Six Sentence Sunday and Denny's Eye Candy: Week 25

Photo snagged from the Internet by Denny S. Bryce. I find this not so much eye candy, but animalistic in its feral depiction of a body poised for action.

Here's my contribution to Six Sentence Sunday from my YA paranormal WIP...no working title yet (there is, but I don't want to say just yet:)...It's a story about a sixteen year-old girl who grows up in a small town and then moves to a city on the ocean with her two aunts after her mother and brother are killed. This is the heroine's POV. Her name is Asia.

Do you understand time? How it quivers in and out and disappears and reappears? Consider how one time long ago, my mother wasn’t dead. How my brother used to laugh. How I never liked chocolate or the ocean. Time changes everything sooner or later and I just need to get a grip on how to deal with it.

Read more SSS entries here.

Six Sentence Sunday & Denny's Eye Candy - Week 24

Photos of Sendhil Ramamurthy snagged from the Internet by Denny S. Bryce.

It's Six Sentence Sunday. My six continues with an excerpt from my WIP, The Vampire Lust Club, an urban fantasy. Here the heroine and her partner have some questions for another vampire.  

Leo looked about as uncomfortable as a vampire could look, his back pressed against the unyielding dining room chair, arms locked at the wrist with silver chains. Whitney was in the far corner of the room in her wheelchair, twirling a strand of dark hair so sharply Casey thought she was going to yank it out of her head at the root. Her brown eyes smoldered with hate as she stared at Leo. If she could stand up, she would have put a foot down his throat.

“I have no idea why you’ve done this, but it won’t work,” she said flatly.

“Don’t worry, I have a plan," Casey said, smiling at Leo.

Six Sentence Sunday & Denny's Eye Candy - Week 23

Photos snagged by Denny S. Bryce from the Internet of TNT's Leverage, various episodes. Sunday night, January 15, season finale!

It's Six Sentence Sunday. My six is from my WIP, The Vampire Lust Club, an urban fantasy. In this excerpt, the hero is working a multiple homicide crime scene in the labyrinth of tunnels beneath Washington, DC (circa 2045).


Detective Michael Pepperdine stood at the top of the second set of broken escalators and pushed his sunglasses up on his nose. The heat from the LED lighting system could dust a Stage Three vampire in twenty seconds. The same lights shattered a human being's optic nerves in less than fifteen. A pair of specially treated sunglasses and a hell of a lot of sunblock were always in his equipment bag and considered more important than a fingerprint kit, camera, or iPad 25. Shit, the only other tool he needed this far beneath the ground was a wooden stake. Old school, yeah, but he'd take the classics any day over this new age bullshit, especially when it came to hunting vampires.

Don't forget to visit Six Sentence Sunday and check out the other writers' six sentences. Enjoy!

Six Sentence Sunday & Denny's Eye Candy - Week 22

OTP OTP OTP - From Leverage - Parker and Hardison - photo snagged from Tumblr.

It's Six Sentence Sunday. My six is from my WIP, The Vampire Lust Club. Here are a few lines from a scene where the heroine is in conflict with the vampire hierarchy.

If the old vampire didn’t shut her mouth Casey was going to rip a chunk of flesh out of her ass. Screw the Council’s laws on killing rogue vampires. Was she supposed to just wait for the rabid beasts to wipe out every soul in Washington, D.C? 

“I know what you want me to do.” Casey scooted to the edge of the sofa and looked Dr. Vapula dead in the eye. “I won't do it.” 

Don't forget to visit Six Sentence Sunday and check out the other contributions! Happy Sunday.

MY NEW WEBSITE IS ALMOST DONE! What Do You Think?

Happy New Year and Happy Thursday!!!

Well, you know, while I was away (I've been on an extended vacation and writer's retreat) I made some decisions about my writing I'll share as the weeks go by. But today, the big one is I am close to finishing up my new website with the assistance of my design team Limb Design and in particular Corey Chow (lead designer).

As part of the marketing tips thing I like to do now and then, I wanted to share with you examples of the graphics and the process Corey and I have gone through to create the 'look' for the website.

Here goes:

Guess which one I like? You'll see when I launch the site:)...

Now, the photos will change and are really more 'place holders' - but I think you get the idea that as an author I write urban fantasy, but also have other stories I want to tell.

Here are some other tips. We are using a $35 template from Mojo Themes for Wordpress. Go here to see the template I'm using. It's cost effective and cuts down (way down) on the price for working with a design team. My palate is orange (power color, I'm told:)...but I also LOVE cities and that's the skyline. I must admit I'm not sure about the font (lettering) for my name - but what do you think?

