Lynnette Austin dropped by the virtual offices this morning to celebrate the release of The Best Laid Wedding Plans.  Please give her a warm welcome!

Top 5 Things You Will Never Find in Jenni Beth’s Purse

The Best Laid Wedding Plans is the first in my new series, Magnolia Brides! I’m so excited to be here with you today talking about it and Jenni Beth Beaumont. Her story is about a person finding her way through difficulties and coming out stronger for them. She’s been working as an event planner at Chateau Rouge in Savannah, but things at home in Misty Bottoms are going from bad to worse.

Her parents are struggling with the loss of their son, Magnolia House, her family’s antebellum home, is crumbling, and Misty Bottoms, Georgia, like so many small Southern towns, is dying. She decides to turn her family home into a wedding destination, hoping to help her parents, save Magnolia House, and bring new jobs to the area in one fell swoop.

Jenni Beth and Cole Bryson have a history—and it’s not pretty! Right now, their future isn’t looking very promising, either. She wants to restore Magnolia House while he, an architectural salvager, wants to deconstruct it and sell it off in pieces. A storm is brewing!

Jenni Beth is very dedicated and assumes responsibility for both her family and the entire town of Misty Bottoms. But she loves to have fun, too. She doesn’t love lightly and is very loyal to her friends.

What a woman carries in her purse says a lot about her. But what about what she doesn’t carry in her Gucci bag? I think that speaks volumes, too! So what wouldn’t Jenni Beth ever have in her purse? Hmmm…

1. An expired driver’s license. Jenni Beth is a rule follower. Period.

2. A notebook without a huge list of to-dos. This woman is seriously busy and seriously organized. She’s a little like Santa. She makes a list and checks it twice! So you can be sure that notebook in her purse contains list after list.

3. Nail polish. Between scraping peeling paint from the house and fixing up the rose garden, her nails would just end up chipped. She has too much to do to waste her time with polish—until she has an appointment with clients! At that point, she’ll probably run into town for a quick fix at Frenchie’s Salon.

4. A bunch of crumpled old receipts. I’ll admit you’ll find exactly that in my purse. I am totally disorganized when it comes to things like this. But Jenni Beth? No way. Those receipts will remain uncrumpled as they’re carried home where they will be filed for future reference. Oh, there are days I wish I was more like Jenni Beth!

5. Loose change. Any change she has goes immediately into her bank when she gets home. With the renovation of Magnolia House, every little bit counts. One year for Christmas, her grandmother gave her the bank and a roll of pennies, along with the advice, “If you watch the pennies, the dollars take care of themselves.” She’s always carried those words with her. Now, more than ever, she needs to be frugal.

I’ve enjoyed every minute I’ve spent with Jenni Beth and Cole and their friends. We’d love to have you come visit us in Misty Bottoms, Georgia. We’re a small town, but we have a lot of heart!

See you there!

Lynnette

The Best Laid Wedding Plans by Lynnette Austin

First in the new Magnolia Brides series

ISBN: 9781492617976

Release Date: November 3, 2015

Genre: Contemporary Romance

Publisher: Sourcebooks Casablanca

Summary

SOME DREAMS ARE WORTH WHATEVER IT TAKES

Jenni Beth Beaumont left her broken heart behind when she took her dream job in Savannah. But after her brother’s death, Jenni Beth returns home to help mend her parents’ hearts as well as restore their beautiful but crumbling antebellum mansion. New dreams take shape as Jenni Beth sets to work replacing floors and fixing pipes to convert the family homestead into the perfect wedding destination. However, some folks in their small Southern town are determined to see her fail.

Cole Bryson was once the love of Jenni Beth’s life, but the charming architectural salvager has plans of his own for the Beaumont family home. As the two butt heads, old turmoil is brought to the surface and Cole and Jenni Beth will have to work through some painful memories and tough realities before they can set their pasts aside and have a second chance at their own happily ever after.

Buy Links

Amazon: http://amzn.to/1LB67Qs

Barnes and Noble: http://bit.ly/1OQ4ram

Apple: http://apple.co/1KmbH7G

Books a Million: http://bit.ly/1MRhhRn

Indie Bound: http://bit.ly/1KmbMbg

Author Bio

The luxury of staying home when the weather turns nasty, of working in PJs and bare feet, and the fact that daydreaming is not only permissible but encouraged, are a few of the reasons middle school teacher Lynnette Austin gave up the classroom to write full-time. Lynnette grew up in Pennsylvania’s Alleghany Mountains, moved to Upstate New York, then to the Rockies in Wyoming. Presently she and her husband divide their time between Southwest Florida’s beaches and Georgia’s Blue Ridge Mountains. A finalist in RWA’s Golden Heart Contest, PASIC’s Book of Your Heart Contest, and Georgia Romance Writers’ Maggie Contest, she’s published five books as Lynnette Hallberg. She’s currently writing as Lynnette Austin. Having grown up in a small town, that’s where her heart takes her—to those quirky small towns where everybody knows everybody…and all their business, for better or worse.

Social Networking Links

Website: http://www.authorlynnetteaustin.com/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Lynnette-Austin-253370174807116/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/LynnettAustin

Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/romwriter/

Goodreads: http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/6456915.Lynnette_Austin

 

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In case you missed the following posts, I wanted to put the two links here. A few weeks ago the Italian publisher, TOPIPITTORI, requested permission to translate my interview with Leonard Marcus and post it on their website. So the Italian … Continue reading →

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Science fiction folks know. What they like and don’t like. Most particularly, they know what they love. All about what they love. I’ve been to conventions. Trust me. You can count me among them for I’m just as cautious about a “new” take on a beloved film or tv series. Hopeful, yes, because I want more. But cautious.

Because, seriously. What if They mess it up?

There’s no mysterious and plural They involved in my books. There’s just me. My publisher, quite rightly, expects me to know what I’m doing. My readers do too. So when I returned to write more about Morgan and Sira, I understood the stakes. I had to get it right. Me. All by myself.

Unless…I had help. What if I could find another set of expert eyeballs? Someone who’d recently reread the first six books of the series. Someone who cared about details. Someone who loved the story enough to tell me if I messed up their hopes for it.

Impossible, I thought, but nothing ventured, nothing gained. Having received permission from my publisher to grant access to the unpublished manuscript, I set up a webpage with quiz questions drawn from the series, and launched a Betareader Competition. (You can try it yourself, with answers!)

EGAD! People leapt to participate. It was amazing. I took the top ten respondents and grilled them with a second, tougher quiz. At the end, I’d found my readers. I’m delighted to introduce Carla Mamone and Lyndsay Stuart, winners of a tough job and official betareaders of the first draft of This Gulf of Time and Stars.

Julie: Ladies, whatever made you do all this?

Carla: When I heard about the betareader competition, I thought it sounded really fun and interesting. I’m a very meticulous person, so I knew I could (hopefully) do a good job. Plus, I couldn’t pass up an opportunity to work with one of my favourite authors.

Lyndsay: I was spending a lot of time stuck in a chair with a new baby and needed to set my mind to some work or go crazy.  It was a chance to use my powers for good.  Besides, how could I live with myself if I let the chance go by without even testing myself on the quiz?  

Who am I kidding? While all that is true, the draw was the chance to read the book early!  I’m terribly impatient and all the work was worth it!

Julie: I have to admit, it was wonderful knowing you were both so excited to do this. But it was work. What did you find the hardest part?

Carla: Not being able to tell anyone about the story. I love talking about the books that I am reading, so it was really hard not to talk about such an exciting story. My husband would ask me what was so funny or why I was crying and I couldn’t tell him about any of it. That was definitely the hardest part.

Lyndsay: The characters and the story aren’t mine so who am I to say when they aren’t right?! It was a bit tough to look at things a little more critically than usual – especially when the story was so interesting & exciting that the last thing I wanted to do was flip back and double check things! In a few places I had to highlight the text and admit that I didn’t understand the reasons underlying particular tensions or a character’s reaction to ::cough, cough:: circumstances.

Julie: Carla, you went above and beyond. I do believe I would have trusted your husband. But thank you for being so good about the non-disclosure thing. (Sorry about the tears, but it did help to know where the story had impact.) Lyndsay, when you showed me what you didn’t get, that was great. Very often I’d been obtuse, or found a different way to tweak. Now, I’ll feel less guilt once you’ve told us what was the most fun.

Carla: Not having to wait until November to see what happens next to Sira and Morgan. I also really enjoyed working with you and Lyn. You’re both so kind, I couldn’t ask for better people to work with.

Lyndsay: I bounce-floated around the house for a month, the surprises in the story are so good! Julie doesn’t just dish out surprises, she’s given us clues about the next book too! I have my guesses and can’t wait until you guys read the book. There is much to discuss.

Julie: Back at you, Carla. And the wait’s over now! One thing I’d asked, and you provided, were any bits you especially enjoyed. Thank you both for those.

The crucial factor, for me, in choosing a betareader wasn’t only expertise, for many people had that, but how well—and quickly–you could communicate my mistakes to me. Time was of the essence, as I had only the gap between my submitting first draft and the final galleys in which to make corrections. You were both amazing, but be honest, how hard was it to squeeze this into your lives?

Carla: The timing actually worked out perfectly. I was in the middle of planning my wedding and was getting pretty stressed and overwhelmed. Betareading gave me an excuse to take a break from wedding planning for a few weeks. So, after I was finished, I was excited to get back to planning and didn’t feel as overwhelmed.

Lyndsay: When this competition began I had a 2 month old baby and a 2 year old toddler, all my reading, studying and annotation couldn’t happen until nap time and I knew Julie was depending on me. Eek! I learned that diapers and reading tablets do not mix with pleasing results.

Thankfully it seems that my real world job experience reviewing written material paid off and for once I got to offer helpful suggestions on something I love. Is this what we call a Unicorn? It’s at least Cinderella getting to go to the ball.

Julie: Congratulations again, Carla! And how lovely being a reader was something good at the time. Whew! Lyndsay, as a person who started full time writing with a 6 month old and a 2 and a bit, I tip my hat. It’s hard enough to get to the bathroom, let alone think. Bravo, both.

Both, you see, because I decided to have two betareaders. (As well as a trusty standby third in case.) Why? Firstly, so you could, if you wanted, talk about me behind my back. The main reason, however, was because I saw from your quiz answers regarding the sample scene that you each identified different problems to bring to my attention. I’m not sure you knew that, but I knew I should have you both. How did you choose what to point out to me?

Carla: I tried to find anything that didn’t match the characters’ personalities or descriptions from the previous novels. I didn’t include anything that was specific only to Gulf, unless I felt that it was necessary.

Lyndsay: Hmm, how to answer without spoilers? For example, there was a section where the timeline had a tiny hiccup. A discrepancy of +/- a few hours doesn’t usually jog a reader out of the story, but in this book I had to point it out. It mattered because the characters can’t go out in the dark so the timing issue created an impossible situation.

Julie: Humbled, I was. Grateful, most of all. Thank you, Carla and Lyndsay, from the bottom of my heart. Gulf wouldn’t be the book it is without you, and you gave me the confidence to send it forth knowing those who’ve loved the series will continue to do so. It’s only fair to let you two have the last word!

Carla: I just want to thank you, Julie, for your wonderful books and for letting me be a part of this one. I had a great time!

Lyndsay: To Julie & DAW, I’m very glad to have gotten this opportunity and thankful to all who helped make it happen.

To you, Readers, I must say that at the end of Rift in the Sky Julie promised all of us we “ain’t seen nothing yet.” Julie knows exactly who and what we love and she’s filled this book up with all of it. Wondering what’s next to come is killing me! Until then it’ll be a big treat to read the final, polished version of This Gulf of Time and Stars.

Julie: Thanks again! A last, last word. (I get to do that.) Invaluable as my betareaders’ expert eyes proved–followed by those of my alert editor, copyeditor, and proof readers–please remember the responsibility for consistency and continuity in the Clan Chronicles is mine alone.

As it should be. Enjoy this new installment!

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And now, the giveaway! Enter to win a free copy of This Gulf of Time and Stars, open to participants in the US and Canada. If audio books are more your thing, we’re giving away one of those, too! Listen now to a sample from the audiobook of This Gulf of Time and Stars narrated by Allyson Johnson, courtesy of audible.com

The Clan Chronicles is set in a far future with interstellar travel where the Trade Pact encourages peaceful commerce among a multitude of alien and Human worlds. The alien Clan, humanoid in appearance, have been living in secrecy and wealth on Human worlds, relying on their innate ability to move through the M’hir and bypass normal space. The Clan bred to increase that power, only to learn its terrible price: females who can’t help but kill prospective mates. Sira di Sarc is the first female of her kind facing that reality. With the help of a Human starship captain, Jason Morgan, Sira must find a morally acceptable solution before it’s too late. But with the Clan exposed, her time is running out. The Stratification trilogy follows Sira’s ancestor, Aryl Sarc, and shows how their power first came to be as well as how the Clan came to live in the Trade Pact. The Trade Pact trilogy is the story of Sira and Morgan, and the trouble facing the Clan. Reunification will conclude the series and answer, at last, #whoaretheclan.

