Countdown to Technically Dead, Day 5

Hello, everyone!

I thought, since Technically Dead is out soon (on the 20th), I'd do a little countdown for you all.

I might be mostly talking about the music of Technically Dead, but I will probably share a lot of other things too, like the faces I see when I think of the characters and things that influenced the story.

And on the day of the release, I'll also be giving away one eBook copy of the book, so you might want to keep an eye on this countdown to learn how you're eligible for the "contest", which won't really be contest at all. ^^

So let us begin.

As I said, music. Many of my stories have a song or a few I associate with them or the events, characters or places, even scenes. So far only my novels have playlists, though.

There's a post somewhere in this blog about the playlist of By Any Other Name, in case you're interested. Just follow the tags.

Technically Dead has even a longer soundtrack, an I keep adding to it occasionally. The latest two additions are Bring Me To Life by Evanescence and Shady by Adam Lambert. Here are the videos for you, I won't spoil who or what I associate the songs with, though. You can read the book and figure it out yourself! :)

I thought I'd share some of the other songs too, but these I can tell you more about... ;)
Just as By Any Other Name's "main theme" was Ghosts of Days Gone By by Alter Bridge, there's one "main them" for Technically Dead as well. This is it:

I love Three Days Grace in general, but when I had just started to write Technically Dead, it hit me that Lost in You was the perfect song for the novel.

Of course I may "see" these songs differently than most readers will, but they're still very strongly "Technically Dead's songs".

Hmm... what next? Well, the funniest thing that I can find from the "soundtrack" is this... :)

Trust me, even when I was writing the book and this song came up as an addition to the soundtrack, I aimed a "really?" at Bran. He insisted. So here it is, Teenage Dream by Katy Perry. I think, even though Bran has never said it, that it represents the naive teenager Bran was when he first met Heath.

As I was writing Bran doing everyday mundane things, like walking from one place to another or working in his office, he was whistling this song in my head a lot.

Moves Like Jagger has been my "earworm" for a long time and apparently I gave it to Bran at some point. However, it doesn't annoy him like it annoys me sometimes, go figure. Yes, writers are a bit odd like that... Nobody ever claimed we were sane... ^^

When I poked at Heath in my head and asked him if he liked contemporary music, he said that he didn't mind it, but that he rarely found any that he truly liked. When I pressed on, he managed to come up with one song that he absolutely loves, but the smile that he gave me was a bit sad, and if you listen to this, you'll know why.

That's about it for today! Because there are almost thirty songs in this list of mine, I'll share with you the Spotify-link to it. Click here to see more. If you don't have Spotify and there's interest, I'll write them all down and make a post or you can email me and ask about the songs if you want.

Tomorrow is all about places and faces, I believe... So see you!

The one where I try not to rant... much.

Lately I've been trying to stay away from Goodreads. Why? Because I seem to be getting a lot of reviews that, positive or slightly less so, miss the story's point completely. Whichever story it is, whatever kind of review it is, I find myself going "did you actually READ the book?" or "wasn't that obvious?" way, WAY too often.

One of my pet peeves is people who read my shifter book, Chuffed, and compare it to the kind of books I talked about in my blog post at Sue's blog. Or when they just don't seem to read the book carefully or slowly enough and then complain about things they missed because they really didn't see them, I guess?

For example, I've had one or two complaints about the shifters in Chuffed going to have their blood tested to be able to bareback. The complaint is that they don't go to the hospital for other reasons, but they do for this? Like it's an OUTRAGE for this to happen. My question to these readers is, where in the book does it say they can't go to a hospital/clinic to have their blood drawn? It's made very clear--if you read the book, that is--that they won't go to a hospital when they're in serious pain because that causes an involuntary shift and they need to stay hidden from the human eyes. Getting your blood drawn wouldn't cause this...?

Or maybe they think that there's something in the blood that would expose the shifters somehow? This is not even talked about in the book, but now that I'm talking about it here, no. There's not a thing in their blood that someone could see and think odd while taking a standard STD-test.

Another thing that comes to mind is about Thank My Lucky Scars, my novella about a bike messenger and a porn star who fall in love. The complaint about this story seems to be that it's ridiculous/stupid/pretentious/hypocritical/whatever that while the guys don't have sex, the porn star goes and has sex on the job.

Now, I don't understand this at all. Honestly. Let's say you're in a tentative relationship with someone who doesn't drink wine. Your job, however, is wine tasting. That's all you do all day every day, taste wines. Because your romantic interest doesn't drink wine, do you stop doing your job?

I know it's not the same, sex and wine are hardly the same (though some say both can be near religious experiences...). My point here is that IT IS A JOB. Do you stop doing your job for your lover who, by the way, understands the nature of your job completely?

Or maybe these people who complain about this aspect of the story don't understand porn? Don't approve of it? Or just find porn dirty and disgusting, unless they're watching it when it's SUPER HOT. But god damn it if those guys have a real life outside their jobs! That's just DISGUSTING!

Okay. I think I'm done ranting now. ^^

There are several other things I don't understand about some reviews or random comments I see about some of my stories, but then again, that won't prevent me from writing other things people won't approve of or understand. In some ways, writing a completely understandable book and trying to see how many people don't actually care to read it carefully enough is... fun. In some masoctistic way, at least.

