Saturday, October 30, 2010

This and That

 Republica Press released the Hearteater Anthology! You can also buy it at AllRomance E Books, or BookStrand. All proceeds go to the charity WaterAid.



And:
Rachel Kramer Bussel accepted my story A Good Stiff One for her anthology Gotta Have It. It looks like a great line up.



Also:
CoffeeTime Romance reviewed Passion and gave it 4 Cups (with a nice mention of my story Rekindle)

Night Owl review gave it 4 1/2 stars and called Rekindle "Sizzling."


EPIC:

Broadly Bound finaled at the EPIC contests. I'm pleasantly surprised. 



NaNoWriMo update:

While working with the snowflake method, I realized that his instructions work well for a contemporary novel, but when you're working in science fiction/fantasy, you have to expand the character sketches a lot to include world building. He also didn't have anything about setting, so I had to add a column to the spreadsheet to expand on that.

Monday, October 25, 2010

One Week to Go

There's one week left to NaNoWriMo madness, so my prep work needs to wrap up soon.


Follow Shanna Germain's progress here at What the Moon Saw . If you have a NaNoWriMo blog or are blogging about it on your regular blog, send a link to me, please.

I decided to try the Snowflake method, which is the exact opposite of the way I usually write. I think I posted a link before, but to sum up:

Start with a one sentence summary of the story. For good examples, search for the New York Times Bestseller List. Every book has a one sentence summary. Look at books you've read and compare how you'd summarize them. Then look at a few for books that you haven't read and figure out why they pique your interest. This is concise writing.

It took several tries to get something that worked for me, and as I went on to later steps of the Snowflake method, I went back to polish that one sentence.

 The next step was to write a five sentence paragraph  about my story telling the beginning, middle, and end. My first sentence was about my main character and the beginning of the story. The three middle sentences hit the catalyst for the story, the reaction of my main character, and the result of that reaction that brought the story to a climax.  The fifth sentence tells how it ends.

Even though I'm on step nine, which is a detailed outline, I have to go back to this and the individual character synopsis to check that it matches the sequence I created for the detailed outline.

One week and counting! 

Monday, October 18, 2010

NaNoWriMo

Next month, I'll dip into the madness that is NaNoWriMo - National Novel Writing Month. While 50,000 words is light for a novel*, it's a horrendous amount of output for a one month timeframe. We'll see how it goes.

I blogged about my prep work to date on Oh Get A Grip.


*For those of you who don't write, 50,000-70,000 words is about the page count of a dimestore romance novel., 80,000-100,000 is a trade paperback, 110,000 is a fantasy novel and some science fiction, and I'll guess that the last three Harry Potter novels came in around 120,000 to 170,000 words (but that's just a guess)

Monday, October 04, 2010

Passion is Coming!

Passion should be out mid-month.





Spank! is out now from Logical Lust.

I'm waiting on a release date for HeartEater.