I finished Not Quite a Courtesan and sent it off. NQAC is a novella which will be part of the Kensington Brava anthology Lords of Passion in December 2010. (A perfect Christmas present!) I am absolutely thrilled to be sharing the same cover with Virginia Henley and Kate Pearce! It was a lot of fun to write, and I hope my editor likes it. Here’s a snippet where Darius and Pru meet:

The man on the step was tall. Dark. Too handsome. “You!” she said. “I am glad you are here. We have business to discuss.”

Pru felt the blood rush to her cheeks. “Of course I am not!” She took a step backward. “And you are not my cousin Sophy’s husband, are you?”

In other news, I’m revising Mistress by Midnight, scheduled for Spring 2011. And I’m going on a cruise for the first time ever! We’re flying to Tampa this weekend and getting on a ship bound for two ports in Mexico. I have a new passport with the most wretchedly hideous picture you will never see. So I won’t be back to blogging until the last week in February, when I’ll spill all the details of my Courtesan Court Contest!

Happy Valentine’s Day, too. Any special plans? Have you ever been on a cruise? Any advice to keep me from falling overboard?

More fun stuff! Every day brings something I never dared to expect. Linkage ahead.

From Katiebabs, a picture of her demon sheep King Mho enjoying a snuggle in a slanket with Mistress by Mistake. I could not embed it, but just click on over to Katie’s site and scroll down. I’ll still be here when you come back.

From India, 527 rupees buys you Mistress by Mistake.

A page at the Brava Authors site!

A teaser chapter from Margaret Rowe’s January 2011 Berkley Heat release Any Wicked Thing is going in the back of June 2010′s Tempting Eden.

I’m in great company! Beverley Kendall has beautiful bookmarks to promote The Season. And she has great things to say about MBM right here.

So there’s the latest. Do you spend your rupees ordering books online, or must you hunt them down in the bookstore and hold them in your hand?

I was going to put an exclamation point in the title, but noticed I’ve gone a little overboard lately in my exclaiming in the headings below. So I’ll be nice and calm, although life has been one lovely exclamation point after the next lately. I recently celebrated my wedding anniversary (as my mother in law so famously declared at our January wedding, “And they don’t even have to get married!”), arcs have been mailed out to prize winners and reviewers, and I’m almost done with the novella that’s due in April. I should have plenty of time to rip apart Mistress by Midnight and put it back together again. Thanks to the fabulous Beverley Kendall and my fabulous critique partners the Vauxhall Vixens, Mistress by Mistake is getting some great buzz and review requests. Their fabulosity and generosity make me twitch to use an exclamation point, so I will!

There’s a new News page on the menu bar above, with room for reviewers’ comments and what I’ve decided to call The Magical Mistressy Tour—my pajama-clad Internet promotion tour. I will have to polish up my wit for interviews to try to make my bespectacled library-clerk self seem mysteriously interesting. Maybe I’ll listen to some Beatles music to inspire me.

What music do you listen to for inspiration? What’s your favorite Beatles’ song? Mine is I Saw Her Standing There.

Congrats to ARC winners Amber E for her comment on the Vixens post and Blodeuedd for commenting at the Bradford Bunch! Mistress by Mistake is on her way! Thanks so much for all the the advice, good wishes and newsletter sign-ups. There will be more chances for free books and prizes in the months ahead.

In completely unexpected, exciting and exotic news, Mistress by Mistake will be published in Thailand! Translated into Thai! Foreign rights have been sold, so eventually I’ll have a book I wrote that I can’t read.

And FYI, Amazon is offering Mistress by Mistake for $11.20–in English– (cover price is $14) and Tempting Eden for $10.20 (cover price is $15) on pre-orders! What a deal. They’ve even got them grouped together. Is it embarrassing to say that I ordered some even though I get author copies? Here’s my Amazon author page , basically the same as the website biography.

I love a bargain. My dad was the shopper in our family, and he always came home with strange and wondrous things. It’s amusing to think of him, a chubby, nattily-dressed guy, pawing through the women’s clothes racks at S. Klein, the discount department store not far from where I grew up. He brought home stuff for my mother and me, guessing on sizes. Most of the time his selections were pretty good. I grew up with a ton of clothes, which dismayed my husband once we were married and I took up all the closet space.

S. Klein is closed now, but there’s always T.J. Maxx. Do you like to shop? Are you a bargain shopper or are you willing to pay full price? Do you know what the Thai alphabet looks like? (I had to Google. *g*)

I’ll post the ARC winners from the Vauxhall Vixen and Bradford Bunch posts on January 25. Everyone who signed up for the newsletter and gave me their mailing address should expect something, too.

Yes! Beautiful red ARCs arrived for Mistress by Mistake last week! I have big plans for some of them in the coming months, but today—January 14, 2010—and Monday—January 18, 2010—all you have to do is leave a comment / sign up for my newsletter 2 get 2 chances 2 win 1! Please drop by the Vauxhall Vixens today and see some of the promo items I am amassing for world domination (snort) and tell me what else you think I should be doing. Then on Monday, go to the Bradford Bunch, where I blog once a month with other Laura Bradford authors for a second opportunity to win an advanced reader copy of MBM. After doing the page proofs, I think there are only 7 teeny tiny mistakes in Mistake, so it’s almost perfect at least as far as typos go, LOL.

