Courtney Milan’s Blog

Winners

January 10th, 2010

SO I just realized I forgot to pick a winner of the Completely Serious Compendium of Utterly Dire Events. In part this is because shortly after posting that post, a Dire Event happened to me–namely, my laptop got stolen–and I’ve been in panic mode ever since.

But panic has been averted, and here I am, picking a winner.

And the winner that random.org draws for the commenters is…. COURTNEY MILAN!

Uh. Oops. (Really. random.org drew me. Thanks, Random.) It turns out that winner already has a handful of copies of that book.

So, the, uh, second runner up: it’s Jeannie Lin! Congratulations, Jeannie.

For the rest of you, I am at the Eloisa James/Julia Quinn bulletin board all month, answering questions, talking about dogs, and telling you what I’m reading. Come by and say hello.

Posted in Contest, elsewhere on the web | 3 Comments »

Subtle Nightmares

January 6th, 2010

There are some obvious nightmares: dreams where you’re chased by big monsters, or dreams where you wake up and someone is standing over you with a knife, or dreams where someone threatens to kill your puppy. For me, these dreams tend to be dark in tone and texture; they happen at night, and they’re often stripped of most of their colors, pulled down to a very basic color palette. (Those who say you can’t dream in color are simply wrong. I do dream in color, and sometimes color has been material to the unwinding of my dream.) You wake up from these dreams with a pounding heart, glad to be back in reality.

Then there are subtle nightmares. They start out like a regular dream: the full color spectrum. Nobody’s chasing me. Nobody’s threatening me or my loved ones. Instead, they start out so subtly normal that I think nothing of it. For instance, in one of my recurring subtle nightmares, I could be anywhere: walking through the town where I grew up, applying for a job, checking the mail. And then something happens: Maybe someone comes up to me and hands me a notice, or maybe it arrives in the mail, or maybe someone makes a phone call at the job where I’ve applied. For whatever reason, the nightmare part starts like this: “Well, Courtney, we just noticed that you never took the Public Health segment in high school. You’ll have to go back and finish it, or we’re going to rescind all your degrees.” And then, before I know what is happening, I’m being pushed back into high school, I’m turning seventeen again, I’m back among all those people, back when people cared more about the name on the jeans pocket than they did about what you might have to say…. NOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!

I wake up, my heart pounding, glad to be back in reality where I desperately need to do laundry and I’ve still forgotten to pay that parking ticket, but by God, at least I don’t have to go back to high school. This is not very fun, as you can imagine. The subtle nightmares are in many ways more insidious, because they feel so much more real.

In any event, this is all by means of saying that in the last week or so, I’ve developed another subtle nightmare. And, yes, it will make you think I’m slightly neurotic as authors go, but hello. I should think you’d have figured that out by now. In any event, my agent, who is wonderful, has been sending me weekly sales reports gleaned from Bookscan. And those sales reports tell me how many copies of my book sold (although Bookscan is not complete, it is the only thing I have, and so I cling to it with irrational force) throughout the US. So far, the only reports I’ve gotten have been reports about the anthology–and I’ve been fairly blase about that in a sense, because it’s not one-hundred percent all the way mine. To be honest, most people bought it because it had the words “Mary Balogh” on the front, and I am totally cool with that.

But this… this one is all mine. And that makes it five hundred times scarier. In my subtle nightmare, I open my Bookscan report, and peer, frightened, at the number.

The number changes. Sometimes it is 6. Sometimes it is 7. It is never any greater than 8. And I say, “Wait. I bought every last mother-loving one of those copies!”

So yes. That’s my current neurosis. I don’t see how authors back in the day survived, not knowing if anyone at all had purchased their book for months and months and months.

I sometimes think that these subtle nightmares are my subconscious’s way of making me feel good about reality by managing expectations. Yes, I may be behind at work; but hey, at least I don’t have to go back to high school! And yes, maybe I am getting far too angsty about meaningless numbers on Amazon–but at least more than 6 people will have bought my book (I hope–I actually will not see these magic numbers until, maybe, tomorrow, so there is one more evening of absolute neurotic panic).

