A tourist in my own town

How often to we get so distracted by daily living, that we forget to actually live? 

Only today I got this in an email from J.A. Rock: But how do you live right next to the Great Barrier Reef and never mention it?! 

To which my answer has to be: Meh. It's some coral and some pretty fish. Seen one natural wonder of the world, you've seen them all. 

Familiarity hasn't bred contempt, exactly, but it has bred a kind of shitty lazy attitude, and brings me, kind of, to something I was thinking the other day: Why have I never set a book where I live? 

I live in tropical North Queensland, Australia. It has palm trees and oceans and reefs and rainforests and shit. People pay a lot of money to visit places like this. They buy postcards, and t-shirts, and, inexplicably, stuffed cane toads. 

I think that it's about time I tried being a tourist in my own town, and saw it through fresh eyes. Because, guess what? It's kind of nice: 

If you guys are wondering what brought this on, it's that J.A. Rock who is currently fighting the forces of Mordor in NZ, is heading to Australia in November. So yay! 

I guess she doesn't just exist on the internet after all. 

Also, I guess I should clean my house. 

J.A. Rock's Field Guide to S'mores

Here it is, ladies and gentlemen, J.A. Rock's Field Guide to S'mores. 

(Tip: While reading, play "Eye of the Tiger" by Survivor in the background.) 

The Guide: 

The Execution: Well, I have to admit that I went a little bit off plan. For starters, I didn't have the courage of 10 000 men. I had the courage of two nine-year-old boys, a six year old girl, my sister and my mum. So, you know, that's probably the equivalent of the courage of 20 000 men. 

Also, it's 30 degrees here today, and not really the sort of weather for a campfire. (I Googled it for the Americans - that's 86 of your degrees.) So instead of a campfire, we had a nest of tea lights on my dining room table. Seemed to do the trick. 

There were also no sticks involved. My garden is infested with possums. I'm not using any utensil a possum might have peed on, thanks. So we used chopsticks. Again, it seemed to work. 

But I wasn't the only one who went off plan. Here is Meg with her "s'more": What can I say? She's a rebel. 

We also ran into some problems with Step 3. While I don't think it was intentional, Tom's friend Hamish did set fire to his marshmallow. Twice. But then he ate it anyway. In fact, he was so impressed with s'mores that he made extra for his parents and his grandmother, and wrapped them up in foil to take home. 

The verdict: S'mores are incredibly sticky. Like, you think a thing's going to be sticky, and then it's stickier than you imagined would be possible. And how yummy were they? Well, I'll let Tom tell you:

News...and s'mores

Okay. So time for some news!

Firstly, the awesome Heidi Belleau and I have signed a contract with Riptide for our m/m novel set in post-apocalyptic Dublin. It's called King of Dublin, and it's heavy on the violence and the non-con. Why is it that the most violent and depraved things are also the most fun to write? 

King of Dublin is about Darragh, who journeys from his home village in Cork to Dublin, and gets tangled up in the gangland wars and power struggles of the self-proclaimed King of Dublin, and with the king's pet slave, Ciaran. Hilarity ensures. No, wait, I don't mean hilarity. I mean bloodshed and trauma. 

In other news, Dark Space will be coming out in print soon from Loose Id! Yay! I'm always so happy when trees die on my behalf. 

And in other, other news, if any of you guys are on Twitter and have been following J.A. Rock and me, you might have noticed our fairly aggressive fights about spelling, bears, and confectionary. This is because in Mark Cooper Versus America, our hero Mark is constantly banging his head against the wall of cultural misunderstandings. 

Well, in the course of writing Mark Cooper Versus America, I might have thrown in a line about having to try everything once...even s'mores. And then I confessed to J.A. that I had no idea what s'mores actually were. And the more she tried to explain, the more confused I got. WHAT THE HELL IS A GRAHAM CRACKER? 

Last night I got home from work to find a parcel waiting for me. It contains: 

1. marshmallows

2. chocolate 

3. crackers 

4. a book about avoiding bear attacks 

...and handwritten (and illustrated) instructions on how to make s'mores. 

Guess what I'm doing this weekend? 

Plagiarism

Another week, and another plagiarism scandal. 

Two, actually. 

And I really don't understand it. If you're going to be a Cheaty McCheater pants, why do it the hard way? Because, frankly, if you're going to take the effort to grab together a bunch of fan fics and then try and edit them together into something cohesive...well, if you've got those skills, wouldn't it be easier just to write your own damn book? 

And this advice is brought to you by the laziest person on earth, I swear. 

The second instance was very much the tried and true method: 

1. Find something free online. 
2. Steal it. 
3. Slap a cover and your name on it, and sell it on Amazon. 

This pisses me off a lot. It pisses me off on behalf of the readers who bought something in good faith, and it pisses me off because every time it happens it makes writers wonder if it's worth the trouble of putting their stuff out there for free. Eventually, everyone loses, because of one asshole who thought that stealing someone else's work seemed like a good idea. 

Grrr. 

Okay, that's the rant over. I'm cross-posting this to Booklikes as well. If you're over there, you can find me at http://LisaHenry.booklikes.com/

Cover Love: When All The World Sleeps

Omigod. How gorgeous is this cover by Amber Shah?  

Although I do feel a little bit guilty for sharing it so early, since the book's not out until March, but want to know the upside? If you pre-order from Riptide, you can win free books for a year! 

But just to whet your appetite a little bit more, here is the blurb: 

Daniel Whitlock is terrified of going to sleep. And rightly so: he sleepwalks, with no awareness or memory of his actions. Including burning down Kenny Cooper’s house—with Kenny inside it—after Kenny brutally beat him for being gay. Back in the tiny town of Logan after serving his prison sentence, Daniel isolates himself in a cabin in the woods and chains himself to his bed at night.

Like the rest of Logan, local cop Joe Belman doesn’t believe Daniel’s absurd defense. But when Bel saves Daniel from a retaliatory fire, he discovers that Daniel might not be what everyone thinks: killer, liar, tweaker, freak. Bel agrees to control Daniel at night—for the sake of the other townsfolk. Daniel’s fascinating, but Bel’s not going there.

Yet as he’s drawn further into Daniel’s dark world, Bel finds that he likes being in charge. And submitting to Bel gives Daniel the only peace he’s ever known. But Daniel’s demons won’t leave him alone, and he’ll need Bel’s help to slay them once and for all—assuming Bel is willing to risk everything to stand by him.

You'll be seeing a lot more of this cover before the release of When All The World Sleeps, since I love it so much. So creepy and beautiful! A lot like Daniel, really...