Maddy Barone's Blog, page 48
October 15, 2012
Tuesday Truth: Book Sale and Blog Hop-Win a Kindle Paperwhite
Thing #1: All Liquid Silver books are on sale 33% off at Kobo. That includes al of mine. Check it out!
http://www.kobobooks.com/romanceoffer
Thing #2: Win a Kindle Paperwhite plus a ton of other great prizes this weekend at the Bewitching Blog Hop. I will be giving away a cute little shawl that I knit myself.
October 9, 2012
Tuesday Teaser: Eddie’s Prize
This is from when Lisa is coming into Kearney for the first time. She and Carla are in a horse-drawn wagon a day after the plane crash.
Carla leaned toward Lisa. “Are you okay?” she asked with compassion. “Are you thinking about the little boy?”
Lisa nodded jerkily. Unlike some children she had encountered on planes, the four-year-old redhead sitting in the seat in front of her had been a perfect angel, quietly coloring and playing giggling peek-a-boo games with his mother. When the plane had finally come to its metallic screeching stop on the prairie, the mother was dead and the little boy so badly hurt that he could only cry almost soundlessly. Lisa had picked him up and numbly carried him out of the plane, allowing Carla to help her down to the ground, but never letting the boy go. She had hummed to him while he bled and cried and finally died. Lisa didn’t know what his last name had been. His mother had called him Alexander. All she had left of him was his blood on her clothes and the memory of his half-smile when he looked up at her right before he died.
That memory was too precious and too painful to linger on at this moment. There were other people counting on her and Carla now, those too hurt to go for help themselves, who needed doctors so they could live. The mayor of Kearney, Nebraska would get the crash survivors the help they needed. Even the crazy men from Odessa had done what they could to help by bringing them here. For the two hundredth time, Lisa forced her thoughts away from the crash to focus on the here and now.
She stared past the driver’s shoulder. “Is this an actual town? It looks as dilapidated as some of the abandoned houses we passed on our walk.”
Buildings looked like they had been half torn down and their windows taken away. There was a familiar fast food restaurant to their right, looking like it had been out of business for fifty years, abandoned for the elements to fade and wear away.
“The recession must have hit this area hard,” Carla suggested doubtfully.
Further in, roads became smoother, and it looked like efforts had been made to clean things up. They rolled past walls that separated whole blocks. The road went from dirt to something like cobblestones. The wagon seat bounced like a car with bad shocks. Even Carla, tough as she was, looked a little green. Lisa was afraid her lunch was going to escape. Soon they began seeing people, all men, come out of buildings and take notice of them.
“Women!” shouted one, pointing at the wagon.
Tuesday Teaser
This is from when Lisa is coming into Kearney for the first time. She and Carla are in a horse-drawn wagon a day after the plane crash.
Carla leaned toward Lisa. “Are you okay?” she asked with compassion. “Are you thinking about the little boy?”
Lisa nodded jerkily. Unlike some children she had encountered on planes, the four-year-old redhead sitting in the seat in front of her had been a perfect angel, quietly coloring and playing giggling peek-a-boo games with his mother. When the plane had finally come to its metallic screeching stop on the prairie, the mother was dead and the little boy so badly hurt that he could only cry almost soundlessly. Lisa had picked him up and numbly carried him out of the plane, allowing Carla to help her down to the ground, but never letting the boy go. She had hummed to him while he bled and cried and finally died. Lisa didn’t know what his last name had been. His mother had called him Alexander. All she had left of him was his blood on her clothes and the memory of his half-smile when he looked up at her right before he died.
That memory was too precious and too painful to linger on at this moment. There were other people counting on her and Carla now, those too hurt to go for help themselves, who needed doctors so they could live. The mayor of Kearney, Nebraska would get the crash survivors the help they needed. Even the crazy men from Odessa had done what they could to help by bringing them here. For the two hundredth time, Lisa forced her thoughts away from the crash to focus on the here and now.
She stared past the driver’s shoulder. “Is this an actual town? It looks as dilapidated as some of the abandoned houses we passed on our walk.”
Buildings looked like they had been half torn down and their windows taken away. There was a familiar fast food restaurant to their right, looking like it had been out of business for fifty years, abandoned for the elements to fade and wear away.
“The recession must have hit this area hard,” Carla suggested doubtfully.