In any event, if you bought my book, thank you for saving me from my worst neurosis. Thank you.

Posted in authors are crazy | 10 Comments »

Mr. Milan reviews Proof by Seduction

January 5th, 2010

Courtney’s Note: This review was written by Mr. Milan. Courtney edited it only for length. We all know that Mr. Milan has no bias towards Courtney. None. Admittedly, he is married to her, but a little thing like that would never lead him to soften his reviews.

Hello again. I’m Mr. Milan, Courtney’s husband. She’s asked me to read and review her debut novel, Proof by Seduction, even though my review of her novella was less than stellar.

Maybe Courtney thinks this time I’ll succumb to the temptation to speak well of her novel for the sake of domestic peace. Maybe she hopes my tastes have changed, that a story without any swordplay, without any characters attempting to vanquish their enemies by force, without an ending that pays the price of the hero and heroine’s triumph in gallons of spilled blood, will magically earn a good review from me.

Though I love her dearly, Courtney thinks wrong. I read Proof by Seduction from cover to cover, and I thought it sucked.

Courtney’s biggest failing is that she consistently fails to focus on the most interesting parts of her own story. Before I get into my review, I want to present this tendency of hers in pictorial form. Since a picture is worth a thousand words, I thought I would provide an illustration, or in this case, two.

This is how Courtney wrapped her Christmas present to me:

Are you seeing the problem? Bows. Ribbons. Curls. Flowers. The present inside was great, sure, but what was with all that stuff on the outside? I showed her how to really wrap presents with my gift to her:

I’m sure you can all see my point here: Courtney focuses on the uninteresting parts. But let’s get back to Proof by Seduction. Courtney gives us a hero, Gareth Carhart, the Marquess of Blakely, who she tells us has lived in the jungles of Brazil. Great. She has my attention. That’s cool!

But does Courtney give us any scenes to flesh out that adventure? No. Lord Blakely must have had to defend himself from jungle predators in Brazil, right? How did he do it? Did he shoot them? What kind of gun did he use? Who manufactured it? What did the after kick feel like? How many guns did he have? I want to read about that one time when Lord Blakely and his party were surprised one night as they sat around a campfire, listening to monkeys howling in the jungle blackness, by an an enormous jaguar who managed to drag away two of Blakely’s companions (to be eaten later) before coming back for Blakely, who had just managed to load his rifle and…

But instead, all we learn about the Brazil trip is… that it taught Lord Blakely how to make his own breakfast.

Memo to Courtney: Breakfast? If you want to write a really good book, write about the exciting stuff!

Courtney’s story telling ability when it comes to her heroine is no less frustrating. Jenny Keeble is the only character smart and resourceful enough to challenge Lord Blakely (who presumably doesn’t carry rifles in London, for some odd reason), and I have to admit that their (metaphorical) dueling reminded me (metaphorically) of the light saber battles between Obi Wan Kenobi and Darth Vader, or Luke Skywalker and the Emperor, or Yoda and the Emperor. Two skilled combatants, evenly matched, kicking each other’s butt.

So how did Jenny get to be such a bad ass? We’re told she was sent to a school when she was four and abandoned by her parents, and that she was a troublemaker. She pissed off the old schoolmarm so much that years later, the old crone wants to see her get what she deserves.

Wow! Jenny must have been a real cool dude in school. Courtney, show us scenes of her being bad ass! But alas. Does Courtney give us any examples of Jenny being a rolling terror in her school girl days? How about a scene where she’s throwing spit wads at the teacher when her back was turned? Or how about the time when Jenny learned to do a karate chop and she broke this other girl’s arm, and then she whirled around and did a groin-kick to this other prissy girl, while ducking under the teacher’s arms? Where are those scenes, huh? What a missed opportunity!

Courtney could have earned a whole extra Sherman Tank from me had she written about just one of Jenny Keeble’s schoolyard fights, preferably with blood and/or breaking bones.

