Helloooooo!
We’re already having a great time here at Marcon. We’ve taken a sweep through the Dealer’s floor and there is some interesting merchandise. 
I’ll be sitting on one late night panel tonight and running my very own Ladies’ Choice: A guide to Hentai. Stop by and say Hi.
| MarCon Apr 6-8 |
| FRI 10:00pm Paranormal Romance FRI 11:30pm Ladies’ Choice: A Girl’s Guide to Hentai SAT 07:00pm Autograph Session SAT 08:30pm Steampunk Lives in Literature |
1 cup quinoa
1 Tbsp olive oil
5-6 cups clean, rough chopped kale
3 spring onions, finely chopped
3 eggs
16 0z tub of nonfat cottage cheese
sea salt
black pepper
optional herbs
In a medium saucepan, combine 2 cups water (or broth) with the 1 cup quinoa and bring to a boil. Reduce heat to medium low and cover, allowing to simmer until cooked and all the liquid is absorbed, about 15 minutes.
Preheat oven to 375 F. Grease a 9×13 glass baking dish.
In a large pan or wok (I used a wok), drizzle olive oil and allow to heat gently over high heat. Once hot, sprinkle with sea salt. Add kale. The pan should hiss and spit. Sautee kale until brilliant green. Add spring onions. Continue to sautee for almost a minute. Remove from heat.
In a large bowl, stir quinoa and eggs until thoroughly combined. Stir in cottage cheese. Add kale and onion mixture. Salt and pepper to taste.
Transfer mixture to greased 9×13 baking dish, smoothing out the top evenly. Bake at 375F for 20 to 25 minutes until edges are golden brown.
Allow to cool and set about 20 minutes before serving.
I’ve got back to back cons in the coming weeks. My bags are packed and I’m ready to go…
…and I’m sure there’s a lot of us ready to have fun, meet new people and learn new things. Since a lot of people have asked me about attending cons, I figured it couldn’t hurt to gather a few of my tips in a post.
PJs Tips for Attending Cons as an Author:
Speaking of which, here’s my con schedule for MarCon in one week and Romantic Times Booklover’s Convention the following.
| MarCon Apr 6-8 | RT Apr 11-15 |
| FRI 10:00pm Paranormal Romance FRI 11:30pm Ladies’ Choice: A Girl’s Guide to Hentai SAT 08:30pm Steampunk Lives in Literature |
THU 4:00pm eBook EXPO FRI 10:00am Plotters, Pantsers, Plotsers FRI 02:45pm Reader Event: Books, Bods and Brews SAT 11:00am Giant BOOK FAIR SAT 08:00pm Cocktails with Carina Press |
I also want to give a special shout out to Mallory Braus, freelance editor for Carina Pres. She’ll be running a special game at RT this year for aspiring and published authors called Editor Hide and Seek.
On Thursday and Friday, Apr 12-13, look for her all around the RT convention area. She’ll be wearing a bright blue feather in her hair. If you find her, you have the chance to pitch to her and also win fun Carina Press swag!
To help you all find her, she’ll be tweeting using the #editorhideandseek hash tag with hints as to her location at various times throughout the two days. How fun is that?
Mallory will also be posting info about Editor Hide and Seek here on the game’s FB page here:
I’ve been tagged by Kelly Metz and figured, why not? It’s been a while since I played a meme.
(And a shout out to her, because I got started on a beta read of one of her WIPs and loved it! I only wish I hadn’t had so much life drop on my head over the last 6 months so I could have finished the beta for her.)
The rules:
Go to page 77 of your current WiP.
Go to line 7.
Copy down the next 7 lines/sentences, and post them as they’re written. No cheating.
Tag 7 other sadists, I mean writers.
Here’s the lines from Fighting Kat, book 2 of the Triton Experiment series:
Normally Kaitlyn worked solo and she liked it that way. Alone, she had the freedom the shift to panther form if needed, based on the terrain and the nature of any adversaries she encountered. For this mission, her panther aspect wouldn’t be an option. Even without Dev’s warning, she wouldn’t risk it with so many soldiers nearby.
Studying Max, she got the distinct impression he was waiting for her answer too. Head skewed to the side, the dog let the tip of his tongue show and the end of his tail brushed the corridor floor once.
Cocky pooch.
“Fine.” She spoke directly to the dog, since she hadn’t decided if she more than tolerated the handler.
And now to Tag (though I’ve no idea if they’ll play):
Meet Kx-8775, mostly known as Max. He’s a new secondary character for book two of the Triton Experiment series, designed after the concept of K9s and military service dogs.
