Last week, Anna got caught staring at the broodingly handsome Ned Jelli, while she was standing at the bar thinking about buying him a drink.

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His look was penetrating, harsh, drilling into her a warning. No playful twinkle, or cheeky sly smile to invite her over.

This is most definitely not the right time.

‘Can you please replace that dear gentleman with what he was drinking,’ she asked the barman. ‘And offer him my best wishes with what ever is concerning him.’ She smiled at Ned as the barman served him, and turned slowly to return to Ginger at the table.

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I recommend you meet Ned Jelli – Hello Darkness by Sam de Brito

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Thank you to everyone who comes over each week and a warm welcome to new readers.

Click here for my past
Six Sentences

Positional Sacrifice     Coffeehouse Play     Drawing Chance     Whisper

I truly value and appreciate your feedback, so if you have the time, I would love you to hear your thoughts, so please leave a comment.

Last week, my two erotic romance heroines, Anna and Ginger from No Soft Soap were having a drink together. Across the bar they spotted the broodingly handsome Ned Jelli, Sam de Brito‘s character from his latest novel Hello Darkness. Anna had jumped up and decided to buy him a drink.

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She stood at the frosted silver beer taps at the bar; lager, pale ale, pilsner or stout?

First impressions are so important, instinct says beer, but which one?

Nervously she tried to smile, the months of admiring him searing up her spine and threatening to burn away her confidence. Looking over she checked, he was still alone and was almost finished with his drink. She noticed his chisled features, the fine line of stubble on his cheeks, and the shape of his lips, but she was on a mission to find out what was on his mind.

Oh NO! He caught me staring at him.

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my observations of Hello Darkness by Sam de Brito

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Thank you to everyone who comes over each week and a warm welcome to new readers.

Click here for my past
Six Sentences

Positional Sacrifice     Coffeehouse Play     Drawing Chance     Whisper

I truly value and appreciate your feedback, so if you have the time, I would love you to hear your thoughts, so please leave a comment.

Hello Darkness is the second novel for character Ned Jelli. A stand alone work, it gives the reader an inciteful portrait of a 39 year old man, struggling with how he perceives himself, the expectations he applies and the fact he is a romantic at heart. We join him in the search for the white picket fence ideal of love and life. How will he achieve this dream, and really, is the dream ever actually attainable?

Ned’s story is told intimately, he talks to us, shares the confusion of his thoughts, his reactions and his goals. I know Ned, I’ve meet him at bars, I’ve dated him, I was even married to him for a while. He is a breathing contemporary character, his story a love story, his perceptions confused, and the effects of his drug antics nudging at you throughout the story.

I applaud Sam de Brito for his ability in charactisation. So often you come across a literary bad boy, one dimensional in his narcissism and misogynistic in his control. However, Ned Jelli, is a layered, complex soul struggling to make sense of expectations, social conformities and ideal dreams. His voice is the raw voice of a man, not written to seduce a female reader, nor to be compared to or challenged by another man. Ned Jelli is put out there, herpes and all, allowing him to be your brother, friend, or even ex lover.

I was particularly excited by the way the sex was dealt with. An honest look, of lust, love and being lonely. I came away wanting to find a work that incorporated de Brito’s frankness in the erotica world. I wanted to read exchanges between the male and female thought processes, something that included dialogue and allowed an appreciation for their differences. I think it would be fascinating, tantalising and highly erotic. I’m yet to find something, but when I do, I’ll let you know.

The hard print copy of Hello Darkness is currently only available in Australia. The cover a montage of newspaper prints and a stock Getty image of a man shaving. The publicity descriptions disclose a man struggling to define himself through his work, not even a faint whisper to define it as a love story.

This throws question after question up for me, are male writers not allowed to be seen as writers of intimate thoughts and love stories, does a love story in publishing instantly then become a romance, but then romances are written by women and always need happy endings. Don’t they? I think the combination of these questions and the debates that ensue become one of the key recommendations I have for Hello Darkness. You get to indulge in de Brito’s art of characterisation and then confont ideas of perception, taste and context. Homogeneously constructed marketing plans and the definitions that pigeon hole works in the publishing world, help to create restraints that I ultimately think keep many works from readers, who would likely become fans.

I would like to see the publishers translate this work and re package it for an international audience. Focusing less on man defined by occupation and more on man living and battling himself while pursuing the romantic dream. Although Hello Darkness is Australian in it’s settling, Ned Jelli could very well be a man in London, Paris, Berlin or New York.