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Thank you, Elizabeth, for giving my Two Mice hospitality on your blog. [Nice to have you on, Sergio!]
      I am particularly fond of this little (6 by 7.5 inches) book of mine. Among my books, it’s the one with the briefest text and at the same time the one that took me the longest to write. There was a lot of thinking and editing to get to the final forty-eight words.
      I’m often asked if my books are born text first or pictures first. This is the perfect example of a book that couldn’t be born either way: It was really a matter of working on words and pictures at the same time. You remove a word, you add a picture; you add a word, you remove a picture. I could never have come up with these images based on the words that I eventually decided to use. I wouldn’t know how to illustrate “One island / Two trees / Three tears,” and I couldn’t have written those words independently from the illustrations.
      A big breakthrough while I was struggling to find the right rhythm, came when my editor, Dinah Stevenson, insisted that the book should have a regular number pattern. That’s how I settled on 1-2-3; 3-2-1. It was still a challenge to find the right word for the right situation, while also considering the mathematical play with additions and subtractions, and on top of that being funny, or dramatic, or sweet. I had to move things around quite a bit, but at the end I was very pleased with the result.
      As with most of my books, I created the illustrations using pen & ink and watercolor, my favorite technique. This time, my originals were smaller than the printed page. Once printed, the line looks a bit thicker but also kind of broken and softer, which is nice.       When I work on my illustrations, I start with a very rough thumbnail sketch.Once I decide what the content of that illustration will be, I make a pencil drawing in which I study the composition, the characters’ body language and facial expressions, and any other elements. I like to include interesting (to me, at least) objects, so I do some research before deciding what the basket, say, or the floor tiles, or the fireplace will look like.Once I’m happy with the pencil drawing, I trace it onto watercolor paper (I use rough Arches); then I ink it with a fine nib, and when the ink is dry, I color the whole thing in watercolors.       Children’s books used to be smaller than they are in today’s market. I think of 19th Century chapbooks, or Beatrix Potter’s series. There is something intimate and charming about a small book, which fits naturally in a little child’s small hands. That’s why I’m very happy that the people at Clarion Books agreed to make Two Mice this atypical size. But that’s not the only production detail I’m grateful for. The paper is very nice, of the right feel and weight. The endpapers’ two different colors for the front and the back lead the reader in and out of the story. The colors are very faithful to my originals, which are not always easy to reproduce. The typeface, Century School Book (Leo Lionni’s favorite), is attractive, elegant, and easy to read. For all this, I want to thank all the people responsible for the way the book was designed and produced, from art director Christine Kettner and designer Opal Roengchai, to Donna McCarthy and Sarah Sherman in production.

     Sergio Ruzzier is a picture book author and illustrator. Born in Milan, Italy, in 1966, he moved to the U.S.A. in 1995, where he's been creating stories and pictures for books and magazines. He was a recipient of the 2011 Sendak Fellowship. Sergio lives in Brooklyn, New York. Visit http://www.ruzzier.com to learn more.

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Tonight is a somewhat rare evening off. Tomorrow begins day one in a new volunteer position as an assistant librarian at Harvard–yep, you read that correctly, Harvard . . . Harvard Elementary, in Northwest Ohio. Wait, before I forget, this month, the entire month, is Picture Book Month. Celebrate Picture Books! I dropped off a …

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One of my favorite people on the planet is Heidi Shulz. She’s the author of the delightfully funny book Hook’s Revenge, which was one of my favorite debuts from last year–and now its sequel The Pirate Code is out! Heidi was actually in Los Angeles last month, and I got to celebrate the book’s release day with her. In the first photo, we’d just eaten mountains of pasta in Venice Beach, and Heidi is beaming over a plate of cannoli. <3 Here’s more about the new book: Fresh off a fearsome encounter with the Neverland crocodile, Jocelyn Hook decides the most practical plan is to hunt down her father’s famous fortune. After all, she’ll need the gold to fund her adventuring in the future. (And luckily, Hook left her the map.) But the map proves to be a bit harder to crack than Jocelyn had hoped, and she’s convinced that... Read more »

The post Hook’s Revenge, The Pirate Code: guest post! appeared first on The Midnight Garden.

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There is Always a Reason to Be Jealous

When I was a kid, scribbling stories and beaming when the teacher or my mom displayed them on the wall, authors were as mythical as unicorns. Walking among the shelves of a bookstore felt like walking among giants. It wasn’t until I wrote my first novel that I started to think being an author wasn’t an impossibility.

And that was also about the time when I started to feel jealous. I wanted, more than anything, to be a published author, and as time went on, I became more and more jealous of anyone who already held the keys to elite circle. That feeling just became more and more intense as I wrote manuscript after manuscript, hoping to find the golden ticket into publishing.

I would tell myself, If I could just get an agent, I’d be happy.

And then, eventually, I got an agent. And so I said, If I could just get a book deal, I’d be happy.

And I did. I got the book deal of my dreams. But then I said, If the book could just do well, maybe some awards or hit the list…then I can be happy.

And it did. And I was blissfully, gloriously happy. I had all my dreams come true. A great book deal, a trilogy that hit the NY Times bestseller list, publisher sponsored book tours, fan letters, literally everything I ever wanted.

But there is always a reason to be jealous.

Always.

Someone else hit the list higher. Someone else got a bigger deal. Someone else is heralded as the height of the genre. Someone else has higher ratings and better reviews. Someone else has everything I have, but also a nice lake house and isn’t allergic to kittens.

There’s always a reason to be jealous.

Even if you have it all, even if everything’s perfect…it won’t last. It just won’t. I guarantee that even J. K. Rowling worries that her next book will flop and the glory days are over. A number one New York Times bestseller fears that no one will read his next book. An author on the red carpet of the movie based on her book has a niggling fear that this is the peak and everything is downhill from here.

And even if you are riding that high, there is always someone who is higher up than you. There just is. That is the nature of the game. We all want to be the best of the best. We all want to be made immortal through our works. We all want to know that the things we wrote made a difference in someone’s life. And it’s hard to measure what our success is. So we look at things that do measure “success.” Things like author rank, or sales numbers, or who gets invited on a book tour, or who gets the most fan art on tumblr, or who is friends with who, who got a blurb from this other author, or which publishing house is better, or who gets more attention from their editor, or who stays on the list longer than who else, or who even makes the list, and in the end none of that matters.

None of it.

There is always a reason to be jealous.

No matter how successful you are, there is always someone more successful than you. No matter what you think the epitome of your career is going to be, when you reach it, there will be a higher point you want to reach. And that is good. You always want to be striving forward, you always want to be trying to make your art better. But if you become focused on what other people have, you waste your life on jealousy. You become bitter. You start reaching for the false goals. You quit celebrating the success of others, because you’re so wrapped up in yourself.

There are countless reasons to be jealous. But that doesn’t mean you have to succumb to them.

I wrote Paper Hearts for the writer I used to be. The questions I used to have plagued me when I was starting this career path. How do I get to the end? What’s the proper way to structure a novel—is there even a proper way? How do I make my book stand out from all the other ones on sub?

Now, fifteen years, eleven unpublished books, three New York Times bestsellers, one self published book, and countless hours working on craft and working with other professionals, I think I finally have the answers that I needed way back then.

Unfortunately, I can’t travel back in time.

But what I can do is try to help others. I’ve been compiling articles on the things I’ve learned about writing, publishing, and marketing for years, first informally on blog posts, then more collectively on Wattpad. After hitting 100,000 reads, I realized that I should take Paper Hearts more seriously…and that I had not one book, but three.

Fully revised and expanded, the Paper Hearts series will feature three volumes, one each on writing, publishing, and marketing. Paper Hearts, Volume 1: Some Writing Advice will be out on November 1, with the other two following in December and January.

PAPER HEARTS: Some Writing Advice

Your enemy is the blank page. When it comes to writing, there’s no wrong way to get words on paper. But it’s not always easy to make the ink flow. Paper Hearts: Some Writing Advice won’t make writing any simpler, but it may help spark your imagination and get your hands back on the keyboard.

Practical Advice Meets Real Experience

With information that takes you from common mistakes in grammar to detailed charts on story structure, Paper Hearts describes:

• How to Develop Character, Plot, and World
• What Common Advice You Should Ignore
• What Advice Actually Helps
• How to Develop a Novel
• The Basics of Grammar, Style, and Tone
• Four Practical Methods of Charting Story Structure
• How to Get Critiques and Revise Your Novel
• How to Deal with Failure
• And much more!

BONUS! More than 25 “What to do if” scenarios to help writers navigate problems in writing from a New York Times Bestselling author who’s written more than 2 million words of fiction.

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BETH REVIS is the New York Times bestselling author of the Across the Universe trilogy, as well as The Body Electric, Paper Hearts, and the forthcoming A World Without You. She lives in the Appalachian mountains with her boys: one husband, one son, and two very large dogs. You can find out more on Facebook, Twitter, or online. If you never want to miss a thing and also get exclusive insider opportunities, sign up for her newsletter here.

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Fun Facts About THE WRONG BRIDE

By Gayle Callen

Hi! I’ve begun a new trilogy, “Highland Weddings,” set in Scotland. The first book is THE WRONG BRIDE, a story about an arranged marriage meant to bring peace to two warring clans. Here are a few Fun Facts to put you in the mood for my Scottish romance:

1) Scotland is a new country for me! I’ve never set a book there, and I didn’t know what I was missing. Technically, in the early eighteenth century, Scotland and England were united as Great Britain, but the Highlanders believed they’d been robbed of their rightful king. That gave me lots of conflict for my heroine, raised in England, and my hero, a Scottish clan chief.

2) I also tried a brand new century. My medievals were set in the fifteenth century, my Elizabethans in the sixteenth, my Victorians in the nineteenth century. My new Scottish trilogy is set in the Georgian era, the eighteenth century. Everything was different: the clothes, the transportation, the political problems. Lots of research—but I love research!

3) I’ve set the book at Larig Castle, a craggy fortress high in the mountains overlooking a beautiful loch (lake). This part was fun for me, because the first 6 books I wrote were medieval, and it was like I was returning home to an old friend.

4) My heroine Riona is the Cinderella of her family—a cousin not much considered by the earl. She’s not the one betrothed to Hugh McCallum. But when the earl is regretting sending his precious daughter to the wilds of the Highlands, and tries to get out of it, Hugh won’t have it. Since Hugh has never met his betrothed, the earl substitutes Riona for his daughter, and Hugh ends up kidnapping Riona and stealing her away to Scotland.

5) Hugh McCallum is the chief of his clan, but he wasn’t raised among his people. He was taken away to protect him, and now he has to return to win the respect of his clan. He thinks bringing home the promised bride, the path to peace, will win him acclaim. Whoops, he won’t be happy when he discovers he’s got the wrong bride!

So please check out THE WRONG BRIDE and find out why I now love Scotland!

From Gayle: A first kiss is always such a fun scene to write. They’re usually filled with conflict and chemistry and confusion—the three Cs!

Riona shivered, but it wasn’t from the bathwater’s chill. It was from the frightening realization that there was something powerful between them, something that called to her, that made the risks Hugh had taken to have her for himself seem arousing, not just self-serving. There was a place inside her she’d never sensed before, surely a recklessness, a weakness.

“Ye’re strangely quiet, lass,” he murmured.

His gaze lazily moved over her face, dipping to her breasts, where the upper curves were displayed above the soapy water. Her skin felt … prickly, sensitive, even inflamed.

“I’m not done fighting you,” she said at last, almost wincing at how breathless she sounded.

A slow grin curved his mouth, even as he reached his hand to cup her face and tilt it toward him. The shock of his warm palm settling so gently on her skin made her tense, but she didn’t pull away, as if that would show that she’d given up, that she was afraid of what he could do to her … what he could make her feel.

He leaned over the tub and kissed her, his palm guiding her head. She wanted to show him he didn’t move her, that this display meant nothing to her. But his lips were warm, and glided over hers with purpose, parted gently as if he wanted to taste her. She’d never been kissed … She felt her head swim at the sensation that seemed to travel down her body, to her breasts, to the pit of her stomach and between her thighs as if he’d touched her in her most secretive places.

When his tongue traced her lower lip, she jerked back in surprise. He didn’t laugh, just studied her with those gray eyes that were considerably warmer. He kept his hand on her face, and his thumb caressed her cheek over and over.

“Our first kiss bodes well for the future,” he said.

He glanced down to her breasts again, and she stiffened. With a faint smile, he let her go and stood up.

“Dry off,” he said, back to ordering her around. “We have things we need to discuss.”

Not the topics she wanted to discuss, apparently, but she didn’t argue. He turned his back and went to the window, while she hastily dried herself and pulled on a dressing gown Mrs. Wallace had laid out for her, trying to forget the feel of his mouth on hers, and how instead of being afraid or disgusted, she’d felt … aroused. Her cousin Cat had told her one could feel overwhelmed when in intimate situations with a man, and Riona hadn’t been able to understand what she meant. She did now, and felt a new kind of fear—fear of her own reaction and response to this compelling persuasion of his.

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My muse is fickle and unreliable, which is really frustrating for me because I’m the type of person that is constantly busy. I knit while watching TV because being still is not in my body’s repertoire. So when Miss Muse shuts down for a little bit, I tend to get frustrated with her, and she usually responds by dumping three to four great concepts into my lap at once, declares her job done, and disappears again.

She pulled this trick on me in 2013 when the barren waste land that had formerly housed my inspiration suddenly said, “Hey, you should write a Victorian Gothic novel set in an insane asylum about a girl who assists a criminal psychologist in catching killers. Also, she has to pretend to be lobotomized in order to escape her abusive father. That should be easy to deliver, ta-ta.”

To which I said, “Hey, thanks muse. Nice. How do I go about doing that?” But she didn’t answer because she’d already jetted off to wherever she goes when not spouting difficult-to-execute concepts at me. But I already knew the answer: research. I needed to know a lot of things in order to even come close to doing this the right way.

How did insane asylums operate in the 1890’s? How was criminal psychology executed then? How often was it right? Was the science accurate enough that a well-trained person could conceivably have caught a killer based on what they knew about the criminal mind at the time? How were lobotomies performed?

OOPS—snag. Lobotomies weren’t a medical practice in 1890. That’s a pretty huge roadblock for me since the plot hinged on my main character being (supposedly) lobotomized. Shifting the timeframe to 1936, when the first lobotomy was performed in the US, would screw up my plot even more. So instead I needed a feasible situation where a doctor could be aware of the benefits of a lobotomy-like procedure, without…you know…actually calling it a lobotomy. This train of thought ended with me reading this book, and this one. Yes, I was really popular on public transit.

I also read this book, and this book, this one (it has pictures—ouch), and to get the other side of that story, this one. And finally a slightly more relaxing one so that I was familiar with my setting. Then just to be thorough, I took a trip to the asylum where the book is set because I’m a big fan of knowing what the hell I’m talking about.

