I've been doing all kinds of guest blogs in the past month or so, promoting my new release. I really should have been posting daily updates as these went live, but I'm working the bugs out of this whole promotional effort.

• May 6, 2011 - Rosalie Lario's blog:   Does Your Werewolf Use a Condom?
  
  • http://rosalielario.com/2011/05/06/does-your-werewolf-use-a-condom-plus-win-a-copy-of-kathryn-scannells-leap-of-faith/
• May 5, 2011 - Romance for the Rest of Us: Weddings Matter
  
  • http://glbtromance.blogspot.com/2011/05/normal-0-false-false-false.html
• May 5, 2011 - The Book Boost: My Worst Writing Mistake
  
  • http://thebookboost.blogspot.com/2011/05/time-tracking-with-guest-blogger.html
• May 4, 2011 - WriteEachDay: Writing is More than Just Adding New Words
  
  • http://www.writeeachday.com/2011/05/writing-is-more-than-just-adding-new-words/
• May 3, 2011 - Suzan Isik's blog: How Does Magic Effect Society?
  
  • http://www.suzanisik.com/2011/05/03/how-does-magic-affect-society/
• May 1, 2011 - Raine Delight's Blog: Interview
  
  • http://authorrainedelight.wordpress.com/2011/05/01/guest-author-kathryn-scannell/
• May 1, 2011 - Manlove and Paranormal: Erotica by Ellis: Breaking Rules
  • http://elliscarrington.wordpress.com/2011/05/01/guest-blog-breaking-rules-by-kathryn-scannell/
• April, 2011 - Creative Chatter: On How to Write good M/M Scenes when You're a Woman
  
  • http://creative-chatter.blogspot.com/2011/04/welcome-guest-blogger-kathryn-scannell.html
• April 27, 2011 - Savvy Authors: Writing Fiction Featuring People Instead of Men or Women
  
  • http://www.savvyauthors.com/vb/content.php?1105-Writing-Fiction-Featuring-People-Instead-of-Men-or-Women-by-Kathryn-Scannell
• April 22, 2011 - Black Velvet Seductions : Things About My Characters that Didn't Make it into the Book
  
  • http://blackvelvetseductions.com/readers_blog/?p=2285
• April 19, 2011 - Haunted Dreams and Dark Destinies: How Dark is Too Dark? 
  
  • http://www.pamela-turner.com/2011/04/tuesday-guest-post-kathryn-scannell.html
• April 14, 2011 - Full Moon Dreaming: The Pitfalls of Titles
  
  • http://julielynnhayes.blogspot.com/2011/04/guest-blogger-kathryn-scannell.html
• April 12, 2011 - Suzan Isik's blog: Using Borrowed Mythology in Your Fantasy
  
  • http://www.suzanisik.com/2011/04/12/using-borrowed-mythology-for-your-fantasy-story/
• April 10, 2011 - Margaret Fieland: Poetry and Prose: Interview
  
  • http://margaretfieland.com/blog1/2011/04/10/interview-with-author-kathryn-scannell

Embracing the Dragon by Kathryn Scannell

Danny O’Riordan’s life was complicated before the vision of a past life
forced him to admit he was bisexual. There’s a war going on, and being
Liegeman to Aran, the Elven King of Avalon puts Danny squarely in the middle
of the politics of two worlds, Earth and Avalon. Adding a romantic
relationship to the mix could be explosive.

His lover from that previous life has been reborn as Mordellir, the ruler of
the Tengri Empire. The Dragon of Heaven is the most powerful person in his
world. Will he want Danny back once he knows he’s been reborn? If he does,
how far will he go to get his way?

Find out today:
http://www.torquerebooks.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=3116

I just got an email from my editor at Torquere telling me the release date for Embracing the Dragon has been moved up from April 27 to April 13. Ack!

I love the internet, and its various writing communities in particular - I posted to a couple of lists about how my promo dates were all now at least 2 weeks after the book releases, and now I have four more promo dates scheduled. I'll have a full list in another post later this week.

