Carole Remy

Saturday, May 18, 2013

Lucy's Sexy Fun Road Trip: Olympic National Park, Washington #TBSU

In Who Is Candid?, Lucy takes a sexy fun road trip that quickly turns into an online erotic Arabian Nights! Here's her story.

Click HERE to buy now on Amazon.

In the spring of 1998, recent graduate Lucy Ralph decides to rebel. The NSA is blocking her job applications, her best friend Dick is a frustrating hunk of gorgeous, and her mother is driving her crazy. Worst of all, she’s still a virgin!

Lucy takes off on a road trip across America, and reinvents herself as 'Candid,' a naughty girl who has sexy fun with just about everybody she meets, and tells the world all about it! Her explicit 'Candid' Internet posts go viral overnight. The National Security Agency, the entertainment media, the paparazzi, and soon the entire nation are on her tail! While she spins a modern day sexual Arabian Nights, she's also being tracked by the sweet, sexy, and elusive Dick, who has his own tricks to play.

Will love ever be more than a virtual reality for Lucy? Can she and Dick get past the friends page? Will exposure ruin everything, if the nation finds out Who Is Candid?

Let's Go on a Road Trip with Lucy!

Lucy's trip begins on May 18, and we're here to head out with her. From now until June 9, we'll be traveling with Lucy, seeing the sights and sharing adventures!

To celebrate and make it easy for you to follow along, Who Is Candid? will be a FREE download on Amazon Kindle all next week! That's right, starting Monday morning in the wee hours, Who Is Candid? is FREE! Set yourself a reminder to download on Monday, and join us here for behind the scenes info and photos of the road trip stops.

Olympic National Park, Washington

Lucy leaves her home in Seattle, and heads to places unknown. Her first overnight stop is in the gorgeous Olympic National Park. Having lived for many years in Vancouver, British Columbia, I visited the beautiful Olympic Peninsula many times.

Lucy sees a scene much like this as she approaches the park. Breathtaking! She continues on driving into the mountains to the Boulder Creek Campground. A nice man helps her back the trailer into a camping spot, and then helps her some more... You can read all the juicy, sexy details in the book!!

The darkness in Olympic National Park is absolute. The story of Patches in the novel is true. The first night of a camping trip, our dog Pax was so freaked out by the total darkness, he wouldn't stop howling. We lit a candle in a tin can to calm him down. I also remember star gazing at the incredible night sky.

It's not feasible to photograph pure blackness, but this haunting image gives a sense of the quiet and peace of the Olympic Peninsula mountains.

Here's one more view Lucy might well have seen as she was driving out of Olympic National Park the next morning. May is a beautiful month!

I hope you've enjoyed these glimpses of the views Lucy sees in the park. These beautiful photos are from the National Park Service public domain image website. In the days to come, I'll be sharing photos and personal stories from many of the locations along Lucy's route.

Have you been to the Olympic Peninsula? Do you enjoy camping? Do you like seeing photos and learning extra details about Lucy's story? I hope you'll join me in the comments for a lively discussion!

Check out these related posts:

Five fantastic blogs, presented in the grand tradition of The Blog Scratchers' Union! #TBSU

Shelley Munro

Erzabet's Enchantments

The Creatively Green Write at Home Mom

Seumas Gallacher

Sapphyria's Steamy Book Reviews

Friday, May 17, 2013

Humility and Publishing #TBSU

My friend Amy Putkonen wrote a post this morning on humility from a Taoist perspective. Here's the image from her post. I'll enjoy it while you take a minute to read her wise words...

The last two sentences got me thinking. "Give [humility] a spot at the table and ask it how its day has been. Let it teach you something."

That wisdom applies to so many aspects of life. If we can take a step back and detach a bit from our emotions, life suddenly becomes much simpler. Not easier, necessarily, but simpler.

I began to wonder how the concept of humility applies in the publishing world.

Humility implies comparison.

The word humble carries within it the notion of high and low. In fact, one of Webster's definitions of humble is "ranking low in a hierarchy or scale." The publishing world is certainly full of comparison. Just look at the ever mysterious Amazon rankings.