Further in, roads became smoother, and it looked like efforts had been made to clean things up. They rolled past walls that separated whole blocks. The road went from dirt to something like cobblestones. The wagon seat bounced like a car with bad shocks. Even Carla, tough as she was, looked a little green. Lisa was afraid her lunch was going to escape. Soon they began seeing people, all men, come out of buildings and take notice of them.
“Women!” shouted one, pointing at the wagon.
October 3, 2012
13 things I Love About Fall
Fall is my favorite time of the year. Here is why:
1. Hot tea. I don’t really enjoy drinking tea when it’s hot out, but crisp fall air makes it perfect.
2. Baking. I like to bake. But heating up the apartment by having the stove on sucks, so I don’t do it in the summer.
3. Knitting. It’s so cozy to have a project in progress in your lap when it’s chilly.
4. Apples. They actually aren’t my favorite fruit, but a sweet, juicy apple is nice in the fall. Plus, you can make apple pie, apple spice scones, apple crisp, and drink hot apple cider.
5. The colors. Here in North Dakota we don’t have many trees, but if I drive east for 30 minutes, I can see the trees of Minnesota in vivid color.
6. The first snow fall. We’re expecting at least three inches tomorrow. Sigh. On Monday I had the air conditioning on.
7. Chili. It’s a great dinner for cool fall evenings.
8. The Northern Lights Quilters Guild Annual Quilt Show and raffle. I don’t quilt, but I love looking at the hundreds of quilts the guild puts on display.
9. The kids are back in school. My mom used to put the flag out of the first day of school. She said it should be a national holiday.
10. TV watching. I don’t watch much TV in the summer because that darn air conditioner is so loud.
11. Good sleeping weather.
12. Hot bubble baths.
13. Holiday season. Halloween!
Do you like fall?
October 1, 2012
Tuesday Truth: Maddy’s a Dork
I got my royalty check Monday and took it to the bank to deposit. The drive thru was closed so I had to go in. The young man who waited on me has helped me before. He’s always friendly, and I’ve always thought he was attractive. Tall, lean, broad-shouldered, with his dark blond hair in a messy Caesar cut. His face is handsome, but when he smiles … Knock out. Gorgeous. Drool-worthy.
Anyway, he looked at the check and casually asked if I worked for Atlantic Bridge Publishing. I said yes, I was an author. His baby blues popped and that heart stopping grin flashed out.
“What do you write?”
I tried to look modest, like I wasn’t molesting him with my eyes. That thin white dress shirt didn’t hide the fact that he is ripped. “I write romance. Werewolf romance. it’s pretty popular with readers.”
“Really? Do you do much research for that?”
I wondered if he meant the sex scenes. I said, straight-faced, “I’ve been trying to find a werewolf to interview, but they like to stay out of the public eye.”
He laughed, and it was all I could do to not blurt out what a great cover model he’d make. Oh, and by the way, if he’d like to pretend to be a werewolf, I’d love to do some research with him.
Are you proud of me? I kept it professional. I told him to have a nice day, dropped my change and had to crawl around on the floor, picking it up with what scant remnants of dignity I could muster. Then I went around the corner to buy a pound of fudge. I earned it.
September 28, 2012
Rough Draft of Eddie’s Prize is Done!
I have been working on Eddie’s Prize since last October. It is 104,058 words long right now. But starting sunday I’ll be doing massive revisions, so it will probably be somewhere around 80,000-90,000 words when I submit it. But I’m not even going to begin revisions until Sunday night. Tomorrow I’m going to clean. I have done nothing in the way of cleaning for over a week, and even before that I barely did more than the dishes. All my free time went to writing. My apartment is in a terrible state! So I need to clean the kitchen (excavate the kitchen, is more like it) and the living room at the least. The bathroom is on the list, too. My bedroom … Well, that’s just me, so it can wait. Because I don’t want to spend all my time cleaning, ya know. I also have The Hunger Games dvd to watch. I’m working on a Dr. Who scarf too, as well as Lisa’s After the Crash afghan. And I plan to put my newsletter together, now that I finally have something concrete to say about Eddie’s Prize.
So Congrats to me on typing The End! More updates are coming.
September 24, 2012
Tuesday Truth: Eddie’s Prize Update
Never surrender!
