Pre-Order The Immigrants, by Constance 'Dusty' Miller.

Constancee 'Dusty' Miller

My new romantic short story, The Immigrants, is now available for pre-order on various platforms. The book will go live on July 26, 2015 and pre-orders will be charged and delivered on that date to customer accounts from participating online bookstores.

It’s a first for us here at Long Cool One Books, and in terms of publishing, it’s easier than we expected. The only exception would be Kobo, where publishing assistant Ivan P. Krumholtz says he can’t find a delayed publishing or pre-order button. He got around that by basically entering all the information and then just saving it without publishing, (see: save and go back to library button on Kobo Writing Life.)

In the past, we sort of shied away from pre-orders, which was basically just a case of negative thinking. The assumption was that no one was going to order it anyways, and so why do it? 

We were basically just opening ourselves up for heartache and disappointment. If you read this Smashwords blog post, you’ll see that there are plenty of things an author can do to support a pre-order. There’s also some flexibility. If something’s a real pain in the ass, we just won’t do it. If something, (chapter reveals for example) promises or shows effectiveness, then we’ll focus on that. That’s an opportunity, and pessimism goes out the window. That’s a step forward on our own personal journey, no matter how many people pre-order the book.

This time around we’re going to challenge some assumptions. Why not start right here at home, right?

We’ve been thinking about this for some time. What decided us was getting an email notification of assetless pre-orders from Smashwords. We’re a bit leery about promising something we haven’t finished yet, but it was interesting to fill out all the metadata, upload and check the formatting, knowing the book wouldn’t come out for over a month. In the past, we basically published it and it came live right away. That way we got some instant feedback, and maybe that was the attraction in terms of author satisfaction or something.

They also say this is a business.

Here’s our sales copy:

Maria sets out on the adventure of a lifetime. She’s leaving France, now decadent and corrupt, and heading for America, which is still young, and strong and vigorous. Travelling on the S.S. France on the Atlantic crossing has its own perils. She’s been getting an awful lot of male attention, and she’s realistic enough to know that it’s a ship. They have six days and six nights, and then none of them will never see each other again. As for a certain Monsieur Yusuf Khoury, there’s something just a little bit different about that one. Dusty Miller’s The Immigrants is a short and romantic story of young love and long odds.

This is a romance of about 15,000 words and is priced at $0.99.

Smashwords.

OmniLit.

The Immigrants will become available for pre-order on the following platforms after internal review:

iTunes.

Kobo.

Google Play.

Amazon.

Readers will be find it at other fine bookstores including Barnes & Noble, Chapters/Indigo, Oyster, Overdrive, etc.

Thank you for reading.

END

On the Importance of Not Listening.

"Ignore them? Wow."

Constance 'Dusty' Miller

I think that my first novel is done.

It’s kind of hard to say.

That’s it? It’s over?

But of course it’s not really over until the book is published.

For some reason I’m a bit shy about doing that.

It’s not like there’s a big deadline for it.

I can sit down and try to read the thing three or four times, and there is no doubt that once I tuck into it, there are changes that can be made.

I could screw around with the ending a bit.

I tried to explain the feeling to a buddy.

Let’s call him Mike.

Mike laughed.

“How long have you been doing this?”

I told him a couple of years. I didn’t know what to say.

“The problem is that you are still listening.”

“What?”

“You’re still listening.”

“To what? The book?” (Mike really is a bit nuts sometimes.)

“No.” He looked me right in the eye. “No. You’re still listening to them.”

Them.

Oh, yeah, here we go.

He sat back a little bit, and then he took a long, slow breath. There was some hesitation there.

“You’re still listening to the other writers. You’re still listening to the people who are telling you how to write a story. You’re still listening to the people who are telling you how to manage a career, and this is your first fucking book for Christ’s sake. You’re still listening to the dos and don’ts and the whatnots, the fucking adverbs and dialogue tags and prepositions and it’s all fucking bullshit.”

“And you’re saying I shouldn’t do that?”

“I’m saying you’ve had enough. At some point, it is extremely important that you stop fucking listening to all of them other voices. For if you don’t…they will go on forever. And nothing is more guaranteed to fuck you up as a writer, quicker than listening to a bunch of other writers. All the fucking time. Look. Read their stories—their fiction, for crying out loud, and stop reading their fucking opinions. They don't know anything more than you do. Ignore all that other bullshit about craft, and business, and publishing, and How to Write a Fucking Book, and all that shit about the industry. Just forget it. It’s nonsense, Dusty. All of it.”

Whoa.

Shit.

“So…so…”

“So what?”  (Man, you smoke a lot. I could see it in his eyes.)

“So what do I do?”

“Listen to yourself. What’s your next story? That's the only thing that's important. Follow your own instincts. And ignore everything and everyone else. Otherwise, you are fucking doomed to follow them. And I don’t see you as a follower at all. You've got all kinds of stuff. It's busting out at the seams. You're the only one who don't fucking see it.”

That fucking guy was dead serious, too.

(Wow.)

“Okay.” I thought about it for a minute. “You mean, everyone who comes after this, right?”

He grinned from ear to ear.

“Now you’re catching on.”

What the hell.

I will try anything once.

