Riding Shotgun ... the cover is so beautiful!

I know I've been remiss about posting ... but better late than never etc., etc., and besides -- this time I have something fantastic to post about!

I just received the proof of the cover for my first book from DreamCraft, and it's beautiful!


This is a great reason to get off my duff and post. You can click on the small example pasted to the page here and see the art full-sized. It was painted by Jade, and she also created the characters especially for whis. Whoooo!

RIDING SHOTGUN is coming out at the weekend. Jade at DreamCraft tells me that the book has already been uploaded to Amazon Kindle. The process takes 24-72 hours before the book "goes alive" in the Kindle database. It's hoped that it will be available in a couple of days, because my story is going to appear on All Romance Ebooks then.

I'm very excited! I'll return tomorrow and post again, when I'll give an excerpt from Chapter One. This is the brightest part of life right now. Have you seen the weather forecast for Anchorage? It's cold. It's dark. I have to go to Fairbanks next week. I'm so thrilled. (Not.) So it's great to have this bright spot in the impending dark of winter, and it'll get brighter at the weekend when the book is released!

Teaser without spoilers

As October heads down into winter I'm really excited about the project I'm working on with DreamCraft,and I promised to talk about in my next post. This is that post. Not that it's so cold this October. The weather in Anchortown is hanging out in the mid-forties, daytime. But it's getting dark, and you know winter is around the corner, so ...

One thing I have discovered, sizzling hot romance sure warms up the long dark. I've been writing such stories for a long time, and the first is about to be published, I hope by the end of end of October. It's called Riding Shotgun, and no, it's not set in Anchorage. I will be writing several stories set in my home state, also my home town. But Shotgun is set in California. I have family there, and visit them when I can get away from work, and afford the exorbitant price of flying outside. Folks in lower 48 have no idea the price of flying from or to Alaska.

So. Riding Shotgun is set in California, about a guy who used to be a cop, and another guy who used to be a total idiot and was heading for hell by the fastest road he knew to get there. Yes. This one is an m/m romance. For anybody reading this blog who does now know what that means, it's male/male ... cute dudes in romantic tangles. Very popular today. (I also write m/f romance, if you were wondering.)

There's a whole lot more to Riding Shotgun, but I don't want to get into plot spoilers. I can tell you that it's got some beautiful locations, and some intrigue, and some hot love scenes to warm up the aforementioned cold dark nights. In my next post I will be able to give you a sampler, and I hope the cover will have been done by then. If I have it, I'll post it.

All very exciting. Stay tuned.

Making the big step up to pro

In the 2-3 years that I've been working towards getting published professionally, I've heard quite a few writers complaining about being edited. They seem to resent it, which is something I don't quite understand ... unless they've been working with a lousy editor who has been changing things in their work for bad reasons, or for no reason...

A good editor is someone who has years of experience and who can sit back and look at your work, see the problems, and know what to do to put them right and get the work back on track. A good editor doesn't change the spirit of the work, or the direction of the characters, or the mood of scenes. Of course, a lousy editor will probably try to do that -- I acknowledge the possibility that I was totally lucky and met a great editor, and had a positive experience.

I work with Jade from DreamCraft, who has spent about 10 years as Mel Keegan's editor. I believe I'm privileged to be working with this outfit. They're small, and select, and you get to work one-on-one with the people who run the whole show. Other places, you feel like a cog in the mechanism and if your books don't sell in huge numbers, you can get dropped. Gives you shivers.

Not that Jade is an "easy" editor ... in fact, I have heard her called a "tough" editor, but this is nonsense. If "tough" means she won't let you get away with murder ... if it means she won't let a book be printed that is full of mistakes -- suuuuuuure. She's tough. But if "easy" means an editor who can't be bothered to fix mistakes, or doesn't have the experience to recognize the mistakes in the first place ... why would you want to work with an "easy" editor?

When I set out to find a road leading being published professionally, I knew I was going to have to learn a LOT. Writing fanfic can only teach you so much. You can learn a lot in that arena, but you have to face facts. You're mostly writing for your friends, and are they going to tell you when your stuff stinks? Probably not. Also, are they qualified to bring a piece of work up to professional standard? Well, maybe a few fannish editors here and there might be, but mostly ... not.

It's a huge step, when you go from writing for friends to sending your story out to a pro editor. You get butterflies. You get HUGE butterflies when you're sending your stuff to the editor who's been working with Mel Keegan for 10 years. Knees do some knocking.

However, the experience was a big positive for me. I now have several stories "in play," and the first one is about to have its cover panted. It's very thrilling. In my next post, I'll write about the first story that's going to be coming out with the name of Claudia Dante on it. Whooooo!

Going Pole to Pole

As my previous post outlined, I'm about to be published. Which is amazing. What is even more amazing is how this came to be, and who I'm publishing with.

About 10 years ago I used to read and write a lot of fanfic. My genre was Highlander. I still have a thing for the show (as well as a number of other old Canadan shows like La Femme Nikita and Due South). I wrote enough fanfic that I caught the writing bug, and about five years ago I was showing my stuff to a friend. She told me, "You're wasted in fanfic, you need to think about going pro."

