K.C. Sprayberry's Blog, page 148

Girls in History

Young women have always had their place in history. From the time they wore animal skins through the heavy clothing used to cover their bodies in the Romance era, all the way to the nineteenth century, where clothing was often uncomfortable and never allowed a girl to adjust for the heat.
A perception that girls had to be protected, coddled from the world, is often used to define these teenagers. That can’t be further from the truth. Most young women of the nineteenth century did more work in a day than today’s teenage girl does in a month. There was no respite of hanging out with friends or spending most of the day in school. Their duties began long before the sun was up and didn’t end when the day did.
Abby Weston is one of those young women of the nineteenth century. She spends every day, from before sunup to long past sundown immersed in boring, endless chores. The only relief in her life are the horses her father and brothers train to provide mounts for the Pony Express. Abby dreams of one day riding for the mail venture, but is thwarted by the thought of what her parents and brothers will do if they catch her sneaking off to try her hand at that adventure. Far into the future, a descendant of Abby’s learns of the end of the telegraph, and then through the stories her great-granny tells, of a special young woman who shared many of the ideas Mina does.



Blurb
The Pony Express brought mail across barren desert, endless prairies, and over steep mountains from April 3, 1860 to October 24, 1861. The telegraph has often taken the most blame for the Pony ceasing operations, although there were other reasons. One-hundred-forty-five years later, the internet made the telegraph obsolete. The romance of that time lives on, in the memories of those who heard the tales of this great venture…
Mina Weston Anders bursts into her home to tell her great-granny that the telegraph is no more on January 27, 2006. A story unfolds, as Granny talks about an ancestor that Mina resembles…
Abigail Grace Weston's starry-eyed dream is to become the first female Pony Express rider. Ma, Pa, and six overprotective brothers won't even let her near the corral to train mustangs for the mail venture, so she gives up her dream to sneak out and talk to the ponies, teaching them to accept her weight on their backs.
Then her life changes and all her dreams are dust. Or are they? 

Get Pony Dreams on Amazon! 
Excerpt

She raced down the street, her sandy blonde hair streaming behind her. Mina Weston Anders had a very important message for one of the people she adored and couldn’t wait to pass it on.


At thirteen, she’d spent a lot of time studying the history of the Old West, and remembered a very important detail when their teacher told them that a thing people had used for one-hundred-forty-five years wouldn’t be around anymore.


“Hey, Granny!” Mina burst through the door of her northwest Georgia home. “Everybody’s talking about how there’s no more telegrams. Didn’t you tell me about them?”


Granny looked up from where she was knitting a baby blanket for the little brother Mina would soon have to look after. She hated the thought of sharing her house with another brother. Didn’t she already have five? Being the oldest, she was the one stuck with all the awful chores.

Info Dumps

One thing you don't want to do as an author is dump information into your story that has no bearing on the current problem. We are all encouraged to provide information about our characters and settings, but a birth to that moment description of the character is unnecessary. How your main character got into trouble as a child for silly incidents isn’t relevant, unless it relates to his or her situation now.
In fact, as with short stories, the information not related to the overall plot should be eliminated completely from the narrative. A brief description of a house should be relative to its importance to the story. We don’t need to know the size of each room, the location of all the furniture—or even if there are any furnishings if we never go into the house. What we do need to know is the house’s relevance to the story.
The same goes for dialogue, actually it goes more for dialogue. Don’t put in information not relevant to the moment in your dialogue. It’s stiff and unnatural. The reader will wonder exactly why the person is saying what they just did.
For example, two people at a sports event talking about great a player and what an awesome move that person just made. Then in the middle of their discussion, one of the speakers says “he’s great as the head of the chess club.” No inclusive “too” to make it sound like the guy isn’t just a jock but also thinks logically. No previous introduction about this amazing combination of agility and brains, just an insertion that the person is in the chess club. Completely out of place and unnecessary to the current situation.
Your reader is now thrown off track. They’re confused about why you thought it necessary to bring in this information at this point. And they should be.
One of the worst mistakes you can make is to deviate from the main plot and have the reader wondering about a situation that won’t arise until later in the book. You will lose a reader, possibly earn a poor review, and in all likelihood have the word go out that your books don’t stay on track.
Authors owe our readers a pleasant reading experience. That doesn’t mean the storyline doesn’t have to get intense, or that the story should be an easy read, but we cannot throw them off the track of what they’re reading.
Remember: information dumps do nothing for your story. Save them for the background file, to be used when necessary, and sparingly.

