Rachel Calish's Blog

June 25 at 7:30 p.m. in St. Paul, MN — Reading at Subtext Books

Visit the Subtext Books listing for all the details but here are the highlights:

Four authors: Ellen Hart, me, Jessie Chandler and Christine Glendenning.

Location: 6 West Fifth Street, Saint Paul, Minnesota 55102

June 27 & 28 in Minneapolis, MN — Twin Cities Pride Festival

I’ll be in booth P005 with a bunch of other local authors writing lesbian, bi, trans and queer fiction. Come visit us, buy books, get autographs, hang out with authors and more.

Here’s a handy map of the Pride Festival with our booth circled so you can find us.

July 22-26 in New Orleans — Golden Crown Literary Society Conference

Thursday, July 23 I’m reading at 10:10 a.m. from “The Demon Gabriella.” If you’re at the conference, join me and five other authors for what’s sure to be a fun reading.

Also on Thursday at 3:10 p.m., my smarty alter ego Rachel Gold is on the panel “Do I Have To Go Outside? Research At The Desk And In The Field.” Even though she’s going to do the talking, I can still sign books for you there!

I’m on an 8:30 a.m. panel about writing paranormal fiction on Friday, July 24! Come see if our vampire member survives long enough to attend. Come see if the ghosts can walk in the daylight and if the werewolf has had enough coffee.

The post Upcoming Events appeared first on Rachel Calish.

If you want more stories set in the same world as “The Demon Abraxas,” visit entertheunseen.com to read the free, serial story “Lily’s School for Wayward Demons and Misfit Witches.” In the story you’ll get to see more of Lily from “The Demon Abraxas,” glimpses of Ana and Sabel, plus new characters to fall in love with — including Sabel’s little sister, Theo.

Sabel’s sister Theo is a natural witch shapeshifter and gets into all kinds of trouble!

The post Visit the School for Wayward Demons appeared first on Rachel Calish.

When I first saw the Big Bang Theory episode (The Love Spell Potential) in which Sheldon is rolling dice as his D&D character makes out with Amy’s character, I looked online to try to find a chart of body parts that could be used in a role playing game setting like that. And I didn’t find one, which shocked me. The closest I found was information about how to calculate weapons blows to different areas of an opponent’s body — not what I had in mind.

So I present the d20 chart for sex scenes in RPGs and table top games:

Feet/ankles
Knees
Thighs
Hips
Abs/stomach/sides
Lips/mouth/tongue
Nose
Ears
Neck/collarbones
Fingers/thumbs/hands
Butt
Shoulders
Scalp/hair
Breasts/chest/nipples
Wrists
Back
Perineum
Genitals external
Genitals internal
Random – choose your own or roll again

To really work there should also be a table of actions. I’m open to suggestions for what should be on it.

Also since I’ve been playing Fate Core lately, I’m tempted to figure out how the Fate dice would work for sexy actions. Basically the way Fate dice work, you roll four of them and either get -1, 0 or +1 for a total somewhere between -4 and +4. This is modified by your skill score. Since sexy scenes in RPGs should be awesome, let’s assume that all players get a +4 skill to sexiness, which means your die roll will end up between 0 and 8. 0 is “mediocre” and here are the other dice rolls:

Average
Fair
Good
Great
Superb
Fantastic
Epic
Legendary

One way to play this would be to use four 6-sided dice and declare that action you’re attempting to make as in, “I’m going to kiss …” then roll the dice and add them up. In this example I get a 13 and we subtract 4 (because otherwise we’re rolling 4-24) to get 9 — which means my character is trying to kiss the other character’s neck/collarbones.

Then I roll again and I get 2, 1, 6, 2. In Fate dice, 1 or 2 is a -1, 3 and 4 is a 0, 5 and 6 is a +1 — so my score is three -1s and one +1 for a total of -2, but since I’m awesome with a +4 skill my total score for this attempted collarbones kiss is a +2, which means I delivered a fair kiss.