September 22, 2012
Eddie’s Prize Teaser
Today I wrote my heart out and completed Chapter 23 of Eddie’s Prize. I really like how the end is coming together. Only one more chapter and I can type “The End” of the rough draft. It’s possible that I will actually finish tomorrow as planned. However, tomorrow is a very busy day (sunday school, church, church annual meeting, knitting with the gals, etc) so I don’t want to absolutely count on it. Still, I’m pretty darned happy. To celebrate, here is a teaser from the chapter I wrote tonight:
Eddie returned to his cold, empty house and pondered Bree’s words. He wanted his wife back. He missed the look of happy pride on her face when he complimented the supper she’d prepared. Every supper she put in front of him had told him she loved him, just as much as the words she murmured to him in bed had. His world was crumbling about him. Without her arms to hold it together, it would shatter.
Alone, between cold sheets on the bed he’d made love to his wife in, he gave in to tears. He needed Lisa. He needed her love even more than he needed his mother’s approval.
Storyteller vs Writer
I’m not sure that’s the best title for this blog post, but it’s all I can think of. What brought this on? Well, I recently finished a romance story by a very successful self-pubbed author. The story was terrific. The characters were interesting. I loved reading how their relationship developed. The tension was good and the climax was well done. In general, I thought it was an excellent story. However, I’ve read several stories by this author, and the heroines are all the same, right down to the dialogue. The author writes dialogue with far too many exclamation points!!! And her heroines trail off in the middle … ohmygod!! … of a thought!!!
I enjoyed the story. I didn’t enjoy the writing. I checked the standings of this author’s books on Amazon, and all dozen or so of them are quite low (meaning they are selling very well) and it made me wonder just what readers are looking for. For myself, I don’t think I’ll read any more of this author’s work because the typos and grammar errors take me out of the story. But going by the rankings, I must be in a very small minority. Maybe it’s because I’m a writer and I notice those errors more. It makes me wonder if she has an editor. I doubt it.
That makes it sound like I think my books don’t have any errors. I know that’s not true. You should see the typos in my rough drafts! Heck, look at 95% of my posts on Facebook! They totally suck. Even though I go over my manuscript before I even submit it, and my editor looks at it multiple times, and the final line editor goes through it before it is even published, I still find errors later. Drives me crazy. I find typos even in the best books from St. Martin’s or Avon. However, there’s a difference between the occasional boo-boo and badly flawed writing mechanics. I expect a book to have sound writing, where the grammar and punctuation follow certain rules.
On the other hand, I once read a book for a book club where the writing was superb. Not just mechanics, but the lyrical use of description was beautiful. It was almost like effortless poetry. The author’s word choices were stunningly perfect. When I read a paragraph, I could see the scenery so clearly I felt like I was there. And I couldn’t have cared less about the characters or their story.
The first author, grammar errors, typos and all, is a gifted storyteller. The second author was a master of the craft of writing. Which is better? Which is more important for the reader? In my mind, clearly the storyteller. But even better would be the author that could blend the two. I think that can be a difficult thing. But there are some authors out there woo do it well. Laura Kinsale is one. Sally Watson is another. (If you haven’t read Sally Watson, I strongly urge you to do so. She writes young adult historicals, and she’s the reason I got a history degree and started writing. I adore Lark and the Hornet’s Nest in particular, but anything she has written is fantastic.) Also, Nalini Singh.
What do you think? Does poor writing take you out of a story, or does it not matter as long as the story itself is good?
September 21, 2012
A Few Upcoming Give-Aways!
I appreciate my readers so much! To all of you who have read my books and enjoyed them enough to mention them to your friends,
Thank You! I wanted to do something nice for you in return. During the next JustRomanceMe bloghop (date not yet determined, but probably in month or two) I will be giving away this little shoulder shawl. I knit it myself, so I can point out all the boo-boos 
, but it’s still pretty cute.I am still working on Eddie’s Prize, but there is hope that I will have the rough draft completed by the time I go to bed on Sunday, September 23. Right now I am writing a scene where Lisa has (in utter frustration) sworn she’ll never try to knit again. She HATES knitting! Tami tries to teach her how to braid rugs, but that is a disaster for Lisa, too. But Rose introduces her to crochet, and for some reason, that works for Lisa. Soon she is making a granny square, and since she doesn’t like the idea of sewing dozens of squares together, she just keeps working on that one granny square until it becomes a big square afghan. I will be creating Lisa Madison’s After the Crash Throw to give away to a member of my newsletter. More info on that in a few months. Here is how far I’ve gotten on it so far:
