Pat Bertram's Blog, page 322
September 14, 2009
How Do You Choose the Books You Want to Read?
I took an informal poll to find out how people discover new authors. (Hmmmm. Wonder why I'm interested in that!) I posted the following on discussion boards on both Goodreads and Facebook:
It seems as if there are as many ways of discovering books as there are readers, but I'm curious as to how you choose the books you want to read. Do you go by reviews? By recommendations from friends? Because you're familiar with other works by the author? Do you ever read a book because of an ad you saw...
September 13, 2009
"Now That My Book is Out, What is the First Thing I Should Do?"
A newly published author asked me an interesting question today: "Now that my book is 'out,' what is the first thing I should do?" I ought to know the answer to that since I was in the same position not that long ago and will be again next month when Daughter Am I is released, but I'm still a bit mystified about how to promote effectively online.
So much of book promotion on the internet depends on social networking sites, which means that one's promotion efforts have to start long before the...
September 12, 2009
My Brand New Cousin and My Brand New Book
I love the internet. I never know from day to day what will happen, who I will meet, who will become part of my future. I've made many new friends, some I have no doubt who will be in my life for years to come, and I also made a new cousin.
Another Bertram contacted me on Facebook and wanted to know if we were related. Since I have very few Bertram relatives that I know of, I told him regrettably that we probably weren't related, though we could be. He lives in Hamburg, and...
September 9, 2009
The Themes of Our Lives
I've been thinking about themes lately — the themes of our lives, the themes of our stories, the themes that permeate our relationships. (Technically, relationships fall under the category of the themes of our lives, but I like to do thing in threes, and I couldn't think of a third theme category.)
Someone asked me recently if I ever considered writing a novelization of my life, and I just laughed. There is no story in my life – nothing noteworthy ever happened to me, and I never did anything...
September 8, 2009
Lisping Dialogue
I used to read books about writing — dozens of them. Several mentioned that mispelled words and apostrophes are no longer in style to show speech defects or accents – such dialogue is difficult to read. To denote dialect, one needs to show speech patterns from the specific area, such as "It's not far, just down the road a piece." Tells you a bit about the character, and it's easy to read. Another suggestion was to use the misspellings and apostrophe's to set the character's accent in the...
September 7, 2009
Free Ebooks!
Free ebooks! Just stop by the Labor Day GiveAway at the Second Wind blog before September 12, 2009, mention the name of a S
econd Wind book that you'd like to read, and you might win an ecopy. http://secondwindpub.wordpress.com/2009/09/06/labor-day-giveaway/ Now is your chance to read More Deaths Than One or A Spark of Heavenly Fire! More Deaths Than One: Bob Stark returns to Denver after 18 years in Southeast Asia to discover that the mother he buried before he left is dead again. He attends...
September 5, 2009
Blog Talk Two
I just finished being interviewed on blog talk radio, and all things considered, it went okay. Well, there was that part where my mind went blank and I couldn't think of a single disease mentioned in A Spark of Heavenly Fire, couldn't think of a single biological warfare experiment that I researched. Sheesh. I spent years on the research. You'd think at least some of it would have come easily to mind. I did manage to mention a connection between swine flu and the novel, but still . . . it...
September 4, 2009
I Need a…Gulp…Outline
I've been rereading my work-in-progress, trying to get back into the mindset of the story so I can work on it. Usually by the time I've written 37,000 words, my characters help develop the story. No, my characters never take over — they always do what I make them do. It's more that I know who they are, what they want, and who's going to stop them from getting what they want. Unfortunately, during the first part of my WIP, my hero mostly contended with the ever-changing world, and the people...
September 1, 2009
On Writing: Looking Up
When your characters look up, what do they see? Sunsets and sunrises are so prevalent in books as to be clichés, yet every day there is a sunrise and every day there is a sunset, even if it's too cloudy for us to see either. I suppose mentioning the rising or setting sun makes more sense if there is a reason. For example, tonight there was a gorgeous sunset here because of the fires in California. The smoke drifts to Colorado and is trapped by the mountains.
I try to find different things for my
August 30, 2009
Distilling the Essence of a Story
I have an interview on BlogTalkRadio on Saturday, September 5 at 11:30am ET. We're going to be talking about back story — where I got the ideas for A Spark of Heavenly Fire and More Deaths Than One. Although one of the hosts of the show has read at least one of my books, I'm sure at some point he will ask me, "What are your books about?" And I will give the same answer I give to everyone who asks. A blank stare. Though, being radio, it will come across as blank silence.
How does one encapsulate a