To sum up: Proof by Seduction has a great hero and heroine, but Courtney doesn’t write enough about why they’re great.

Bottom Line: One and a half out of five Sherman Tanks.

Posted in Mr Milan reviews, Proof by Seduction | 31 Comments »

Happy New Year!

January 1st, 2010

Hi everyone, and Happy New Year! It’s January 1st, 2010, and that means…. YES! Proof by Seduction is officially out! You can buy it anywhere fine books are sold.

One of the places where fine books are sold is over at eHarlequin.com, where they are running a special promotion, in which Madame Esmerelda is making predictions. These are the best kind of predictions for a false fortune-teller to make, of course: one where the person making the predictions controls the outcome.

But there are other places to buy Proof by Seduction: Indiebound | Amazon | B & N | Powell’s | Borders

And, as always, with any release, there will be more goodies here. For instance, later on this week, I’ll be hosting what is quickly becoming an important tradition: Mr. Milan (yes, my husband) will be posting his review of Proof by Seduction. For those of you who missed it, Mr. Milan reviewed my novella, “This Wicked Gift.” It was… interesting. (We were planning to have the post go live on January 1st, but an unfortunate incident in which his laptop was stolen seems to have prevented that).

There may be a couple of other surprises in store for today, too. You’ll just have to wait and see!

Posted in it's all about me! | 8 Comments »

Covering the cover

December 31st, 2009

So! My book is officially coming out tomorrow, and before it does so, I have a very important public service announcement.

You see, I have had very mixed reactions to the cover for Proof by Seduction. People either love it, or they are completely embarrassed by it. On the one hand, I’ve had a lot of people tell me that it is gorgeous, elegant, beautiful, sexy, and classy. And it is! See? Love that corset. On the other hand, I’ve had a handful of people e-mail me to say, “Wow, Courtney, I am interested in reading your book… but that cover! It is far too sexy for my bus ride. All the other people on my commute are going to look at that cover and then they will leer at me. Also, I can’t read it at lunch, because my mostly male colleagues will rib me over it.”

Hmph. Personally, I fail to see how a mostly-unclothed woman, lying on a divan in a provocative pose, could indicate anything except the highest of high-minded high-mindedness, and I think all those people who judge books by covers should be frowned upon. But, to be slightly serious for the only time in this entire blog post, back when I first started reading romance, I would take my books up to the cash register very carefully–sometimes even buying High Minded Looking books with sepia-toned factories belching smoke on the front to hide the clinch romance books I actually wanted to read as I walked up to the cash register. Even now, I won’t whip out truly scandalous clinch covers in front of some of my older, male colleagues–their hearts just can’t take the rise in blood pressure. So I totally understand how someone could look at this cover, imagine herself taking it out at lunch in front of a bunch of unsympathetic co-workers, and wincing.

Plus, one reader said that she teaches small children, and if she took a book like this out, they might start to get the Wrong Idea, and parents somewhere would complain. How could she possibly read my book? This was an excellent point, and it got to me to thinking about something I could do to help out with that problem, especially since there are children involved. (If you have not noticed, one of the things we take seriously here at courtneymilan.com is this: lying to small children.)

Here, for the first time, for your covering-up pleasure, is a downloadable book cover. Like all High Minded books, this is a cover done in sepia (although if your printer is black and white, it will print just fine in grayscale, and it will look appropriately bleak!). This is the book you have always wanted to carry on the subway: It declares that you are so smart that you’re reading not for pleasure or enjoyment, but for the sheer thrill of scraping your fingernails across the chalkboard of literature. It can be read without hesitation in accounting firms or in kindergartens. Feel free to whip it out during dull moments at the New York Stock Exchange.

Here’s what it looks like:

And here’s how you use it:

What you need:

One printer; one internet connection; one piece of paper; four pieces of tape (optional); and one copy of Proof by Seduction (available here: B & N | Amazon | Indiebound | Borders | Powell’s) (other books can be substituted, but really, why would you want to do that?)