Another pet peeve? When people round down their .5 ratings on Goodreads. That's just mean, really. But that's a whole other rant for some other time.

(PS. There will be a contest at some point soon, you can win a paperback of Technically Dead and whatnot... Keep your eye on this blog and my Facebook and Twitter too. Just remember I'm usually not that SFW with my Twitter links... ;))

A book you might like

Hello, everyone!

I know it's still a while until Technically Dead is out (two weeks, to be exact), so I thought I'd give you guys another recommendation meanwhile. :)

A friend of mine, a fellow author Anna Martin has her book Tattoos & Teacups out today! It's such a lovely book, that despite reading it twice already (I was one of her betas for this), I just bought it and am reading it right now!

If you like my stories, I'm pretty sure you'll like this one too. :)

So go ahead and check T&T out here: http://www.dreamspinnerpress.com/store/product_info.php?products_id=3080

Oh, and isn't the cover gorgeous? :)

Coming Soon: Technically Dead!

Technically Dead is now on Dreamspinner's Coming Soon-page. The release date is July 20th, and I couldn't be happier with the cover. I think it's stunning!

I hope you'll like the book as much as I do!

I'm at Sue Brown's blog

...as usual, rambling. This time it's about the shifter genre in M/M romance.

Click here to read the post.

YAM LGBT Blogathon -- The awesomeness of QaF

Since I'm all for abbreviations and this post is for the YAM GLBT Blogathon, I thought I'd write about QaF. That, to those who don't know, is Queer as Folk. 

Now, Queer as Folk was a huge thing back in the day when it was originally on TV. The original, British version only ran for one season and one TV-movie, but it laid a foundation for the American version that became huge. What the shows had in common was the frank sexuality and showing the urban gay lifestyle in a way no one had seen before, not on TV. 

The American version of Queer as Folk ran from 2000 to 2005 for five glorious seasons. Whereas the UK version had the main characters more archetypes than actual characters you could take seriously, the US show managed to pull off much more than that. In QaF US, we see some serious arches and character development. In fact the growth the writers managed to pack into five seasons is staggering, if you compare it to some other drama shows out there.

Now, as many of you may know, QaF US was the first show on American TV to portray a simulated explicit sex scene between two male characters. And what a scene it was…. Not only do we see a scene between two men, we see a scene where someone loses his virginity. We see—even though we really don't see it—anal sex, rimming, even. When was the last time you saw either of those things on TV? Yeah, it's still not something you see in a regular drama show, yet this show did it twelve years ago.

I have to say I didn't see the show before a couple of years ago. I do, however, remember being in my early twenties when it was shown here in Finland, and I was so bummed the channel it was on was out of my reach at the time. Back then, I was a young, out and proud, so even though we didn't get The L Word until 2004, there was a LGBT show there already. In some ways, The L Word did to lesbians what Queer as Folk did to gay men.

What struck me first, when I started to watch QaF myself, was the frank portrayal of sex. I was shocked. Not because I'm easily surprised or don't approve of showing sex on TV, but because it was a ten-years-old show I was watching. Naturally, I enjoyed those bits, as do most of the people watching it, but soon I began to realize the other awesome things.

First of all, we get to see gay life. That's something refreshing in itself, but huge for us LGBTQ-people who get to see the straight lifestyle portrayed in every show we see. Many straight people never understand what we go through in our daily lives, let alone in general, just because we were born different.

The topics QaF covered went from the relatively ordinary things—like coming out, the club culture, safe sex, gay adoption, internet porn (also as an industry) and discrimination—to the things many people never even think of—like conversion therapy, underage prostitution and violence.

Secondly, the cast was well-thought, and the dialogue was spot on. What I also love are the contrasts it show. From the friendship between Brian and Michael, to the relationships Justin had with Brian and Ethan, to the lesbian couple's struggles compared to those the gay couples had. Even the two main mother-figures of the show—Debbie who was not only Michael's mother, but pretty much the only supportive mother Brian ever had, and Justin's mother Jennifer—were two very different women. At first they were different from each other, then later different from the other mothers (Brian and Lindsay's mothers, for example).

The subplots in the series are various and varied, and they are always meaningful or, at least, funny. The humor in the show is one of the major things that make it work so well. While the themes are often really heavy and heartbreaking, the humorous events and the witty dialogue make things easier to bear. Anyone who has seen the show remembers the hilarity when Debbie started dating and Emmett and Ted gave her certain tips…. But we also remember the end of season 1 and the subsequent horribleness….

If you've never seen the show and plan on beginning, please make sure you have a couple of episodes of season 2 also. When you get to the end of S01, you'll thank me. Trust me on this.

Queer as Folk has something for everyone. If you want the hot gay sex, you have it. If you're looking for serious themes, yep, they're there. Looking for fun? I can quarantee you'll laugh your butt off.

One of the best things Queer as Folk US gave us is Brian Kinney. Why? Watch the show and find out.

Finnshifters - Chuffed and part 2

Hello again!

I've gotten a few questions about when the next part of Finnshifters will be out, since you guys seem to be loving the universe that starts with Chuffed. :)

Part two, tentatively called Moving On, has "September" as the release "date". This is based on my contract, and in my experience, the tentative dates in my contracts are pretty solid. So, Finnshifters 2 will probably be out in September. A few months! Not that bad, right?

And because I get asked a lot... yes, the next part will be Noah's book. ;)