the league of reluctant adults

Rather than give a full update about the AAD con, I'm just going to focus on a few of the more interesting shenanigans. (And with so many Leaguers out and about, you know there are some good ones...though I'll only mention the ones I was involved with, including eating a place that served...Clover Weenies. Pure Beef Pleasure, yo. And yes, that *does* say that "select members of our staff are available for private parties" under there. Feel free to use your sordid imagination any way you like. ) 1) Cupcakes - League friend @Zombie_Joe was awesome enough to show up with some home-made themed cupcakes. Mark Henry and Jaye Wells each got a set...as did I - specifically known as the HornyCorn. (Made with corn and pig candy, no less...pretty much a perfect combination, all the way around. And yes. Horns.) 2) Red Dress Race. Nothing to do with AAD at all, but there is still something surreal to see thousands of people drunkenly staggering around ...

Alas, I wish I was. But even so, I had my son's 9th birthday party to celebrate today...and you know that laser tag and pizza with a bunch of little boys is *almost* as good as hanging out with all the brilliant stars and cosplayers in SDCC, right? Anyway, short post today simply because I have a lot of company in town and things ran away from me time-wise. (Plus I had the added bonus of taking Tumbleweed to the vet yesterday -> bonus pictures here , if you're interested in seeing what  hedgehog looks like after she's been gassed so she can be examined. I live a charmed life, clearly.) Next month I'll have a primo post - simply because it's right after AAD in NoLA, so lots of good things coming then! (And right now, it's all about finding some great swag to give away!) :)

In my last post, I indicated that the Trace of Moonlight cover that was out wasn't final, but yay, this one is! (Out October 30,2012, even.) And on top of that I just got my cover flats for it, and I'll be giving one away at some point this week - all you have to do is head over to my writing prompt blog post and give me 500 words or less based on the picture and then I'll randomly draw and mail off a signed copy of the flat. :) Here's a photo of the cover flats - aren't they pretty? (Super shiny and gold foil letters, even.) Anyway, for some reason, my day to post here at the League tends to fall on the same day I post over at Word Whores, so there's a bit of an overlap. Today on Word Whores, I'm talking about odd jobs and I'm specifically getting into the story of how I was taloned by a red-tailed hawk during a wildlife veterinary internship. (Which sounds more exciting than it was, I think.) But one of the jobs I didn't mention...

First off, I'd like to apologize about last month's blog post. I was so deep into revisions for A Trace of Moonlight that I completely forgot. (A few days later, I was like "Wasn't I supposed to...crap.") The good news is that revisions for ToM are finally done and I'm just waiting for copy edits now. And playing catch-up with everything else. Speaking of ToM - there is a cover for it floating around on Amazon and elsewhere on the web - please note that cover was leaked and is not final. It's a pretty low quality image and as far as I know, my publisher is still working on a few of the changes I requested. When the official cover comes out, it will be up on my website ASAP.  :) Otherwise, things are in a sort of lazy medium. I've started a few new projects, but I've given myself a couple of weeks to give my brain a bit of a rest. Which means that days like yesterday's Mother's Day was spent doing nothing but putting Lego Avenger kits ...

I'm sort of in the middle of promo-release day-blog-tour-o-rama fun, so I'm actually out of things to really talk about. (Which happens when you're guest posting everywhere. Sooner or later you run out of vaguely professional things to say and before you know it you're blogging about what color underwear your characters have on and if they like to butter their corn or any other crazy little detail. And before people ask...yes, Abby wears Hello Kitty undies. Talivar and Ion? Not so much.) Anyway, things are humming along as per usual, but I did want to make mention that Sad Sausage Dogs is now officially up and running. My first comic, Fox & Willow should be going live in the next month or so. As an aside, I get a lot of questions on how I hooked up with my artist. ( Aimo ). In a vaguely appropriate twist given some of the literary news this week, I can honestly say it was fanfic. Now, I'm not going to get on my soapbox about fanfic in general in this po...

Not that I have anything against Valentine's Day. It is what it is and if you enjoy it, great! And if you don't, great! (See, easy to please here.) Besides, by the time you read this I'll probably be in recovery from getting a portion of the nerves on the left side of my spine burned out. (Don't worry - it's out patient. And hopefully painless. After all, if the nerves aren't firing, what's to hurt, right? Maybe. It's been a long time coming and a last ditch effort to try to get me some relief from years of chronic pain. And hey, if I'm lucky and it works..I'll be able to go back a few weeks later and get the rest of them fried. ) Still - doesn't exactly put me in the mood for romantic blogs posts, so I'm just going to skip all that and plug my upcoming release, A Sliver of Shadow! Which comes out February 28th! And continues the story of Abby, Brystion and a certain perverted unicorn by name of Phineas.  (And a slew of new char...