Download the full graphic (warning: it’s huge at around 4 MB) here. Print it out.
Fold on the white lines along the top side and the bottom side; then fold along the white lines on the right and left sides. This should form little pockets on the right and left side of the cover.
Jimmy the right pocket over the front cover of Proof by Seduction; wrap the cover around the book, and then jimmy the left cover over the back cover of Proof by Seduction.
For those who are extra-conscious of security, four pieces of tape can be used to make sure that the book cover does not come off.

The result:

One of these books is read by smart people! The other is only read by people who are intelligent. Can you guess which one is which?

So, what do you think? Let me know–one random commenter will win a copy of A Completely Serious Compendium of Utterly Dire Events, as created using above method.

Posted in Proof by Seduction | 42 Comments »

Win my book; read their excerpts!

December 30th, 2009

So today, December 30th, Carrie Lofty, Victoria Dahl and I are having a joint contest! It goes like this.

1. I’ll be posting excerpts from Victoria Dahl’s Lead Me On and Carrie Lofty’s Scoundrel’s Kiss.

2. I will then ask a few questions about those excerpts (on this blog) and throughout the day on Twitter. One random answer will get a free copy of Proof by Seduction.

3. Carrie and Victoria will have excerpts from Proof by Seduction on their blogs, and they’ll be asking questions about my books on twitter. You can follow Carrie on Twitter here, and Victoria on Twitter here. So go read the excerpts for Proof, and you could win a copy of Lead Me On or Scoundrel’s Kiss from either of them! Carrie’s post is here; Victoria’s is here.

So, from Lead Me On:

The door opened and she expected to look up and see Mr. Jennings walking in. What she didn’t expect was the man who’d visited her dreams the night before. But she was cool Jane now, the impenetrable fraud, so she merely raised an eyebrow. “Good morning, Mr. Chase.”

“Hello, Miss Jane,” he countered.

She almost laughed at his joke, and what a disaster that would have been. If he knew she found him charming, he might ask her out again. She didn’t
allow her expression to budge. “What can I help you with?”

He held out the folder he’d tucked under his arm. “See? Safe and sound. I’m the soul of responsibility.”

“Mm-hm,” she murmured, trying to hide the way he was wreaking havoc on her concentration. His sleeve had inched up, revealing more of the tribal tattoo on his left arm. “Thank you.”

“So…” he said.

She jerked her eyes up from his arm.

“Have you thought any more about it?”

“About what?”

“Going out to dinner with me?”

“No,” she answered as if it were the honest truth. Actually, it was. Dinner hadn’t entered into her thoughts even once.

“Come on.” He smiled at her, his wide mouth curving into a very handsome grin. His dark blue eyes sparkled. “Just dinner.”

“No, thank you.”

“Why not?”

“You’re not my type.” The bald-faced lie fell smoothly from her tongue.

“You sure?” He glanced toward his arm, and Jane felt her pulse leap. Oh, my God. Had he looked at his tattoo when he said that? She felt her
face heat despite her best efforts to suppress the betraying flow of blood. He’d seen her looking. But those could have been looks of horror, she told herself. They’d meant
nothing. Nothing.

Her pulse wouldn’t listen to her. It gathered speed. Chase smiled and put one hand on her desk to lean closer. His gaze fell to her mouth, and she
could feel herself breathing too fast.

Last night as she’d boxed, she’d imagined her trainer was Chase. She’d imagined him grabbing her, his hands sliding across her damp skin, his mouth
descending with a growl…

Oh, God, her masquerade was crumbling around her. What if she let Chase–

Her cell phone rang, breaking the man-spell she’d fallen under. Jane looked down to the phone and the display was a bucket of cold water dumped over her head. “MOM,” it read, the back-light glowing red in warning. She stared at it for a moment, skin cooling as each second ticked by. “Yes,” she finally answered him, “I’m sure.”

“Sure about what?”

“I’m sure you’re not my type, Mr. Chase, but thank you very much for the invitation.”

