I think the synopses are okay to post; now that the first two books are done, and are about to be looked at by the nice editor lady, I can ease off some of the lockdown.

In two parts:

ROCK & ROLL NEVER FORGETS: A SYNOPSIS

When JP Kinkaid, aging guitarist for long-lived megastar rock band Blacklight, comes off the road from the European leg of Blacklight's current sold-out tour, he doesn't know that his past, his present and his future are about to collide.

His first morning home in San Francisco, trying to recover from a post-tour exacerbation of his multiple sclerosis, JP gets a phone call from Blacklight's LA publicist. She's got word that a sleazy biographer named Perry Dillon is planning a detailed history and biography of Blacklight.

This is very bad news for the entire band, but JP and his much younger lover of 25 years, Bree Godwin, have special cause to worry. Dillon, famous for his celebrity hatchet jobs, seems to have an uncanny knack of digging up things anyone in their right mind would rather keep buried. And in the case of JP and Bree - the private, fiercely protective girl he fell in love with when she was still a teenager - this means not only secrets that JP and Bree have kept buried for years, but a few that Bree has never shared with him. JP's history with Bree is a strange story, made stranger by the fact that JP is still legally married to Priscilla, the obsessive, ambitious woman he met and married in 1973. As deep and as strong as JP and Bree's relationship is, he's never been able to fully let go of Cilla. And to Cilla, still being able to call herself the wife of a world-famous rock and roller has always been a matter of life and death.

Leaving a balking Bree in San Francisco, JP flies down to LA for a one-hour interview with Perry Dillon. During that interview, JP slips up - and gives away a piece of information, the answer to a question Dillon shouldn't have had the background info to ask in the first place. Worried, he confesses the mistake to Bree. She surprises him by shrugging it off, and agreeing to come on the American leg of Blacklight’s tour, less than a month away. Since Bree is obsessive about staying as invisible as possible in JP's professional life, he's as surprised as he is pleased..

Perry Dillon is told, through Blacklight's management, that his conversation with JP is the only contact he's going to be permitted while the band's on tour. He's officially barred from backstage access at any show. The tour opens at Madison Square Garden, to thunderous applause. But when it's time for the encore, the wings onstage at the Garden are as full of police as they are of family and guests of the band.

Perry Dillon has been found dead backstage. He's been bashed across the throat with one of JP's guitar stands. He was killed in JP's dressing room. And Bree, who has been acting in ways that are highly unusual for her, was the one who found the body.

part two:

As Lieutenant Patrick Ormand of NYPD Homicide digs deeper into Perry Dillon's world, JP realises that Ormand's prime suspect is Bree. And as deeply as he loves her, he can't shake his own suspicion, that her deep protective streak, her desire to keep the world away from him, may have led her to do something that could get her taken away from him forever.

During the course of the investigation - which parallels the first half of Blacklight's tour - facts begin to emerge. JP has a near-fatal heart attack after Blacklight's Boston show, and comes out of the anaesthetic to find that Ormand wants to know why Perry Dillon's cell phone records show two phone calls to Bree. While she denies ever having spoken to Perry Dillon, it's obvious to JP - who knows her - that, while she's telling the truth about that, she's also hiding something. After Blacklight's Philly show, Ormand asks JP to come to NY and listen to some sound files from Perry Dillon's New York computer. JP is floored to hear Dillon referencing incidents that show he must have had some insider sources.

The tension comes to a high point of when Bree disappears from Blacklight's Miami show, in the middle of the concert. JP learns that she got a mysterious phone call, hurried back to the hotel, and headed to NYC - taking half of JP's prescription meds with her. And while she calls him to let him know she's safe, she won't tell him where she is, what she's doing, or why. For twenty-five years, she's displayed perfect loyalty to JP, sometimes to both their cost. Now she needs some of that loyalty and trust back from him - and he can't question her.

As the clock ticks down, the story becomes clear to both JP and Ormand. JP realises that he's going to have to do something to keep Bree out of prison, or possibly even off death row. And when he gets a phone call that puts the key to the situation in his hands, he must choreograph an intricate dance of timing and location, in a race to get Bree - and himself - home free.