Everybody Reads YA ~ First Love Anthology

Happy “Everybody Reads YA” Sunday! Today I’m sharing an excerpt from the First Love Anthology. Valentine’s Day is about love, especially for teens.




He presses harder on the accelerator, his foot twitching inside his sneaker. His is an easy life, one he’s taken for granted for years, but now … now … things are so different. Jack Byers lives only for Lea Wright.Jack comes from the richest family in Landry. They live on a hill, overlooking the valley where most of the town barely exists since the recession began, yet he’s never really been as bad as the rest of his family. Sure, he has movie star good looks, with his shoulder brushing mink brown hair, green eyes that tend to sparkle with repressed laughter, and a build that put him on the football team long before he entered school.


About the Author
Born and raised in Southern California’s Los Angeles basin, K.C. Sprayberry spent years traveling the United States and Europe while in the Air Force before settling in northwest Georgia. A new empty nester with her husband of more than twenty years, she spends her days figuring out new ways to torment her characters and coming up with innovative tales from the South and beyond.
She’s a multi-genre author who comes up with ideas from the strangest sources. Some of her short stories have appeared in anthologies, others in magazines.




That magic moment for a teen. The realization that the person you’ve liked is a little more than a friend. Chance meetings. Old friendships. Even a social media post. These can all lead to that first love.
Authors M.A. Cortez, Gloria Weber, Vanayssa Somers, Margaret Egrot, Josie Montano, K.C. Sprayberry, Pauline Prentiss, and Mya O’Malley bring you tales of teens in the throes of their first romance.


First Love Anthology

Book Launches

Avant garde, laissez faire—both phrases that pretty much mean let things go as they will. That shouldn’t ever apply to a book launch. We, the author, need to approach a book launch as we have every other aspect of book production—with a serious eye to the audience.
What does this mean?
Your book launch should be planned and set up as diligently as you wrote and edited your book or choose your cover art.
The first thing you should do is decide how you want your book launched, both on social media and through traditional methods. Will you do a Facebook event, a Twitter blast, a blog post, or any combination thereof?
Once you make this decision, you need to set up the events. Ask other authors and even librarians to help you with the launch event. Remember to tag on both Facebook and Twitter to those people and/or organizations. If you’ve contacted librarians, ask about becoming involved with their reading programs, especially those that will directly benefit your book.
Once your release day arrives, all of your social media posts should be ready to load to the sites, except the links, which you should have within a few hours of your book being uploaded. Get the news out. Make sure those who promised to help are doing that. If they don’t, make a note not to use them again instead of sending out an angry demand for an explanation.
On launch day, the urge to manage every single moment of your book’s arrival in the world is strong, but you must learn the hardest lesson yet. Once you’ve done your posts, let them sink in and grab people’s attention. Don’t start putting up more posts immediately that might be construed as spam. Start on another book, take a run around town, schedule a trip with the kids to the zoo, anything to get your mind off the fact that the world hasn’t instantly noticed your book. Once you’re back in front of your computer, check out the events. If they need a nudge or two at this point, do it. You might even offer a special type of swag associated with your book—a necklace, pens with your name and the book’s title on them, or any type of giveaway item that will let people recognize who you are.
As the day ends, many long hours after it started, you should take a deep breath and check your sales venues to see if there were any sales. If there were, yeah! Success! If there weren’t, you can still count your release launch as a success if you had a large number of people seeing your book. Remember, readers sometimes take a bit longer to warm up to a new author. You never know if you’re the person they’ll go back to at a later date because of your launch.