I'm also planning to have a short story, previously published by Torquere, as a promotional item when I'm out and about talking to people about Embracing the Dragon. Leap of Faith, which is set in the same world as Embracing the Dragon, and shares some characters with it, was originally issued by Torquere as part of the 2009 Charity Sip blitz. The rights came back to me in September of last year, and I've been debating what to do next with it. Then I started thinking about promotional give-aways and it was clearly a match made in heaven.

I've hooked up with a cover artist, Sheri McGathy (http://www.sherilmcgathy.com) who is hard at work on a wonderful cover for it, and am now working on figuring out how to get the text into various e-book formats.

I have safely purchased my tickets already, so now I'll share it with my friends. :-)

Al Stewart is going to be playing the Tupelo Music Hall in Londonderry, NH at the end of July. He's an artist whose work I've enjoyed since I was in college, and I never figured I'd have a chance to see in person. I'm a happy camper.

We're toying with going to a Tempest concert if Beth can get at least half a day off. They're playing a venue in Cumberland, RI on April 15th. It's only about 2 hours, so it's doable as a day trip.

Last week we had a spontaneous impulse and headed over to Portsmouth for a concert by Derek Warfield and the Young Wolfe Tones at the Ri Ra Irish Pub.  It was definitely a good choice.

The music was pretty much what I expected. Warfield is one of the original members of the Wolfe Tones, an Irish rebel group who've been around since the 1960's.  He parted company with them in 2001, and went on to do some solo recording, and is now  touring with a new group of musicians. Their sound is much like the original Wolfe Tones., and since many of the songs they performed were traditional, or written by Warfield, the repertoire hasn't changed much either. I attended a Wolfe Tones concert in the late 80's, so this was a serious trip down memory lane for me, in a good way.

The venue was pleasant, going for a traditional pub atmosphere, with more upscale food offerings. The menu was pricier than your typical pub, but not outrageous. Most entrees were under $20, although not by much. Prices for drinks, both alcoholic and non-alcoholic, are steep. The service was good, and the food tasty. 

My major issue was with their web site, which is pathetic at best. A month ago the announcement for Warfield said "Tickets available". No link. No information. I tried emailing to ask how one would order tickets. No response. So I put the notion of going aside as probably not practical on a weeknight.

The day of the performance I had second thoughts. I checked the site again. The announcement about Warfield and the Young Wolfe TOnes no mentioned nothing about tickets. I thought perhaps it had been an error, since the place is basically a restaurant, not a concert venue, and generally such places don't tell tickets. The web site said the performance was scheduled to start at 9pm, so we headed over intending to get there about 8:15, have dinner, and then sit back and enjoy the music.

You can probably imagine how pleased and impressed we were to get there and find that there was an unadvertised $20 charge for tickets, and that the show had started at 8pm, not 9pm. We stayed anyway, and had a good time, but it left a very sour taste in my mouth where the management of the establishment are concerned.

That wasn't the only issue with the web site either. The daily specials section of the menu is still running the specials from November.

And someone should tell the person who programmed the "Show me a map" option that 22-26 Market Square and 22-26 Market St are not the same place. The map option worked much better when I put in the Market Square version of the address, which was shown clearly on the page next to the "Show me a map" button. Lesson: if you're going to put up a web site with directions, at least click the link once and see that it works, instead of giving you six possible addresses Google thinks you might have meant, 3 of which aren't even in the right city.

So, if you're thinking of going to something there, you'll probably enjoy it. But do what we should have done: pick up the phone and confirm all the pertinent details with a live human. The web site is a pretty risky information source.

I just got notice that my submission to the upcoming Dragon Moon Press anthology, Swords and Swashbucklers, has been accepted. Details of the line-up are on the editors blog: http://vg-ford.livejournal.com/606113.html

This is a companion volume to Rum and Runestones, and like its predecessor, is a collection of stories features pirates and magic as primary plot elements. 

I'm excited because this is my first sale outside the romance genre. My story, currently titled "Running from the Storm", is set in the same world and several of my romance stories (Embracing the Dragon, Lessons, and Winter King), but it's pure fantasy, with no romantic elements at all.

Morien, an Elven mage with a rare talent for manipulating weather, has been captured and enslaved by Tengri pirates. When the ship is taken by a larger pirate boat, he expects to die. But life rarely gives you what you expect. Will the new ship bring him simply a new set of masters, or a chance of rescue?

