Okay, I know I suck and that I haven't written on here in a while. I've just been so busy and blocked. I fear I have nothing to say. There's also the fact that I'm thinking about switching this journal over to blogspot. I think I'll get better traffic there, to be honest. And these days, livejournal.......is not what it used to be, let's put it that way. I think this site has run its course, so perhaps in another week or so I'll close this journal and put a redirect link to blogspot.

We'll see.

On to the writing parts! I'm STILL working on POISON. I should have had it out and finished by May 1st, but my mind wandered on me and I made excuses not to work on it. However, I have no excuses now. I've got nine chapters left to write, plus the editing process. Now, I can write nine chapters in a week if I just sat down and did it. And I want to.....but real life gets in the way a lot and my days seem to get away from me before I realize it.

Starting today (Saturday), that will not be an excuse any longer. Now, no matter what I'm doing I will MAKE TIME to write.

Plus, I bought a nifty new laptop, which helps me out tremendously with writing. I hated being stuck in my bedroom  where my old desktop is. And when I say OLD, I mean OLD--think year 2000 Gateway with a floppy disc drive and no dvd drive that couldn't even get on the internet. The damned thing is so old I only used it as a word processor, which was fine for writing. I didn't have the internet to distract me. I wrote all of my books on that thing--and it's still in good shape as far as being useable for writing goes. 

But, I'm using the laptop from now on. Time to upgrade! Sorry, Yoda! (Yoda being the name of my old Gateway, after the figurine of Yoda which has been sitting on top of the monitor since I bought it back in 2000, LOL) My new laptop's name is Sweet Purple Bitch. Or Grimace! I'm thinking about calling it Grimace...because it amuses me.

 Anyway, probably tomorrow I will be posting the cover art for POISON, STORMWARDEN, THE OTHER, and MIDNIGHT DREARY.  Poison and Stormwarden are the sixth and seventh installments in the Lazarus Series, respectively, The Other is a short story I'm working on, and Midnight Dreary is (possibly) the first in a seperate paranormal romance series.

No wonder I'm blocked: I've got a lot on my plate!

Well, wish me words!
 

I finally got off of my lazy ass and filled out my Author Profile page on Amazon.com. It's a lot easier to find me now, I think. :) I plan on trying to promote the books somewhere every day. This means I'm going to have to be social with people.

I'm not a people person. I observe, not interact, or at least interact well. lol This should be interesting.

I finally realized that if I was going to do this right, then I needed to do it already. I redesigned the journal, and put some links on the user page to the books. I'm pretty happy about it. :) I plan on putting up more biographies, histories and character drawings that I've done! Also, I'm going to post a few excerpts from the books, and from future books in the series! :)

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So the latest news in the world of C. J. Baker is that POST-MORTEM has been published! I've been working on it since September 2010, so it was about time I got it done. I really have no excuse except to say that I was just damned distracted....and lazy. Most of what I had to do was rewrite, and I intensely dislike rewriting or editing. It gets repetitive and I tend to dread it more than a visit to the dentist.

But, I finally buckled down, told myself that it would be published in March and got it finished. I'm actually glad that it was as late as it was because the long edit made me really refine the plot. I even reordered some events; I think the story is a lot stronger than it was, and I'm just in love with it. But I'm glad I'm done. LOL There's only so long I can take on one story before I'm ready to move on to the next.

The next book would be the sixth entry in the story, called, POISON, which follows Hunters Elle Kyle and Aiden Thorpe. If you've read the books, their names should be familiar. :) I wrote about half of it two years ago, and stopped when I decided to reboot the whole series and publish them. So Poison has a lot of editing and finishing up to do, but it shouldn't take that long. (Just like Post-Mortem shouldn't have...I swear I'm not going to let myself slack on this one!!)

After I finish and publish POISON, I plan on working on a stand-alone vampire novel, set in a separate universe as the Lazarus Series, called MIDNIGHT DREARY. This one will be pretty different. I already have about 13 chapters written. I kind of love it a lot. :)

 

Here I've written some dossiers on some of the most notable Hunters in the series so far, so that you can get to know them better. Some of them, like Asher's dossier, are incomplete, though I know his history. I'm just not going to tell you yet. There are SPOILERS in here though for all of the books up to "Sanguis", so if you haven't read that far, don't read these if you don't want the books spoiled for you somewhat.

