Interview with Markus Redmond 🩸

Last week I had a wonderful time interviewing fellow vampire author Markus Redmond about his upcoming second-in-series Blood Rising. I have interviewed people a couple times for IG Live, and I wasn’t worried about the talking part, but the whole “getting the app to play nicely so that things run smoothly, the Live begins on time—and I don’t look unprofessional, which is a thing I have nightmares about.

Here it is on YT:

Or watch it on IG

I had a traumatic experience with this when I was with the Bad Old Publisher (henceforward BOP), which I’ve never talked about online before, but I think it’s time to finally tell that story… 💁‍♀️

I had realized by the time the second book (of my three book deal) came out, that BOP was not only going to fail to market my books in any meaningful way, but that too many people at the company did not like or understand my writing. The guy who was in charge of doing the YouTube interviews with each author as their books launched did an interview with me where he told the viewers that “they could just skip the sex scenes if they didn’t like that stuff.”

Here’s my publisher, literally telling the BOP readership that they should just skip reading whole sections of my book 😲😬🤬🤯

This was the same guy who put together the newsletters, and my books were always buried at the bottom, no matter how much great promotional material I sent the company, or what great reviews I was able to get.  

So, for my third book, I asked the company if we could do a Live on launch day, and have actual fans of the series asking questions instead of this sex-negative turnip. They said, that sounds great, and we scheduled everything, and I made lots of fun promo material and begged people to attend.

They had never done one before, and I also begged the two people involved to do a trial run with me, to make sure that everything was set to work optimally. They refused. “It’ll be fine,” they said, “We’re not worried about it.”

I was worried about it. But there was nothing I could do, as the Live would be going out through the BOP company Meta account.

On the day, I had my interview area cleaned to gleaming perfection. I had my hair done at the salon. I put on my carefully chosen outfit, and did my makeup with growing anticipation.

Half an hour beforehand, I was sitting at the computer, a bundle of nerves. About a hundred people had already RSVPed to the event. I posted the last reminders about it to various places, then waited. About ten minutes beforehand, I suggested to the team we get it up and running and I could chat with people until M-minute.

They tried to set it up. We could see the Live had started, but none of us could login to interact with people who were already there. I started desperately searching for help with the problem. There was nothing to be found online that addressed the issue.

They tried some things. Nothing worked.

M-minute. People started sending me messages that they were in the Live, but I wasn’t there. Don’t worry, I told them, just some technical difficulties, it will be working shortly.

The BOP team was now, all-too-belatedly, trying to problem-solve.

I watched as the people who had joined the Live left, one after another.

At M minus 30, they still hadn’t solved the issue. I told them to just forget it. I was raging mad. Seldom have I been so incandescently angry in my life. All I asked was that we do a quick trial run. We could have avoided this fiasco entirely. A hundred people had kindly turned up because I had asked them to, and all of them had seen me fail completely. (See above fear of not looking professional.)

I didn’t know what to do with myself. Then I remembered there was a punching bag newly installed in the backyard. I changed into gym clothes and took my anger out to the punching bad.

I didn’t yet have gloves to use with said punching bag. But in the moment, that was irrelevant. I punched my anger out and out and out. It took a while to work it all out.

This is what my hands looked like after that.

I learned many lessons that day. Probably the most important is that I should always keep fighting gloves on hand in case I need to punch something repeatedly. Second to that is that if you can, you should ALWAYS do a trial run before any important thing involving technology. (I had not needed to learn this lesson in the first place, dammit!) Thirdly was that I needed to leave the publisher, STAT.

So, that’s all to say that even though I did do a wee trial run of Live last week, I was still a very nervy gal in the moments before 6PM 😰 Archie actually did his service animal task—that is, he poked me with his nose to tell me my breathing pattern was concerning to him. But it all went off perfectly, Markus seemed to have as good a time as I did, and hopefully this will go some distance to repairing that stupidly unnecessary wee trauma.

ASK ME ANYTHING

From feedback I’ve gotten, many of you really love the stories I’ve been telling you of my life, the things that formed this Raven into the weirdo she is today. At Hellmouth, a few of you came up to the table to say how much you’d been enjoying reading those, and it absolutely made my con 🥰

So I’m putting out the request for more questions for me to answer in upcoming newslettera. Ask me literally anything—you (and I!) never know what the question will lead to me sharing. Like the question about me writing gay male sex scenes turned into a whole exploration of my own gender experiences that I wasn’t even planning to write 😂

Just hit “reply” and drop the question in the email, or if you prefer, message me over on Instagram or Threads. Or hell, even Facebook, if you must 😉

That’s all for this newsletter. I’m caught up in trying to care for my mom, get everything ready to take Archie on his first flight and then do DragonCon (which is not a small con like his first con, ReaderCon) and keeping up with writing and all the other gazillion author-tasks.

See you in two weeks, and until then, be good or be good at it! 😘

💭 I'd love to hear your thoughts, questions and feedback: drop me a note 📨

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