A year after Miss Disappearing Muse dropped the concept on me, I figured I knew enough to actually start writing the book. Except, no. This was the first time I’d ever attempted to write a historical, and because I despise anachronisms I had to get things as correct as I possibly could. From what kind of lighting was in the room my character waked into (Fire? Gas? Electrical?) to what she was wearing, to the question of whether she was working side by side with “policemen,” “cops,” or “constables,” I found myself in the position of not being able to finish most sentences without a quick fact check.

It was painful, torturous writing – and not only because of what I put the characters through. To make thing worse, I’d spent so much time researching that I’d painted myself into a pretty serious corner in terms of deadlines. I won’t tell you how quickly I wrote MADNESS because you’ll question my sanity, but I will tell you I gained almost fifteen pounds doing it because I basically shut myself in my room and wrote while slamming cheeseburgers. At one point I would’ve accepted a catheter just to get the job done more effectively.

A Madness So Discreet released yesterday, and I’m pretty proud of it. It marks a genre departure from my earlier works—Not a Drop to Drink and In a Handful of Dust are post-apoc survival—but not a departure from what I do best. Which apparently is write rather stomach-churning scenarios while eating.

Told you I’m a multi-tasker.

MINDY MCGINNIS is a YA author who has worked in a high school library for thirteen years. Her debut, Not a Drop to Drink, a post-apocalyptic survival story set in a world with very little freshwater, has been optioned for film my Stephanie Meyer’s Fickle Fish Films. The companion novel, In a Handful of Dust was released in 2014. Look for her Gothic historical thriller, A Madness So Discreet on October 6 from Katherine Tegen Books.

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This October the second in Gwyn Cready’s Sirens of the Scottish series, First Time with a Highlander, comes out! To celebrate, Gwyn’s here to tell us a little bit more about the inspiration behind her time-travel romances AND play a quick game of “Would You Rather.”

“People often ask me why I like to write time travel romance, and it’s a two-part answer, because there are really two questions in there—why do I like to write romance, and why do I like to write time travel.

I began to write with the intention of getting published in June, 1997 to honor my younger sister, who was a poet and photographer and who had died suddenly the month before. The sort of book I wanted to write was a book like the one a friend had given me a few months earlier—Outlander. At that time, I’d never read a romance before, and I COULDN’T PUT IT DOWN. Jamie is the best sort of hero—devoted, funny, brave, smart, and supportive of the heroine. I was so hopped up on the first three Outlander novels, it was pretty much all I could talk about in the spring of 1997—and it was one of the things I talked to my sister about since her college boyfriend had been named Jamie and like the heroine in Outlander, my sister’s name was Claire. It was the last conversations I ever had with her.

So there I am, in 1997, wanting to honor my sister with a book, and certain the book I want to write is a romance like Outlander. Time travel fit in nicely for me. Outlander is a time travel novel, of course, but I’d been a time travel fan before that. The Back to the Future movies are my holy grail of time travel. I loved Somewhere in Time, of course, as well as the Terminator movies, Time After Time, and Groundhog Day. Time travel lets you quickly throw your character into adversity and see if he/she sinks or swims. The question you want readers asking in romance novels is “How, with all these challenges, will the hero and heroine still end up together?” Time travel adds another layer to that tension, specifically, “How will they end up together when each is destined to be in his/her own time?” In my mind, one of the most heroic things a character can do is give up his own time in order to be with the person he/she loves, and that’s always a tender and gripping moment to write in my books.

Which brings us to First Time with a Highlander. Serafina and Gerard were such fun characters to chase through a novel. As with Just in Time for a Highlander, the first book in the Sirens of the Scottish Borderlands series, I wanted to shake things up a bit by having the hero be the person who travels to the past. Gerard is an ad man—and since I spent twenty years working in brand management at a big pharma company, I know what ad men are like. The women in this series hold positions of unusual power for women in the eighteenth century, and Serafina is no exception. She inherited a shipping concern from her father, but her blackguard of an ex-fiancé has run the business into the ground. He’s ruined her socially and financially, but Serafina is not one to take things lying down. She uses herbs she’s, ahem, “borrowed” from a famed spell-caster to summon a man to help her claim the cargo from the ship’s final voyage before her fiancé can get his hands on it. She only needs a man for one night and…well, you can imagine what that leads to in the hands of an inexperienced spell user. But Serafina is willing to pay the price—in fact, she’s quite willing once the smart, dashing Gerard appears.

Would You Rather Question: Would you rather be able to shape-shift or time travel?

I’ve always wanted to be a hawk. They’re so beautiful and hang on the breeze with barely a movement. The downside, of course, is eating mice—gah! Time travel, of course, would be great, too. And there’s always the chance to find Jamie Fraser before Claire does. I’m pretty divided on this one. I think life should be measured by the experiences we gather, and either of these scenarios would have to top.

Title: First Time with a Highlander

Author: Gwyn Cready

Series: Sirens of the Scottish, #2

Pubdate: October 6^th, 2015

ISBN: 9781492601968

From the “master of time travel romance”, award-winning author Gwyn Cready continues her steamy Sirens of the Scottish Borderlands series.

She needs a man—but only for a night

What do you get when you imbibe centuries-old whiskey—besides a hangover the size of the Highlands? If you’re twenty-first century ad exec Gerard Innes, you get swept back to 18th-century Edinburgh and into the bed of a gorgeous, fiery redhead. Gerard has only a foggy idea what he and the lady have been up to…but what he does remember draws him into the most dangerous and exhilarating campaign of his life.

Be careful what you wish for…

Serafina Seonag Fallon’s scoundrel of a fiancé has left her with nothing, and she’s determined to turn the tables. If she can come up with a ringer, she can claim the cargo he stole from her. But the dashing man she summons from the future demands more than a night, and Serafina finds it easier to command the seas under her feet than the crashing waves he unleashes in her heart.

Gwyn Cready is a writer of contemporary, Scottish, and time travel romance. She’s been called “the master of time travel romance” and is the winner of the RITA Award, the most prestigious award given in romance writing. She has been profiled in Real Simple and USA Today, among others. Before becoming a novelist, she spent 25 years in brand management. She has two grown children and lives with her husband on a hill overlooking the magical kingdom of Pittsburgh.

***

Buy Links:

Amazon: http://amzn.to/1Od18Lg

Apple: http://apple.co/1UTdm01

BAM: http://bit.ly/1LfkTjF

B&N: http://bit.ly/1KdVz9j

Chapters: http://bit.ly/1OVBKXF

Indiebound: http://bit.ly/1Lfl8eq

Kobo: http://bit.ly/1LwEJ5N

 

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When I sold my YA contemporary fantasy, Gilded, it was one of those WOW-is-this-really-happening-moments. The elation on a scale of 1-10 was definitely an 11. Not too long after the deal, I visited my editor in New York. Over coffee, we chatted about books and series and what made us fall in love with them. During that convo, we had the “what happens next” talk. I’m not going to lie. I was really excited to think about what would happen next, but also terrified. My editor asked me some tough questions. Did I want Gilded to be a standalone? Two books? Three? But the hardest question was: “Why?”

I didn’t know the answer.

So I went back home and played around with some ideas. I brainstormed and wrote up a potential synopsis, but I really wasn’t feeling future books.

It was actually after my editor sent me her revision letter that everything began to click into place. She asked all the right questions. Sure, they were tough, but as I began to answer them, my world solidified, my characters grew, and in turn, so did I as a writer.

When I turned in my edits for Gilded, I realized I didn’t want to leave that world.

Literally the moment I turned in those edits, I started writing Silvern (book 2). I didn’t follow the original synopsis for the book. Instead, I allowed my characters to take me on an unexpected journey into North Korea. It was invigorating and I was hooked. I wrote that first draft in two months while teaching full time and being a mom.

My agent sent Silvern to my editor. She loved it and bought it. YAY! More celebration. More freak-out moments. But in the back of my mind, I knew the story wasn’t complete. I had left my main character in the most horrible of situations and I knew I couldn’t leave her there. I didn’t think, didn’t ask, I just wrote the next book. And that’s when Brazen (book 3) was born.

So perhaps in many ways, writing this series was based on passion and hearing my characters tell me their story. Even still, I know I couldn’t have written the Gilded series without the seven key elements below.

Quick Tips for Writing a Series

1. Keep a Series Bible

In my series bibles, I keep a section for each character with their physical characteristics, sayings, and personal history. Since I’m a fantasy writer, I make sure I take copious notes on the rules for my world. I also love printing out pictures for visuals of my settings.

2. Timeline

This can be kept in your series bible or on a separate piece of paper. This will help you remember when events occur in your character’s life. It will also assist you when you create the overarching arc for your series. Interestingly, there are many events in my characters’ lives that never made it into the book, but I need to know to understand my characters better.

3. The Hansel and Gretel Technique

So when I wrote the Gilded series, I sprinkled what I call cookie crumbs throughout the books. These not only provided bridges and continuity for the series, but gave the world a fuller, richer feel.

For example in book 1, I introduced a secret tunnel that leads to North Korea, but my main character never uses it. Why? Because I knew she needed it for book 2. Another example, Haemosu (the antagonist) mentions he’s working for Kud, the god of darkness. Kud never has screen time in book 1, but he becomes the focal antagonist for book 2 and 3.

4. Book Arc vs. Series Arc

Remember that each book in your series has its own plot and character arc. But what creates a successful, satisfying series is when the writer has developed an arc for the entire series. There must be a larger, overarching issue or problem that isn’t solved completely in each book. It must grow over the course of the series until the stakes are at an all-time high, culminating in the final book.

5. Plot Like Mad!

So I’m an obsessive plotter. I like to know my end game before I even begin. Because of that, it really helped me create a full series arc. Take the time to make sure your series has a rising conflict, a climax, and a resolution.

6. Let Your Characters Drive

So yes, you should plot, but never forget that your characters are the essence of your story. They must be likeable (your readers will be spending lots of time with them), real, have flaws, a purpose, and grow. Don’t be afraid to let your characters drive your story in unexpected ways because they’ll take you on adventures you never thought you could imagine.

7. Make Your World A Reality

One of my best author moments was when a 7^th grader asked me how to get into the Spirit World. He really believed that the dragons and white tigers in Gilded existed.

To create a realistic world bridge your readers between ours and yours by using the familiar. Think how J. K. Rowling used a train to bridge us. Or Riordan used dyslexia for demi-gods. And don’t forget to make sure your rules are rock solid so your reader isn’t turned off by the unbelievable.

Have you ever wondered if a book you are writing could be a series? For those of you who have written a series, please share your tips as well!

To celebrate the release of BRAZEN, Christina is giving away a Kindle Fire (US only) and a $50 Amazon gift card (international). The letter for this stop is A.

Click here to enter!

CHRISTINA FARLEY is the author of the Gilded series, a YA contemporary fantasy series set in Korea. Gilded was nominated for the 2014 Morning Calm, the 2015 Buckeye award, and the Tome’s It List. As a child, she loved to explore, which later inspired her to jump on a plane and travel the world. Christina’s adventures sparked her to write stories, infusing the real world with fantasy. Currently she writes from home in Clermont, FL with her husband and two sons—that is until the travel itch whisks her off to a new unknown. For more details, check out her website at www.christinafarley.com or visit her on Twitter @ChristinaFarley and Instagram @ChristinaLFarley.

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When I sold my YA contemporary fantasy, Gilded, it was one of those WOW-is-this-really-happening-moments. The elation on a scale of 1-10 was definitely an 11. Not too long after the deal, I visited my editor in New York. Over coffee, we chatted about books and series and what made us fall in love with them. During that convo, we had the “what happens next” talk. I’m not going to lie. I was really excited to think about what would happen next, but also terrified. My editor asked me some tough questions. Did I want Gilded to be a standalone? Two books? Three? But the hardest question was: “Why?”

I didn’t know the answer.

So I went back home and played around with some ideas. I brainstormed and wrote up a potential synopsis, but I really wasn’t feeling future books.

It was actually after my editor sent me her revision letter that everything began to click into place. She asked all the right questions. Sure, they were tough, but as I began to answer them, my world solidified, my characters grew, and in turn, so did I as a writer.

When I turned in my edits for Gilded, I realized I didn’t want to leave that world.

Literally the moment I turned in those edits, I started writing Silvern (book 2). I didn’t follow the original synopsis for the book. Instead, I allowed my characters to take me on an unexpected journey into North Korea. It was invigorating and I was hooked. I wrote that first draft in two months while teaching full time and being a mom.

My agent sent Silvern to my editor. She loved it and bought it. YAY! More celebration. More freak-out moments. But in the back of my mind, I knew the story wasn’t complete. I had left my main character in the most horrible of situations and I knew I couldn’t leave her there. I didn’t think, didn’t ask, I just wrote the next book. And that’s when Brazen (book 3) was born.

So perhaps in many ways, writing this series was based on passion and hearing my characters tell me their story. Even still, I know I couldn’t have written the Gilded series without the seven key elements below.

Quick Tips for Writing a Series

1. Keep a Series Bible

In my series bibles, I keep a section for each character with their physical characteristics, sayings, and personal history. Since I’m a fantasy writer, I make sure I take copious notes on the rules for my world. I also love printing out pictures for visuals of my settings.

2. Timeline

This can be kept in your series bible or on a separate piece of paper. This will help you remember when events occur in your character’s life. It will also assist you when you create the overarching arc for your series. Interestingly, there are many events in my characters’ lives that never made it into the book, but I need to know to understand my characters better.

3. The Hansel and Gretel Technique

So when I wrote the Gilded series, I sprinkled what I call cookie crumbs throughout the books. These not only provided bridges and continuity for the series, but gave the world a fuller, richer feel.

For example in book 1, I introduced a secret tunnel that leads to North Korea, but my main character never uses it. Why? Because I knew she needed it for book 2. Another example, Haemosu (the antagonist) mentions he’s working for Kud, the god of darkness. Kud never has screen time in book 1, but he becomes the focal antagonist for book 2 and 3.

