Patti O'Shea's Blog, page 211

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...

Guest Blogger: Crystal Jordan

I have a guest blogger today, Crystal Jordan.

The first time I "met" Crystal was when she asked me to be part of a workshop on Science Fiction Romance at Romance Divas. That was in 2007, I think. Fast forward. We reconnected on Twitter, became friends. She's funny, smart, insightful, and I'm lucky enough to count Crystal as one of my best book writing buddies.

For a more formal intro: Crystal Jordan writes award-winning erotic paranormal and futuristic romance for a variety of publishers incl...

1776

Last night, I watched 1776 a musical with William Daniels, Howard Da Silva, and Ken Howard. It's actually one of my favorites, but that wasn't what I planned on watching on an October weekend. Unfortunately, what I did plan to see left me bored, and after studying my DVD collection, this was the title that I felt like watching.

A strange thing occurred to me as I watched it. I suddenly remembered all the times I'd been asked: If you could meet anyone living or dead, who would it be? It's ...

Why'd You Write That?

People sometimes ask me how I decide what to write or they ask why I haven't written a particular story. The answer is the same for both--I write the characters that are talking the loudest.

To use an example to illustrate, I was writing In Twilight's Shadow in 2007 when I saw a picture online and boom! Chaya showed up. It really does happen that fast and anything can cause a character to appear. Sometimes nothing happens and they still arrive. It's the way it is. So Chaya showed up in 20...

After "The End"

From the time I wrote my first published story, I've always gotten scenes that happen after the book is over. I wish that I'd written them down because what I've seen on the earlier books has faded now and I don't have a real good memory of what I was shown any longer. Why didn't I write a brief scene with what I saw?

Good question. Part of it was being tired from all the writing I'd already done and that these were scenes I would never include in the book. Part of it was I was certain I'd...