Anya Bast

My Maverick Author buds, Lauren Dane and Megan Hart, have sold another anthology to Black Lace!

From Publisher’s Marketplace…

Megan Hart and Lauren Dane’s NO RESERVATIONS, the sequel to the upcoming Taking Care of Business, again to Adam Nevill at Black Lace Books, in a nice deal, by Laura Bradford at Bradford Literary Agency.

Well, this is my personal cycle of anxiety, anyway. The creation of a novel brings with it a roller coaster of emotion.

I start research on a new novel. There is excitement! Geeky joy! The glomming of lots of new books to read in order to help me build my world! Yay! Yayayayayayayay!

During the plotting stage — more happy, happy, joy, joy! The creation of new characters? Bliss! Discovering their pasts and all the deep, dark secrets that drive them throughout the book? Wheee!

I start the novel and look forward to writing every day. I luuuuurve it with a passion that gets me up from my fluffy bed at six every morning to write before my tornado, er, daughter wakes up. There are occasional bouts of dark ohmygodthisSUCKSandeveryonewillhateit.

I finish the first draft and go into the editing stage, which is intensive for me. Happy, happy, yet far more frequent incidences of ohmygodthisSUCKSandeveryonewillhateit.

I complete all revisions (which take me almost as long as writing the first draft) and send it off to my editor. I’m satisfied with my story and the way I told it. It could be no other way, after all. *shrug* I feel I have done justice to my characters. Yayayayayayayayay!!! *drinks champagne with husband*

First round of edits from editor arrives. I realize that while I can change sentence structure and move paragraphs around, ect, I can’t make any major changes to the book. Eeek! Anxiety sets in. Lots of ohmygodthisSUCKSandeveryonewillhateit. Lots and lots of second guessing myself.

Final proofreading stage. Same dealio as edits, except I have talked myself into my zen place now, so I’m feeling better about the whole thing.

Book release. Yaaaaaaaaaaaaay! Lots of joy! My book is out there and people are reading it. Ohmygod…my book is out there and people are reading it? Eeeeeeeeeeek! What if everyone hates it? What if it totally sucks? Ack! Blarg! Blargity blarg blarg blarg! *vomits in trashcan* And yet…my anxiety is also mixed with this euphoria born of having my story out there in print.

Gradually the anxiety fades back into peacefulness as I see that not everyone hates my books *wipes sweat from brow* Whew! I mean, I can’t expect to please everyone but most people seem to be enjoying it. And all is well. S’okay. Zen place is found once more.

And the cycle starts again.

Welcome to a peek inside my head. Scary, huh? 😉

This post brought to you by the first round of edits on Witch Heart.

So far I’ve really been enjoying the summer. I hope you have too. The weather has been mild, for the most part, yet warm enough for swimming and running through the sprinkler. This fills my daughter with lots of joy, joy that I get to partake in too. 🙂 My world is just about perfect when she’s laughing. When I’m not hanging with my daughter outside, I’m writing.

At the moment I’m working on Witch Fury, the last of the books in the Elemental Witch series. I’m angling toward the end of the book now, gearing up for the fireworks display that will bring the story of the Coven witches, the warlocks, and the daaeman to an end. It’s a bittersweet thing. I’m excited about my next project, yet it’s always hard to say goodbye to characters that you’ve spent years with. It’s hard to close up a world that’s lived in your mind, one that you’ve created and populated and that exists so vibrantly in your subconscious that you dream about it at night.

My next project is another series, this time one based on pre-Celtic myth. Before the year is out I plan to write a novella set in this new world and get a good start on the first full length novel of the series. Right now I’m reading and researching, taking notes and building my world. I’m reading some Yeats (apparently he believed in faeries. Who knew? Maybe you did, but I didn’t). I’m also finishing up Gods and Fighting Men, by Lady Gregory.

So, I’m closing up one world and opening another.

But before you see that new world, there will be two more Elemental Witch books released. In fact, here is the cover for Witch Heart, the third in the series. Pretty, huh? The cover artist is Tony Mauro. I think I’ll keep it. 😉

With the immense powers of an earth witch, Claire isn’t destined to be a demon’s handmaiden. Yet this has been her fate since she was six, when her warlock mother brought her to Eudae. Now at thirty-one, she’s about to discover her true power—and how far others are willing to go to take it away…

As part of a mission with the Coven, Adam Tyrell rescues Claire from her enslavement—and finds himself immediately taken with the beautiful witch. But this charming playboy soon learns that it’s easier to steal Claire from demons than win her heart, for her life as a servant has ravaged her spirit. But with Adam determined to protect her from the warlocks who want to harness her magick for evil, Claire’s resistance starts to give way—and they find themselves in the heat of danger, surrendering to the lure of their deepest desires…

Witch Heart will be out on January 6, 2009. It’s available for pre-order now on Amazon.com. This year is flying by so fast, it seems like the release date will be here in no time.

It’s been a while since I’ve had a contest over here, so let’s do one. One random poster will get her choice from my backlist. Pick a title from any publisher. One snag is that if you pick something from my EC backlist, it’ll have to be in ebook since I don’t have any extras of those titles in print right now. Comment on anything you want. About how you’re spending your summer, on the weather, on the prettiness of my new cover ;), on worldbuilding, what you’re reading right now. Anything you want, as long as it’s of substance. Blank posts or “I’m posting to enter” posts will be disqualified, (I get those sometime from the sweepstakes people and I call foul on that one).

Have a fabulous day, you all!! I plan to spend mine working on Witch Fury.

