A Clear Head

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Trees in Seaport Village, San DiegoI apologize for the lack of a post last week, but I was visiting beautiful San Diego, California.  It was a work thing for my day J.O.B., which means I was stuck inside most of the day.  But since Daylight Savings Time was in effect, I had two hours of sunshine to enjoy after each day’s activities.  I’m not one of those that goes to the after-conference gatherings to drink and socialize.  I’m much happier going out and taking a walk, sitting and enjoying the scenery or people-watching (doesn’t every author engage in people watching?), and decompressing for the day with a good book.

Something about traveling for my job, not only do I get to learn new things and network with colleagues from all over the country, but I get a lot of “thinking” time.  And thinking time can usually mean working on my novel in my head.

And I did a lot of that last week.  As I struggle with making my characters real, and building a story that gives those characters something to do, that thinking time is exactly what I need.  When I’m home, there is laundry, meals to be cooked, the television is blaring in the other room, my daughter may be (badly) practicing her flute.  There are phone calls to make, bills to pay, floors to mop, gardens to weed… One would think I could do some thinking while folding a load of warm towels fresh from the dryer, but apparently not.  I’m usually thinking about the next chore that needs to be done.

Away from home, my only concern is where I’m going to have dinner that night, and what time I should go to bed in order to be up at a reasonable hour the next morning for my next session.  No cleaning, no bed-making, no meal preparation.  Easy-peasy.

So my brain wanders off a lot.  What if the purposely distanced father decides he wants to have more to do with the daughter he abandoned all those years ago?  What if my artist heroine shows her obsession with the hero, the guy she has known most of her life, by putting his face in every mural she paints around town?  And that hero, a butcher, but also a musician, what would happen if he could hear the ghost that the heroine hears?  How would he react, and what would he do about it?  And could he give up his learned career to make music instead?

Plenty of puzzle pieces there to work with.  But with thinking time, those puzzle pieces are slowly falling into place.  Not forced, but by shaking everything out and seeing where it lands.  The puzzle pieces that don’t fit are slowly being discarded into the bag of Ideas For Another Novel.  As the puzzle pieces fall into place, a path becomes clear for me to write that story.

If you’re a working mom, how do you find your “thinking time?”  Do you fight with your puzzle pieces the way I do?  Tell me about it in the comments!

Oh, and just for your amusement…apparently this week one of the boats on the San Diego Pier lost control and crashed. I’m posting a video of it below.  This is the same place I was last week, and one of the boats in the background of the video (the Cabrille that you can see just to the right as the Hornblower is coming in fast) is the ferry boat I would take between the mainland and Coronado Island during the week.  Kinda scary stuff!

Witty Comebacks

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Yeah, You and what army?I am the queen of snappy comebacks.  Witty repartee.  Having just the right response for every insult or witty remark

As long as you ask me later, after I’ve had time to think about it, to come up with the best zinger I can.  These things take planning. And there’s that whole “Hindsight is 20/20” thing.

What’s that you say?  You too?  Well, I’ll be…

Being full of words means that I have quite the arsenal to work with.  But it doesn’t mean I’m particularly fast at it.  But as a writer, I can often use those little snippets of responses (and perhaps the insult or witty remark that started it) in my stories.  My heroines are quite amusing, usually ready with a quick, witty response in any situation.  They can crack a joke like a seasoned stand-up professional.  After all, they have access to many years’ worth of witty responses I’ve carefully collected and cataloged over the years.  It might as well be put to good use.

And I like sharp-tongued, quick-witted characters.  Not the mean, painful kind, but those with a quick, amusing response that makes me smile or outright laugh.  Quick comebacks and humor-filled answers can break up an intense scene, relieving tension and stress on the reader.  An intense thriller can be great, but you need a break here and there to allow the reader to catch their breath.

I just wish I could come up with these zingers when I need them in real life.  Seems such a shame to be able to come up with them later, when they do much less good!

Do you use humor, witty one-liners, and comebacks in your novels?  Why?  Do your own humorous scenes sometimes make you laugh out loud? Tell me about it in the comments!

