Patti O'Shea's Blog, page 197

Pop Culture and Fiction

I've been thinking this week about pop culture and how it's used in fiction. I will admit that I absolutely loathe brand name dropping (especially designer name dropping) when I read a book. Every time I see a heroine in Bruno Magli shoes, I cringe a little. There are other shoe brands besides this one.

And here is where I confess that I did, indeed, mention a brand of shoes for a secondary character in one of my books. But she wore Amalfi pumps and the only reason I named a brand at all was b...

Adventures With WordPress

WordPress is a challenge for me. I can do HTML coding. I can manage CSS with a cheat sheet. I can even hack the code in Blogger with instructions and have everything work right, but WordPress? It's a problem for me and I can only do the bare minimum with it.

It is the blog I use on my website, but my web designer set it up, and I just update it. That's easy enough to do. Although I swear, there are times that's a challenge, too.

So in a fit if idiocy, I decided to put WordPress on a secondary w...

My Favorite Lines--Part One

There are books I've read that have lines I can quote even years after the last time I read that story. For example, Perfect Partners by Jayne Ann Krentz has one of my favorite lines of all time: "Good news, Dixon. She doesn't need therapy."

Or how about Linda Howard's Mackenzie's Mountain: He needed a woman bad.

At odd moments as I read, I wondered if my favorite line in the book was the same as the author's favorite. Did she have one? Was it something different? Or did she think back to this ...

The Great Coffee Mystery: Solved!

About a month ago or so, I got a new coffee maker. Prior to this, I'd been using a 4-cup maker without a timer function on it, so getting a full-sized coffee maker with a timer was a big deal for me. Anyone who follows me knows how much I love my coffee! How cool would it be to wake up on the weekdays to fresh-brewed coffee?

Once everything was all cleaned out, I read the instructions on setting the timer and went at it. And I woke up to discover that I had less coffee in my cup than I had wi...

World Views

I mentioned earlier that I sold another short story to Nocturne Bites. I've been immersed in this world ever since, writing and thinking about things. The basic world building is done and has been for a while because this is the third story I've set in this society, but areas that were only vaguely dealt with earlier are playing a bigger role in this story.

The two previous stories set in this world are Blood Feud in The Mammoth Book of Vampire Romance 2 and Demon Kissed, my first Nocturne Bit...

Here We Go Again

First, the big news! EDGE OF DAWN won the Beacon Award for Best Paranormal!!! I just read the email a few minutes ago and I'm still grinning!


* * *

So late this afternoon, after I'd finished the chapter I was working on and getting ready to head to my parents' house for Sunday dinner, I hear a voice in my head say, "F***, man." Now if a normal person heard this, they'd believe they thought it. I am not normal, I'm a writer. I knew what it meant.

"Who are you?" I asked. No reply. "Are you som...

One of My Theories On Character Growth

One of my favorite things about writing is watching the characters change and grow over the course of the book. When my stories start, neither the hero nor the heroine could form a lifelong bond with someone else, but by the time I near the end, they've changed enough that they can have their Happily Ever After (HEA).

I don't believe that one person can change because of another--not in real life and not in fiction either. I heard someone use this analogy: A person is like a locomotive. You c...

Not Going To Conference Conference

I wrote a post earlier today talking about the Not Going to Conference Conference at Romance Divas and emailed it to myself only to find it never arrived. Sigh. I hate it when the cyber black hole strikes.

Instead of trying to recreate it (severe weather is moving into my area), I'll just mention that if you're a writer and you're not attending the Romance Writers of America National Conference in Orlando this week, you can swing by Romance Divas and check out their online workshop. I'm doing...

Hey, I'm Having Coffee!

I look at Saturdays as a day to sleep in. It's the day where I can dawdle through my morning coffee as much as I want without having to worry about being late. It's the day where I can lounge around in my pajamas and relax. Do others not view Saturday this way?

Because it seems like every Saturday morning someone comes knocking at my door. It might be a politician stumping for votes in the upcoming primary, it might be Jehovah's Witnesses, it might be someone selling something. It happened a...

Sale News!

This week I sold another short story to Nocturne Bites! I really enjoy the short stories because they're just plain fun. The story is set in the same world as my May Bites, Demon Kissed, and the earlier story I wrote for The Mammoth Book of Vampire Romance 2, Blood Feud.

The blurb I'm using for the story is: A vampire trapped in a hellish limbo has one hope to reclaim his life as the undead--the hunter who tried to kill him.

The heroine is Cass Lanier. She worked as a vampire hunter for 14 mo...