Ute Carbone's Blog, page 38

#8Sunday: Superman has a cover!

Click on image for WeWriWeI've had a very exciting week! First off, I finished the draft of To the Wind. It's an early draft, but it's nice to have something done. And, second but not least, I got a cover for my new romantic comedy, Searching for Superman:
 
New cover art is always a big moment for me and to celebrate, I thought I'd do a snippet from the opening of book.  
If the perfect man existed, why did he keep eluding her?  Searching for Superman comes out on June 3For more about the book, click HERE For more writing snippets, click HERE

Cover Reveal: Searching for Superman

Getting cover art is a little like unwrapping a Christmas present. And, as is always the case with Champagne Books, this one is exactly what I wanted.
So, tada, here is  the newly unwrapped cover for my brand new Romantic Comedy, Searching for Superman done by the very talented Trish FitzGerald:

Here's a bit about the story:
 Stephanie Holbrook has finally found a job she really loves: working as an assistant to Conrad Finch in a small regional theater that’s about three dollars and a power outage from being torn down.  Stephanie wishes her love life would be as perfect as her job. She’ll be thirty on her next birthday and she still hasn’t found Mr. Right.  According to Stephanie, Mr. Right has to be strong and brave, with great values and good looks. A guy a lot like Superman. 

            When Doug Castleberry shows up at her niece’s birthday party dressed as Superman, Stephanie is positive he’s not the real deal. Sure, he’s great with kids and he’s kind of cute.   But he’s just a high school teacher making extra money by dressing up for kid’s parties. Hardly the strong, brave, and drop-dead gorgeous guy she’s looking for.

            As the theater teeters ever closer to the edge of disaster, Doug proves to be a better man than Stephanie had ever imagined. Could he be the Superman she’s been looking for all along?
 

The book will be released on June 3.

Wednesday Poem: Desert Rose

It's Wednesday again, time for some poetry. Why? Because Wednesday, like all days, is a great day to wax poetic


This poem was inspired, as the name suggests, by my first encounter with desert roses. Desert roses aren't flowers, they are crystal clusters of gypsum and sand. They form in arid conditions, often as the result of salt water evaporation
 Sandroses photo by Sven Teschke. For more information on this image, please visit Wikimedia

Desert Rose

Emblem of scarce water, you are born
of evaporation and brittle ground,
the child of lack

Bloom of gypsum,
buds of sand,
your garden is corralled by mesas

Ball of string, will you unravel
when rain pours into the arroyo?

#8Sunday: Happy Easter

For more WeWriWa, click on imageHappy Easter everyone! In honor of the holiday, I thought I'd take a break from Anton and Lenora and give a snippet having to do with Easter.

These eight come from "The P-Town Queen", a romantic comedy set in Provincetown, Massachusetts.  Marco, the hero, has just been dropped off in the heart of town by the Teaneck Gay Men's Choir. He's running from the mob and has decided that the best way to hide is by pretending to be gay.

After the bus dropped us off and Evan got the boys to sing “So Long,
Farewell,” as we went our separate ways, I had to stop myself from flagging
down another bus and begging the driver to take me back to Newark.

I walked the length of Commercial Street. Most of the shops were
still closed and the only noise came from the pier where the boats were going
in and out and off into distance. Church bells started to ring, and I thought
about my Nona and how all those years she’d drag me off to Mass every
week and how on Easter she’d always hide a couple of those plastic Easter
eggs with pennies in them. I was a sucker for those eggs. I don’t think she
would’ve liked it to see me walking down the street homeless, so I made her
a promise that I’d find a job. And that, after I got done with being gay, I’d
settle down with a nice girl.

I remembered Evan’s words about my not seeming gay, so every
time I saw two men together I watched real careful so I could imitate.

Happy Spring! 
For more great snippets, please visit Weekend Writing Warriors

For more about The P-Town Queen, including where you can get your very own copy, please click on the banner.

Wednesday Poems: Ain't I a Woman

Wednesday, like all days, is a good day for poetry.

This week's poem is one I wrote while listening to Edda James singing the blues.

Ain't I a Woman

Singing a woman's song
in a strong soft voice
that travels limb to limb
and says "leave your worn body here"

Ain't I a Woman, after all
who can flash you an eye
and call your name to the moon?
And the the moon gives a shine,
her fullness illuminating better than any old star.

The moon will tell you true;
 I got shoulders sweeter than honeysuckle
for you to lay your head,
I got arms that spread like the tide
like joy

The moon will tell you
'cause ain't she a woman too? 

