Meet Commando Barbie

About five years ago, I got up the nerve to wear a particular outfit to a romance convention. That evening, I was dubbed “Commando Barbie”. Okay, cool. That was fun. The outfit was great–$12 on the sale rack at a Forever 21 in, like, 1999. It hung in my closet for years because I was determined not to get rid of it until I’d worn it at least once. Thus, in 2003, Commando Barbie was “born”.

I wore it to Comic Con that year and caused a bit of a double-taking stir as I cruised about the Expo floor. One guy in a booth full of knives, swords and various other weapons just stared and said, “Wow…” before he’d even realized he’d said it aloud.

See, Commando Barbie is much hotter, cooler, better than I could ever be. I dunno what it is about her, but she’s really got her shit together. I, however, am her dorky alter-ego. I have difficulty speaking, going places and I’m just so darn uncool. I’m far too shy for my own good and could really learn a thing or two from Commando Barbie. Her social skills are far better than mine. I, in fact, have no social skills.

In a slightly different outfit, Commando Barbie (and her two best friends, Wendy and Jen) met Jamison Newlander and Corey Feldman, the Frog Brothers from Lost Boys–her favorite movie (and mine. We’ve got that in common.)

She even got up close with Gareth David-Lloyd, Ianto Jones from Torchwood. (BTW-you should seriously check out the band he fronts, Blue Gillespie. Awesome, sexy, hard blues. Makes me want to go back to Wales again real soon and catch a concert. I also haven’t been to all the castles in the south yet.) (Gotta love the T-shirt he’s wearing, too. All day long, having his pic taken with numerous women. See, now that’s the kind of skills Commando Barbie has and I could only dream of. That shit’s hilarious!)

Here she is right next to the Lost Boys: The Tribe booth… As herself…

And in her vampire-hunter gear.

I really wish I were as awesome as she is. In fact, walking around Comic Con with my best friend Jen (together, we’re the Ashleigh Raine writing team), I remarked how I wish I wasn’t such a big dork. I mean, here I am goofing off with a Dalek… Yeah, a Dalek from Dr. Who for heaven’s sake. “Exterminate! Exterminate!” Not cool. And there I am dorking it up, trying to be all cool in my camo and failing miserably. Nice. Help me Commando Barbie! Please put me out of my misery!

And what was Commando Barbie doing…instead of a Dalek? Well, she got her picture taken for Hustler magazine…for their “Hot Chicks of Comic Con” project. Of course.

Why can’t I be more like her? Instead, I freeze up when people try to talk to me. I trip over my own feet and quite often I have significant difficulty discerning where my ass ends and my head begins due to their close proximity–one being firmly shoved up the other all the time. *sigh*

When I grow up, I wanna be Commando Barbie. That bitch has everything…

Driven to Distraction available…Finally!

Once upon a time, I was driving in my ‘68 Mustang fastback…just out for a fun drive (gas was still waaaaay cheap back then!). I had a route I used to take which reminded me of a few stretches of road where I grew up and discovered the pleasure of taking the long way home. As I turned the corner, there was a sweet ‘69 Firebird, hood up, with a hot guy standing there.

I couldn’t believe my eyes. It actually took me two blocks of deliberating before I finally said, “Fuck it! I’m going back.” I whipped a U-turn at the next opportunity and then whipped another one to pull up behind him.

He was closing up a cell phone as I came to a stop, but he walked toward me, a smile slowly growing across his lips. It seemed like he was trying to figure out whether he knew me.

Nope. We were complete strangers to each other.

I asked, “Do you need help? I’ve got tools in my trunk.”

He replied, “No, it’s okay. The car just overheated. I’ll be back on the road in a few minutes. No worries. Thanks for stopping, though.”

I hid the fact that my world was crushed and continued on my way to nowhere. *sigh*

Fast forward several years and this was the incident that spawned the opening to a novel…which is now finally available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Borders.

My best friend and I write as Ashleigh Raine and when she decided we should write a novel that takes place in the entertainment industry–but how do we start it?–I knew my little experience was perfect.

