New Release from Ruth Cardello!

Ruth Cardello is an amazing author and will hopefully becoming more involved with Kentucky Independent Writers in the future.  It was so exciting to listen to her speak about her experience as an independent author and I couldn't be happier to share a sneak peek at her latest release! 

He paused and shook his head. Jeisa slid beneath one of his arms again to help steady him.  The heat from his body spread like a wildfire through her own. Jeremy was all man now and everywhere their bodies touched, Jeisa felt just how much he’d changed.  The strong arm draped across her shoulders no longer felt like it belonged to a man who spent his life behind a computer. Boxing was only a small piece of Jeremy’s plan to physically transform himself.  He’d started running and lifting weights very soon after they’d met.  Jeisa hadn’t thought it was necessary… But oh, the results were nice.

He stumbled as they walked. Her hand flew up to steady him, coming to a rest in the middle of his hard chest and she felt him catch his breath. 

Is he thinking what I’m thinking?

No, no, no, she thought frantically.

Unlike me, Jeremy has always been painfully honest.

Remember that he’s doing all of this to win the heart of a woman.

Another woman.

As in, not me.

Her body didn’t care. She looked past the swelling and the blood and all she could see were his beautiful, sexy blue eyes. They paused for what seemed an eternity and she couldn’t look away.

What would it be like to be loved by a man who is willing to do anything to win your heart?

You could be yourself with such a man.

Love like that doesn’t follow the rules.

It is sweaty, and passionate, and the stuff that romances are made of.

An odd expression entered Jeremy’s eyes and he straightened away from her, breaking contact. “Jeisa,” he said in a gruff voice, “let’s go home.”

“Yes,” she said, and mentally kicked herself for allowing the lines between employer and friend to blur.  She was part of Jeremy’s life.

Just not in the way she wanted to be.

Pinterest--Hoarding Without the Clutter

Pinterest--Hoarding without the Clutter

Chasity Bowlin for KIW Blog

Social media is an amazing tool for writers.  It allows us to promote our work, to cross promote with other authors, to connect with our readers and to bring our readers together so that they can connect with one another.  Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, the antiquated Myspace, and now Pinterest are ways for us to be more accessible to our readers and also for us to interact with our readers and become more to them than simply the name on the cover/thumbnail.  But in this post, I want to specifically talk about Pinterest and how it can be utilized not just for interaction, but also for inspiration.  

Pinterest is, for me, the internet version of a big, fat, glossy magazine.  It’s like someone took Vogue, Cosmo, Southern Living, Veranda, GQ and a sexy dose of Men’s Health and combined them in one place.  You can search by categories such as food, home, fashion, and about a dozen others.  You can choose to view pins of only those pinners that you follow, or you can choose to see all pins in a totally random fashion.  You can also search for specifics.  For example, you go to the search box and type in Regency Fashion and you’ll find all of these pins of gorgeous gowns with empire waists and daring necklines.  You may then repin that photo of a gown to your own board.   

You can create boards for published works.  You can also create boards for WIP’s.  And as writers, inspiration often strikes in strange and wonderful ways.  Suppose you happen upon a pin of something utterly fabulous that speaks to you, that urges you to tell a story, you can create a board for inspirations.  The truth is you can create a board for anything.   At this point, I’d need five large houses, a warehouse for a closet, and an eating disorder to actually do something with all of the things I have pinned.   If your goal with Pinterest is to attract more followers, I recommend repinning recipes and men.  Nothing lures women to you like good looking men and sinful chocolate.  Memes are also a hot ticket item.  If you can make them laugh, they’ll come back.

The steps to repin photos and create boards are fairly simple.  If you can navigate Facebook, Pinterest will be easy.  You can download a “pin it” button for your toolbar which will allow you to pin photos from other websites, blogs, etc., without having to go into Pinterest first.  You can categorize your pin during this step also, so that it goes to the right board and it’s immediately organized.  Also, mistakes are easy to fix.  Say for example you repin a recipe of Dessert Crack to your Villains I’d like to Hang With board.  Simply click on the pin, go to edit and then select the appropriate board.  Easy Peasy.  Creating boards and uploading pins from personal photos is also a very simple and self explanatory matter.  It literally walks you through step by step.  

What does Pinterest offer you that Facebook doesn’t?  With Facebook, when a reader posts on your wall or sends you a message, there’s an obligation to respond in some way.  This isn’t a bad thing, but as each of us attracts more and more readers, it does become a very time consuming thing.  With Pinterest, there is no obligation to reciprocate.  Someone likes your pin, maybe they repin your book cover to their “Books I want to Read” board.  Or maybe to their, “Books so steamy they made my makeup melt” board.   It’s done.  One click, a couple of drop down boxes later and suddenly your book cover has been shared with every person who follows that reader on Pinterest.  It is a much more visual experience than Facebook, and frankly less dramatic.  While it hasn’t happened for me yet, I’ve noticed with some of the bigger authors that I follow on Facebook, they sometimes have to referee when things get out of hand with the back and forth comments.