I was really flattered, but I did not have any experience with "real" gay fiction at the time. I did not even know huge amounts of gay fiction are written by women. It turns out, m/m romance is a region of fiction where loads of women love to write ... and read. So a lightbulb went off over my head, and I realized, this was where I probably belonged.

Getting on the Web and looking for books was interesting. "Spoiled for choice" was putting it mildly. I had no idea where to start. So I asked my friend to make some recommends -- she told me great places to start, gave me a half dozen names to go read.

One of them turned out to be my favorite writer. If you don't know the name of Mel Keegan, you just don't know gay books. Mel Keegan writes "real" books, with real plots, stories with meat on their bones, as well as the sexy stuff. He also writes so well, the author inside me cringed to compare my humble works, and got a bit depressed, and a bit jealous, and then a LOT challenged. Reading Mel Keegan made Claudia Dante a better writer, and Claudia is the first one to admit it.

I found my way to www.melkeegan.com without any problem (duh), and from there went to his blog. Surprise! I never knew Mel had lived and worked in Alaska! He was up in Fairbanks, which is something like 358 miles away from my very own front door (if you stay on the Parks Highway. Take the Richardson, and it adds about an hour, give or take, depending how lead-footed you are).

This made me feel like I almost knew Mel, So I left a comment on the blog, and told him how much I liked his books, and how I was in Alaska. I was surprised and so pleased when he replied. We started chatting. After maybe a couple dozen emails I risked mentioning I'm a writer and wanted to get published. I was really hesitating about saying that. Pro writers must get hit up every day by wannabes, always saying, "Can you help me get my book published?" That would get real old, real fast. I didn't want to wear out my welcome.

He was totally charming, and helpful. It basically came down to, "You're talking to the wrong person, Claudia -- I'm a writer, you need to be talking to an editor or publisher." And then he said, "Why don't you show your best stuff to Jade at DreamCraft, see what she says?"

I emailed off to DreamCraft with a lot more hesitation. I knew from their website, they are not in the US. They are in Australia, which is a hemisphere away. I thought, "How can this ever work?"

Of course, I didn't reckon with the magic of the Web. Long story short, I wound up signing with DreamCraft about six months ago. I've been working with a fantastic editor since then to bring some stories up to speed. They're going to be published very soon and I'm thrilled.

In my next post, I'll write about how it went from submitting to getting close to publishing. You've read enough from me already, for now...

Introducing Me

Hello all. First, my name is not Claudia Dante. That is my penname, and I use a penname for my writings because I'm a very private person, which is the same as saying I'm not a natural blogger. I guard my privacy because I have a very in-your-face job, in which I deal with every man and his uncle eight hours per day, and when I get home I like peace and quiet. However, here I am blogging, and you'd have to ask why.

This is the blog you MUST have, if you're a writer in the year 2011 ... there is no such thing as a writer without a blog. Though there are numerous things such as blogs without writers. And I AM ABOUT TO BE PUBLISHED!!! Which is amazing in itself.

My editor has told me, "Girl, you gotta blog. If you don't blog, readers won't feel like you're a real person, and probably won't buy your books, which will be a crying shame because they're good books that deserve to be read."

I said to her, "I'm too private to blog. I have nothing I want to put out there in front of the world."

She answered with a lot of common sense instructions. "You have plenty to blog about. You have your writing. Your books. That's what people want to read about anyway."

Made sense to me, so here I am ... blogging.

I guess I need to introduce myself first...

My name is not Claudia Dante.
I live in Anchorage, AK, USA...
...work for the state government.
...write romance to warm up the long cold Arctic nights.
...was married up to six years ago, but am not married now. Thank God.
...live with two big lazy cats called George and Ursula.
My hobbies are reading and drawing.
Am a very good reader and a very bad artist.
Favorite actor: Tommy Lee Jones.
Favorite Hunk: Brad Pitt.
Favorite Movie: Snow Dogs.
Favorite Music: Loreena McKennitt
Favorite Reading: romance, esp. m/m
Favorite writer: Mel Keegan
Best book read lately: When the Lights Go Out by Tanith Lee
Last vacation: Vancouver, BC, too long ago.
Dream vacation: ride CP, BC to Nova Scotia, fly home.
Favorite Restaurant: The Sea Galley, Anchorage
Loves: Mexican food, animals, good books, Kindle, sound sleep.
Hates: breakup, fast food, alarm clock.
Wants to: lose 10lbs, learn to ski, publish many books.
Least wants to: punch clock and commute till retirement. Yuk.
Favorite color: yellow.
Favorite drink: Bailey's Irish Cream.
Vital statistics: variable and subject to change without notice.

That's me in a nutshell, and more than I wanted to post, but I got carried away. Everything else is private except for the writing, the books, the stories. So that's what I'll be posting about on this blog.

In my next post, I'll tell you the story of how I come to be ABOUT TO BE PUBLISHED. How it came about and where I hope it's going to go. It makes an interesting story in itself.