Ombailamos

The L.A. Stories!

Note: this post is going to be "featured" i.e. pinned to the top of my blog, because I've gotten some new traffic recently and I would like to call attention to my writing.  To read new posts, continue down the page.

ABOUT MY BOOKS AND STORIES

The L.A. Stories are novella-length modern romances - they average 21,000 words.  They feature adult situations, language, and themes.  Rights available!  Find out more at the dedicated website: TheLAStories.com

• Getting Off: (2012) two female friends compare notes on dating and make an unexpected discovery.  A F/F love story. **2018 edition now available!** get "Getting Off"
• All the Bars on Sunset: (2012) a lounge lizard falls hard for a salsa dancer **2018 edition now available!** get "All the Bars on Sunset"
• Chrome: (2012) a Japanese-American designer takes a semi-pro dancer by surprise **2018 edition now available!** get "Chrome"
• The Continental: (2012) a young ballroom instructor meets the man of her dreams.  There's only one problem: he lives on the other side of the planet **2018 edition now available!** get "The Continental"
• Beat: (2013) a retired fighter and a younger draftsman walk into a bar in West Hollywood ... a M/M love story **2018 edition now available!** get "Beat"
• Chai at Midnight: (2013) an Indian expat and an African-American club owner decide love is worth some changes **2018 edition now available!** get "Chai at Midnight"
• Speed Date: (2013) an up-and-coming DJ is ready to settle down, and finds his match where he least expects to **2018 edition now available!** get "Speed Date"
• Set Dressing: (2014) a designer with trust issues and a set decorator with a history find common ground **2018 edition now available!** get "Set Dressing"
• Mating Dance: (2014) how much older is too much? a ballroom pro and a younger actor figure it out **2018 edition now available!** get "Mating Dance"
• Benchwork: (2015) an L.A. doctor's plan to deal with her biological clock takes off on a tangent when she meets a widowed jeweler **2018 edition now available!**  get "Benchwork"
• Vintage: (2016) a young attorney and an independent wine consultant decide to take a second chance on love **2018 edition now available!** get "Vintage"
• The Whole Truth: (2018) a friendly work relationship between two attorneys evolves rapidly after a tango get "The Whole Truth"
• Toward Love: (2018) two actors assigned a showmance fall headlong into real love get "Toward Love"
• Exposure: (2018) a Broadway veteran and a TV actor play the long game, and play it for keeps. A M/M love story. get "Exposure"
• Green Man Walking: (2018) an industry pro and a dancer find that working on a project together takes them from "maybe" to "forever". get "Green Man Walking"
• A Random Sequence: (2018) two lottery winners, a wildfire, and dancing on the beach: what could be more L.A.? get "A Random Sequence"
• Drawn Out: (2018) an animation artist and a filmmaker meet at a festival and knock each other for a loop. How do they move forward when the whole world seems to be watching?  get "Drawn Out"
• Stripped: (2018) a TV actress and a dancer/barista negotiate several significant life changes in West Hollywood, with a little help from their friends. A F/F love story. get "Stripped"

  

THE NOVELS

The Exiles was my first-completed book.  It is a long historical romance, set during the French Revolution, with some of the action taking place in France and the rest in England. get "The Exiles"

Discovered is a follow-up, not precisely a sequel, to The Exiles.  The action here is all in England and features an inter-class relationship.  I'm particularly proud of this one. get "Discovered"

Home Sweet Home is a contemporary romance set in the 1980s. get "Home Sweet Home"

Million Dollar Death is a mystery with two points-of-view: one, the director of a stage play; the other, the police officer investigating the death of one of her cast members.  Set in the modern day in Los Angeles, this novel is related to the L.A. Stories.  **2018 edition now available!** get "Million Dollar Death"

The novels are also available in paperback or for Kindle.

THE OTHER STUFF

"What Went Down" is a stage play, basis for the production described in Million Dollar Death.  A project in the works is creating sheet music for the songs in this play.  Both formats.

and finally ...