Except I get the guy!!!!!!!!!!!!!

We used a bunch of my on-set experiences, including the time I tripped while working on Threat Matrix which spawned a chapter or so. I recall using the base camp and set from one of the times I was on Anchorman. The area for the helicopter stunt was inspired by my night on a music video for 4Mula1 plus a building that served as holding on American Dreams. There were two guys on Ripley’s who inspired both Jay and Levi…and the snake incident. One of the precision drivers on Starsky & Hutch also served as inspiration for both Smitty and Cash. The cars in Jay’s garage include a few similar to ones I own (Viper and Corvette). And then there were the times I went to stunt driving school…failed the first time, passed the second and got to ride along during an afternoon of drifting which served as further research and inspiration just talking to all those stunt drivers. Oh yeah, and the week I spent being paid to drive four exotic cars which inspired the Ferrari F430 being used as a hero car.

As you can imagine, it was up to me for all the car references as well as the on-set stuff, but Jen played a critical role in it. She was my barometer. Whenever I got too technical, she could chime in with such phrases as “I have no idea what you’re talking about here.” and I could tone it down for people who don’t work on their cars and would likely get lost among the trailers on a typical base camp.

Driven to Distraction has a lot of other stuff inspired by my experiences, but if I were to list them all here, this post would go on forever. And since the book is classified as erotic romance, it’s probably better you just go read it. Or at least read some excerpts…

Part of the infamous opening scene inspired by Mr. Hot Firebird: Roadside Attraction
Part of the sex scene inspired by my cars: Garage Rendezvous
Part of a scene inspired by many little friendly races I’ve had: After Race Romp
Part of the scene using a few locations I’ve been on: Helicopter Stunt

 

Back in Action

Well, I at least hope to be now that the hubbub of the holidays is over. I’ve got a stack of Tales to add as well as some odd things–such as the cause of the funky scent in my Prowler during one of my Tales…

First up, as half of the Ashleigh Raine writing team, I’m happy to announce that Lover’s Talisman has released from Samhain Publishing as of today. Check it out! Spiffed up and waaaaaaaay sexier, too!

Also, now that I did actually get a miraculous call-back on The Changeling, I’ve posted the Tale. This is a very large budget movie starring Angelina Jolie and directed by Clint Eastwood. It was hard not to be fangirl and even harder to believe that yes, I was on a movie set with Angelina Jolie and Clint Eastwood. OMG! I still get all giddy when I think about it!

2007 was a year for that. I mean, I got paid to drive and evaluate Ferraris, Maseratis and OMG, I just realised I didn’t actually post that entry! Doing it now! Click here!

Shelfari…

I spend much of my time gazing off into space above my computer screen. When my eyes focus, they read the spines of several books, so I figured why not spend a few minutes and open up a Shelfari account. Plus, if I have them all up there and need to refresh my memory about whether or not I have a particular book, I can just do a search of my Shelfari shelf to find out if I should waste my time digging or just buy a new copy.

It’s kind of a fun way to get to know people, too. It’s like whenever I’m at someone’s house and I find myself next to a bookshelf, I gotta read what’s there just to see what kind of stuff the person’s interested in.

Right now, all I have are books that I’ve written whether solo or as Ashleigh Raine and about a quarter of the ones I can see over my computer screen. It’s the non-fiction section, but I suppose that does say a lot about my interests since I read more non-fiction than anything else. Mostly Medieval and Celtic, too… I couldn’t see all the ghost story books or the tarot and divination ones. Also, the books are double-deep. It’s gonna be awhile before I get everything posted.

I’m actually surprised how fun it was. I suppose as I dig through the mountain and realize just how monumental an undertaking it really is, I’ll change my mind on all that supposed fun. But hey, in the mean time, it brings me joy, so why not?

Yay! Driven To Distraction is available for pre-order!

Dodging explosions, crashing cars, jumping off rooftops…and falling in love.

Sometimes it’s the little things, but y’know, I’m excited nonetheless.

