Author: Maya

Just an hour until I go get the kids from school. Oldest child is on field trip and he won’t return until late this evening. Youngest is also on field trip but hers is contained within school hours. I swear I’m soooo excited for this weekend. We’re spending it on the lake doing some tubing, swimming and some fishing. We’ll be completely waterlogged by Monday night but man will it be fun.

I’m going to enjoy every minute and not even think about work once.

Hope everyone has a fantabulous holiday weekend!

:fishing:

:weee:

Micah is done. Or Sweet Temptation as the actual story is called. Some stories are much easier to write than others. The easy ones are always nice to luck into but they don’t happen regularly enough for my tastes. Parts of Micah’s story were easy, but others…I tweaked and obsessed and mulled, binge wrote and pieced it together like some puzzle on steroids.

Now the story isn’t due yet but I’m over my “want to be finished by” date which kind of screws up some other stuff on my “to do before vacation” list. It’s not insurmountable. It just means I have to get my ass in gear and get some of this stuff off my plate.

I have some mulling to do on a project. I have to finish Songbird. I need to get Darkest Hour put to bed. Eh, what’s two weeks, right? :dunno:

But the important thing is, Micah’s done!! :banana:

Ok gang, here are the winners of signed copies of Sweet Persuasion!

Alexandra comment #9

Marcia L comment #23

Ashley comment #38

AND the prize for best reason she should get an early copy goes to Lori comment #44 :purplelaugh: I’m throwing in an extra copy because it was either send Lori drugs or a book.

Ok so, get shoot me an email at mayaATmayabanks.com and give me your snail mail address. I’m giving you guys until Monday noon to claim your book. If I don’t hear from you by then, I’ll give the book away to another randomly drawn winner.

Thanks for playing! :hug:

Edited to Add: I have my hands on a few more copies, so I’m going to up the ante here to THREE copies. I’ll give away copies to three readers and I’ll get them in the mail so guys get them no later than the end of this next week.

It’s become a tradition to give away my very first copy of my HEAT books, and since I got a couple in the mail yesterday, I’ll give the following copy away

Don’t screech at me when you get the book and it doesn’t look quite as pretty and shiny as it does on screen. I’ll lament that fact right along with you. I don’t like the paper quality of HEAT covers at all. I’m a total paper snob. Particularly since hubby’s company makes the really nice high quality SHINY stuff like what comes on the Samhain covers. I don’t even like the actual paper the pages are printed with. It’s sorta cheap feeling, and if you’ve ever read a HEAT book, you know where I’m coming from.

Anyway off my tangent :sumo: Here are the rules and blah blah associated with this giveaway. Today is Friday :banana: I want to mail this puppy on MONDAY because dude, I have lots of other stuff to mail because my post office sucks ass and they are constantly losing crap, so I have replacement packages to mail and I need to get them out and well if I wait any longer, you won’t be getting Sweet Persuasion early at all, which is the whole point of this contest.

So if you enter this contest, be prepared to come back on Sunday or even early Monday morning to see if you won. I won’t track you down. You have until then to claim the book and if you don’t I’ll draw another winner and I’ll do this until someone comes forward quickly.

I’ll ship priority so you’ll have the book in hand no later than the end of next week. Sound fair?

Okay, now to the good stuff. Just tell me WHY you want this book early and you’ll be entered to win it.

Have a great weekend!

is the longest month of the entire year for me. Kids are ready for school to be out. Family is ready to get a jumpstart on summer and vacation. So typically the month drags for eternity. But today I looked on the calendar and damn. Where did the month go? I’m not sure whether to be grateful or a little freaked.

On the one hand, I’m so, so, SO ready for vacation. We’re all tired, mentally fatigued and more than a little grumpy. We’re ready for some serious fun in the sun. On the other, given how much stuff I need to get done BEFORE vacation, I sink a little more into the pit of despair when I think that I have less than three weeks to get my shit together.

Oh well, I’ll get it done. I always do!

Mother’s Day was fun. Would have been better if oldest child wasn’t gone, but he was off in Washington D.C. on his school trip and he had an absolute blast. My two youngest kiddos went shopping with daddy and after much disagreement, agreed on a bracelet to buy me. They were so cute. They each picked out a card and wrote me a personalized note. Middle child’s totally cracked me up. Then they cooked dinner for me.

Hope all you moms out there had a terrific day!

And I appreciate the quiet because I have a lot of work to get done before we leave on vacation at the end of this month. Micah is coming along nicely and I’ve been working on a few other side projects just to keep myself fresh on them. Sometimes if I leave a project for too long, it takes me a good while to get back into it and with my writing schedule as jammed packed as it is for the rest of this year, I can’t afford any delays. I literally need to be able to move from one project to the next seamlessly. Yeah, we’ll see how well THAT goes.

Oldest son is off to Washington D.C. at the end of this week for his school trip. He’s beyond excited and he was about to lose his mind thinking they’d cancel it because of swine flu (lord knows they’ve cancelled everything else!) So he’ll be gone for Mother’s Day *sniffle* and middle child has if you can believe a “Mother’s Day Tournament” so I’ll be spending Mother’s Day at the ballpark. Yay…

Me, I can’t wait for vacation….

Going on here. I’ve sorta been on internet hiatus because I’m crazy busy with writing and family stuff. End of the school year is always a little nuts with school stuff, two kids playing baseball/softball and getting ready for vacation. I cannot WAIT for vacation. This summer is going to be an absolute blast and everyone in the family is on countdown mode. We’re all SO ready for the school year to be over with so we can get on with having fun.

I’m trying to get Micah’s book finished up early so I can get to some other stuff on my to do list and get it wittled down.