Kelly Meding has hairy armpits. (Let that sink in a moment.) Do I know this because I hide out in her shower? No. I know this because while going through my website stats the other day, that particular phrase came up as a pointer to my blog. And as much as I might love to blackmail Kelly with some super hairy armpit pictures, the truth of it is that I've got her name on my sidebar (as I do all the Leaguers)...and I tend to post scantily clad men about once a week. So somehow the browsers are putting those two things together and churning up my blog as the answer to their Urban Fantasy author hairy armpit utopia. Now, note that I've never actually mentioned armpits on my site (until very recently when I noticed this interesting trend), but over the last few months I've seen an increased number of visits to my site - all based on hairy armpits. Which is sorta scary in its own right, but I began to dig a little deeper and I have to admit to being a *little* bit...

I tend to fangirl myself pretty hard sometimes - this year I actually had a set of Christmas cards made up with my characters from A Brush of Darkness. You can buy a set if you're so inclined...if not, I'm giving some away, along with a bunch of swag - including signed cover flats and bookmarks, trading cards and a stuffed hedgehog. Yes, a hedgehog. Why? Because I own one. And they are awesome. And prickly. And awesome. However, I can't give away Tumbleweed, so a stuffed hedgehog it will have to be. To enter for this fabulous little prize package, you will have to write hedgehog haiku, over at my official author site . (You can go there now, but I won't open for comments until the 16th. However, there are pictures of the swag...and a hedgehog in a sleigh, and that's worth a look-see, right?) And this is all part of the  Mistletoe Madness Blog Hop, which includes a grand prize of a Nook, complete with a lovely bunch of pre-loaded books. (Includi...

One of the interesting things about being published is that your words aren't always your own. Or your time, really. Before I had a contract I could write whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted. Silly stories, or smutty bits of fanfic, huge posts in online role-playing games - the writing was "just for fun." Except when I got serious and started pushing toward what I needed to do for publication. And the thing is, I got my contract very quickly. A Brush of Darkness was my first real attempt at getting published (though I hadn't really meant it to be - it was supposed to be my "learner" book. Fate is odd that way, I suppose.) But one of the trade-offs to that is that I don't have a trunk full of additional manuscripts I can pull from. I'm writing as I go - which means contracted work comes first, even if I get struck with inspiration for something else. And clearly, every author is different. I'm a slow writer and I've got all that "Rea...

Well, the cover hasn't been "officially" released yet, but I've been given the go ahead to give away cover flats, so here's a quick shot of the new A Sliver of Shadow cover! New model, new artist...and yes, a shot of Phin on the back there.  Though for some reason I couldn't convince the art department to put him in a wombat brothel. Alas. (There's actually a bit of a gork-up on the image on the spine, but that will be fixed with the book release, so chalk these up babies up to potential collector's items. You know, some day when I've got that massive movie deal.)

So it turns out I managed to sell Spanish rights for A Brush of Darkness a few months ago...and here's the cover! :)  (And yes, it's already been pointed out that the girl on the cover and my author picture seem very much alike - i.e. head angle and expression. Total surprise on my part, but kinda cool.) Looks like it's been renamed to "The Pact," but if you click on the pic, you'll see they put Phin on the cover. This delights me to no end. Huzzah! It will be available for sale in October. :) (And sorry for the utter lameness of this post, but it's my daughter's birthday today so things are bit crazy.)

Sorry this isn't going to be much of a post but I'm trying to type it up from a borrowed iPad since I'm a bit too lazy to actually fire up my laptop. Anyway, I've spent the last fees days hanging in Philly for the Authors After Dark con. As cons go this was one of the more intimate ones that I've been to, but It was nice because I got a lot more one on one time with readers and fans that I might not have run into in a larger venue. I also got to be on my first set of panels. As a first timer I can really appreciate the more laid back atmosphere that AAD provided. Far less intimating than I thought - plus I had the added bonus of being able to talk pretty freely about a certain panty-sniffing unicorn. (Oddly enough I had questions about him even on panels I wasn't actually attending!) The only real bump so far was pulling into the parking garage the first morning and hearing my brakes start thumping. (I actually took it to a local dealership today. Good news...

Last week I caught a random tweet about something called Womanthology . I adore comics and I adore woman-centric projects, so I thought I'd check it out. (I always enjoy watching the process of how a project like this comes together.) Basically it's a collaborative effort between some awesome comic book artists/writers (Barbara Kesel, Gail Simone, etc.) teaming up with unknowns to produce over 300 pages of stories and artwork for charity. It's spearheaded by Renae De Liz, who did the absolutely gorgeous graphic novel adapation of The Last Unicorn. (Yes, I have a signed copy. <3 ) According to their website: "Womanthology is an anthology graphic novel created entirely by women for Charity. The purpose of the book is to showcase the works of female creators of every age and experience levels. The Graphic Novel will majorly consist of many short stories interpreting our theme for this volume; "Heroic". We'll also have interviews and how-to's w...