 

More Homework

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Since my story is coming along slowly (and I’m a slow writer to begin with), these last few weeks have been spent doing homework.  When we last talked, I was making my way through Goal, Motivation, and Conflict by Debra Dixon.  Since finishing that, I’ve been playing around with a GMC chart for each of the four characters in the book.  Using post-it notes and a white board seems to be the best way to do this, for now.  I can move the post-its around as I figure out what is internal and what is external GMC.  This has helped solidify what I already knew about the characters, but there is much more room to grow here.

William Bernhardt, Creating Character (part of the Red Sneaker series)To that end, I picked up William Bernhardt’s Creating Characters.  This book was recommended by a fellow author.  This book is part of a series of six books called the “Red Sneaker Books.”  Each is a short hit with good, concise information and exercises that can be done to help firm up your stories.  It covers things like plot, story structure, dialogue, style, and premise, along with the character book.  The appendices are loaded with examples, worksheets, and exercise you can do.  Halfway through Creating Character, I am finding that I need to give my characters more to do.  Every story, Bernhardt says, is “character driven.”  He points out some ways of adding detail that I hadn’t thought of yet.  Rolling this into my work with GMC is natural and enhances my ability to problem-solve through the difficulties I’m having right now getting my story written.

Of course, if I’m doing homework, I’m not writing, and that makes me feel bad.  Both Dixon and Bernhardt insist that you need to write every day.  This is so hard for me to do, with all of real life taking much of my energy and time.  There are nights I barely have time to get a shower before bed, with a school-age daughter and plenty of other things I need to do.  Last night I was up until midnight, taking care of laundry so someone would have work clothes, putting some more time in on a baby quilt that I need to make for someone, cleaning up the kitchen from dinner, waiting up for my daughter to get done with her event at school, etc..  And it’s spring.  My workload vastly increases during this time as the gardens need to be worked and planted, there is outside house maintenance to start working on, oh, and yes, my older daughter is getting married in June.  I have a junior bridesmaid’s dress to make for the younger daughter, and decorations to create for the wedding, not to mention scheduling all of the little details for the ceremony and reception.  And I get to run away to a conference for work at the end of March.

So yes, finding daily time to write is hard, but when so many tell me I need to be doing it, then I need to be doing it.  I’m going to take a real hard look at my schedule and see where I can put that time.  Even if it is a half hour, it will be better than no writing at all.  And I need to keep myself from doing things related to writing and calling it writing (like reading Berhnardt’s book and doing the exercises).

Have you read any of the Red Sneakers books?  Have you found them to be helpful?  Do you have book recommendations to help me get my story moving?  Leave your suggestions in the comments!

 

Fairest of the Faire – available now!

Fairest of the Faire book coverBlurb:

Schoolteacher Connie Meyers is suddenly a young widow, her husband killed in a horrific car accident. Heartbroken to find out he had gambled away everything they had, she moves to her sister-in-law’s Midwest home to rebuild her life. A trip to the local Renaissance Faire with her nieces leads to a summer job as a costumed storyteller.

Avowed bad boy and fair performer Gage Youngblood is infatuated with Connie at first sight. Despite his deliberately commitment-free life, and Connie’s don’t-touch-me attitude, he soon has her in his arms, realizing quickly she is also in his heart.

When she is threatened by her late husband’s bookie, he steps into the role of protector, his fate forever sealed with hers.

Available NOW!

Buy at Wild Rose Press:  (eBook and paperback)

Buy at Amazon (Kindle and paperback)

Buy at Barnes and Noble (Nook)

Doing My Homework

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Goal, Motivation, & Conflict by Debra DixonAs I continue to flounder through my current Work In Progress (WIP), I am looking for ways to make the process come together more quickly.  Another author with my publishing house, Peggy Jaeger, recommended Goal, Motivation, and Conflict By Debra Dixon.  I’ve read through it quickly once, but now I am going back through and doing what the book told me to do.  That means I am doing homework! It’s been many years since I’ve been in school, so homework is a bit of a foreign concept to me at the moment.  There’s also that whole “old dogs, new tricks” thing that plagues many of us over the age of 50.  I am no exception.