So does striving for humility mean we should hope for poor rankings? Does it mean we should be content with sitting in the middle somewhere, unnoticed. I think not. To me, humility in publishing means letting the book talk. A brief digression, then I'll tied it together...

The word humble comes from the Latin humus, meaning "of the earth." It goes back in English all the way to around the year 1200. Of the earth to me has a connotation of trusting the elements, the basics. When we live of the earth, we don't worry about numbers, we don't compare. We live gratefully with the abundance we have.

Trust the book.

In place of the phrase of the earth, substitute of the book. To me, humility in publishing means trusting the book. Just as we can nurture the earth, we can certainly nurture the book: Amazon it and Tweet it and Facebook it and Google+ it and Goodreads it. But we can also realize that the words themselves, apart from us entirely, have their own life.

The book itself owns the Amazon ranking, not the writer. When we detach our ego from the darling product of our creation, we take a giant step toward peace and contentment, as writers and as human beings. We become neither humble nor arrogant, but simply happy parents of strong, independent offspring.

Could humility become obsolete?

I wonder if we can reach a place where humility becomes irrelevant. I ask myself, is my Soul humble? The question has no meaning. My Soul just is. Humility is a human construct, something we've accumulated over the millenia along with blame and guilt and anger.

In every one of our modern definitions and connotations, humility implies comparison. Once we recognize that we are everything, that we lack nothing, that the Universe is us and we are the Universe, we are neither humble nor arrogant. We just are. What an excellent goal!!

What do you think of when you hear the word humble? Is humility even a goal? How does humility play into your experience of the publishing world? Please join me in the comments. I look forward to a lively discussion!

[As a fun aside, my personal exercise in humility this morning includes having no control over the spacing of paragraphs! Must learn HTML...]

Check out these related posts:

Some great blogs, presented here in the grand tradition of The Blog Scratchers' Union! #TBSU

Thursday, May 16, 2013

Ophélie is Dark, it's Erotica, and it's on Kindle! #TBSU

My fifth novel is now on Kindle!

Click HERE to buy Ophélie on Amazon.

The Blurb for Ophélie

Dear Reader, Unlike my other novels, Ophélie is not a sexy fun romantic adventure. Ophélie plunges deep into the dark, engrossing world of self-destructive sexual obsession.

Have you ever had an erotic dream so real, so intense, you weren't sure whether it actually happened? Ophélie is a young college professor of psychology. Her husband Wes adores her. Yet she finds herself having violent erotic dreams about a male colleague. As the dreams spill over into her waking life, Ophélie's mind slowly unravels, and she succumbs to the seductive allure of a world of forbidden, humiliating, undeniable pain and pleasure.

Have you have ever been sexually obsessed? Have you ever wondered whether you'd survive or die? Drown yourself, for a few hours, in Ophélie's world.

The Story Behind the Story

In my last year of teaching high school in Canada, a student committed suicide. He had been in my journalism classroom only a few hours earlier. His death was a complete shock, and countless counselors spoke with everyone. My journalism students, a small, tight-knit, cooperative group who worked endless hours together producing the school newspaper, were especially affected. Despite everyone's best efforts, the school went into a tailspin, with three more suicides and over 20 known attempts that same year.

Ophélie grew from those beginnings. I wasn't trying to figure out what happened; the irrationality of suicide defies explanation. I only knew that I needed to get inside, to see suicide from the inside looking out. As a writer of erotica, it made sense that Ophélie's disintegration would be sexual, like Ophelia's in Hamlet. Writing the manuscript, I didn't know myself page to page whether Ophélie would survive.

Because of the intensity of the experience of writing and, I've been told, reading Ophélie, I don't want readers coming to it accidentally. For that reason the price is a bit higher, to prevent the unsuspecting purchase of a bargain novel. For the same reason, at present I do not plan to use the Kindle Free Days for Ophélie. The Pinterest page for Ophélie is dedicated to mental health resources.

I hope you will choose to read Ophélie, and I hope you will come to love the woman Ophélie, as I do.

Worldwide Links to Buy Ophélie

Amazon US

Please join me in the comments to discuss whatever you wish. Suicide is a difficult subject. Sometimes talking helps. Joyful talk works for me too!! Wherever your mind is today, let's go there!