I have to admit, though. That was a new one on me.

It does make a weird kind of sense, though.

END

(Dusty’s just a bit shy, ladies and gentlemen. She’s put a lot of work into it. It’s not a bad book and if she can’t think of anything to add, then the thing is done, isn’t it? I promise that I won’t let her stew too long.– ed.)

What's this thing called, love?

Dusty Miller

“What’s this thing called, love?”

It didn’t take too much erotica writing before the inevitable questions arose.

“Holy crap, are erotica writers among the frickin’ loneliest people of the world?”

“Why am I just aching with loneliness inside, and why is finishing one of these and not having anything to do the worst feeling in the world?”

(“Why am I so horny all the time?”)

“And why am I staring at people’s faces and checking out their walk in a world where we tend to avoid eye-contact, staring, and being sexually aggressive?”

I don’t know, but it’s definitely a time-filler, or something.

What I think happens is that writing romance, love stories, erotica, all that romantic shit, highlights and underscores the fact that there’s not really all that much going on in our own life.

And yet maybe, as an expression of our own most personal wants, needs, desires or fantasies, it says a lot.

Love is a universal human need. Everybody wants love, it’s like money in that sense. Sex is a powerful driving motive behind many of our daily actions.

Stated baldly, a house is a place where people mate and have kids…right? Sure, we all got to live somewhere. But it could be stated that way and not be all that inaccurate.

***

Every so often you get a crush on someone.

You know damned well it ain’t happening, right? Generally speaking, there’s not much you can do about it but suffer and wait for the next big crush to come along…then you’ll forget all about ‘em.

Yeah, that’s the ticket.

Even then, it says a little something about what’s going on inside of your head, which is the biggest sex organ of all, according to the experts, mostly scientists and guys with big heads…(hmn.)

***

I don’t think it’s ever a mistake to love someone. Even when they don’t and probably never will love you back, or even be aware of your existence.

In those clear-cut cases, it’s probably better not to dump that heavy load on someone who may already have a spouse, significant other, or maybe they're just not very likely to be interested, plain and simple.

Why tell them, right?

Loving someone that you may never have is sure a lot better than hating someone—because that can get to be a habit that’s hard to break.

Because loving and having are all mixed in together. Why love someone you'll never have?

I think it's better than not loving anybody at all, for surely in order to love someone else, we must first love ourselves, and maybe even consider ourselves worthy of some love?

Does that make any sense at all, ladies and gentlemen?

I sure hope so.

***

There are all kinds of love, from an academic love of humanity, which includes some less than exemplary individuals, but we sort of accept that, to the love of a mother for a child, a father for his son, or between brothers and sisters.

The love of a mate is special. Human beings are animals too, and the natural urge is to mate, and to have a mate.

It’s interesting to read about monogamous species. When the stork loses a mate, it may never mate again. 

Romantic as it seems, it also seems pretty tragic. In most cases, humans will remarry or ‘re-mate’ if you will, sometimes relatively quickly.

A friend told me, “After five years you’re officially a virgin again.”

She’s a lesbian, but her perspective is not far off.

“Well, that is good news indeed.” What the fuck was I supposed to say?

But after a while a bit of that mental or psychological virginity kicks in and it’s like falling off a horse: you’d better get back on and ride that thing, or walk away and stay away!

But it’s, ah, definitely troubling.

I’m a healthy and normal 31 year-old woman, and that biological imperative is hard to ignore.

And if I was out on a hot date with some luscious hunk, always in the back of my mind would be the daughter at home with the babysitter, and the unpaid bills, and the squeaky fan belt on the old Nova, and a hundred other adult concerns that we really didn’t have back then—when we were in high school, or college, or young adults without a care or responsibility in the world. And yet that’s where most of the memories are—that’s where they were built.

No wonder it bears little resemblance to our present reality.

***

To write erotica or romance is to fantasize, to daydream, and then very simply to write it all down in the best form you can manage. The database for our fantasies is of course our memories. This includes experience, books, films, education, conversation, everything in our heads remotely related to our fantasy of the moment.

There is more to it, I’m sure.

It is a kind of wish fulfillment of a purely symbolic nature.

And yet at the same time there may be a kind of magic in it.

People look at what they like. That’s why I will buy a red car before I buy a silver one. I might even order it special and have to wait, when a silver one was sitting right there on the lot.

People dream and scheme, and manipulate to get what they want. They also have to convince themselves, a.) that it is possible and b.) that this is what they really want c.) the price will not be too high d.) it will work as advertised…the list goeth on.

Because there are always options, including the nun’s habit and the cloister. For whatever reason, that just doesn’t sound like me, although it sure sounds like Sister Heather in Project: Passion.

That book has a very simple message: you have to know what you want or you ain’t ever going to get it now, are you?

I have no doubt whatsoever that the interest in romance, erotica, love, relationships, it all holds great meaning for this writer. And it holds a lot of meaning for readers as well.

The readers want to be loved too. The reader is just like me.

Coming to terms with that meaning, and figuring out just what I must do about that meaning, personally, and in the works that I produce, may be a little more difficult, but we’ll take it one day at a time and see how it goes.

Other than that, thank you for stopping in.

***

Smooches.