Driven To Distraction by Ashleigh Raine (I’m half of the writing team) is now available for pre-order at Amazon.com!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

A Hollywood Heat Novel

Up-and-coming stuntwoman Blaina Triton stops to help a sexy stranded stranger on the side of the road. Passion ignites hotter than the asphalt beneath their feet and they go back to his place for an anonymous carnal romp. Days later, she arrives on the set of her next feature film only to discover that the man she played out wanton erotic fantasies with is also her boss, Jay Williams. She thinks this job just got a whole lot better, until Jay makes it clear he never mixes business with pleasure.

Jay knows firsthand how distraction can be fatal, but around Blaina, his full, lust-ridden attention strays to her rather than staying on the job. In an effort to regain control, he offers an ultimatum—off set, their relationship is no-naughty-holds-barred, but on set, when they touch, it has to be strictly professional.

Soon their clandestine rendezvous ignite as hot as the movie’s onscreen explosions. As an unstoppable stunt team they are flawless, until the strain of their secret relationship begins to tear them apart. Jay has to make a decision. Walk away from the woman he loves, or allow himself to be driven to distraction…

Warning, this title contains the following: Jay and Blaina are imaginative in their proclivities. There’s lots of sex in, on and around cars. Sex in public places, sex in a hotel room, masturbation, exhibitionism, oral sex, anal sex, spanking, minor bondage of the tie-me-up-and-have-your-wicked-way-with-me kind and sex with a foreign object.

BUY EBOOK
EXCERPT: Roadside Attraction
EXCERPT: Garage Rendezvous
EXCERPT: After Race Romp

Off The Cuff Today…’Cause it’s Friday!

My parents were down this week. We went to some fun places, did some fun things that I wouldn’t've done had they not visited. That’s always nice.

But I think the best part was up in my home theater, on a 127″ screen, I logged in to Second Life to show my parents what the hell I was talking about. My hubby and I had tried to describe it to them, even showed them last Christmas on a laptop, but they still didn’t understand its usefulness, it’s mystique, none of that.

Then, larger than life, I showed my dad the Sistine Chapel on the Vassar sim. The first thing he said was, “Wow! The floor! I don’t think I’ve ever seen the floor! I’ve seen hundreds, even thousands of pictures of the Sistine Chapel, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen the floor! Wow!”

To which I replied, “Watch this!” and flew my camera up to the ceiling and along the walls.

Needless to say, he was hooked and is likely ordering either a new computer or necessary upgrades for the machine he has now as I write this…

We also walked around the Dresden for a little bit. That was cool, too.

He says Second Life is like an internet that you can walk around in and experience rather than just look at or read. I like to think he’s absolutely right.

That’s why if you go to Book Island and Publisher Island, you’ll see a lot of booths set up, but only one is more like an experience. It’s got a big castle on the front and hides a room from Otherness: Rift. Seeing it in Second Life made it real for me…a real experience rather than a written one. But, it’s also meaningless unless you’ve read the book. It’s neat and all to look at, but it doesn’t resonate unless you know that this room had been sealed up, untouched, for over a century and once reopened, had so much more to discover.

But I’m just getting started in Second Life. One of these days, I’ll get advanced enough that I put Talisman Bay (still nothing I can link to on the Ashleigh Raine site, but there will be very, very soon!)  in world. Now that would truly kick ass!!!! (I’ll have to figure out how to get all of the Shadow Walkers on patrol every day. But good golly, that’d be soooooooo worth the effort!!!!!)

More on The Swordswoman and its book report

I like to think, somewhere underneath it all, there’s a little bit of The Swordswoman in Otherness: Rift. Granted, I like to add in more characters and have many points of view and I tend to stay in this world, but add lots of magic and mysterious phenomena, but underneath it all, it was that book that got me fascinated by fantasy and parallel worlds and thinking outside of the reality of this world. The usual sword and sorcery, dragon books were too far from where I wanted to be.