4. Book Arc vs. Series Arc

Remember that each book in your series has its own plot and character arc. But what creates a successful, satisfying series is when the writer has developed an arc for the entire series. There must be a larger, overarching issue or problem that isn’t solved completely in each book. It must grow over the course of the series until the stakes are at an all-time high, culminating in the final book.

5. Plot Like Mad!

So I’m an obsessive plotter. I like to know my end game before I even begin. Because of that, it really helped me create a full series arc. Take the time to make sure your series has a rising conflict, a climax, and a resolution.

6. Let Your Characters Drive

So yes, you should plot, but never forget that your characters are the essence of your story. They must be likeable (your readers will be spending lots of time with them), real, have flaws, a purpose, and grow. Don’t be afraid to let your characters drive your story in unexpected ways because they’ll take you on adventures you never thought you could imagine.

7. Make Your World A Reality

One of my best author moments was when a 7^th grader asked me how to get into the Spirit World. He really believed that the dragons and white tigers in Gilded existed.

To create a realistic world bridge your readers between ours and yours by using the familiar. Think how J. K. Rowling used a train to bridge us. Or Riordan used dyslexia for demi-gods. And don’t forget to make sure your rules are rock solid so your reader isn’t turned off by the unbelievable.

Have you ever wondered if a book you are writing could be a series? For those of you who have written a series, please share your tips as well!

To celebrate the release of BRAZEN, Christina is giving away a Kindle Fire (US only) and a $50 Amazon gift card (international). The letter for this stop is A.

Click here to enter!

CHRISTINA FARLEY is the author of the Gilded series, a YA contemporary fantasy series set in Korea. Gilded was nominated for the 2014 Morning Calm, the 2015 Buckeye award, and the Tome’s It List. As a child, she loved to explore, which later inspired her to jump on a plane and travel the world. Christina’s adventures sparked her to write stories, infusing the real world with fantasy. Currently she writes from home in Clermont, FL with her husband and two sons—that is until the travel itch whisks her off to a new unknown. For more details, check out her website at www.christinafarley.com or visit her on Twitter @ChristinaFarley and Instagram @ChristinaLFarley.

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Hi everyone! I’m so happy to introduce Andy Peloquin, who is a first timer here at WHW with some great ideas to share on shaking the creativity tree for ideas, and then transforming them into something useful. Please read on!

Where Do Great Ideas Come From?

It’s funny how science still has no idea where ideas come from or how they are formed. What part of the brain do they begin and end in? Are they nothing more than electrical impulses between the hemispheres of the brain? If so, how are they transformed into something usable? How does a simple electrical signal end up in the form of a masterpiece like Michelangelo’s David, Van Gogh’s Starry Night, or Terry Pratchett’s Discworld?

Take a look, if you will, at Brandon Sanderson’s The Rithmatist. It’s an entire magical system based on chalk drawings! I’d be willing to bet that he saw some random children drawing on the sidewalk and thought, “Now that’s an interesting idea!”

We don’t really know how ideas are formed, but how do they become something more than just a “brain fart”? How do we transform them from a “cool idea” into an entire concept?

My inspiration comes from the most unique, unusual places. In my brand new series, The Last Bucelarii, the hero is an assassin (an anti-hero, my personal favorite sort). But he’s something much more than human. Stronger, faster, and better than humans, he can’t be killed. In the end(spoiler alert!), it turns out he’s a half-demon.

The idea for the story came in two interesting stages:

Stage 1: At the age of 17, writing was my passion. I’d write ALL the time, and as much as I could. I participated in online writing competitions–even going so far as to win one. I wrote a short piece of fiction from the perspective of a terrified human being chased by some monstrosity/guardian who was inexorable. In the end of the piece, the human was killed. All very graphic, very raw, very interesting.

Stage 2: Flash forward nine years. At the age of 26, I rediscovered my passion for writing. When reading through all the stuff I had written years ago, I found this old piece and LOVED it. That was to be the prologue for The Last Bucelarii (Book 1): Blade of the Destroyer. The POV started as the human being hunted, and the Hunter (the main character) is the implacable “monstrosity” hunting him down. From there, the Hunter became an awe/terror-inspiring assassin feared by everyone in his city of Voramis.

But how did this character become a half-demon? Well, I had to find some way to explain why he was so good at what he did, why he was more than human? I didn’t want to go the route of elves, dwarves, or all the other fantasy races. I was stuck!

At the time, I was addicted to a silly iPad game called Dungeon Hunter. It’s a classic RPG where you hack and slash your way through hordes of demons. Not a real brainiac game, but very fun!

As I was playing, I couldn’t help thinking about how fun it would be to write about demons. There’s so much you can do with them, and they are a classic villain. So what if the main villains of the piece were demons? That would make for a fun story. But the interactions between the villains and the main character had to be realistic. What would make it more interesting? What if the Hunter was actually a descendent of demons?

Boom! Like a bolt of lightning, it happened. I had found my inspiration!

Of course, the story has morphed and changed in many ways since that day. The whole “demon” thing is very done to death, so I had to find a new approach to demons. Once you get deeper into the series, I believe you’ll find it highly satisfying. But in Book 1, it’s all about him dealing with these unstoppable creatures and discovering his heritage.

Earlier, I posed the question, “How do we transform them from a “cool idea” into an entire concept?” That’s the rub, isn’t it?

Lifehacker.com has a unique twist on creativity: “What separates the creative from the not-so-creative isn’t so much the ability to come up with ideas but the ability to trust them, or to trust ourselves to realize them.”

What does this mean? Simple: EVERYONE has creative ideas. You have them in your sleep, as you’re brushing your teeth, while you’re driving, or even on the toilet. But what do you do with them? Do you let them slip from your mind, or do you try to use them to create something amazing?

Here are two keys to taking a good idea and making something of it:

• Not letting it go. If the idea has merit, don’t let it go. Keep thinking about how you can use it. Keep trying to shape it or let it shape your story. See if it works in what you’re currently writing, or consider starting something new. The more you mull over an idea, the more it will develop. You may find that it will totally transform your story, or change the direction. No good idea should EVER be let slip!
• Trusting yourself. How many times have you hit “Backspace” on a word, paragraph, or sentence because you weren’t sure that it was right? How many times have you neglected to write something down because you weren’t convinced the idea was sound? A good idea is a good idea, simple as that! Trust that you can tell the difference between a good and bad idea, and save that idea. Even if you don’t use it right away, it can be useful later on–or in something else. As you learn to start trusting yourself and the source of your ideas, you’ll find that you can turn pretty much anything into something worth reading. Look at what Brandon Sanderson did with chalk drawings!

Take those creative ideas and use them to help you do amazing things! It doesn’t matter where the ideas come from–what matters is how you use them. If you find something interesting, why not try to incorporate it into a current story line or create a whole new story around that theme?

You never know where things will go, or how it will morph and develop. Heck, you could come up with a 5 or 6-book series from a simple idea. I know I did!

The Last Bucelarii (Book 1): Blade of the Destroyer

The Hunter of Voramis is the perfect assassin: ruthless, unrelenting, immortal. Yet he is haunted by lost memories, bonded to a cursed dagger that feeds him power yet denies him peace of mind. Within him rages an unquenchable need for blood and death.

When he accepts a contract to avenge the stolen innocence of a girl, the Hunter becomes the prey. The death of a seemingly random target sends him hurtling toward destruction, yet could his path also lead to the truth of his buried past? 

Amazon ~ Goodreads ~ Andy’s Website

The post Dream Up A Great Book Idea & Make Something Of It appeared first on WRITERS HELPING WRITERS™.

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Please give a warm welcome to Dixie Lee Brown!

Top Five Reasons Why Military Heroes are Hot by Dixie Lee Brown

I’m excited to be here at the Manga Maniac Café today to talk about my top five reasons military heroes are HOT! However you prefer your heroes, maybe you’ll identify with some of these.

5) What makes military men hot? The uniform, of course! A man all cleaned, pressed, and buttoned up automatically lets our heroine know that, if nothing else, he should be able to pick up his dirty clothes and throw them in the hamper. Right? But it goes far beyond that. Even a man in fatigues seems to do it for our heroine. It tells her he’s disciplined, he pays attention to detail, he’s protective, and fresh from the fight.

Remember these great lyrics from this song, Holding Out For a Hero, sung by Bonnie Tyler in the movie, Footloose?

I need a hero

I’m holding out for a hero ‘til the end of the night.

He’s gotta be strong

And he’s gotta be fast

And he’s gotta be fresh from the fight.

A hero fresh from the fight is hot! Of course, it doesn’t hurt if the uniform he’s wearing showcases broad shoulders, thighs of steel, and a chest that screams lean-on-me.

4) The military hero is in top physical condition due to the nature of his job. Garrett, the hero in my new release, is an Army Ranger. Ranger school is grueling by itself, but that’s not the end of a Ranger’s training. When they’re not deployed on a mission or on leave, they’re learning new techniques or improving old ones. These heroes have strong muscles and mad skills! Who wouldn’t go for a hero like that?

3) Military men learn to operate as a unit. The team is crucial. They come to rely on the man next to them and would do anything to protect that man. To the heroine, the no man left behind adage is very sexy! It shows the ability to commit.

2) Our hero exudes integrity and courage. He commands respect with action, words, and bearing. The idea that he will stand firm in the middle of a crisis, and that our heroine can count on him for safety and security makes him a true hero in her sight. Nothing is hotter than knowing your man has your back when it counts.

1) The top reason military men are hot becomes evident when the uniform comes off. No, I’m not talking about those rock-hard abs…or those amazing buns. (Although that sounds pretty good too!) I’m referring to the sensitive man who appears when he removes his armor. The man who can love his woman unselfishly and with abandon, but who might need a little help to realize he’s a hero to her. If you love strong and sensitive heroes, you’ll love my new book.

Woot! That was fun. Thanks for stopping by and please leave me a comment and tell me about your favorite hero.

 

Protecting those in trouble is what Army Ranger Garrett Harding does best. But after helping a feisty redhead toss a couple of losers from her Idaho bar, the woman is anything but grateful for his assistance—in fact, she seems to know him. Worse, she almost certainly hates him.

The only thing Rachel Maguire wants is to send this smart-mouthed, muscled military man packing. She knows Garrett has his own reasons for staying, so when he offers Rachel a deal—two days to prove his worth or he leaves—she reluctantly agrees. Despite wanting to loathe him, Rachel finds herself drawn to his quiet confidence…and the way he fills out a t-shirt.

But when Rachel receives a phone call from the past, everything changes. The stalker who destroyed her life ten years ago is closing in once more. Refusing to put anyone else in harm’s way, Rachel hits the road hoping to lure danger away from those she loves. But Garrett won’t leave this sexy spitfire to face her stalker alone. He’ll do anything to protect her. Even if it means risking his life—and his heart.

Excerpt:

She stood with elbows braced against the far side of the bar, drawing down on the kid with the rifle she gripped like a modern-day Annie Oakley, and Garrett didn’t doubt her threat for a minute. Clearly, however, the dimwitted kid didn’t have the sense to take her seriously. Shit. It chapped his ass to have to take this worthless scum’s side. “Uh . . . Rachel is it? Maybe we should let the police handle this.”

A disbelieving laugh burst from her. “The police are worse than Riley here.”

With her attention solely on the young Riley, Garrett sidled up to the bar, shoved the barrel of the rifle up, and pulled it from her hands. “Trust me. He’s right about this. You don’t want to do that.”

Riley picked that moment to laugh.

“Damn it. Shut up, kid, if you know what’s good for you.” Garrett’s patience was at its breaking point.

Rachel inhaled sharply, and Garrett’s attention jerked back to her. She stared at the door.

“Drop the rifle, Mister.” The new voice was deep and raspy, and it was followed by the sound of footsteps moving closer.

Garrett slowly turned to see the two men from the old Ford pickup standing one on each side of the swinging panels. Both carried sawed-off shotguns. They reminded him of Darryl and Darryl, two no-doubt inbred brothers from an old sitcom he’d watched once. These two weren’t quite as funny, though.

Riley hooted, strode toward Garrett, and confiscated the Winchester. “What the hell are you boys doin’ back here? I told you to go pick up the supplies.”

“We saw this yahoo park and go inside. Thought there could be some trouble.” Darryl #1 smirked as though that’s what he’d been hoping for.

Riley gave him a playful shove. “Oh, and you didn’t think I could handle it by myself?”

“Naw, Riley. Just didn’t want you havin’ all the fun.”

Darryl #2 chewed on a toothpick as he studied Rachel, then swept his gaze to Garrett. “Thought we was just supposed to git the girl. What we gonna do with him now?” The older of the two jabbed his shotgun toward Garrett.

“What d’ya think?” Riley smirked.

What the hell was going on here? This wasn’t some awkward kid trying to coerce a kiss out of a reluctant girlfriend. Not even close. Both parties seemed willing to kill over whatever the stakes were in this little game, and Garrett was sadly out of the loop. He met Rachel’s gaze and cocked an eyebrow in question.

“I’d say I told you so, but the satisfaction would be short-lived. Bet you wished you’d stayed on the interstate now.” She lowered her eyelids, and it appeared she was studying something below the level of the bar, then she slowly opened them again until she was looking into his once more. There was a message in her green depths—if he could only figure out what it was.

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I wrote to author Susan B. Katz, author of ABC School's For Me and several other books, asking her to talk with parents about the power of rhyming stories.

I notice that so many parents love reading these aloud to their kids. Why is that? Why do these stories play such an important part in children's language development? Can listening to stories actually help kids learn to read, even if they aren't reading the words at all? And what do you think makes the difference between a good rhyming book and a bad one -- what do you look for when you read aloud to kids?

Thank you, Susan, for your delightfully fun and thoughtful response.