So I’m thinking I’ll be pretty scarce for awhile.

Hubby’s been nagging me to buy a Mac laptop. Why I don’t know. I mean it’s not as if he ever uses my laptop. Honestly he just loves buying new tech toys for me because he knows I’m clueless and he gets to take the new shiny toy out of the box and fiddle with it and configure it and get everything set up for me.

I bought him a Mac desktop thinking that would satisfy his urge for all things Mac but it got worse. He’d call me during the day to ask if I’d fiddled around with his Mac yet. “Do you like it? Huh? Do you?” :help:

Sooo I finally got on it. It wasn’t as scary as I was making it out to be. I’ll admit, Word is…different. Not bad different but different. I hate change. I cursed a blue streak when they completely changed Word for the newest version. It took me FOREVER to figure everything out and I still don’t like it as well as the old version.

And then the words that sealed my fate. “So uhm you still think I should go buy a Mac laptop?”

So uhm yeah. We went to Best Buy last night and I came home with the very last 17 inch Mac Book Pro. Hubby was up until midnight puttering around on it. Still not even close to being done moving all my shit from my Sony to the Mac. That’s probably going to take us a week. I have emails I’ve saved from years ago. (I don’t like to throw anything away)

So now the computer count in the house is Mac 2 PC 6

I realize I’ve bared my soul and spouted my love for you all over the internet, and that this grants you an advantage, but I am a discerning lover. Not to mention I hold a grudge forever. I cannot be wooed with a few pretty words, an oops with a flimsy excuse and you expect me to climb back into bed with you. I may be cheap, but I’m not that cheap.

Your shabby treatment of me will not so easily be forgiven. Those dollars will have to be pried from my stiff, unyielding fingers. I do not think your talk of glitches reeks of sincerity.

I think it’s time we break up, and no we cannot still be friends. I gave my all to you and you’ve trampled my poor heart. I deserve better and will now go flirt with the likes of BN, Borders and BAM.

XXOO

The crazy ex girlfriend

I rarely write about “writerly issues” in my blog because since I’m primarily a reader, I want stuff that pertains to reading. But I’m utterly sad that Amazon has performed a WTFery to end all WTFerys.

They’ve deranked books containing erotic content as well as many books that do NOT contain erotic elements but are devoted to topics such as gay romance, lifestyles etc etc. I won’t go down the extensive list because I’d be here all day. Suffice to say, there is no rhyme or reason other than apparently Amazon is seeking to protect the sensibilities of some of their customers as well as play parent to kids who might GASP actually come across said books on their site.

Oy! This could take awhile so bear with me.

1. I do not need Amazon to parent my children. Nor do I need them to protect my sensibilities. Nor does the rest of the population. As popular as it is to remove the responsibility from the parent of monitoring their children’s online activity, that is not anyone’s responsibility other than the parent. Period. End of story. Expecting a business do do so is utterly ridiculous.

2. I’ve already heard it said, rankings? what’s the big deal? Rankings don’t mean anything. Well, yes and no. If you’re looking at it as a popularity contest then no, rankings aren’t terribly important in the scheme of things. However, rankings determine placement on certain bestseller lists.

Being on one of the bestseller lists means VISIBILITY for that book. It means that a whole lot of readers who look at these lists to see what’s hot, new, popular or what other people are buying are going to SEE this book. Marketing 101. Visibility? HUGE. If a book is stripped of its ranking then obviously it will never be listed on any of the bestseller lists (and there are many by category at Amazon)

3. Aside from rankings, books are disappearing from search results. When typing in an author name, not all the books are coming up. The books that have been “deranked” are conspicuously absent. This leads back to the whole VISIBILITY issue.

If a reader is looking for books from an author’s backlist or looking for a new release and they do a search by the author name and the books don’t show up? Missed sale. End of story.

4. I’ve heard the outcry of discrimination etc etc but let’s put all that aside for a moment and lessen the emotional impact of what’s going on. I’d like to know how it makes good BUSINESS SENSE for Amazon to bury these books and cut the visibility of these books. Why would you want to cut off a source of revenue?

This reeks of an emotional decision to pacify a segment of the customer base. I don’t really know because Amazon hasn’t made a statement. But as a business decision? This has to be one of the most moronic I’ve seen in a long long time. And I’ve been a total Amazon fan so I say this with no prior bitterness whatsoever.

5. Lastly, I have been a long, LONG time shopper at Amazon. My end of the year receipts? Number in the hundreds as far as total orders, thousands of dollars in cost. I routinely give away not only my books but many many other authors books and I order them from Amazon. I have given away hundreds and hundreds of dollars in Amazon Gift certificates.

I have a Kindle (recent) and have already dumped hundreds of dollars into buying Kindle ebooks. In fact, I gave up my monthly shopping spree at Eharlequin to buy ALL titles from Amazon. If I add up all my receipts from Amazon over the last few years, I’m willing to bet I pay an Amazon execs salary, so I’d say my business counts for something. Right? RIGHT? Or are you so willing to piss that away?

With everyone crying over the economy and the fact that it’s in the shitter, I’d think businesses would be going that extra mile to make every sale count, to highlight every possible source of revenue, NOT shut down an entire freight train of income and piss off not only a huge customer base but the authors of all those books as well.

Me? I’ll wait for an official response. Provided there IS one. I want to see what, if anything, Amazon does or how they respond to this. However, if they don’t respond in a satisfactory manner, I’ll be more than happy to pay an exec’s salary at BN or Borders (because Im pretty sure Borders wouldn’t turn down ANY revenue right now)

Your very unhappy, long time, very loyal customer