year I walked more than 1,500 miles.
What does walking have to do with writing? For most authors and other people with sedentary jobs, nothing.
But it should.
When I’m on a roll and the words are flowing (or not flowing as it sometimes happens), I spend six to eight hours a day sitting at my computer. To do that day after day, is not a healthy lifestyle.
So I walk.
Every day, rain or shine, I log 10,000 steps or 4.25 miles. Every day.
I get about half that amount just doing my daily business: getting the newspaper, checking the mail, letting the cats in, letting the cats out, grocery shopping, vacuuming, etc. The other 5,000 steps or roughly two miles I get by applying my feet to pavement as I walk around my neighborhood.
I keep track of my steps with a pedometer. I put it on as soon as I get up in the morning. Beyond measuring how much and how far I walk, a pedometer provides a great gauge of how much I move around in general. I think of it this way: I walk at a moderately fast pace. It’s not an oh-no-I’m-going-to-miss-my-plane sprint, but I don’t dawdle. Walking 10,000 steps all at once would take me about an hour and twenty minutes.
So basically, in any 24-hour period, I’ve only moved around for about an hour and a half.
It kind of puts that 10,000 steps or 4.25 miles in perspective.
Getting organized for the New Year…
I always thought I was “organized.” My photos are in albums. My books are shelved. I have a system for keeping track of tax deductions so that doing my taxes is a snap. I never go grocery shopping without my list or my cloth grocery bags.
I thought I was organized because I spend a lot of time organizing my things. My closets, drawers, purse, shelves–get messy and I straighten them up. They get messy again and I organize again. Wash. Rinse. Repeat.
After reading Snoop: What your Stuff Says About You by Sam Gosling, I realize I’ve been deluding myself. I’m actually disorganized. A truly organized person wouldn’t need organize and reorganize his or her stuff because the stuff would never get messy to begin with.
While some of my cabinets are perfectly organized, others are catchalls. An organized person wouldn’t tolerate this hodgepodge.
Since I finished the book, I’ve identified my root problem as impatience. It’s not that I don’t know how to organize things or that I have too much stuff, I’m just too impatient to put things back where they belong immediately. Although I rarely lose things, I did lose my driver’s license once. I found it a year and a half later—in the dryer vent (not the lint trap, but the vent to the outside of the house)! I had obviously written a check at a store and put the license in my pocket because it was seconds quicker than putting it back in my wallet and I didn’t want to hold up the line. Although the license was the only “card” I’d ever lost, I can’t recall the number of times I’ve had to go through the laundry looking for the ATM or credit card I’d slipped into my pocket.
That stops now. My New Year’s resolution is to stop being so impatient and get organized.
I have a strategy. I am going to:
- Take the time to put things away. I’ve already started doing this and I like the results so far. I know where everything is.
- Start with individual drawers/closets etc. that are problem areas and tackle them one-by-one.
- Evaluate my organizational systems. I’ve discovered already that sometimes the system doesn’t work. A case in point: my bathroom drawer. I used to have a tray to keep it neat, but things never seemed to return to their proper compartment. The problem was that some of the compartments were too small to be functional. I eliminated the tray and replaced it with some plastic baskets and voila! The drawer has stayed organized for several weeks now.
Despite my history of disorganization, I am disciplined (at least Snoop didn’t reveal that I’m not), so I think I have an excellent chance of achieving this.
So, how about you? What is your New Year’s resolution?
2010 in review: one author’s highlights
Spanked! was published by Black Velvet Seductions in October
A writer’s life moves slooowly…you spend a lot of time at the computer, and while you might knock out 1,000, 2,000, or even 3,000 words a day, that’s still a long way from a completed novel. And then there are revisions, which can take LONGER than writing the first draft. You read and reread your work over and over until you’re sick of it.
Then you submit the manuscript and you wait. It’s accepted and it goes into editing and you wait.
It seems like much doesn’t happen. But as I look back on 2010 I realize I had a fairly eventful year. I started January with just one novella, Intimate Submission, a erotic romance/spanking story published by Black Velvet Seductions. My second one, Secret Desires, had been submitted but wasn’t published yet.
And then this is what happened in 2010:
- Secret Desires was published as an ebook (July)
- Both Intimate Submission and Secret Desires were published in the Spanked! paperback and ebook anthology (October)
- Spanked! received good reviews from Two Lips Reviews and Night Owl Reviews
- I wrote, completed, submitted and signed a contract on a new novella, Spanking Melania, the start of an erotic romance domestic discipline series.