I originally checked the book out from the library, because I wasn’t sure if it was something I wanted to spend money on or not.  That first read showed potential, so I found a used copy online and bought it.  It’s been a few years since the book was published (1996), and although it’s still in print, used copies are going for almost the same price as brand new.  Still, if it helps me get to my goal (writing a second novel) it will be money well-spent.

And so far, the homework seems manageable, and sort of fun.  Today, I will be watching the The Wizard of Oz, which was assigned in the first chapter.  So, before I can move on (I just finished chapter 2), I need to watch that movie.  There are others on the list, but it is well-known that I am not a movie/television person, so I’m not sure I’ll get through the rest of the list.  I hate losing an evening or sunny afternoon to a movie, even an entertaining one.  My German, semi-rural upbringing makes it virtually impossible for me to sit still doing “nothing” unless it is productive.  If I’m sitting and writing, that’s productive.  But sitting and watching a 2 hour movie is not productive. I cannot fathom how people can spend an afternoon or day or weekend binge-watching some popular television series, unless they are bedridden with illness or injury. It is a foreign concept to me. I do watch sports mostly football and baseball), but it’s always while I’m doing something else – working on a craft project or quilt, cleaning house, folding laundry, etc.   I’m sure I’m not alone in that.

Anyway, back to the homework.  I have seen The Wizard of Oz many times.  Probably at least ten times.  But it has been at least a dozen years since I’ve seen it, and I’m sure there are parts I have forgotten, and will need to know in order to do the homework in GMC.  So I will sacrifice part of a sunny afternoon today to watch a movie, instead of doing something outdoors, or finishing the weekend chores.

Have you read Goal, Motivation, and Conflict?  What do you think of the process, and have you used some of the process (or all of it?) to write any of your novels?  I would love to hear your thoughts!

 

Fairest of the Faire – available now!

Fairest of the Faire book coverBlurb:

Schoolteacher Connie Meyers is suddenly a young widow, her husband killed in a horrific car accident. Heartbroken to find out he had gambled away everything they had, she moves to her sister-in-law’s Midwest home to rebuild her life. A trip to the local Renaissance Faire with her nieces leads to a summer job as a costumed storyteller.

Avowed bad boy and fair performer Gage Youngblood is infatuated with Connie at first sight. Despite his deliberately commitment-free life, and Connie’s don’t-touch-me attitude, he soon has her in his arms, realizing quickly she is also in his heart.

When she is threatened by her late husband’s bookie, he steps into the role of protector, his fate forever sealed with hers.

Available NOW!

Buy at Wild Rose Press:  (eBook and paperback)

Buy at Amazon (Kindle and paperback)

Buy at Barnes and Noble (Nook)

The Cooking Heroine

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Green beans

Some of my home-grown green and royal purple string beans.

My heroines are sometimes so much like me.  Or maybe, I just feel compelled to insert some of myself into them.  After all, who do I know better than myself?  But one thread running through all of my heroines is that they cook.  Every work-in-progress, my published novel, all have a heroine who cooks.  In Fairest of the Faire, Connie makes a mean buckwheat pancake.  In Second Chances, my terrible self-published novel, Genevieve runs a bed and breakfast.  The entire story is sprinkled with her cooking.  In my current WIP, my heroine cooks some plum-braised pork chops, and uses her own canned peaches to flavor her fresh-simmered steel-cut oats.  The historical novel I’ve been piddling with for the last ten years has a heroine who spend all of her time in the kitchen on an Italian estate.  Another WIP that I drag out and work on once in a while woos the hero with a home-cooked Italian meal, even though she has spent much of her adult life traveling the country in an RV as a freelance photographer.

It’s all about the food.

Maybe it’s because I’m fluffy.  Maybe it’s because I like to cook.  Maybe it’s because I like food.  Maybe it’s a result of my generation, where women did cook, and cooked a lot.  Or more likely, it’s how I bring my heroine back to earth.  It’s a way of making her “real” in a way.  I often refer to my heroines as “sweet,” and my stories are sweet as well.  So having a cooking heroine seems natural to me.  Her appeal to most men would be pretty assured.  At least in my mind.