Earlier this week I ranted a bit on my personal blog about being trolled in a livestream chat room. (And before the innuendo starts flying, it was a perfectly harmless chat/livestream belonging to an artist that I like. (Livestreams are great to get a bird's eye view into a talent that I'll never have, anyway.) The chatting portion became a little strange at one point when one of the other chatters essentially accused me of being a liar. That I couldn't possibly have written a book. (Part of the discussion was about what we were working on at the moment  - pretty harmless stuff.) I have no idea why. No idea who this person is or why they decided I couldn't be trusted. In the end I suppose it doesn't really matter. I know what I've done and that's what counts. However, the whole thing did get me to thinking  more about voice and style overall. Plagiarism happens all the time - of writing, of art, of any number of things. There's a fine line between ...

I have a small confession to make. A Brush of Darkness was never actually supposed to be published. Back in the summer of 2008, I started writing it. It was the first thing I'd seriously written in nearly 15 years. It was supposed to be my "starter" book - the one I was going to learn the ins-and-outs of publishing with. You know - how to query, how to revise, how to *write*.  I took a bunch of workshops, and wrote off and on until I finished it in April of 2009 - just in time to pitch it at Romantic Times. I entered it in many contests, wrote and rewrote that first chapter probably like 15 times, trying to please everyone as to what a first chapter *should* be. Eventually I found friends and fellow writers who convinced me to listen to my own voice and do what *I* wanted with it. Funny thing? I started winning some of those contests. I fixed up my query letter. I started writing the second book. And then I got my agent. (I actually ended up with three offers of r...

To be honest, I had a much different blog planned for this week - full of all the fun stuff I got to do at RT, and how utterly grateful I was to my fellow Leaguers for taking me under their collective wings. I learned so much from them last week, and I can't say enough about it.  Heck, Jackie Kessler and I shared a four hour plane ride home in the second-to-last row of a SouthWest rust bucket, surrounded by extremely chatty teenagers on their way to tour collages on the East Coast. (Seriously, we're practically blood sisters now, bound by fear of fuselage rippage and York Peppermint Patties.) However, an hour after my plane touched down in Virgina, my father-in-law suffered a terrible stroke and subsequently passed away Monday morning. So obviously, my brain just isn't in a good place for anything particularly snarky or witty right now. The funeral is today, in fact, and I'd like to keep that part of things to myself. In the meantime, I want to give a shout out to m...

Apparently the new cool thing this year as far as swag goes is trading cards. I first ran into the concept on Twitter a few weeks ago and the more I thought about it, the more I really liked it. I mean, sure, it's a little cheeseball to hand out cards with your character's stats, but the inner geek in me started fangirling almost immediately. There's a lot of flexibility here - both in the overall design and the details you might want to include on the back. As a reader, I love to collect things like this - just a few more insights into the characters or books I've come to love.  As an author, it gives me a chance to express my vision of my characters in an unrestricted way. At any rate, the trading card movement (at least for romance) has taken off over at Romance Trading Card s If you're getting cards made up for any of the conventions, be sure to stop by there and upload a few of them and add your name to the list so that readers will know you'll have the...

*waves* Hi, I’m Allison Pang and this is my first (and quite possibly last) post at the League of Reluctant Adults. >_<  Of course, it is Valentine’s Day, and that comes with its own set of issues…so I’m not actually going talk about that at all. Not that I’m against a holiday celebrating love or anything, but I’ve never been a fan of forced displays of affection for the sake of commercialism. *ahem* So, that means I’m going to talk about unicorn pr0n wtfkery instead, which is neither commercial nor anything romantic or particularly celebratory. (At least, I hope not.) In truth, my one claim to momentary fame has a lot to do with a certain panty-sniffing unicorn character that I write about. Part frat-boy, part Yoda, Phineas is by far the most popular thing to come out of A Brush of Darkness, and I’m often asked about how I thought up such a crazy character. Personally, I’m not sure he’s all that unique. I just took everything about unicorns that we generall...

FIRSTLY: we're getting our asses organized. Like, starting now, with this post, we're officially more organized than we were five minutes ago! If all goes according to the League's Multifarious Plans, we're going to stick to a Calendar Thingie and POST REGULARLY! Last I heard, you'll get a different author posting something every day from the 1st to the 21st of each month. And then, on those remaining nine days of each month, either CRAZY SHIT or ABSOLUTELY NOTHING will happen! There's nothing in between, see. I'm supposed to slap something up here on the 7th, so the next time you'll get a post from me is on March 7, unless I pop in and unleash some CRAZY SHIT during February's last chocolate-coated gasp of a week. Mark Henry's got the 8th of each month; Stacia Kane's got the 9th, and so on. We might start doing these posts with a theme, too. March might be SEX MONTH, for example, so you'd have 21 days of sex posts PLUS crazy shit at the ...