Patti O'Shea's Blog, page 209

Guest Blogger: Rowan Larke

Today, I have a guest blogger--Rowan Larke.

Rowan and I had been online acquaintances for a while--I remember at least one chat room conversation I did that she was at--but it was when we had a chance to talk regularly on Twitter, that we became friends and writing buddies. She's one third of my plot group, and as well as being an awesome writer, Rowan is sweet, insightful, and incredibly nice.

Now for a more formal introduction: Rowan's always wanted to be a writer. Always. She never thought ...

I Love It When a Plan Comes Together

For about five months or so now, I've had these characters in my head. I knew who they were, I knew they belonged together, I knew which world they belonged to, but I didn't have a story for them. All my vague ideas were too close to something else I'd already written and I hate to repeat myself. There was no great rush, though, to figure it out since they were third on my list.

I mailed off project number one to my agent, now I've got a rough draft done on project number two, which meant i...

Noise

Not that long ago, it used to be that advertising was confined to predictable locations. You'd see it on TV, hear it on the radio, see it on billboards and on the sides of buses. Now advertising is everywhere, and with all the noise, the target audience doesn't even see most ads let alone remember them or the product.

It used to be that only minor league baseball teams had advertising on their walls, now all the big league teams do. It used to be that if you saw a truck with writing on it, ...

Adventures With Socks

I have this problem with a sock disappearing when I do laundry. The first time it happened, I didn't consider where it might be, and later that week, I got dressed and went to the Evil Day Job (EDJ). As I'm walking down the aisle to my cube about mid-morning, one of my guys asks me, Is that your sock?

No, I say, I'm wearing my socks. He insists. Then it dawns on me--it's my missing sock! It had been stuck in my pants leg and had worked its way loose as I walked around the office. Oops. ...

How's the Book Going?

One of the hardest questions I get is How is the book going? The person asking is probably doing it along the lines of Hi, how are you?, but this isn't as easy to answer as they think it is and it requires me questioning them in return.

Which book? Do they mean Edge of Dawn, my book that came out earlier this year? It's a little early for sales results and I find the royalty statements confusing anyway. Hey, there was a reason why I majored in Advertising Copywriting in college--math is no...

Writers and Word

The one thing that continually surprises me is how many writers are unfamiliar with computers--even the word processing software they use! Now granted, some of the things in Word that aren't accessed often are not easy to figure out, but we're talking simple stuff here like creating headers or getting word count. How can you spend hours on a computer every day writing and not know some of these things?

It's not only writers, I know that. I work with people who can't figure out how to do any...

Seasonal Writing Disorder

Summer is a really hard time for me to write. I'm not sure why. The days are longer which means I don't get tired as early and that should equal more writing time, right? Only in summer, I want to be outside. Maybe that's a Minnesota thing because our summers are so short and our cold weather goes on forever. But it's more than just a desire to be outdoors, my brain also seems to move more slowly in the heat.

I find this strange in these days of central air conditioning. And it's especia...

Review: Liquid Story Binder

Disclosure: I received a copy of Liquid Story Binder free from Giveaway of the Day about a year ago (maybe longer) and this is the version of the program I took out for a test drive. Last night, I went to the website and bought a license for this software because I wanted to be able to upgrade to the current version.

I've had a story in my head since the early 1990s. (Actually, it's a trilogy idea, but one story is more vibrant for me than the others.) In the last five or six years, I've pl...

Phone-phobic

I am totally phone-phobic. I hate it and do everything I can to avoid using it. This is one of the reasons it amazes me that people spend like every minute in their cars on their cell phones. Hello? This is the place you can go to get away from the damn phone. (I do own a cell phone, but it's never turned on and I never think to check for messages. Once, I found a voice mail from a friend from months earlier on it. Talk about embarrassing.)

Tracing back my dislike of the phone gets murky...

Look Who's Talking

When authors talk about Point of View (usually abbreviated as POV), we mean whose head are we in as we write the scene. Are we seeing things unfold from the heroine's perspective? The hero's? A secondary character? Writers hear all kinds of rules about POV, too. The most popular is write the scene from the POV of the character who has the most at stake.

That's not how I choose whose head to be in when I write a scene because I don't always know which character has the most at stake when I...