#8Sunday Still writing To the Wind

For more Weekend Snippets, click on image.Hi Sunday snippeteers! I'm still working on the draft of To the Wind. It's a historical novella set in 1852 on and around a clipper ship. I think I'm finally getting to the end of my voyage. The book is a sequel to Sweet Lenora, which will be released in July. I think this may end up being a series, as I won't resolve everything in book two and more conflict keeps arising. So it goes when you let characters run amok. The story is told in the voice of Anton, a sea captain in his late twenties.


Here's my eight:


She put her hands to her hips and a fire lit in her green eyes. “You forget, Sir, that I helped to build Sweet Lenora. I knew her every inch before you even set foot on her and I will not tend roses while a group of poxy old men decide her future.”“I’ll defend the Lenora,  isn’t that what I have promised to do?”“And I promised to be your helpmeet, not your flower tender.”I doubted the poxy old men gathered in the courthouse would agree that my wife had an admirable disposition. But then, they did not know her and love her as I did.“Get dressed and hurry. Wear the gray dress, it is far more serious.”

Thanks for stopping by. Click here for more Sunday Eight. 
click cover image for more on Sweet Lenora

Wednesday Poems : Paradelle at Mill Pond

I began my writing life as a poet and as a result, I have a lot of poems. A lot. A whole real lot. So, for a while, I thought I might post some of them here in a new blog I'm calling Wednesday Poems. Because today is Wednesday. And Wednesday, like all days, is a great day for poetry.
This week, I'm posting a paradelle. This is, in fact, the only paradelle I've ever written. It's a form-poem in which the first and second lines are repeated, then the third and fourth lines take the exact words from the first four lines and reorder them. In the last stanza, all the words are reordered.
Paradelle is, to my mind, the most difficult form I've come across. Which may explain why I've only ever written one. Paradelle at Mill Pond is a study, looking to the water after a stone has been cast.

Paradelle at Mill Pond 

A stone tumbled from my careless hand
A stone tumbled from my careless hand
Cast ripples to bend the wavering maples
Cast ripples to bend the wavering maples
My wavering hand cast ripples to bend a stone
tumbled from the careless maples

Even swallows that carry sun
Even swallow that carry sun
Across narrow wings turned to blur
Across narrow wings turned to blur
Carry that narrow sun turned to blur
across the swallow's even wings

Folded leaves floated like rocking boats
Folded leaves floated like rocking boats
In the shallow water
In the shallow water
Shallow boats in the folded water
floated like rocking leaves

Even a cast stone turned to blur
folded wings floated across my rocking hand
swallows tumbled from narrow leaves
like careless boats that carry sun ripples
to bend the shallow maples
in the wavering water

Please Welcome Audra Middleton

Audra Middleton, writer of fantasy extraordinaire, is visiting today! She's sharing a blog on a fear many of us share. The old computer click phobia, or what happens if I press the button and everything goes poof?

Without further ado--Here's Audra!



Click Fear & Facebook Phobia
    I was one of the first kids to use a personal computer at my elementary school.  (Yeah, I’m thatold.)  Got my picture in the local paper and everything.  I rocked Lemonade Stand and Oregon Trail like nobody’s business.  When I got my own Radio Shack computer, I even wrote simple computer programs.  In high school I was a wiz with the Macs in the journalism room.  I rarely had to ask my students for help with my new laptop when I taught junior high.  And then things changed…    I don’t know what happened.  Perhaps a traumatic technology related tragedy occurred, and my mind has blocked it out.  Maybe it was that Fatal Monkey Virus that killed my computer in the nineties.  I’m not sure, but somehow I went from computer literate to technologically-challenged.    I now suffer from Click Fear.  There’s something final about clicking those cyber buttons.  Will I lose everything I just worked on?  Do I really want to ‘send’ this?  I mean does what I just typed sound dirty?  In some cases dirty would be a bonus, but when you’re emailing your son’s teacher, not so much.  Why does the computer keep second-guessing me?  No, I am not sure I want to ‘place that order.’  Internet shopping is always a gamble.  Why am I conversing with an inanimate object?  Where did that screen go – the one I was just on?  I haven’t even clicked anything yet.  If I ‘click here’ am I going to have to wade through eighteen pop-up ads and wait ten minutes for the page to download?    And there’s nothing worse than finally making that decision to click and nothing happens.  That’s when I over compensate.  Click²³ and now my computer won’t respond until the year 2062.  Each computer journey leaves me sweaty and in need of Xanax.  If it weren’t for undo, ctrl+alt+delete, and back arrows, I think I’d be uploading Fatal Monkey Viruses on all of my computers.    Once I signed my publishing contract (yay), I found myself needing to build a website and join Facebook (yikes).  The whole idea of Facebook terrified me.  I come from a family of conspiracy theorists and I live in a small town.  I was quite certain everything I did on there could and would be used against me.  I had only been on it for ten about minutes before I had six Facebook related anxiety attacks.  Why does it only show my big shiny forehead when I post?  Did my pastor see that dirty joke I just ‘liked?’  How do I delete that picture my friend posted of me that looks like I’m having a seizure?  Is Big Brother watching me now?  Who am I kidding?  He’s been watching me since I tried to research how to kill someone and make it look like a heart attack.  (Writing novels sends you down some strange roads.)     I thought I had shed my neurotic tendencies when I entered my thirties.  Apparently they decided to hang on a while longer.  But I’m old enough now that I know better than to let them win out.  I have been have been actively promoting my book on-line for a year now, and it didn‘t even require switching to decaf or taking up yoga.  Of course, I haven’t even attempted Twitter or Pinterest yet…