I have read books that were sprinkled with recipes, or where the heroine was a caterer or baker, and there would be recipes at the back of the book that I could try myself.  I always like these types of books.  It’s like getting a bit more for your money.  “Look!  Free recipe!”

I know I don’t think about it consciously.  It is just something that sort of happens.  I am fascinated by recipes, never pass a facebook post with a recipe without clicking, and pick up used magazines from the free table at the library if they have a recipe on the cover.  I love to cook, and spend a lot of time in my kitchen working with delicious ingredients.  Maybe I missed my calling somehow.  Maybe I should have become a television chef.  The thought amuses me.

What down-to-earth things do you have your heroine do?  Is the purpose to make her more “real,” more like a woman you would actually meet in real life?  Do you talk about cooking in your novels?  Let me know in the comments!

Happy Valentine’s Day

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Weddiing RingsToday in the United States, it is Valentine’s Day.  The day of all things love.  The day of all things chocolate and roses.  The day of charm, and proposals, and embellished cards and chocolate covered strawberries.

The history of St. Valentine and his connection to “love” is rather dubious, and I’m not sure how we got to this maddeningly sweet celebration that can be a polarizing event for many people.  Those who have a valentine go all out, and those with no valentine lament the way singles are “singled out” as being single on Valentine’s Day.

The day itself gives me very mixed feelings.  I married my first husband on Valentine’s Day, in a misguided wish to have him remember our anniversary.  We argued loudly outside the wedding venue that day, I remember.  Yet I still went inside and married him.  Gosh, was I stupid!  It was certainly a sign of things to come.

And I met my current husband at a Valentine’s Dance.  We’re still married, have made it more than twice as long as that first marriage.  Things aren’t perfect, but when are they, really?  And my husband is a romantic.  There are flowers, and chocolates, and sappy cards on Valentine’s Day.

You would think that I would be the romantic, since I am the romance writer.  But I’m way too practical for that.  It’s the German in me.  I love flowers, and chocolate, and sappy cards.  But my brain just thinks, “hey, we could have bought ____ with that money.”  My heart may be romantic, but my brain sure isn’t. Not that I don’t appreciate the flowers and chocolate.  You know I’m eating those chocolates.  And sniffing those flowers. And getting moist eyes when I read the sappy card.

As a romance writer, I put a lot of romance in my stories.  Sweet gestures of love like small gifts, a sweet or steamy glance, a small but powerful touch, a romantic meal in a dark cafe or a sunny picnic in a park.  Showing you love someone is not hard, and doesn’t have to be costly or complicated. In fact, I would say the smaller gestures stack up in a much more meaningful way than large ones.  And smaller gestures should happen year-round, not just on Valentine’s Day.  True love happens every day, not just on February 14th.

What gestures do you like on this day, and other days with your partner?  And what do you think about Valentine’s Day?  I’d love to hear your thoughts!

Location, Location, Location

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You’ll pardon me a bit today, I hope.  The Big Game is on tonight, and I’m a bit distracted.  It’s All Broncos, All The Time around here right now.  Half of the people you see walking around anywhere are wearing orange and blue.  Yesterday I found the grocery store packed, with everyone doing what I was doing – buying snacks and chicken wings.  We can’t help it.  We’re Colorado, and this is our team.  Go Peyton!  Not that Cam Newton isn’t a hell of a nice guy and all, but as we like to say around here, “If God doesn’t love the Broncos, then why are our sunsets orange?”

This also means that our local paper was digging through the archives, pulling up interesting stories from years past when the Broncos were in the Super Bowl.  Being a Woman of a Certain Age, I find it amusing that the throwback stuff from the 70’s still seems fresh and new to me.  I mean, wasn’t that just last year?

One of the throwback stories was a recipe from 1978 for an “Orange Cake.”  And the photo with the original article puts the cake in the hands of a woman dressed in a plaid shirt, sitting on a lichen-covered rock with a background of pine trees and blue sky.  I can hear the conversation that took place before this picture was taken.

Orange cake in the mountains

“Delores, we’re gonna have to ask you to meet us up in Rocky Mountain National Park with that cake, so we can get a decent picture.”

(photo courtesy of the Denver Post, photographer Bill Johnson.  Model was food editor Helen Dollaghan.)