No publication date has been set yet. I'll post when I know more.

Some of you have heard already that we'd been approached by a friend to see if we might be able to offer a home for an elderly cat belonging to a friend who was unable to care for her due to health issues. I heard the cat's age, which is alleged to be in the 20-22 range, and immediately thought "No one will adopt a cat that old, therefore we should." Yes, we have sucker written on our foreheads. Also we knew when this came up that Romeo, who had been fighting a battle with squammous cell carinoma since August, was not going to hang on much longer, so there would be a vacancy in the househould. So we said yes, pending meeting the cat.

We went to meet the cat and her person today, and the cat did not hate us on sight, so we brought her home. Her name is Truffles. So far things appear to be going peacefully. She's walking around the house exploring, but there have been no explosions or even great fits of hissing. So far so good. Undoubtedly there will be issues, but this is a promising beginning.

The caretakers at the kennel where she's been living (for a YEAR, apparently) expressed doubts outside the owner's hearing that she was really 22. They thought perhaps 15 or 16, based on the way she moves. At any rate, we have an appointment on Wed. with our vet to get her checked out, and some real bloodwork done. She hasn't had a senior profile to check things like kidney function since 2005, and she seems a little underweight.

We've joked before about there being an agency which sends a new cat when we have a vacancy, but it's getting a little unnerving. We got this email about Truffles out of the blue at the beginning of last week, and set up the appointment to meet her today. Romeo took a sudden turn for the worse on Thurs. night of this week (probably a heart attack, or possibly a stroke - he just fell over suddenly, and never really seemed fully conscious again), and we let him go on Friday morning). I'd feel a lot better about this kind of providence if it didn't seem to be anticipating events so successfully....

I've been feeling kind of creatively stuck lately, not getting a lot of writing accomplished. Help me out with that. Give me some nice, creative prompt words to work with. I'll take them till 6pm EST.

Something very unexpected just happened. I was outside mowing the lawn (hopefully for the last time for this season), and looked over at our tiny little backyard pond (about 4' x 8' across), and there, standing on the edge inspecting it, was what I think I've identified as a Great Blue Heron. It stayed long enough for me to get Beth to come outside to see it. Sadly we don't have pictures, as the camera was stolen last week, and the replacement has not yet arrived.

We are relatively close to Lake Massabesic, which probably supports quite a lot of water birds, but not so close that finding one in my back yard wasn't quite unexpected.

Borders ( http://www.torquerebooks.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=79_111&products_id=2823 )  just got 4 stars out of 5 from Jenre at Reviews by Jessewave: you can go read the whole thing here: http://www.reviewsbyjessewave.com/?p=31148

I'm doing a happy dance now.

We took him to the vet when we returned from Pennsic because the lady running the boarding facility where we left him had noticed blood in his water dish, and thought he might have an abscess in one of his teeth. The vet anesthetized him, and discovered a lesion on his tongue. He suspected it might be a squamous cell carcinoma (aka skin cancer), so he took a sample for a biopsy. It's one of the more common oral cancers in cats. Unfortunately his suspicion proved to be well founded.

When it happens in an exterior location (ears are common), it can sometimes be treated effectively by amputation. That's not really a practical option inside the mouth. Some vets will remove part of the tongue and jaw in an attempt to stop the growth of the disease, but the results seem to be questionable. (<10% one year survival rate). It's just not something I'd consider putting a cat through, and not an option our vet even suggested. (Picture trying to feed Romeo with a tube....). Also it only works if the cancer hasn't spread to the lymph nodes.

At this point all we can do is keep him comfortable. I'm glad we did the biopsy. We know what's going on, and that there's no prospect for recovery, so we'll doubt ourselves less when we start looking at him and thinking its time. Right now he's still eating baby food, and wanting attention, so I think he's reasonably comfortable. We don't really have a prognosis on how long he has - I suspect it will be measured in weeks, not months, but right now he's holding.

He's seventeen, so we're getting into the area where something was going to take him from us. He seems mostly comfortable, and spends a lot of time sleeping on our bed. When he sleeps lately its so deep that he doesn't notice you approaching until you actually touch him. It's been scaring me, but now I think it would be a good thing if he can just drift away peacefully.