As an added bonus, when I found the Swordswoman book report, I also found the very first book I’d ever written. It was for school, bound in a cardboard and shelf paper cover (probably an arts and crafts component in combination with the creative writing one), and I got a resounding A on it, but what’s more fascinating is that tucked away with it was a complete character and world outline…and a sequel I’d written just for the fun of it.

Seeing those extra pages reminded me of a time when I first started thinking that maybe someday I’d like be a writer. It also reminded me that since that first book, I really did keep writing for pleasure one way or another. Sometimes fiction, sometimes more like memoir in my journals, but never letting longer than a month pass between entries or stories…even to this day.

If I can muster some nerve, I’ll post that first book here… I’d even illustrated it! It’s called The Fighting Four, it’s sequel, The Engaging Eight. (Yes, even back then, I was good at bad alliteration [see Orgasm Fairy by Ashleigh Raine. I wrote all of the bad erotic poetry in the opening scene...one of my many hidden, brilliant, useless talents.])

According to the title page of The Fighting Four, it was written in 1986. I was in 6th grade. About 12 years old.

That was the same year I wrote The Three Witches From The Planet Zebtron. I am still trying to find Zebtron again, but in the mean time, I’m enjoying the other treasures I’ve unearthed while in my quest for my first story… See, even back then I was mixing genres. No romance yet, though. But I hadn’t really discovered boys yet, either. That’d come a few years later.

…And include my best friend Jennifer, a troll, a flying sword, a now cult classic movie, a whole lot of imagination, determination and a bunch of miscellaneous scribblings that to this day I continue to find folded amid other unimportant schoolwork. Yeah, The Swordswoman happened for me in 1986, followed by The Fighting Four and various little stories until the genesis of Talisman Bay with Jennifer in 1989.

From then on, everything was somehow connected either to Talisman Bay or used elements of it. Read Otherness: Rift. and then Lover’s Talisman (being re-released from Samhain Publishing in January, 2008) and tell me about the similarities…

All’s well that ends…well…

Since my last post, I’ve pulled apart my car and found that it wasn’t a cracked crankshaft, it was a loose flexplate.

A little bit of loc-tite and a whole lot of wrenching later, I got the car back together and started her up. Perfect.

Except that when I dinked with the tranny pan to get it to stop leaking, it was the end of a very long day and I goofed when I put the filter on and now I gotta take off the pan again and redo what I’d goofed.

The good news is that’ll take about a half hour tops. The bad news is I can’t seem to find 30 minutes of non-sleep time. Oh well. Perhaps by the end of the week.

I didn’t take as many pics as I’d hoped. I also haven’t looked at what I took. If there’s any worth posting, I’ll of course post them!

It is, after all, Valentine’s Day today, so I’m just gonna toss out a little something related to romance– Ashleigh Raine is going to have some news in a few months. Some really, really good news. I can’t talk about it yet, but oh how I want to.

When I can talk about it, I soooooooo will!!!

Duh…

I did have something newsworthy to report and I have no idea how I neglected it!

Okay, other than that I hadn’t been sure which day Jason had a book signing with Tim Powers until the day was upon us…which had made it very difficult to mark my calendar and mention it here ahead of time. And with the constant flow of life’s activities lately there hasn’t been much time to dwell on events past.

Over the weekend, Jason Stoddard got to share a signing table with Tim Powers. And good golly, I had a wonderful time with Tim and his wife, Serena. They’re a hoot!

I’m still kicking myself for bringing my camera, but forgetting to snap pics. Duh. Duh. Duh. Duh. Duuuuuuuuuh.

Next time, of course.

The store, Bookman in Orange, CA, was phenomenal! I scored some Jude Devereaux titles I’d been needing to replace since a rather unfortunate spring cleaning accident a few years ago in which a bag of ‘keepers’ got tossed because it was next to a bag of ‘giveaways’. In most cases, I even managed to match the old covers, too.

