Learning Center

I didn’t write my book for you.

I don’t mean to be rude, and it’s entirely possible that the book and its genre are right up your alley. You might enjoy it very much.

Still, I didn’t write it for you.

Like many writers, the structure for my novel came out of ideas that had been floundering around in my head for years, disjointed and random (not unlike myself, I’m told). I might read other pieces that touched on similar themes and made me consider how I would have told the story differently. At other times, a plot point might form in my mind only to realize it fell out logically from one I had the month prior. Such threads of inspiration soon wove themselves together into a fuzzy scarf of creativity (I still have problems with metaphors). Before I knew it, I suddenly had the framework of a story. A jotted note turned into a series of bullets. A paragraph became a page, a page a chapter.

When I write, I prefer to use a deep third person POV.

Author Suzanne Brockmann uses the term "deep POV" and it seems accepted in the romance community, although it might not be an "official" definition. In a nutshell, being in deep POV means you're in the character's head. You see only see what he can see, hear only what he can hear. You're privy to emotions, to thoughts. The author isn't on the page. There is no narrator.

Wait. Isn't that the same as first person?

If you’re reading this, you’re probably either a reader or a writer of fiction—or both. So, I challenge you: why do you read fiction? Possible answers could include:

To kill time.
For pure entertainment.
For enlightenment.
To get out of my own head for a while.
To step into someone else’s world, to live their lives, feel their feelings.
To learn, by seeing how someone else lived through a situation.

No matter why we read fiction, nearly all of the above apply. Reading does indeed “kill” time. If it isn’t entertainment, why bother? I’m afraid the lofty goal of seeking to attain enlightenment became passé in the last century, but all of us want and need to get out of our own heads at one time or another. What could be more exciting than to step into someone else's world, to meet new and interesting people and to see things through their eyes and feel their feelings for a while? And who among us doesn’t need a little help from time to time coping with what life throws at us?

If I told l you I saw a cat in a morgue, would you believe me?

It’s true. I recently attended the Mad Anthony Mystery Conference in Hamilton, Ohio. As part of that event, participants toured the Hamilton Police, Fire, and Coroner’s departments.

The morgue was particularly fascinating. The coroner, Dr. Burkhardt, walked us through the process of receiving a body, and he and his staff showed us autopsy tools and spoke of procedures while regaling us with stories both macabre and humorous. As the coroner spoke, an orange tabby wound through our legs, his kitty-cat curiosity apparent. Someone asked why they had a cat in the morgue, and the coroner said, “There’s so much desolation here—it’s comforting to have something alive when devastated people come to identify their kin.”

Congratulations to all Savvy Authors!

Our first congratulations this week goes out to Savvy Authors member Lucy Felthouse. She was nominated in the Best Author Site category and the Best Review Site catagory - Erotica For All - of the Xcite Book Awards 2012 contest. Congratulations, Lucy!

Big congratulations go out to Tara Lain, who was nominated for two CAPA Awards – Best Contemporary Romance for Genetic Attraction and Favorite Author. She was also nominated for two LRC Best of 2011 Awards - Best Author of 2011 and Best Series of 2011 for the Genetic Attraction series which includes The Scientist and the Supermodel, Genetic Attraction and Deceptive Attraction. To cap it off, she received two new book contracts from Etopia Press. One for Fire Balls, an LGBT contemporary, and one for another sequel, Beach Balls, also LGBT contemporary. Fire Balls will be released next month and Beach Balls is expected in the summer. The three erotic romances will be printed later this year as a single-author anthology. Congratulations, Tara!

Starting February 20th Savvy Authors will be offering my class on Author Marketing and Branding. I published my first book less than a year ago, so I know what it's like to do promotion and that it can feel like throwing sand into the wind. But I also know from my fifteen years of experience in marketing and PR before I became a writer that there are concrete steps you can take to get your name out there. And no, the steps aren't difficult or expensive.

What works? No one can say with one hundred percent accuracy, but there are some things that are more likely to work. For instance, one of the first things I did for promotion was put up my website. One of the mistakes authors make, though, is putting up the website and then forgetting about it. I update mine an average of once a week, sometimes more, depending on how much new stuff I have. The more you update your website the higher your Google rank will be - Google's "spiders" like websites that have fresh content.

I remember when I first started in publishing, lo those many years ago (6 or so), that I thought published authors had a secret handshake or something. It was like a secret club and no one wanted to share the secret about how they got published.

Then I became published and I realized there really isn't a secret handshake. It's hard work and luck, combined. Trends come and go, and sometimes you're in the right place at the right time. Sometimes you hit that right combination of characters and plot and setting and BINGO, you have a book that catches some people by storm. It might catch a reviewer's eye, or a reader who yells about it or maybe it'll be the media. It's luck and hard work and luck.

Quality inspirational romance requires the same credentials as all romance novels: real characters, strong plots, relentless conflict, scenic settings, and love’s heartbeat at the center.

These characteristics are expected regardless of sub-genre or topic, which also mirror other romance sub-genres. Contrary to some misconceptions, there are almost no forbidden topics in inspirational romance. Life deals out harsh realities regardless of background or culture. Broken relationships, strained finances, violence, disease, and lost dreams walk side-by-side with new beginnings, birth, celebrations, and fresh opportunity. The main difference in this genre is the “lifescape” lens that filters choices.

Being an author honing the craft of writing fiction, you would think I'd written it all. Yet I am constantly amazed at the different facets of writing from verbs to dialogue. Speaking of dialogue, that's what I'm going to talk about right now!

Dialogue, speaking between (two or more) characters, is more than just "Hello I am so and so," and it can do more than one thing, depending on how you use it. To simplify things (and because I love them) I'm going to create a list/outline of just what dialogue can do for you, your characters, and your story!