Because if we’re in Colorado, we must all live in the mountains, and all of our pictures will show pine trees, rocks, mountains, and blue sky.  I’ve lived here for five years.  I do not live in the mountains, although I live very close to them (less than six miles).  I spend a lot of time in them and have taken plenty of pictures of myself on rocks, with pine trees and blue sky in the background.  But I’m not carrying cake around in the mountains.  Because Magpies love cake.  And we’d all die.  Kind of like what happens on the beach with seagulls when you decide you are going to eat your lunch.

What does any of this have to do with writing?  I like to think many of our preconceived notions about any geographical locale is formed by what we’ve heard, or by what media has portrayed over the years.  If I think of California, I think of Venice Beach.  I’ve never been to Venice Beach.  There are only two places in California I have been – San Diego and the San Jose area.  Neither of those places look like Venice Beach.  But my memories are full of images of people roller-skating on a sidewalk with the beach and the ocean nearby.  Accurate?  Hardly.  When I think of New York, I think of tall buildings and streets where the sun never reaches the ground.  When I think of Texas I think of cowboy hats and cattle walking the streets.  Mexico looks like a small adobe village, with a church, two cantinas, a big stone fountain in the middle of town, and women wearing colorful swirling skirts.

Those are nothing more than ideas that have ended up in my head because they were portrayed to me that way in the first place.  Accurate or not, there they are. Is that picture of the orange cake in the mountains even close to accurate?  Funny, but definitely not accurate.

Are we doing this to our characters when we write?  How realistic are our settings, our locations?  Are we taking the time to do some research, so that our locations feel “real?”  Can we mix the accuracy of the location with the need for some poetic license before we set our characters in our scenes?  I know that now that I live in Colorado, that old draft of a novel set in Colorado is in serious need of a location overhaul.  I made a lot of assumptions, even though I had done some research.  I was pretty off-base.  Like the picture of the orange cake – now that I live here, that picture seems wholly ridiculous.  Not that we don’t bake cakes in the mountains (I live at altitude, and I definitely bake cakes).  But we don’t all have a rock-pine-blue-sky backyard.  The  picture makes me laugh at its silliness.  And I know I don’t want readers laughing at my locations in my stories.  Silly is not really what I’m going for, for the most part.

Not that we shouldn’t or don’t want to idealize our locations in our novels to best effect.  But we should be keepin’ it real.

Now, who wants some orange cake?  Go Broncos!

 

Taking the Bad With the Good

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Who told you you could write, anyway?When you’re new at this author game, you are sure you can “take it.”  You will tell yourself that you can take the criticism, and say, “how bad can it be?”  You believe that you are mature enough, have had enough life experience, that this should roll off your shoulders like water off a duck’s back.  It won’t hurt you, much less make you bleed.

But I’m here to tell you, you are never really ready for the criticism.

It starts with your beta readers, who come back with blunt comments about what needs to be fixed.  Then you sell your manuscript but wait, there’s an editor, and she will be ruthless.  Absolutely ruthless.  The beta readers were like walking on stinging nettles, compared to the daggers the editor will throw at you.  Much bleeding will occur, mostly in the form of red ink (or in this case, “track changes”) on your manuscript.

Then there are the reviews.  Some less than stellar.  Ouch.

As a debut author, with my first novel now out there for the world to see, I now have a much better understanding of the process it takes to get to a published book.  There is a process I went through in each of these three stages.

Beta readers

The comments came back, and I anxiously read them all.  Prick prick prick went the needles in my ego.  Prick prick prick…tiny drops of blood ink.  One reader picked out all my weird…grammar.  She caught all the sentence splices, the incomplete sentences, the improper use of contractions.  Another picked out a glaring plot hole in the first third of the book.  Another took me to task for the first sex scene of the book.  And my writing companion found a weird plot thing, not a hole exactly, but something strange, towards the end.  Tiny drops of red ink.