Here is the publishers blurb and links to getting yourself a copy of this work, check it out and let me know what you think.

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In paperback and digital formats, Hello Darkness available through Pan Macmillian Australia‘s website and the Kindle edition is available at Amazon 

In Ned Jelli’s family, journalism and siren-chasing in the news pit of Sydney is in the genes. And everyone knows, you can’t escape your genes, or your family. At 39, Ned’s life has come full circle and he finds himself back in the news empire where he started his career at 19. And for a lost boy like Ned, where 20 years have been spent eddying around the same small course of Bondi, babes, and booze, this is the final sign he’s going nowhere fast. Held back by his own fear and loathing, and searching for the perfect woman to fill the black hole where his heart should be, Ned continues the fatal and often fatally funny trajectory he began in The Lost Boys. Set among the newsrooms of Sydney, Hello Darkness is a sharp, demonic expose of the world of journalism from an insider, exploring the cost of being less than you hoped you would, and wishing for what is beyond your reach.

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Sam de Brito

Sam de Brito is a contemporary artist. His medium the written word. His latest two novels, fine literary portraiture. He captures the essence of a man, trapped by …read more

Something different, the prelude to a post in progress.

This week, my two erotic romance heroines, Anna, whom you know well from my Six Sentence Sunday snippets and Ginger from my not yet finished novel No Soft Soap are having a drink together. Across the bar they spot Ned Jelli, Sam de Brito‘s main character from his latest novel Hello Darkness. Which one will decide to go over and talk to him?

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‘It looks like he’s just had a swim, said Anna, noticing his wet hair matted wild by the sea salt. ‘He’s handsome and broodingly sexy, just standing there, he’s inviting my gaze.’

‘He is the cat’s pyjamas,’ Ginger agreed. Leaning in closer she whispered, ‘Though, I think he looks distracted, rather than out on the prowl. I’d say something is playing on his mind.’

‘Only one way to find out,’ Anna jumped up from the table, grabbing her purse, ‘I’m going to buy him a drink.’

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Pop back next Saturday to discover more about Ned Jelli, Hello Darkness and Sam de Brito. Hopefully Anna manages to discover what makes them tick over a drink.

Max after surfing by Olive Cotton 1937

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Thank you to everyone who comes over each week and a warm welcome to new readers.

Click here for my past
Six Sentences

Positional Sacrifice     Coffeehouse Play     Drawing Chance     Whisper

Hello Darkness by Sam de Brito – Observations

I truly value and appreciate your feedback, so if you have the time, I would love you to hear your thoughts, so please leave a comment.

Reblogged from Horror, Sci-Fi, Fantasy & Thrillers – Lawrence Pearce:

One morning, four days before I wrote this story and the reader-contributed stories flooded my inbox, I had a nightmare. The next day I tweeted about my nightmare: The twitter conversations that followed made me realise what morbid and gruesome imaginations my followers had. I wanted to encourage this imagination to be paired up with some spontaneous creativity. So I posed this challenge: I figured what better way to get their juices flowing than to invite them to murder me. Below is my attempt at my own …

Absolutely fantastic!

This week after Anna and the two men have disappeared upstairs we are listening to the reaction of the administrator of the chess championship. Anna has found a sense of freedom in the arms of her lovers but her fate as the reigning champion is now threatened.

I think this might become a separate chapter or short work and I’ll call it Whisper

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“Did you see her?!” Snarled the the administrator, tapping his pencil until the point snapped. “She’s poison. Bewitching Louie and that other gentleman, forcing them to participate in her sordid charades,” his face crumpling in disgust. ’It is not the behaviour of a champion. Something must be done.”

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Thank you to everyone who comes over each week and a warm welcome to new readers. I hope you have enjoyed my six today.

Click here for my past
Six Sentences

Positional Sacrifice     Coffeehouse Play     Drawing Chance

London 1951 image by Bill Brandt

Thank you!  

More from Drawing Chance, Anna is still blindfolded with the silk restraint. The two men having slipped off her dress.

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‘Ohh Yeah,’ she heard from the man in front, as her dress settled around her ankles. The soft deep whispered growl covering her now near naked body in goosebumps. Frozen, she wanted to reach out and touch him, discover if she was the only one being exposed.

Before she could resolve her thoughts, she felt his breath, hot on her stomach and the firm grip of his hands around her hips. Then a hand from behind gently touched her cheek and turned her head to meet his full wet lips. Within that instant, she felt free.

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Thank you to everyone who comes over each week and a warm welcome to new readers. I hope you have enjoyed my six today.

