Bev Pettersen's Blog, page 49
May 16, 2017
The Drips and Drabs Add Up
As I sit here writing this, I’m on a train headed back home at the end of a weekend. The ride is short enough not to be a drag but long enough I can actually get a few things done and it’s with that in mind that I’m writing this blog post. I’m hoping to snag about 3 or 4 pages on the work in progress, too.
It took me a long time to appreciate these bits of time. It’s easy to look at them as inconsequential, but those lone half hours and hours add up. And, if put to good use, can be a huge adv...
May 15, 2017
Meet 2017 Golden Heart Finalist Laurel Kerr!
The credit for the idea goes to Alice Yu, but the group loved it as soon as...
May 14, 2017
Character: The Heart of Great Story
Good stories are all about great characters, and great characters take work. Some writers develop characters through discovery/rough drafts while others create character notebooks with detailed charts, photos, interviews, etc.
Regardless of your approach to character development, here’s a fun and simple technique to help you write rich, complex, and compelling characters — Persona Poems. These eight-line poems are biographical in nature and are an excellent way to build and distill character....
May 11, 2017
Mother’s Day the Minnesota Way…AND FREE KINDLE E-BOOK!
Here in Minnesota, the walleye is our favorite freshwater fish. It’s considered such a delicacy that, regardless of temperature, the first day of walleye fishing season lures thousands of Minnesotans to their favorite lakes and fishing holes, trying to catch their limit.
There’s good news and bad news. The good news? 100% ice out! The ice has melted from every Minnesota lake. (This isn’t always the case.) The bad news? In Minnesota, the walleye fishing opener is always scheduled for the secon...
May 9, 2017
Quick. What’s Your Story About?
With Nationals only ten weeks away, I thought I might address the subject of loglines and blurbs. (Ten week is not long. Trust me, especially during summer and when the kids are out of school.) Now is the time to think about them, so you can brand the log lines in your thoughts. You can even practice with checkout people while you shop for your conference essentials.
Recently, I worked on the blurb for my next book, releasing this summer, and for days I detested every line I’d written. I walk...
May 8, 2017
Writing Emotion:
This is a reprise of a post from December 2010, but hopefully it’s as relevant now as it was then:
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You hear it everywhere: readers want books that evoke deep emotion.It’s not surprising, given the tough times we’re in, that readers want to be swept up in strong feeling—feeling so authentic and substantial they forget their day-to-day worries and just care about the characters, maybe even have a good cathartic cry. (When was the last time a romance actually made you cry?...
May 7, 2017
Dictating Fiction
I love to knit, but knitting doesn’t love me. About a year ago, I developed something known as “knitter’s elbow,” which is basically the same kind of tendonitis one gets from playing too much tennis or golf. Unfortunately, elbow tendonitis makes it painful to spend hours using a keyboard or a mouse.
What’s a writer to do? When my tendonitis first flared I was on deadline for A Small-Town Bride with 20,000 words left to make my word count. Since my publisher had already given me extra time, I...
May 4, 2017
Where’s the Beef? Finding Truth and Pain in Comedy
Maybe you can’t go full Nora Ephron, but even the most serious of novels can use a break. Even you (yes, you!) can add a few lines for laughs to break up all the kissing and fighting and sighing and scheming in your romance.
If it doesn’t come out naturally, it always seemed to me that it shouldn’t come out at all. But several years ago, a friend told me to expand my comedic skill set, so I decided to give it a shot. I borrowed “The Comic Toolbox: How to Be Funny Even If Y...
May 2, 2017
Re-Launching an old Series
If you want to make a career as a writer, you will learn pretty quickly that this business has ups and downs. You will have months where you think “If I make this much every month, I’ve got it made!” and months where you think “If I make this much every month, I’m totally screwed.” For most of us, that’s just the nature of the beast.
A few years ago, I started noticing a downturn in my paranormal sales. This lead me to launch my contemporary pen name which has turned out to be a hugely po...
May 1, 2017
To SWAG or Not to SWAG – Revisited
In 2013, I wrote a post titled “To Swag or Not to Swag”, on one part confessing my swag addiction, but also discussing my take on when it’s good to swag and what sort of benefits authors can expect from it.
Now, four years later with the spring/summer conference season looming ahead, authors are still wondering…should I spend my hard earned dollars on author swag? Does it do any good? What’s the biggest bang for my buck?
Four years ago I was a self-styled Swag Queen, but apparently that wasn...
