I *will* do better! Yeah, right...

With the start of a new working week, I'm determined to do better!

Basically, I'm sick to death of myself for frittering away hours and hours of valuable time, either foofing about on the internet, or just sitting like a zombie being negative. It just won't do! And I can't go on doing it, because I have a whole page full of 'to do' list and some of it's just got to be cleared or else I'll sink under the weight of it and never ever catch up. I should be getting stuff done and clearing off jobs, just in case something exciting happens... And no, there's no specific exciting thing on the horizon, but you never know... something might come up, that needs my attention, and then I'll be wishing that I'd used all my wasted time more productively.

Anyway, in spite of being very tempted by my usual foofage, I've managed to get 1K words of Chance of a Lifetime done, and it's only midday. Which means that I've done my quota nicely and can either push on and do a bit more this afternoon, or switch to other jobs that need doing! It does not mean I can go surfing around the Lolcats sites and/or Encyclopaedia Dramatica!

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Sunday bits and bats...

I've signed up for the next Seventy Days of Sweat! And a jolly good job too, because I've been slacking a lot in the last week or so, and have not got much writing done. I need the incentive of a group effort like Sweat70 and the scorn and abuse of Mr Blue when I don't shape up and get some words produced...

In other news, I watched Sleepy Hollow on the telly again last night, and I do think I have to have this movie on DVD. Mr Depp looks remarkably scrummy in it, and puts in a deliciously comical turn as Ichabod... Trouble is, I don't know which version of the flick to order: Widescreen or Anamorphic... any suggestions as to which is best?

I have another timewasting, writing-avoidance tool... and it's called I Can Has Cheezburger, a rich repository of LolCats... I could spend hours there [in fact I *have* spent hours there] just browsing the many many comical cat pix!

I blame Alison Kent for inadvertently alerting me to this source of procrastination!




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some good stuff, no writing...

Here's a new favourite of mine... The nifty show NUMB3RS! I caught a couple of episodes, then missed one, so I decided to treat myself to the boxed set of Season One, and have just had a mini marathon. Obviously, I love me a cop show... but I like the angle on this one. I've always had a thing for cute but extremely brainy men, Detective Goren being the prime example, but I must admit to being rather taken with genius Charlie in this show. He's not my usual type, but he's rather cute and so is his big brother too.

Have now treated myself to Season Two as well... I don't think this will replace my beloved Law and Order: Criminal Intent, and the brilliant Clever Bobby, but just because I love one it doesn't mean I can't like the other show too...

In other news, I managed to get my La Cie Porsche external hard drive to work properly and back up my Documents folder! Wonders will never cease!

It wasn't the drive itself, or the USB driver/card etc, as I'd feared... it was the poxy free backup software supplied with the drive!!! When I downloaded me a decent backup program - Genie Backup Manager - the backup set that I calculated would take around four days with the bundled software actually only took 15 minutes!!!!

So that's good news, innit?


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While you're here, please, please, please pop over the the Night Owl Romance Awards and vote for me in the Best Erotic Contemporary Ebook!

If you love you some Portia click here and VOTE, VOTE, VOTE every day until 31st October!

Better....

Well, I've managed to do about a thousand words yesterday and today on CHANCE OF A LIFETIME, my BDSM novella featuring a naughty, kinky aristocrat, who likes to play pervy spanking games in his crumbling and decrepit old stately home... It's not great literature, but it's a bit of a giggle... and the beautiful Marquis of Blaystock is as hot as he is twisted... :)

And while you're here... please, please consider voting for me every day in the Night Owl Romance Awards! I'm in the Best Ebook Contemporary Erotica category and it's a very close call. I probably won't win, but I'm not giving up without a fight, and if you're a PDC fan, and prepared to vote for me each day, I stand a better chance...

Click here to visit the voting site!

Please accept my profound gratitude and appreciation in advance! Love you all!

Rage

This was me, yesterday, raging at almost everything! [only I have better teeth] I did no writing and spent most of the day in a state of fury at 'stuff' and inanimate objects that all seemed to conspire against me to stop me achieving anything positive! My printer was playing up, telling me there were paper jams when there were nothing of the sort... Tried to do a back up to my new[ish] Porsche designed hard drive... Porsche? Don't make me ****ing well laugh! The speed this stupid thing was transferring had more in common with that trolley thing that pulls Space Shuttles out of the Vertical Assembly Building, only in this case, towed by geriatric snails! Had to abandon the back up as my calculations predicted it would take around seven years... grr... Obviously something is wrong there, and I suspect it might be my USB driver or summink like that... Only trouble is if I start getting into diagnostics that's just another thing to stop me writing!

