Thursday, April 28, 2011

All Stirred Up ~ Now Available

My latest novella, All Stirred Up is available at MLR Press!
Here's the blurb:

After Brendan and his mother witness a completely random tragedy, his carefully controlled life begins to fall apart. First he starts having nightmares and panic attacks, and then he loses focus in his daily life. His board of directors insists he take a vacation at a so-called “relaxation destination” and to make matters worse, they’ve hired newly minted psychiatrist, Dr. Dirk Melovitch, to accompany him.

Dirk, whose job it is to help Brendan learn to relax, walks into the lobby of Brendan’s hotel wearing a borrowed suit and an attitude that rubs Brendan the wrong way from the moment they meet. They head for the airport and their carefully planned itinerary goes out the window, one small setback at a time.

From the airports of New York and Atlanta, to the long, lonely highways of Texas, to an upscale rehab destination in Santa Fe, Brendan and Dirk each try to gain the upper hand until both find out that it’s not just life that can get a guy All Stirred Up.

To read an excerpt or buy the book, go HERE.

Monday, April 18, 2011

Contest Winners!




Just a quick note to announce the winners of my swag contest!

I announced these on Twitter and got in touch with the winners via email, but more formally the winners are as follows:

Debra Durbin, Tracy Faul I’m sending your T- shirts today!

Charles Edward gets trading cards (and maybe a little something extra)

Brandi Roberts gets a tote bag!

John Hunter, your mug will be on it’s way shortly!

Sunday, April 17, 2011

Where it comes from...




Last night was a balmy 75 degrees Fahrenheit here in southern California and the moon was so full and bright it seemed alarmingly close.  For the first time in years I went to Disneyland on a crowded Saturday night, mostly because my son got six free tickets through school. 

The kids went their own way to plunder the big ticket rides and the churro sellers and my husband and I sat under the few scattered stars and watched the Fantasmic! show, and for the first time in a long time, I saw the fireworks overhead and not from a distance through my bathroom window.

My husband got a first hand introduction to what I do all day, every day. I zone out (right in the middle of a sentence, usually) and watch people. I observe them and make up shit. My train of thought is so rickety it can be derailed by a hot guy, an interesting tattoo, or a piercing. (Purely in a NOT stalkeriffic, detached, professional way.)

Young couples in love, older men and women, characters dressed in Disney costumes… No one is safe from my imagination. I began to tell my husband stories about the people around us, and his eyes grew round and troubled.

After several hours of listening to me, he finally asks, “Do you do this all the time?”

I had to decide how much to tell him. Cause at some point he’s going to realize I haven't really been paying as much attention to him as he thought. But sure. It’s what I do. And lately, it’s paying the bills, partly. I have deadlines and contracts and yes… It’s even hard to take a night off for fun with the family, but my kids are old enough that a check-in by phone every couple of hours took care of my responsibility to them, and I was free to let myself play. So I answered him honestly.

“Yes. I do this. All the time, I can’t help myself. Some people are asking for it. Take that bodybuilder guy over there. He’s with the blonde, but see how he keeps eyeing Chip?”

This is why my husband is my man. He hasn't skipped a beat. He's eyeing chip up and down and glancing back at the man in question. My husband is now utterly on board. “I think that’s Dale, honey.”

“No, I’m sure it’s Chip. He’s got wandering eyes.”

At this point my husband goes all in. “Oh, no he does not. Chip and Dale are a committed, monogamous couple. I’m shocked by the way your mind works sometimes. But did you see that very good looking young man with the saddle shoes at the dance pavilion? There’s a story there, I’ll bet.”


Saturday, April 16, 2011

I am! I just got the cover art from MLR Press for All Stirred Up, the second half of the stirring stories. The first book, Stirring Up Trouble, featured Toby and Evan, Chefs who manage to cook up the perfect recipe for love.
The second book features Evan's twin brother Brendan as he reels from PTSD, only to find the proposed cure -- in the form of psychiatrist Dr. Dirk Melovitch, MD and a stay in an upscale rehab center -- might be worse than the disease.

Trying Something New

Sometimes my LiveJournal blog has been shaky and sometimes my readers aren't able to comment. So I'm actually trying to migrate my blog to Blogger, and we'll see how it works. So far, it's been a right regular pain in the @ss.

Apparently, there's a way to 'fetch' all the LiveJournal entries and make them into XML files and move them, but I'm not holding out any hope that this is going to work for me. My husband and I have been working on that for a while now and we've gotten absolutely nowhere. Of course, I use a Mac, and the program isn't compatible with Mac Software, (It's a linux program) so we dragged out my hubby's work computer and that didn't work either. We tried every permutation of my passwords, URL's journal names and zip... error messages every danged time. And of course, it's not like I was absolutely brilliant in my LiveJournal posts but some of them contain sweet memories (and tough ones) that I don't want to lose.

Bottom line? Here's my LiveJournal URL:


That was the blog I was using as a way to connect with readers, talk about real life, plan books, make recommendations, and announce work related things. I'll be continuing that blog here, at:


News that is strictly related to my work as an author is on the website:


In the next few days, I'll have new cover art, a book release announcement, a few contest winner announcements and I'm likely to want to vent a little. Cause that's just how I roll... :D

Stick around and I'll see if I can't start making this work. In the meantime, you can save yourself the trouble of having to look this up time and time again by creating an RSS feed or whatever it is that lets you know when a new post is published.

Thanks for all your support!

ZAM