Laurie Boris's Blog, page 37

Book Tour Winners!

Randy (Random Number Generator) and I have just chosen the winners from each stop on my recent virtual blog tour for Sliding Past Vertical. One commenter from each participating blog wins a copy of Drawing Breath; the overall winner from all the commenters wins a $30 Amazon gift card, just in time for holiday shopping.

Here are the e-book winners:

Rich Meyer

Andra Lyn

Nurmawati Djuhawan

Eva Millien

Rita Wray

Chelsea B.

And…drumroll, please…the winner of the $30 Amazon gift card is…

Mary Preston

Congratulations to our winners! Thank you to everyone for stopping by during the tour and thank you to Goddess Fish Promotions for throwing the party. They make the best margaritas…

Sliding Past Vertical: On Tour!

Happy Friday, everyone! I’m excited that Sliding Past Vertical is about to go on tour—well, a virtual tour—and that these lovely blogs have agreed to host me. We’ll have a mix of interviews, reviews, and short articles. I hope you’ll stop by and leave the blog owners a like or a comment for being so nice. Especially a comment, because that’s how you can win stuff. I’ll be giving away an e-copy of Drawing Breath at each stop (And maybe some extra goodies.) At the end, I’ll draw from all comments for one winner of a $30 Amazon gift card: just in time for holiday shopping. I’m looking forward to seeing you!

Monday, November 18: Zee Monodee – Author’s Corner

Tuesday, November 19: Deal Sharing Aunt

Wednesday, November 20: Straight from the Library

Thursday, November 21: Musings and Ramblings

Friday, November 22: Long and Short Reviews

A Room of One’s Own

Fifteen years ago this month, my husband and I moved out of the tiny apartment we’d overgrown and into our own house. I hesitate to write that we’d “taken possession” of it, because technically it’s the bank’s house and they’ve been generous enough to let us live here. What excited me most about home ownership? Not that we’d finally have room for all of our stuff. Not that I could go crazy landscaping or putting up an herb garden. Not that we had the ability to knock out walls, which we haven’t, or paint them in colors not synonymous with “off white,” which we have.

No.

What sealed the deal for me was an eight-by-ten spare bedroom upstairs, which would become my writing room—a first, for me. Previously, I’d written in whatever quiet corner I could nab, and my computer lived atop a rolling cart tucked into a semi-alcove of our bedroom. This had become a frustrating arrangement, as I had to work around my nocturnal spouse’s schedule. I am not nocturnal. But I was not about to stop writing. I’d hand-write my morning pages in my journal and key them in when he was up and about. I longed for a room with a door that closed, so I could do my thing when I was at my most creative without fretting that the clickety-clacking keys or the aroma of my coffee would wake him.

So, finally, after eight years, I got my wish. The house might have belonged to the bank, but I definitely took possession of that spare room. I possessed the hell out of it. I stripped off the teddy-bear ceiling border, painted the walls pink, and went into debt for a wood-crate-style corner office grouping complete with an ergonomic-style pullout keyboard tray. I used a housewarming-gift check for a glide rocker perfect for reading, journal writing, and daydreaming. Sigh.

One thing I did not change, however. The ceiling. The former resident of this room had peppered the ceiling with a constellation of glow-in-the-dark stars. I adored them. Sometimes I’d shut the door, turn off the lights, and stare at them, letting my thoughts swirl around my head. Occasionally, a star would fall and I’d make a wish.

Some aspects of home ownership annoy me: the taxes, the maintenance, the things that break when we can least afford to fix them. But the dozen or so stars that remain, and my joy at having this room, are still glowing just as brightly after fifteen years.

Morgen Bailey’s Writing Prompts

If you want to jump start your writing or give your creativity a little cross training, you might want to check out Morgen Bailey’s Online Novel Writing Group website. Every weekday, she posts four writing prompts. Sometimes it’s a group of words to be used in one piece of writing. Or sentence openers, concepts to explore, or maybe even a picture. Set your timers for fifteen minutes and try one of them. You don’t even have to be a novelist. Use them as a warm-up exercise for other writing, or to shake the cobwebs out of your brain if you have a problem you can’t solve.