On a plus note, I did manage to free up a bit of space at the side of the bed by moving some books and throwing out some papers, but it's just marginal really. I can move there now, though, so that's a plus...

Today, I am going to write something! I'm not going to get distracted by 'stuff' and I'm going to resist the urge to hang out too long at my favourite blogs and boards. And I'm not going to get sidetracked into promo stuff again today either... either written, or graphicky... Like I said, if I don't actually write anything, what the bleeding hell is there going to be to promote????


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While you're here, please, please, please pop over the the Night Owl Romance Awards and vote for me in the Best Erotic Contemporary Ebook!

If you love you some Portia click here and VOTE, VOTE, VOTE every day until 31st October!

Agh!

... I just can't seem to get any writing done! I'm drowning in sort of writing related/promo related jobs and I'm just not getting to the actual fiction... which is frustrating and worrying because if I don't do any, what the **** will I have to promo in the future? I'm just going to have to cut back and not get as involved with stuff. Discipline myself to just a visit or two per day to my fave sites, and no more. And not take on anything else that I just don't have time for!

But on the plus side of things, here are two new reviews of Hotbed! First one is by Ashley Lister, a connoisseur of fine literature if there ever was one!

Review of Hotbed at ERWA by Ashley Lister

The second is by the legendary Harriet Klausner. It's a little odd, but she seems to like it, so thanks, Harriet! :)

Review of Hotbed by Harriet Klausner


And here's a nice review of Eyes of Desire by Deb at SensualReads.net

Review of Eyes of Desire by Deb at Sensual Reads.

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While you're here, please, please, please pop over the the Night Owl Romance Awards and vote for me in the Best Erotic Contemporary Ebook!

If you love you some Portia click here and VOTE, VOTE, VOTE every day until 31st October!

Bits and bats...

Well, it's the first of October and the fabulous Raven Halloween Hunt is on! I hope you'll click the graphic above and take part in this fun game of hide and seek... There are lots of authors taking part and offering many, many fabulous prizes, including books from little old moi!



On the subject of games of Hide and Seek the above anthology, edited by the fabulous Alison Tyler and Rachel Kramer Bussel has just been published, and it contains an offering from Portia Da Costa! GLINT is a naughty short about a frisky couple on holiday and their sexy high jinks on a beach. There are stories in the collection from lots of top authors, including my fabulous writing buddy, Saskia Walker.

It's available from both the Amazons now: Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com



HOTBED is out too, in the UK, and imminently in the US... It says on the front it's 'an erotic romance', but to be honest, that's stretching a point. It's more like a woman's voyage of sexual discovery type story... and it's very, very rude! But... the heroine does get her man in the end, and something he says and does shows her that she's the one for him even if there's not a lot of hearts and flowers and stuff.

Check it out at the Amazons: Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk

STOP PRESS... there's a spiffy new interview with me in The Sandbox at The Writing Playground

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While you're here, please, please, please pop over the the Night Owl Romance Awards and vote for me in the Best Erotic Contemporary Ebook!

If you love you some Portia click here and VOTE, VOTE, VOTE every day until 31st October!

Yeah, things are getting bad again....

My bedside disaster area is getting out of hand again. The pile of magazines and paper is now actually higher than the bedside table itself, and the heaps of books that lean against this pile are at a more or less matching height. I think something has to be done in the next few days or it'll all end in tears.

Sorry there haven't been any posts this last few days. You could say my mind is a bit like my bedside... a teetering pile of unsorted information. I have been crossing stuff off my to-do list, but it just seems as if as fast as I do this, I add new items, so I never get to the end of it. But I suppose that's a writer's life? I'm sure there are writers who sit at a clutter free desk, with their business paperwork in an A-Z filed filing cabinet and with all their books on mahogany bookshelves in an office with a harmonious garden view... but I bet there are more out there who function in various stages of hyper-chaos, the way I do... I could say it's part of the mythos of being a 'bohemian artiste', but that's just pretentious claptrap... what it really boils down to, in my case, is the mythos of being an idle, disorganised slob. :)

Anyway, my naughty Marquis story is moving ahead, at a modest pace... Christian is the type of male character I love. Dominant, but humane, aware of his own foibles and not prone to taking himself all that seriously. He's a sort of blend of Mr Stone and Valentino, but with a title and a crumbling old moneypit of a stately home.


