Did you know Captain Kirk has a medal for Conspicuous Gallantry?

Two new blog tour things up today:

1. I was part of my first podcast yesterday! I was a guest on Danielle Monsch's Romantically Speaking. Here's her description of our conversation:

So what was discussed? Georgette Heyer vs. Jane Austen, East Coast vs. West Coast, Gerard Butler vs. Christina Hendricks, and Kirk vs. Picard.

I'll give you a hint as to how that last conversation went:

DANIELLE: Kirk.
ME: Kirk.
DANIELLE: Oh, definitely Kirk.
ME: I love Kirk a LOT. Plus he's really cute.
DANIELLE: I don't like William Shatner though.
ME: Oh, of course not! Ugh.

I haven't actually listened to the final recording yet (I'm going to do that after I post this) but I had a lot of fun talking to Danielle. I'll tell you a secret, though: after I got off the phone, I thought to myself, "Did I talk too much? Did I monopolize the conversation?" How sad is that when I was being interviewed? Also, if you enjoy rants, this is the podcast for you, because I was unable to resist sharing my issues with "geek chic" TV, 300, and many other things.

Leave a comment if you listen, okay? I'm guessing podcasts don't get as many comments as blogs simply because a lot of people listen to them away from the computer, and Danielle puts a lot of work into this thing and it's awesome.

Anyway, you can download that here. I'm going to have a guest post going up on her blog soon too!

2. I have a guest post up at MuseTracks. I don't know how to talk about it exactly so I'll just repost the first few paragraphs:

When Marie-Claude asked me to write a post that would help inspire unpublished authors, I knew immediately what I wanted to talk about. And then I put off writing the post for weeks. Because the three years between when I started writing In for a Penny and when I sold it were the three worst years of my writing life, hands down. Possibly the three worst years of my life, period, except I think junior year of high school still has that honor (and yes, I know that’s only one year, but it felt longer).

I started writing In for a Penny in mid-January 2006. By mid-March I’d written a hundred pages. Things were going great, the book was flowing, I felt confident that this would be the one that would sell. My goal was to finish the book by Rosh Hashanah of that year (the holiday falls in early to mid-September), and I thought I could do it.

At the end of March I found out my mom was dying.

It was a tough one to write, which may explain why I've already got an addendum (copied from the comments section):

"I want to qualify my initial statement that those were the three worst years of my writing life–that third year of taking a break from trying to write for publication was actually a great year for me, personally and in terms of writing, and I’m proud of a lot of things I wrote then. It was just an awful year for romance novel writing. This is what I get for going back and figuring out the chronology AFTER I wrote the intro, and also for writing emotional posts late at night!"

It's important to me to clarify that, because I do care a lot about what I wrote that year, and about all the people who read it, and about my friends who are reading this post, and I don't want them to think that I don't value those stories or that I was secretly depressed and miserable that whole year. So.