Bev Pettersen's Blog, page 83

How to Stay Sane When You’re Writing Insanity

**WARNING: A few WWII descriptions ahead. Read please, as we should never forget, but read at your own risk.**

Usually I’m entrenched in research about kilts and Henry VIII’s tantrums or the latest terms teens are using. Yes, I write historical romance and YA contemporary romance. But over the last few months I’ve been working on something completely different. Different and hellish.

My grandmother & her sister in Smolensk, Russia. The person they tore out of the picture, whom my aunt is look...

Fangirl Friday

Need agreat summer read? Dive into Summer Kisses–a boxed set of TEN full-length contemporary romance novels by TEN Romance Writers of America Golden Heart award-winning or nominee authors–featuring NY Times and USA Today bestselling author, Theresa Ragan.

HAVING MY BABY by NY Times and USA Today Bestselling Author, THERESA RAGAN

After being left at the altar, Jill Garrison realizes she may never have the wedding or the husband, but nothing is going to stop her from having a baby. With the he...

A Picture Paints A Thousand Words (I Hope!)

People always ask where I get my story ideas. It’s a complicated question…and yet it isn’t. Because they never come from any one place. Sometimes an article I read on the internet will get the wheels turning. Sometimes an overheard conversation sparks something. And sometimes it’s a picture.

A picture like this one.

My son went snow tubing with friends this past winter. When he came back, he had several pictures. This was one of them. I chuckled and told him his facial expression seemed a lit...

Show and Tell Wednesday – Vintage romance covers

I was looking for public domain romance cover images, as one does, and came across these from http://comicbookplus.com, a repository of scanned comic book covers in the public domain.

What can I say? I LOVE the titles. I think they’d still work today!

The love triangle. A timeless trope indeed.

Aww, the classic clinch cover. But what is he wearing? It looks like pajamas with little suns.

Or maybe it’s a steampunk thing?

And look at the price. All that drama and angst for only 10 cents.

I...

Curiosity and the Author

Writers are Super Heroes.

Their Superpowers are: Imagination, Curiosity and Creativity.

A few weeks ago I shared thoughts about the author and imagination. Today it’s curiosity.

Author’s professional curiosity is a huge subject on many levels. It begins with, can I write a book? Should I write a book? How do I write a book? Flash forward to a truck load of how do I promote and gain new reader questions.

I believe an author’s personal curiosity keeps the joy in writing. It ignites the imaginat...

Psychic Distance

In all the workshops, conferences, and lectures I’ve attended through RWA, I never heard of this concept until I went to the International Thriller Writers Conference in July. There I attended two talks by Steve Berry, the thriller writer, and I highly recommend him for his talks on craft. In one of his talks, he mentioned psychic distance.

A simple concept, but one that had always escaped my notice. Since I tend to write in first person, it’s not something I often need.

Referring to someone...

Fangirl Friday

Welcome to my first Fangirl Friday.

This week we lead with a boxed set on sale for 99 cents. And not just any boxed set. Summer Kisses, 10 stories from Golden Heart finalists, nine Ruby sisters and Theresa Ragan, who is a Pixie Chick sister of mine. If that isn’t enough to get you rushing for your Kindles, if you preorder Summer Kisses and forward the receipt to katiegraykowski@me.com, she’ll put you in for a drawing for $100 Amazon gift card that she’s providing. Getthe details at www.facebo...

Director’s Cut

The director’s cut, a movie released several years after the original, giving us a look into scenes and story we missed when the film was in the theaters. Aliens, released in 1986, the director’s cut coming out in 2003 with roughly eighteen minutes of a movie that really should have been in the first. Boondock Saints II, All Saints Day, twenty-two minutes that made it practically a different film.

These directors knew what they were doing. They knew what cut to make it still work and then the...

Show and Tell Wednesday – Coloring Books

There are few things I’m braggish about, but one of them is coloring. I’ve got mad coloring skills.

Hubby chuckles whenever it happens. I’ll sit down or kneel down next to my twinsies as they color (which usually to them means a few scribbles before peeling crayons and breaking them). Or I’ll pick up a crayon at a restaurant with a kiddie menu — they all have those now, don’t they?

“Mommy was very good at coloring,” I’ll boast shamelessly to the twinsies. “She won awards.”

I have.

The local...

SHIPPERS

I’m not talking the postal service. UPS, or FedEx. I’m talking about shippers as it relates to fandom.

Shipping (from Wikipedia):
Shipping, initially derived from the word relationship, is the desire by fans for two people, either real-life celebrities or fictional characters, to be in a relationship, romantic or otherwise. It is considered a general term for fans’ emotional involvement with the ongoing development of a relationship in a work of fiction. Shipping can involve virtually any kin...