Alison Kent's Blog, page 6
June 20, 2012
The deadline book … with pictures!
I haven’t said much here about the books I’m writing for Amazon Montlake. (I haven’t said much here at all lately, heh.) I have probably the tightest deadline schedule for the rest of the year I’ve ever had in my professional life, but it’s by choice. I’m determined to up my productivity, and now I’m legally obligated! (And if I wasn’t, I’d be driving daily to the beach in the new car. This is why deadlines are good for me.) My books from Montlake will be tagged A Hope Springs Novel as all three books take place in the Texas Hill Country community of Hope Springs. My original title for the first, The Kitchen at Second and Chances, will most likely be changed. We’re still working on a title concept for the series. Book #1 comes out next March, though that’s always subject to change, too.
Here’s the book’s first scene with pics (and there’s another excerpt at the title link above):
It was done.
The papers signed. The money transferred. The holding tight to the other shoe a thing of the past.
After weeks of waiting to hear on her outrageous offer, Kayla Oakes was now the proud owner of the three-story Victorian tucked into the middle of an oak-shaded acre and painted Van Gogh’s Starry Night blue.
It was the house where she’d spent the best years of her life. It was the house which had saved her. She wrapped her hand around the keys, the tiny teeth in her palm like roots, burrowing, and smiled at the windows taking her in.
The shutters would be the first thing she replaced. Several slats were broken, some dangling, others gone. They’d once been white, but the paint had since chipped and faded. A soft dove gray would suit much better. Or maybe the pale butter yellow of Van Gogh’s stars.
“Was there anything else before I go? You’ve got the keys, the contact info for the utility companies, your copies of all pertinent documents, and my number if we’ve missed anything.”
The real estate agent. Hailey Ross. The other woman had remembered Kayla from high school, but the memories from Kayla’s past had yet to be puzzled into place. “Sorry. I was lost picturing new shutters, but yes. I should have everything.”
“Ah, not quite. For new shutters, you need a contractor. I’ve got a card here somewhere,” Hailey said, her voice lost in the depths of the quilted tote hooked over her shoulder.
Kayla was used to professional women accessorizing with designer labels. The quilted tote’s paisley and pink elephant print reminded her how far Hope Springs was from Austin—a distance that had little to do with miles, but everything to do with Kayla’s return.
“Here you go,” Hailey said, coming up with the card. “Anything you need repaired or replaced, Ten’s your man. He’s the best, and runs a crew that knows what they’re doing, even if they’re a bit unconventional.”
Tennessee Keller. Two words and a phone number. The whole of the information imparted by black ink on white stock. She filed away the unconventional remark, preferring to make that judgment for herself. “He’s here? In Hope Springs?”
Hailey nodded, blowing at an unruly brown curl dangling between her eyes. Hailey was always blowing, pushing, adjusting, as if she was so used to doing the same for her two year old twins, she couldn’t stop setting things to right.
“For about seven years, I guess? Eight maybe? He did some work on Wade’s back porch the summer we started dating, so that would’ve been…wow, more like ten.”
Ten years ago, Kayla had left Hope Springs for Austin, her departure a ship in the night to Tennessee Keller’s arrival. A decade of work in the area should mean he’d have plenty of references. She tucked that thought away, too, sliding the card into the back pocket of her jeans.
“Thanks. I guess that’ll do it then. At least for now.” She moved her keys from her right to her left hand to shake Hailey’s. “I really appreciate you going to bat for me with the Colemans.”
“Oh, please. How could they say no? In this economy? And you paying cash? I mean, really, it’s not my business, but cash?”
Kayla’s financial advisor had been of the same incredulous mind, but Kayla would not be swayed. Cash meant the house was hers. The lawn, the trees, the memories. The turret bedroom. The kitchen. Most of all, the kitchen.
She slipped her fingertips into the pocket with the card and toyed with the sharp edge. She had big plans for the kitchen. Even better, she had the funds to see them through. “I know how crazy it sounds, but it was the right thing to do.”
“Well, it’s your money. I guess you’re the one who would know best where to put it. Listen.” Hailey was speaking into her tote again. “We rarely have any problems with vagrants or break-ins, but the Colemans got so caught up caring for Bob’s parents in Wichita Falls that the place kinda took a back seat. The police have had to run off squatters a time or two.”