Here’s one that I tried, leaping off from the opener, “Sorry about falling…” [original link to post]

Sorry about falling. But the cake was too beautiful, all shivery with fresh coconut shavings. The aroma took me back to my youth, of strolling along Miami Beach with my grandfather, accompanied by the cries of seagulls. I snuck peeks at the lithe, oiled bodies of the women in bikinis, my face growing hot with shame as my grandfather scolded me for looking too long. But those ladies were so perfect, like the cake—three tiers of heaven made to look like a fairytale castle with green gumdrops surrounding the top for parapets and glossy slabs of chocolate for windows. And then I noticed it: one of those chocolate squares was a half a bubble off plumb. I could not stand for it, no, as an architect I could not. I did not put down several important projects and travel eight hundred miles to see anything go wrong with my niece’s wedding, especially something related to construction. And nobody was in the room, well, except for the musician tuning his violin, grimacing at the shriek of his strings, so I did not think anyone would notice if I leaned over a bit to fix it…why the cake was put behind a railing I’ll never know; did someone think it might escape? Or that someone might try to steal it? I tried to be ever so careful, even rolling up the sleeve of my best suit jacket to keep it from brushing even a sliver of that luscious coconut. Maybe my wife was right and it could be time to see a doctor about that balance problem. It had never been a big deal before. But as I leaned, my fingers millimeters from getting the proper, delicate grip on that chocolate window to adjust it, I felt my foot give way and…well, you know the rest. Let me assure you, if anyone has any doubts about hiring that baker again, it was the lightest, most delicious confection I have ever experienced. If I close my eyes I can still smell the coconut and remember the petite brunette in the pink bikini who gave me a wink as we passed by.

So choose the prompt that calls to you and have fun with it. Writers, have you used any  prompts that you’d like to share?

 

What’s Up With That Title?

Sometimes a book, like a character, will name itself. You’ll be chugging along on the first draft and the perfect name or title pops into your head and nothing, no matter how long you brainstorm, poll your friends, read the baby-naming books, or draft pro-con lists, will ever work as well.

Drawing Breath was like that.

In a way, Sliding Past Vertical was as well.

The title came from a term used in diving competitions. I’m a huge fan. Obsessed, you could call it. When the Summer Olympics air, I will troll the cable channels and Internet footage for all of the qualifying rounds, not just the finals. Mainly I watch because it’s so beautiful. These daredevils leap and spin and twirl and land perfectly, knifing through water with such quick precision that they become negative space, leaving a tiny hole where they cut through. I want to know why. I want to know how they position their hands and feet to create barely a teaspoon of splash. I want to know what’s going through their heads as their toes leave the board. I want to know what those little towels they dry their hair off are made from. I want one. I want to know why someone would think of jumping off such a ginormously high platform in the first place.

I’m also fascinated because I have always been terrified of diving. No matter how much my father egged me on, no matter how many times he offered me a quarter to simply put my arms out and roll head first off the edge of the pool, I couldn’t make myself do it. I still can’t, and I’m okay with that, so I live vicariously through Olympic diving.

I forget which Olympic games I was watching while I worked on the first draft of this novel. During the commentary, one of the announcers, a former champion herself, kept talking about one competitor’s unfortunate habit of “sliding past vertical” during her dives. In the ideal dive, no matter how many times you spin and flip and twirl, you need to straighten out your body at a certain point so that you break the water as perpendicular to the surface as possible. That’s part of what results in the tiny splash, which is the last impression a diver leaves with the judges. The Chinese divers seem particularly good at it. Slide past that vertical ideal, however, and it’s not the prettiest of pictures. If you don’t get a good jump, or if your spins go out of control, often you don’t have enough time to get your body in the right position for the entry. Hence, that sliding thing.

Even before I started writing the book, I knew that Sarah, my female lead, had been a diver. I knew she was having problems with getting her life on track, especially when it came to certain ill-considered decisions going terribly awry. Learning about “sliding past vertical” brought it all together for me. I knew that had to be my title, because the affliction not only ended Sarah’s diving aspirations, but also had bled into her everyday life and the lives of the other characters.

What are some of your favorite “odd” book titles? Do you think they fit the stories?