Rock & Roll Never Forgets, with its themes of loyalty, protectiveness and trust, is the first book in the Kinkaid Chronicles, rock and roll mysteries that give the reader an all-access backstage pass to how musicians work, live, and love.

And, the second book synopsis, long version (these are the two that Jenn sent to Lyssa today):

WHILE MY GUITAR GENTLY WEEPS: A SYNOPSIS

Book Two of the Kinkaid Chronicles picks up a week after Rock & Roll Never Forgets leaves off.

John "JP" Kinkaid, guitarist for megastar rock band Blacklight, is recently widowed, home in San Francisco, and engaged to his long-time lover, Bree Godwin. Blacklight's American tour is over, and JP has agreed to sit in as second guitar for a new CD being done by his longtime local friends, the Bombardiers. In the meantime, Bree is left to plan the wedding.

The Bombardiers - Tony Mancuso, Kris Corcoran and Billy DuMont - have been around since the early seventies, and they've recently lost their founder and frontman-guitarist, Anton Hall, to liver disease. The new CD, already late because of Anton's long illness, is now a cause of friction between the band and their record label. As a result, the pressure is on to fill Anton's shoes, and do it fast.

Paul Morgenstern - Bay Area fixture, longtime local producer, club owner, art collector, philanthropist, and friend to musicians in need -hooks the Bombardiers up with a new frontman, Vinny Fabiano. Problem is, it's not going well. Self-absorbed and abrasive, Vinny is new to the Bay Area music scene, and all anyone seems to really know about him - including Paul - is that he has some very expensive instruments, and no obvious source of income to pay for them.

The sessions start and even JP, a consummate professional and lifelong session musician, has trouble keeping his patience with Vinny. Vinny makes no effort to match the Bombardiers' established style - he seems to think they ought to change to suit him. He bullies his cousin and guitar technician, Rosie. He blames his very sophisticated and pricey equipment for his own shortcomings.

Things look to be coming to a head when JP and Bree attend a party at Paul's hillside house in Sausalito. Vinny, not knowing who Bree is, makes a pass at her, and tries fondling her. When she insults him and tells him to back off, he takes a swing at her, JP goes berserk, and Bree takes control of the situation by introducing her knee to Vinny's groin.

At the same party, the other members of the Bombardiers introduce JP to Bruno Baines, a local luthier. Bruno's been commissioned to build a very gaudy $12,000 guitar for Vinny; he's been paid a deposit but is waiting to collect the rest. He has the guitar with him, and when the group leaves Vinny on Paul's floor and heads out to dinner, JP gets a look at the astounding quality of Bruno's work.

part two:

Less than a week later, after a very good rehearsal session, Vinny is found dead in the Bombardiers' San Francisco rehearsal space, smashed over the head with the custom Bruno Baines guitar. JP has noticed that Vinny was a "one guitar per session" guy - and the guitar he was killed with wasn't the guitar on the stand when the rest of the band quit for the night.

Beside the mystery of the guitars, the murder leaves the Bombardiers - already in hot water with their record label - without a singer or a regular guitar player. And the morning after the murder, JP and Bree get a phone call from their old adversary and acquaintance from the Perry Dillon murder, Patrick Ormand - who is working homicide with SFPD and, because he knows JP and the other members of Blacklight, has been put in charge of Vinny's murder.

JP, trying to help out the Bombardiers, comes up with a brilliant solution to their most pressing problem, which is getting the new CD recorded: he calls Blacklight's notoriously oversexed lead singer, Malcolm "Mac the Knife" Sharpe, and asks him to come and help. Mac jumps at it, and arrives with his fierce, beautiful bodyguard, Domitra Calley, and the two settle in for a long stay with Bree and JP. And since Vinny's death has left the Bombardiers without a regular guitarist, JP now has to do all the guitar work for the new CD.

Listening to Vinny's work, they realise that they're going to need some of Vinny's equipment to get the right sound: most important is a $75,000 Zemaitis custom electric called Big Mama Pearl, with custom electronics. Without the Zemaitis, JP has no hope of making the guitar work sound like the Bombardiers, rather than watered-down Blacklight.