The Chosen Sin is out in October, but it’s already been reviewed by Tammie at Night Owl Romance Reviews (thanks, Tammie!). This was a surprise, since I don’t even have my ARCs yet!

“Anya Bast pulled another winner out of her pocket. The Chosen Sin was a thrilling ride through space and an interesting look at what if situations. What if we found out Vampires existed? What if a form of slavery came back into our society? What would you do if your best friend was murdered? These questions all drive this paranormal story that will have you thinking how humanity acts. If you are looking for a paranormal story that is just out of this world pick up The Chosen Sin. You will get more than just the generic vampire story.”

Here’s the whole review.

The book video….

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AEr7Tl4HEbI]

hhhhhhhh

Cupcakes are my kyptonite. I fall to my knees and am powerless against a chocolate with buttercream frosting.

Hey, all — I’m not sure I mentioned this before. I just turned in a contract for the Mammoth Book of Paranormal Romance, which will be out in 2009. It will be a collection of short stories within the sub genre of, you guessed it, paranormal romance. 🙂

Anyway, I’m really excited to be participating!

Here’s the Mammoth Book of Vampire Romance on Amazon, which release at the end of July. Just a bare sampling of the authors included is: Karen Chance, Lilith Saintcrow and Vicki Pettersson.

Today it is SO hot. Wow. Here’s me, very happy we have central air again. 🙂 We spent the day at the library and then at the (very crowded) public pool. Hope you’re staying cool wherever you are!

Why does my husband not understand that books are not a luxury? They are a necessity, like prescribed medicines and bread. I must have my books. I must! Therefore, when he gets the credit card bill and sees what I’ve spent on books he should not read it as a charge for inconsequentials, but for my life’s blood. He should be happy I’m not off buying shoes or purses. That would be a much more expensive past time. Why does he not understand?

*screams and has dramatic breakdown*

No seriously, though, it’s damn hard to live with someone who is not A Reader. I’m doing all I can to ensure my daughter is A Reader. Then he’ll be outnumbered. *laugh of evilness*

In a bit of good news…I surpassed the halfway point on Witch Fury yesterday. I haven’t had a chance to write yet today (what a crazy day!), but my characters are about to come against a huge challenge. My fingers are literally itching to get at the keyboard. I can’t do that until I have a quiet house, however.

In yet other news, we picked the first first organic tomato off the vine two days ago and savored it sliced with a bit of salt. Yuuuum. So good. Summer is officially here.

I am about 40% finished with Witch Fury and rapidly reaching the halfway mark. It’s misleading to say I’m “40%” finished, however, because there’s always so much cutting, rearranging, adding, rewriting, ect during my editing portion of the book writing process. But this is how far along I am in the initial draft.

The male lead is infuriating. He won’t do what I need him to do. Sometimes characters are like that. You create them to be a certain way and then their personalities make “dealing” with them difficult. In this case, the hero is stoic, untalkative, gruff and uncooperative. He was like that in Witch Heart too, but in that book he was only a secondary character. I’m going to have to get the whip out soon.

I’m writing this morning, but will probably knock off at some point today to take my daughter to the zoo. It’s beautiful here. I hope it’s half as pretty where you are.

If you have a second, be sure and check out Lauren Dane’s new cover for Fated. Also, go on over and take a peek at Megan Hart’s cover for her next Spice release, Stranger. They are both incredibly pretty!

I have like ten gajillion books on sale at Amazon.com, yet every time a new one goes up for pre-order I always go Eeeeeeeeeeep!!!!! Hello, Witch Heart! Nice to see you there!

I have an FANTABULOUS cover for this book. Unfortunately I don’t have the final version yet and can’t post it. I have news too. Oh, such shiny, pretty publishing news! I can’t share that yet either. As soon as I can share the news and/or the cover, I’ll be over here burning up my blog’s keyboard, you can lay money on it.

The heating and air conditioning guys are here bright and early for the second day of the installation of our new central air/heat pump. Yesterday they spent about eight hours ripping out what seems like the guts of our house and installing vent/duct work (new veins?) in the two rooms created by the renovation we did to the house over Christmas. Today apparently they’re finally actually installing all the new guts and finishing off the vent/duct work.

The latter will make me very happy because since yesterday afternoon we’ve had two more or less open holes leading into the crawl space and that made me wake up in the middle of night on the sudden thought, Oh, my god, there are brown recluse crawling up from the bowels of house! Heh. This is brown recluse country, but I have ample reason to believe we are brown recluse free. That was just middle of the night paranoia.

The sad part is that we probably won’t even use the air conditioning all that much for a while. I told my husband last night, “Yeah, but I looked at the weather and it’s only going to be 90 tomorrow!” His face looked like this: :- / I’m more of an environmentalist than he is. We got through all of last summer with no air conditioning. I only turn on the air if it’s really, really HOT and 90 is not really, really HOT to me because I have sure fire strategies of keeping the house much cooler than that during the day (it helps that we have lots of trees shading our house). If the heat index gets up into the mid to high 90s, then I relent.

See, every time I turn on the air conditioning I think of all the polar bears who don’t have any ice to stand on and that’s pretty much enough of an image for me to suffer a little bit of heat. I tend to drive as little as possible too. It’s not the gas prices deterring me, (though they definitely help). I’ve always kept my driving to a minimum by avoiding unnecessary trips and planning out my errand running in the most effective way possible.

This weekend, Renaissance Festival! Yay! I love me some Ren Fest.