Patti O'Shea's Blog, page 208

Sharing the Giddiness

I wasn't a good athlete when I was growing up. I was one of the last picked for every team in grade school and things never got any better. Now I think kids can letter for excellent grades or community service, but when I was in school only athletes got letter jackets and trophies.

Spending every quarter on the honor roll, being a member of the National Honor Society, or editor of the yearbook didn't get me anything to show off. Maybe this is why I get so excited now when I do win something...

I'm Not In Charge

Once upon a time, before I ever started writing (which was in 8th grade), I believed the author had complete control over her stories and her characters. Then I put pen to notebook and discovered that my characters were the ones in control. I didn't worry about it too much, but I did check out every book the library had on how to be a writer.

I found out I was doing everything wrong. Instead of sitting down and just writing, I needed to color code index cards and pin them to my corkboard in...

Snip, Snip, Snip

I finished the first draft of my short story for Nocturne Bites on Sunday night. That was the goal, and though I had to push to reach it, I did succeed. I also thought that I was 2000 words over maximum word count and I'm like, okay, there are lots of places I can get, including an overly long fight scene in chapter 2, but 2000 words? That's like 14% of the story!

I wasn't quite frantic, but I was concerned. Mentally, I ran through the story, trying to think of places where I could do some...

Making Room For More

I snuck in a reread of Eternal Nights this week. While I do reread my stories when they first come out (or when I get ARCs), it's rare for me to reread an older book unless I need a specific bit of information from it. I had to scan through both EN and Ravyn's Flight real quickly before writing The Troll Bridge for The Mammoth Book of Time Travel Romance because I wasn't 100% sure of a couple of things, but it sure wasn't a reread. I was looking for specific facts I needed to verify.

This w...

Happy New Year!

Wishing you a healthy and happy New Year! May 2010 be a magical year for you and your family!

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All Consuming

At one of the Romance Writer of America (RWA) conferences, I heard a luncheon speaker say something along the lines of most people want to win the lottery and quit their jobs to have fun, but writers want to win the lottery so they can quit their jobs and have more time to write. I'm afraid that while the idea stuck with me, the speaker and which conference she said that at aren't in my memory banks. I don't even have her exact words memorized and I wish I did. I wish I had the speech on r...

Review: The Cat From Outer Space

I mentioned before Thanksgiving that my family watches movies on the holidays and that I was going with Disney classics since those are about the only films we can all watch together. I like action and adventure and my parents don't. On Thanksgiving, we watched The Boatniks and that was a huge hit, so I decided to try The Cat From Outer Space, another live-action Disney movie. It's from 1978 and stars Ken Berry as Frank and Sandy Duncan as Liz.

Warning, there will be spoilers!

The basic prem...

Merry Christmas

Wishing everyone a safe and wondrous holiday! Merry Christmas to those who celebrate!

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Old Friends

Over the weekend, I felt a driving urge to read In the Darkest Night, my April 2010 book, and revisit Kel and his heroine. I don't know why since since I've had the Advanced Reading Copies (ARCs) of this book for a couple of weeks now, but I couldn't resist. So Friday night while I was doing laundry, I went through and read all my favorite parts.

And then I had an after-the-book moment come in. I've mentioned this before on the blog, but I almost always get scenes that happen after each of ...

After the Worldbuilding

With the bulk of my world building done for two different projects, I'm ready to think about the next phase. Series arc and each individual story within the arc.

These are tied together for me because each individual story needs to fit into the overarching plot. I might only know two paragraphs worth of the final story in a trilogy, but it's enough to give an editor an idea where the story is going and I always know what the goal of each book is. I liken it to a framework of a house--you ha...