From Kayden McLeod, author of the Sara's Story trilogy, Jezebel's Article, and Deadly Fetishes:

Robin Wolfe’s Ink Me is an erotically satisfying tale, hooking your definite interest from page one. The unexpected twists and turns for a tattoo artist and his model leave you guessing, never sure what will happen next. Even through some awkward moments, she seeks to shed propriety in an effort to just let go... Don’t we all seek to be free in one way or another? If you want perfectly wicked sex scenes, complex characters and a story that will so easily allow placing yourself in Marie’s shoes, to experience every unsure and confident moment alike; this is it. Ink Me is a for-sure read for anyone who has ever fantasized about that one unattainable guy, who suddenly… just falls into your lap. Or you into his.

If I had three thumbs, they'd all be up right now.

1. I'm guest-blogging today on Ginger Simpson's blog. Feel free to come check it out. :)

2. Also, I've now got a mailing list set up. Go here to sign up if you want to be kept up-to-date on upcoming releases!

3. Aaaaaaaaaaaaaand... the finalized cover for Ink Me!

Tonight at work I was doodling on my notepad while talking on the phone, not really paying attention to what I was doing. And then I realized I was writing the name of my male lead from the Tonga story, Jerome Kaui, with little hearts around his name. It was so sixth grade.

I am looking at an almost-finished copy of Ink Me. Everything save for the cover is here; the copyright page, the title page, the acknowledgments and dedication, and ads for other books at the back are all here. With the exception of the blank page where the cover will be, I'm looking at how my electronic-format book will really look.

This is the final stage, where I reread this copy and note any spelling or formatting errors that may have slipped past myself, my editor, and the copyeditor, and then those are fixed prior to creating the finalized copy that will be sold starting Dec 7.

Holy crap. This is where it all begins. My first money-earning commercial publication. This is where it all begins.

There's a local dance night that I often attend on a weekly basis, and one of the club denizens is a man referred to as "Michael Jackson". Nobody knows his real name. He's a quiet fellow with a shuffling step, who dresses like Michael Jackson and periodically gets banned from the club for being strange. Last week a couple people and I were watching a weird encounter between Michael and another person, and one of my friends leaned over and said, "There's slash fiction waiting to be written, right there." While it didn't end up being slash fiction, it did indeed end up getting written. So, I present to you the first installment of Michael's Saga.

--

Michael regarded the empty chair opposite him. It was scarred and dingy, like so much else in this dark little club. But he didn’t care. She’d sat there, and that was all that mattered.

He didn’t know her name. He’d spent weeks working up the courage to ask. Every Monday evening, as he’d peered into his bathroom mirror to check that his hat was at exactly the right angle, he’d told himself, "Tonight. I’ll ask her tonight."

But each week went by, and he didn’t ask. He’d watch her sitting by herself at the little two-seater table, her long pale fingers clasping a plastic cup. She drank rye and Coke. He knew this because he’d asked the bartender. Of course, that was assuming the bartender was being honest; Michael knew from long experience that many people lied to him.

Finally there had come a week when Michael felt… different. Stronger, smarter, more interesting than usual. This happened sometimes, and he knew he should take advantage of it. Strike while the iron was hot, wasn’t that the phrase? "Tonight," he told himself. He told himself that all day, and when he got to the club, she wasn’t there. That wasn’t unusual; he was often there before anyone else arrived. So he began to dance, keeping an eye on her table.

Sometime around midnight she came in, wearing a sleek black dress, her hair pulled back in a bun. Michael watched as she went to the bar and ordered her drink, then headed for her usual seat. After a few minutes to let her settle in, he stopped dancing and walked over to her, just like that. Why had he found it so hard before? It didn’t matter. The important thing was that he was doing it now.

He stood beside her table and she looked up at him, the beginnings of wariness on her face. Michael smiled at her and started to tell her his name and ask her her name, just as he’d practiced so many times in his mirror at home, suave and confident. But when he opened his lips, no words came out. "Oh no," he thought, and then the panic hit.