She handed Kayla another card, this one imprinted with the official seal of the Hope Springs Police Department. “You can always call 911, but this is the direct line to Alva Bean in dispatch. If you need an officer, he’ll have someone here pronto.”
“Great. I really appreciate it.” The card joined the one for the contractor. “Oh, while I’m thinking about it, would you know what time the newspaper office closes today?”
Hailey brought up a hand to shield her eyes from the sun as it cut through the limbs of the street side oaks. “Something makes me want to say three. We’ve got a high school girl at the office who takes care of our listings there, so I can’t be sure.”
“Thanks.” Kayla wanted to put an ad in the next weekly edition, but before she did anything, she needed to get Magoo from her Jeep. “Maybe we can have lunch sometime soon? My treat?”
“A meal eaten without twenty grubby fingers reaching for everything on my plate? It’s a date.” With a wave, Hailey turned to go, her sensible flats smacking against the sidewalk as she made her way to her minivan parallel parked at the curb.
Kayla waited until the other woman had pulled safely onto Second Street then headed through the overgrown grass to the driveway on the Chances Avenue side of the lot. “Hey, Goo. Ready to check out the new digs?”
Tongue lolling, the two-year old shepherd mix placed his paws on the door frame and boosted himself halfway through the window. Kayla slapped her hand to her thigh, and ninety pounds of dog sailed through the air to land at her feet.
She scratched between his ears, then circled the vehicle to grab his bowl and a jug of water from the passenger floorboard. He trotted beside her to the breezeway connecting the garage to the house. The door there opened into a mud room that opened into the kitchen she’d dreamed of for ten years. She filled Magoo’s bowl, setting it near the back door before allowing herself to take it all in.
She didn’t know where to start. The six foot island with a stove top, cutting board, and second sink for food prep. The walk-in pantry with shelves deep enough and tall enough to stock with a platoon’s worth of supplies. The linoleum that had suffered skid marks from rubber-soled shoes, and gouges from dropped mixer beaters, and stains from food coloring intended for a Red Velvet cake.
Kayla wrapped her arms around her middle and remembered the klutz she’d been at twelve. All those tiny squeeze bottles, the mess on her fingers and the toes of her shoes, the droplets flung like blood from a knife to the floor. She’d ruined a brand new sponge, wasted half a roll of paper towels, and still not wiped away all traces of the spill. She’d wanted so badly to surprise May Wise, but her foster mother had been less concerned about her birthday—or the shambles of the kitchen—than to hear through a sobbing confession that Kayla knew about knife wounds.
As much as Kayla would love to install hardwood or Italian marble, her plans required commercial flooring—durable, slip, fire, and stain-resistant, easy to maintain. The menu for her daily ten-to-two lunch would be simple, self-serve, and self-pay. Salad, bread, entrée, dessert. Payment in cash dropped in a cigar box at the dining room door.
Kayla’s specialty was business—and brownies—not reproducing the breads baked in this kitchen the eight years she’d lived here. Or putting together the hearty main dishes she would serve others as May Wise had served those in her care. Making a success of Two Owls Café meant a cook who knew red leaf from romaine, gouda from feta from Parmigiano from Swiss. Egg noodles from rice noodles from semolina. Hiring the right one was a priority.
She hadn’t come to her plan lightly. Malina’s Diner was the only restaurant in Hope Springs proper. Max Malina did a booming breakfast business, but closed at ten once the rush was done. He reopened at four for dinner, leaving a six hour window where anyone wanting a meal had to cook or leave town. The fast food franchises on the interstate boomed at lunch like Max’s place did at first light.
Two Owls Café would offer an alternative to soup and sandwiches, burgers and fries. But more than that, it would offer a place for friends to gather, and over a meal discuss crafts and childrearing, music and books and movies, favorite recipes and lawn care tips. Kayla saw her place as an oasis, one with a limited menu, yes, but then this house had always been about nurturing with things other than food.
She glanced at Magoo as he huffed and snorted his way around the room’s baseboards, his tail up, his ears up, his nose hard at work. “Whaddaya think, Goo? ‘Wanted. A butcher, a baker, a candlestick maker.’?
Magoo gave a single distracted wag of his tail in answer, then moved into the dining room, leaving Kayla on her own in the kitchen. It was this room more than any other where she had come to terms with the life she’d lost and the one she’d been gifted in return.
What she hadn’t been able to do, however, was reconcile the bloody images, the ones stamped on her five year old mind’s eye, her mother lying on the floor of another kitchen, their neighbor, Angus, holding her tiny, shivering body and crying when authorities had whisked her away. Her father nowhere to be found.
