FREEBIE

ANYMORE is free on May first and second.

I may have mentioned the wrong book in a few  places and I apologize, but this is the deal.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B007O47VIE

You will find it somewhat different and smaller than my previous work.  I hope you will participate and enjoy.

Excerpt from Sacred Sin

Of course, it was only a matter of days until Barney knew she was back in town.  One morning, Sarah brought the mail in, including this week’s “US” magazine.  On the cover were two side by side photos, one of Daniel getting off the plane in England and one of Jenny and the kids, getting off the plane at O’Hare.  The caption read, “Trouble in Paradise?” and, within, a long article with photos of Daniel with his split lip and Jenny crying.  Barney was on his way out the door to go to work and took a minute to glance at it.  “I’ll drive by and see if she’s okay.”  And he dashed out the door.

The kids were on the lawn and Jenny was sitting in the side yard writing on her computer.  When the huge red truck pulled up and the huge guy got out, she hit ‘save’ and started across the lawn.  As he ran toward her he thought, “If the house was on fire, she would remember to hit ‘save.’”

The kids were terrified, especially little Maisie who began to cry and run to her mommy just as Jenny literally jumped into Barney’s arms.  “Oh my God.  You look so wonderful.  The glasses.  You’ve put on weight.  You look wonderful.  Oh my God.  I’m so glad to see you!”

“Jenny.  What did you do to your hair?  Are you alright?  You weigh nothing.  What’s going on with you?”

“Just a sec,” she said, as she stepped away to pick up sobbing little Maisie.  She turned away from Barney and put her cheek against the baby’s and whispered to her, Maisie’s tears wetting Jenny’s face and their copper curls comingling.  The baby’s crying ceased the moment she felt the safety of her mother’s embrace.  The sight of them--each end of the spectrum of all that was true in his life,  Maisie, the perfect replica of the nemesis of the kindergarten Barney, and Jenny, the only image he carried in his soul--stabbed into him, love spiraling into itself, redoubling and ripping a hole in his chest where his heart had been.

He felt full of some ancient knowledge, but as though his life was renewed.  “Not my kid.  Not my kid. . .” his brain kept trying to remind him.  But he knew that this icon before him was his only truth.  He knew he was seeing Jenny’s reality, if only for a second, her truest person, and he knew he would never be anything more to her than her soldier, her bastion, her anchor.  But he realized that was all he was meant to be and she needed that.  And her need for him, born when she took her first steps and reached for his hand, drawing her to him in the troubled nights of her adolescence, and now her child reflecting the intensity of her love, brought him a sense of purpose he had never known.  He knew that he was the part of her that finally let her be unafraid to give her love.  And he knew he would be rooted to this spot in time, in his life, in his soul, forever.  He chuckled slightly, “And was this one cloned in a Petri dish?”

(This is one of my favorite parts.  It ties all my books together. Sacred Sin will be free to download on May first and May second, 2012.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B005H3EW3Q

Seriously

I keep saying Barnes and Noble bring me the most sales, but I promise not to let it go to my head.

Argument

Every now and then I will jump into a comment thread on a blog that has gone on so long and gotten so far off track it is ridiculous.  I have prided myself on being able to bring some of these long-winded discussions to a crashing halt.  Now, it's like why bother.  The truth is the people just want to see the ink.  I have admitted that I have been guilty of it.  I call it being a blog whore--posting just cuz you know that site will bring you hits.  I do it when I notice a dip in my stats.  It always seems to reverse the trend, but I cannot definitively say it is a cause and effect relationship.  I have blog spikes that are inexplicable and often leave me wondering what someone must have said about me somewhere that I know nothing about.

I have also commented on the fact  that people will read something in my blog and then go and blog about it like I am not going to notice where they got  the idea.  This, I know, at least on more than just a few occasions, is a fact--or ESP.  I don't even care about that.  It's kind of flattering.  But it would be nice if they just kind of in a generalized way mentioned that someone gave them this thought and they ran with it, even if they don't get specific.

The latest is the prevalence of certain terms.  Mises just finished a month long multi pager in which the main figures in the argument went off track with defining and accusing each other of the ad hominem attack.  Now I just got through another windy one where, not only did they have to pause in their tracks to make a snarky remark about my "one-liners", (A market is a market, asshole.  I don't care what you peddle.) they go completely down the side road about the fucking ad hominem attacks.  It is like the word of the week .  It is usually accompanied somewhere in the discourse with several mentions of cognitive dissonance.  The last time I saw 'cognitive dissonance' in a blog, I went in and said, "I call bullshit.  This is cognitive dissonance, not what you are referring to."  Boom.  End of thread.

Well, what should I expect?  I'm the one that keeps saying there are only 26 letters.  I always think of the millionth monkey in that room with the pianos, pounding out Beethoven. Or is it typewriters and Shakespeare?

It's been said.

Today's CTA:  What hasn't been said?

Polite Conversation

Someone actually came up to me at a family gathering recently, a cousin of a cousin that I hadn't seen in years.  She is almost exactly the same age as I am and she has a child younger than some of my grandchildren.  (Which is hard for me to imagine for many, many reasons.)  When we were all younger and used to have family parties for this or that reason, we sort of hung out cuz of our similarities in age and interests, plus I kind of liked  her older brother.  She actually asked me what happened to me, that I used to be kind of always up for a good time.


 Today's CTA:  Should I have told her?

Stop It

So now Google is farting around with my blog and facebook has that new timeline thing and it absolutely confounds me how some organization can send you an email to come and buy stuff on their website and you have to sign into the website and then they tell you that email is already taken, yeah, goofnuts, it's mine, and then they will send you an email so you can get a new password and screen name.  How the fuck did they send you the  fucking email in the first f-ing place.  For f's sake.  I'm just about through I guess.  I cannot even open the lid on the shampoo bottle anymore and I am going to need a wheel barrow if I am assigned any more pills.  I would love to sit and mess with the 26 letters, but if the chair is turned the wrong way, I can't sit down and I have to walk around the chair and turn it the other way, and by then who feels like writing some cheerful little ditty.  Not me.

Scratch That

Previous post = over medicated? Can't stop. Won't. Needed a bit of an ass-kicking, but I am fine.

Mixed feelings

This is the plan. I am going to rotate the four books through Select and rewrite each one, heavily editing the sex out of the first, at several people's suggestions, and doing new covers at least for the third. I feel like I am done being a writer. I wanted to do the four and they are done. And they pretty much are tanking. I average a sale a day. I realize that is sixty times better than no sales for months at a time, but the word of mouth thing is not working for me. I blame my personality and lifestyle for that.

But I'd like to say a few things about the "business" end of this business. I get lots of email and even phone calls that they want to tell me about this publishing deal and that. Okay. Leave me alone. I'm published. Unless you have some promo ideas, I have nothing to say to you and I don't want to listen to you. Word of mouth is the ONLY thing missing from my equation and you cannot sell me a program for that. Don't ask me to send you copies of my work. It is all out there in many different forms or places. If you can't do anything else, you can name search for me. As far as I know there is one other Virginia Llorca and she is a 23 year old girl in North Carolina.

Thanks to everyone who read my stories and double triple thanks to those who said nice things about them, and think about the Karma, especially you family members who pretend it doesn't exist or it's a whim. Read any Lora Leigh and then get back to me about MY work.

The only thing that is bothering me now is that I am toying with ideas. It is just because I am bored and am so very unused to dealing with a sense of relief. I'm trying to talk myself out of it.

Today's CTA: Do you get angry with yourself when you break promises to yourself or do you just shake it off? What do you learn from the experience? Share.