Heather MacAllister's Blog, page 3
September 29, 2014
Emily Contest 2015 | West Houston RWA
Emily Contest 2015 | West Houston RWA.
If you’re an aspiring writer or an author who’s changing genres, this is the contest for you. You’ll receive excellent feedback from a comprehensive scoresheet and judges are encouraged to write comments. Manuscripts reaching the finals are judged by agents and editors. Even better, many finalists are invited to submit their manuscripts. This is great, which you know if you’ve ever submitted a proposal to an agent or editor and waited . . . and waited . . . and waited for a response. So enter. Now!
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August 20, 2014
Carrot Clarinet
Why does this sound so much better than the plastic clarinets sold to 7th grade band parents?
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August 4, 2014
RWA 2014 Literacy Signing
Thanks to all who came out to support the literacy signing in San Antonio. We raised over $53,000 in two hours!
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July 22, 2014
RWA 2014 National Conference
I’m off to San Antonio for the RWA conference. Why does it take an entire day to pack?
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July 7, 2014
Road Trips
I have a new book out this month! TAKEN BY STORM is a strangers-to-lovers road romance. We’ve got Zoey, who is taking her sister’s champion Afghan Hound across country to breed, and Cam, a craft brewery owner who is also headed to Seattle. And we’ve got stakes–Zoey’s life has been a series of spectacular failures and her sister and brother-in-law have been a safety net. Now, she’s got a chance to repay them if she just doesn’t mess up again. Cam runs MacNeil’s Highland Beer, the family brewery in Austin and he’s been doing it by himself with sporadic and unreliable volunteer help from his relatives. He needs to hire full-time help, but that takes money. He’s got a chance to pitch to a potential investor–if he can get to the meeting on time. And we have complications in the form of a record blizzard that strands them at O’Hare. So they team up to drive and things go very, very wrong before they end up very, very right.
It’s those very, very wrong things that reveal people’s true selves. That’s why I have long said that before you agree to marry someone, you should take a long road trip together. Not three or four hours–days. A week is good. Two weeks, better. And not on an escorted tour bus, either, but on your own where you have to make your own plans, arrange for your own meals, and handle your own luggage. Things will go wrong. You’ll both get cranky. You’ll get on each other’s nerves. And you want that, because you’ll learn a lot about the other person. But–and this is important–you also want to enjoy yourself. If you can’t look back on the trip and think, “There were a few bumps, but overall I had a good time and I’m glad we were together,” then don’t get married, because marriage is the ultimate road trip.
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May 12, 2014
May 9, 2014
99¢ on the 9th
Hope you took advantage of the 99¢ sale on Counterfeit Cowgirl. Bluebonnet season is ending in Texas, but there’s still time for one more visit to Bluebonnet Ranch.
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May 7, 2014
Testing . . . Testing . . .123
I’ve been taking way too many internet quizzes lately. You know the ones that get shared on Facebook with questions like What Super Power Should You Actually Have? (I got the super power of white hot puns. Seriously.) What Font Are You? (Garamond. And let me tell you that the opinion of us Garamonds is really snarky.) By taking these quizzes, I’ve learned that I should be living in Barcelona in the 60s with electric blue hair. I’m screen siren Lauren Bacall, although I didn’t choose Humphrey Bogart as my ideal man, and I made a perfect score as a literature expert, even though I totally guessed at a couple. When I first took the career quiz, the result was chemical engineer and as someone who is the daughter and daughter-in-law of chemical engineers (and who never took chemistry in school) I knew that wasn’t right. So I changed two answers: I discovered that I hated patriarchy (a social system in which males are the primary authority figures) more than idiots and that I hadn’t scrolled down far enough to see all the choices of what I’d save in a fire. I’d chosen a photo album over a pet. I know. The horror. I swear I didn’t see that a living thing was one of the choices before. So once I made those two changes, guess what I became? A creative writer!
Click on the links, take a couple of quizzes and share.
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May 2, 2014
First harvest!
First harvest! Not the tomato on the left–the two pea-sized ones on the right. I’m taking the big one out to the garden to show them what they could look like if they worked out in the tomato gym.
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