She had to find the missing pieces. And she could only do that from the safe harbor this house had never failed to provide.
May 10, 2012
Evaluating Your First Page
Evaluating Your First Page
View more PowerPoint from Jane Friedman
I can’t even tell you how much I love this PowerPoint slide show about book beginnings. Let me count the ways:
1) Common 1st Page Troubles: Backstory, Info Dump, Character Dump
2) Biggest Bad Advice: Start with “action”
3) Action But No Character: Offers an action scene for the sake of excitement, but without any connection to the real plot, conflict, or story arc
4) Parting Wisdom: Writing is rewriting
5) Resources: ANYTHING by agent Donald Maass
April 29, 2012
April 27, 2012
April 26, 2012
X is for Xebec
A xebec was a Mediterranean sailing ship that was used mostly for trading. It would have a long overhanging bowsprit and protruding mizzen mast. It also can refer to a small, fast vessel of the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, used almost exclusively in the Mediterranean Sea.
April 25, 2012
W is for Walking
The value of mental-training games may be speculative, as Dan Hurley writes in his article on the quest to make ourselves smarter, but there is another, easy-to-achieve, scientifically proven way to make yourself smarter. Go for a walk or a swim. For more than a decade, neuroscientists and physiologists have been gathering evidence of the beneficial relationship between exercise and brainpower. But the newest findings make it clear that this isn’t just a relationship; it is the relationship. Using sophisticated technologies to examine the workings of individual neurons — and the makeup of brain matter itself — scientists in just the past few months have discovered that exercise appears to build a brain that resists physical shrinkage and enhance cognitive flexibility. Exercise, the latest neuroscience suggests, does more to bolster thinking than thinking does.
My good friend Loreth Anne White sent me a link to this article from which I’ve snipped the above. I’ve talked before about how much I love walking. As long as it’s outdoors. Because I cannot STAND to walk on the treadmill. So stupid when I could be in the air conditioned living room watching the big screen TV. Walking to me is about being outdoors. Usually in the sunshine and slathered in sunscreen, but even gloomy days will do, and misty days, and frosty cold ones, which we almost never get here.
I can’t even tell you how many words I’ve dictated while walking. I used to walk at lunch while working the day job, sometimes on the downtown streets, sometimes on the health club track. I specifically remember dictating a lot of LOVE IN BLOOM on that track. And I’ve walked the dogs in the neighborhood and dictated, two birds with one stone, and all. I’m quite sure people think I’m strange, but moving doesn’t require thought, so it’s the perfect time to let the muse have her way. And then there’s the part about my brain working better, and having more energy, and sleeping like a baby, and not wanting to turn to junk food (or at least as much) when I’m stressed.
I’ve slacked off the last few months, but am determined to get back to it. I feel amazing when I’m moving, even if it makes it doubly hard to sit and write when done!
V is for Vegetables
From my backyard (and yes I know they’re really fruit, but I’m all about the irony)! Click for the bigger versions, which are pretty good considering I used my Blackberry!
April 24, 2012
U is for Undeniable
UNDENIABLE (available now for pre-order in print at Amazon and Barnes & Noble; electronic versions to come closer to release date) will be 
released October 2, 2012 from Berkley Heat. Heat is Berkley’s erotic romance imprint, and they publish such authors as Lauren Dane and Jaci Burton, and many many more. This means Undeniable is quite hot and spicy, a bit of 50 Shades of Grey on horseback, as it were – or at least in a barn, though now that I think about it, that sex scene is in the second book of the series. Though both couples do make creative use of pickup trucks!
This makes it a bit hard to give a sexy excerpt but I’ve posted a short PG-13 rated one after the cut.
He came closer, one step, then another, stopping in front of her, close enough to touch but doing so only with his eyes. They held hers as he shrugged out of his shirt, and she breathed deeply, scenting him, the hint of sun and heat that stayed with him.
The skin of his hands, his wrists, that of his face and neck was baked to a darker bronze than that covering the rest of his torso. A cowboy’s tan. A working man’s tan. His pectoral muscles and his shoulders and his neck telling the story of the manual labor he required of his upper body.