Make Time For Rhyme
By Susan B. Katz

I grew up on a diet of books by the master rhymer, Dr. Seuss. I devoured Green Eggs and Ham, the Sneetches and that crazy Cat on the Loose. As a teacher for 20 years, I did lots of “rug” read alouds. Rhyme sure does please the little listener crowds. Parents will find that rhyme gives students a feeling of success. Children are able to predict the last word, they love to shout out a guess. That is what’s called a Cloze, and yes, it’s spelled with a Z. In my books, predictable rhyming patterns make clozing easy. Take for example, in MY MAMA EARTH, my second title. Students guess the ending words; that brain engagement is vital. I say, “My Mama makes the hippos snore and mighty lions proudly ________.” Clozing keeps them involved and on their toes so reading isn’t a bore. My most recent book, ABC SCHOOL’S FOR ME, features bears, at school, making all sorts of creations. Students also predict the rhyming words using the colorful illustrations.

Authors are discouraged from writing in rhyme by most publishers, of course. Editors receive a lot of rhyme that is, what we call, “forced.” But, there are those of us who continue to publish in rhyme, confident that children’s love of verse will stand the test of time. Rhyme helps students learn language patterns like: might, tight, bright, sight. This impacts their spelling, long term, so they get more words right. You can teach them that rhyming words live in a family. The “cat, sat, mat” words fill up the leaves on the “AT” family tree. Research shows that children who detect rhyme orally in their early years are much more successful as the time for reading print nears. Even “pre-readers” enjoy rhyme although they’re not decoding books yet. And, as for that Common Core rhyming Kinder standard—consider it met! Rhyming is fun and can even be silly sometimes. Dr. Seuss still offers the best example of funny, whimsical rhymes. Novels in verse are becoming more popular for sure. The most recent Newbery was awarded to THE CROSSOVER by Kwame Alexander.

The English language has so many exceptions to the rules. English Language Learners benefit from having rhyme as one of their literacy “unlocking” tools. I have written all four of my books in verse. Thinking in rhyme is both a blessing and a curse. I rhymed all of my middle and high school speeches when I was young. Rhyme and word play just roll off my tongue. Children like songs and poems, both of which are different forms of rhyme. Prose has a purpose and place too—you can’t rhyme all the time. But, rhyming helps children tune their ears and change out sounds. Rhyming is a natural part of jump roping on playgrounds. “Ms. Mary Mack Mack Mack, all dressed in black, black, black.” I probably haven’t jumped to that since I was very small. But, the rhyme makes it easy for me to recall. For songs that are on your phone, the radio, TV or in a Disney movie, rhyme makes words tickle the tongue, melts meaning into your memory. There is so much power in the rhyming word. For a child’s language development, it is like the wings of a bird.

Can you imagine a world without songs and chants? Rhyming invites imagination, it welcomes, it enchants. You’d be hard pressed to find a child who doesn’t like to play, with words, that is, like: say, day, way, today! I will continue to be a champion for writing and reading rhyming stories. The love lasts forever: college kids listen to rap (a.k.a rhyme) in their dormitories. So, find a good rhyming book that sings and allows kids to cloze. (Once in a while, you can still read them prose.) Rhyme is the foundation of word patterns and song. It makes students feels successful—how could that ever be wrong? Most importantly, rhyme gives children a love of language and reading. You feed your child three meals a day-- consider rhyme a literary feeding. It fuels your child’s brain; helps expand their vocabulary. Rhyme makes reading sound much less scary. Build a banquet of books for those picky readers at bedtime. I promise you, they will be delighted if you just feed them, I mean, read them, rhyme!

Many thanks to Susan B. Katz for sharing her thoughts on rhyme. If you make a purchase using the Amazon links on this site, a small portion goes to Great Kid Books. Thank you for your support.

©2015 Susan B. Katz, via Mary Ann Scheuer, Great Kid Books

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My Near-Death Adventures (99% True!) by Alison DeCamp (February 2015, Crown Books for Young Readers, for ages 8 to 12)

Synopsis (from Indiebound): There are many things that 11-year-old Stanley Slater would like to have in life, most of all, a father. But what if Stan's missing dad isn't dearly departed after all? Armed with his stupendous scrapbook, full of black-and-white 19th-century advertisements and photos, Stan's attempt to locate his long-lost hero/cowboy/outlaw dad is a near-death adventure fraught with pesky relatives, killer lumberjacks, and poisonous pies. His tale will leave readers in stitches, but not the kind that require medical attention.

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Ask most writers what kind of sale they’d like next, and they’ll answer: any kind. The sold kind. The I have another book coming out kind.

But the different kinds of sales play out very…well, differently.

Let’s look at the pros and cons of both options.

The Proposal: Pros

• You don’t have to write the whole book before making a sale!
• The money comes in while you’re working on the book. Fantastic!
• You can write without the stress of wondering if the book you’re working on will ever turn into an actual book.

The Proposal: Cons

•  You don’t have to write the whole book before making a sale.
• Why, exactly, is this a bad thing? (cue pesky inner voices…) What if I run out of inspiration halfway through? What if the plot, which seemed like it would work perfectly in outline form, stops working? What if it isn’t any good?
• Stress. Doubt. Angst. Not the best environment for creative work.
• Also? Synopses and summaries and pitches are really tough to get right.

Hmmmmm. Let’s have a look at the other option.

The Full Manuscript: Pros

• You have time to run the story by your beta readers.
• You have time to get everything working thematically and structurally before an editor ever sees it.
• By the time it’s good enough to send to your editor, you’re probably at least halfway done!
• You get the chance to fall truly, madly, deeply in love with your story without looming deadlines.

The Full Manuscript: Cons

•  You may work for months or even years on a story that isn’t what your editor is looking for.
• You may write a story that you love, and your editor loves, but that can’t make it past the acquisition process.
• It’s tricky knowing when to send a manuscript to your editor. You don’t want to hold on to it too long and overwork the poor thing. But you also don’t want to send it in before it’s really ready, before it’s the quality of book a whole team can get behind.

So if I had my choice, which would I pick?

Well, my first two books, Parched and Audacity were sold as full manuscripts. I loved being able to shape each story into a book I was really proud of before anyone ever laid eyes on it. But I’ll admit, there were some anxiety-filled moments while we were waiting for a sale!

My 3^rd book, A Nearer Moon, and my 5^th book, an untitled Middle Grade, were both submitted via proposal. That vote of confidence from your publishing house from the start of a project is really great. But there’s some stress there too. You can’t ever really get away from it, you just learn how to tune it out while you’re working.

I suppose the submission sweet spot for me came with my 4^th book, a super-secret project I’m not yet divulging the details of. It was the second part of Audacity’s two book deal. It sold as an unspecified YA, with a far-away deadline that gave me security and freedom, motivation and time. Yep, if the literary gods let us pick, that would be my choice.

What about you? What are you hoping for, or what have you discovered works best for you? Whatever your preference, here’s to many submission success stories in your future!

MELANIE CROWDER holds an MFA from VCFA and is the author of three books for children and teens: Parched, Audacity, and A Nearer Moon. Her books have received honors such as Junior Library Guild selection, Parent’s Choice Silver Medal, Bank Street College’s Best Books of the Year and a collective eight starred reviews from Kirkus, SLJ, PW, BCCB, and SLC. She lives in beautiful Colorado; catch up with her online at Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or her website.

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It’s September, y’all! That means the kids are back in school and many of us have a little more time to write. NaNo is coming, which means many of you are gearing up to write that next novel. But sometimes, amidst the excitement of a new project and a new season, worries creep in and threaten to steal our joy. Can I do this? What makes me think I’m qualified? Will I have the time? What if I fail? No one wants to be derailed by self-doubt, so Jordan Holman is here to share some helpful thoughts on how to overcome those negative thoughts and return to positivity.

As a writer, I know that we all have those tiny moments of self-doubt when it comes to our work, but what happens when those tiny moments turn into full-on negative thinking? I’m currently still working on my first novel and, at first, I found myself sporadically writing and then scrapping everything. I went through this process over and over until I almost got to the point where I thought I should just stop writing. Then, one day I got on Pinterest and saw something interesting. I saw this pin that talked about how Veronica Roth wrote a bestselling book before she even graduated college! That was something inspiring to me and it told me that if she could do it, then so could I. Self-doubt is something that not just every writer, but every person, struggles with. So when it comes to your writing, here are some tips to help get you out of your rut and back on track.

Give Yourself a Deadline

A major fear that has crossed all of our minds is that we can’t do it and it’s too big of a mountain to climb. I know it has crossed my mind more than a time or two. Giving yourself a deadline for your project is a way of keeping you on track. That way you can write as little or as much as you want to everyday. You can break down your big project as you build your confidence. Even if you write 500 words a day, that will help break down the mountain of work so it’s not so daunting.

Make Yourself Write

Making yourself write may not seem like the best way to go, but you don’t have to work on your project all of the time. During the summer, I wrote short stories, alternate endings to books—anything that kept me writing. Working on different projects refreshes your mind and opens it up to new ideas that you may not have considered before.

Find the good in your work

Not all of your work is going to be perfect. In the past, I’ve come up with an idea that I loved, then two weeks later, I hated myself for even thinking it up. It’s okay to realize that some ideas may not be right for some stories, but it’s also okay to find the good in your ideas.

Make an outline

A common fear for writers is not knowing where the story is going; that can become an overwhelming thought. If this is a struggle for you, an outline can make the project more manageable. For helpful tips on creating an outline, check out these posts at She’s Novel and Now Novel.

Get Inspired!

Along with other art forms, writing requires creativity. It is an outlet that allows a person to express their ideas and ultimately themselves. To get inspired, try reading, watching a movie, or exploring your neighborhood. If you’re having trouble finding inspiration where you live, then take a trip on Pinterest. It has a lot of cool ideas you can try out.

Believe in Yourself

Cliché, I know, but it’s true. Like I said before, I used to think that I should give up writing. I thought that my work wasn’t good enough for other people to read. Once I surrounded myself with people who believed in my abilities, that led to me believing in myself. The change didn’t take place overnight; I actively worked on my confidence by submitting stories for contests, blogging to get more practice, and enlisting others to read my story. If you believe in yourself and your ability to learn and grow, then you’ll be able to improve your craft. You’ll see the improvements in your writing and will gain confidence in your ability to finish that project and make it awesome.

I know that self doubt is a struggle for a lot of first-time novelists. However, I believe that these struggles that we endure make us not only better writers, but better people. Your literary journey will be full of ups and downs, but if you persevere, you’ll get to the pot of gold, the heroic rescue, or whatever else awaits at the end of your story.

 

 

Jordan Holman is a College Junior who is currently working on her first novel. She studies Media Industries with minors in Communication Studies and English. She is from St. Louis, MO but wants to attend NYU to obtain a Masters in Publishing.

 

 

The post You vs. Yourself: Defeating the Self-Doubt Slump appeared first on WRITERS HELPING WRITERS™.

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You’ve Chosen Your Setting – Now What?

Who cares where your story takes place? Just about everybody.

A well-chosen setting grounds your story in the reality of a particular place and time. It’s more than a flat backdrop against which themes and metaphors unfold. The setting is a character in its own right, and as such helps to propel the story forward, to reveal character, to heighten tension, and ultimately, to provide resolution.

CREATING THE SETTING

Who died and made you God? Setting is your opportunity for world-building. The importance of the right setting is most apparent in fantasy and science fiction writing, but is equally true for mysteries and mainstream fiction. A story’s setting forces the passage of time, unleashes weather, changes seasons and offers landscapes and skylines and history. It imposes restrictions upon your characters, as well as offering unique opportunities and challenges. The city of Paris, France, is real and familiar to many but in my novel, The Paris Key, I had to bring it to life for those who’ve never visited. Setting the story in Paris not only shaped what my characters could do and how, but allowed me to incorporate unique features, such as the city’s subterranean catacombs and the gargoyles high atop Notre Dame, as metaphors for my character’s journey as she unearthed family secrets and determined her own future.

Make it resonate: Evoking the texture of your setting is critical: make your fictional world as tactile and present to your reader as it is to the characters in the story. Address all five senses: sight, sound, feeling, taste—and don’t forget scent! Good or bad, our sense of smell is primal and evocative. An American in Paris may initially be struck by the beauty of its historic architecture, the grand museums, and well-tended parks, but will always remember the aromas of fresh baked bread from the boulangeries, sweets at the patisseries, coffee at the sidewalk cafes, the fresh rain on the pavement and the sometimes funky-smelling waters of the Seine.

Propel your story: Run out of ideas for your character halfway through your story? Look to your setting to ratchet up the emotional stakes for your character and move the story along. In The Paris Key, my protagonist can’t slip easily through her days because she is in a foreign country and has limited language skills. She struggles to understand—and to make herself understood—and even simple tasks are made challenging by a new language, different customs, and France’s legendary bureaucracy.

YOUR MOST IMPORTANT CHARACTER

If you make your setting the heart of your tale it will pump warmth or frigidity, comfort or strife, familiarity or strangeness through the entirety of your story.

Reveal character: Use your setting to reveal aspects of your protagonist’s character, whether through comfort with the surroundings, or conflict, or both. The Paris Key is essentially a tale of reinvention as my protagonist struggles to cope with being a newcomer, a fish out of water, a stranger in an unfamiliar (yet charming, this being Paris!) culture. The sights and sounds of Paris surround her and dictate her internal conflicts. Everyday activities pose new and unexpected difficulties and the struggle inspires constant questions: Is it worth it? Should I give up and go home? What have I done?

Different Time, Different Place: The unique history of the time period is, of course, a crucial part of your setting. Storylines from different eras might take place in the same physical setting, but the passage of time changes and affects the surroundings. The contrast between two different time periods can help tell your story: how have social customs and expectations, governments and communities changed? A secondary tale in The Paris Key has to do with a character damaged by the Basque struggles against the legacy of the Franco dictatorship; his presence in the City of Light, so far from Spain, brings the fight to the streets of Paris and echoes the brutality of World War II. On a personal level, his story becomes part of the family secrets the protagonist find buried in the catacombs.