Theoretically the other character could attempt to resist my charms, for which they would use their Will skill. So let’s run this again: I am going to lick … (17-4=13) the other character’s scalp. (Risky move!) But I roll 5, 6, 5, 3 so I’m at +3 and my natural +4 means I could do an Epic level scalp lick, except that the other character decides to resist. Let’s say she has a +2 to Will. And she rolls 1, 6, 2, 5. That’s a 0 with +2 — and at this point my knowledge of Fate breaks down but I think something like a Superb scalp lick occurs.

Hopefully this is helpful for sexy tabletop RPG scenes. If you see something that should be added or want to point me in the direction of other people who have already done this, just tweet me: @RachelCalish.

The post The Love Spell Potential appeared first on Rachel Calish.

Ever since someone said, “Can you believe they’re sending Dr. Hotpants to Fargo?” I wanted to meet Zoie Palmer. I know it’s dangerous meeting an actor from a beloved TV show – what if they turn out to be completely different from the character? Worse yet, what if they turn out to be like the character? (I’m not saying she offered to turn me Fae, but then I’m not saying she didn’t.)

In person Zoie is charming, gracious, and highly sarcastic. It’s a great combination and almost made me want to trade in my well-practiced blend of neurotic, awkward and incomprehensibly geeky.

We did the interview right after her Q & A session on the main stage, from which I was still laughing. Confronted with a very shy Dakotas & Minnesota audience, Zoie eased into the stunned silence with which they all regarded her by ducking into the Tardis on stage and then asking if she could do her whole session from in there. Somewhat later she asked if its real purpose was a make-out booth (see episode 5, season 6, of The Big Bang Theory for the answer).

She also did a few spins in the Captain’s chair and gave dating/sex advice to the audience at large. It was exceedingly well-received. I can’t quote all of it, but one key tip was, “Don’t annoy your naked dates.” This explains a lot about what I’ve been doing wrong, and I determined to take this advice to heart. (P.S. Zoie, if you ever need it, I have some video footage of you spinning around in the Captain’s chair and saying the Lost Girl version of “make it so.”)

Zoie also said that we’ll get to see more humor from Dr. Lauren in Season 4 of Lost Girl and I’m very much looking forward to it.

If you’re a lesbian or bi-woman with an IQ over 120 you probably believe that Dr. Lauren is the real star of the show. No offense to Anna Silk, but it’s awesome to see a woman winning through science and sheer brainpower. For more about Lost Girl, visit SyFy.com.

A new review is up for The Demon Abraxas! Carleen Spry over at Frivolous Views agreed to jump back into the ocean of paranormal fiction after first experiencing it through Buffy fandom. She writes, “Let me start by saying this:  I’m very happy that I chose this book to reintroduce me to Paranormal novels.”

For the rest of the review, visit Frivolous Views.

Now that the book is out, some people who know me might have realized that my puppy and one of the main characters of The Demon Abraxas share the same name: Sabel. I just wanted to clarify that the character of Dr. Sabel Young came first. Then a clever person who was invested in me having a genetically-engineered super dog (i.e. a Border Collie & German Shepherd mix), suggested I name that super cute puppy, “Sabel.”

The character from the book, who doesn’t even have a puppy, but I’m pretty sure approves of my having one.

My amazingly smart puppy is named for the even more amazingly smart Dr. Sabel Young of The Demon Abraxas.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

However, there is one feature that both share: iron discipline. Although Sabel the character was trained by an order of witches and Sabel the pup was trained by professional dog trainers, they’re both really good at doing what’s needed even when it runs counter to what they want.

I didn’t have a picture of human-Sabel doing anything particularly disciplined, but here you can see Sabel-pup determinedly not eating human food.

The Avid Reader describes The Demon Abraxas says, “I was impressed with this book and really enjoyed it.” Read the whole review here.

 

Last week around Oct. 8th. Apparently there was some javascript in my header that redirected people to a porn site. I didn’t see the site myself but I’m assuming it wasn’t good enough porn to improve my brand. Rats.

Anyway, apologies to anyone who tried to get to my site last week and found it blocked by the search engines. We’re back up and running and taking steps to prevent future hackings, and just in time for the launch of The Demon Abraxas!

In case you were wondering. I even made this dramatic representation of my stance on the serial comma: notice how the predator gets to use serial commas as her weapon of choice.

“Had to be me. Someone else might have gotten it wrong.”