She couldn’t help herself, and she reached out, sliding her fingertips along his collarbone, the skin beneath resilient and firm. He kept his hands at his hips, but pulled in a sharp breath, and her stomach clenched in response. This thing between them…
“Hurry,” she whispered. It was all she could say, her chest rising and falling as she watched him shed his jeans and his briefs.
Then he was naked in front of her, his forehead against hers, his toes on hers, his hands holding hers at her sides, his cock between them insistent. They stood together, breathed together, let the room disappear as together they became one.
She closed her eyes and felt the sting of tears, but left them to well behind her lids. Wiping them away would mean taking her hands from Dax’s and she couldn’t bring herself to do that.
He lifted his chin, brushed his lips along her hairline, whispered, “Do you know how beautiful you are?”
A shiver ran like a river down her spine, pooled at the base, spread lower and worked its way between her legs to ready her. “You’re the one who’s beautiful. Your mouth. Your hands. The way you touch me. The way you look at me.”
“Just not the way I look, eh?” he asked with a laugh.
She opened her eyes, lifted her hands and threaded her fingers into his hair, holding him. “I didn’t know what to expect. When I heard you were back. I’d pictured you all this time as I knew you in high school. Cocky and brash and always with the sort of grin that turned girls to puddles at your feet. But now…”
“I hear I look really good in jeans.”
“In them, but even more so out of them.”
April 23, 2012
T is for Toes
Several weeks ago when I was complaining about my back being stiff after a long day of writing to a deadline, the husband dared challenged me to do a series of toe touches to stretch. (And honestly, I meant to include “stretch” in Saturday’s S sampler.) I guess he didn’t think I could, but I can. I can bend at the waist with straight legs and put 
my hands flat on the floor. I’ve always been very flexible. No idea why. So I did them. Maybe ten. And then later I did ten more. And then I got to the point where every time I got up from the computer – to use the restroom, to get a drink or lunch, to walk outside and say hi to the cats, to put in a load of laundry, to check the mail – the first thing I did when I stood up was to do twenty or so toe touches. My back has stopped hurting completely. I don’t groan when I stand up from the desk, but I also don’t sit for more than thirty minutes at a time. And I’ve learned after the week spent at the dining room table doing taxes and killing my shoulder in the process, that these days, I really do need to write at my desk. It’s not particularly ergonomic, or at least not planned to be, but it keeps me from aching in all the wrong places. I’ve had the same desk chair for ten years at least, and I love it. It’s a standard secretarial model, but it’s got a big wide seat for my big wide seat. I still like to write in the backyard, but these days I find I need to use pen and paper because neither my laptop or Alphasmart can be situated at the right angle to keep my wrists from complaining. It sucks getting old and decrepit, but I’ve got to say, toe touches have saved me a lot of pain and suffering. Just taking those few minutes several times throughout the day has helped my back, my shoulders, my arms and my legs. And it’s so easy! No gym or even shoes required!
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April 21, 2012
S is for Sampler
Sunshine
I don’t know why, but my writing flows so much better when the sun is shining. I’m sure it’s the natural light fighting the mild case of SAD I get when the weather is gloomy. I could never live in Seattle, heh, so I grin and bear the heat of the Texas summers.
Sleep
I’m very fortunate to work from home on my schedule. My kids are grown and gone, my husband doesn’t leave for the office until 9:30, getting home around 7:00. I don’t set an alarm clock any longer. I did for a gazillion years. I’m finally sleeping enough to keep my brain functioning at its best, and it’s showing in my work. It’s cleaner, deeper, more thoughtful. I lost many hours of sleep in the past, writing at 3:00 a.m. before leaving for the day job, and I know many many authors write on similar schedules. But sleep is vital. get as much as you can! And if you don’t believe me, there’s this study:
Belenky’s high-tech brain images show that sleep debt decreases the entire brain’s ability to function — most significantly impairing the areas of the brain responsible for attention, complex planning, complex mental operations, and judgement.
Support System
Every writer needs a strong support system, though not every writer will find it in the same place. Again, I’m very fortunate that my husband is behind me 100% through all the industry ups and downs. I also have a handful of close writer friends to whom I can say anything about what’s happening in our careers. The trust network we share is invaluable.
Slow and Steady
I’m not a speedy writer. I don’t fast draft. In my entire career I’ve written 20 pages in a day one single time. I’m comfortable at 5. Maybe 7. But I also polish as I go. It’s how my brain works. When I get to the end of a book, I’m done. Slow and steady works for me, and my process is exactly how James Rollins describes his in the video below.
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