Friday funnies

Here's your Friday funny:

My wife and I were sitting at a table at my high school reunion, and I kept staring at a drunken lady swigging her drink as she sat alone at a nearby table. My wife asks, "Do you know her?" "Yes," I sighed, "She's my old girlfriend.  I understand she took to drinking right after we split up those many years ago, and I hear she hasn't been sober since." "My God!" says my wife, "Who would think a person could go on celebrating that long?"

Have a great New Year.

Jennifer

Is it difficult to write sex scenes?: the ups and downs of an erotic romance writer

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HAPPY CHRISTMAS!

Best wishes for Christmas and the New Year

Jennifer

Friday funnies

This might seem a long ‘funny’ but it is one of my favourites!

A man was working on his motorcycle on the patio, his wife nearby in the kitchen.  While racing the engine, the motorcycle accidentally slipped into gear. The man, still holding onto the handlebars, was dragged along as it burst through the glass patio doors.

His wife, hearing the crash, ran in the room to find her husband cut and bleeding, the motorcycle, and the shattered patio door.  She called for an ambulance and, because the house sat on a fairly large hill, went down the several flights of stairs to meet the paramedics and escort them to her husband.

While the attendants were loading her husband, the wife managed to right the motorcycle and push it outside.  She also quickly blotted up the spilled gasoline with some paper towels and tossed them into the toilet.

After being treated and released, the man returned home, looked at the shattered patio door and the damage done to his motorcycle. He went into the bathroom and consoled himself with a cigarette while attending to his business.
 About to stand, he flipped the cigarette  butt between his legs.

The wife, who was in the kitchen, heard a loud explosion and her husband screaming.  Finding him lying on the bathroom floor with his trousers blown away and burns on his buttocks, legs and groin, she once again phoned for an ambulance.  The same paramedic crew was dispatched.

As the paramedics carried the man down the stairs to the ambulance they asked the wife how he had come to burn himself.  She told them.  They started laughing so hard, one slipped, the stretcher dumping the husband out.   He fell down the remaining stairs, breaking his arm.

Have a wonderful Christmas.

Jennifer

Wednesday writing

I was helping a fellow author recently by reading her manuscript and doing some reviewing/editing. I can see now why, when editors are asked what they like most about editing, they state helping a writer develop their story. In the process of helping this fellow author I have realised that editing is like gardening:

• You do a lot of weeding and pruning (getting rid of parts of the story that are superfluous, don’t work or are out of place);
• You mow the lawn keeping it nice and short (cutting down those overlong paragraphs or sentences to make nice shorter ones which are easier to manage);
• You add new plants (adding new words or punctuation to established areas to enhance them);
• You plant seeds that you can’t see at this stage (you realise you need to add seeds of thought earlier in the story to make it clear why something happens later);
• You replace plants with others (replacing words or punctuation for other ones that work better);
• You move plants to another area (moving sentences or paragraphs around to make it flow better);
• You take a close look at the red flower in the midst of the green and yellow bank of flowers and try to remember why you planted that there (remembering why you put a certain section in a certain place and making a decision to remove, replace or leave);
• And then you take a step back to see it in its entirety (ignoring the content you look at the presentation to see if the paragraphs are of varied length, they don’t all start with the same words, the font is consistent and so on).

                         

Having done all that you sit back with a satisfied feeling of completion.

Jennifer

Wednesday writing

Following on from Monday’s blog where I talked about word counts I thought I would tell you what forthcoming books I am planning to write:

Friend or Foe is the last in the Friends series and is about Gina who falls for someone she works with despite always being at loggerheads with him. I have finished writing this and it is with a friend for critical reading before I will submit it to Siren Publishing.

Last in the Doms series – title to be confirmed but it might be something like I Submit to You. This is Ellie’s story and she has some erotic photos taken but has trouble submitting to the person who is in love with her. I have only just started this one.

Dragon story – title to be confirmed. About a world where dragons and men live but rarely come into contact with each other and a man falls in love with a human girl who is one of the women who live with a community of dragons as their mates. I am at the stage of plotting this one and setting the world of dragons otherwise known as ‘world building’.

Wolf story – title to be confirmed. About werewolves and a human woman who agrees to an arranged match with a man not knowing at that stage he is a werewolf and what is involved in being the wife of the alpha. I haven’t done more than think up the synopsis and am world building the world of wolves.

Captured in Space – this is the story that Matt and Lissa are writing in Friendly Seduction so I thought it would be a good idea to write it for real! It is a sci-fi story about a girl who has run away from her owner and is captured by bounty hunters. On the way home they fall in love but they have to give her back to her owner. Haven’t started on this one yet.

Ten years on type story (title tbc) – I quite like the idea of doing a ten years on story following what happens to the six women from the Friends & Doms series as things don’t quite go to plan and they all have to revisit why they fell in love with their husbands in the first place. That’s as far as I have got so far.