Celebrate Teen Reading Week, Indie Style

Launched in the US in 1998 by YALSA (Young Adult Library Services Association), Teen Reading Week is, you guessed it, an initiative to encourage adolescent literacy.

This is an excellent program and I’m all for getting more kids to read. As a child and a teen, I spent hours disappearing into my favorite books. Without these literary friends, my life might have turned out very differently. I still enjoy reading, editing, and celebrating young adult books.

With that goal in mind, a couple of my indie author friends, Greta Burroughs and Vickie Johnstone, have organized an “Inspiring Teens” blog hop. See below for a list of all the authors you can meet this coming week. You might also win some books or an Amazon gift card.

Enjoy!

Monday, Oct. 14

Blogger – Kate Bainbridge  http://read2review.com/

Author - Vickie Johnstone

 Blogger - Sharon Ledwith http://sharonledwith.blogspot.com/

Author - Jennifer Loiske

 Blogger - Armen Pogharian https://armenpogharian.wordpress.com/

Author - Ey Wade

 Blogger – Candice Conway Simpson    http://booksforboysreviewsandfun.blogspot.co.uk/

Author - Sharon Rose Mayes

Blogger-Cedar Sanderson http://cedarwrites.com/

Author - Kim Mutch Emerson

Blogger – Maria Savva –http://www.mariasavva.com 

Author – Ed Drury

 

Tuesday, Oct. 15

Blogger - Kate Bainbridge http://read2review.com/

Author - Greta Burroughs

Blogger - Jennifer Loiske    http://jenniferloiske.wordpress.com/

Author - Cedar Sanderson

Blogger – Lisa Cresswell www.lisatcresswell.blogspot.com

Author - Tim Flanagan

Blogger -Debra J Jameson Smith http://creationsbydjamesonsmith.com/blog/

Author - Sharon Ledwith

Blogger -David Lowbridge  http://indieebookreview.blogspot.co.uk)

Author - Amanda Haulk Taylor

 

Blogger -Wendy Strain - http://www.writeonwendy.com/

Author - Greta Burroughs 7:45-8:45 PM CST 

This is a five minute fiction contest open for all participants to write a short piece using a prompt provided by Greta Burroughs.  A prize will be awarded to the winner.  It’s a lot of fun and an exciting way to show off your skills at writing.

 

Wednesday, Oct. 16

Blogger - Kate Bainbridge  http://read2review.com/

Author - Debbie Manber Kupfer

 

Blogger –Maria Saava   http://www.mariasavva.com 

Author -Linda Deane

Blogger – Debbie Manber Kupfer - http://debbiemanberkupfer.wordpress.com/

Author - Randy Attwood

Blogger - Ey Wade http://dna-bloodtiesandlies.blogspot.com/

Author - Armen Pogharian

Blogger – David Lowbridge  http://indieebookreview.blogspot.co.uk

Author -Helen Daly

Blogger - Robert DeBurgh http://robertdeburgh.weebly.com/blog-blogging-through-the-mire.html

Author - Christine Hughes

 

Thursday, Oct. 17

Blogger - Kate Bainbridge  http://read2review.com/

Author - Hugo Jackson 

Blogger - Vickie Johnstone (Vixie’s Stories) - http://vickiejohnstone.blogspot.co.uk/

Author  - Paul Plunkett

Blogger - Kim Mutch Emerson http://masterkoda.com/category/master-koda-blog-tour

Author - Donna Dillon

Blogger - Karen Pokraz Toz  http://kptoz.blogspot.co.uk

Author - JR Simmons

Blogger - David Lowbridge http://indieebookreview.blogspot.co.uk/

Author -Saoirse O’Mara

Blogger - Brenda Perlin http://homewreckertheblog.com/

Author - Charlotte Blackwell

 

Friday, Oct. 18

Blogger - Kate Bainbridge  -http://read2review.com/

Author - Tianna Scott

Blogger –Tim Flanagan  http://timflanaganauthor.wordpress.com

Author - Catherine Stovall

Blogger – Sharon Rose Mayes – http://www.notyourmomblog.com/

Author - Wendy Siefken

Blogger –  Cassie McCown http://gatheringleavesreviews.blogspot.com/

Author - Alan Tucker

Blogger –David Lowbridge http://indieebookreview.blogspot.co.uk/

Author -Michael Chulsky

 Blogger – Wendy Siefken  http://siefkenpublications.blogspot.co.uk/

Author - Juli Caldwell

 