Heighten conflict and find resolution: Setting can be the catalyst for plot development. Literally and metaphorically, our environment molds us. We may all be the same underneath, but think how different the life experiences of someone born and raised on a farm in California, compared to someone born and raised in Paris. The protagonist in The Paris Key has always held herself apart from others, but she finds this impossible in Paris, partly because of a culture of neighborliness she find herself in, and partly because the foreign setting makes her dependent on the kindness of strangers. As the novel progresses, the catacombs and the streets of Paris are the setting for the story’s resolution, as they reveal their secrets and the protagonist is forced to come to terms with her mother’s story, and the truth about her own past.

DON’T TACK IT ON

Whatever you do, make your setting integral to your book. Give it a purpose. Whether a story is set on a distant planet, in a spaceship, in a small American town, or a large French city, reveal the setting slowly over the course of your story, as you would any character. Allow your readers to “meet” your setting with fresh eyes at first, and uncover the complexity of the environment slowly, through the interactions of the story’s characters. Let the setting help you to frame and arrive at your resolution, as the environment makes its impact known. Remember, your setting can reflect, embody, or fight with your characters, but at the very least it will affect your novel’s emotional landscape, from first word to last.

JULIET BLACKWELL is the author of The Paris Key (Berkley/Penguin; 9/1/15), the New York Times bestselling Witchcraft Mysteries and the Haunted Home Renovation series. As Hailey Lind she wrote the Agatha-Award nominated Art Lover’s Mystery series. She is past president of Northern California Sisters in Crime and former board member of Mystery Writers of America. For more, visit: http://www.julietblackwell.net.

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This morning, Marina Adair dropped by to share a Top 5!  Be sure to enter the giveaway below!

Top 5 Books You’ve Read This Year

1.     Honor’s Splendor by Julie Garwood (I reread this book every year or so)

2.     The Reign series by Joya Ryan

3.     Do or Die by Suzanne Brockman

4.     The Best of Me by Elizabeth Barrett

5.     This Heart of Mine by Brenda Novak

 

About the author:

Marina Adair is a lifelong fan of romance novels. Along with the Sugar series, she is also the author of the St. Helena Vineyard series and the upcoming Shelter Cove series. She currently lives in a hundred-year-old log cabin, nestled in the majestic redwoods of the Santa Cruz Mountains, with her husband and daughter. As a writer, Marina is devoted to giving her readers contemporary romance where the towns are small, the personalities large, and the romance explosive. She also loves to interact with readers and you can catch her on Twitter at @MarinaEAdair or visit her at www.MarinaAdair.com.

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A TASTE OF SUGAR by Marina Adair (August 25, 2015; Forever Mass Market; Sugar, Georgia #3)

A blast from her past…

Charlotte Holden, Sugar’s favorite pediatrician, knows better than anyone that love only leads to heartbreak. Instead, she’s focused on creating the Grow Clinic, an outpatient center for children. All she has to do now is to host the best Founder’s Day Parade in the history of Sugar, Georgia, to win over a big-city donor. Easy as peach pie. Then sexy Jace McGraw blows back into town and utters those three words every woman dreads: we’re still married.

…leads to tantalizing trouble

Jace McGraw was making an offer on his dream business in Atlanta when he was told that his wife had some credit issues. Wait, his wife? The annulment went through years ago—or so he thought.  He’d walked away only to keep his troublemaker reputation from ruining her dreams. But now that they have a second chance, Jace offers Charlotte a deal: he’ll grant a discreet divorce in exchange for 30 days and nights of marriage. Because this time he isn’t going to let her go without a fight.

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SUGAR ON TOP by Marina Adair (April 28, 2015; Forever Mass Market; Sugar, Georgia Book #2)

She’s sassy and sweet

The last thing Glory Mann wants is to become chairman of the Miss Peach Pageant in Sugar, Georgia. Spending months hearing nothing but the clinking of pearls and judgment? No thank you! But when Glory is forced to take the rap for a scandal she didn’t commit, the judge sentences her to head the committee. Even worse, her co-chairman is rugged, ripped . . . and barely knows she’s alive.
He’s ready and willing
Single dad Cal McGraw can’t take any more drama in his life. After a difficult divorce, his little girl became a boy-crazy teenager and his hands are full. The last thing he needs is to spend his down time with the town bad girl. Glory is pure trouble-tempting and tantalizing trouble. But he can’t deny the strong chemistry between them-or how her touch turns him inside out. Now as squabbles threaten to blow up the contest and the town of Sugar itself, Cal must risk everything on the sexy wild card to get a second chance at love . . .

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SUGAR’S TWICE AS SWEET by Marina Adair (November 25, 2014; Forever Mass Market; Sugar, Georgia Book #1)

He’s trouble she doesn’t need…

Thanks to a cheating fiance, Josephina Harrington’s perfect life just crashed and burned. Moving in with her overbearing parents is definitely not an option. No, she needs to prove she can make it on her own. And she will—by turning her great-aunt’s old plantation house into a destination getaway. She’s just not expecting her contractor to be so hands-on—and so totally irresistible. 

…but everything she wants

Bad-boy golf champion Brett McGraw figured his hometown of Sugar, Georgia, was the perfect place to lay low and get his life back up to par. The leggy blonde with a pint-sized pup is the kind of sweet ’n’ sassy trouble he never saw coming. She doesn’t know a nut from a bolt and before long, he’s renovating her house…as she steals his heart. Can he convince Josephina that his womanizing ways are in the past and he’s ready for forever?

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Excerpt: 

“Morning, Dr. Holden,” he said, unfolding himself from the car.

“You’re late.” Charlotte stood and swished her way down the steps toward him. No good morning, no thanks for coming, just a you’re late as though they had plans, as though he’d disappointed her again.

“Sorry,” he said coolly, tapping the face of his watch. “Forgot to set it to Charlotte Standard Time.”

She stopped a few feet from him, and he could see the hesitation in her expression. Hesitation and something else. Something that looked an awful lot like vulnerability. Oh, there was a good portion of irritation and hostility glaring at him through those baby blues, but behind it all was definitely vulnerability. Interesting.

“You’re the one who said we had to go to Atlanta today.”

“I believe you told me you were too busy to make the time,” he said, not sure how he was going to handle six hours in an enclosed space with her. Just standing downwind taking in her floral scent was making him hard.

“I changed my mind.”

Jace looked at her for a long moment, then laughed. She was serious.

“Darling, you don’t change your mind. Ever.” Charlotte Holden might be a Southern belle, but her Kevlar wall of stubbornness could rival a Southern granny’s—and having been raised by the most mule-headed granny in the world, that was saying a lot. Oh, he believed that Charlotte had changed her mind, he just didn’t know why. “So what happened with your debutante sisters yesterday that has you desperate enough to call me?”

“Sugar Peaches,” she corrected. “And since when do you keep up on Sugar gossip?”

“Since you started calling yourself a Sugar Peach. I mean, weren’t the Peaches your mom’s thing?”

Charlotte had once confided in him that she moved to Atlanta to escape the pressure of following in her mother’s footsteps. The pageants and parties and social ladder climbing were Babette’s dream for Charlotte. Charlotte’s dream was to save lives—and she was a master at it.

“Well, it’s my thing now,” she said, and he couldn’t help but notice the resignation in her voice. He wanted to know what else had changed, then realized it didn’t matter anymore. “And that means I have to be back as soon as possible. Founder’s Day is only three weeks off, and I have a lot to do.”

“Yeah, me too.” He had to get an annulment, convince his buddy to fix Hattie’s car, and secure that loan before Dale pulled his offer.

“Good, because as the current regent of the Sugar Peaches it falls to me to plan the Founder’s Day Fair, so this trip needs to be a quickie,” she said, her bossy, take-charge tone making him smile.

“Quickies aren’t really my specialty,” he said. “But who am I to argue with a lady?”

“Easy and discreet, Jace. The last thing I need right now is to explain this to my parents,” she clarified as though he was slow, as though he didn’t know just how anxious she was to put the past behind them. Which shouldn’t have pissed him off, because that was what he wanted, too. But it did.

“Easy and discreet? Kind of like our marriage?” he mused.

She looked at him for a long moment and then slowly shook her head. “Nothing about our marriage was easy, Jace,” she said, and the absolute certainty in her voice made him want to prove her wrong.

“There was one easy thing between us,” Jace said, stepping into her and closing the distance, trapping her between the car and his body. He reached behind her neck, crushed his mouth to hers, and kissed the hell out of her.

Only one touch, and she was kissing him back. No hesitation, no second-guessing, just—pow —debutante to seductress. Not interested to tongue down his throat in two seconds flat.

And holy fucking God, it was perfect. The way she felt, the way she tasted, the way she crawled up his body and demanded more…How had he forgotten this side of her?

That insane pull between them, which he’d convinced himself didn’t exist, wasn’t only burning a hole through his clothes—and his mission—it also wasn’t one-sided. Which told him that he should a) back the hell up, and b) immediately cancel this field trip they had planned. Before things got crazy.

But then she made this sexy little sound in the back of her throat—the one that used to drive him batshit crazy, that still drove him batshit crazy—and he was a goner.

So he deepened the kiss, because why the hell not? Charlotte had her prim and proper hands all over him, and he was certain that this was the best kiss he’d ever had. Hot and needy and raw and so damn desperate it was like driving down the track at three hundred miles per hour with no breaks.

Then he realized that this was not only the best kiss ever, but probably also their last kiss ever, and he slowly pulled back, tugging her lower lip between his teeth as long as he could until the connection finally broke. And damn, he wished he hadn’t stopped.

That one second of uncharged air was all Charlotte needed. Sure, she was breathing heavily, and her gaze was dazed and confused. A mirror image of his own. But within a split second her eyes frosted over and that unflinching fortitude was back.

Not that he was fooled. Jace knew that they had chemistry, remembered how electric they were together, but what had arched between them just now floored him. And it had floored her, too.

Charlotte cleared her throat. “This changes nothing.”

Jace lowered his gaze to her hands, which were resting on the buckle of his belt. “Oh, it changes something.”

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Today I am honored to have two wonderful guests from the Monster & Me series, including the recently released Monster Needs Your Vote (reviewed here). You might remember them from another interview (read it here). There is no better way to get at the story than from the view point of the characters.

Monster and Boy cut to the chase as they answer a few of my hard-hitting questions. Of course, you’d expect nothing less from an interview with a political candidate. Monster is vying for President! Yep, he doesn’t play around folks (well, not much), and aims for the top! Monster’s long-time friend goes along on the campaign trail, giving guidance and help as only Boy can. (NOTE:  Kids, any Boy—or Girl—and any Monster can aspire to this relationship, as enviable as it is.)

HOLD ON, HERE WE GO!

Welcome Monster and Boy. Your new book Monster Needs Your Vote is in bookstores now. The author, Paul Czajak, chose an interesting topic for your 5th book:  politics. What did you think, Monster, when you found out you would be running for president?

.

“First off thanks for having me, any opportunity to get the message out I am up for!”

“MONSTER 2016!! Turn your voice into a roar!”

“Monster we’re no longer campaigning, remember? You already saved the library.”

“Oh yeah, I forgot. Sometimes I forget stuff. Anyway I want to point out when I was running I was my OWN Monster and not an imaginary Monster created by Mr. Paul Czajak. I decided to run for President when I found out I wasn’t old enough to vote. Which is not fair!”

I BELIEVE IN MONSTER 2016!!

True, at first, you simply wanted to vote. Have you ever voted before that day? I know I’m not supposed to ask, but my curiosity is overpowering my good sense. Which candidate did you vote for?

“I never voted before. In fact I didn’t even know what it was until that day. Once I heard about it I thought, “How cool is that?! Being able to voice your opinion on how decisions are made! What an awesome responsibility!” Then Boy told me I wasn’t old enough to vote yet, UNFAIR! So I figured I would run for President and help change that rule.”

Boy has always helped you, like when he helped you choose a Halloween costume, find a Christmas tree, and when he helped you go to sleep. How did Boy help you on the campaign trail?

“Well, he’s very good at making posters, and he’s great at coming up with campaign slogans. He created “A chocolate cake on every plate, a pie in every pot!” I thought that was very clever.”

.

“Thanks, Monster!”

“Even though I really liked that slogan, Dessert For Dinner was probably not the best platform, or issue, to run on. Boy helped me figure out that I should stand behind something that isn’t about what I need but what everybody needs, like a library staying open. But honestly who wouldn’t want chocolate cake for dinner?”

“I like vanilla.”

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“You’re so difficult.”

Boy, I’m curious again. You have a giant amount of confidence when guiding Monster, but he is, like, 100 times bigger than you. Aren’t you afraid Monster might, well, become a monster?

“I don’t get it? Monster is a monster, that’s why his name is Monster. He can’t become a monster since he’s already a monster. Any idea what she’s talking about?”

“Sorry I wasn’t listening, I’m still thinking about chocolate cake.”

In Monster Needs Your Vote, both of you use some odd words and combinations of words, like soapbox (a box of soap?), oratory, platform, grassroots movement (moving grassroots?), “give a voice” (you can do that?) and “all for naught” (who is naught?). What do these words mean and why are these important when running for president?

“This sounds an awful lot like a “gotcha question.” Where’s my agent?”

   “Monster, you don’t have an agent. Plus, I think she just wants to know how you got such a big vocabulary.”

.

“Oh! Mr. Czajak teaches me lots of big words. No reason not to use them when the opportunity presents itself,

“New Hampshire, then to Iowa he caused a rousing raucous,
“Speaking to the voters at the primary and caucus.”

“Monster, no one likes a show off.”

“Tell that to Trump.”

People running for president usually have a running mate, why isn’t Boy your running mate instead of your campaign manager? (Did the author veto that idea?)

“He was going to be my running mate!”

“Monster needs a running mate, “So who’s it going to be?”
“Monster said, “My only choice is you for my V.P.”

“But I never got to that point since it turns out you have to be 35 to run for President. Which, again, is unfair! I know, I’ll run for President and change that rule too!”

I don’t recall from your first adventure, Monster Needs a Costume, if we found out where you came from. President Obama had to show his birth certificate to prove he was born in the U.S.  Running for President is tough to do. Did anyone ask to see your birth certificate?