Jennifer

Inspirational Mondays

My inspiration today is what you can find on the internet these days. I had seen on another writers’ blog that she had a word count meter showing what stage she was at with various stories.  So I found (after a bit of searching) this website http://www.writertopia.com/toolbox/meters which gives several different and FREE word counters. I particularly liked the cartoon one which you can change the mood of from frustrated to joyful.

However, I am a very un-techy person (I don’t even have a mobile phone!) and it took me quite some time to work out which ‘gadget’ on my blog I needed to add the link to in order to generate the picture. It was the ‘picture’ gadget which makes sense (Duh!) but I couldn’t work out then how to change the word counts. I realise that I have to remove the picture, change the count (and/or mood of the cartoon) in the link and upload again.

BUT I DID IT! Yeah!!!!! Watch my word counts to see how I am progressing on the next stories.

(PS The competition is still open as per last Monday's blog I am interested to hear from readers from around the world. So email me a paragraph about yourself: your first name, male/female, age range, job, where you are from, if you have read my books and what did you like. And in return I will give the first five people from different countries a PDF copy of one of my books - or the new one in January if you have read both of them).

Jennifer

Friday funnies

A teacher at a polytechnic college reminded her pupils of tomorrow's final exam. "Now listen to me, I won't tolerate any excuses for you not being here tomorrow. I might consider a nuclear attack or a serious personal injury, illness, or a death in your immediate family, but that's it, No other excuses whatsoever!"

A smart-arsed chappie at the back of the room raised his hand and asked, "What would you happen if I came in tomorrow suffering from complete and utter sexual exhaustion?"

The entire class was reduced to laughter and sniggering. When silence was restored, the teacher smiled knowingly at the student, shook her head and sweetly said, "Well, I suppose you'd have to write the exam with your other hand!"

Have a good weekend

Jennifer

Wednesday writing

Originally my stories were all separate, self-contained tales but as I wrote them I realised they were all about women who fell in love with men they were either friends with, worked with or acquainted with – hence the series’ titles. After discussion with the publisher I decided to separate them into two series as the tone of books one and two (Just Good Friends and The Submission Challenge) was quite different from each other, although with overlapping characters between the series and I conceived the idea of a group of six female friends, three in either series each having their own story.

This worked okay until I got to book five (at the time of writing this blog Friend or Foe is in the final stages of being written) and I realised I needed to do a timeline of when each book starts (which was generally when the previous finished, eg, book 1 Just Good Friends was immediately followed by book 2 The Submission Challenge despite being a different series).

For the reader wanting to know the best order to read the books it is the first one of the Friends series followed by the first one of the Doms series, then second one of the Friends series and so on. You can read each series alone, but if you then start to read the other series you  could come across characters you read about previously and you may be confused to find they are married when they hadn’t even started a relationship yet!

So having decided on a timeline it took quite some jiggling around. Only in one of the books had I specified a time of year (Submissive Training) but there were time factors in some of the books relating to how long it took to publish a book so I was limited to this reality when considering the timeline. There were other items like having stated in Friendly Seduction that one couple were married whilst another were only engaged. Having completed this timeline before I got the edits for the latter book I then added in a bit about it taking place over Christmas time since I now realised that Christmas would have come and gone so had to make some recognition of this.

In future I intend to do a timeline from the beginning – even if it is a stand alone book – listing items like time of year and time scale from start to finish. I’ve probably made some continuity mistakes in the two series mentioned above but it can’t be helped. After all I am still new to writing and each time I write I learn a little bit more about being a writer.

Jennifer

Inspirational Mondays

I am astounded once again by the readers I seem to have who read this blog from around the world. It amazes and inspires me how easy it is for my work to travel the globe. I mentioned a few weeks’ ago that I had just found out that I had readers from Rumania, India, Mauritius, South Africa, The Philippines, Finland,  Australia, and Germany amongst other places outside the UK or US. The new countries I am getting readers from include Latvia, Poland, Austria and China. I have one frequent reader (or readers) from Russia. But what I find frustrating is that I don’t know anything about them. Who are you? Where are you from? How old are you (20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, older, younger)? Are you female readers or do I have any male readers? What work do you do? Have you read any of my books and if so what did you particularly like about them? What do you like about my blog?

To this end I am starting a new competition. I will give a free copy of one of my books (or if you have read both of them then a copy of the next one due out in January) to the first five people FROM DIFFERENT COUNTRIES to email me with a paragraph or two answering the above questions and telling me about yourself. I won’t put any details on my blog other than to indicate which countries the winners are from. Please email me on Jennifer.denys@yahoo.com and put ‘worldwide reader’ in the subject line.

Jennifer