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While you're here, please, please, please pop over the the Night Owl Romance Awards and vote for me in the Best Erotic Contemporary Ebook!

If you love you some Portia click here and VOTE, VOTE, VOTE every day until 31st October!

What's next?

Well, now that Gothic Heat is finished, I've got to decide what to do next... I'm hoping there'll be another Black Lace novel in the works before too long, but while decisions are being made on that, I need to have a project to occupy me in the meantime.

What I'm hoping to do first off is work on another novella, and what I have in mind is a sexy, kinky contemporary story about a pervy modern day aristocrat who's into a bit of the old BDSM. The idea is starting to firm up nicely in my mind and I'm getting a clear picture of my hero, Christian, who's a rather eccentric marquis who dresses a bit gothic and has silky long black hair. I've had a thing about long-haired heroes since I wrote about Valentino in Suite Seventeen, and as I had to forgo Rafe's long hair in Gothic Heat due to cover issues, I'm going to indulge myself now with Christian, Marquis of Blaystock.

Am looking forward to having some fun with this one... :)

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While you're here, please, please, please pop over the the Night Owl Romance Awards and vote for me in the Best Erotic Contemporary Ebook!

If you love you some Portia click here and VOTE, VOTE, VOTE every day until 31st October!

Gothic Heat has left the building!

It's gone! Clad in its folder, its rubberbands and its heavy duty poly posting bag, it's on its way to my agent to see what she thinks of it, and thence, when she's read it, to my editor...

Gosh, has this been a ride and a half! I've never done a book from a standing start of 'maybe I could do a sequel...' before. From nothing, from no outline, no idea, no characters, no nothing... And part of the time, I thought I'd made a huge mistake, agreeing to this, but now I feel okay because I think it's all right, although obviously no great work of dazzling literary genius or anything. But I think it's a reasonable story with some okay bits in it, and hopefully, all the folk who liked Gothic Blue will like it. Even though there's precious little Andre in it...

I think I must give a shout out to Romance Diva Gwen Hayes in connection with Gothic Heat... she did a super review of Gothic Blue, many months ago, in which she said the only thing she'd like to have seen more of in it was the evil sorceress, Isidora. And that's what gave me the idea for the Gothic Heat! So Gwen, take a bow...

And while you're here, please, please, please pop over the the Night Owl Romance Awards and vote for me in the Best Erotic Contemporary Ebook!

If you love you some Portia click here and VOTE, VOTE, VOTE every day until 31st October!

--
Telly: Sharpe
Choc/Yummy: Lindor Bar
Mood: strange
Writing: nothing, but must start again soon
Reading: Slave to Sensation, Nalini Singh
RSI/FMS: bit sore..


Don't forget Portia's Promos - new stuff being added all the time!

Avast, me proud beauties!

Shiver me timbers, it be...

International Talk Like a Pirate Day!

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Don't forget Portia's Promos - new stuff being added all the time!

time....

Well, I've finished another pass at Gothic Heat... and I'm glad I did because I found a whole bunch of internal logic glitches and demented things with the timeline [like a night that seemed to last 24 hours!] that I'd somehow perpetrated when I was doing my content tweaks. They were quite minor, and might not have been noticed, but I would have known about them, and I'd always be scared that someone would pick up on them and comment on them in a review. A lot of the big review sites seem to jump all over errors like that.

I feel exhausted now. Deflated. Worried that I ought to go through it yet again because there's other stuff I've missed. I ought to be thrilled, but these anxieties, and other stuff that's upset me this afternoon, have left me tearful and depressed.

I'll pull out of it. I always do. Maybe I need to eat extra chocolate and have a bit of a spending spree?

--
Telly: westerns
Choc/Yummy: lindor bar
Mood: low
Writing: editing Gothic Heat
Reading: nothing today
RSI/FMS: weary


Don't forget Portia's Promos - new stuff being added all the time!