Bev Pettersen's Blog, page 119
March 16, 2014
Kill Your Darlings…And Save Yourself
(*Warning: Author has the tendency to seek patterns in life and wax philosophical about them.*)
What is an important part of a satisfying romance? Pacing.
What is a key ingredient in making a story suspenseful and thrilling? Pacing.
What can make or break an author? Pacing. And knowing one’s limits.
Years ago, one of the most valuable lessons I learned as a newbie romantic suspense writer was how to use pacing as an effective tool. I had to kill my darlings—to delete paragraphs, sometimes even p...
March 13, 2014
Title Help
Does anyone besides me need help coming up with a reallllly good title? My Ruby sisters are whizzes at this. Look at the titles they gave their 2009 Golden Heart finaling manuscripts.
The Great Bedroom War – Laurie Kellogg
Death, Taxes, and a French Manicure – Diane Kelly
Butterfly Swords – Jeannie Lin
First Grave on the Right – Darynda Jones
They’re the kind of titles that make you want to pick up the story and read. They make you laugh. Snicker. Go “ooooh.” They put you into the story.
Since Neme...
March 12, 2014
Published Book Pet Peeves…Quality Always Matters!
Last week we talked about lessons learned from judging unpublished manuscripts in the Golden Heart contest. And then we talked about quality, craft, and reader expectations in reference to judging the RITAs. Today I want to do a bit of a combo of both those subjects again, specifically having to do with published romances. I want to talk about pet peeves.
You see, there are some really REALLY great books out there. And then there are some . . . that are not so good. I don’t want to belabor the...
March 11, 2014
He Said, She Said
I’m going to talk about Guy Speak in romance books. It drives me bonkers to read dialogue that has a man speaking like a woman. Y chromosomes express themselves differently therefore, their dialogue is going to be different.
Taking it down to the very basics: male and female brains are hardwired different. Nothing you can do about it. It goes back a million years. Females were driven to search out a strong mate that would protect and provide for her and her offspring. Males were driven to spre...
March 10, 2014
Ruby Tuesday: Laurie Kellogg
Welcome, welcome, welcome! It’s Ruby Tuesday time again! Time to peel back the layers and get to know one of our Rubies a little better. Today our willing victim is the lovely Laurie Kellogg, multi-Golden Heart finalist and bold indie authoress of a host of contemporary romances. Take it away, Laurie!
Name: Laurie Kellogg
2009 GH Category & Title: Contemporary Series, The Great Bedroom War
What Happened to That Book: Indie-Published in 2012
Website: http://www.LaurieKellogg.com
What subgenre(s) do...
March 9, 2014
I want my HEA
Shailene Woodley is going to be big in 2014, with two highly-awaited films releasing this spring: Divergent (March) and The Fault In Our Stars (June). I probably won’t see either.
I want happily-ever-afters. I prefer for books to end on a joyful, uplifting, satisfying note. If I know in advance that a story will end sadly, I’m not likely to pick up the book.
There was an agent who once wrote this wonderful blog post about her personal preferences in fiction. She said that she only represented a...
March 6, 2014
Really? Quality, Craft, and Reader Expectations
Darynda wins the first Ruby RITA!
Today is the day that preliminary round scores for RWA’s RITA contest** are due, and I have one last book to score. I’ve read it three times, and it’s giving me fits.
What’s the problem, you ask?
How many points do you award “The Writing” when the book features beautifully descriptive language, deep and authentic POV work, evocative love scenes…yet contains dozens of grammar and spelling mistakes? When an author uses some of the most original metaphors and simil...
March 5, 2014
A Tiny Gem – Small Conferences
Have you ever attended a small writers/readers conference? I used to think that I had been to several. Compared to the over two-thousand attendees at the National Romance Writers of America conference, the Georgia Romance Writer’s fabulous Moonlight and Magnolia conference seemed intimate at three-hundred attendees. But this past weekend I attended the TastyAuthor’s Weekend in Wilmington, North Carolina with under fifty other authors, readers and industry professionals.
At first glance I worri...
March 4, 2014
The Mind of a Writer
If you watched the Academy Awards, you heard Robert De Niro read this as an intro to the screenwriter’s award. If you have author friends on facebook and twitter you may have seen it posted several times. I had planned another blog topic but I’m sharing what De Niro said agai...
March 3, 2014
What Did You Learn from Judging Unpublished Contests?
I don’t know about you, but whenever I read a stack of unpublished work, I learn a lot about craft. We’re all so close to our own WIPs, it’s hard to be objective about what we’re doing wrong or right, but when I’m reading work by anonymous strangers, patterns start jumping out at me.
The set I got to judge this year were all impressively solid—all the writers put sentences together we...
