Bev Pettersen's Blog, page 25

Contest Rules for the 2018 MAKE IT GOLDEN Contest!

The Ruby Slippered Sisterhood will celebrate our NINTH blog birthday tomorrow, with our usual celebratory fun and fabulous prize packages!! The following Wednesday, September 26, in keeping with Ruby tradition, we’ll be opening our 9th Annual MAKE IT GOLDEN CONTEST, and giving our Golden-Heart-eligible readers a terrific chance to shine (plus have a chance to earn more great prizes!!) The MAKE IT GOLDEN contest is designed for unpublished authors who are polishing up their entries for RWA’s...

Don’t Let Fear Block the Parade

It’s time again for my semi-annual oncology check-up visit, and it never fails to make my heart pound and my knees feel weak. I’m a seven-year ovarian cancer survivor and am very lucky to be alive. It was a fluke really, that they caught my tumor, which grew from nothing detectable at my annual GYN visit into a 12 cm monster, spreading to four places in my abdomen and to my other ovary in less than five months’ time. I was only 40 years old, with three young kids, my youngest being only four....

I Loathe Writing First Drafts!

I loathe writing first drafts. LOATHE IT.

There. I said it.

I know, I know. I’ve heard all the writerly bromides: “First drafts are  supposed to be bad.” “You can fix anything but a blank page.” But the perfectionist who lives in my head doesn’t listen. She’s singing, “Let it suck, let it suck, let it suck!” – to the tune of “Let It Snow” – at the top of her lungs, and not believing a word of it. Being I’m seventeen chapters into my WIP, with three more chapters and an Epilogue to go, the fi...

Foreign translations through Babelcube

At Romantic Times 2017 in Atlanta, I attended a workshop where an author panel discussed book/marketing projects that took little effort and brought in “nice” revenue. One of the authors mentioned having her books translated with Babelcube and the steady income she gets from those translations. “It’s free money!”

That suggestion caught my attention. I hold the translation rights for 7 books; why not check it out?

In the year since, I’ve discovered a lot about foreign translations. My experien...

Simply the Best

I had the amazing good fortune over the past few weeks to attend the US Open. I had the even better good fortune to watch Serena Williams play. First, let me just get this out of my system.

Wow!

Wow, wow, wow. She is AMAZING. Like stunning, awe-inspiring, girl-on-fire amazing.

There’s very little I can say that hasn’t been said before about the woman’s athletic ability, her competitive spirit and her competence on the court, so I’ll share something else that struck me.

She is the best. And it...

What My Mother, And Walt, Didn’t Tell Me

Life is messy. I don’t know one person who is living the fairy tale that Walt and his tribe, lack of social media, and the sheltering love of parents helped us to envisioned as children. Disagreements were once about how we were affected. Now they included our families, our communities and our world’s state, and these disputes are not easily forgotten with a hug.  Disease, accidents, and death are no longer something that happens to someone else. Financial responsibility is more than adding d...

The Mysterious Creative Brain

This year at RWA, I attended several workshops about the brain which blew my mind (ha. get it?), including the PAN Retreat with Roseanne Bane who spoke extensively about how stress can literally change your brain chemistry and inhibit creative thinking.  (You can check out her additional resources for her keynote here:  RWA2018)

She had a lot of great tips (including these three habits), but the one that stuck out most in my mind was when she talked about rewards.  We’re all doing this for th...

How to Prepare for a Book Release

Hello Ruby Readers! Hope you had a fantastic holiday weekend if you were lucky enough to have Monday off. Even though I went to the beach with friends and family, my mind was ticking away on all the promotion details I need to remember for my upcoming book release. The first book in my new Highland Roses School series, A ROSE IN THE HIGHLANDS, comes out September 24th! I’m so excited about this new series. It deals with women empowerment in a time when women were often abused and/or treated l...

A Dash of This and a Pinch of That

All too often, writing advice can come off like a recipe.

No more than three sentences in a paragraph. All paragraphs must be a minimum of three sentences.  

Keep your chapters short. Write at your own pace.

Build a rich world and trust your reader will keep up. Don’t confuse the reader with too many characters.

On and on, the advice goes. And often, pending the workshop you’re sitting in, it can seem like a whole lot of noise and very little help in navigating your work in progress.

The real...

After the Big Triumph (or Defeat)

Last week I had the opportunity to check something off my bucket list.  I got to go on Jeopardy! (Aaaaahhh!!!!) Now, if you want to find out how I did, you’re going to have to wait until October 15th like everyone else – at which point I will spill ALL – but today I want to talk about Big Goals (like going on Jeopardy or getting published or catching the killer or saving the world) and how achieving them can have an impact on us and on our characters.

We’re all familiar with the build up.  Wh...