A series of shrieky high-pitched giggles exited his mouth, uncontrollable and irrepressible. And now, oh God, his hands got in on the act; they began to swoop and flap in front of him like drunken birds.

She stood up so fast her chair fell over. As she backed away, her drink forgotten on the table, he saw The Look on her face. He’d seen The Look on so many people’s faces over his lifetime: that agonizing mixture of confusion, fascination, and a heavy dose of unthinking primal fear.

Michael was still laughing as she fled. He watched her go, his chest tight, hating himself even as the giggles continued to pour from his lips.

Of course she never came back to the club after that; he’d scared her away for good. Still, he carried a written apology in his wallet, in case he ever saw her again. And he sat at her table week after week, looking at her empty chair, drinking rye and Coke.

And here he was, four months later, when a hand landed on the back of her chair. Michael knew instantly that it was not her hand; the skin was weathered, the knuckles rawboned, the width much wider than her delicate frame. His gaze followed the arm up to a face. There was a man standing there, lanky and wispy-haired, dressed in sun-bleached jeans and a button-down shirt. The man nodded at the chair. Michael shrugged. The man sat down, his fingers gripping the neck of a beer bottle. Michael reflected that the man was not so unlike her, really.

They drank in silence, staring into their drinks, their eyes occasionally meeting. Michael knew that he should say something. Maybe he could tell this man his name. Maybe he and this man could be... friends.

Or maybe not. Michael knew better than to assume anything could be that easy. And he didn’t know if he could bear to see The Look on yet another person’s face. Maybe it was time to settle for less, and accept that this quiet companionship was the best he could hope for.

And so the two men sipped, and stared, and remained silent.

I was looking through the archives of A Softer World and came across two comics that spoke to me, in terms of making me think of the stuff I write.

This one makes me think of, well, most of the things I write. ;)



And right now I'm working on fleshing out Julian's back story in TSOD, and when I came across this comic I had to smile. Part of his story is that the first thing he ever killed was a suffering animal.

The manuscript for Ink Me is completely finished and now I'm just waiting for cover art.

I finished a new short story (well, my definition of short, ha), which feels very promising to me. It could be the beginning of something big. :)

And now: I have had scenes percolating in my subconscious for TSOD. It's time to let Anna and Julian really come to life and tell their story as it deserves to be told. I tried to water it down to make it acceptable to mainstream erotica publishers, but I'm done with that. pink_siamese is right - it's literary. If that means it's a small-audience thing, so be it. It doesn't deserve to be dumbed down in an attempt to make it acceptable for mass consumption.

So, now to write. I've missed them, and it will be a pleasure to get to know them both a hell of a lot better. :D

The second-round edits are finished, so now the manuscript goes to the proofreader. The time for making major changes has now passed; in a couple weeks I'll get back the "errata", which is basically a list of anything that the proofreader caught and how the sentences will look changed. I approve that, and then it's time to work with the cover artist! I'm so excited about getting to see the first draft of the cover. :)

I just sent back my approval for my editor's first-round edits of Ink Me. It's so exciting! :D

I...

I just sold my first ebook.

I JUST SOLD MY FIRST EBOOK.

OMFG.

I JUST SOLD MY FIRST EBOOK.

Hooooooooooooooly shit, I'm a Real Writer(tm).

So all y'all are gonna buy a copy of my ebook when it gets published, right?

The ebook publisher that I submitted my story to yesterday got back to me this morning, saying that they're currently reviewing short works and will be getting back to me shortly. Man, is it ever refreshing to get a prompt response from someone, even if that's just to tell me the real response will be forthcoming soon! :) Keep your fingers crossed, I do like the look of this company.

My story, One Dance, is up on Clean Sheets! I'm not all that thrilled that they changed all my italics to quotes, since it makes some of it look awkward, but such is life.

Also, Ink Me has now been submitted to an ebook publisher. Keep your fingers crossed!