I do plan on putting up dossiers on other characters, like more of the less important (though no less interesting) Hunters, and of course, the bad guys, and any other important characters that pop up during the series. These dossiers will all be updated as the series goes on and the biographies change.

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The Full List of Hunters, up to HUNTERS

Asher*
Jason Bairds*
Celia Bowen*
Puck Conyers*
Brody Fox*
Jolene Fox*
Nick Kaleimamahu*
Elle Kyle*
Alyssa Smith*
Aiden Thorpe*
Rembrandt Van Amburgh*
Carmen Vega*
Kimiko Yamamoto*

Dave Banks
Oliver Belle
Linus Benz
Lawrence Boggs
Cash Boltnik
Stella Braidy
Sashawna Brown
Mai Lu Chong
Jane Cook
Colbie Daniels
Amy Dees
Cyrus Dolan
Lisa Feldman
Larry Finney
Mimi Flagg
Kelly Flash
Geoff Fletcher
Wally Florence
Andre Frost
Rita Frost
Adam Goldstein
Brad Haas
Duke Hayden
D'Artagnan Jackson
Forrest James
Brenda Johansson
Aisha Jones
Uri Kolchak
Taylor Levine
Helena Marsh
Monique Martinez
Sean Masters
Jorge Mencia
Gabriel Montpelier
Shanti Nagra
Phyllis Nash
Patrick O'Bannion
Jimmy O'Rourke
Travis Parrish
Mohinder Patel
Johnny Penn
Roger Phillips
Dorian Polley
Michelle Ramone
Mason Redfeather
Luiz Rodriguez
Daisy Rogers
Saul Rosenberg
Kenneth Sands
Enrique Salvatore
Terry Shoemaker
Tina Shultz
Robbie Stewart
Joey Stump
Jet Sullivan
Hector Theodorakis
Lenny Torres
Maria Torres
Riley Trianna
Brad Walker
Simon Wright
Becky Vanoort
Hammond Vetch

*biography has been posted

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Remember that you can read the Lazarus Series for yourself at Smashwords or Amazon! If I didn't give you any answers in this entry, just leave a comment and hopefully I'll be able to answer it for you! :)

--C. J. Baker

LAZARUS LEXICON A-Z:
 Everything about Lazarus that you might want to know, in alphabetical order. This is handy guide for readers!

(Note: This lexicon will be updated after the publication of each novel in the series. Currently, the lexicon is current up to Sanguis, the third book in the series)

--C. J. Baker

Smashwords
Amazon

Well, I think this is just about everything I can think of to tell you about the Hunters and how they work. If you have any questions or want to know anything, don't hesitate to ask me.

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"Welcome to Lazarus, the land of the bleed and the home of the depraved. We didn't invent death, but we've really made it our own." - Elle Kyle in Poison, the sixth book in the series (coming in January 2011 to Smashwords.com and Amazon.com!

What is Lazarus? What exactly is Thirteen Points and why is it so dangerous? What are the Hunters and what do they do? Why are there vampire gangs? What are the Damned?

All valid questions, and all about to be answered. There's a lot of information and background that I just can't cram into the books, both for length and because no one wants a history lesson when there's hot vampire action to be had. I don't know about you, but I love back story.  Whether it's the history of Rowling's Wizarding world, Tolkien's Middle Earth, Mercedes Lackey's Valdemar, Sherrilyn Kenyon's Dark-Hunters or Patricia Briggs' Mercedes Thompson series--I want to know it. I love knowing the intricacies of these complex worlds. I want them to feel real, fleshed out and most of all, I want to know that the author knows this stuff, even if they don't tell us directly in their books.