“It all happened during a debate with one of the other candidates, I think I still have the transcript.”

“A Monster can’t be President, he has no expertise!
“Who is Monster? Where’s he from? I think he may have fleas.”

“Fleas are not the issue, this is just something that misleads
“This country needs a Leader that will focus on the needs.”

“After the debate the officials asked for my birth certificate which showed I wasn’t 35, dumb rule.”

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“Also, I would like to go on record that Monster does not have fleas. That man was just being mean.”

What I really like about Monster Needs Your Vote is all the other monsters Wendy Grieb brought out. There are some interesting-looking monsters. Monster, there is one that sure looks like he/she could be a relative. Do you know any of these monsters?

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“A lot of them came to my Birthday Party this past April! It was such a surprise when I came home from Pirate Land and found all my friends in the house.”

 

I’m so sorry. I missed your birthday party. I bet it was a frightful affair!  Anyway, I think Monster would be absolutely terrific at any sport or getting fit (kids need that—adults, too). Boy, what is next for Monster?

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“We will focus on Monsters message of “Reading Turns Your Voice into a Roar!” for the rest of the election. Then I think Monster might go to school next fall… His sports career will have to wait a bit. Though he will definitely get involved in something.”

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“Yup, like basketball, or swimming, or tennis, or yoga, or maybe surfing or cheerleading…”

.

Ah, Monster, you are such a dreamer . . . I mean you have great dreams . . . um, what I really mean to say is, “Yes! You go Monster!”  So, is there anything either of you would like to say directly to the readers?

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“Read! Read! Read! And support your local library!”

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“What he said, it’s why he’s the best candidate.”

.

That is a fantastic message! Monster and Boy, thank you for stopping by . . . Oh, wait! I forgot to ask one BIG QUESTION. In Monster Needs Your Vote (you have my vote)—DID YOU WIN?

.

“Well I guess someone didn’t read the book. It’s only 350 words, it’s not like it would take that much time.”

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“Monster, I think she’s just pretending to have not read the book to build up suspense. You know, a bit of suspended disbelief on the part of the interviewer.”

“Suspended what?”

“Suspended Disbelief, when something doesn’t make sense, but you let it go for the sake of the story. You know, kind of like if someone wrote a story about a monster who’s too young to vote but then decides to run for President.”

.

“You lost me.”

Monster and Boy, thank you for stopping by Kid Lit Reviews once more. It is always a delight and a surprise!

Boy and Monster, what a pair. You got to love them and I believe you will while reading the Monster & Me series. This is one series that has never disappointed me. The stories and illustrations are full of humor, bold images, and a gentle message no one, not even a Monster, tries to blast at you.

You can start the Monster & Me series with their the latest, Monster Needs Your Vote (reviewed here), as each book can stand on its own (and no, Monster, I do not mean that they actually stand on their own, but that you can read any story without having to read the story before it).

Soon it will be Halloween, a good time to read Monster Needs a Costume (reviewed here). And then Christmas will be upon us and Monster Needs a Christmas Tree (reviewed soon) is the perfect holiday story.

If holidays are not your thing (really, could that be true of anyone?) how about a birthday party story with Monster Needs a Party (reviewed soon), or a story to help you nod off with Monster in Monster Needs His Sleep (reviewed here)?

It sounds like Monster will be heading off to school—for the first time—next Fall and maybe joining a sports team—or the cheerleaders. I cannot wait for those stories. Until then, I hope you have enjoyed this latest interview with Monster and Boy.

And don’t forget to “Read! Read! Read!” Support your public library, and VOTE FOR MONSTER!

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Copyright © 2015 by Sue Morris/Kid Lit Reviews. All Rights Reserved

 

Full Disclosure: Monster & Me by Paul Czajak & Wendy Grieb, and published by Mighty Media Kids. Monster and Boy’s interview answers by Paul Czajak. Images copyright © by Wendy Grieb.  The opinions expressed are my own and no one else’s. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”

Monster & Me Series

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Purchase at  Amazon  IndieBound Books  Mighty Media Kids

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A HUGE THANKS to Paul Czajak!

Filed under: 6 Stars TOP BOOK, Books for Boys, Children's Books, Favorites, Guest Post, Interviews, Picture Book, Series, Top 10 of 2015 Tagged: Boy, Mighty Media Kids, Mighty Media Press, monster, Monster & Me series, Monster Needs a Christmas Tree, Monster Needs a Costume, Monster Needs a Party, Monster Needs His Sleep, Monster Needs Your Vote, Paul Czajak, Wendy Grieb

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Thanks to Gallery Books, I have  a copy of Emma Chase’s latest, Sustained, up for grabs!  First check out Emma’s Top 5 favorite reads, then enter for your chance to win below!

Top 5 Favorite Reads by Emma Chase

1. Gentle Rogue by Johanna Lindsey: James is my ultimate male lead character! Sarcastically funny, possessive, sexy with just the right amount of tender moments to make me sigh. If I was stranded on a desert island, this is the book I’d bring with me (along with the entire Malory series if allowed).

2. The Bride by Julie Garwood: I’ll never get tired of rereading this one – sexy and heart-tugging moments, spirited characters mixed with a tiny bit of intrigue! I love all of Garwood’s historical romances.

3. Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë: I’ve adored this book since I was fifteen years old – the drama, the passion! To me, Heathcliff is the prototype for every romantic “bad boy” who came after him.

4. Beautiful Player by Christina Lauren: Smart, sexy and fun! I love Will and Hanna, they never fail to make me giggle and blush. This book is always a good time.

5. The King by Tiffany Reisz: The Original Sinners Series is simply brilliant – and for me, it’s all about the characters. They’re sharp and complicated and so very funny at times! Every turn of the page is like peeling back a layer and discovering something brand new, making you care even more deeply for the characters and more invested in their unique happy ending.

About Sustained:

Emma Chase, New York Times bestselling author of the Tangled series, returns with a brand new funny, romantic, sexy story!
A knight in tarnished armor is still a knight.

When you’re a defense attorney in Washington, DC, you see firsthand how hard life can be, and that sometimes the only way to survive is to be harder. I, Jake Becker, have a reputation for being cold, callous, and intimidating—and that suits me just fine. In fact, it’s necessary when I’m breaking down a witness on the stand.

Complications don’t work for me—I’m a “need-to-know” type of man. If you’re my client, tell me the basic facts. If you’re my date, stick to what will turn you on. I’m not a therapist or Prince Charming—and I don’t pretend to be.

Then Chelsea McQuaid and her six orphaned nieces and nephews came along and complicated the ever-loving hell out of my life. Now I’m going to Mommy and Me classes, One Direction concerts, the emergency room, and arguing cases in the principal’s office.
Chelsea’s too sweet, too innocent, and too gorgeous for her own good. She tries to be tough, but she’s not. She needs someone to help her, defend her…and the kids.

And that—that, I know how to do.

About the Author

By day, Emma Chase is a devoted wife and mother who lives in a small, rural town in New Jersey. By night, she toils away bringing her colorful characters and their endless antics to life. Writing has always been her passion, and the release of her debut romantic comedy Tangled was nothing less than a dream come true. The subsequent books in her delightful, beloved series include Twisted, Tamed, and Tied. She is also the author of Sustained from her sexy new Legal Briefs series.

US mailing addresses only, please

a Rafflecopter giveaway ,/p.

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Susanna Reich and Adam Gustavson are here today to talk about their latest book, THE FAB FOUR FRIENDS. Take it away!

Susanna: Hi, Adam! I'm excited to chat with you about Fab Four Friends. Here's a question to get us started. I know that you play the guitar. How did being a musician help you in creating the images for the book? Susanna

Adam: Hi there, Susanna! Yes indeed, after all this time since you finished writing and I finished painting, it is exciting to get to talk about things.
      I think being a musician really had quite an influence on how I went about illustrating the book, probably in more ways than I consciously thought about it during the process. There were so many themes and experiences in the story that would be familiar to practicing musicians, whether playing guitar on a bedroom or living room, or rehearsing in a basement, or even playing shows in weird, dimly lit and questionably decorated clubs. It was an interesting experience blending these two sides of my life together, actually. For the sake of visual storytelling, I’d like to think these same experiences— which result in a kind of personalized approach to the pictures’ compositions— had the end result of further humanizing our almost mythically famous characters, allowing the pictures to reinforce the intimacy of the storytelling.
      From a research standpoint, there’s a lot of guitar playing in the book, and a guitarist’s relationship to their instrument is also a very personal thing; people hold them at slightly different angles and at different heights, and the Beatles’ varying preferences for certain instruments over the years is pretty well documented. In that case, it really helps to know what to look for. I also like to make sure the hand that holds the guitar neck is actually playing a chord...
      So, a big question, maybe: what drew you to write a music biography, and why do you think the story of the Beatles’ early development appealed to you as a subject?
Susanna: This is my first picture book about musicians, but my second music biography for kids. My first book was a middle-grade bio of Clara Schumann. It was inspired by my mother, Nancy Reich, a musicologist who wrote the definitive biography of Clara in English (for adults.) As you can imagine, with a musicologist in the family, music, both live and recorded, was played constantly when I was growing up. My mother played violin and viola; her string quartet rehearsed at our house. My father was an opera lover who sang in a chorus. Once, a famous concert pianist ran through her entire upcoming recital on the Steinway grand in our living room. My brother and I were taken to orchestral and chamber music concerts and to opera from an early age, and I had years of piano lessons. I also played string bass in my school orchestra and jazz band, and like most kids in the '60s, I played folk guitar.
      There is always, always, a tune playing in my head, and if I go anywhere where background music is playing (like a grocery store), I come home humming it, usually without being aware of it. My family makes fun of my musical "sponge brain." It's interesting from a neurological standpoint (see: Oliver Sacks), but it can be annoying when I find myself unknowingly humming an inane pop song or advertising jingle.
      As for the Beatles, they were not only my favorite group when I was kid, but in my opinion they were the most important musical group of the '60s. Groundbreaking and trendsetting, both musically and culturally. In writing about them, I chose to focus on the early years because I've always been interested in the question of how and why someone becomes an artist, musician, dancer, actor. Most of my books explore the relationship between childhood experience and artistic creation, not in an academic way, but with a light touch so that kids can relate. I hope readers will be inspired not only to understand and appreciate the art that is everywhere around them (yes, even in the pop song and advertising jingle!), but to continue to be creative and to use their imaginations as they grow older.
      What that in mind, here's a question for you. How and why did you become an artist?
Adam: Well, my earliest inclination was to be a cowboy, but that was only until I found an article in National Geographic about alligators that featured a picture of an alligator farm. Clearly, my calling at that point was to be an alligator farmer. At various other times, I considered archaeologist, rock star, soldier (World War I was my personal preference)... Somewhere along the line I think I realized the only thing that all of my proclivities had in common.
      When I was interested in something, I drew it. I drew it a lot. I researched its minutia, and obsessively rendered it in my sketchbooks. On the other hand, I never thought of being an artist as something that real people actually did; while my family was very artistic and creative—my two brothers and I never played catch, we drew and made action figures out of modeling clay together—my father was an orthopedic engineer who commissioned cartoons from me on a regular basis, my mother drew beautifully and had an astonishing eye, but was a crafter and a hobbyist.
      But when I was a junior in high school and was starting to considered college, my father just said something like, “well, you’re going to be majoring in art, and it looks like there’s such thing as a major in ‘illustration.’” Apparently I was the only person in my life who hadn’t just assumed I’d be an artist. I’m glad I had people around me who might have known me better than I knew myself at 16, or could see my place in the world when I couldn’t. Most of what I’ve been able to do as an artist has come from the encouragement of my parents and family to find my own model to live by, and to keep at it in a world that’s not really built for oddballs and impractical thinkers.
      It’s good that I did. Even now, if I go a day without creating something, I get cranky. Two days and I feel lost and rudderless. I get whiny. Even at my busiest as an illustrator, I need to find creative outlets in between pictures and projects, usually something tangential to the work at hand. If I wasn’t an artist by trade, I’d still have to define myself as one, and I think that as hard as it is to pull off professionally, it has allowed me the luxury of focusing on my craft with far less frustration than I could if it was only my part time love.
      Because in truth, I never stop. When I sit at the table with someone, I’m constantly rearranging objects in front of me or shifting in my seat to arrange the composition I’m looking at. I’m distracted by and constantly trying to memorize lighting effect and abstract shapes that randomly appear. My brain is on a constant search for pictures.
      That brings me to wonder: with all the music and creativity surrounding you in your life, what was it about writing that drew you in? How did writing become your way of expressing other passions and interests?
Susanna: I didn't plan to be a writer. My first love was dance—that was my response to the music around me. I trained at the American Ballet Theatre School in NYC and the Royal Academy of Dance in London, but I didn't really have the right body for ballet, and by college I'd switched to modern. I danced professionally through my twenties. Writing wasn't even on the horizon.
      Then I changed careers and worked as a florist for ten years, mostly weddings and special events. It was like stepping backstage and becoming a set designer. I began writing as a way to promote my flower business. One of my first articles was about wedding bouquets, published in Brides magazine.
      I started writing for kids after my husband and I became friends with the illustrator Ed Young. This was in the early '90s. I joined SCBWI and went to conferences, learned about the publishing industry and the craft of writing, wrote a few picture books and collected rejection letters. When my local children's librarian told me she needed biographies of women, and my mother suggested Clara Schumann, I was hooked. By then, I'd had enough of the high-pressure wedding flower business. I've been writing ever since.
      Of course, dance, floral design and writing have a lot in common--structure, rhythm, phrasing, balance, color, timing, beginnings and endings, foreground and background. In each art form, I've been trying to express thoughts and feelings that are, on some level, inexpressible, because words, movements and designs are only abstract approximations of experience.
      When it comes to writing, I love grappling with words. I've always been a voracious reader and find linguistics and etymology fascinating. I especially enjoy the challenge of finding the best way to communicate complex ideas in a way that kids will understand.
      With Fab Four Friends, I had a lot of fun with the language. I learned so much about the Beatles' childhoods in post-war Liverpool, and wanted to give readers a flavor of that time by including some British slang. As I do with any picture book, I wrote this one spread by spread, with the aim of creating a colorful scenario on each page that would lend itself to illustration. I remember discussing with Christy, our editor, what kind of illustrations I envisioned--fairly realistic, not too stylized or cartoonish, something that would show the energy of rock and roll and the boys' love for it, as well as their grit and determination. Is that how you pictured it when you first read the manuscript?
Adam: Oh good, because that’s very much what I pictured on my first read through. One thing I hoped we could do between the art and the tone of the narrative was to humanize characters that have been so mythologized. A challenge in the art becomes doing this with a set of gents as photographed as The Beatles were: culturally, we can become so used to certain specific, frozen images of our celebrities, that it can be hard to objectively figure out what they look like. My hope in the pictures was to get likenesses right in some unselfconscious way, reducing them into protagonists in a story.
      (In the case of the Beatles, the fixation with parsing reality from “that famous photo” has given way to an amazing array of conspiracy theories that all stem from a thought like, “oh yeah, well if this is what we all know Paul looks like, how come his nose looks different in the other photo?” That was a singularly weird badger hole to crawl down while researching the lads...but I digress!)
      But just like writing about someone so highly regarded, producing a series of artworks that doesn’t caricature or romanticize them is a delicate balance. Trying to come up with something that just feels genuine is quite a trick. The iconic quality our fellers have attained creates another hurdle: does John Lennon, for example, look like John Lennon when he’s NOT being the picture that’s already in your head? Slicked up pompadour and leather instead of a mop top, or the beard, or the round glasses, or any of his most recognizable personas? The same goes for the rest.
      One thing I tried to keep in mind through all of this was a sense of who our book was ultimately for... I mean, yes, somewhere out there is a fan who will be relieved that George’s first guitar has the right tuning machines installed, or that the white antimacassars on Paul’s mom’s couch are correct, but all of that needs to be convenient background. It’s a good bass line: you’d notice if it wasn’t there, but if it’s doing its job, it lets everything else in the song do its job.
      The last thing I’d want to do when constructing visuals for a biography aimed at children is to make them feel like they’re coming in late to the game. Telling them how good the Beatles are shouldn’t feel like we’re just trying to tell them their parents and grandparents are cool and have good taste and this is why. It should be relatable and inspiring without that context. So every cinematic solution or facial expression should look new, not like a re-interpretation of an already famous moment. Like, appearing on the Ed Sullivan show shouldn’t feel like a great cultural landmark, it should feel like four young guys getting to play on their biggest stage yet, and the excitement contained in it should be theirs. I wanted the performance illustrations to feel like shows played by a young professional band in that same circuit, their ensuing fame not a foregone conclusion. (And all of that is secondary to just how hard it is to draw someone playing the guitar...)
      I hope all of that doesn’t sound too high falutin’. To my eye, the manuscript seemed to already aim for a similar goal, one of relatability and humanization, and of making events that have taken on a mythology of their own feel like they’re happening for the first time, without all the meaning we’ve had 40+ years to assign them. So that’s what was going on in my mind through those months I dug in weaving pictures into your words. I hope that’s vaguely what we wound up doing!
      Susanna: Well, now that the book is going out into the world, we’ll find out! Thanks for the conversation, Adam, and for your wonderful illustrations. I can see that we’ve been on the same wavelength all along, even though we’ve never met.