I got my first writing-related rejection letter. I can't say I'm surprised; TSOD is dark as fuck and as pink_siamese put it (this is a paraphrase since I'm sleepy), "No matter how spicy Harlequin thinks they've gotten with their 'Spice' imprint, they're not anywhere near your level."

Now, the letter in its entirety (it was sent to my agent, hence why I'm referred to in the third person):
Thank you for sending me The Shadows of Dusk to consider for our Spice program.

It is easy to see that Robin is a very talented writer. However, after reading the chapters you sent, TSOD just isn’t for me and, after reading the full synopsis, I admit to being a bit put off by the violence that takes place in the rest of the book [cut for spoilers]. Spice books definitely do not need to be all sweetness and light, that’s for certain, but Anna came across as too hollow a protagonist for me to have any sympathy for her, and the ending seemed overwhelmingly bleak. I’m sorry to say TSOD just struck the wrong chord with me.

Thanks again for thinking of Spice for this submission. I’ll look forward to seeing more from you in the future.

I expected to be disappointed when I got a rejection letter, but I also pretty much expected Spice to reject it (if they'd accepted it my jaw would have dropped so fast it would likely have become permanently unhinged), so I'm neither surprised nor particularly disappointed. And I do appreciate the feedback, since a lot of editors don't bother writing feedback (they've had writers get nasty about it one too many times). I sent my agent a thank-you letter to forward to the editor. I'll have to give more thought to the Anna-hollow thing and possibly write some revisions. The ending, however, can't really be any other way than what it is; some people just bring out the worst in each other, and Julian is definitely one of those people for Anna. I quipped awhile back that TSOD is basically for the kind of people who think movies like Natural Born Killers are romances, and it's really quite true.

And now: onwards! I've got a print publisher in mind that will possibly be a better fit, and a couple ebook publishers as well. :)

I just approved the galley tonight and it was thrilling to see it on the site. It should be live tomorrow, Feb 11. If you go to tomorrow and scroll down to the poems, mine should be there! <3

ETA: Here it is!

Since it should be here, let it be said: I got an acceptance back from Cleansheets! They want to print one of my poems. :D Now no matter how many rejection letters I receive (and I will no doubt receive many, since that's part of being a writer), I will still always have the satisfaction of knowing that the very first time I submitted something, it was accepted. <3 As pink_siamese said, "You're a professional writer now!"

It feels good. <3

And in other feeling-good news, I've been stalled on Good Girl for awhile but last night I managed to get a paragraph that had been stumping me, and tonight I wrote several more pages. The block seems to have broken. It feels lovely to be working on that story again. :)

I also finished a new short story. It's a RPF ("Real Person Fanfic") about a particularly intense crush of mine, Ronnie Boy. I wrote it for two reasons: 1) to make other Ronnie fangirls happy, and 2) just to see if I could pull it off. I watched as many candid/informal videos of him as I could find to try to analyze his personality and speech patterns as well as possible. I'll never know how close I came to his actual character (there's just not enough source material and I don't know anyone who knows him well in person) but I'm satisfied with how it turned out nonetheless. I'm giving it a couple days to settle and then I'll give it an edit and toss it up here.

So I've decided to start putting myself out there. Time to submit, bitches.

Just now I sent three poems to Clean Sheets. I felt an actual physical chill after hitting "Send", but seriously (siriuzly), if I can't even deal with submitting some poems to an online magazine, how am I going to deal with the terror of my agent sending my novels out to the few publishers who handle my style of erotica? (Note that I specify "few" because, unlike a generic crime novel or something, there are only a small handful of imprints who handle the kind of stuff I write. That means each one is far more important since there's less chances to be accepted than if you can just blitz a bunch of imprints.) Estimated time to hear back: 4-6 weeks.

And tomorrow or the next day (I'm just having my agent give a quick scan to my planned cover letter), I'll be submitting Ink Me (which is the first chapter of Arkham Dreams*, rewritten so it's a stand-alone) to an ebook publisher. (Estimated time to hear back: Unknown, as they don't give an estimated turnaround time on their submission guidelines page.)