One issue with Pinterest, and it’s not really an issue as much as a minor inconvenience, is that you have to be “invited” to join.  It’s easier to join if you have Facebook, but it is not required.  I would also caution that Pinterest is a huge time suck.  It’s an enjoyable time suck, but still dangerous.   You start out perfectly groomed and presentable looking and the next time you look up, you’ve gone all Tom Hanks in Castaway.  Hours and sometimes whole days can be lost to Pinterest because we all like STUFF.  We all have crafty urges, redecorating agendas, secret fashion yearnings, and an intense and abiding love of foods that taste good but treat us as bad as an ex boyfriend.  That is why Pinterest is dangerous.  It’s everything you want in one place and it’s free.  Use with caution!!!!!

Scheduled Release: The Haunting of a Duke

Facing danger from both sides of the grave, will two souls merge to find a love that conquers all?Communing with spirits has been both gift and curse to Emme Walters. Now it's made her a killer's target. Emme knows why the Dowager Duchess of Briarleigh invited her to a house party—to investigate whether the duke, Rhys Brammel, murdered his wife years ago. But Emme never imagined she would fall in love with the brooding duke.Branded by society as a possible killer, Rhys is suspicious of Emme and her alleged "gift." Then a late night encounter creates awareness of her other, more attractive, aspects. When Emme's life is threatened, Rhys becomes her protector.Emme and Rhys find passion and peril as they join forces to solve the mysteries at Briarleigh. She made him believe in spirits, but can she make him believe in love?

I Need a Hero!!!!

So, I confess, I love the old Bonnie Tyler song, I Need a Hero.  I belt it out in my car at the top of my lungs and picture every archetypal romance novel hero that exisits.  From a knight in slightly tarnished armor on a black horse (cause I have to be a little different!), to the hot cop with the oh so Freudian gun. 

What makes him a hero?  What qualities make this man irresistable to the heroine and to the readers alike?  Is it necessary that he be movie star gorgeous?  The answer to the last one is probably yes.  It is fiction after all, where even a plain heroine can land a smoking hot guy.  

Common elements of heros are that they have a lot of internal conflict.  The bottom line is he can't think of himself as a hero.  No matter what his job, what his motivation, it can't be to save the world.  Most romance novel heros feel on some deeper level that they are atoning for something, even if those sins aren't theirs.  Maybe he's a cop who lost a partner because he didn't go by the book, or possibly because he did go by the book.  We'll see a transformation in this hero from one extreme to another.  Maybe he's a kid from the wrong side of the track who feels the overwhelming urge to prove himself as a worthy person and devotes his life, risking it time and again, for his country.  Maybe he's a guy born with a silver spoon in his mouth and has to prove to himself and everyone else that he's more than the sum of his family's wealth.  So at the heart of every hero, he is conflicted.  Who he is, what he is and where he comes from all play a part in that. 

In terms of relationships, they want to be loved, need it, even if they don't recognize it, or feel unworthy of it.  They will NEVER verbalize that desire, at least not until the last chapter.  They will instead struggle with this guilt of developing a relationship with the heroine knowing that it can never work out because they are cursed, doomed, unlucky at love, on a mobster's hit list, have a job that makes them a target for violence every day, or in historicals, have no money, have a title that isn't truly theirs because they were secretly born a bastard, etc.. etc. etc.  Again, the secret is conflict. 

To write a compelling and readable hero, take a hot guy, inflict a world of misery on him, both internal and external and then throw him in the path of a woman who calls to him on an elemental level, and who makes the good better and the bad bearable. 

RWA Follow Up

So, we're one week post conference and I have been a busy, busy girl.  I have submitted synopses and partial manuscripts to all the editors and agents who requested them, and I sent synopses and WHOLE manuscripts to the agent and editor who requested them.  Had to mail a hard copy to one person.  I didn't even think people did that anymore! 

I feel really good about this.  I think coming back from the conference, getting through the holiday, all the drama of the past week, and getting back into the swing of things at work and STILL managing to all edits done, the emails sent, and hard copy shipped off, is pretty impressive.  So, you'll just have to pardon me while I give myself a nice little pat on the back. 

Writing It Out... How to keep going when the world falls apart.

It's hard to focus on the people and the plot of a make believe world when the real one is so intent on intruding.  But we have deadlines, whether we've given them to ourselves or etched them in stone with someone else.  Part of being a professional, of being a "real" writer, is working even when you don't feel like it. 