Though his face fell, Chase didn’t look the least bit angry. In fact he pulled a business card from his back pocket and handed it over. “All right then. Call me if you change your mind. That’s my cell.”

“Thank you.” She meant to drop it in the trash. She really did. But as Chase turned and walked out, Jane tucked his card into her purse. Then she turned off her cell phone and stuck that in her purse too.

NICE. And I mean not “nice” as in, “he’s a nice guy,” but NICE, as in, “oh yeah, baby.” This is one of the things I love about Victoria Dahl–she knows how to get a slow burn going. And she also knows how to take a gallon of gas and pour it over that smolder. You can read more about Lead Me On here.

And here’s a sneak snippet from Scoundrel’s Kiss, by Carrie Lofty:

When one step separated his body from hers, Gavriel breathed the scent of lemon and skin warmed by the mineral-rich spring water. The more he breathed, the more lightheaded he became. He felt every heartbeat in triplicate: beneath his ribs, in his skull, at his groin.

Gavriel brushed his mouth along the curve of her shoulder. Ada shuddered but did not pull away. The moist heat of his breath raised goose bumps on her skin and reflected back against his face. He waited, glorying in that intimate caress, knowing he would take her if he tasted her.

“Order me to go,” he rasped.

Ada looked over her shoulder. He let his eyes fall down the line of her brow and her cheeks and her chin. “I won’t do that,” she said.

“Why not?” The need to touch her again burned like hell’s fires. “No respectable woman behaves as you do.”

“We both know I left respectable behind some time ago.”

“Then you do this as a game or as punishment.”

“You’re mistaken if you believe this involves you alone.” She spoke with less deliberation and more speed. “Perhaps I do this simply to see what I’ll do next. I hardly know who I am anymore. It makes me wonder.”

He reached out to trace the line of her shoulder blade but pulled back. “Wonder what?”

“Am I the kind of woman to seduce you outright, or will I wait for you? Either way, you’ve become a most welcome distraction.”

“Ada, don’t–”

“You think you’ve cured me because I no longer shake or cry,” she said. “But in that you’re mistaken. The need is still here. Right here.” She clenched one hand over the other and pressed it to the hollow between her breasts. “It’s like thirst or hunger or lust. A need. Can you understand that?”

He could only nod, a weak one at that. A delicious and wanton angel stood before him, his own parable of temptation. The redness of the hot spring had faded, leaving the smoothest white porcelain skin–a feast for his eyes. But he wanted more. No matter his aims or his vows, he was a man who needed more.

“I can understand,” he said thickly.

“Then help me, Gavriel. Give me something new to crave.”

Oh, Carrie Lofty. I am definitely feeling some cravings right now–a craving for a really awesome book! You can read more about Carrie Lofty’s Scoundrel’s Kiss here.

So, for the first chance to win a copy of Proof by Seduction, answer these two questions (one random commenter will win):

1. What kind of parable does Gavriel think Ada is?

2. Where does Chase have his tattoo?

Posted in Contest, Friends, book recommendations | 18 Comments »

Giveaway: Lead Me On by Victoria Dahl

December 29th, 2009

So, it’s December 29th, and a Tuesday, and that means that new books are on the shelf. Those of you who are familiar with this drill know how it goes: Almost every day is “Buy a Book Written by Courtney” day, which has been very inconvenient, as Courtney has (up until this point) only had novellas (rather than actual books) available for purchase.

Naturally, since today is Tuesday, and since the semi-official release date of my actual book is in a few days, my book is probably going to be on the shelves just about everywhere. So am I going to tell you to buy my book?

No! That would be weird. I’m going to tell you to buy Lead Me On by Victoria Dahl. It’s no surprise that I’m a huge Victoria Dahl fangirl; I think there’s something about her heroines that really just speaks to me. They’re never the sort of person to give up and let someone else solve their problems; they always dig deep and figure out how things move forward on their own. They don’t need heroes.