Fun Summer Reads

Summer time is for fun, being outside, sports, and reading.
Reading, you say. Who wants to read during the summer?
A lot of people immerse themselves in books during the summer. Libraries host summer reading programs to get students interested in all sorts of things. Those programs can even be for adults and held in the evenings—what parent wouldn’t love one day a week in adult company when the kids are around all day?
With all the electronic media today, you can even read a book on your phone or tablet while you’re at the beach, a park, or just hanging with your friends. Free apps make this very easy, and many authors offer their books free or at a reduced price during the summer months, to allow their readers to get a great bargain.
My most recent release is a fun summer read for teenage boys. Okay, maybe for everyone, but the target audience is teen boys. There is conflict, of course, but there is also magic, Phoenixes, friendships, and getting into trouble. Sounds a lot like my own boys when they were teens.
Blurb:
The Evans family has always been the Protector of the Phoenix. The heavy mantle has passed from father to oldest son for hundreds of years—until an accident in the breederies changes everything.
Trank’s dreams are of Wizard Camp and teaching about his wonderful world to young wizards and witches around the world. He has plans, none of which include working at the family’s legacy. After an accident in two of the breederies, he finds himself with the heavy mantle of Protector shoved on his shoulders, a mere day after his fourteenth birthday.
Not only is he thrust into the drudgery of protecting the Phoenixes, he has to continually fight to prove that he can do the job when the father of his best friend attempts to wrest the position of Protector from the Evans family. Can Trank do what is needed and prevent a reoccurrence of the accident that took so many of his family? Will he succumb to the intense work and quit to escape what he views as something that is making him so unhappy?


Excerpt:
The Evans family has always been the Protector of the Phoenix. The heavy mantle has passed from father to oldest son for hundreds of years—until an accident in the breederies changes everything.
Trank’s dreams are of Wizard Camp and teaching about his wonderful world to young wizards and witches around the world. He has plans, none of which include working at the family’s legacy. After an accident in two of the breederies, he finds himself with the heavy mantle of Protector shoved on his shoulders, a mere day after his fourteenth birthday.
Not only is he thrust into the drudgery of protecting the Phoenixes, he has to continually fight to prove that he can do the job when the father of his best friend attempts to wrest the position of Protector from the Evans family. Can Trank do what is needed and prevent a reoccurrence of the accident that took so many of his family? Will he succumb to the intense work and quit to escape what he views as something that is making him so unhappy?

Protector of the Phoenix 







 

Your Best Foot

We’ve all heard the saying to put your best foot forward. This pretty much means that whatever you do in life make sure you’re doing it to the best of your ability.
This is especially true when it comes to submitting your book to a publisher. Every bit of advice you will get on this subject will always start with the same thing: “Always, always make sure you send a well-edited manuscript.”
The reason for this is that your manuscript is your interview with a publisher. The story must flow sensibly from one paragraph to the next. There can’t be any misspellings. Nor should you send the publisher what you received from your beta reader or critique group without ensuring there isn’t any type of editing contained within the body.
In essence, your submission is not only your interview, but also your face-to-face moment with a publisher. The appearance of your manuscript is as important as the story. Everything is being judged.
Think of it this way. Did you run out the door without making sure you tie didn’t have a spot on it from where you dropped part of your breakfast? Did you happen to make sure there wasn’t any lipstick on your teeth? Is your hair well groomed and neatly styled? Are your shoes clean and polished, if necessary.
These are all the last second points you check on before walking in for a face to face interview. Apply them to your manuscript before you send it through the ether of the internet for that interview with an editor in chief. Especially, make sure you haven’t sent them a manuscript full of editing marks. It’s not only embarrassing, especially when you get a rejection with a gentle note telling you that was why, but it’s like showing up for an interview dressed for a day at the beach—fine if you’re applying for a position as a lifeguard, not so good if you’re trying to become a teller in a bank.

Everybody Reads YA ~ Pony Dreams

Happy “Everybody Reads YA” Sunday! Today I’m sharing an excerpt from my YA novel: Pony Dreams. What little girl hasn’t dreamed of the forbidden?