The Watcher

War threatens to destroy the world of Anthelion unless the holy man, Goran, can solve his prophecy riddle. For every clue he finds, another obstacle surfaces. An orphan girl, Watcher, becomes his responsibility. As if parenthood itself isn’t daunting enough, she keeps a bear for a pet and transforms into her forest surroundings to avoid socialization. Hope momentarily emerges when Goran finds Benaiah, the Chosen Son of the prophecy. Only he soon discovers Benaiah is a social pariah on the verge of embracing darkness.

When Benaiah and Watcher unexpectedly meet, the two outsiders find in each other a sense of belonging they’ve never known. Now their emerging love promises to bring about the very war Goran is struggling to prevent.

You can buy the Watcher here:  http://burstbooks.ca/product.php?id_p...


Audra's love of writing began in the third grade, when she was chosen to go to a young author’s conference based on a story, "The Dragon Cookie", which she wrote about a giant cookie that comes to life. She continued writing, and was sometimes asked to write stories for friends as birthday gifts.

Audra went to college thinking she would go into journalism, but opted to go into publishing instead, and even took an internship at Yale University Press. Audra married right after college and was unable to find a publishing job where they were living in Seattle. Audra took an office job. After helping put her husband through law school, Audra went back to school and got her teaching degree. Audra enjoyed teaching, but once her oldest was born, she chose to stay home. At the encouragement of friends Audra started writing again, the result being her first novel, Watcher, releasing January 2013.

Audra and her husband with their three boys, now live in a small town in eastern Washington. They have a black Lab named Benji who eats shoes, gophers and packages left on her front porch (thanks Fed-Ex). When Audra is not chauffeuring and refereeing her children, she writes, dabbles in on-line shopping and plays Texas Hold ‘Em with her friends. 
You can find Audra at her website:  http://audramiddleton.weebly.com
And on facebook:http://www.facebook.com/AudraMiddletonAuthor

#8sunday To the Wind is in port.

For more Writing Warriors, click on imageHi WeWriWa hoppers. Welcome back. I've still been work on To the Wind, a historical novella set in 1852. To the Wind is the sequel to Sweet Lenora, which is coming out in July. I've gotten my characters to port in San Francisco. Of course, this doesn't mean trouble is behind them.

Sweet Lenora is written in the hero, Anton's voice. Lenora is the heroine.  Here's my eight:




She squeezed my hand so fiercely that I thought she might break the bones. “ Something else troubles you, Anton.”             “They plan to fire the ship.”             Lenora let go her grasp. “Destroy Sweet Lenora?”               I nodded my consent. “It is common practice here, for a ship so ravaged by fever. They do not want an epidemic in port.”



For more Weekend Writing Snippets, click HERE


For more about Sweet Lenora, click HERE

Weekend Writing Warriors: More Anton #Sunday

Click image for more Weekend WarriorsI'm still sailing onward with the sequel to my historical romance novella, Sweet Lenora. The story is set in 1852 on a clipper ship. The working title is "To the Wind".

Here's eight sentences from this week's writing:



            I seized  him by the collar. “I should have let them kill you.”            “You think that rabble lot would not have mutinied in any case? You have been too busy with your harlot to run a crew. I’ve heard the rumors from Rio and they do not paint her pretty.  If anyone is to blame for the ship’s misfortune, it is you,Sir.”            I took my dagger and put it to his throat. “One more word about my wife and you will find yourself without a tongue.”


Check in HERE or click on the image for more great eight sentence samples from WeWriWa.

Sweet Lenora will be released in July. For more information on the novella, click HERE