Rosie, Vinny's cousin and tech, tells them the Zemaitis is up in the warehouse next to Paul Morgenstern's club, the Seven Oh Seven, in Marin County, and they arrange with Paul to meet up with him next morning. But when they get to the warehouse, they find Rosie dead just inside the warehouse's rollup doors - and no Zemaitis in sight.

The story moves through the investigation, the discovery of a few personal landmines in JP and Bree's long, evolving relationship, emergency cancer surgery, and a gruesome murder, caught live on the studio's recording equipment. It ends with a wedding in Las Vegas, and some unwelcome news from JP's neurologist about his eight-year battle with multiple sclerosis. And it sets the stage for the third book in the series, London Calling, in which the past - courtesy of Bree's having to deal with JP's London house, his late wife's residence for a quarter-century and a documentary film about to see the light of day for the first time in thirty years, at the Cannes Film Festival - may be a bit too much for Bree to handle.

Beginning with an MRI and ending with a wedding, While My Guitar Gently Weeps is the second in this series of rock and roll mysteries featuring JP Kinkaid. The Kinkaid Chronicles give the reader an all-access backstage pass to how musicians work, live, and love.

The synopses are great, deb. Very intriguing.

In other news, whoot! Victor accepted my little story for the November 3rd Club's inaugural edition. I'm very happy and honored to be a part of their endeavor. Look for it under 'Ella Sprink.'

Liese, excellent!

my contribution to "Rain" My Worst Rainstorm Ever

“Lord, save us!” an unnatural soprano voice cried out.

It was true that the sky had just frickin’ opened up that night, in end of season monsoon excess, beaded-curtain swaths of water to boggle my parched desert soul, and I looked forward to playing with hailstones because they fascinated me.Thirteen, I looked to my mother to plant the smackdown on what she would call”Sarah Bernhardt” behavior.But she didn’t do it because this woman and her husband, besides being wacky Christians, were my stepdad’s side-job tech clients.
It was a tough job. I’d heard him muttering darkly that of course they better have faith in God if they were dumb enough to think “Press any Key” meant “Delete”. Their machine had been in our new house for three days waiting for the Weirdos (It just said “Weir” on their mailbox)to be between Bible studies and deal with secular matters like databases and word processing.
When the storm started, James wanted to beg off until Monday again, but my mom said she hoped that he and The Weirdos’ PC would be very happy together, were that the case.”Get that thing out of my house.” She told him. “It feels like it counts my sins or something.”

James said he didn’t think that technology was generally available yet, and got The Look that we all dreaded. I could’ve told him, but he already thought I was fresh. So the date with the Weirdos was on.
Honestly, I could halfway relate to Mrs. W.’s sentiment because my mom and I had just had a wicked fight because she didn’t go out in the storm to get...some thing I needed for school the next week. I was torn between my frustration and feeling like a moron, and really hoping God didn’t watch all the time because I looked so bad. I snuffled. “For Heaven’s sake, Erika,” Mom said(forgoing her usual “God damn it”...like in the Cosby routine, my brother was “Jesus Christ”) it’s not the end of the world."

“Actually it is,” Mrs.Weirdo said, looking almost pretty with all the color in her face. “The 700 Club” had a show on it this morning.”

”Our neighborhood just needs storm drains.” Mom replied.

Left with that evidence of our apostasy, Mrs. Weirdo prayed along with every thunderclap, sometimes with added wailing, and I wondered what her damage was. I would be scared if there was a flood because I wasn’t sure there was a Heaven, but maybe she was loud because she wasn’t sure.
“Ma, is she crazy?” I asked, in the other room.

“Yeah. I want you to respect people’s faith, but, yeah, probably. Crazy and rich, so don’t say anything.”

“I thought I wasn’t supposed to care if people were rich.”

“It doesn’t make them better, but James needs this contract.”
“I hope they go home soon.”

”Amen.”

t puts in order for both books

I have a dumbass question because i am woefully ignorant of publishing. My agent sent me the final draft of the proposal, and I like it and all, and she made this comment, "you'll just have to take out all the stuff like "joss whedon, writer of the Buffy series" that appears more than once. Once you've said it and people are reading straight through, it's as if they're characters and the reader knows who they are. But by then you'll have an editor and you and he/she can iron that out."

I'm too embarassed to ask her, but dont I have to pay for an editor? Aren't they very expensive?