"Other Voices: Social Commentary in the Novels of Frances Burney" was my master's thesis.  It looks at the ways this very successful, highly-placed Englishwoman managed to say a lot of things that most women in her position wouldn't have dared to.  I don't have an image for this particular book, but it is available for Kindle e-readers and in paperback from Amazon.

my author page

excavation

This is what it looks like when a sewer pipe has to be dug out because it's broken.  The pipe in this trench was terra-cotta and probably original to the house.  It was broken, and the verkakte grass was feasting, which two facts meant that I really couldn't do much of anything in the front yard.

I am very grateful to our landlords for doing this.  And glad, on behalf of the poor guy who did the digging, that the pipe was only about three feet down.  Yikes, what a day's work.

reading list: September 2018

It is another very short reading list.  Since finishing that novel draft, I've taken a bit of a hiatus, or rest period, from writing (have a read-through-edit to do very soon, and am still in progress with novella #18). 

So far in October, I've already read as many books as I got through in September.  And next weekend won't be much for writing either, so I may not have writing progress to report till near the end of the month.  And when, for whatever reason, I'm not writing ... I'm reading.

Anyway!  Herewith, September. * denotes a new-to-me book.

 

65. The Wild Child, by Mary Jo Putney. An ambitious Regency with so much plot, I was tired.

66. The Undomestic Goddess* by Sophie Kinsella. An entertaining story of a young lawyer's professional implosion, followed by reinvention.  I could have done with more of the romance.   I mean, if you're going to adopt a new life because you realize you're in love with a person who can't be integrated into your old life, that person needs to be a little more alive on the page.

67. Locked Rooms, by Laurie R. King.  Came up on sale and is a series favorite, so ... really very good.

68. A Conspiracy in Belgravia* by Sherry Thomas.  The other nouveau-Holmes fiction I read.  This series' Holmes does not engage me on the same level as King's Russell, but the novels are smart.

69. Hold Me Tight and Tango Me Home* by Maria Finn.  A well-written memoir about a plunge into Argentine tango following the breakup of a marriage.  Lots of dance detail, so of course now I want to learn tango even more than I already did (I know a few basics, and enough to be an intelligent viewer - which is to say, I can tell good technique from bad - but that's not enough).

preparing for work

Half of the front yard has been more or less unmanageable for months due to the broken drainpipe that runs underneath it.  We recently got word that a repair was imminent.  This meant that certain arrangements needed to be deranged, because said arrangements were impeding access.

Before:

and After:

This move necessitated cutting back the grapevines, well before I would have chosen to. At least the wisteria didn't suffer much loss.  And the prospect of being able to actually do something to that half of the yard is pleasant! 

Well, now that it's not too hot to breathe outside.  During the hottest weeks, it was all I could do to get out there and fill the bird feeders.

P.O.P.

It happens to be my dad's birthday today.  HAPPY BIRTHDAY DADDIO!

In honor of that event, here is a picture of a pigeon I call POP, which is short for "Pile O' Pennies," because that's what it looks like to me.  In this lighting, you don't really get the hint of iridescence that brushes some of the feathers.

Back when I worked in Beverly Hills, there was a pigeon that would strut up Beverly Drive that was a smooth copper color, almost like a cedar waxwing, but with that iridescent neck you see in the standard-issue gray birds.  He was beautiful (I know it was a he because of his behavior). 

This bird is beautiful in a different way; it is more like the sparrows who come to the yard.  You don't really notice the subtlety of the colors because the overall impression is "brown."

Anyway, there is a POP for my pop.  I love you, Dad.

nice surprise

Among the many plants I acquired after moving into Chez Violette were a pair of "Yuletide" camellias.  These are apparently of the type that thrive under a regime of benign neglect; I have done absolutely nothing with them, since potting them up, except water them with a fair degree of regularity.

Recently I noticed that they are both covered with flower buds.  This was nice!

And this is what the flowers look like open:

writing evolutions

This post may eventually migrate to a new website which my beta reader and marketing guru and BPS (best possible sister) is setting up.  At the moment, it's easier for me to write it here.  Why migrate?  Well, because this blog will most likely shut down next spring, when my hosting contract runs out.