If anyone had asked me to describe fifteen, I'd tell them it was near an impossible age. Everyone expected me to act like a lady and wear dresses all the time. I had to pin up my hair instead of letting it swing in the breeze in two long braids. Ladies didn't run around without a care in the world, nor could they allow the sun to tan their skin.
Being a lady stinks.
What I wanted deep in my heart was to wear pants and train horses from sunup to sunset. No one in my family listened whenever I begged them to let me help with training the horses, so a lady I was. They told me to get about my chores. To stay out of trouble, I did those awful, everyday, jobs but with hate in my heart. That was all I, Abigail Grace Weston, faced—never-ending, boring housework day in and day out.

About the Author
Born and raised in Southern California’s Los Angeles basin, K.C. Sprayberry spent years traveling the United States and Europe while in the Air Force before settling in northwest Georgia. A new empty nester with her husband of more than twenty years, she spends her days figuring out new ways to torment her characters and coming up with innovative tales from the South and beyond.
She’s a multi-genre author who comes up with ideas from the strangest sources. Some of her short stories have appeared in anthologies, others in magazines.





The Pony Express brought mail across barren desert, endless prairies, and over steep mountains from April 3, 1860 to October 24, 1861. The telegraph has often taken the most blame for the Pony ceasing operations, although there were other reasons. One-hundred-forty-five years later, the internet made the telegraph obsolete. The romance of that time lives on, in the memories of those who heard the tales of this great venture…
Mina Weston Anders bursts into her home to tell her great-granny that the telegraph is no more on January 27, 2006. A story unfolds, as Granny talks about an ancestor that Mina resembles…
Abigail Grace Weston's starry-eyed dream is to become the first female Pony Express rider. Ma, Pa, and six overprotective brothers won't even let her near the corral to train mustangs for the mail venture, so she gives up her dream to sneak out and talk to the ponies, teaching them to accept her weight on their backs.
Then her life changes and all her dreams are dust. Or are they?


Pony Dreams

Release Day! Protector of the Phoenix

What would you do to be in charge of a Phoenix’s rebirth? Would it thrill you or become another boring chore in your life?
Trank Evans is the youngest of six sons and has a younger sister. His family has protected the Phoenix throughout the centuries, with the Protectorship passing from father to eldest son, until an accident in the two of their six breederies leaves him with a duty he never wanted right as he celebrates being fourteen.

 Protector of the Phoenix





Blurb
The Evans family has always been the Protector of the Phoenix. The heavy mantle has passed from father to oldest son for hundreds of years—until an accident in the breederies changes everything.
Trank’s dreams are of Wizard Camp and teaching about his wonderful world to young wizards and witches around the world. He has plans, none of which include working at the family’s legacy. After an accident in two of the breederies, he finds himself with the heavy mantle of Protector shoved on his shoulders, a mere day after his fourteenth birthday.
Not only is he thrust into the drudgery of protecting the Phoenixes, he has to continually fight to prove that he can do the job when the father of his best friend attempts to wrest the position of Protector from the Evans family. Can Trank do what is needed and prevent a reoccurrence of the accident that took so many of his family? Will he succumb to the intense work and quit to escape what he views as something that is making him so unhappy?




About the Author


Born and raised in Southern California’s Los Angeles basin, K.C. Sprayberry spent years traveling the United States and Europe while in the Air Force before settling in northwest Georgia. A new empty nester with her husband of more than twenty years, she spends her days figuring out new ways to torment her characters and coming up with innovative tales from the South and beyond.
She’s a multi-genre author who comes up with ideas from the strangest sources. Some of her short stories have appeared in anthologies, others in magazines.