See, it’s Jude Devereux’s fault for hooking me on romance. I was in either 8th or 9th grade–perhaps the summer between the two–when my best friend (the other half of Ashleigh Raine) loaned me KNIGHT IN SHINING ARMOR–which actually belonged to one of her friends and she was worried she’d get in trouble for loaning it to me without asking first. Well, I got it on a weekend and gave it back the following weekend. From then on, I was hooked. Time travel. Romance. I was soooooooooooooooo into that!

A few years later, I discovered Virginia Henley–who at RT 2005 judged my costume as one of the winners! Needless to say, I was in absolute awe.

Oops! I digressed… Sorry, I got a little excited. Books take a person to more places than just the fictional worlds therein.

Anyhow, the signing was fantastic–got to meet a lot of people and then talk amongst ourselves over pizza afterward. That was tons of fun.

…And I’ve already learned a thing or two from the big fat sewing book from 1972 that Jason sprung for. I swear times have changed so much that I get more use out of old sewing books than new ones!

Learning about myself

Here I go again having recently had something happen but yet I was lame about blogging. I honestly have no idea why I do that. It’s not like stuff’s a big secret or I’m afraid or whatever. I mean, I’ll shamelessly wear my geese with stripes shirt in public. Hell, ya’ll should see what I wore over the weekend at the two book signings in Northern California.

[Wow! I just accidentally segued into what I'd set out to blog! COOL!]

There’ll be pictures up soon at ashleighraine.com but I’m not quite ready to post them yet. They need to be resized and stuff. Plus, I’m digging out from the pile of other, older updates that still need to be done.

Anyway, over this last weekend, Jennifer and I (and our great friend Donna) went up to Northern California for book signings in Monterey and Santa Clara. Special thanks to Borders Express because they’re awesome for having such a huge group of authors signing those two days!

Jen and I used those two signings as an excuse to stay at my parents’ house and visit with as many of our old friends as were around.

I could go on and on and on and on about how much fun we had at the signings and getting caught up with friends and all that excitement, but that’s not what I’d intended this blog entry to be about.

I wanna write about what I learned. I was rather surprised, too.

Y’know how you’ve got friends that you don’t see all the time, but whenever you talk to them it’s like you’d never lost touch…aside from all the ’so whatcha been up to?’ catching up stuff? Then there’s the friends that are always around, but they tend to call you before you call them… And then there’s the friends that you always call first–whether it’s because you need their help or they’re just the person you need to talk to right then.

Well, all of the friends Jen and I were with fall into all of those categories. Our friendship range was diverse and we were all wishing the whole crowd was there, but happy with the crowd who made it.

Anyhow, at the end of the first night, my old friend Carrie was making a run up to the corner store for a few things and in passing, I’d thanked her for letting me tag along because I needed to “decompress”. She questioned what I meant and I replied that there are certain expectations of me when I’m out with Jen, etc. and that when I’m out with Carrie, those expectations aren’t the same.

At the time, I didn’t really ponder that thought, but later on, I totally did…And started to realize just how many personalities I have in certain situations–which got me realizing that it’s not conscious…and that they go along with the company I keep.

From there, I realized that I hang out with the people I hang out with–when I hang out with them–because of what they bring out in me. Seriously, if I want girltalk, I call Jen. If I want tomboy, crawling around at the junkyard, I call Eddie, the best man at Jason and my wedding. Obviously, I choose to hang out with my husband Jason the most, but still. I found the whole thing rather fascinating. Just in those three examples, there were three almost completely different ‘me’s. They all intersect, but are not limited to the same list of traits–some are louder than others.

Everyone probably does the same stuff without realizing it, but then I started wondering if there were facets of me I should put forth more often; which ones do I like more? Would it work to mix those facets…say, drag Jen to a junkyard or girltalk with Eddie? Probably not. And that’s what makes them unique and my friendships with them so wonderful. I dunno. To me, discovering this kind of stuff about myself is fascinating.

Of course, from now on, I’m gonna be analyzing the characters in my writing to see if they’re true to life in how they operate with other characters in their stories…see how they mesh and dive a helluva lot further into what makes them who they are and why. I geek on characters already, but this quantification will only make me geek harder and I think that’s awesome.