Editor

When the first round of edits came in, I was so excited that I immediately dived in to take a look.  Boy, was that a mistake.  Every mark was like being stabbed in the heart.  I only got about half-way through reading them before I had to stop, completely demoralized.  She was asking me to chop off the toes and fingers, and dig out the spleen.  I had to put it away for a few days, when I could look at it with a much clearer head.  It was painful.  But I made the changes, seeing where she was going with things, and felt happy with that version that I turned in the second time.

Well, we weren’t done.  The second round of edits came in.  This time, we were chopping off legs and arms, and doing a brain transplant.  Copious amounts of blood ink.  The opening chapter needed to be removed completely and re-written.  The agony!  I agonized for days before editing anything, arguing in my head with my editor about the changes.  I tried to come up with a good way of arguing my point with my editor.  Surely, we didn’t need to be so drastic.  Surely, not the whole beginning!  Agony.  Pure agony.  I finally gave myself a stern talking to, packed up my laptop, notes, and printout of that first chapter, and took a short retreat to the mountains.  I sat in a coffee shop by a little river, watching it snow, while I scribbled and scratched and came up with a new beginning.  It was the best thing I could have done.  I was able to focus completely, hand-writing a rough draft, then typing up the final draft.  It took four hours.  I’m surprised the other people in the coffee shop couldn’t see the blood ink dripping onto the floor.  I had never worked so hard on a story.

I sent it back to my editor, holding my breath.  The third round of edits came back, and they were so minor that I nearly cried for joy.  I had made it!  I had survived the blood ink-letting, and my story was the better for it.  I wondered momentarily why the editor hadn’t given me those big edits on the first round.  But I know now that she was being very smart.  If I’d gotten back he big edits the first time, I’d probably have dissolved into defeat, and never touched the story again.  She started with the easy stuff.  In my case, weird phrasing and filtering words, which I’m particularly bad at.  Once she saw that I could handle those relatively minor edits, she knew I could take the bigger ones.  And she was absolutely right.

Critics and Reviewers

There are always going to be people that don’t like my book.  I did actually have a reviewer make a comment about my cover.  I didn’t design the cover, that was handled by the publisher, so it didn’t hurt too badly to hear that.  But there were others who thought my heroine was too naive, that the bad boy wasn’t bad enough, that the story was too “soft.”  I got good reviews too, so I can’t complain.  But those little pokes of criticism still hurt, still set me back a bit.  As they should.

You see, it really does take all that criticism to make me a better writer.  If I can’t take those criticisms, I will never be able to improve my writing, and sell a second book, a third book, a fourth book…

I’m a big girl.  I can take it.  And if I say it often enough, it will be true.  Or, as I like to say, BRING IT.

How do you take your criticism, and how did you survive your editing process?  I’d love to hear about it in the comments!

 

Using Real Emotion in Writing

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Daisy the catThis past Monday, we had to put our elderly cat to sleep.  She was just shy of 18 years old, and had multiple health problems including extremely high blood pressure, thyroid issues, blindness, loss of hearing, and worst of all, senility.  Poor Daisy would get lost in the only room she spent time in – not able to find her food, her favorite chair, etc.  Sunday night, the Great Cat God took away her ability to walk.  It was time for us to say goodbye, and we made the decision to do what had to be done.  We will miss her, even the crazy, senile iteration of her we’ve been caring for the last two years.  Life is nothing if not changing circumstances, right?

But what does this have to do with writing?  My current Work In Progress opens with the burial of the heroine’s grandfather, who raised her.  In describing her emotions and behaviors at the funeral, I had to draw on resources I didn’t actually have.  I am at a sort of in-between age right now.  My grandparents are long gone, most having passed when I was a teenager, but my parents, while elderly, are still alive and quite well.  So it’s been a while since I experienced heart-stopping grief.

Monday fixed that.  I blubbered my way through the day, so distressed that I didn’t care who saw me sobbing in public.  One pocket of my jeans was full of new tissues, and the other full of used ones.  I went through two full boxes of Puffs, and drank enough water to fill a small swimming pool.  Every day since has had me fighting back tears at least once, but it is getting better.  I’m thankful for that, because my face rather feels like I’ve been in a bar fight, and I’m worried my eyes will stay puffy forever.