Well, what are you waiting for? (Comments here have been turned off.)

I’m not especially tech-savvy. I mean, it was a big deal when my dad bought me an electric typewriter to replace the old Royal upright I used to bang out my college papers on (both were purchased at the Salvation Army as I recall). My grandmother viewed phones with suspicion and used an egg beater instead of an electric mixer. We’re talking Dark Ages and Luddites here–my family was also the very last on the block to get a color TV. If black and white was good enough for Fred and Ginger dancing down the stairs, it was good enough for the Lanmans sitting on the couch.

While we’ve had a PC in the Robinson household now for 20+ years, my kids had priority. But since I started to putter around writing in 2003, I’ve taught myself a thing or two. Here, without further ado, is my Not-At-All-Ready-For-Prime-Time book trailer for Mistress by Mistake. Hollywood will not come calling any time soon, but I’ll admit I had fun fooling around. Just click on the link and be patient through the buffering. Beethoven makes everything better.

MBMistake

Do you pay any attention to book trailers? What have you taught yourself to do lately?

I’ve had a busy busy break. Finished electronic copyedits for Margaret Rowe’s Berkley Heat debut Tempting Eden. Finished Maggie Robinson’s first draft of Book #4 for Kensington Brava, Master of Sin.Wrote 1/3 of the Kensington novella that’s due in April. Sent the page proofs back for Mistress by Mistake .(It’s almost a book! It’s mine!)

It wasn’t all work. We had a wonderful time with our family, and spent three days in Virginia to celebrate the new year. And I got the best Christmas present from my youngest daughter. She gave me a beautiful red Cross pen to sign my beautiful red books with in Nashville. I got a little weepy when I opened it. Everything is becoming so real. And a little complicated. I said to someone this whole writing thing now is like 24-hour-a-day homework in a whole bunch of subjects (juggling multiple books), plus you have to grade the papers yourself (when you edit/revise/proofread). But I’m not complaining.*g*

Were you good about doing your homework, or did you put it off until the last minute? What was your favorite gift this holiday season?

P.S. That’s my newish desk. I had to replace the printer since this picture was taken…and the dust I discovered was daunting.

Congratulations to J.K. Coi, the winner of Susan Gee Heino’s Mistress by Mistake! I cut up little snips of paper, closed my eyes, and there she was!

The blog will be on a break until after the new year. An early resolution is to finish the current project before 2010. Or else. I’m awfully close. Right now Gemma is trapped in a house with Italian assassins. I’m pretty sure she’s going to rescue herself, and rescue me in the process. Since we’ll be going to Virginia to spend New Year’s Eve with our oldest friends, she’d better do it before I board that plane.

Happiest of holidays! How are you celebrating the new year? We’ll be staying in, eating the lobsters we’re bringing from Maine. I bet I struggle to stay up until midnight.

Just a reminder—if your name is in the post below or if you’ve received the first Maggie Robinson/Margaret Rowe newsletter and haven’t sent me your mailing address yet, please do so! I sent out the first wave of promo packets this week, much to my postmistress’s delight. One even went to Australia!

I’m not much of a statistician, but the new websites are connected now to a stat counter, and it’s fascinating to see where people are coming from to visit this site. Ireland. Bulgaria. France. Norway.The intertubes are a divine mystery.

Speaking of mysteries, about 5,000 words to go on Master Of Sin and I have no idea how it’s going to end, LOL. I have revisions to think about for Mistress by Midnight, the second Courtesan Court book scheduled for the spring of 2011 from Kensington Brava. Still putting on the finishing touches for Tempting Eden for Berkley Heat. Debuting on the Bradford Bunch blog on December 18, where most of the authors repped by my fabulous agent Laura Bradford muse about their muses. Starting to schedule a blog tour for the spring, buying an ad in RT. Scary, exciting stuff!

Since it’s getting close to Christmas, I’m giving away another copy of Mistress by Mistake! This time, I can hold the actual book in my hand, becasue it’s not my Mistress, but the Golden Heart-winning Susan Gee Heino’s delightful debut for Berkley that shares the same title with my April 27, 2010 debut from Kensington! Yes, 2 books, 2 authors, 5 months apart, 1 title. Leave a comment and let me know how you’re doing getting ready for the holidays and the “other woman” will be yours if I draw your name. Check back next week for the winner.

I confess I’m nowhere near done shopping, but my little fake tabletop tree is up and the pine roping is on my front porch railing. Joy to the world.

P.S. When I titled this post, the cancellation of As the World Turns had not been announced. I haven’t seen the show since I was a little girl, watching it with my grandmother. Good-bye to 72 years of romance! Watching soap operas as a kid probably put me on the path I’m on today. Hm. I sense a future blog topic.