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AUTHORSdB 

Appearances

Probably the biggest way to attract people to your books is in appearances. This is the twenty-first century. Authors no longer hide in their garret, pounding or scribbling out their next great novel. We have to see and be seen. Our picture should be on the back cover of our print books. Put that picture up on all of your social media sites. Be friendly and always smiling, no matter what you feel like on the inside.
I’m sure you’ve heard this exact same advice from everyone in the publishing field. And you’re probably having the same reaction I did the first time I heard it. Are you kidding me? I got into writing just so that I wouldn’t have to interact with people. My books should be enough to satisfy them.
Well, that’s just not true any longer. You are an author. No one can argue that. You do need to be working on your next book. Very true. But you can’t hide in the shadows any longer. Come to think of it, you probably need to get outside, take a walk or work on the garden, to tighten up your muscles and get a little color in your skin. That’s one of the more important things you should think about before an appearance.
Why? You demand. I’m fine the way I look now.
Again, this is one of those “you’re competing with literally thousands of other authors” things. Today’s author is supposed to laugh off the assumption that we spent hours and hours every day hunched over the keyboard. Our stories are supposed to magically appear, perfectly edited, at any of the many online sales venues. They do that while we’re doing interviews either locally or nationally, while we’re getting out into the world so people can see that we’re a real person, and while we’re also dealing with our normal loves.
I’m not going to do interviews, you state firmly. I hate talking to people.
Most authors are introverts. We’re the shy person in the corner at a party. We’d rather have a root canal than do an appearance. Unfortunately, a root canal isn’t going to save you from the dreaded interview, so here are a few tips on surviving.
First, speak with the person who will be interviewing you. Find out what they’ll want to know. Then write out what you’re going to say and practice, practice, practice. Podcast and radio interviews will be easy. You won’t have a camera focused on you. If you happen to score a television interview, remember to focus on the interviewer, not the camera.
Second, have your panic attack early. During your many practice sessions. This will alleviate the possibility of freezing at a crucial moment.
Third, remember to smile and look like you’ve done this a million times. Practice your smile in front of a mirror until it looks natural, not like you’re going to scare small children.
Finally, prepare for the best but expect the worst. You’ll do fine.

Girl Power

There is a lot of talk these days about empowering women. I’m here to say that women have been empowered for a long time. Yes, throughout the ages, women have had to stay at home, stuck taking care of children, cleaning, and doing all sorts of things today’s modern woman thinks is beneath her, but you have to think hard to understand how the women of yesteryear were empowered.
Many women in centuries past were capable of pulling up their roots and living far from family and friends as our frontier was settled. They didn’t complain that they had to abandon their home and start over. Pioneer women were strong, accepting of their role in expanding this country. They would do whatever it took to ensure their family survived and were happy.
Some women dreamed of being what others of that age considered far too different to imagine. Take Abby in Pony Dreams. She knew her lot in life. A woman’s life on the frontier was harsh. Women didn’t have much to expect other than boring, mind numbing chores from sunup to sundown, and past in many instances. Abby has a dream—to ride for the Pony Express. Yet, she realizes that is an impossible dream, so she settles for training the horses that were used in the mail venture.






Blurb:
The Pony Express brought mail across barren desert, endless prairies, and over steep mountains from April 3, 1860 to October 24, 1861. The telegraph has often taken the most blame for the Pony ceasing operations, although there were other reasons. One-hundred-forty-five years later, the internet made the telegraph obsolete. The romance of that time lives on, in the memories of those who heard the tales of this great venture…
Mina Weston Anders bursts into her home to tell her great-granny that the telegraph is no more on January 27, 2006. A story unfolds, as Granny talks about an ancestor that Mina resembles…
Abigail Grace Weston's starry-eyed dream is to become the first female Pony Express rider. Ma, Pa, and six overprotective brothers won't even let her near the corral to train mustangs for the mail venture, so she gives up her dream to sneak out and talk to the ponies, teaching them to accept her weight on their backs.
Then her life changes and all her dreams are dust. Or are they?

Pony Dreams
Excerpt:




She raced down the street, her sandy blonde hair streaming behind her. Mina Weston Anders had a very important message for one of the people she adored and couldn’t wait to pass it on.


At thirteen, she’d spent a lot of time studying the history of the Old West, and remembered a very important detail when their teacher told them that a thing people had used for one-hundred-forty-five years wouldn’t be around anymore.