But they do deserve them. And I think, more than any of Victoria’s other books, Jane Morgan deserves her hero. I absolutely ached for her to have her happily ever after, and this book stretched her, forced her to really look into herself and decide that she was worthy of happiness. I just adored this book–so much so that I pushed a copy of it off on my sister who is visiting for the holidays. I don’t want to give away too much, but today is definitely a holiday: Go buy a book written by Victoria Dahl, and don’t wait to read it. Because Lead Me On is really, really fantastic.

(If you are reading this after December 29th, the link won’t work–in that it will no longer be a holiday in which you are supposed to buy a book written by Victoria Dahl. You can find out what I think about the book by clicking here instead.)

In any event, leave a comment and some lucky person will win a copy of this awesome book.

Posted in Contest, book recommendations | 41 Comments »

outtakes…

December 28th, 2009

When my agent first sent Proof by Seduction out to editors, it started with a scene between Gareth and Ned. I had played with the concept of ditching that initial scene, but had never quite figured out how to do it. On the one hand, I wanted to get rid of it because I felt as if it were like starting off playing a symphony with a variation, rather than a theme; on the other hand, getting rid of it would have ruined some of the symmetry that comes later in the book.

When HQN acquired the book, my editor had some ideas for how to tighten up the manuscript, and ultimately, that first scene disappeared. But since the book has apparently been showing up on shelves, both real and virtual, for about a week now, and as its official release date approaches, I thought it might be nice for everyone to see how it originally began…

Here you are: the original first scene of the book. Think of it this way: Gareth meets man-eating elephants, and lo, they are herbivores.

Posted in Proof by Seduction | 3 Comments »

Antidisclaimer: Books I give away

December 22nd, 2009

Here we poke, disturbingly, behind the grotty scenes of a romance author’s blog, and ask this question:

“Courtney, where do you get the books that you give away?”

Good question. Sometimes when you see a book being given away on a blog, the truth is that the source of the book is either the author or the publisher. Authors receive a number of free copies of her book–I get 48, which is enough to fill a box that if dropped at precisely the wrong angle, could break your toe. We could leave these books on our shelves to look pretty, but (a) all our shelves are already full with books written by other people; and (b) they don’t do any good sitting on our own shelves, because an author is not precisely her target market (Although, admission: I bought a shocking number of copies of my own book–which makes no economic sense at all).

Despite this, as a general rule, I buy every book I give away. (The only exception to this was Sherry Thomas’s Not Quite a Husband; of the two copies I gave away, Sherry bought one copy and I bought the other.) I do this for two reasons:

1. I want to support other authors who I think write cool books.

2. If I’m talking about a book, by implication I think it is worth spending money on. It’s a way of keeping me honest: As a romance author, the prevailing community norm is that authors don’t talk critically about other books. So how can you trust that I mean it when I say I like a book? And that’s easy: you can trust me because I’m willing to put my own money–for the book and postage–on the line.

The only books I (probably) haven’t paid for are my own–my publisher gives me free copies–and even then that’s not guaranteed, because as I mentioned earlier, in defiance of all economic rationality, I buy my own book. Often.

Disclaimer to this antidisclaimer: I am writing this post because three separate people e-mailed me and said, “Oh, you’re giving away a copy of my book! Let me give you one of my author copies!” To these very nice offers, I said, “Pfft.”

Posted in book recommendations | 4 Comments »

I’m fairly certain…

December 20th, 2009

I have the best friends ever.

Tessa Dare and a bunch of other people have teamed up to create the 12 days of Proof by Seduction. This was done entirely without my knowledge; I was holed up in an undisclosed location attempting to write while they plotted the whole thing. Apparently this will involve a song, with 12 verses (are you scared? I am scared!), and autographed giveaways from a ton of historical authors (Eloisa James, Julia Quinn, Anna Campbell, Sherry Thomas, Elizabeth Hoyt, Sara Lindsey, Julie Anne Long, Carolyn Jewel, Victoria Dahl, Jennifer Haymore, and of course Tessa Dare herself).