But I’m a writer.  So ultimately, I will be finding good use for my very personal experience with overwhelming grief.  I know, losing the grandfather who raised you is not the same as losing a pet, but I would wager that the response, at least for me, would be similar.  With this “refresher course” in grief and how I respond to death, I feel better equipped to put the right emotion into that opening scene, and into the scenes that follow for the next few chapters.  So at least my grief has become a bit of a win, in a way.

Many writers use their own real-life experiences to fill scenes in their novels, and building the right emotions and using realistic emotional responses in our writing is part of that.  We want our readers to feel our character’s emotions acutely.  It is part of getting the reader attached not only to the characters, but to the story.  Nothing bothers me more than an unrealistic story with ridiculously unrealistic characters.  So I want my characters and their emotions to be as real as possible.  Or at least, realistic. I hope to be able to insert some more realistic grief-type reactions and emotion into the opening chapter and subsequent scenes in my current WIP.

Have you used your own personal grief or response to death in your writings?  What about other emotions?  I’d love to hear about it in the comments!

Fairest of the Faire – available now!

Fairest of the Faire book coverBlurb:

Schoolteacher Connie Meyers is suddenly a young widow, her husband killed in a horrific car accident. Heartbroken to find out he had gambled away everything they had, she moves to her sister-in-law’s Midwest home to rebuild her life. A trip to the local Renaissance Faire with her nieces leads to a summer job as a costumed storyteller.

Avowed bad boy and fair performer Gage Youngblood is infatuated with Connie at first sight. Despite his deliberately commitment-free life, and Connie’s don’t-touch-me attitude, he soon has her in his arms, realizing quickly she is also in his heart.

When she is threatened by her late husband’s bookie, he steps into the role of protector, his fate forever sealed with hers.

Available NOW!

Buy at Wild Rose Press:  (eBook and paperback)

Buy at Amazon (Kindle and paperback)

Buy at Barnes and Noble (Nook)

 

Rag-Picking

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fuel for coffee shop writingAs usual, I’m at the coffee shop this morning, jump-starting my weekend.  The picture to the left shows my usual fuel for writing in the early mornings.  24 oz. latte, a banana, and a 24 oz bottle of water.  I always think it will help me perform magic. It doesn’t, but it tastes good, so it’s still worth it.

This week has been busy at the day J.O.B., so much so that I come home completely wiped out and unable to think.  That makes it hard to write at night, so I’ve been reading instead.  And mostly I’ve been reading some older pieces I’ve written, looking for gems to pull together for some sort of a novel.  I call this process “rag-picking.”  As I’ve worked on this particular story idea for the last five or six years, there are a lot of rags to pick through.

And not surprisingly, that big lie we all tell ourselves comes into play.  “I don’t need to write that down, I’ll remember it.”  In this case, I have snippets of this particular story idea in so many places on my hard drive that I can’t seem to find them all.  I know I wrote a bang-up car crash scene (gosh, I’m punny this morning!), but I can’t find it.  Last night I stumbled across an alternate opening scene I’d completely forgotten about, and dang if it isn’t better than the four others I already found.  Some of the pieces are five or six pages, some more than thirty.

Are all these snippets at least in the same folder on my hard drive?  Of course not!  I’ve found them in a couple of NaNoWriMo folders (2010 and 2012), in my usual place (“novels”), and one just hanging out on my desktop.  I found one hiding in the folder for Fairest of the Faire. And I never save things to my desktop.  What the heck was I thinking by putting one of those snippets there?

Who knows!  Writer’s brains are messy.  We leave our stuff everywhere up there in our cerebellum, and once in a while a floating bit of an idea taps us on the shoulder and we follow the idea right down the rabbit hole.  My hard drive is a reflection of what is going on in my brain, I think.  As organized as I usually am, this one thing seems to get out of order pretty quickly.

But that’s okay.  It’s kind of like a walk of discovery, digging around in boxes of knick-knacks and old t-shirts and photos of vacations, finding that gem or two that is worth rescuing.  I’m rag-picking.  Those bits and pieces will make a great quilt of a story someday.

That is, if I don’t end up stuck in the rabbit hole…

I’d love to hear about your current WIP, if you’d like to share.  Leave me a comment!