And oh, in case you are wondering - no, I am not published. I am pre-published and an optimist. I also know that branding and marketing are critical components that agents and editors expect authors to bring to the table. And don't even mention self-publishing. This is part of what you MUST do there.

So I ask again, what do you think? And thanks in advance for your feedback.

Six Sentence Sunday and Denny's Eye Candy: Week 21

BBC's Being Human cast in a sexy photo op snagged from a friend at Tumblr.

Happy New Year!

Kicking off the first Six Sentence Sunday of 2012 with a blurb from my WIP, The Vampire Lust Club...:)...The heroine is visiting the owner of the club and she's intrigued by his new look...

“And what’s up with that dirt beneath your lip?” Casey asked.

“All the cool men rock this look, baby girl.”

“And you joined the cool men club, when?” Not entirely unattractive, Henry still wasn't the hottest man in the District by a chubby mile but he was the only human Casey didn’t mind teasing. “You know, back in the day, me and my girls used to call that tuft of hair beneath a man’s lower lip a flavor saver.”

The tip of his tongue flicked at the small patch of hair, and then he said slowly, “I get that.”

Romancing the Pomegranate: An Ode to My Favorite Holiday Fruit

Pomegranate photo snagged from the Internet by Denny S. Bryce.

Did I mention I'm hanging out in Maui for the holidays? Okay, maybe I have a few thousand times on Twitter, but not so much here. In addition to the whales, the sun and the beach, what else am I doing here? Well, I'm taking a writer's workshop called The Art of Writing, Selling and Marketing Memoirs with Rebecca Walker (it's fabulous!).

And no, I don't write memoirs, but the course explores the process for creating memorable, marketable memoirs, and the keys to getting the words and the story on the page are for the most part the same as writing fiction and include voice, situation and story, structure and perspective.

I wrote the piece below in 15 minutes for a prompt—describe your favorite fruit, using all of the senses. It was a fun exercise, and I wanted to share. I hope you like!

Happy Holidays!!!
_______________________________________

Ode to the Pomegranate: The Holiday Fruit

I can't remember the first time I had one. Probably didn't know what the hell it was—but a pomegranate is the most red, most delicious, most weird exotic fruit going.

There's the color and what could be more sexy than a round, red, smooth object that fits in the palm of your hand. With its thick skin and furry end or root cap, it just doesn't look like any other fruit.

I like to slice them in half with a knife, and then stare at the juice flowing from the seeds for a moment. The richer the red the sweeter the taste. But is a pomegranate ever really sweet? Or is it the promise of sweet that makes the process of eating the fruit so amazing?

Inside are all of these cocoons of goodness, and I can't get the color out of my mind, and the contrast between the pale little coves where each seed is buried. I bet there's a whole section in the Bible about pomegranates. Back in olden times there had to be some mystery, some mythology, and some message that the fruit had to share. You can't just show up with something like a pomegranate and not want to ask questions about history, the Bible and how old a thing has to be to get its own mythology.

I don't care what you say you can't make a banana sexy (okay, I hate bananas), and apples are so first sin that I bet it was actually a pomegranate in the Garden of Eden.

How dull to pull an apple from a tree when there were certainly pomegranates in the Garden. Besides, if you're going to sin, why not have a thousand seeds to drop in Adam's mouth. Give the man more than a bite or two of the bad fruit—make him work for it.

And imagine the mess. All over his face and hands and shirt. Oh, that's right, everyone was naked in the Garden of Eden. So you bet the pomegranates would have made for a much more fun evil mess than an apple.

I have no idea why I am associating the pomegranate with the Garden of Eden (someone mentioned a commercial?). Perhaps it's because you can only get the fruit in November in the city. And I would only buy it at Whole Foods, or as we call it Whole Paycheck—but again, not the real point here.

We're talking about a piece of fruit. Something that's sweet and good for you. Something that you should have every day. An apple a day keeps the doctor away. Yeah, sure, but what can you do with a pomegranate that's only around for one month out of the year?

And how much do you hate it when you can go into the store and get all of the seeds in a plastic pint-sized container. All of the fun of ripping the thing apart and tearing the flesh away and dropping the juicy seeds down your throat—gone. Wiped out. Just because of convenience and whatever else people at grocery stores do when they think about pomegranates.

You know this is now going to be a quest. Find out everything there is to know about my favorite fruit because it is a mystery. It's origins wrapped in secrecy. Because I bet, the pomegranate has been around for centuries and it's in the Bible (everything juicy and decadent is mentioned at least once in the Bible—and likely in the Old Testament). I just want the apple to move over. Get out of the pomegranate's way so that the real red round fruit can rule.

You feel me?

by Denny S. Bryce for The Art of Writing, Selling and Marketing Memoirs Workshop 2011