Saturday, Oct. 19

Blogger – Robbie Cox www.themessthatisme.com

Author - Patrick Robbins

Blogger – Jonathan Gould  http://daglit.blogspot.co.uk

Author – Sibel Hodge

Blogger - Donna Dillon  http://authordonnadillon.blogspot.com/

Author - Debra J Jameson Smith

 

Blogger - Greta Burroughs http://booksbygretaburroughs.weebly.com/-a-new-day-has-begun.html

Author - Chris Baker

Blogger – Cassy Wood http://reviewmetwice.blogspot.com

Author - Vicki Kinnaird

Blogger – Vickie Johnstone –  http://vickiejohnstone.blogspot.co.uk/

Author – Lisa Cresswell

Win a Copy of Sliding Past Vertical

A giant box of pretty, pretty books arrived on my doorstep this morning. And a good thing, too, because I’m giving a few away. If you hop over to Goodreads, you could enter to win a signed copy of Sliding Past Vertical. The giveaway is for folks in the US and Canada and goes until October 25.

Thank you for listening, and now back to your regularly scheduled Internet fun, like this quiz to see how well you can read people’s emotions from only their eyes. (Thank you to Lynne Cantwell for the tip.)

Have a great weekend.

Brenda Perlin: Home Wrecker is Back!

Today I’m letting Brenda Perlin take over my blog. She’s just about to release Home Wrecker II: The Brooklyn Chronicles. This contemporary romance sounds really interesting and has been getting a lot of good reviews. If you’d like to meet Brenda online, she’ll be having a Facebook party on October 11th at 1:00 pm (PST) where there will be fun, games, and prizes. If you’d like to hop on that link now, she’ll have random e-book giveaways leading up to the event.

A bit about the book that started it all:

Brooklyn Rosen had high moral principles and was raised properly. Married for over fifteen years, those standards went out the window along with her fidelity when she met Bo. After becoming a self-proclaimed “Home Wrecker,” Brooklyn left behind her marital home, along with the damage caused by her emotional wrecking ball. But the whispered remarks followed. In Home Wrecker: The Brooklyn Chronicles we learn what shaped Brooklyn, the trials of an unhappy marriage and a deep abiding love that would not be denied. We meet a troubled, spiteful wife, who does not want to become an “ex.” Will Brooklyn and Bo survive, or will all be lost to a bitter woman?

Here’s what one reviewer had to say about the first book:

“Home Wrecker: The Brooklyn Chronicles provides a look into the heart and mind of a woman who cheated on her marriage and the reasons why it happened. It is honest. It is real. It is the story of what made Brooklyn the woman she is today, the decisions made that put her on the path she walks today, and it does it with an openness and honesty not found in many such stories. The book is well written and grabbed me from the beginning and held my attention until the very end.” – Crystal Schall, The Book Rack

According to Master Koda Select Publishing,  Home Wrecker II: The Brooklyn Chronicles puts the reader on a journey through the eyes of the main character, Brooklyn Rosen. Her story, at times, is excruciatingly honest and evokes one’s own self-reflection throughout the reading experience. However, through the devastation and tribulations, the reader will also gain an insight to the inspiring strength of the heroine as she struggles toward personal happiness.

Learn more about Brenda here:

Facebook https://www.facebook.com/HomeWreckertheBook

Twitter https://twitter.com/HomeWreckerbook

Website http://www.homewreckerthebook.com/

Blog http://www.homewreckertheblog.com

One Crazy Week

October is my favorite month—Indian summer, apples, beautiful leaves, that lovely crisp feeling in the air. After a completely insane September culminating with the release of Sliding Past Vertical, I had been looking forward to kicking back a teensy bit. Okay, I know that’s not really possible, since once the book comes out, the work really starts. At least I hoped to get outside once in a while before my schedule heated up again.

