Alison Kent's Blog, page 54

It’s Monday

I’m at MANY places today. First, I’m at GenReality talking about the economy, train wrecks, and acts of God. Next, I’m at Access Romance All A-Blog talking about how vacations are for more than fun, complete with pictures! Finally, as an admin type person at the Access Romance Readers Gab, I’ve put up a super duper giveaway post for today - five titles up for grabs plus a bonus for all the winners!

I love this!

When Casey came by after work yesterday to pick up Sam, he showed me this picture taken last month when the two of them along with #2’s boyfriend and a couple of guys from Casey’s job went to the big monster truck show. Boys and their trucks!

What’s going on?

It’s been a couple of days over two weeks since I sent in my manuscript for ONE GOOD MAN and since then I’ve done a whole lot of nothing. Doing nothing is seriously great, but I figure working as much as I have over the years - at the day job that lasted 18 years, at being a single parent of teens for many years, at writing a whole lotta words through the years - that I deserve to do a whole lot of nothing for awhile. And I have been doing things. Some cleaning of the deeper sort than just dish

A chance to win!

Laurie at Laurie’s Laudanum is giving away 2 copies of A LONG, HARD RIDE, and says:

I truly think this may be the best Blaze I’ve read to date.

Doesn’t get much better, eh? ;) Thanks, Laurie!

Poetry

A great deal of the art of lovely prose is its rhythm and the connection of the rhythm to meaning. Varying sentence structure and making the structures appropriate to your mood, intent, etc., is critical, as if fitting the rhythms together in a musical way. However, there is one dirty little trick that anyone can use . . .

Lydia Joyce gives a great explanation of rhythm and flow here. A lot of us hear our narrative in beats and write in the same (as her examples explain). We also have a lot of trouble *not* rewriting mentally when reading passages that don’t do the same. We want to hear the music in the text.

Here’s an example from LUV U MADLY; I’ve bolded the beats as I hear them in each of the sentences:

He shifted beneath her, adjusted his erection, slipped his hand between their bodies to cover her breast.

Her whimper filled his mouth, and he kissed her harder, rolled her nipple with his finger and thumb.

I’ll add to what Lydia said based on what I heard LaVyrle Spencer once say during a workshop she gave – and that’s to end a passage, a scene, or even a chapter on the most important word rather than burying it in the middle of a sentence.

I often have to rework a sentence several times to get the rhythm right and to get the last word where it needs to be! Here’s a sentence from the same LUM scene:

And when he finished, the shiver that ran through him shook loose the wrapping with which she’d carefully packaged her heart.

I could have said:

And when he finished, the shiver that ran through him shook loose the wrapping around her heart that she’d packaged so carefully.

See, er, hear the difference? Heart is the important word in the sentence, scene, chapter and so I made sure to word the sentence to put it at the end while still structuring the sentence in beats. (Rushing through here, so that’s not the best example in the world, but you get the idea!)