Submitting an ebook to a large publishing house is far scarier than submitting poetry to Clean Sheets, but these things must be done. I'm never going to get published if I don't start putting my work out there. Besides, there's an empty space on my bedroom wall that I'd planned to wallpaper with rejection notices. I may as well get started.

AIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE. When I see a response sitting in my inbox from Clean Sheets or the publishing house, I'll probably have to call either pink_siamese or abigor before I'll get the courage to actually open it.

* Arkham Dreams was previously known as "the yet-unnamed tattoo fic".

Name: An Eternity With You
Word Count: 767
Warnings: Contains forced sex and abuse
Author's notes: I was challenged to write a story about autorenewing hymens of paradise. It didn't turn out quite like I'd expected. ;)

( Click. NSFW text. )

1. The agent has been giving me her Dancing Monkey Lists for TSOD. Progress is slowly being made. We're trying to decide whether to go through the whole thing prior to submitting to publishers (probably another 6 months) or have her do a read-through to identify any serious issues, take care of those, then submit the first three chapters to publishers and hope that if they accept the first 3, they'll be okay with some minor stylistic imperfections in the rest of it.

2. I'm sitting on Starfucker for a bit prior to starting revisions. There's no hurry anyway, since obviously we're going to be dealing with TSOD for a good long while...

3. I finished a story last night that originally started as a short story... it ended up as a novella (~36,500 words). Gah. I'm just happy to have completed it. It still doesn't have a name, it's just been referred to as "the yet-unnamed tattoo fic" for the entirety of my working on it.

And because it made me laugh, from wondermark:

So I came across Literotica's "volunteer editor" program, and one of the editor descriptions caught my attention immediately; it was from someone who was into the interplay between sex and violence. "Damn," I thought, "he'd be perfect for Good Girl." (Good Girl's never been posted publicly; it's a short story about two men taking advantage of a very sheltered eighteen-year-old girl, raping her and obtaining post-facto consent through psychological manipulation. It's quite dark.) So I contacted him and he was interested so I sent him GG. He wrote back with some fantastic advice and I started rewriting it with his suggestions in mind.

I was quite content with it being a short story, but as I rewrote it I began to see where it could go, and so I've been continuing it. I've got no expectations on length or anything like that - with two novels currently in various stages of production (TSOD's been sent off to my agent for her review; Starfucker is about 75% of the way to a completed first draft), I don't feel the pressure to push GG at all. If it wraps up naturally at 20,000 words or whatever, that's fine by me. Word count doesn't matter to me on this one.

I must say I'm very pleased with how it's going. I've written other things that involved violence but I'd say this is the first one that's becoming actively sadistic, in both a physical and psychological sense. It's uncomfortable to write because I'm able to see that the techniques Damien uses clearly cross over into psychological abuse, but at the same time... it's really fucking hot. It's the kind of story where some of the audience will stop reading because it's too disturbing, and the other part of the audience will be getting off on it in that shameful brutal deep-down-darkness way. The kind of way where you feel like maybe you shouldn't be getting off on it, you know it's wrong and it would be horrible in real life, but you can't help it - this primal part of you responds and says, "Oh, fuck yes," and it makes you feel a little dirty and bad just for enjoying it in fiction.

I really like where GG is going so far, and the scene I just wrote makes me a very happy writer indeed.

I've been working on a new novel. pink_siamese referred to it as a "starfucker story" and that was the working title that stuck, LOL. I have hope for this one because it fits much more neatly into a relationship/drama box than TSOD, which was definitely more cross-genre.

I'm about 50k words in, so I'm bit beyond halfway to where I'd like to be in terms of word count. I'm enjoying the story thus far though and there's been a couple really rawr scenes, although I don't think the sex is as hardcore as in TSOD - not to say it's any less kinky (in fact, I'd say it's more kinky) but it just feels less hard to me for some reason. That's probably a good thing too. ;)