I've been writing here since 2009.  I started writing fiction again, in a serious way, in 2012.  And this year the fiction has taken on a life of its own, which has prompted an examination and analysis of what's needed to make the fiction more - we hope - than just a hobby.

Starting with, unsurprisingly, marketing.

This coming weekend I have a few assignments for myself in that regard, starting with updating my Amazon author page and buying a couple of online ads.

 

Before really starting a marketing push, I needed to finish the series rewrite: putting all of the novellas into conventional narrative form, changing from present tense to past, etc.  That process led to fairly significant changes within some of the novellas, hardly any in others. 

But a rewrite is actually about to be done again because we've decided to do paperback versions, packaging two novellas per volume.  For that purpose, the page size needs to be changed, which means other aspects of the formatting need to be changed.  Since I have to look at every page during that process, this almost certainly means there will be other tweaks to the actual text.

Each time I go through one of the finished stories, I catch something.  It might be something to correct; more often it's something to add or subtract or simply change.  Within the six new novellas I've added this summer, and the full-length novel I'm nearly finished with, and the seventh new novella I'm roughly halfway into, I have changed certain events within the timelines of my (dozens of) characters. 

Those changes need to be consistent across the series.  So, everywhere a character appears, I have to go back and make sure the timeline correction is made.

When it's done there will be one short novel (Million Dollar Death), one long novel (work in progress), and eighteen novellas within the L.A. Stories universe.  And I will be sufficiently organized to take on the next two projects (both conceived as full-length novels).

 

For the paperbacks, we also have to come up with a cover design that can be applied across the series.  I did a halfway decent job with covers for the Kindle editions.  But my design inspiration was always within each story.  If you looked at all of them on a shelf side by side, it's evident they are all by one author, but you wouldn't guess they are part of a series, or even that they are romances. 

So the current cover images may live on inside the print books, but they won't be the actual covers.  The actual covers will - we trust - convey two things: 1) this book is about romance; 2) this book is about Los Angeles.

If we had Big Publisher Money to play with, we might hire a designer and/or get original art.  Since we have No Money to play with, the new covers will almost certainly feature our own photography and typesetting. 

Fortunately, BPS has desktop publishing skills, and is a very good photographer and image processor, and will be able to do something good with whatever garbage I give her.

 

Anyway, I will continue to post here during this transition period, but Ombailamos will eventually cease to be.  Writing and marketing won't be (cannot be) a full-time job, but it's going to consume more of my time and attention than blogging ever has. 

Most of the ten years' worth of content here will gradually be removed, because once I stop paying the hosting fee the world won't be able to visit.  But the content is and always has been mine, so I'll save what I can.  You never know what can be recycled.

a tale of two Lears

So Mr. P & I went to see the streamed National Theatre Live broadcast of Sir Ian McKellen's "King Lear," and I'm really glad we did because that is the way to see these plays, if you ask me.  Even with our theater's chronic tech problems, and even though we were in the theater for going on four hours.

Quick comparison:  Mission Impossible: Fallout: in the theater for two hours forty minutes, felt like eternity.  King Lear? Over in a flash.

I was not bored for a second.  I did not have trouble following the play, even though I've never read it.  The acting was, if not uniformly excellent, certainly very high quality and in some cases hard to imagine bettering.  I now have a crush on James Corrigan, who played the nefarious Edmund. McKellen was everything I'd hoped.

Seriously loved that Kent was played by a woman, Sinead Cusack, who was SUPERB.  Since Kent is arguably the hero of the piece, extra special love here.

The director staged the play in two long acts, which works for the modern theatre-goer, and the break in the text was in a logical and cliff-hangery place.

 

Then, coincidentally, Amazon just released a new Lear film starring a slew of fabulous actors including Anthony Hopkins (Lear), Emma Thompson (Goneril), and Jim Broadbent (Gloucester).  This was an abridged presentation, coming in at right around two hours total.  We watched it, and I definitely preferred the unabridged version.  A lot of plot threads just disappeared in the truncated text.

