Posts Tagged ‘Author’
Happy New Year everyone! I hope you all had a safe fun holiday. The beginning of the new year always has me reflecting on the past year and thinking about what I can do to improve in the upcoming. Trial and error has taught me to keep my resolutions simple and few if I want to meet them all (I found the more resolutions I make the more I fail to keep…), this applies to Novel Reaction as well as my personal life. There are a couple of things Novel Reaction is going to do in the coming year:
- Resume the Books-to-Movie Challenge each month (goodness knows Hollywood is not coming up with anything original anymore).
- Monthly author spotlight on titles that were originally released in print and are now available in ebook (older print books).
- Resuming the bookish news postings, I don’t know about you but I miss them.
So how about you? Any new resolutions that don’t involve losing weight? 
Novel Reaction is excited to welcome author Edie Ramer (I have reviewed Edie’s Dead People which can be found here) to discuss something near and dear to my heart. Edie Ramer is one of the author’s of the anthology Entangled who is generously donated every dollar made from this novel to Breast Cancer Research. My mother was diagnosed with breast cancer the first time when I was 16, which she beat and we got an amazing ten years with her before it came back but it was four years ago this month that I lost my mother to breast cancer so you can understand why I find this project so worthwhile. Not only do you get a great collection of short stories by some great authors, you are helping donate money to a great cause.
Edie is going to share with us how she was able to get this amazing group of authors together on such a worthwhile project.
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I’m Edie Ramer, one of the writers and editors of ENTANGLED, A PARANORMAL ANTHOLOGY. This whole project was a labor of love, without the “labor” part. From the fabulous cover donated by Laura Morrigan to the formatting by Lori Devoti, and from Amazon’s KDP people (who probably don’t realize how helpful they were) to Stacia Kane (who wrote the best foreword ever), everyone pitched in to make the anthology a success. Most of all are the amazing stories from the uber talented authors. They’re generous, too, because every dollar made from this will go to the Breast Cancer Research Foundation.
I’m a breast cancer survivor. It’s been eleven years since my mastectomy, and I’m lucky it hasn’t returned. My critique partner and friend hasn’t been as lucky, and I want researchers to find a cure. And I want them to find it fast.
One of the first authors to accept my invite to be in the anthology was New York Times bestselling author Allison Brennan. I immediately sent a squee-mail to Misty Evans, my co-editor, saying, “Allison said YES!!!” Allison and I were in the same critique group before she sold her first book. I critiqued her second published book, which she wrote in 18 days. (That isn’t an error; she really wrote it in 18 days.) At the time she had five young children, one just a baby. I remember thinking that I could never complain again that I didn’t have time to write. This same book, THE HUNT, hit the extended New York Times list. It’s like her to go the extra step and write a novella for Entangled that took my breath away as I read it.
Jennifer Estep wasn’t able to be part of this Round Robin, but I wanted to give her a shout out. SPIDER’S REVENGE, the fifth book in her Elemental Assassin series is just out, and she’s a bit busy. In her short story, HALLOWEEN FROST (a Mythos Academy story), Gwen Frost and her friends are in for more tricks than treats when they run into a mythological monster intent on killing them.
In my story, THE FAT CAT, a witch and a wizard battle for the souls of seven women. The wizard has the god of war on his side. All the witch has is a fat, black cat. You can read an excerpt here, but I thought I’d leave you with the first line of the story:
Of all the cat houses, in all the towns, in all the world, she walks into mine.
You can find out more about me and my books at my website, http://edieramer.com. I hope you’ll love reading the stories in ENTANGLED as much as I did.
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Thank you Edie for sharing how you brought about this great collection of stoies. I know that I will be purchasing a copy of Entangled and I encourage you to do the same. A ebook copy can be purchased at Amazon here.
Amanda Lee is the author of the embroidery mystery series published by Obsidian. The latest book in the series, Thread Reckoning, will be released on September 6, 2011. In addition to the embroidery mysteries, the author writes a cake decorating series under the name Gayle Trent. The latest book in that series–Killer Sweet Tooth–will be released in October of 2011. Please visit Amanda/Gayle online athttp://www.gayletrent.com or on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/
pages/Gayle-Trent-and-Amanda- Lee-Cozy-Mystery-Writer/ 123653074333103 ).