The world of Lazarus is a complex place and goes far beyond the scope of Hunter vs vampire. There are machinations that have been going on for centuries, and some since even before the founding of the city. While I'm not going to tell you everything--that would be spoiling the books completely--I can give you the well-known history of the founding of Lazarus, the mystery behind Thirteen Points' odd draw of the Damned, and a brief introduction to the Hunters and the vampire gangs.

So, you wanna know all about Lazarus? Get ready and click this link: 

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Also, for those of you who have read the series, or would like to, I've made a detailed map of Thirteen Points, complete with zones and a locations key to make it easy to find the different places talked about in the books. I'm a total map geek, so I couldn't resist drawing up the Points. I hope you find it informative to your reading experience! I know I use it frequently when I'm plotting out a story. It doesn't do to forget where the Rathskeller's located, or on which end of Mickey Finn Fetish is located!

click to view larger image:

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Remember that you can read the Lazarus Series for yourself at Smashwords.com! And if you have any questions for me, drop me a reply to this post and I'll answer it as soon as possible! I love all kinds of feedback and I always appreciate it!

--C. J. Baker
 

Remember that you can read the Lazarus Series for yourself at Smashwords.com! The first 50% of the books are free! Got any questions or comments? Reply to me here and I'll get back to you as soon as possible! I appreciate it!

--C. J. Baker

Welcome, welcome one and all! Thank you so much for stopping by my little writing journal. While I usually post as somethingwicked, I realized that I needed my own writing journal. Who am I? Well, my name is Cynthia, but you can call me C. J. A lot of you might know me as Syn, and that's okay to call me too. If you're a relative of mine who hasn't realized yet that I'm a grown ass woman and not a chubby 3-year-old who sucks her thumb, I guess you can call me Pooh. It's not okay, but you're going to do it anyway, so what the hell?

As some of you might know, I've recently started self-publishing my books on Amazon and Smashwords. I've published 3 books so far, with many, many more in the works. My books are available as ebooks, for download on eReaders, such as the Kindle, Nook, SonyReader, Stanza for your phone, etc. They're also available to download on your personal computer. Just because you don't have an eReader doesn't mean you can't read them if you want to! Personally, I don't have an eReader, so if you don't I'm not going to hold it against you. I read ebooks on my computer and love them!

So, why am I doing this writing journal thing? Because I am way too lazy to do a website, to be honest. I figured a journal will satisfy my needs just fine. What I want to put here is everything you need to know about my books, including character bios, my thoughts on each book, on the characters, settings, background info and history, even drawings I've made of the characters! I even have maps that I want to post! Eventually all of it will be posted, including links to where you can buy my books.

Mostly I got this journal so that I could post about the Lazarus Series, which is a series of paranormal romance novels that I've written. Currently the first two books, Hunters and Damned
 are available to buy at Amazon and Smashwords. The third book, called Sanguis, will be available in July 2010 at both of the sites mentioned.

I've been working on the Lazarus Series since 2006, and I've finally gotten the courage to publish them online. As I said, the Lazarus Series is a paranormal romance series, but it also strays into urban fantasy, horror, thriller and mystery territory sometimes. I don't like to be put into a box, but I think paranormal romance seems to be the best way to describe the series, so I've cottoned onto that one. The books are dark, edgy, full of drama, mystery, passion, vampires, demons, werewolves, vampire Hunters, machinations, betrayals, sex, oh my! There's a little bit of everything for everybody in the series. I'm enormously proud of the books and I'm so happy with the response I've had from them so far. It's been overwhelmingly positive!

I have to say that I'm incredibly pleased with both Amazon and Smashwords, who sell my books for $2.99 each. The process has been easy and rewarding, and makes me excited about writing all over again! (was that a little pitchy? oh well!)

Besides, the Lazarus Series, I've also written another book, called Something Wicked, which is also a paranormal romance and also available at the aforementioned websites. I have other stand-alones and series in the works, but right now Something Wicked is the first and only one that I have up so far.

I plan on using this journal to post all kinds of things about both the Lazarus Series and other books that I'm writing. I'll put up coupon codes, so that you can get my books for cheap, give you sneek peeks at upcoming novels and so much more!

I don't know about you, but I need to get back to writing! More to come later!

--C. J. Baker