Not so, it seems, but it’s all good. I woke on Monday to find that Don’t Tell Anyone had been chosen the category winner for literary fiction in The Kindle Book Review 2013 Best Indie Books Awards.  (see shiny badge to the right). Snoopy dancing! As my entry progressed from semi-finalist to finalist in September, I was happy to see enough editing work and book promotions on my calendar to keep me from thinking about October 1.

One great thing about indies is their generosity and eagerness to support other authors. I entered the contest along with a bunch of talented author friends and did little happy dances when Nicole Storey, DV Berkom, Julie Frayn, Rosanne Dingli, and Carol Wyer made it to the semi-finals, then again when Nickie and I were in the finals (with Hugh Howey in a different category!) When I got the “you’re a winner” email from Jeff Bennington at The Kindle Book Awards, it had also been sent to the other category winners. We immediately began contacting each other with congratulations and requests for Twitter handles.

After a bit of flutter, I forced myself back to earth, because Husband and I needed to get the print version of Sliding Past Vertical done. And here she is! I was so excited to get the proof in my hands. Four books in, and the feeling of holding the finished copy hasn’t yet gotten old. I hope it never does.

Have a great week!

A Beginner’s Mind

Did you ever watch a child try to stand for the first time? My elder nephew’s attempts fascinated me. He’d strain on chubby hands and feet to push his diapered rump into the air, doing the baby Downward Dog until he’d cry in frustration and fall back to the floor of his playpen. He did this over and over. I felt so badly for him, because he was so clearly in anguish about not being able to stand and walk like the Big People. Then one day, he got up. It wasn’t a linear progression. Some days were better than others.

Now he’s in graduate school.

Writers go through much the same process, although hopefully, with fewer diaper changes. We were all once wobbly beginners aching to run before we could even stand.

When we’re new, we write with the heart-pumping joy of a story sizzling through our fingers, harboring secret fears that it’s all a pile of crap, that we don’t know what we’re doing, that any praise we get is accidental. Criticism is a stab through the heart, a corroboration that we should take up fencing, or haberdashery, or register for nursing school like Mom always hoped.

To paraphrase a popular grass-roots campaign, it gets better.

Do anything enough times and you will learn.

We all learn. All writers were amateurs once. Your favorite author, the one whose work keeps you up way past your bedtime, the one you’d stand in a block-long line to meet, once didn’t know how to write his or her own name. Didn’t know how to conjugate a verb. Didn’t know how to write dialogue or sustain dramatic tension. I could regale you with story after story about the rejections certain well-known books or authors received before someone decided to take a chance on them.

So go a little easier on yourself. As an “apprentice” writer, you have a couple of things working for you.

1. A beginner’s mind is an enthusiastic, thirsty little sponge. Take the opportunity to learn all you can about writing. There are some good books on writing out there. Two of my favorites are Anne LaMott’s Bird by Bird and The Art of Fiction by John Gardner. But one of the best ways to learn is by reading. Read a ton: good, not-so-good, something outside your favorite genre. It’s a great way to see the craft in action, to see what works and what doesn’t, and to begin to get a feel for why.

2. You don’t know yet what you don’t know. A frustrating bit of tautology, perhaps. But I noticed this as a long-time judge for a local school district’s yearly literary contest. The stories written by the younger children were so free and imaginative. Unicorns turned into flying sailboats that turned into rocket ships that took them to Saturn, where they had tea parties with space creatures. Something happened to these children as they get older, though. Maybe a teacher told them that unicorns aren’t real or if they really tried to have tea on Saturn, they’d die. Or a parent criticized their work in some less-than-thoughtful way. By sixth grade or so, many kids were writing with critics on their shoulders. Their writing got smaller, more contained, less imaginative. They began to associate writing with homework and grades and red ink. This analogy, I think, also holds true for adults beginning to write fiction. Unhampered by an internal critic that parrots back things like, “Never use flashbacks,” “Write what you know,” or “No one will ever publish this,” the apprentice writer may feel more free to experiment, to try different points of view or tenses or genres. Take advantage of that and play. Otherwise, you might never know that you’re really good at writing horror. Or poetry. Or stories about flying to Saturn on a unicorn-sailboat-rocket.

I hope you’re taking some time to enjoy the trip.