Hopkins' Lear was very different from McKellen's: meaner, more violent, with less pathos.  Less sympathetic, and without some sympathy for the old bastard it's difficult to conceive of the piece as an actual tragedy.  The Cordelia in the Amazon film was stronger, to my mind, and Emma Thompson has never been anything less than perfect.

The two versions were quite similar in their sort-of-modern settings.  Both had Cordelia marrying the Duke of France but then in military uniform, actively participating in the French sortie on English soil.  I have no idea if she has conventionally been played as a soldier.

 

So, one of the upcoming events promoted with this screening was a December NTL broadcast of 'Antony & Cleopatra,' with Ralph Fiennes and Sophie Okonedo.  I have already ordered tickets.

 

And since I have got my Shakespeare thing going, I think it is time to re-watch some of the filmed versions that live in the jukebox.  I have also, finally, downloaded a copy of the complete plays so that I can, belatedly, further my education in this regard.

reading list: August 2018

Seriously, the reading list is hardly worth posting at all.  What with NOVEL NUMBER 5 that I just finished writing the first draft of, I have not been reading much of Other People's Stuff.  This may be the shortest reading list I have ever posted here.

Anyway ... * denotes a new-to-me book.

 

61. Lord John and the Private Matter* by Diana Gabaldon.  An 18th-century mystery, rich in historical detail, but also a cracking good adventure.  Will almost certainly read others in this series.

62. If We Were Villains* by M.L. Rio.  A blisteringly good novel about death at a Shakespeare college, and its fallout for the six student survivors.  I would instantly read a sequel.  I usually delete things from my Kindle after reading (because having too long an index stresses me out) but have left this one on the device because I want to read it again very soon.  I was tearing through it at such a pace (wanting to find out what happened) that I know I failed to appreciate some of the gorgeous theatrical language.

63. Longshot, by Dick Francis.  It came up on sale, and since it is one of my favorites of his, had to have it.  An excellent palate-cleanser.  I had - somehow - forgotten that the hero is actually a writer.  As well as being, like all Francis' heroes, intelligent, courageous, and resourceful.

64. Irresistible, by Mary Balogh.  A workmanlike Regency with a rather fraught and overextended blackmail plot.  I always enjoy this author, but this particular plot was a little hard to take at this particular time.

 

What I have been doing this summer instead of reading, I guess, is going to movies.  Mr. P and I, or my BFF, or the three of us have been to see

• Ocean's 8;
• Set It Up (on Netflix);
• Mamma Mia 2;
• Ant Man & Wasp;
• MI: Fallout;
• The Spy Who Dumped Me;
• Crazy Rich Asians;
• Happytime Murders; and
• Juliet, Naked.

Maybe even something else that I've forgotten because of my writer's spongiform encephalopathy.  Plus we watched "Galaxy Quest" at home with other friends who had not ever seen it, which was a situation direly in need of correction.  All were satisfactory entertainments and some were very much better than that.

Because of the M.L. Rio book, I am seriously considering going to see "King Lear" with Ian McKellen.  That will probably be me on my own, if at all; I've never seen the play nor read it, and  having seen his Richard III, I do believe I will want to give this my undivided attention.

alien visitors

So one day recently, after filling the feeders and going back inside for my coffee + yoga, I had a little time and sat down to look out the window at the bird show, and ...

insert Scooby noise here

what?!

the?!

cluck?!

Yes, folks, those are real, live, actual, legit CHICKENS which somehow made their way to my disastrous - but apparently appealing! - yard.

I have no idea where they came from.

Haven't seen them since, but they sure were good for a laugh.

L.A. Stories, Number 16

And because I was so busy writing new stuff, I forgot to "announce" when I finished this one.

A RANDOM SEQUENCE is the story of Linda & Diego, two lottery winners, both Mexican-American.  There's some dancing along the way, and a supporting role for my characters Vince & Kelli from ALL THE BARS ON SUNSET.

Linda and Diego may turn up in a future story that I'm developing. You just never know what's going to bubble up, these days.

A Random Sequence at Amazon