Just a Reminder

Heading off for San Francisco today. YaoiCon should be a blast. Hope to see you there!

PS-- Not doing the "Where's Rowan" hide-and-seek this time. But I am bringing the hat, so if you want to meet up, drop me a line on twitter, here, etc, and I'll be sure to have it on me so that I'm recognizable. :)

Tango

Thanks to The Yaoi Review for sending me this vid. Precision is so sexy. The hot guys in well-tailored suits help too.




For more information on the art of him-and-him tango, you can go to: http://www.verytango.com/tango-men.html.

Goin' to Yaoi-Con 2011!

October 21st through 23rd I’ll be at Yaoi-Con in San Francisco! W00t! It’s really short notice but I only found out last week that I would be able to go, then this week my mother ended up in surgery and I ended up in the emergency room for completely unrelated reasons, so things have been a little crazy. After I finish writing up this post I fully intend to stare up at my ceiling fan and listen to Enya for at least an hour.

Are any of you guys going? I’m not sure if I’ll be playing Where’s Rowan this year—Would you be interested in playing again? If so, I might also do an online version this time around where you can look for me via twitter. I’m not sure. It depends on how I feel after Enya stops playing. ;)

In celebration of my trip to Yaoi-Con 2011, I’m posting a few pics from Yaoi-Con 2010, which I never got around to posting because my SD card got corrupted and I lost most of my images. It depressed me, yada yada yada. But some good ones survived, and here are three:

A friend and I won a bishie in an auction. Here he is in his in all his Ichigo hawtness posing with Alex Woolfson, another friend of mine and writer of a fab webcomic called Artifice.

I don't know who they are, but I love the hell out of butterflies.

Cutest. Frog. Ever.
In my head all I could hear was "Kero Kero Keroppi."

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So that's three snapshots of last year's Yaoi-Con. If you'd like to see more, check out my flikr account at http://flic.kr/s/aHsjwifMdr. Feel free to leave comments there, and let me know here if you're going to the con!

Wrote a book! Signed a contract!

It’s called Just Perfect, and it’s going to be published by Torquere Press. I can’t share a lot of details yet, but you can read the blurb as well as a short rambling about the story by me at: http://www.rowanmcbride.com/stories/drayners/justperfect/. Right now you can’t actually get to that page from anywhere on my site—the link I just posted is one of two access points to it. The first was posted on my newsletter back on Friday, which is one of the perks of being on the mailing list. ;)

Just Perfect is the (hopefully) first in my Drayner series. Unless you happened to catch my now out-of-print short story Just Wait back in 2007, then for you it’s a prequel. Although Just Wait may or may not still be an official part of the series anymore. It’s complicated. There were twins involved. Sexy, scary twins.

But hey, my first book in two years. And it’s all...dark and twisty and such. Should be good times whatever happens, yeah?

Names and Master Plans

This post is probably going to be even more ramble-y than my usual, so there’s that.

I started a story recently where I changed the name of the main character three times. That never happens to me. In a best case scenario, when I imagine a character for the first time he already has a name attached. In other, less desirable situations, I spend hours—sometimes days—going through my baby name book, name websites, and scrolling through my television menu for random actor names until I find something that fits, dammit. But something always does, even if I have to eventually make it up. The name captures the person.

Until this new guy. He started out as a Dan, then as a Ray, and currently he is Neil. At the moment I’m not entirely sure I think his name is Neil. It’s really disconcerting. I can’t even start a story unless I know who the main characters are, and here I have one and I can’t pin down his name. I feel like I’m writing about a ghost. Which I’m not.

Then come the repeats. I’m not sure what the writer etiquette is on that. I have a Michael in Michael Finally Grows Up (which was updated late last month—yeah!), but I also have a Michael you’ve never met, in a sequel that I promise I’m working on slowly but surely. In this case I don’t think it’s so bad because MFGU is a free serial and in a different category from the novel I’m working on. Separation challenge: Easy.

Things get murkier when the stories are both books. Jesse Winter is still my favorite character I’ve created, but a few days ago this new idea popped up in my head, along with a brand new character whose name was…Jesse. I figured I had to change it, but Derek—the love interest—calls him Jess and how hot is that? Keith never called his Jesse Jess. Of course, Derek is the name of this guy I’d had planned for a fairy tale down the road…

*headcramp*

I’ve lost count of how many idea files I have on my hard drive. How many “chapter ones” I intend to spin out into fully realized tales. I also have a spreadsheet to keep track of all the names, to help keep my myriad of master plans and distinct worlds from colliding with each other. And yet I have two Michaels, two Jesses, and a dude who may or may not be a Neil.

Sometimes I wonder why I put so much effort into names, anyway. Would the content of my stories be that much different if I named half my characters Bob? Then I take Jesse from Warm Rush, and try to imagine him as, oh I don’t know, a Duke or something, and that really doesn’t seem like it could work. But Duke from G.I. Joe? What other name could he have? Also—hot.

This new Jesse? I’ve tried retro-fitting him with different names. Nothing works so far. I think about books I’ve read by authors I love and I have to admit, unless it’s the same universe, I don’t pay attention to names (or similarities, or repeats) from one series to another. But then I’m freakishly bad with names (hence the spreadsheet mentioned above to help me remember my own characters) so I’m most likely not the best sampling here.

What do you think? Is it confusing when an author has two characters with similar names, even if the story worlds never overlap? Or does the fact that I have around 250 names used (as in seen in a published/posted story) or on reserve (as in featured in one of my many “chapter ones”) in my spreadsheet make it a big enough pool that I can use a couple of them more than once?

And Neil, or whatever the hell his name'll be by the end. Still no idea what to do about him. Maybe he'd work as a Bob...

So much for master plans. >.<

Michael Finally Grows Up - Comments Section

Story Blurb:

When up-and-coming artist Avery Scott spots a shy wallflower at a party, he just can't seem to help himself-- he brings him home. Michael's sexual hungers tread on the kinky side, even by Avery's standards, but Avery is more than capable of giving him what he needs. Before he knows it, five years have gone by, and Michael is still in his bed. Avery is comfortable. Even happy. And he's famous, which is a bonus.

But now Michael is changing... into something that Avery's been having nightmares about for most of his life.

http://rowanmcbride.com/stories/mfgu/index.html

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If you'd like to make a comment about any of the MFGU installments, or the story as a whole, you can do it here.

Sorry I've been absent.

Been sick. Still sick, but feeling a little better now. Even been writing a bit, and *might* have something to post soon. XD