- I wrote the first draft of the second book of the series, Disciplining Emma
- I joined Romance Writers of America and the Passionate Ink chapter
- I started this blog (April), and wrote 63 posts
- I joined Twitter, Facebook and Goodreads
Holiday wishes and a little rum cake….
I’ll be taking a break from blogging during the holiday, so this will be my last blog of 2010. I have many things planned for 2011 including more author interviews, guest blogs, and discussions about erotic romance and spanking. In the meantime, I wish you and yours the merriest of merry and would like to share one of my favorite recipes for rum cake.
This one is quick and yummy, easily thrown together from ingredients on hand when you need an emergency dessert. It comes from the Eddie Bauer Legendary Recipe Collection.
Rum Cake
½ cup chopped nuts (optional)
1 pkg of yellow cake mix
1 (3 ¾ oz) pkg of vanilla instant pudding
½ cup light rum
½ cup water
½ cup vegetable oil
4 eggs
Grease and flour a bundt or tube pan. Crumble nuts in the bottom of pain. Combine cake mix and pudding mix. Add water, rum, oil and eggs. Mix for about 2 minutes. Pour in pan and bake at 325 degrees for 60 minutes.
Let cool in pan on wire rack for approx. 3 minutes. Remove cake from pan and pour glaze over the cake.
Glaze:
1 cup of sugar
¼ cup light rum
1 stick of margarine
¼ cup of water
Place ingredients in a saucepan and boil for 3 minutes.
Note: I usually make only half the amount of glaze to cut back a little on the fat and calories. It’s more than sufficient. I’ve made this without the glaze, and it turns out like a pound cake.
Amazon secret…converting a PDF for Kindle
You can find great deals for Kindle books on Amazon. But sometimes the deals are better direct from the publisher. For instance, Ellora’s Cave novels are typically cheaper on the EC website. But when you buy from a publisher, what you get is usually a PDF file.
You can read a PDF on Kindle…but not always comfortably. The first time I loaded a PDF onto my new Kindle, I knew immediately it was NOT going to work.
The type size was way too small. Picture the fine print in a legal document and you get the idea. I couldn’t imagine reading an entire novel in print that tiny. The scalable fonts don’t work on a PDF document. Few of the Kindle functions do.
I had to convert the PDF to the Kindle (.AZW) format. It’s easy to do, but HARD to find the directions on the Amazon site. Apparently, they’d rather you bought your books directly from them, rather than purchase ebooks from a publisher and convert them. Go figure!
However, I was determined, so despite their best efforts to hide the information on the Amazon web site, I found it. (Ha!).
There’s two ways to a convert a PDF file to a Kindle .AWZ file: one is free and the other costs a small fee (about 15 cents, depending on file size). The fee option, of course, is the easy way.
Easy way for a fee:
1. Attach your PDF to an email
2. Type “convert” (and nothing else) in the subject line. (And that means don’t include the quotation marks).
3. Email it to: “yourname@kindle.com.” (This is the Kindle name Amazon assigned you when you bought your Kindle).
Amazon will convert your PDF to an .AZW file and send it via Whispernet to your Kindle. It takes longer than purchasing a Kindle book, sometimes as long as 15-20 minutes. Be patient. Don’t email it several times like I did the first time.
The free way
1. Attach your PDF to an email
2. Type “convert” in the subject line
3. Email it to “your kindle name@free.Kindle.com.” (Note this email address is a little different)
4. Amazon will email you an .AZW file
5. Download the file to your computer
6. Attach your Kindle to your computer with the USB cord you received
7. Using the mouse, drag the .AZW file to your Kindle OR use the “move” command, to transfer the file to Kindle (the latter is what I do)
Tip: If you buy a PDF book from a publisher, pay attention to the file name that you receive. I bought several books from Ellora’s Cave and when I received them, the file name was the UPC code. Not a problem if you have only one book, but when you have several books in your Kindle named with numbers, you don’t know what the titles are. Before I send UPC-named books to Amazon to be converted now, I change the file name to the book’s title. Be sure you keep the .pdf extension if you change the file name.
Here’s the Amazon link with all the info:
Cara Bristol 