Click here for my past
Six Sentences

Positional Sacrifice     Coffeehouse Play     Drawing Chance

I hope you enjoy Ruthie Knox as much as I do.

From Egghead to Smut Peddler: A Publishing Journey with Ruthie Knox

When I was seven years old, my family moved to a small college town in Ohio. At sixteen-almost-seventeen, I left for college in Iowa. At twenty-almost-twenty-one, I moved to North Carolina for grad school. And at twenty-five, I got my Ph.D., got married, and moved to Wisconsin.

Had there been any more school to go to, I would have signed right up, but having maxed out, I had to figure out what to do with myself next. I wanted to be an editor, and academics was what I knew, so I became an academic editor. I built on five years’ experience in acquisitions at a university press to launch a freelance copyediting and developmental editing business for primarily academic clients. Which is to say, I became an egghead editor for other eggheads. Perfect.

I did that for a while, and I took up knitting and became kind of obsessive about it, and then I had a baby, stopped knitting, went back to work, and got bored.

I need to be learning new things all the time, or I get restless and dissatisfied. After five years at a scholarly publisher and seven running my own editing business, I wasn’t encountering new challenges anymore. My husband suggested I might want to expand my business into a sort of academic editing empire. Instead, I started writing romance.

Mine is both a typical and an atypical background for an erotic romance novelist. On the one hand, it happens so often that woman have babies and start writing romance a few years later to stave off boredom, it’s almost a stereotype. On the other hand, I’m the only freelance academic editor I know whose goal in life is to make enough money writing sexy books that she never has to edit another bibliography.

And yet there is much that is useful about having moved from academic publishing into romance writing. For one thing, I understand how publishing works. Now, granted, I’ve never worked at a New York fiction publisher, but I have spent hundreds of hours assessing submissions, writing rejection letters, offering editorial advice to authors, and taking disgruntled authors off of ledges.

I have photocopied So. Many. Manuscripts.

More usefully, I’ve designed the interior of a book, processed and filed purchase orders from bookstores, written cover copy, and solicited blurbs. I’ve done contracts. I’ve drafted book budgets. I’ve observed how agents shape the author-publisher relationship. I’ve chased down permissions for dozens of photographs and song lyrics. I’ve watched designers make beautiful covers that authors hated and beautiful covers that authors loved. I’ve set up and manned a conference booth, sold books, talked to authors, and collapsed in an exhausted heap at the end of the day.

And, of course, as an editor, I’ve manipulated other people’s words in just about every way possible. All that before I’d written a single word of fiction.

Once I did start writing fiction, in October 2010, I wrote three full manuscripts pretty quickly. The third one was the story that became Ride with Me. I queried at the end of March 2011, signed with my agent in April, and accepted an offer on Ride with Me in July. Zoom!

I know this accomplishment involved some combination of good fortune, skill, and savvy, but as to what proportion of each, I have no idea. My opinion varies depending on whether my id, ego, or superego is operating the helm at any particular moment. Most of the time, I just figure I lucked out in a big way.

But I do think that my experiences as an editor were — and continue to be — helpful in a variety of ways. For one thing, it never hurts to have excellent mechanics. Close-to-flawless grammar and properly formatted manuscripts do have an edge over sloppy ones, particularly with persnickety people who care about that kind of thing. When your manuscript is clean, there’s nothing on the page to distract the person you’re trying to impress from the story you’re trying to tell.

For another thing, my experience in publishing has helped me to stave off any irrational fear of agents and editors. Yes, these people have a great deal of expertise in fiction that I lack. Yes, they are the gatekeepers who control whether or not I get published. But they’re also just people, like all of the agents and editors and authors I’ve worked with over the years. We’re all in this because we’re geeks who love to read good books.

A third advantage is that I understand, roughly speaking, how publishing works. I know what stages a book passes through, how labor is divided, what influences decision making. While there are differences from one type of publishing to another and between presses, there are a lot more similarities. And having been in the shoes of the contracts person, the copywriter, the editorial assistant, the copyeditor, and so on, I can understand and appreciate exactly what they’re bringing to my book.

Finally, being an editor has shaped my self-editing process. I tend to write a book from beginning to end, scene by scene, and I don’t consider a scene “done” and move on to the next one until I can read it through without a hitch. That usually requires a fairly rapid first draft, a slower second pass where I flesh out missing pieces and improve awkward language, a third pass for polishing, a fourth pass for polishing, sometimes a fifth pass for polishing . . . all before I’m ready to let anyone’s eyes on it but my own. I hold myself to a high standard.