My family watched the first season of LOST when the show was in its fourth season. We thought the first episode-the plane crash-might be our last, as our daughter covered her face during some of the gorier moments. But that episode ended and we all agreed to watch the next . . . and the next . . . and the next . . . and the next. We’d have likely watched another, but that was all that was on that first disk.So why is LOST so compelling? It doesn’t hurt that many of the show’s talented cast have found themselves on various “pretty people” lists; but, mainly, it’s the writing. Here are a few of the lessons to be learned from LOST:
* Have questions form in your readers’ minds immediately. In LOST, viewers have the obvious question: Why did the plane crash? But we also have more subtle questions: Why is there tension between the husband and wife? Who are these people? Why were they on this particular flight? What was the rock singer Charlie doing before the plane crashed that got him in trouble with the flight crew? Why is Sawyer so surly and suspicious? What is the roaring in the jungle?
What burning questions can you put into your readers’ minds?
* Before you answer those questions, throw more questions out. In LOST, it’s obvious all of these people have a past. We begin to be slowly drawn into their characters as they have flashbacks. As writers, we’re told to handle flashbacks carefully. LOST’s writers handle flashbacks with something akin to surgical precision. For example, an early flashback reveals John Locke was once in a wheelchair. Now he is walking. In later flashbacks, we see additional scenes from Locke’s life. In one flashback, he is shown in a wheelchair being treated terribly by his young supervisor. In another flashback, he is shown as an adult, but he is walking. What happened to him? Was he in an accident? Did someone beat him up? It’s questions like this-plus the more pressing questions like “Will they be rescued?-that keep viewers tuned in.
* Make your readers care about your characters. By the time we realize Charlie has a drug problem, we’re already rooting for him. We’ve seen that he’s a good person; he’s trying to help everybody else; and we want him to overcome his addiction. Rose sits alone looking out at the sea. Her husband was in a different part of the plane, but she “knows he’s alive.” The others pity her and bring her back into the group.
* A little humor goes a long way. Well-placed humor can offset tense situations and can make your characters more realistic. When Charlie reveals his “deepest, darkest secret” to Hurley, he expects Hurley to reciprocate. Hurley does, but Charlie doesn’t believe him and gets angry because he feels Hurley treated his confession as a joke. This is funny because the viewers know Hurley is telling the truth, but it also contributes to the dynamic between Charlie and Hurley and the realization that sometimes that which we think is unbelievable is actually true. For example, I once worked with a woman who I thought was not very well off financially. She lived modestly, dressed sensibly and brought her lunch to work every day. Years later when I went to work for an accounting firm, I learned the woman was a millionaire.
* Don’t neglect your setting. The island on LOST is practically a character itself. It’s both beautiful and menacing. It provides their food; and yet, there are life-threatening presences in the jungle.
Thank you Amanda for sharing with us what we can learn from Lost. Amanda Lee/Gayle Trent is the author of several books including Murder Takes the Cake (you can read my review here).Novel Reaction is excited to welcome author Debby Guisti here to share with us the importance of weather and location on the setting of a mystery novel.
Debby Giusti is a medical technologist who loves working with test tubes and petri dishes almost as much as she loves to write. Growing up as an Army Brat, Debby met and married her husband–then a Captain in the Army–at Fort Knox, Kentucky. Together they traveled the world, raised three Army Brats of their own and have now settled in Atlanta, Georgia where Debby spins tales of suspense that touch the heart and soul.
Debby’s work has won numerous awards, including the Daphne du Maurier Award for Inspirational Suspense, the National Readers’ Choice Award, the Golden Quill, the Beacon, the Gayle Wilson Award of Excellence and the Write Touch. In addition to full-length fiction, Debby has written magazine articles for Southern Lady, Woman’s World, Our Sunday Visitor, Army and Family, and served for over twelve years on the editorial advisory board of ADVANCE for Administrators of the Laboratory.