Elizabeth: Thanks for stopping by guys!

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We are so excited to have Susan Kaye Quinn here today, and the topic is very appropriate. Why do you ask? Because Susan is a great success as an indie-published author. She was a frontrunner in many ways for young adult authors taking the SP leap, and every step of the way has sought to understand the online landscape so she could share that information with other writers looking to shorten their learning curve when it came to all things indie. Finally with pressure from her many, many fans, she started putting all this practical and time-tested knowledge into a book on self publishing. Now she has two books on the topic, and both are must-haves for anyone choosing this route.  And gosh, I haven’t even gotten started on all her fiction books, but I better stop now before I turn this introduction into a post on how awesome Sue is. Besides, I believe in showing, not telling, and as you read on, you’ll see her amazing-ness in action!

 Can you spot the self-published titles?

Hint: they all are.

(Caveat: A.G. Riddle started out indie but is now published through Amazon’s 47North imprint along with Marko Kloos)

The truth is that self-published titles now regularly top the charts – if not outright dominate them. Successful self-published titles have great covers and lots of fervent fans – often the only way to distinguish them from traditionally published titles is the publisher listing in the description (and the price – indie titles are usually less than $5.99 for single titles).

How do you become one of these successful indie authors? Hard work, luck, and educating yourself about how the indie marketplace works.

Here are FIVE TIPS to get you started. For a full run-down on how to launch your indie author career, see my Indie Author Survival Guide (Second Edition now available). To take your indie author career to the next level, check out the second book in the series, For Love or Money: Crafting an Indie Author Career. The two books are meant to be used in tandem.

TIP #1: Study the Bestsellers – In both craft and business, studying successful people will help you discern the ingredients of success. Always be striving to take your craft up a level – by craft I mean storytelling, not just the way you string words together. Because as much as we like to disparage that poorly written erotica book at the top of the charts, I guarantee that good stories well told actually do sell. (Alternatively, if you want to chase the latest trend, that’s possible now  – there’s no sin in giving readers more of what they want, but it’s nowhere near as easy as you think.) As far as business, look who is selling in your genre and what they did to get there. Don’t follow what people say – look at what they actually do. The actions of successful people often fly in the face of conventional wisdom. (I welcome you to look at my own path to success as well as many other indie authors – often the most successful are not the ones offering advice about it! #yesIseetheirony )

TIP #2: Be a Professional – Don’t dabble. Don’t dip your toe into indie publishing with a short story that’s not going to sell. Go full cannon-ball jump into the pond with professional covers, formatting, editing, the works. Make sure your novel can comfortably sit in the top 100 of your category. This will require up-front investment, but most books can be well-published for under $1000 – and I know of no other legit business you can start for that little money invested. Don’t skimp. (Note: on the other hand, don’t throw money away on a $3000 cover that will be hard to recoup; be sensible.)

TIP #3: Launch With a Series – You don’t have to pre-write an entire trilogy and release the books one month apart… but that’s an option now, with indie publishing. If you can write a novel in six months, you could publish the first book, then write and publish Books 2 and 3 within a year. I’ve seen both models be successful (note: don’t wait more than six months between books). Make the commitment to quickly build a backlist and get books into readers’ hands. Delivering three connected novels to readers within a year is a strong way to launch a career (note: I’m talking novels here, not novellas or short stories or serials – those are fun, but not career-launchers).

TIP #4: Launch in Amazon then Go Wide –  There’s a lot to learn in indie publishing, so staying focused can be key to staying on track – plus launching a new series in the Kindle Unlimited system gives new authors/new series a boost in visibility. Use this to get your footing. Then, when you’ve established your brand as an author, you can expand to the other retailers (Nook, Kobo, iTunes, Google Play). You’ll be a veteran at that point and in a good position to weigh the pros and cons of exclusivity vs. reach.

TIP #5: Never Stop Writing – the single most important thing you can do in your career is write the next book. Generating new IP (Intellectual Property) is the one thing only you can do – the rest can be outsourced. It’s tempting to get bogged down in all the latest and greatest changes in the industry, but the biggest lever you can pull to move sales is to launch a new book. Or an entirely new series. You want to study the bestsellers, but always remember: your biggest asset is your uniqueness. Make sure you’re continually feeding your creativity, reaching for that next level with your work, bringing out the fullest expression of your abilities. Spend the bulk of your time doing creative work – reading, writing, watching movies, taking workshops, using craft books to boost your skills, exploring new forms, learning how to write faster… whatever works for you to elevate your craft and increase your enjoyment of writing. This is the creative life you want, yes?

I really should have started with TIP #0: Decide What Mountain You Want To Climb – I have an entire section in my Indie Author Survival Guide about making a Mission Statement so that you know you’re climbing the right hill before you set off in dogged pursuit of the success you think you want.

Knowing what will make you happy, then having a plan to get there? That’s the only key to success you actually need.

p.s. if all of this terrifies you, I understand. Truly. Watch this webinar on facing your fears and don’t let that hold you back.

Susan Kaye Quinn is the author of the Singularity Series, the Mindajck Saga and the Debt Collector serial (as well as other speculative fiction works) and has been indie publishing since 2011. She’s not an indie rockstar or a breakout success: she’s one of thousands of solidly midlist indie authors making a living with their works. The Indie Author Survival Guide and For Love or Money are based on her experience in self-publishing fiction. They are guides to help her fellow writer-friends take their own leaps into the wild (and wonderful) world of indie publishing… and not only survive, but thrive.
Facebook | Tumblr | Website | All of Susan’s Fiction

The post 5 Tips for Success as a Self-Published Author appeared first on WRITERS HELPING WRITERS™.

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Lauren Dane dropped by this morning to share the most essential items in her deadline survival kit. Check it out!

Top 5 Items in My Deadline Survival Kit

1.  Pizza delivery. Two meals in one move! My kids can’t complain all they’re eating is sandwiches and cereal. Sometimes I order salad to keep them guessing.

2.  Pony tail holders – because showers are a rarity as you stare the deadline in the face!

3.  Chocolate – I use it for bribes for myself to get my words done.

4.  Music – my book playlist helps keep me on track and in the right mindset.

5.  Water – It’s so easy to drink too much coffee but I need the water so I make myself carry around a giant container of it.

 

FALLING UNDER by Lauren Dane (August 4, 2015; Forever Trade Paperback; Ink & Chrome #2)

Duke Bradshaw, co-owner of the Twisted Steel custom motorcycle and hot rod shop, may devote his days to chrome and leather, but his nights belong to Carmella. His sultry redheaded neighbor has a smile like an angel and a body built for sin, and for the past year both have dominated Duke’s dreams. When a problem at Twisted Steel requires a fast fix, Duke sees his chance to finally make his fantasy a reality.
Ever since she first heard the low rumble of his engine, Carmella Rossi has wondered if Duke Bradshaw handles his women as expertly as he handles his bike. When he shows up at her door offering her a much-needed job at his shop, she gets her chance to find out. Beneath Duke’s masterful touch, Carmella soon submits to a world of unimaginable pleasure.
But history has taught Carmella how bad a boy boy can be. If she doesn’t put on the brakes fast, her hard-bodied heartbreaker could drive her right over the edge . . .

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About the author:

The story goes like this: While on pregnancy bed rest, Lauren Dane had plenty of down time, so her husband took her comments about “giving that writing thing a serious go” to heart and brought home a secondhand laptop. She wrote her first book on it. Today, Lauren is a New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of more than 60 novels and novellas across several genres.

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Excerpt:

Carmella answered her door to find Duke standing on her porch with a six-?pack

and some chips.

He held them aloft. “I was thinking we could hang out and have a beer and some snacks.”

She smiled, even as she looked down at herself. “Uh. I’m sort of messy. I was cleaning the kitchen.”

He walked in without saying anything else, but once he got to her kitchen, he turned back. “You look fantastic.”

Ginger had already abandoned her nap at the sound of Duke’s voice and deposited herself at his feet.

“So easy,” she murmured to the dog as she joined them in the kitchen.

“Glasses or the bottle okay?” He indicated the beer with a tip of his chin.

“Bottle is fine. There’s an opener in that drawer there.” She pointed. “If you’re hungrier than just chips and dip, there’s leftover baked ziti. I was just thinking about some dinner.”

“Leftover ziti? How is that even possible? Was everyone sick? I promise if you made me baked ziti, I’d eat every last bit.” He cocked his head and looked extra hot.

She put a hand on her hip. He was so totally full of it. “Actually, I made a smaller one for myself and took two to a big family dinner. It’s my uncle’s favorite. But I brought home coconut cake and some other stuff.”

Carmella bent to look in her fridge because he was standing so very close and she was getting giddy. Giddy was bad. Giddy ended up being the last time she slept with her ex. Though to be fair, it had been fantastic.

This man was a giddy nuclear reactor and it made her girl parts want to be so stupid.

And then he bent to peer into the fridge at her side. “Jesus Christ. Carmella. Baby, this is the most organized refrigerator I’ve seen in my entire life. I’m in awe.”

She was so surprised and weirdly flattered, Carmella turned to look at him and ended up whacking her forehead to his so hard she saw stars against her closed eyes.

Firm hands took her by the upper arms and helped her stand though she wobbled a little. “Honey, are you all right?”

“Ouch,” Carmella managed. “Sorry. I got you pretty hard.”

Duke laughed as he moved the hand she’d had over her forehead and replaced it with a bag of frozen berries. “My go to is corn usually, but you don’t have any. That should help. I’m okay. I have a very hard head. That’s totally true so stop it with that look of yours.”

“You have a go to remedy for head bumping?” Carmella sat at one of the stools at the island. “And what look do you mean?”

“Works for busted knuckles, black eyes, the usual sort of lifestyle-related injuries.”

Carmella winced when she raised her brow at him. “Lifestyle-?related?”

Duke shrugged. “What can I say? Ass kicking and fisticuffs seem to be a regular part of my life. And the look I meant is the one you’re wearing right now. The one you give that makes everyone feel like a wayward boy who craves your approval.”

“I have that look? Really?” How awesome! She clearly needed to use it more.

“You do. Why do you think we’re all so obedient to your paperwork rules?”

“Because it’s efficient and makes money move back into the shop more quickly?”

He laughed again and then moved the bag of fruit to kiss the sore spot.

They both went very still.

His muscles tightened, the tension radiating from him made her dizzy. And probably crazy, but needing to soothe. So she slid her hands up the wall of his chest, not to restrain or hold back, no matter how much she told herself that lie.

Once she touched him, she knew it to her toes that everything had changed.

“Damn it,” he snarled and then kissed her. Only, no. He took her mouth, owned it, and had his wicked way with it.

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