At the same time, though, I know that written words aren’t precious. I’ve certainly hacked other people’s prose to pieces enough times to understand that it’s the ideas that matter. So if I hear from a beta reader (or from the whispering voice in my own head) that a chapter isn’t working and it needs to go, I wince a bit, and then I hack it off. If my editor tells me that the beginning of my manuscript isn’t doing what it needs to be doing, I’ll write a new beginning. I can always write more words, and chances are they’ll be better than the ones I had.

Through it all, I continue every day to seek new ways to learn more, to improve, to excel. Smut peddler or not, I’ll always be an egghead at heart.

Ride With Me Giveaway

Ruthie has been so generous to offer one randomly chosen lucky commenter a digital copy of Ride with Me. Winners will pick up their copy through Net Galley. So good luck!

The Beginning of the Synopsis for Ride with Me

Before the training wheels came off her first bike, Lexie Marshall knew she would ride the TransAmerica Trail one day. She just didn’t know she would ride it with a tall, dark, melancholy hermit.

Inspired by her parents’ stories of their own journey along the cross-country cycling route, Lexie prepares to spend the summer she turns thirty enjoying the greatest adventure of her life. She has the maps, the bike, and the legs to climb any pass between Oregon and the Atlantic. She’s anticipated every contingency and planned out the trip to the last detail. All she needs is a riding companion. Because it’s one thing to be a strong, independent woman on the streets of Portland, but it’s quite another to fall asleep alone in a tent in the middle of nowhere without worrying about axe murderers. She’s tried it. It can be done, but it really sucks.

So Lexie does what any woman in her situation would do: she places an ad in the Companions Wanted space on the Adventure Cycling website, carefully screens the respondents for signs of perviness, and picks out her biking buddy.

When Tom Geiger turns out to be two decades younger and about a hundred degrees hotter than Lexie had any reason to expect, she rolls with the punch but defends herself against her tendency to fall for all the wrong men by telling him she’s married. Which is funny, actually, because with a couple of broken engagements under her belt, Lexie has shoved marriage to the very bottom of the list of things she wants.

All Tom wants is a quiet summer alone, taking in the scenery and watching his front tire eat up 4,200 miles of asphalt. But his sister answered Lexie’s ad in his name, setting him up on the bicycling equivalent of a blind date, and by the time he finds out about it, he can’t stomach the idea of backing out and forcing Lexie to either give up her trip or ride alone. He decides to do the honorable thing and ride with her, at least until he can find her a more suitable companion.

Tom knows too well that this impulse to play the hero is his Achilles heel. Five years ago, it ruined his life. <details redacted> Since then, he’s been working as a bike mechanic, cycling in some of the world’s remotest places, and spending as little time around other people as possible. The last thing he wants is to travel across the country with an uptight, controlling woman who talks too much. Particularly a married woman whose ass looks so fine in black spandex, it’s literally painful to ride behind her.

It doesn’t help that the two of them strike sparks off one another from the beginning. Lexie finds Tom so infuriating, she stops speaking to him ten miles into the ride. To her chagrin, she also finds him so intriguing that when he still hasn’t broken the silence on day three, she challenges him to a hot-sauce-eating duel at a Mexican restaurant in the hope he’ll cave and say something, even if it’s “Holy shit, that’s hot!” By the time six bottles of sauce have bit the dust, Tom and Lexie have begun to play nice — and to worry they may have ignited a blaze they can’t put out.

Click here to find Ride With Me at Random House.

More from Drawing Chance, last week we left  Anna, blindfolded with the silk restraint, trying to decide if the two men were serious or joking with her. She had decided that challenging them was the only way she could find out. She had commanded them to lead the way and now we find her in Louie’s hotel room.

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‘Shhh,’ was all she heard, as she felt the light brush of a finger over her lips as she went to speak. She was standing, in what felt like the middle of the room, the presence of one man directly in front of her and the other very close behind. The tingle from the brush of skin on her lip, escalating quickly into a sudden shiver as she anxiously awaited the where and when of another touch.

They are SO not joking.

Almost simultaneously she felt their hands, firm but tenderly, a pair on her shoulders effortlessly sliding off the straps of her dress. The other pair following the zipper down and the material started to fall.

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Thank you to everyone who comes over each week and a warm welcome to new readers. I hope you have enjoyed my six today.

Click here for my past
Six Sentences

Positional Sacrifice     Coffeehouse Play     Drawing Chance