It Was a Dark and Stormy Night!
By Debby Giusti
It was a dark and stormy night. Anyone familiar with Charles M. Schulz’s cartoon strip, Peanuts, will recall the opening line of Snoopy’s Great American Novel. Although his writing career never blossomed, the loveable pooch did understand the importance of establishing the setting at the beginning of his book. Take a dark and stormy night, add rumbling thunder and bolts of lightning that expose an old Victorian house badly in need of repair and you’ve got a suspense story waiting to be written.
Any author worth her weight in typing paper knows the importance of anchoring the reader at the onset of the story. In a suspense novel, time of day, weather, location and a mix of details hand selected by the writer weave together into a chilling setting that keeps the reader turning the page. Take the unsuspecting hero or heroine from their ordinary world and drop them smack dab in the middle of an escalating problem–whether manmade or an act of God—to build reader anticipation and drive home the point that something sinister is about to happen.
Blue skies and sunshine are saved until the end when everything works out. After all, the hero and heroine deserve a happily ever after. By the close of the book, they’ve survived a series of life-threatening dangers in an ominous setting that grows worse on every page.
In THE OFFICER’S SECRET, my May release from Love Inspired Books, the story opens with a middle-of-the-night summons that forces my heroine to drive through a storm to a military post she vowed never to visit again. I added a set of quarters surprisingly similar to her house of old, a corpse in the attic and a secret, which causes the heroine to dig deep into her past to uncover the reason an officer died.
THE CAPTAIN’S MISSION, on sale in October, begins when a military training accident turns deadly. The smell of cordite and smoke permeate the dirt-clogged air and paint the desolate terrain in an eerie veil of gloom. The company commander hero and criminal investigation division special agent heroine are caught in a deadly trap that leads to a mountain campsite where uncovering the truth almost costs them their lives.
My tenth book, THE COLONEL’S DAUGTHER, will be in bookstores next August. The story commences with a summer storm and a murder victim. To up the stakes, I tossed in a deserted cemetery, a desecrated gravestone and a serial killer on the loose. An explosive ending leads to redemption and reunion and a resolution that should satisfy even the most difficult to please.
Whether hurricanes, tornadoes or torrential rains, a mountain cabin or oceanfront condo, high noon or midnight, a well-crafted combination of details sets the stage in which a story can unfold. In a suspense novel, that setting needs to be filled with intrigue and fraught with peril to draw the reader into the danger and keep her on the edge of her seat until The End.
I hope you’ll visit my website and consider reading one of my books. Leave a comment and the names of your favorite suspense stories and the types of settings that capture your fancy to be included in a drawing for my October Love Inspired Suspense, THE CAPTAIN’S MISSION.
Happy writing! Happy reading!
Wishing you abundant blessings,
Debby Giusti
Watch for THE CAPTAIN’S MISSION, in stores this October!
A DEMONSTRATION TURNED DEADLY: When one of his soldiers is killed by live ammunition during what was supposed to be a simple training exercise, Captain Phil Thibodeaux wants answers. Even if it means working with the Criminal Investigation Division that seems certain to pin the blame on him. But after CID agent Kelly McQueen defends his conduct, Phil realizes that there’s more to the dedicated agent than meets the eye. Maybe she’s someone he can trust, after all. And he’ll need someone to rely on as investigations lead him to doubt everyone else—even his own soldiers.
You can read an excerpt here.
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Thank you Debby for sharing with us about setting. I have to admit since moving to the extreme desert and living with the fear that in the heat of the sizzling summer I could easily die of dehydration I pay more attention to setting than I previously did in novels. As stated above Debby is giving away a copy of her October release The Captain’s Mission, which is the second book in the Military Investigations Series.
To be entered to win leave a commentthe names of your favorite suspense stories and the types of settings that capture your fancy to be included in a drawing for Debby’s October Love Inspired Suspense. The contest will close September 29th at midnight. This contest is limited to US and Canadian residents only (sorry Internationals, I promise I will have a contest for you soon).