He’s based off of one of my dogs, Kaiser. In fact, Kaiser has inspired several stories and some of them are by other authors. Both D Renee Bagby and Stephanie Burke have been inspired after spending time around him.
German Shepherd Dogs are intelligent, strong willed and loyal. Kaiser, in particular, is responsive, sensitive and very driven to “work.” Because of his very strong prey drive, he requires careful supervision around smaller animals, even other dogs. His nurturing side comes out with small humans, though, and he’s often trying to play with children. He’s a little rough and clumsy, but you can see his mind working, learning what the limits are for each particular child.
Intelligent also translates to sneaky. He can unlock doors, climb 6 ft fences, open refrigerators and generally get into stuff. He’s like a velociraptor. The minute I come home, he’s back on good behavior, but he’s definitely got a mind of his own.
With dogs like Kaiser, you don’t command him. You convince him early on that he wants to listen to you. And once you have his loyalty, it’s yours forever.
One of the aspects I like to have fun with in the Triton Experiment series is introducing animals and touching on how they’ve adapted or been adapted for a society with space travel. Max is special because he not only has the particular traits of his breed but he also has genetic tinkering, a commonality with Kaitlyn. Unlike most animals, he also gets to contribute to the decisions about his future. His choice over rules everyone else’s, regardless of rank or position.
Dev will have his hands full with a big black and tan dog on board and a crew member who turns into a black panther. And of course, there’s Chester too. By the time we get to the end of the story, the ship’s captain may lose his calm. We shall see.
Got sick last week. It’s the high fever, congested, lose my voice kind of sick. My boyfriend tucked me into bed and fed me soup all weekend. Michael told me not to try to work out because I’d only make it worse. I tried to do a tiny bit of yoga, but some days I was too weak to make it through even that.
Results? I’ve gained 1.4 pounds (0.3% body fat) since last week
I’ve lost ground. I can’t throw myself too hard into winning it back this week because I’ve got to take it easy or risk a relapse. It’s super frustrating. Still, I’m not gong to suffer inertia. I’ll climb back up to where I was and go even farther. 
Personal Trainer and Ifbb Pro Michael Stuart, photo by Luis Rafael
Quote from Michael:
If you’re sick don’t workout, you will make it worse!
Interested in training with Michael Stuart?
Find him on Facebook or Twitter (@MaxfitTraining1) and tell him I sent you, he’ll hook you up with a great training packa
Confession: many people have told me to read my writing out loud as a self-editing exercise. I never did it.
I’ve read an awkward line or two as I struggled for better wording. But I’ve never read one of my works out loud from start to finish.
Last week, I read my new steampunk short to record audio for the podcast version of the story. (It’ll go live sometime in April, I believe.) during the course of the reading, I found several typos, an orphan word or two left behind in the flurry of track changes, and I realized the hero’s name changed in Scene 3. None of us noticed, not me or the editors! A beta reader had noticed and I’d thought I’d gone through and made the changes but apparently had missed Scene 3. Whoops.
If it hadn’t been for the need to read the story out loud to record audio, I’d never have found those mistakes. And the name swap was a big one. Lesson learned and I’ll think about reading my work out loud in the future, a scene at a time.
Recording for audio gave me no small amount of anxiety. To me, I sound like a chipmunk. Since this steampunk short draws heavily on Thai mythology and in fact, is set in Thailand, I figured I sounded like a Thai chipmunk.
To prepare, I listened to the podcasts of the Tales from the Archives Volume One. The podcast productions are quite well done and I wanted to provide audio to match their sound quality. But I’ve never done podcasts before and didn’t have the equipment. On Tee’s advice, I kept it simple and clean.
Software: Audacity
Free. (Important!) Cross- platform (meaning it can be for PC, Mac, Linux, etc.)
Simple to use with the ability to record, cut, copy, and splice sound tracks.
Using Audacity for software, I recorded my voice using the mic on my SteelSeries Siberia V2 headset. I could have used the built-in mic on my laptop, but the level of ambient noise would’ve been much higher and I wanted to give Tee and Pip the cleanest audio I could manage. The mic on the headset captured my voice much better. Additionally, I sat in my closet during the reading for additional sound buffer from ambient noises around my apartment or coming from neighboring apartments.
Finally, I split my files by scene. The shorter the reading, the fewer mistakes in each. Also, splitting by scene kept file sizes manageable.
My final, high quality mp3 files ranged between 11 Mb and 30 Mb depending on length of scene. Some of these exceeded the maximum file size limit on Gmail, so it was a good thing we were transferring files via Dropbox.
Hopefully, these will be the foundation for my podcast reading of “A Swan in Siam” as a part of Tales from the Archives Volume Two, to be released sometime around April.