In many ways, writing is a solitary profession and it is one where you are largely accountable only to yourself, at least until you reach a margin of success with it.  So where's the motivation to keep plugging away when things have gone crazy around you?  Sometimes, writing is therapeutic in that sense, because at least in the world you are creating on the page, you are in control. 

I lost a dear friend today, someone that many years ago I thought would be my Happily Ever After.  That wasn't to be, like so many things, but while our romance fell apart, our friendship actually became stronger.  It hurts me to know that he's no longer in my world, that I won't hear his laughter or see him quirk his eyebrow sardonically at me (and yes, he really did that, just like the hero in a book).  But, I am happy that he isn't suffering any more, and that he is no longer dependent on other people to care for him, something that rankled him to no end I am sure. 

With all that weighing on my mind, the last thing I wanted to do was work on my book.  Reading and proofing and editing and rewriting seemed unimportant in the overall scheme of things.  Until I realized that getting lost in my story gave me an escape, gave me an avenue to get away from all that was going on and focus on something positive just for a few minutes.  Writing is a profession, yes.  But it isn't a job.  I don't write because I have an obligation to do so, but because I love the art of it, the craft of it.  And at times when things are spiraling out of control elsewhere, I find solace in it.

What the heck is POV? (and about half a dozen other acronyms germane to the publishing world)

Really, I just wanted to show how smart I was by using the word germane.  Truthfully, there are a lot terms and various acronyms that will get tossed around at writing conferences, in groups of writers, and in blog posts about writing.  This post is an attempt to define those terms for all you newbies out there. 

 POV (point of view)--during a workshop featuring the fabulous Susan Elizabeth Phillips this term came up.  She described it as being inside the character's head, looking through their eyes, or being beside the character, observing them in the situation.  An example would be, Stacy's heart pounded in her chest and the cold sweat of fear beaded on her skin. She knew the killer was close, she could feel him.   That is from Stacy's point of view.  If you were observing Stacy, it might read, Her heart beat was audible in the room, the sweat beading on her skin a clear indication of her fear.  She had to know the killer was close by.  This is the point of view of someone who can observe both Stacy and the killer.  Not the best of examples, but sometimes POV shifts can be subtle.  Also, repeated shifts of POV in a book can sometimes be difficult to follow.  There are no hard and fast rules about whose point of view to use, when and how to switch them.  Bottom line, if you change POV, have a reason for it.  Try not to head hop (back and forth between character's POV's).  Your manuscript should read seamlessly. 

GMC (Goal, Motivation, Conflict)--This refers to a fairly simple concept.  Your character must want something (goal), there must be a reason why want it (motivation), and there must be an obstacle to their getting what they want (conflict).  Example, your main character wants the of respect of snobby people in her home town--that is her goal.  She wants this because she was made fun of and teased growing up poor and looked down on--that is her motivation.  In spite of everything she's done and achieved in her life, the townspeople still see her as the same poor, white trash she was growing up--that is her conflict, that she isn't really able to control how other people see her. 

The Black Moment--I feel like that phrase should be accompanied by the dum, de dum, dum dum of the Dragnet theme music.  In almost every romance novel, there is a point, usually near the end of the book, when all hope seems lost.  In short, this is the cliffhanger before the HEA (next segment, I swear).  When the heroine believes the hero has cheated on, when the hero realizes that he has a history of madness in his family and to protect the heroine from himself he leaves her, when the heroine finds damning evidence that the hero actually only married her for money and that she can't trust anything he says, etc. etc.  You get the point.  Regardless of what form it takes, this is a moment in the point where it seems that there are insurmountable obstacles to the couple being together.  Naturally there aren't.  In terms of writing a black moment, the important thing is that it needs to seem organic in the story.  In other words, if there has been no hint at all in the book that the hero has a history of being a rake or womanizer, suddenly throwing in the suspicion of infidelity ISN'T organic.  However, if all along the hero has been sort of emotionally distant or afraid to express his feelings, an argument between the hero and heroine where he says something stupid and horrific such as "There is no such thing as love.  It's nothing but a word for poets and fools".  That would be organic to the character. 

HEA (Happily Ever After)--This is the reason we all read romance and write it.  We all want to believe in the Happily Ever After.  These very within genre.  In some books, the couple gets married, others they have children, some they ride off into the sunset for a life of adventure...Bottom line is, they are together.  The level of commitment depends on the genre (inspirational, contemporary, historical) and also on the characters themselves.  These are happy, hopeful end points where we can say goodbye to characters we've become invested in and believe that they are going on to better and happier things. 

There are more terms and acronyms, many more.  This is a sampling to start, and more will be added later.