Lawyer and Writer

Hey everyone! I just wanted to let you all know that Smashwords is running a promotion this week. All of my stories are at least 50% off - most of them are free! If you were thinking about checking out my books but hadn't gotten around to it yet, now is a great time to do it.

You can see my books here:
Books under my own name
Books under my pseudonym

Even if you're not interested in my books, I highly encourage you to look into the promotion. There's a full catalogue of the authors who are participating in the promotion, which can be found here.

Happy browsing!

Over the last couple of months, you've likely seen me refer several times to an anthology I'm putting together, compiling all of my Grim Hunter stories. If you look back on the tags for that series, you'll see quite a bit of discussion about it.

I've been doing a lot of thinking about this. These are erotic stories, and while there's nothing illegal about them, I've recently had the ex-husband of one of my clients stalk my LinkedIn and make false reports about me to the Law Society. It's all handled, but it's made me rethink my strategy a bit.

I have a YA series in the works, and I'm also a lawyer. Silly as it may seem, some people may have issues putting this together with writing gay erotica about vampires.

So I've decided to release the Grim stories under a pseudonym. Thus, this will be the last time I talk about it in this particular blog, unless I create a new blog or website for the pseudonym. If you want to keep up with these stories and be notified when they come out (and the first of them is going to be released as a single very, very soon) please join my mailing list. The link for that is at the bottom of this post and many of the posts I make. All announcements for both Jessica Steiner and the works under the pseudonym - Suzanne Fisher - will be made there.

I'd love to hear thoughts on pseudonyms! Have you ever considered using one? Or do you use one? Why?

I've been silent because, well, my internet is disconnected currently while I am in the process of moving. However! Today was designated as my posting date for originalbigbang, so I turned my phone into an internet hub and stopped packing to get it posted.

My contribution was Grim Opera, which is the fifth story in a series of short stories I've been writing for several years. There are vampires and shape shifters and gay sex, and each of the stories riffs off of a story from classic literature. You should go read it.

The story should stand on its own no problem. I plan on publishing all five of the stories, plus some other short stories, as a collection next spring sometime. I haven't yet talked to my cover artist about that yet, and my wife may be contributing stories as well, so the project is still sort of nebulous, but that's the general shape of the plan at the moment.

As part of the Big Bang, astro_noms also made a mix tape to go with it. I don't have the room on my data plan to download it yet, but I'm excited to listen to it.

While I'm connected, I might as well mention: I've been snatching moments to write here and there and have accumulated 7500 words on NaNoWriMo so far this month. It's been really great, flowing well, though my time to write has been limited. I'm behind, but I feel like I can catch up no problem when I have time to do so, which will be next week...

I took yesterday off, though, despite technically having downtime in which I could have written, because it was my birthday! I celebrated by having a really good burger and fries, then going home and NOT packing, and instead marathoning downloaded episodes of Gordon Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares. Then I slept the sleep of the dead. It was a good evening.